The Story of William Booth Christian and the Salvation Army Soldiers

How did a Victorian pawnbroker's apprentice come to found a church that now, with nearly 1.6 million members, functions in more than 109 countries? How did an organization that married the jolly sounds of the music hall with the jargon of the military develop into one of the world's largest, most diverse providers of social welfare? How did a persecuted band of evangelists, who set up in 1865 to convert the roughs of East London, grow into the respected, faith-based relief agency that in recent times alone has helped in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7 London bombings and the Asian tsunami?

The story of the Salvation Army is full of such fascinating questions, not least because its founder, his methods and his followers excited vehemently contradictory reactions: Polite society thought William Booth was a bearded fanatic, others saw a charismatic champion of religion and reform. His wife Catherine was both social heretic and pioneer of women's equality. Their tale is a compelling one.

William Booth was born, the third child of Samuel and Mary, on April 10, 1829, at 12 Notintone Place, Sneinton, Nottingham (now his birthplace museum). Samuel was variously an entrepreneur and builder, but when he died in 1842 family finances were in such a ruinous state that 13-year-old William was apprenticed to a local pawnbroker to help support his mother and sisters. He also began taking the first steps in his religious career — away from the "formal, unfriendly" services of the Church of England, into Methodism. Inspired by the fiery theatricality of the likes of controversial American preacher James Caughey, who traveled around England between 1841 and 1847, Booth felt God was calling him to some (as yet unspecified) great work. Despite ill health, which would dog him all his life, the zealous adolescent began spreading religion in the back streets of Nottingham. Then in 1849 he moved to London to continue preaching — and pawnbroking — there.

Booth's approach to religion was instinctive rather than intellectual, and he had little time for academic or theological debate. He therefore easily moved between several churches that had sprung from the disputes that racked Wesleyan Methodism in the 19th century. Eventually, he threw off pawnbroking and became a minister for the Methodist New Connexion. More important, in 1855 he married Catherine Mumford.

If William had shown precocious teenage interest in preaching in Nottingham, Catherine's youth was no less remarkable. She was born January 17, 1829, in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, although the family later moved back to Boston, Lincolnshire, Her father had been an occasional preacher before losing his faith; however, her mother was so zealously pious that she kept Catherine away from school lest she pick up undesirable habits from less God-fearing children. In fact, Catherine's formal education effectively began when she was 12.

Like William, Catherine was frequently sickly throughout life, bur where she differed from him was in her close study of theology. She held strong moral convictions and joined the Temperance Movement. In 1844 the family moved again, to London, and shortly afterward 16-year-old Catherine experienced the divine moment that finally convinced her of salvation while she was reading a Charles Wesley hymn. She taught at Sunday school and gave classes before meeting her future husband at a tea party in 1852.

Devotion to religion was their bond, and where William showed passion but a lack of direction, Catherine provided the iron hand to guide, including constant chiding that William should improve himself but guard against ambition. Theirs was a relationship of equals — an eyebrow-raising proposition in Victorian England. Moreover, Catherine held the heretical view (backed up by her biblical studies) that women should, with as much entitlement as men, be allowed to preach in church. William soon accepted this standpoint. For her part, Catherine lived up to the conventional bargain of wedlock, producing eight children.

William spent the early years of their marriage at different postings on the Methodist New Connexion circuit, with Catherine and their growing family in tow. He was beginning to make a name for himself — and also to attract criticism from more traditional churchmen. His flamboyant, hellfire style, combined with hymns sung to popular contemporary tunes, might appeal to the benighted masses ignorant of the standard melodies of the church, but the educated middle classes who "knew better" were deeply offended. William, though, was in no doubt that he should be communicating his message of salvation to the downtrodden folk neglected by the established church, and if a touch of music hall was required, so he it.

In 1862 the Booths split from the New Connexion. William had been outvoted in wanting to ban producers and purveyors of alcohol from joining the movement; he was also desperate for the life of an itinerant preacher pursuing the active Christianity of his hero John Wesley, rather than ministering in one location. By now, following the urging of the Holy Ghost to assume full female ministry, Catherine was preaching, too — and drawing sensational, half-horrified, half-rapt audiences.

At the time "undenominated work" was on the rise in England, the idea being to convert sinners, then point them to local, established churches to continue their newfound religion. The Booths, supported in their endeavors by various wealthy benefactors as they would be throughout their careers, embraced their venture with gusto, buoyed by the success of their recent Cornish campaign (1861-62), which yielded at least 7,000 souls for Jesus. Whether such sudden salvations endured was debatable; nor did every church welcome the alarming descent of ill-dressed hordes into its tidy pews.

The Booths learned valuable lessons as they roamed the country for the next two years. One was that the poor were more likely to listen to their own kind and be saved — Who could resist addresses by "converted pugilists, horse racers and others"? So Booth recruited these unlikely helpers into his catchily named Hallelujah Band. Secondly, Catherine's eyes in particular were being further opened to the social wreckage caused by drink, prostitution and poverty.

Their peripatetic lifestyle came to an abrupt end in 1865. A group of missionaries, impressed by William's preaching in the seedy streets of London's East End, asked him to lead a series of meetings for them in a large tent at Mile End. William was so struck by the amount of work to he done among the local poor that the Booths agreed to stay. Despite never intending to found their own Christian church, they set up the East London Christian Mission, soon renamed the Christian Mission to reflect its nationwide potential.

William preached in unusual venues ranging from a stable to a disused pub, while Catherine raised funds among the city's well-to-do. Crucially, the Booths had espoused social work as a means to an end, William reasoning that no one could concentrate on the message of the Lord on an empty stomach. Soup kitchens and "Food for the Millions" shops were created to help provide the poor with sustenance.

Yet all the while, the Booths were stirring antagonism. Brewers feared they would lose their clientele to the church; middle-class Victorian England was perturbed by this loud evangelizing that disturbed its complacency; rowdies just liked an easy target. Mission meetings were disrupted by jeering, stone throwing, fireworks and worse. William and his people merely turned the other cheek; in fact, persecution became tantamount to a badge of honor. It took a special kind of person to deal with such hostility, and among the Booths' recruits were a good number of eccentrics, like the impetuous radical George Scott Railton. They were instrumental in growing support, and Railton in par ticular endorsed Catherine's endeavors to gain women equality in what was about to become the Salvation Army.

The name change was the result of a family "joke" by the Booths' eldest son, Bramwell. All the Booth siblings had been immersed in religion and strict discipline from birth, presenting a formidable dynasty. Bramwell was now an industrious second-in-command to William in the new church. On hearing them called a "volunteer army," he thought it a rather under-stated description for such assiduous workers. So William replaced the offending word with "salvation," and from 1878 the Christian Mission became the Salvation Army.

From this moment the movement really took off, and its familiar iconography and trappings developed. The concept of an army (albeit peaceful) captured the imagination of certain jingoistic sections of Victorian society, though inflated martial jargon led to some absurd juxtapositions — as a poster publicizing a Whitby campaign had shown, screaming: "We are rushing into war…. It is a field of blood already," deflatingly adding, "A public ham sandwich tea will be provided in the Congress Hall."

But war it was. Ranks were adopted in the Army, with William as general, and uniforms were designed so that members could immediately recognize each other. For women, the unflattering "Hallelujah Bonnet" served the double function of separating wearers from worldly fashions and protecting them from missiles. The War Cry newspaper started publication, and the Army marched with flags and took the motto "Blood and Fire" — signifying the blood of the Lamb and the fire of the Holy Ghost. For long, William had realized the power of popular music to aid conversion, and he found that brass bands were great for attracting crowds as Army corps progressed through the streets; they also helped drown out hecklers.

Violent persecution increased, notably by the Skeleton Army, a rabble shamefully supported by publicans, beer sellers and the like. There were martyrs, and some Army soldiers, blamed for "provoking" attacks simply by holding noisy open-air meetings, were imprisoned. The Booths used the oxygen of publicity to rally even more folk to their cause: By 1884 there were 910 corps (church centers) and 2,332 officers in Britain. In its nonuse of the sacraments and its proscription of alcohol the Salvation Army might differ from the Church of England (which kept a wary distance), but it was becoming part of British life.

At first, William Booth resisted the idea that the Army should spread internationally. An autocrat, he feared not being able to control far-flung outposts that might discredit the Home Front. There had been a short-lived, unsanctioned venture in Cleveland, Ohio, but after the Shirley family from the Coventry Corps successfully set up in Philadelphia from 1879, William allowed George Railton to lead a small contingent to New York. Despite an initial misunderstanding when they were booked as a music hall act, the seed was sown, and soon Ballington, William's second son, was sent to command forces in the United States. Penetration of other countries — France, India, Australia — rapidly followed.

Back in Britain, the Army became involved in 1885 in exposing the sale of young girls into prostitution. W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and longtime Salvation Army supporter, was imprisoned for his part in the "abduction" of 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong, staged to prove what went on. Nevertheless Army efforts helped influence the raising of the legal age of consent from 13 to 16 years.

Then in October 1890, "Army Mother" Catherine Booth died after an arduous fight against cancer. Her funeral in London was attended by 36,000 people, a mark of not only the respect in which she was held but also the strength of the Army. William and the whole organization sorely missed her guiding hand.

Two weeks after Catherine's "Promotion to Glory" (Salvation Army terminology), In Darkest England and the Way Out was published. Doubt hovers over how much of the work was personally authored by William Booth, but it certainly contains his ideas on practical Christianity. After spotlighting the poverty and social injustice that he believed hampered people's path to salvation, William described the ways in which the Army could remove those hurdles. These included the establishment of city colonies, farm colonies and overseas colonies as places of rehabilitation; shelters for the destitute in every town; lost persons bureaus; and prison reforms like rehabilitation for ex-prisoners. (The Army already ran a home for discharged felons in King's Cross.) Many Victorians still held the view that the poor had only themselves to blame for their plight and sin, so reactions were mixed.

In the last years of his life, William turned again to itinerant preaching and met the world's wealthy and powerful, from King Edward VII to Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. From 1904, and despite failing health, he embarked on a series of annual motor tours of the UK, covering thousands of miles and speaking at hundreds of meetings. It was a punishing challenge for a septuagenarian, but he was in his element. Unfortunately, the founder's latter years were also marred by differences within the Booth family that ended with his children Ballington, Kate and Herbert, all leading lights in overseas operations, quitting the Army.

William Booth, worn-out and blind, was Promoted to Glory on August 20, 1912. Some 150,000 mourners passed his bier, and tributes flowed in from the great and the good. He may have upset people with his strident, unconventional style, but his practical Christianity inspired countless more. Certainly today many of his visions for social and missionary work have continued to come true.

The Salvation Army is the fifth largest charity in the UK, As of 2005, its outreach has been expanded to include 109 countries, in 175 languages. The Salvation Army's membership consists of 3,500 officers, 60,000 employees, 113,000 soldiers, 430,000 adherents and more than 3.5 million volunteers. Its Web site is www.salvationarmy.org.

We are rushing into war….It is a field of blood already. A public ham sandwich tea will be provided in the Congress Hall'

By Siân Ellis

Strength after Struggle

Logan's heart attack made her life more difficult. But it also made her spirit stronger.

Logan Olson expected the haunted house to be scary. She did not expect her visit to change her life forever.

Yet once inside the dark house on Halloween of 2001, Logan collapsed to the floor. Her heart stopped beating. "Call 911 !" shouted her terrified cousin. Logan's dad, Tim, and another man performed CPR. Still, Logan didn't breathe.

By the time paramedics arrived and Logan's heart started beating again, her brain was badly damaged. She slipped into a coma. No one knew if she'd live.

Starting Over
Logan doesn't remember the helicopter ride to a hospital in Spokane, Washington. Because of her brain injury, she recalls little of the seven months she spent in medical centers.

When she first woke from the coma, Logan thought she was a little girl. She was actually a 16-year-old student with a job, a boyfriend, and a driver's license. Now, though, she couldn't even talk or raise her head.

Day after day, Logan struggled to simply sit up. "Why did this happen to me?;' she remembers thinking. "I want my life back. Dating, driving, working, I had it all. Then bam! Goodbye."

She was frustrated by her slow recovery. "I had to fight every day to walk, to eat, to drink, to sit, to stand. It wasn't easy." She also sometimes passed out when the blood flow to her head decreased.

Logan was born with a heart problem. By age 16, she'd already had six operations to fix it. Eight months before that Halloween, a weak part of her heart was replaced with a valve from a pig. The stronger valve may have saved Logan's life, says her mom, Laurie.

"I'm part pig," Logan jokes. Logan had always hoped to work as a makeup artist or model someday. But her stiff fingers made it hard to put on makeup and button her favorite jeans.

Her mom searched stores for products that would be easier to use. For instance, Logan can handle wide makeup sticks. A rubber pencil grip helps her hold eyeliner steady. These discoveries inspired Logan and her mom to create a magazine for girls with disabilities. They wanted to share helpful fashion and makeup tricks.

A teen fashion magazine was just what Logan needed. To meet with photographers and advertisers, she would have to speak more clearly. She began working extra hard in speech therapy. She repeated sentences such as, "Let's go to Nordstrom and buy shoes"

Logan took her walker to the mall to study the latest fashions. She quickly became stronger and more coordinated. She passed out once in JC Penney. It didn't keep her away.

Proudest Moment
Logan faced another major challenge in the classroom. She'd missed so much school that her younger brother, T.J., was set to graduate before her. Logan's teachers knew she was studying hard. They offered to let her cross the stage first. In return, she would finish classes the next school year.

Logan's parents were afraid she would fall. But Logan was determined to graduate before T.J. She also insisted on wearing new stylish shoes.

Logan was nervous and tripped three times before the ceremony. Still; she safely crossed the stage while the audience clapped and cheered. It was Logan's proudest moment.

A Better Person
Five years after her haunted house heart attack, Logan's life is far from easy. She misses friends who drifted away to busy social lives. She longs to drive a shiny Ford F-150 but settles for a motorized shopping cart.

There are many things Logan can no longer do. Instead, she stays busy with Other fun and challenging activities. That includes this fall's debut of Logan Magazine. As creative director, she gets to attend workshops and fashion shows. She also models trendy clothes, sometimes sitting in her wheelchair.

Memory problems still haunt Logan, who's now 21. She can type business plans but often forgets her computer password. Two detailed calendars help her remember meetings.

Logan believes she's a better person this Halloween. She has become more mature, and far more compassionate, she says. "I had it all back then. But I've gained even more now through everything that's happened to me."

By Jeanette White

Stairway to Heaven

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burned flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling above my bed, a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees below my window. But the most troubling thing was the ceaseless roll of drums: a sonorous, ponderous thudding that hovered around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I couldn't tell.

I was sixteen, at the age when fear arouses inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug a brand-new Moleskine journal out of my suitcase, and had just managed to write, on the first page, "Kinshasa 7.7.1983," when I heard my parents' bedroom door slam open and Tata cursing and stomping away. I leaped out of bed and followed him into the living room, where he had already flipped on the lights. I bumped into Mama, who was cradling her worrisome bosom in her arms; Sestra was there, too, pressing her face into Mama's side. All the lights were on now; a gang of moths fluttered hopelessly inside a light fixture; there were cries and screams; cymbals crashed all around us. It was terrifying.

"Spinelli," Tata exclaimed. "What a dick."

Tata slept in flannel pajamas that were far more appropriate for an Alpine ski resort than for Africa--air-conditioning allegedly irritated his kidneys. Before he vanished into the thrumming murk of our building's stairwell, he put on a pith helmet, lest his bald dome be exposed to drafts. I stood in my underwear, my pen still in hand. The possibility that he might not return flickered in the dark, but it did not occur to me to go after him. The stairwell light went on and we heard a plaintive chime. The drums continued to roll. Tata abandoned the bell and started pounding on the door, shouting in his stuttering English, "Spinelli, you are very crazy. Stop noise. We are sleep. It is four in the morning."

Our apartment was on the sixth floor; there must have been scores of people living in the building, but it appeared to have been abandoned. As soon as the stairwell light clicked off, the drumming stopped; the show was over. The door opened and a nasal American voice said, "I'm sorry, man. I absolutely apologize."

By the time I went back to bed, it was dawn already. In the trees outside, a nation of birds had replaced the bats and were now atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life. Sleep seemed beyond me; nor could I write. Smoking on the balcony, I waited for everything to make sense. Down on the street, a barely clad man squatted by a cardboard box with cigarettes lined up on top of it, as though he were guarding them from some invisible peril.

In the early eighties, Tata was mostly absent from Sarajevo, working in Zaire as a minor Yugoslav diplomat in charge of communications (whatever that meant). Meanwhile, back home, I responded to the infelicities of adolescence and the looming iniquities of adulthood by retreating into books; Sestra, not yet a teen-ager, was oblivious of the aches sprouting inside me; Mama was mid-life, miserable and lonely, though I could not see this at the time, with my nose stuck in a book. I read compulsively, only occasionally surfacing to reality. I read all night, all day; at school I kept a book hidden under my desk, a felony frequently punished by a junta of class bullies who made me lick the pages until my tongue was black with ink.

I met Azra while checking out books from the school library, and I immediately liked the readerly quietude on her bespectacled face. I walked her home, slowing down whenever I had something to say, stopping whenever she did. She had no interest in "The Catcher in the Rye"; I had not read "Quo Vadis," feigned interest in "The Peasant Uprising." We shared an interest in "The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country," even though it was a children's book. And it was clear that we also shared a passion for imagining lives that we could live through others--a necessary ingredient in any love. We started dating, which meant that we often read to each other on a bench by the Miljacka, making out only when we ran out of things to talk about, kissing cautiously, as though letting ourselves go would have exhausted the quaint, manageable intimacy we had accrued. So when Tata announced, on returning to Sarajevo for a leave, that we would all spend the summer of '83 in Africa together, I felt a strange relief: if Azra and I were apart, we could resist temptation and eschew the taint that the body inflicts upon the soul. I promised I would write to her every day--in my journal, as letters from Africa would have arrived long after my return. I would record every thought, I told her, every feeling, every experience, and, as soon as I came back, we would reimagine it all together, reading, as it were, the same book.

There were many things that I wanted to note down that first night in Kinshasa: the west ablaze, the east impenetrably dark as we crossed the equator at sunset; my perfect recollection of the smell of her hair; the line from a book that we had both liked so much--"I have to find my way home before the fall, before the leaves cover the path." But I wrote nothing and assuaged my conscience by ascribing this failure to the drumming disturbance. What I didn't write stayed in the back room of my mind, like the birthday presents I was not allowed to open until everyone had left the party.

The following morning, I found Sestra in the living room, staring with vague fascination at a puny man in a T-shirt with an image of an angel pierced by an arrow in midair. Mama was sitting across the coffee table from the man, her legs crossed, listening intently to his high-pitched warbling.

"Svratio komsija Spinelli," she said. "Nemam pojma sta prica."

"Good morning," I said.

"Good afternoon, buddy," Spinelli said. "The day is almost over." He exposed a set of teeth that descended evenly in size, like organ pipes, from the center toward the cheeks. He had both of his hands parked on his thighs, and they were calmly immobile, as though resting before their next task--which was to push apart the two curls parenthesizing his forehead.

"Sorry for the noise," he said. "A bored dog does crazy things."

At sixteen, I spent a lot of energy affecting boredom: the eye-roll; the practiced blankness of expression; the terse, short answers to parental inquisition. I had built an iron-clad shield of indifference that allowed me to escape, roam, and return to my cell without anyone's noticing. But that first week in Africa the boredom was real. I could not read; I kept scanning the same--twenty-seventh--page of "Heart of Darkness" and could not move beyond it. I tried to write to Azra, but could come up with nothing to say, probably because there was too much to say.

There was certainly nothing to do. I was not allowed go out alone into the human jungle of Kinshasa. For a while I watched TV, broadcasts of Mobutu's rants and commercials featuring cans of coconut oil floating in the blue sky of affordable happiness. Once or twice, in the middle of the day, I even felt a rare, inexplicable desire to be with my family, but Tata was at work, Sestra had her Walkman turned way up, and Mama was remote, interned in the kitchen, probably crying. The ceiling fan spun sluggishly, a cruel reminder that time here passed at the same mind-numbing speed.

Tata was a great promiser, a fabulist of possibilities. In Sarajevo, he had projected onto the vast, blank canvas of our socialist provincialism a Kinshasa that was a hive of neocolonial pleasures: exclusive clubs with pools and tennis courts; diplomatic receptions frequented by the international jet set and spies; cosmopolitan casinos and exotic lounges; safaris in the wilderness; and Phillip, a native cook whom he had hired away from a Belgian by increasing his piddling wage to a slightly less piddling amount. That first uneventful week, these promises were drably betrayed; Phillip didn't even show up for work. When Tata came home from the Embassy, we had humdrum dinners that Mama improvised from what she had discovered in the fridge: wizened peppers and sunken papayas, peanut paste and some kind of animal flesh that may have been goat meat.

Determined to dispel the cloud of tedium hanging over us, Tata finally put in a call to the Yugoslav Ambassador and invited himself and us to the Ambassador's residence in Gombe, where all the important diplomats lived. The mansions there were large, with wide lawns and majestic flowers blooming in impeccably groomed bushes; the venerable Congo flowed serenely. His Excellency and his excellent wife were polite and devoid of any human vigor. We sat in their receiving room, and the adults passed around statements ("Kinshasa is strange"; "Kinshasa is really small") as if handing around a sugar bowl. Exotic trophies were carefully positioned around the room: a piece of Antwerp bobbin lace on the wall; an ancient Mesopotamian rock on the coffee table; on the bookshelf a picture of their Excellencies on a snowcapped mountain. A servant with an implausible red sash brought in the drinks--Sestra and I were each given a glass of lemonade with a long silver spoon. I didn't dare to move, and when Sestra, abruptly and inexplicably, rolled like a happy dog on the ankle-deep Afghan rug I feared that our parents would renounce us.

As soon as we returned home, I went up to Spinelli's place. He did not seem surprised to see me, nor did he ask what had brought me around. "Come on in," he said, smoking, a drink in his hand, music blasting behind him. I lit up; I had not smoked all day, and I was starved for nicotine. The smoke descended into my lungs like feathery silk, then out, thickly, through my nose; it was so beautiful I was breathless. Spinelli was air drumming along to the loud music, a cigarette dangling from his lips. " "Black Dog,' " he said. "God damn." In the far corner, under the window, there was a set of drums; its golden cymbals trembled in the stream from the air-conditioner.

Between his imaginary drum solos and bridges, Spinelli made unsolicited confessions: he had grown up in a rough Chicago neighborhood and beat it as soon as he could; he had lived in Africa forever; he worked for the U.S. government and could not tell me what his job was, for if he did he would have to kill me. He started each sentence sitting down and finished it standing up. He never stopped moving. Space organized itself around him; he exuded so much of himself that I felt absent. Only after I had left his apartment, exhausted, could I really think at all. And then I thought that he was a true American, a liar and a braggart, and that hanging out with him was far more stimulating than the shackles of family life or the excellent diplomats in Gombe. At some point during his restless monologue, he christened me, for no apparent reason, Blunderpuss.

I went back upstairs a couple of days later, and then again the following day. Mama and Tata seemed fine with that; if I removed my boredom, we could avoid long stretches of crabby silence. They must also have thought that engaging with the real world and its inhabitants without actually leaving the building was good for me, and I got to practice my English, too. As for me, I could smoke as much as I wanted at Spinelli's; the music was much louder than my parents would ever have permitted; and he poured more whiskey into my glass before it was even half empty. But most of all I enjoyed his stories: he delivered them slouching back on the sofa, blowing smoke toward the ceiling fan, sipping his J&B, interrupting his delivery for every drum solo. There may be a taint of death, a flavor of mortality, in lies, but Spinelli's were fun to listen to.

In high school, he'd run a cigarette-selling business and had regular sex with his geography teacher. He'd hitchhiked across America: in Oklahoma, he'd drunk with Indians who fed him mushrooms that took him to where their spirits lived--the spirits had big asses with two holes, both of which smelled equally of shit; in Idaho, he'd lived in a cave with a guy who watched the sky all day long, waiting for a fleet of black helicopters to descend upon them; he'd smuggled cattle from Mexico into Texas, cars from Texas to Mexico. Then he'd joined the Army: avoiding rough deployment by applying onion to his dick so as to fake an infection; whoring around in Germany, cutting up a Montenegrin pimp in a disco. Then Africa: sneaking into Angola to help out Savimbi's freedom fighters; training the Ugandan special forces with the Israelis; setting up a honey trap in Durban. He told his tales laterally, moving across his life without regard for chronology.

Afterward, I would lie in my bed, trying to organize his stream of consciousness in my giddy head so that I could write it down for Azra. Only then could I see the loopholes in the texture of his tales, the inconsistencies and contradictions and the plain bullshit. Once I was out of his proximity, he made little sense; he had to be physically present in his own narratives to make them plausible. Therefore I sought his presence; I kept going upstairs.

One night when I went upstairs, Spinelli was all dressed and ready to go, wearing a black unbuttoned shirt, reeking of cologne, a gold chain dangling below his Adam's apple. He lit a cigarette in the doorway, inhaled, and said "Let's go!" and I followed without a question. It did not even cross my mind to tell my parents where I was going. They never came to check on me when I was at Spinelli's. It turned out that we were going to a casino around the corner.

"The guy who owns the casino is Croatian," Spinelli said. "Used to be in the Foreign Legion, fought here, then in Biafra. I don't wanna know the things he did. We do business sometimes, and his daughter likes me pretty well, too."

I could not see his lips moving as we walked; his voice was disembodied. We turned the corner and there was a splendid neon sign that said " PLAYBOY CASINO," the "S" and the final "O" flickering uncertainly. A few white cars and military Jeeps were parked in the gravel lot. On the stairs were several hookers in ridiculously high heels, neither climbing nor descending, as if they were afraid they might fall if they moved. But move they did as we passed; one of them grabbed my forearm and turned me toward her. She wore a helmetlike purple wig, and earrings as elaborate as Christmas ornaments; her breasts were pushed up by her tiny bra, so that I could see half of her left nipple. I stood petrified until Spinelli released me from her grip. "You don't fuck much, do you, Blunderpuss?" he said.

Three men were sitting at the roulette table, all plainly drunk, their heads falling on their chests between the revolutions of the wheel. A heavy fog of masculine recklessness hung over the table, the green of the felt fractured by piles of colorful chips. One of the men won and snapped out of his torpor long enough to gather up the chips with both arms, as though embracing a child. "Watch the croupier steal from them," Spinelli said with delight. "They're going to lose it all before they get another drink, then they'll lose some more." I did watch the croupier, but could not see how the stealing happened: when the players won, he pushed the chips toward them; when they lost, he raked the pile toward himself. It all seemed simple and honest, but I believed Spinelli. I had already started composing a description of the place for Azra: the cone of smoke rising to the light above the blackjack table; the hysterical flashing of the two slot machines in the corner; the man standing at the bar in the attire of a plantation owner--a light linen suit and a straw hat--his right hand hanging down like a sleeping dog's head, a ribbon of cigarette smoke passing slowly between his knuckles.

"Let me introduce you to Jacques," Spinelli said. "He's the boss."

Jacques put the cigarette in his mouth, shook Spinelli's hand, then looked me over without saying a word.

"This is Blunderpuss--he's Bogdan's kid," Spinelli said. Jacques's face was perfectly square, his nose triangular; his neck was a stovepipe of flesh. His expression bespoke the chummy ruthlessness of someone whose life was organized around profit and survival; as far as he was concerned, I did not exist in the world of straightforward facts. He put out his cigarette and, in English marred with clunky Croatian consonants, said to Spinelli, "What I am going to do with those bananas? They are rotting."

Spinelli looked at me, shook his head in bemused disbelief, and said, "Put them in a fruit salad."

Jacques grinned back at him and said, "Let me tell you joke. Mother has very ugly child, horrible, she goes on train, sits in coupe. People come in her coupe, they see child, is very ugly, they cannot look, they leave, go away, disgusting child. Nobody sits with them. Then comes man, smiles at mother, smiles at child, sits down, reads newspapers. Mother thinks, Good man, likes my child, is real good man. Then man takes one banana and asks mother, "Does your monkey want banana?' "

Spinelli didn't laugh, not even when Jacques repeated the punch line: "Does your monkey want banana?" Instead, he asked him, "Is Natalie here?"

I followed Spinelli through a beaded curtain into a room with a blackjack table and four players; they all wore uniforms, one of them sand khaki, the other three olive green. Natalie was the dealer, her fingers long and limber as she placed the cards; her pallor was luminous in the dark room; her arms were skinny, with no muscles whatsoever; she had bruises on her forearms, scratches on her biceps. On her shoulder she had a vaccination mark, like the imprint of a small coin. Spinelli sat at the table and nodded at her, slamming a cigarette pack against his palm. Her cheeks rose, quotation marks forming around her smile. She raised her hand gently, as though lifting a veil, and scratched her forehead with her pinkie. She blinked slowly, calmly, as though pulling her long eyelashes apart required effort. I was enthralled. Natalie was from out of this world, a displaced angel.

From then on, for a while, there were three of us. We went places: Spinelli driving his Land Rover, drumming on the wheel, slapping the dashboard, calling Natalie his Monkeypie; Natalie smoking in the passenger seat, looking out; I in the back, the breeze from the open window blowing her smoke, her intoxicating smell, directly into my face. The three of us: Spinelli, Monkeypie, Blunderpuss, like characters in an adventure novel.

One day, we went to the Cité to look for Phillip, who still hadn't shown up for work. Presumably, this was a means for Spinelli to expiate his drumming sins, arranged between Tata and him. Spinelli and Natalie picked me up at the crack of dawn, the light still diffused by the residue of the humid night. We drove toward the slums, against a crowd marching in antlike columns: men in torn shorts and shirts; women wrapped in cloth, carrying baskets on their heads; swollen-bellied children trotting by their side; emaciated dogs following at a hopeful distance. I had never seen anything so unreal in my life. We turned off onto a dirt road, which became a car-wide path full of mounds and gullies. The Land Rover stirred up a galaxy of dust, even when moving at low speed. Shacks misassembled from rusty tin and cardboard were lined up above a ditch, about to tumble in. I understood what Conrad had meant by "inhabited devastation." A woman with a child tied to her back dipped clothes into tea-colored water and beat the wet tangle with a tennis racquet.

Soon a shouting mob of kids was running after the car. "Check this out," Spinelli said and hit the brakes. The kids slammed into the back of the Land Rover; one of them fell on his ass. "Oh, stop it!" Natalie said. As soon as the car got up some speed, the kids were running after it again; they didn't often see a Land Rover in the Cité. Spinelli hit the brakes again, slapping his thigh with glee. I could see the face of the tallest boy smash against the glass, blood blurting out of his nose. Spinelli's laughter was deep-chested, like the bark of a big dog. It was infectious; I was roaring with laughter myself.

We stopped in front of a church, where a choir was singing with sombre voices. Spinelli went in to leave a message for Phillip while Natalie and I stayed in the car. He pushed his way through the kids, who parted, murmuring, " Mundele, mundele." "It means skinless," Natalie said. The tall boy was still bleeding, but he could not take his eyes off Natalie. She took a picture of him; he wiped his bloody nose and turned away.

"You're gonna have to get yourself a new cook, Blunderpuss," Spinelli said, climbing into his seat. "That's Phillip's funeral they're singing for."

From the Cité we went to the market--Le Grand Marché--and wandered around; it was too early to go home. Bartering in Lingala and English, Spinelli pretended to be interested in a dried monkey, whose hands grasped nothingness with unappetizing despair; he picked through yams but didn't buy any. Natalie took pictures of terrified goats waiting to be slaughtered, of eels still fidgeting in a beaten pot, of worms squirming in a shoebox.

These people had no abstract concept of evil, Spinelli said. For them, it was black magic coming from a particular person, so if you wanted to get rid of the evil spell you eliminated the guy. The same thing with the good: it was not something you could aspire to, the way we did; you either had it or you didn't. He delivered his anthropological lecture while bargaining over an enormous, baroque cluster of bananas, which he bought for nothing and loaded onto his shoulder. You couldn't die of hunger here, he said, because bananas and papayas grew everywhere like weeds. That was why these people had never learned to work; they'd never had to harvest and store food to survive.

A mass of people followed us, offering things we could not possibly need: toilet brushes, knitting needles, figurines carved out of what Spinelli claimed was human bone. I bought a bracelet made of elephant hair and ivory, a gift for Azra.

Later that day, we went to the Inter-Continental and sat in the lounge, where a ponytailed pianist played "As Time Goes By." We ordered colorful cocktails with tiny umbrellas stuck into unknown fruit. There were men in Zairean attire: wide collars, bare chests adorned with gold, hands bejewelled. Spinelli called them the Big Vegetables; they liked to stick out of Mobutu's ass, he said. Those expensive white whores with them came from Brussels or Paris; they spread their legs for two or three months, then took a little pouch of diamonds back home to live it up for the rest of the year. And that man over there was Dr. Slonsky, a Russian who had come twenty years ago, when you had to import ass-wipes from Belgium. He used to be Mobutu's personal physician, but now he only did the Big Vegetables; Mobutu had a Harvard graduate taking care of him these days. Slonsky liked heroin and boys, Spinelli said.

Natalie sucked at her straw, as if she had heard it all already.

Then there was Towser the Brit; his wife worked at the British Embassy. And that scruffy youngster sitting next to him was their Italian boyfriend. They were talking to Millie and Morton Fester, New Yorkers who dealt in tribal art, most of it pilfered away from the natives by the Big Vegetables. Millie wrote fancy porn novels; Morton used to be a photographer for National Geographic, trawling the Dark Continent for images. Spinelli actually waved at them and Morton waved back. Somehow, the waving confirmed Spinelli's stories, as though he had conjured them into existence with the motion of his hand.

Then we were joined by Fareed, a Lebanese whose head was as smooth as a billiard ball and whom Spinelli affectionately called Dicknose. He bought us a round of drinks, and, before I could even agree to it, we went up to Dicknose's room, where he opened a black briefcase for us. Inside was a velvet cloth, which he unwrapped, proudly exhibiting a tiny heap of uncut diamonds, sparkling like teeth in a toothpaste commercial. They had just arrived from Kasai, Dicknose said, fresh from the bowels of the earth. Natalie touched the heap with her fingertips; her nails were bitten to a bloody pulp. "All you need to make your girlfriend here happy, Blunderpuss, is twenty-five thousand dollars," Spinelli said. Natalie looked at me and smiled, as if confirming the price.

From the Inter-Continental, we drove to Spinelli's place, past the American Embassy, a large building surrounded by a tall wall. Bored guards smoked behind the iron-grille gate. On top of the Embassy there was a nest of sky-begging antennas. I imagined a life of espionage and danger; I imagined the letters I would send to Azra from behind enemy lines. They would be signed with a false name, but she would recognize my handwriting: When you get this letter, my dear, I will be far beyond the reach of your love. "This is where I defend freedom so I can pursue happiness," Spinelli said. "One day I'll take you there, Blunderpuss."

As we climbed the stairs of our building, I passed the apartment where my family was likely having dinner, but it felt as though they were not there, as though our place were empty. The absence could have been frightening, but I was too excited to care.

Spinelli went straight to his magnetophone and turned it on. The reels started revolving slowly, disinterestedly. "Ladies and gentlemen, "Immigrant Song'!" he hollered and then howled along with the music: "Aaaa Aaaa Aaaaaaa Aaaa Aaaaaa!"

I put my hands over my ears to signal my suffering, and Natalie laughed. Still screaming, Spinelli rummaged through the debris on his coffee table until he found what I believed was a joint of marijuana. He interrupted his howl to light it up, suck on it briskly, and pass it on to Natalie. I was innocent in the ways of drugs, but when Natalie, holding her breath so that her eyes were bulging and somehow bluer for that, offered it to me, I took it and inhaled as much as I could. Naturally, I coughed it all out immediately, saliva and phlegm erupting from me. Her laughter was snorty, pushing her cheek apples up, dilating her nostrils. A chenille of snot hung from my nose, nearly reaching my chin. "If you can't stand the heat, Blunderpuss," Spinelli whinnied, "stay out of the oven." Well, I was enjoying the oven and once the cough subsided I sipped the smoke from the joint and kept it in my lungs, waiting for the high to arrive.

Spinelli sat at his drum set and grabbed the sticks. He listened intently to a different song now, waiting, biting his lips to express passion. "The greatest goddam bridge in the history of rock and roll," he said, and attacked the timpani. I recognized the beat: it was what had frightened us on our first night in Kinshasa.

"What's the name of that song?" I asked.

"'Stairway to Heaven,' " Spinelli said.

"It sounds so African."

"That ain't African. That's Bonzo, white as they come."

Natalie took the joint from my hand; her fingers were soft and cold, her touch eerily gentle. I leaned back and stared at the fan revolving frenziedly, as though a helicopter were buried upside down in the ceiling. Spinelli stopped drumming to take a puff.

"See," he said, exhaling, "you're just an innocent kid, Blunderpuss. When I was your age, I did things I wouldn't do now, but I did them then, so I don't have to do them now."

He was rewinding the tape, pressing the "stop" and the "play" buttons alternately, trying to find the beginning of the song.

"There's so much you don't know, son. You have no idea how much you don't know. Before you know anything, you have to know what you don't know."

"I know."

"The fuck you do."

"Leave him alone," Natalie said, dreamily.

"Shut up, Monkeypie." He took another puff, spat on the minuscule butt, and flicked it toward the ashtray on the coffee table, missing by a yard. Then he asked me, "Why are you here?"

"Here? In Kinshasa?"

"Forget Kinshasa, Blunderpuss. Why are you here on this goddam planet? Do you know?"

"No," I had to admit. "I don't."

Natalie sighed, as though she knew where it was all heading.

"Exactly," Spinelli said. "That's exactly your problem."

"Are you O.K., sweetheart?" Natalie asked me, extending her hand, but she couldn't reach me and I couldn't move.

"I feel nothing," I said.

"Stairway to Heaven" was picking up, the drums kicking in. "That's the way!" Spinelli leaped in excitement. "There is always a tunnel at the end of the light."

By this time he was leaning over me, blocking my view of the ceiling fan.

"Steve," Natalie said without conviction. "Leave him alone."

"He is alone," Spinelli said. "We live as we dream. Fucking alone."

"That's Conrad," I said.

"What's that?"

"That's Joseph Conrad."

"No, no, no, no, no, sir. That ain't no Joe Conrad. That's the truth."

He played the "Stairway to Heaven" bridge over my head, closing his eyes, curling his lower lip. Natalie slipped her hand under her cheek and closed her eyes, producing a celestial smile. He dropped down next to me, his back to Natalie's stomach.

"There's a tribe here," he went on, his voice lowered, "that believes that the first man and woman slid down from the sky on a rope. God let them down on a rope, they untied themselves, and the boss pulled the rope up. And that's exactly what happened, my friend. We were dropped down here and we wanna go back up, but there's no rope. So here you are, Blunderpuss, and the rope is gone."

He spread his arms to point at our surroundings: the coffee table with its pile of formerly glossy National Geographics; an overflowing ashtray and a bottle of J&B; ebony sculptures of stolid elephants and twiggy warriors, one of them draped in a T-shirt.

"But we can at least try to get up as high as possible," he said, and he excavated a tinfoil nugget from his pocket, unwrapped it with delectation, and showed me a lump of green paste at its heart. "That's why God gave us Afghanistan."

The day I smoked pot for the first time was the day I smoked hashish for the first time. He chipped slivers off the lump, then stuffed it down the narrow bowl of a clay pipe, murmuring to himself, "Yessiree bob!" This time I had no trouble inhaling and releasing the smoke impressively slowly.

"I'm here," Natalie said, and I passed the pipe to her. She smoked on her back, her eyes still closed. The smoke crawled out of her mouth, as though she were not breathing at all.

"See, I was much like you when I was a kid," Spinelli said. "And here I am now."

My head and stomach were completely empty. I tried to inhale air to fill up the vacuum inside me, but it didn't work. I was gasping, as though rapidly deflating, and it sounded like a giggle--I heard myself as someone else.

"You might wanna munch on a banana or something," Spinelli said. "You're pale as shit." Abruptly he stood up and charged off to the kitchen. Natalie's face was ashen, her lips pink; a single hair stretched from her forehead to her mouth. Before I could make any decision, I leaned toward her, planting a kiss where the hair touched her lip. She opened her eyes and widened her smile until I could see the tip of her tongue protruding between her teeth.

I retreated into my throne of stupor just as Spinelli came back with a huge, blazingly yellow banana. He offered it to me and said, "Would the monkey like a banana?"

The monkey ate the banana, promptly passed out, and dreamed of two women, one fat, one slim, knitting black wool to the rhythm of drums, chanting angrily, "Spinelli! Spinelli! Spinelli!" Whereupon I woke up to see Tata in his pith helmet and flannel pajamas shaking an enraged, ruddy finger in Spinelli's face. Spinelli had his hands on his hips and they slowly curled into fists; he was about to punch my father. Natalie sat up and said, "Steve, let it go. Let Bogdan take the boy home." The hair on the right side of her head was bunched up in the shape of a harp, or half a heart.

"All right, man, I apologize. We were just partying a little," Spinelli said. "Hopefully, it's all bridge under the water."

Walking downstairs was much like crossing an underwater bridge: an invisible stream pushed against my knees; I could not feel the solid concrete under my feet. Tata practically carried me, his hands grasping my flesh sternly. He was talking to me, but I could hear only the tone of his voice: angry, quivering. Downstairs, Mama and Sestra sat on the couch like a two-member jury; Sestra watched me with slumberous amusement; Mama's face was awash with tears. For some reason, it was all funny to me, and, when Tata dropped me into the armchair across from them, I slid down to the floor and convulsed with laughter.

Later on, in the middle of the night, I tottered to the kitchen, found the trash bin in the darkness, pressed the pedal to open the lid, and pissed a thick, pleasurable stream into its mouth.

There was no talk given by my parents, no warning about drugs and alcohol, no lecture about self-respect, no complaint about having to clean up the piss lake on the kitchen floor. They just stared at me, mute, across the dinner table: Tata pursed his lips, contemplating the troubling question of my future; Mama pressed her hand against her cheek, shaking her head in disbelief at her extraordinary bad luck in having had such a son.

I was forced to go everywhere they went: to the Lolo La Crevette, where we devoured shrimp with a malarial Macedonian prone to delivering unhurried reports on his talkative cockatoo; to the Portuguese club, where I watched two decrepit Frenchmen play tennis, a skinny boy fetching their scattershot balls; to the Belgian supermarket, pristinely overlit, where everyone was immaculately white, as though the place had been magically transported from the pallid heart of Brussels. I carried "Heart of Darkness" around and tried to read it when no one was talking to me, which was far from often enough. All I wanted was to be alone.

I was alone only when I smoked on my balcony in the tarrish heat, hoping to catch sight of Spinelli or Natalie on the street, but I never did. There was no shuffling of feet upstairs, no slamming of doors, no drumming or hollering along to Led Zeppelin. When I thought of our time together, I could not recall our doing anything or being anywhere. All I could recollect was the sound of Spinelli's voice reciting his adventures: Spinelli going up the Congo with a crew of mercenaries, looking for a fallen Soviet satellite; Spinelli in Angola, submerged in a shallow river, like a hippo, invisible to a Cuban patrol; Spinelli in a Durban restaurant, spooning raw monkey brain out of a cut-open skull.

One Sunday, we went to the Czech Ambassador's garden party in Gombe. There was beer and champagne, marakuja juice and punch; there were piles of niblets and fruit, offered on vast trays by a couple of humble servants; there were the blond twin daughters of the Romanian Ambassador; there was our Excellency and his wife, and a lot of wily Communist kids scurrying around and taunting an angry chimpanzee in a cage by the garden shed. I wanted to find a quiet spot to read, but Tata compelled me to join a volleyball game. We were on the same team as the Romanian twins, and a squat Bulgarian whose many gold chains rattled every time he missed the ball. Fortunately, there was also a Russian named Anton, tall and lanky, potato-nosed, gray-eyed. He was by far our best player and handily destroyed the other team. He showed me how to make my fingers flexible so that the ball would float high enough for Tata to smack it into the Ambassador's excellently flabby flesh.

Anton was the only man who did not smoke or drink after the game; he knew how to stay in control. I followed him and Tata to a table under an enormous umbrella; they spoke Russian together, and Anton's voice was deep and curt, used to giving orders. He tapped on the table with an agitated finger and Tata threw up his arms; I thought I heard him say Spinelli's name. When I turned around, I saw Natalie walking barefoot toward me in a diaphanous white dress, and a flare of hope went off in my chest, but it was just one of the Romanian twins, guzzling beer out of a large mug, two streaks curving from the corners of her mouth toward her bepimpled chin.

Soon thereafter we went east for the promised safari. A man was waiting for us on the tarmac of the Goma airport; we saw him as soon as we stepped out of the plane. He wore dark shades, a white shirt, and a black tie; he walked up to Tata and shook his hand diplomatically, as though welcoming a dignitary. His name was Carlier; he assured us that he was at our service and kissed Mama's hand as she was trying to extract it from his grip. He stroked Sestra's hair and nodded at me, as if he thought I was tough and he respected it.

Carlier was slurring his words and I could not tell whether it was his accent or whether he was drunk. Except for his shades and a large diamond ring on his middle finger, he resembled a butcher in a poor neighborhood: he had a heavy, fat-rounded head, large ears with meaty earlobes, blood speckles on his mercilessly scraped face. He bribed our way through the ovenlike airport, extending his money-stuffed hand to uniformed officers. Outside, he chased away a swarm of cabbies and crap-hawkers and led us to a van next to which a man stood at attention in a suit with a tightly knotted tie. Carlier barked at him and he leaped to open the door for us.

The streets of Goma were enveloped in roiling clouds of black dust. In an uncanny moment, I realized that everyone in sight was barefoot and, for a moment, I could not remember what the purpose of shoes was. But then I saw booted policemen standing on the porches, leaning on walls, like idle villains in Westerns, and the world of straightforward facts was restored. When we stopped to let a skittish herd of goats pass, nobody approached the van to offer us carved human bones or knitting needles.

"You make a right turn here," Carlier said, "and you are in Rwanda."

We turned left, got out of town, and drove through the fields of black lava rock surrounding intermittent islands of jungle verdure. A gray mountain beyond the green-and-black landscape exuded smoke; the earth seemed unearthly. "Nyiragongo," Carlier said, as if the word were self-explanatory.

The Karibu Hotel consisted of huts scattered along the shore of Lake Kivu, which, Carlier told us gleefully, contained no life: the last time Nyiragongo had erupted, the volcanic gases had killed every living creature in it. Sestra and I shared one of the huts, which was redolent of clean towels, insecticide, and mold. As she unpacked, humming to herself, I stared out the window: a pirogue glided unhurriedly on the waveless water; the sky and the lake were welded together seamlessly; a pale moon levitated in the haze. The sun was setting somewhere; it seemed as if everything were returning to darkness after an unhappy day out.

The ban on my wandering seemed to be suspended here; I left Sestra sprawling on her bed, happily attached to her Walkman. "Heart of Darkness" in hand, I took an uphill path past the other bungalows. I was hoping to escape dinner with my family. On the way from the airport, they had felt as foreign to me as if they were hired actors mindlessly performing gestures of care and kinship: Tata in his absurd pith helmet, Mama smirking, routinely afraid of the future, Sestra approaching everything with pointless curiosity. I could remember that I used to love them, but I could not remember why, and I was terrified.

The carefully trimmed hedges were moist with dusk; low, mushroomlike lanterns flickered along the path. I walked onto a terrace extending from a vast dining hall. At its center, like an altar, was a table laden with food and flowers. And there, with his back to me, picking up slices of meat and chunks of fruit, mounding them on his plate, was Steve Spinelli. I recognized his triangular torso and narrow hips, his clawlike curls and cowboy boots. For a blink, I considered sneaking out, but then he turned--a veritable hillock of victuals on his plate--and looked at me with no surprise whatsoever.

"Look what the bitch dragged in," he said.

He walked out onto the terrace and I went with him to his table; he offered me a seat and I took it, determined to leave before Tata caught me there. Without being asked, I said, "We are going to the Virunga National Park tomorrow, for a safari."

"It's a fun world, Blunderpuss," Spinelli said. "Getting funner every day."

"Is Natalie with you?"

"She is."

"Why are you here?"

He chewed heartily, with his mouth open, ignoring me. Between forkfuls, he puffed on a cigarette.

"For a vacation," he said. "And, who knows, there might be some business to be done."

I grabbed his Marlboros and lit up. The possibility that the cigarette might be drug-laced crossed my mind, but it tasted good. He seemed to speak to me from a space in which no life mattered--all the roles had already been assigned and I did not know what mine was. I fidgeted and tapped the ashes off my cigarette until the ember broke off.

"I hear that you're a good volleyball player," he said. "Did you like Antonyka?"

"How do you know him?"

"I know a lot of people. Anton is a remarkable gentleman, as well as a Communist cocksucker."

He waved at Carlier, who was just walking into the dining hall, accompanied by a tall man with sideburns and a scaphander-like Afro. Carlier spoke to the man brusquely, pointing at the meat tray, then at the flowers--there was some disorder to be redressed. "I know Carlier, too, for example," Spinelli went on. "We used to run guns to Angola together." The man took notes, looking at Carlier with dismay that tightened the muscles and sinews in his forearms. I envisioned him suddenly punching Carlier's face in, blood spraying onto his white shirt.

"Your dad also played with you and Anton, didn't he?" Spinelli said. "I bet you played pretty good together."

Carlier dropped into the chair next to Spinelli. He pulled a pipe out of his breast pocket and picked some detritus from its mouth with his pinkie, but didn't light it.

"Whipping would be too good for Monsieur Henry," he said peevishly.

"One day, Carlier, he's gonna slit your throat," Spinelli said. "And I'll cry over your corpse till I can piss no more."

Scoffing with approbation, Carlier picked up my book, looked at it without interest, and put it down. I took it and bid them good night.

The mushroom lamps cast a feeble light on the path, but not on anything else. The lava gravel crunched under my feet. Obscure creatures rustled in the black trees and bushes. The sky was splattered with stars, smeared with the Milky Way. I was lost; I could not remember the number of my hut, which was identical to all the others; the path seemed to go in circles.

I don't know why I behaved like a lunatic. I heard footsteps coming down the path behind me; I stepped off into the darkness and ducked behind a tree, with a precise clarity of action, as though somebody had already done it once and I was just repeating his motions. Whatever was in the tree shuffled its way up; I dropped my book. The footsteps stopped.

"Come out, Blunderpuss. I can see you."

I was afraid to move or look at him, exhaling until I was out of air, then inhaling through my nostrils, getting light-headed and elated, as though that were the way to make myself invisible. Something fell on my head from above--a leaf, an insect, monkey hair--but I did not brush it off. It was so easy here to forget everything, to lose all bearing. I stepped out onto the path.

"Let's go and say hi to Monkeypie," Spinelli said. "She'd love to see you."

"Maybe later," I said. "I must go."

"She's crazy about you, you know. She talks about you all the time. She'd love to see you." He put his arm around my shoulders; I felt the weight of his forearm on my neck as he softly pushed me forward.

Their room smelled of burned sugar; the ceiling fan was dead. Natalie lay on her side, her hand tucked between the pillow and her cheek, her tranquil face lit by the bedside lamp. Around her biceps a loose rubber rope twisted. On the nightstand there was a syringe and a spoon and a lit candle. I was an instant behind myself: I saw what it all was, but the thought could not encrust itself with meaning. Spinelli caressed her forehead with the back of his hand and moved a stray hair from her cheek.

"She is beautiful, isn't she, so peaceful," he said. "Would you like to fuck her?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think so."

"She's a little out of touch, but she'd love it, believe me."

"No, thank you."

"What's your problem, Blunderpuss? When I was your age, I had a hard-on twenty-four/seven."

He stood above her with his hands on his hips. I couldn't move, until my knees got so weak I sat down next to Natalie, my back to her; she did not flinch when I leaned on her belly. I had reached the farthest point of navigation. Dear Azra, The leaves have covered my path. I do not know if I will ever see you again.

"You can't get it up, can you?" he said, chortling. "You can't get it up. Let me show you something." He quickly unfastened his eagle-buckled belt and let his jeans drop. His dick stood in my face like an erected cannon. Its head was perfectly purple; the blue veins seemed to be throbbing.

"A solid torpedo and ready to explode," Spinelli said and stroked it. "Do you wanna touch it? C'mon, touch it."

Natalie sighed but did not open her eyes; the candle flickered, nearly going out. With indescribable effort, I finally stood up and pushed him away. "Hey!" he said, stumbling backward with his pants at his ankles. Still, I expected him to grab me from behind. I was ready for him to smash my head against the door until I blacked out, but nothing happened.

Outside, a tremulous wake of light stretched itself toward the cataractous moon. My heart was playing the bridge from "Stairway to Heaven," but beyond the noise in my veins, beyond my limp limbs, beyond my clammy skin, there was a serene flow carrying me away from everything that had been me. Up the path, past an oddly azure pool with a school of insects drowning in it, I walked back toward the dining hall.

At the dining hall there would be my family: Sestra picking the green beans off Tata's plate; Tata slicing his steak, still wearing his pith helmet; and Mama separating the mashed potatoes from the carrots on Sestra's plate, because Sestra never wanted her foods to touch. I would take my place at the table, and Tata would ask me where I had been. "Nowhere," I would say, and he would ask me nothing more. "You'd better eat something--you look so pale," Mama would say. My sister would tell us how much she was looking forward to the safari, to seeing the elephants and the antelopes and the monkeys. "Tomorrow is going to be really great," she would cry, clapping her hands with joy. "I simply can't wait." And we would laugh, Mama, Tata, and I, we would laugh, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, desperately hiding our rope burns.

By Aleksandar Hemon

The Photograph

Getting older wasn't too bad. The baldness suited Martin. Everyone said it. He'd had to change his trouser size from 34 to 36. It had been a bit of a shock, but it was kind of nice wearing loose trousers again, hitching them up when he stood up to go to the jacks, or whatever. He was fooling himself; he knew that. But that was the point—he was fooling himself. He'd put on weight but he felt a bit thinner.

There were other things, too, that had nothing to do with his body and aging. The kids getting older was one, and the freedom he'd kind of forgotten about. For years, if he stayed in bed in the morning, if he wanted to, it had to be carefully planned. Lizzie, his wife, had to be told. The kids had to be told, and nearly asked. It hadn't been worth it, the fuckin' palaver he'd had to go through. For years, all those years the kids were growing up, he'd been on call. A pal of his had used the phrase, on call. He'd been talking about his own life, but—there were four of them there that night in the local, sitting around one of the high tables—he'd been describing all their lives.

—I'm like a doctor without the fuckin' money, Noel had said.

They'd all smiled and nodded.

He'd loved it, mostly, the whole family/kids thing, and he'd ignored the throb above his left eye that had often felt like too much coffee or dehydration, too much or too little of something, that he thought now had probably been the pressure of that life. For years, the throb—the vein. Everything he'd done, everywhere he'd gone. Every minute had been counted and used. He had four children, and there were eleven years between the oldest and the youngest. It was over now—it seemed to be over—and the throb had gone away.

It had taken a while. He'd be wide awake early on Saturday, with nothing to do. He'd drive down to the recycling center in Coolock with five empty bottles and a cardboard box. He'd shove the box in on top of the other boxes and newspapers and he'd remember holding up one of the kids, usually the little girl, so she could reach the slot the cardboard was pushed into. He'd wonder what the fuck he was doing up and out of the house when he could have been at home in bed. He'd drive out to Howth and watch other people buying fish. He'd feel useful while he was driving. There were no kids in the back, only more cars behind him in the rearview mirror. It took him a good while to stop. Well over a year. He was driving long after the kids stopped needing him. But he did stop. He could relax now without thinking too much about it.

He wasn't on call anymore, and Noel was dead.

He missed the kids. Two of them still lived at home. They smiled when they saw him. They sometimes stayed at the table for a few minutes after they'd finished eating, and they'd chat. They'd talk more to Lizzie than to him, but it was easy enough; it was nice. They'd been wise that way, him and Lizzie. They'd got through the teen years without too much grief. There'd been no drug habits or pregnancies, not too much puking and far less screaming than they'd heard coming from some of the other houses on the road. They were great kids. He missed them. If he thought of it, the fact that he didn't have children anymore—if he'd been an actor, it was what he'd have done to make himself cry.

There was sex as well. That was a nice surprise. There'd always been sex, more or less, in among the nappies and the Calpol and schoolbooks. They'd never really stopped fancying each other. But the big surprise was some of the stuff they'd got up to since the kids had stopped being kids. Without any announcement or decision. She bit one of his nipples one night, and she'd never done that before. It hurt but, fuck, it woke him up. And he'd made her come—this was a different night—just by talking to her. So she'd said, anyway. She was hanging on to him and crying before he really knew what was going on. He just thought it was a bit of gas, whispering into her ear. He even put on an American accent, all that pussy and cock palaver. He was still just getting the hang of it, deciding what part of the States he was from, when she came. He'd never fuckin' forget it.

And there were other women. Women liked mature men. He'd read that somewhere, in a waiting room somewhere—the dentist or the doctor. Or it was just one of the things you grew up with. Women went for older men. He'd never believed it. Even when he changed it a bit, to some women, and some older men. He'd always thought it was a load of bollix. He still thought that, even more since he'd started noticing women looking at him, kind of giving him the eye. Not young ones—he didn't think he could have coped with that, smiling back at some gorgeous monster less than half his age. No, it was mature women, older women—some older women. One or two of them. There was a woman from up the road who always waved at him—she lived on the other side, nearer the shops—and she looked great from that distance. He'd looked up from the pile of newspapers in the SPAR one Sunday morning, and she'd been right beside him. He smelt her perfume, and she looked nice up close, too. She was dressed up a bit, in the old-fashioned Sunday way. And she blushed when she saw him.

—Hi.

—Hi.

She looked a bit flustered.

—Great day.

—Lovely.

He loved that, thinking that, that he'd knocked her off course a bit, just by being there, older man himself, in the SPAR on a Sunday morning. He felt the heat in his own face. He bought his Indo and kind of drifted out of the shop, took his time. He hoped, half hoped, they'd walk back up the road together, and chat till they got to her place, and a little bit more at the gate, then he'd go on to his. But it didn't happen. He walked home alone, and she passed him in her car and she kept going, past her house. She must have been going somewhere, her ma's or somewhere. Her husband was driving.

It was fine. He wasn't interested in taking it further, and he didn't think he'd have had the guts. Anyway, another of his friends, Davie, had separated from his missis a few years back and he was living back home with his mother, the poor fucker, because he couldn't afford to do anything else. But he, Davie, went to a different pub on Sunday nights, where men and women like himself, unattached and out of practice, went. And, after a few months of this, he'd come up with Davie's Law: All women over the age of forty are mad. He'd announced it in the local, one of their Wednesday nights, and none of them had disagreed.

Martin was lucky, though. Lizzie was kind of sexy mad. The insanity suited her. She knew it, and that made it even better. He'd never have done anything to wreck it.

But it wasn't all great, the getting-older business—far from. He'd started grunting whenever he picked something up or bent down to tie his laces, or whatever. He hated it. He'd tell himself to stop. But he'd forget. It became natural. Pick the soap up in the shower—grunt. Start the lawnmower—grunt. He didn't have to grunt. He was well able to bend over and the rest of it. He asked the lads, and they all did it, too.

And there was the cancer. Not his. He'd never had it. His friend who'd died. Noel. That was cancer. Felt a bit short of breath. Went to the doctor. Straight up to Beaumont Hospital. Came out two days later with the news and the dates for his chemotherapy. He told them about it the day after that, in the local, sitting in all the smoke—this was a few months before the smoking ban.

Martin didn't smoke. He never had. Noel did. But he'd given them up a year or so before the cancer, or at least before he found out about it.

None of them said anything, for a bit. They waited for him to go on, to make it less terrible. Martin watched Davie put out his cigarette, crush it into the ashtray. He pushed away the last of the rising smoke with his hand.

—They say it's early enough, Noel said. With the chemo and that. They should be able to stop it.

And they'd watched him slowly die. Not slowly. Only now it seemed slow, start to end. But at the time he'd been fine—he'd looked fine. He'd lost the hair with the chemo, but he'd looked good. Into the second year, they'd all thought he was going to make it. But then it had really started. They'd had to visit his house. He sat there with his oxygen beside him, one of those cannister things. His eyes started to look huge and he struggled to get up when he was going to the door to say goodbye to them.

—Stay where you are. We're grand.

—No, no, I'll come out with yis.

It took him forever to get to the door. They waved at the gate, and smiled back in at him and his mad skeleton smile, his shirt way too big on him.

They got into the car. And then they spoke.

—He's not going to make it, is he?

—No.

Then nothing for a while.

—We'd better get going. He'll be wondering why we're not moving.

—Right. O.K.

Lizzie knew Noel wasn't well, and she asked Martin how he was every couple of days. She asked this time and he told her and he cried and she held his head. About a week after that, he went to the jacks and there was blood on the sides of the bowl when he stood up and turned to flush it. He'd pulled the handle before he properly knew: that was his blood. He said nothing. There was no blood the next time, or the time after that. But it was back the next time; it looked strange on the toilet paper, too red. He had to phone in sick and stay home, because he was getting cramps and sweating like a madman. He told Lizzie. He went back to bed. She sat beside him.

—Blood?

—Yeah, he said.

—Jesus. Sore?

—Kind of, he said. Uncomfortable.

—I'll phone the doctor's, she said.

She looked at her watch.

—He should be still there.

—No, he said.

—Yes.

—O.K., he said.

He had to get up again. He had to go back to the jacks.

—You poor thing, she said.

He went past her.

—Sorry, he said.

He heard her at the toilet door, waiting. He wished she'd go away.

It wasn't cancer. He'd ended up going to a specialist and he had a colonoscopy three weeks later, a fibre-optic camera all the way to his appendix. He lay down on the bed thing, turned on his left side, like he was told, and the specialist gave him the jab, a needle in the arm. It was over when he woke up, and he was in a different room. They gave him toast and tea and the specialist was suddenly there, beside him—Martin was still a bit dopey—and told him that he had diverticular disease. The specialist wrote it down on a piece of paper, said something about looking it up on the Net, and then he went back behind the screen and Martin didn't see him again.

He Googled it when he got home, and for a few stupid minutes he wished he had cancer. It was fuckin' disgusting. Diverticula are pockets that develop in the colon wall. He could feel his own colon; he could feel it throbbing, coiling. He got up, and sat down again. Pain, chills, fever, change in bowel habits. His finger was on the screen, under each word. Perforation, abscess or fistula formation. He found a dictionary in his daughter's room and looked up abscess. He'd never been sure what an abscess actually was, some kind of spectacular toothache. A swollen area within body tissue, containing an accumulation of pus. He put the dictionary back on her desk. He sat on her bed and ate the Mars bar he'd found beside the dictionary. He didn't look up fistula. It could wait. He knew enough.

He couldn't tell anyone. He couldn't tell Lizzie. She'd never let him touch her again. Or she would and he'd see it, the pity and revulsion.

Pus.

Stand well back, lads, the next time I fart. He could make a joke of it. He was good at that. It was part of the way they were, making a laugh out of everything. But they'd still all be disgusted.

Why him—why Martin? What had he done to deserve perforations and pus? Cancer was dignified, something nearly to be proud of—a fuckin' achievement, compared to this. What the fuck was a fistula formation? He still didn't look it up.

Noel was in the hospice. He was too weak for home. They went in to see him one Sunday afternoon, one of the last summer days. It was a nice room. The window was open. Martin could smell flowers, hear birds. Noel sat on the side of his bed. His head was bent and everything he said came through the oxygen mask. He sounded high-pitched, like his voice had never broken, like every bit of each word was being pulled out of him. They chatted about the usual, the football and that. They laughed more than they had to, and then the laughter became more even and Martin thought he'd tell them about the diverticular thing. But Noel got in there first.

—Look it, he said.

They said nothing. They waited.

—I'm fighting this, he said.

They waited.

—Yis know that, he said. But, in case.

They watched him swallow air and keep it.

—Yis've been. Great friends, he said. I just wanted. To say that. In case. You know.

—Works both ways, brother, said Davie.

—You'll be grand, Noel.

—Just, wanted. To say it.

He died four days after.

The trick was the diet. As far as he could see, from what he'd read on Google. It wasn't really a disease. It was more like waiting to be a disease. Most people who had it didn't even know. Plenty of fresh stuff, vegetables and that. No nuts or big seeds, nothing that might block one of the pockets on his colon.

For fuck sake.

My arse is a time bomb, lads. He could hear himself saying it. Making small of it. Maybe when they were having a pint after the funeral. He could see it and hear it. The questions, the laughter.

He told Lizzie.

He actually blamed Lizzie, but only for a little while. It was the food she'd been giving him for the past twenty-nine years. She'd been killing him. But he didn't really think that. He told her the same day Noel died. He should have waited—he thought that later. He shouldn't have jumped in with his own bad news. He knew he was doing it. Throwing himself into poor Noel's grave. But he did it.

—I've a thing called diverticular disease.

He stopped himself from adding "myself." I've a thing called diverticular disease myself. He didn't go that far—I've got cancer, too. He didn't. But it sat there. He knew it. On the kitchen table.

Disease.

He told her what it was, as far as he understood it.

—I can swing between constipation and diarrhea. Or, if one of the yokes gets blocked . . .

He was stuck now. He had to go on. She was looking straight at him.

—If the fecal matter gets caught in one of them, he said. One of the pockets or pouches, like. It'll become inflamed. Even perforated.

Her hand went to her mouth.

—If I'm not careful, he told her. They'll have to take out my colon.

—All of it?

—Most of it.

He wasn't sure. He hadn't really read that far.

—But that's only if I'm not careful.

—What d'you mean, careful? she said.

—About my diet and that, he said.

—What's wrong with it?

—Nothing.

He was leaning over, taking the big words back off the table. Why hadn't he kept his fuckin' mouth shut?

—Will you have to become a vegetarian or something? she said.

—No, he said. I don't think so. But I'll have to eat vegetables.

—You do already.

—I know.

Just don't boil them to fuck.

He didn't say it. He didn't even think it, really.

He shrugged.

—It's just . . . Anyway. Now you know.

They sat at the table. He thought about Noel.

They walked up to the church together, him and Lizzie; it was no distance from the house. There was a big crowd, waiting on the steps and on the bits of grass, out onto the street.

—That's good, he said to Lizzie.

He wasn't sure why. A bit of a comfort for Noel's wife and kids, who'd be arriving soon in the black cars, with the hearse. It was what he'd have thought. My husband was popular. All these people knew my father. Familiar faces. Unfamiliar faces. He'd had a big, full life.

Martin had bought a new shirt, to go with his jacket. It was a bit tight on him, but grand as long as he kept the jacket on. He'd be losing weight soon. The whole new regime. Fruit, grains. The fresh veg. Legumes. Another of the words he'd had to find in the dictionary. Peas, beans. Health and boredom.

He hadn't slept. Not since Noel had died. Since a good bit before, actually. He'd jump awake before he was really asleep. Afraid to sleep. Afraid of falling. His skin was dry. He saw that when he brought his face up to the mirror. Dry skin all over his face. Especially across his forehead and at the sides of his nose. And spots. He could feel them, threatening, angry, right over his forehead. He looked desperate.

—Stress, said Lizzie.

He nodded.

—Grief.

—He's only dead a few days, he said.

—You've known for two years, she said back.

She was right. It made sense. The death, the news, hadn't done anything. He'd known what it was when the phone rang. He'd been waiting.

The sleep was the worst part. One good night would have made the difference, would have put whatever was missing back under his skin. That was how he felt, what he nearly believed. The night before, Lizzie had handed him a bottle of Benylin, the cough mixture, half empty and sticky. He hadn't seen Benylin since the kids had grown up.

—Take a mouthful of that.

He looked at it.

—What's the best-before date? he said. It must be fuckin' ancient.

—Never mind the date, she said. If it pours out, it's grand.

He got the lid off. He filled his mouth. He'd always liked the taste of it. He swallowed.

—Here, she said.

He gave her the bottle. She put it to her mouth and swallowed the rest.

—Good night, she said.

—Good night.

He conked out but he was awake again at half-three. Wide awake. Looking at the ceiling becoming brighter, the big swinging cobweb he always meant to get at with the brush. He got up. Had his breakfast. His new breakfast—a sliced banana, a sliced pear. Yum fuckin' yum. It was all right, though, and good for him. He was hungry again by the time the rest of them got up.

They stood at the church gate and chatted a bit as they waited for the hearse. It was weird, like pretending they weren't there for the funeral.

—Here they come.

The hearse came off the road and up past them to the front of the church. They blessed themselves. The coffin in there—Noel. It didn't seem real. And the black cars after the hearse. Two of them. The wife, the kids, a boyfriend; his sisters, the brother from Australia. They watched as they all got out of the cars and the undertaker's men took the coffin from the back of the hearse and carried it into the church.

He and Lizzie went about halfway up the aisle, not too near, not too far back. Martin hadn't been in the church in years. But he remembered it exactly, how cold it always was. How far down his knees would have to go before they landed on the padding that ran under the back of the seat in front of him, when the priest told them to kneel. How Jesus in the Stations of the Cross looked a bit like Keith Richards. He was going to show Lizzie, to remind her.

But he heard the gasp. That was what it sounded like, the whole place gasping, softly, everybody there. He looked. Noel's wife was walking away from the coffin. She'd put a framed photograph on top of it.

Noel. That was what the gasp was for. Noel, twenty-five years before.

—Jesus. Look at that.

He'd forgotten. He'd forgotten that Noel used to look like that. A big man with a big grin and a big collar on his red shirt. A big handsome man. A young man, looking back at the camera. Right into his future.

He'd forgotten. The last two years, they'd watched Noel get smaller. And, in the last months, the smaller version became the man. The man Martin hoped he wasn't talking to for the last time. He'd looked at him carefully, already remembering, storing him away. And he'd forgotten about the real man. The full man. But there he was now, on the coffin.

It should have been heartbreaking. And it was. Seeing the faded color, the big collar. He felt guilty. He'd let himself forget. He'd let the sick man become the man. He'd forgotten why Noel had been Noel, why they'd been friends. But there was more—the guilt didn't settle. He could feel it, and hear. The gasp had become whispers. The photograph. Noel's wife—Barbara—her putting the picture there, on the coffin, that was brilliant. And brave—going up there, letting the wood of the frame clatter against the coffin lid. Keeping her hands steady. She was even smiling when she came back and sat down.

Martin could see Davie in front of him, and the other men he knew and liked, all looking at each other, over other people's heads, smiling. Sad and good had become the same thing. Martin wanted to talk. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to stop being the man with diverticular disease. He felt Lizzie beside him. He nudged her knee with his. She nudged back.

The priest was walking over to the platform beside the altar, and the microphone. Martin heard a soft voice somewhere behind him, a man.

—Here goes.

They stood.

By Roddy Doyle

Landfill

Tioga County landfill is where Hector, Jr., is found. Or his "remains"--battered and badly decomposed, his mouth filled with trash. He couldn't have protested if he'd been alive, buried, as he was, in rubble and raw garbage. Overhead are shrieking birds; in the vast landfill, dump trucks and bulldozers and a search team from the Tioga County Sheriff's Department in protective uniforms. For three weeks, Hector's disappearance was in all the newspapers and on TV. Most of his teeth are broken at the roots, but those which remain are sufficient to identify Hector Campos, Jr., of Southfield, Michigan. Nineteen years old, a freshman engineering student at Michigan State University at Grand Rapids, reported missing by his dormitory room-mates in the late afternoon of Monday, March 27th, but said to have last been seen around 2 A.M. Saturday, March 25th, in the parking lot behind the Phi Epsilon fraternity house, on Pitt Avenue. And now, in the early morning of April 17th, Mrs. Campos answers the phone on the first ring. These terrible weeks that her son has been missing, Mrs. Campos has answered the phone many times and made many calls, as her husband has made many calls, and now the call from the Tioga County Sheriff's Department they have been dreading. Mrs. Campos? Are you seated? Is your husband there?

Mrs. Campos is not seated but standing, barefoot and only partly clothed, shivering, with matted hair and glazed eyes, her mouth tasting of scum from the hateful medication that has not yet helped her to sleep. Mr. Campos, hurriedly descending the stairs in rumpled boxer shorts and a sweated-through undershirt, says, "Irene, what is it? Who is it?" and rudely pries her icy fingers off the receiver. The Tioga County landfill, approximately eighty miles from the Campos home: how soon can Mr. and Mrs. Campos drive to the morgue to corroborate the identification?

Of course, the body has "badly decomposed," so Mr. Campos views it alone, through a plate-glass partition, while Mrs. Campos waits in another room. Remains! What is this strange, unfathomable word? Mrs. Campos whispers it aloud: "remains." She seems to have stumbled into a rest room, white tiled walls, door locked behind her, and the light switch triggering a fierce overhead fan that blows freezing antiseptic air: the stark settings to which, on a weekday at 10 A.M., emergency brings us. Why is Irene Campos here? Why has this happened? Is this a public rest room? Where?

Elsewhere, Mr. Campos observes the body laid upon a table beneath glaring lights, most of it shielded by a sheet so that only the head, or what remains of the head, is exposed. How is it possible that these "remains" are Hector, Jr., who once was a hundred and seventy-five pounds of solid flesh, who was, like his father, slightly soft at the waist, short-legged, with thick thighs, a wrestler's build (though Hector, Jr., who'd wrestled for Southfield High in his senior year, had not made the wrestling team at Grand Rapids)? What now remains of Hector, Jr., could not weigh more than ninety pounds, yet his father recognizes him at once, the shock of it like an electric current piercing his heart: the battered and mutilated and partially eaten-away face, the empty eye sockets. Oh, God, it is Hector, his son.

Mr. Campos can barely murmur "Yes," turns away quivering with pain. "Yes, that is Hector, Jr." Mr. Campos will never be the same again--now that he's a man who has lost his son, his soul cauterized, telling his anxious wife, "Don't ask, don't speak to me, please," even as she loses control. "Are you sure it's our son, I want to see him, what if there's a mistake, a tragic mistake, you know you make mistakes, why would Hector be in that terrible place, how has this happened, how has God let this happen, I want to see our son."


Hector, Jr. Called by school friends Heck or Scoot. Within the Campos family, sometimes called Junior (which he hated, as soon as he was old enough to register the insult) and sometimes Little Guy (until the age of twelve, when Hector, Jr., was no longer what one would call "little"), more often simply Hector. At Grand Rapids, Hector, Jr., was called Hector by his professors, Scoot by his fellow-pledges at Phi Epsilon, and Campos by the older Phi Epsilons he so admired and wished to emulate. Campos was a good guy, great sense of humor, terrific Phi Ep spirit. Of the pledges, Campos was, like, the most loyal. Seems like a tragedy, a weird accident, what happened to him, but it didn't happen at the frat house, that's for sure.

On the Hill, partying begins Thursday night. Mostly, you blow off your Friday classes, which for Scoot Campos were classes he'd got into the habit of cutting, anyway: Intro Electrical Engineering, taught by a foreigner (Indian? Pakistani? whatever) who spoke a rapid, heavily accented English that baffled and offended the sensitive ears of certain Michigan-born students, including Hector Campos, Jr., whose midterm exam was returned to him with the blunt red numeral 71; and Intro Computer Technology, in which, though the course was taught by a Caucasian American male who spoke crisp English, he was pulling a C, C-minus. Probably, yes, Scoot had been drinking that night, maybe more than he could handle, not in the dorm here but over at the frat house. Most weekends he'd come back to the dorm pretty wasted, and, yes, that was kind of a problem for us. But basically Scoot was a good kid. Just maybe in over his head a little. Freshman engineering can be tough if you don't have the math, and even if you do.

His roommates in Brest Hall reported him missing late Monday afternoon. They guessed something might be wrong, called the frat house, but there was no answer. Scoot's things were exactly as he'd left them sometime Saturday afternoon, and it wasn't like Scoot to stay over at the frat house on a Sunday night, or through Monday. He was only a pledge and didn't have a bed there, and he'd missed four Monday classes.

Weeks later, Mr. and Mrs. Campos are signing forms in the Tioga County Morgue, as through the twenty-two years of their marriage they have signed so many forms--mortgage papers, homeowner's insurance, life insurance, medical insurance, their son's college-loan application at Midland Michigan Bank. Hector Campos, Sr., one of the most reliably high-performing salespersons at Southfield Chrysler, at least until recently, has often lain sleepless in his king-size bed in the gleaming-white, aluminum-sided Colonial at 23 Quail Circle, Whispering Woods Estates of Southfield, his thoughts racing like panicked ants, his head ringing with the crazed demand for money, always more money. Apart from the sum quoted by the university admissions office for tuition, there was room and board, textbooks, "fees" for fraternity rush, for fraternity pledging, a startlingly high fee (payable in advance, Hector, Jr., said) for fraternity initiation in May. "Send the check to me, Dad. Make it out to Phi Epsilon Fraternity, Inc., and send it to me, Dad. Please!"

Mrs. Campos, lonely since Hector, Jr., left for college, took up the campaign, excited and reproachful. She pleaded and argued on Hector's behalf. "If you refuse Hector you will shame him in the eyes of his friends, you will break his heart. This fraternity--Pi Episom, Pi Epsilom?--this fraternity means more to him than anything else in his life right now. If you refuse him he will never forgive you, and I will never forgive you."

Only when Mrs. Campos threatened to borrow the fifteen hundred dollars from her parents did Mr. Campos give in, disgusted, defeated--as so often through the years, if a man wishes to preserve his marriage, he gives in. Married for love--does that mean for life? Can love prevail through life?

Now, in the chilled antiseptic air of the Tioga County medical examiner's office, Mr. and Mrs. Campos are co-signing documents in triplicate that will release the "remains" of Hector Campos, Jr., for burial (in St. Joseph's Cemetery, Southfield) after the medical examiner has filed his final report. The police investigation has yet to determine whether Hector died in the early hours of March 25th in the steep-sided Dumpster behind the Phi Epsilon frat house--where investigators found stains and swaths of blood, as if made by wildly thrashing bloody wings--or whether he died as many as forty-eight hours later, after lying unconscious, possibly comatose from brain injuries, until Monday morning, and then being hauled away unseen beneath mounds of trash, cans, bottles, Styrofoam and cardboard packages, rancid raw garbage, stained and filthy clothing, and paper towels soaked in vomit, urine, even feces. At approximately 6:45 A.M. on March 27th, he was dumped into the rear of a thunderous Tioga County Sanitation Department truck and hauled sixteen miles north of the city to the Packard Road recycling transfer station, to be compacted and then hauled away again to the gouged, misshapen, ever-shifting landscape of the Tioga County landfill.

Carefully, the Tioga County sheriff has explained that "foul play" has not been ruled out as a possibility, though the medical examiner has determined that the "massive injuries" to the body of Hector Campos, Jr., are "compatible" with injuries that would have been caused by the trash-compacting process. A more complete autopsy may yield new information. The police investigation will continue, and the university administration will convene an investigating committee. As many as a hundred college students have been interviewed: Hector's roommates, classmates, Phi Epsilon pledges and brothers, even Hector's professors, who take care to speak of him in the neutral terms befitting one who has suffered a terrible but inexplicable--and blameless--fate. Jesus! You have to hope that the poor bastard died right away, smashed out of his mind, diving down the trash chute into the Dumpster and breaking his neck on contact. Only the police investigators can bring themselves to imagine that Hector Campos, Jr., may have been "compacted" while still alive.


During the strain, anxiety, and insomniac misery of the three-week search, Mrs. Campos was fierce and frantic with hope, holding prayer vigils at St. Joseph's Church. Relatives, neighbors, and parish members lit votive candles, for God is a God of mercy as well as wrath, while she hid her face in prayer. God, let Hector return to us, send Hector back to us, Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen.

Mrs. Campos would forever relive the shock of that call out of nowhere: a man, identifying himself as an assistant dean at the university, and Mrs. Campos saying, "Yes? Yes, I am Hector's mother," drawing a quick short breath. "Is something wrong?"

In weak moments, she imagined the possibility of a phone call bearing different news. The possibility of subsequent phone calls bearing different news. For it was crucial, during those days, those interminable stretches of (open-eyed, exhausted) time, to believe that Hector was alive. Our son is alive! She had only to shut her eyes to see him as he looked when he came home for a few days the previous month--his frowning smile, such a handsome boy. Mrs. Campos always had to tell him how handsome he was. Hector had hated his "fat face" since puberty, his "beak nose," his "ape forehead, like Dad's." Mrs. Campos winced at such words, pulled at Hector's hands when, unconsciously, he dug and picked at his nose. Any serious discussion between them had to be initiated by Mrs. Campos, and then only gingerly, for her son so quickly took offense. "Jesus, Mom, lighten up, will you? Must've missed your call--what's the big deal, this crappy cell phone you bought me." And Mrs. Campos cried, "But I love you! We love you," but her words were muffled. She was sweating and thrashing in her sleep; the nightmare had not lifted. She had to keep the flame alive those terrible days, weeks.

At Easter Sunday Mass, she shut her eyes tight, but this time saw only Hector, Jr.,'s grimace--how he'd hated going to church. In recent years he'd refused altogether, even refused midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Mrs. Campos had been so ashamed, so hurt. Now she was kneeling at the Communion rail, hiding her hot-skinned face in her hands, her numbed lips moving rapidly in prayer. She was dazed and desperate, snatching at prayer as you'd snatch at something for balance. The tranquillizers she was taking had affected her balance, her sense of her (physical) self; there was a buzzing in her head. Please help us, please do not abandon us in our hour of need. She looked up as the elderly priest made his way to her, and craned her neck like a starving bird, opening her mouth to take the doughy white Communion wafer on her tongue, her dry, dry tongue. This is my body, and this is my blood.

She was half fainting then, in ill-chosen patent-leather pumps, staggering away from the Communion rail, into the aisle, all eyes fixed on the heavily made-up woman with so clearly dyed, dark-red hair, a middle-aged fleshiness to her face, bruiselike circles beneath her eyes, and quickly there came Mr. Campos to help the swaying woman back to the family pew, fingers gripping her arm at the elbow. Hector Campos, Sr.! Father of the missing boy! Swarthy-skinned, with dark wiry hair, a low forehead crisscrossed with lines, and large, oddly simian ears protruding from the sides of his head. There was a grim set to the man's mouth, a flush of indignation or impatience, as Mrs. Campos confusedly struggled with him as if to wrench her arm out of his grip, as if he were hurting her.

In the car driving home, Mrs. Campos dissolved into hysteria, screaming, "You don't have faith! You've given up faith, I hate you!" For it was crucial to believe, as Mrs. Campos believed, that, nearly three weeks after Hector, Jr., "disappeared," he might yet be found unharmed. He might yet call his anxious parents, after so many days of (inexplicably) not calling. He might show up to surprise his parents on Easter Sunday when they returned from St. Joseph's, might be in the kitchen, eating from the refrigerator.

Or maybe Hector had been injured and was amnesiac, or had been abducted but would escape his captor or be released. Or he had been wandering, drifting, who knew where, hitchhiking; he'd left the university without telling anyone, he was upset, had problems with a girl, a girl he'd never told his parents about, just as he'd never told them much about his personal life since sophomore year of high school, since he put on weight, grew several inches, and became so involved with weight lifting, and then with wrestling, the fanatic weight obsessions of wrestling--fasting, binge eating, fasting, binge eating. And maybe the Phi Epsilons had been putting pressure on Hector; maybe he'd been made to feel inferior among the pledges. He'd once called his mother to say how crappy he felt, never having enough money--the other guys had money, but he didn't. He'd told her how shitty he was made to feel, and that if the fraternity dropped him, didn't initiate him with the other pledges, he'd kill himself, he would. He swore he'd kill himself! And Mrs. Campos had pleaded, "Please don't say such terrible things! You don't mean what you're saying, you're breaking my heart."

Mrs. Campos blamed Mr. Campos for coercing Hector into engineering. Such difficult courses, who could have excelled at such difficult courses? It was no wonder that Hector had been so lonely, away from home for the first time in his life. None of his Southfield High friends were at Grand Rapids. His classes were too large; his professors scarcely knew him. Twelve thousand undergraduates at Grand Rapids. Three hundred residents in Brest Hall, an ugly high-rise where poor Hector shared a room with two other guys--Reb and Steve--who, in Hector's words, never went "out of their way" to be friendly to him.

In turn, Hector's roommates spoke vaguely of him when they were interviewed by Tioga County sheriff's deputies. Didn't know Scoot too well, he kind of kept to himself, kind of obsessed about things, like the wrestling team last fall. He didn't make it, but the coach encouraged him to try again, so he was hopeful. It was hard to talk to him, y'know? You had to care a lot about Scoot's interests--that's all he wanted to talk about, in kind of a fast, nervous way. He'd be, like, laughing, interrupting himself laughing. Fraternity rush was a crazed time for Scoot. He was really happy when he got a bid from the Phi Eps. He was so proud of his pledge pin, and he was looking forward to living in the frat house next year if his dad O.K.'d it. Because there was some money issue, maybe. Or maybe it was Scoot's grades. He was having kind of a meltdown with Intro Electrical Engineering, also his computer course. He'd ask some of the guys on the floor for help, which was mostly O.K.--you had to feel sorry for him--but then Scoot would get kind of weird, and sarcastic, like we were trying to screw him up, telling him the wrong things. There were times Scoot wouldn't speak to us and stayed away from the room and over at the frat house. Phi Eps are known for their keg parties--they're kind of wild-party guys. There aren't many engineering majors there on the Hill, not in the Phi Ep house, anyway.


No. 228 Pitt Street is a large, three-story Victorian house with peeling gunmetal-gray paint, moss growing in rain gutters, rotting turrets, and steep shingled roofs in need of repair. The Phi Epsilon house dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century, when the Hill was Grand Rapids's most prestigious residential neighborhood. Now the Hill is known as Fraternity Row, and Phi Epsilon exudes an air that is both derelict and defiant, its enormous metallic-silver "??" above a listing portico. Scrub grass grows in the stunted front yard. Vehicles are parked in the cracked asphalt driveway, in the parking lot at the rear, in the weedy front yard, and at the curb. Often, the Dumpster at the rear of the house overflows and trash lies scattered at its base. It's a feature of the Phi Epsilon house that, warm weather or cold, its windows are likely to be flung open to emit high-decibel rock music, particularly at night; and that, out of the flung-open windows, begrimed and frayed curtains blow in the wind.

Inside the house there's a pervasive odor of stale beer, fried foods, and cigarette smoke. The high-ceilinged rooms are sparsely furnished with battered leather sofas and chairs, the decades-old gifts of alums. On the badly scarred hardwood floors are threadbare carpets; on the walls, torn and discolored wallpaper. Brass chandeliers have grown black with tarnish. There are rickety stairs and bannisters, gouged wood panelling, and in the dining room a long table carved with initials like fossil traces. In the basement is the enormous party room running the width of the house, with a stained linoleum floor, more battered leather furniture, leprous-green mold growing on the walls and ceiling, and more intense odors. Scattered throughout the house are filth-splotched lavatories, and in a small room beyond the party room is an ancient, rattling oil furnace.

For several years in the nineteen-nineties, Phi Epsilon fraternity was "suspended" from the university for having violated a number of campus and city ordinances: underage/illegal drinking on the premises, keg parties in the front yard, "operating a public nuisance," sexual assaults against young women and high-school-age girls, and even, during a secret initiation ceremony in 1995, against a Phi Epsilon pledge who had to be rushed to a local emergency room with "rectal hemorrhaging." Bankrupt from fines, lawsuits, and a dwindling membership, the fraternity had gone off campus until, in 1999, a group of aggressive alums, led by a Michigan state legislator, campaigned to have it reinstated. Still, by 2006 the fraternity hadn't yet regained its pre-suspension numbers--it had only twenty-six active members, one-third of whom were on academic probation.

In the rush season when Hector Campos, Jr., became a pledge, the fraternity had needed at least seventeen pledges, but only nine young men accepted bids: Zwaaf, Scherer, Tickler, Tuozzolo, Vreasy, Felbush, Herker, Krampf, and Campos. Of these, only the first three were first choices of the fraternity; the others were accepted to help fill out the membership. None of the pledges knew this, of course. Although, you know how guys are when they're drinking. It might have been, nobody can recall exactly, but it might have been the case that Herker's "big brother," who was pissed off at Scoot Campos for his falling-down-drunk belligerence and his all too frequent assholish behavior, told him that he wasn't anybody's first choice. "Fuck you, fuckhead!" the guys yelled, lurching at each other. Or maybe this never happened, or didn't happen in this way. When interviewed by the Tioga County investigators, none of the guys could remember, exactly. First we knew Scoot was missing, it's the dean calling. Nobody here knew he was missing. Must've gone back to his dorm and something happened there, or maybe he never went back. But whatever happened to him didn't happen here.


Mrs. Campos tried to take pride in this fact: Mr. Campos brought his family from Detroit to live in the city of Southfield, in a white, four-bedroom Colonial, and no one in Irene Campos's family had such a beautiful home--not her sisters, not her cousins--and no one in Mr. Campos's family, either. Mr. Campos's mother was living out her life on lower Dequindre, in mostly black Detroit, where for thirty-five years her husband, Cesar, worked for Gratiot Construction & Roofing--he squatted and stooped on roofs in the blazing sun and drove a truck for the company, hauling rubble from construction sites until his back gave out. He died of heart failure at the age of sixty-seven, and Irene Campos was terrified of seeing in her husband's face the defeated look of the old father, resigned always to the worst--that peasant soul, bitter in resignation--dying before his time. He has given up, he has lost hope that we will see our son again. I will never forgive him. Mrs. Campos continued to have faith. How many times had she called Hector, Jr.,'s cell phone, knowing that her son's cell phone was no longer in operation, that no one knew where it was. (In the vast Tioga County landfill amid tons of rubble, very likely. Where else? Hector, Jr., kept his cell phone in the back pocket of his jeans, and that part of his clothing had been torn from him.)


Mutations are the key to natural selection, Hector had learned in Intro to Biology, his science-requirement course--said to be the easiest of the science-requirement courses, though he hadn't found it so easy, had barely maintained a C average. Natural selection is the key to evolution and survival, he'd written in wavering ballpoint, fighting to keep his eyelids open, so very tired, still wasted from the previous night of hanging out with the guys. He was trying to concentrate, a taste of beer and pizza dough coming up on him even now, hours later. Genes are the key to change, evolution is only possible through change, species change not by free will but blindly. No idea what this meant, what the lecturer was saying. If words were balloons, these words were floating up to bounce against the ceiling of the windowless fluorescent-lit lecture hall, colliding with one another and drifting about, stupidly. He would've used his laptop, except his fucking laptop wasn't working right. No purpose, just chance. The pattern of scout ants seeking food would look to a viewer like "intelligent design" but was really the result of the random, haphazard trails of ants seeking food. Ants? No idea what the hell this guy's droning on about, like it matters. Jesus, he's so bored! And thirsty for a beer--his throat is parched.

He checks his cell and finds a text message: " PLEASE CALL MOM DARLING." His heart sinks, and with a stab of annoyance he erases the message. What looks like "intelligent design" is merely random. Instinct, not intelligence. Any questions? Meant to call his mother, but, Jesus, why doesn't that woman get a life of her own? It's pledge-party weekend. Scoot Campos has other priorities. The girl he'd been planning to take to the party had sent an e-mail: Something's come up. Bitch, he knew he couldn't trust her. A girl one of the Phi Ep guys hooked him up with last time said thanks, but she'd be out of town starting Friday. Scoot is damn disappointed, depressed. What's he going to have to do, pay for it?

Kind of earnest and boring when he was, like, sober. You got the impression Campos hadn't a clue how totally uninterested people were in the things he'd talk about--the frat house, wrestling, his opinions on his courses, girls. Me and Steve liked him O.K. at first, it's cool we got a Hispanic roommate, or what's it--Latino?--that's cool. But Campos, he's just some guy, nothing special about him you could pick on, except he wanted to hang out with the frat guys. Thought we were weird for not signing up for rush. After he pledged, he'd start coming back to the room really late, stumbling around drunk like an asshole, mess up in here, piss on the toilet seat and the floor and next day act like it's some goddam joke. That last weekend he didn't come back, truth is it was great. That poor guy, you have to feel sorry for him, but we didn't, much. It's a shitty thing to say, can't tell any adult, but we don't miss Scoot. And we're fed up answering questions about him--we told all we know. Fed up with everybody assuming we were friends of his, involved somehow, or responsible. Fuck it, we are not involved and we're not responsible! And seeing his parents, Mrs. Campos so sad and so pathetic, trying to smile at me, hugging me, and Steve, like we were Scoot's best friends. It's totally weird to realize that a guy like Scoot Campos, so pathetic, a loser, is somebody that is loved by somebody.

At the party, things are going O.K. in spite of the red-haired girl ditching him first chance she has, hooking up with one of the older guys. O.K., Scoot can live with that, but later there's some exchange of words--he's hot-faced, trying not to show he's pissed at the guys taunting him. Then he's laughing to himself, crawling--where? Upstairs, where? He can't think, his head is bombarded with deafening music, so loud you almost can't hear it. Some kind of a joke, eager to make the guys laugh to show that he isn't hurt by, who was it, that girl, blond girl, little-bitty tits, skinny little ass in jeans so tight it's all you can do not to trace the crack of her ass with your forefinger. Maybe, in fact, somebody did just that, and he's cracking up with laughter, braying belly laughter, until somebody slaps him, kicks him, and he's on his knees, on his hands and knees crawling, needing to get to a toilet, and fast. Maybe it isn't funny, or is it? Scoot Campos has fine-honed a reputation at the Phi Ep house as a joker, funniest goddam pledge. The other pledges are losers, but Scoot Campos is a wrestler, he's witty and wired. And good-looking, in that swarthy Hispanic way, with dark wavy hair, a solid jawline, and a fleshy mouth. Funny like somebody on Comedy Central, except Scoot makes it up himself, improvises. A few beers, some tequila, and Scoot isn't tongue-tied and sweating but witty and wired. By coincidence it's Newman's Day, the twenty-fourth of the month, named for the actor Paul Newman--Scoot doesn't know why, nobody knows why, and the challenge is to chug twenty-four beers in some record time, and, of course, there's tequila at the party, too. Scoot has acquired a taste for tequila! If he'd known about tequila in fucking high school, he might've had a goddam better time.

Now he's trying to remember what it was, a few weeks ago--some crappy thing one of the brothers did, humiliating, hurt his feelings, right in the middle of midterms. He'd fucked up the engineering exam, he knew, so he was drinking with some of the guys over at the frat house and (somehow) fell down the stairs somewhere. He'd been puking, and sort of passed out, and somebody had dragged him into a bathroom and turned on the shower and left him, and after a while one of the guys came back and turned off the shower, and by this time Scoot had crawled out onto the floor and flopped over onto his back. The guy kicked him-- Hey, Campos. Hey, man, how ya doin'?-- meaning to wake him, maybe, or turn him over, but when Scoot didn't move he left him to sleep off the drunk, soaking wet and shivering in the cold. Next morning when Scoot woke up, groggy and dazed, with a pounding headache, a taste of vomit in his mouth, and dried vomit all down his front, he'd had to admit with the cruel clarity of stone-cold sobriety: They left me here on my back to puke and choke and die, the fuckers. His friends! His fraternity brothers-to-be! And he thought, Never again. Not ever. Meaning he'd de-pledge Phi Ep, and he'd stop drinking. But, somehow, the next weekend he'd come trailing back, couldn't stay away. These guys are his friends, his only friends.

Except tonight there's some kind of bad feeling again, Scoot's feelings are bruised, but, fuck, he isn't going to show it. Of the pledge class, Scoot Campos is possibly the alums' favorite, he's been given to know. Ethnic diversity--an idea whose time has come for Phi Epsilon. At the top of the stairs he's out of breath, can't hold it back, God damn, is he pissing his pants? Can't help it, can't stop it. How'd this happen? If the girls downstairs learn of Scoot's accident they'll be totally grossed out, and who can blame them? The guys are going to be disgusted. It's not the first time that Scoot has been too staggering drunk to lurch to a toilet, or outside to the lawn, too confused about where he is, if he's awake or, in fact, asleep. Maybe this is a dream, one of those weird dreams, and it's O.K. to piss, nobody will scold, it's O.K. to piss into some receptacle or crack in the floor, that hot wet sensation spreading in his groin, soaking his underwear and down his legs, quickly turning cold.

A piss trail follows Scoot Campos up the stairs, soaking into the carpet, and he's laughing like a deranged little kid who's wet his diaper on purpose--hell, the carpets at the Phi Ep house are already (piss?) stained, what's the big deal? "Fuck you," he's saying, defending himself against some guy, or guys, stooping over him, calling him names. Scoot Campos is wired tonight, he's laughing in their faces, and somebody's dragging him--where? Toward a window? Through the wide-open windows the curtains are sucked outside and flapping in the rain, and there's a moon, a glaring-white moon like a beacon, some kind of crazy eye peering into Scoot Campos's soul, like, How ya doin', Scoot? Hey, man, know what? You're O.K.

This is God's eye, Scoot thinks. (Or maybe a street light? Outside on Pitt Avenue?) Somebody is lifting him, and he's thrashing and flailing his arms, laughing so hard that any remaining dribble of piss leaks out, and whoever it is grabs Scoot in a hammerlock. Probably one of the older guys, one of the wrestlers, built like a tank and taut-jawed and giving off heat and the pungent smell of a male body in fighting mode. He's cursing Scoot, calling him asshole, dickhead, fuckhead, and Scoot is being lifted, pushed into an opening in the wall--the trash chute. Or maybe the drunken pledge is crawling head first into the chute of his own volition, and one of the guys grabs his ankles to pull him back, and Scoot is kicking and yelling and laughing. At least it sounds like laughter; with this wild-wired spic anything is possible. Hey, guys? Help me? Help me, guys?

He's kicking like crazy, so whoever has hold of his ankles has to let go--Campos is goddam dangerous when he's been drinking--and then his thick, stocky body lurches down the trash chute. It sounds like a pig squealing, or a kid shooting down a slide in an amusement park. At the end of the pitch-black, stale-air chute there should be something soft to break his fall, except there isn't, and with the impact of a hundred and seventy-five pounds Scoot Campos strikes the edge of the trash bin and his forehead hits its sharp metal lip.

Immediately he's bleeding, dazed; his neck has been twisted, his spine, his legs are buckled weirdly beneath him. He's too dazed to be panicked, not knowing what has happened or where he is. Feebly, he pleads "Hey, guys? Help me?" amid a confusion of rich, ripe, rotting smells, something rancid. He's upside down trying to turn, to rotate his body, stunned and quivering like a mangled worm, trying to lift his head, to breathe, to open his mouth, a terrible throbbing pain in his neck, in his upper spine. Like a gasping fish he opens his mouth, but he can't make a sound, can't call for help. For sure the guys will check on Scoot, make their way downstairs shouting and laughing like hyenas. Craziest damn thing, this drunk pledge, smashed out of his head, slid down the trash chute. It's not the first time a drunken pledge or active at the Phi Ep house has slid down the trash chute into the Dumpster. Anyway, at some point there was the intention to check on the pledge in the Dumpster, but amid the party noise, the swarm of people--including heavily made-up high-school girls--and the pounding music there were too many distractions.

Later, it will be claimed that a couple of guys did, in fact, check the Dumpster but Campos wasn't there. Possibly Campos had been bleeding, but he couldn't have been seriously hurt because evidently he'd crawled out of the Dumpster and gone away, back to the dorm maybe. Anyway, nobody was in the Dumpster when they checked, they swore. Yet the guy had a weird sense of humor--everybody would testify to Scoot Campos's weird sense of humor--and he might've returned and crawled back into the Dumpster, like a little kid would do, like hide-and-seek, except he'd fallen asleep there, or he'd hurt his head and passed out, and got covered in party trash. Had to be some freak accident like that--what other explanation was there?


As Scoot's brain is bleeding, as Scoot's mouth is filling with trash, as Scoot's heart beats and lurches with a frantic stubbornness, seventy miles to the east, in Whispering Woods Estates, Southfield, Irene Campos lies awake in bed uncomfortably perspiring, hot flushes in her face and in her upper chest. Her thoughts come confused and slow, and have something to do with the moon veiled by curtains, or by high scudding clouds--the full moon is a sign of good luck and happiness, or is there something disquieting about the full moon, so whitely glaring? Or is it a neighbor's outside light? Mrs. Campos isn't fully awake, nor is she asleep, and she is planning tomorrow to insist to Mr. Campos that they drive over to Grand Rapids to visit with Hector, Jr., who hasn't been answering her calls. Beside her, Mr. Campos is sleeping fitfully on his back, twitching and thrashing in the smelly underwear that she'll sometimes find kicked beneath the bed or in a corner of Mr. Campos's closet--why? Why would a man hoard soiled underwear? And socks?

Mr. Campos snores, snorts, sounds like a drowning man, and, careful not to wake him, Mrs. Campos pokes and nudges him until he rolls off his back, now grinding his teeth but facing away, at the edge of the bed. Earlier that day, Mrs. Campos sent Hector, Jr., a pleading text message: " PLEASE CALL MOM DARLING." But Hector, Jr., did not respond, and she has become seriously worried. Oh, if only that college hadn't been so aggressive about recruiting students from Southfield High, sending brochures and pamphlets, even calling on the phone--not that the university was going to offer Hector, Jr., a scholarship, not a penny, his parents would be paying full tuition. If only Hector, Jr., had decided to go to Eastern Michigan University at Ypsilanti, no more than forty miles away. There's an engineering school at Ypsilanti, too, and fraternities, and Hector, Jr., could live at home, and Mrs. Campos could take better care of him. Unconsciously caressing her left breast, holding her left breast in her right hand--how like a sac of warm water it is, or warm milk--and, on the brink of a dream of surpassing beauty and tenderness, Mrs. Campos shuts her eyes. Why does Mr. Campos never caress her breasts anymore? Why does Mr. Campos never suck her nipples anymore? Mrs. Campos runs her thumb over the large soft nipple, stirring it to hardness, like a little berry. She is driving back from the city, driving back from ugly Detroit to Whispering Woods Estates, such joy, such pride, turning into the brick-gated subdivision off Southfield Road, making her way floating along Pheasant Pass, Larkspur Drive, Bluebell Lane, and, at last, to Quail Circle, where, in the gleaming-white Colonial at No. 23, the Campos family lives.

By Joyce Carol Oates

Pinchuck's Law

Twenty years in the homicide division of the N.Y.P.D. and, brother, you've seen everything. Like when some Wall Street broker juliennes his little petit four over who gets to work the channel changer, or this lovesick rabbi decides to end it all by salting his beard with anthrax and inhaling. That's why when someone reported a dead body on Riverside Drive at Eighty-third with no bullet holes, no stab wounds, and no signs of struggle I didn't freak to some film-noir conclusion but put it down to one of the thousand natural shocks the Bard claims the flesh is heir to but don't ask me which one.

When another stiff turned up in SoHo two days later, though, also without the least trace of foul play, and a third likewise in Central Park, I got out the Dexedrine and told the immortal beloved I'd be working late for a while.

"It's amazing," my partner Mike Sweeney said as he strung the usual yellow bunting around the crime scene. Mike is a bear of a man who could easily pass for a bear, and has in fact been contacted by zoos to fill in when the real bear was ill. "The tabloids are saying it's a serial killer. Naturally, the serial killers are claiming bias and that they're always the first ones accused when three or more victims are killed the same way. They'd like the number raised to six."

"I'll level with you, Mike, I've never seen anything like this one—and you know I'm the guy who collared the Astrology Killer." The Astrology Killer was a vicious maniac who liked to sneak up and bash people's heads in while they were yodelling. He was tough to nab because there was so much sympathy for him.

I told Mike to call me if he came up with any sexy clues and I beat it down to the morgue to ask Sam Dogstatter, our coroner, about poison. Sam and I go way back to when he was a young coroner starting out and used to perform autopsies at weddings and sweet sixteens, for cigarette money.

"At first I thought it might be a tiny dart," Sam said. "I tried to check out everybody in New York City who owned a blow gun, but the task was insurmountable. No one realizes half the town's got one of those six-foot Jívaro jobs and most citizens have carrying permits."

I brought up the possibility of the Amanita mushroom, which can kill without leaving any trace, but Lou shot it down. "There was only one health-food store that sold really deadly mushrooms, but it stopped years ago when it turned out they weren't organically grown."

I thanked Sam and put in a call to Lou Watson, who was excited because he'd gotten a very good set of fingerprints at the crime scene, which he instantly traded to another precinct for a rare set of Enrico Caruso's that were quite valuable. Lou said the lab had come up with a hair. They had also come up with a bald spot. The hair unfortunately matched an eight-year-old kid's and the bald spot was traced to a row of nine men in the front row of a girlie show, who all had airtight alibis.

Down at headquarters, I chatted with Ben Rogers, my mentor and the man who solved the Yuppie Restaurant Murder Case, where the victims were shot and then lightly dusted with lime and fresh mint. Ben had waited till the killer ran out of fresh mint and was forced to use chopped walnuts, which were traceable by their serial numbers.

"Tell me about the victims," I said. "Did they have any enemies?"

"Sure, they had enemies," Ben said, "but their enemies were all at Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach. There was a big Enemies Convention and practically every enemy on the East Coast attended."

I had just left Ben to grab a sandwich when I got word that a hot-off-the-griddle stiff had turned up in a Dumpster on East Seventy-second Street. This time the pristine corpse was Ricky Weems, a young actor who specialized in sensitive rebels and was the star of the TV medical soap opera "When a Mole Darkens." Only this time a homeless lady caught the action. Wanda Bushkin, who'd once slept every night in a carton on the Lower East Side, had recently moved to a carton on Park Avenue. At first, she worried that she wouldn't get board approval, but when her net worth was shown to be above four dollars and thirty cents she was accepted at the more desirable box.

Bushkin couldn't sleep on the night in question, and caught sight of a man who drove up in a red Hummer, tossed a body, and sped away. At first, she didn't want to get involved because she had once identified a criminal who then broke off his engagement to her. This time, she described the suspect to our sketch artist, Howard Inchcape, but Inchcape, in a fit of temperament, refused to do the picture unless the suspect would come in and sit for it.

I was trying to reason with Inchcape when my mind suddenly twigged on B. J. Sygmnd, the psychic. Sygmnd was a poor Austrian who'd lost all the vowels in his name in a boating accident. In 1993, I had used Sygmnd to find a cat burglar, whom he rather miraculously picked out from almost a hundred strays. I watched now while he poked around at the victim's belongings and then went into some kind of trance. His eyeballs widened and he started to speak but the voice that came from him was that of Toshiro Mifune. He said the man I was looking for employed Novocain and worked with drills on molars and bicuspids, and he might even be able to pinpoint the profession but he needed a Ouija board.

A quick computer check corroborated that all the victims were patients of the same D.D.S., and I knew I'd hit pay dirt. Anesthetizing myself with four fingers of Johnnie Walker, I used a Swiss Army knife to pry out the silver amalgam in lower seven, and the next morning sat openmouthed while Dr. Paul W. Pinchuck worked on my cavity.

"This won't take long," he said. "Although if you have a little time I should also do the tooth next to it. I'm surprised it hasn't given you any trouble. You're not missing anything outside today, anyhow. Can you believe this weather? April set a record for rainfall. It's this global-warming thing. Because too many people use air-conditioners. I don't need one. Where we live you sleep with the window open even in the hottest weather. I have a good metabolism that way. My wife, too. Both our bodies adjust well. Because we're very careful about what we eat. No marbleized meat, not too much dairy—plus I exercise. I prefer the treadmill. Miriam likes the StairMaster. And we very much enjoy swimming. We have a house out in Sagaponack. Miriam and I usually begin taking the weekends, the start of April, out in the Hamptons. We love Sagaponack. There's people if you want to socialize but you can also keep to yourself. I'm not a big social person. We like to read, mostly, and she does origami. We used to have a place in Tappan. There's a few different ways to go but I usually take I-95. It's a half hour. We prefer the beach, though. We just put in a new roof. I couldn't believe the estimate. My God, those contractors get you every which way. Look, it's like anything else—you get what you pay for. I tell my kids there are no bargains in this life. There's no free lunch. We have three boys. Seth will be bar-mitzvahed in June."

I began to feel myself gasping for air as Pinchuck's drill cut through my enamel and I fought the onset of Cheyne-Stokes breathing. I sensed my vital signs were ebbing, and I knew I was in trouble when my life began to pass before my eyes and my father was being played by Dame Edna.

Four days later I awoke in the intensive-care unit at Columbia-Presbyterian.

"Thank God you're made of iron," Mike Sweeney said, leaning over my bed.

"What happened?" I queried.

"You were very lucky," Mike said. "Just as you lost consciousness, a Mrs. Fay Noseworthy burst into Pinchuck's office with a dental emergency. She was an F.W.I.: Flossing While Intoxicated. Apparently it caused her temporary crowns to slip out and she swallowed them. When you hit the floor at Pinchuck's, she began screaming. Pinchuck panicked and made a run for it. Fortunately, our SWAT team got there just in time."

"Pinchuck ran? But he seemed just like any regular dentist. He worked on my teeth and chatted."

"Right now, you get some rest," Mike said, flashing his Mona Lisa smile, which Sotheby's had claimed was a forgery. "I'll explain it all when you're up on your feet."

In case you're wondering where this little homicide tale goes, keep watching the back pages for news out of Albany, where the legislature will be taking up the bill that will lead to Pinchuck's Law, which makes it a felony for any dentist to endanger the life of a patient by relentless conversation or by saying anything other than "Open wide" or "Please rinse" without a prior court order.

By Woody Allen

Other People's Deaths

EVERYBODY LEAVING

The coroner's men put James in the back of the truck and drove away, and the Bernstines, once again, urged Ilka to come home with them, at least for the night, or to let them take the baby. Again, Ilka was earnest in begging to be left right here, wanted the baby to stay here with her. No thank you, really, she did not need—did not want—anybody sleeping over.

The friends and colleagues trooped down the path: Leslie Shakespeare, the director, and Joe Bernstine, the co-founder of the Concordance Institute—genus think tank, of which Ilka was, and poor Jimmy had been, junior members—and their colleagues the Ayes, the Zees, the Cohns, and the Stones. Outside the gate they stopped, they looked back, but Ilka had taken the baby inside and closed the door. They stood for a moment, they talked, not accounting to themselves for the intense charm of the summer hill rising behind Ilka's house, of standing, of breathing—of the glamour of being alive. Leslie asked everyone to come over for a drink.

The report of the accident had come at the very moment the committee was about to vote on Jimmy's retention.

Jimmy had told Ilka not to worry when he accepted the job as the institute's director of projects: what he didn't know about the Who's Who of scholarship he would pick up as he went along. Ilka had worried. She watched him not writing the book stipulated in his contract. She watched him worry when he screwed up the institute's directories on the new computer. Called on the carpet most recently for failing to file a duplicate of his letter to one conference participant, Jimmy had failed to confess that he couldn't find the fellow's address. Leslie Shakespeare had sent Jimmy out of town on institute business while his retention was under discussion.

The friends and colleagues began to move along the sidewalk in groups and pairs. Alfred Stone walked with his wife, Alpha. Alfred was a doctor, the only one of the group unconnected with the work of the institute. It was he who had attended at the scene of the accident. As he walked, he was arranging the sentence he ought to have spoken to the widow when he arrived at her house or at some moment in the hours since.

Everybody stopped at the corner. Ilka's door had opened and the two policemen came out. They had spent the day in the hallway trying to look inconspicuous. Now that the dead man, brought so inexplicably home from the scene of the accident, had been removed, they could finally leave. The small Puerto Rican policeman walked out the gate, but the big young policeman turned to wave. Ilka must be standing back in the darkness. The two policemen got into their car and drove away.

Inside her foyer Ilka closed the door and leaned her head against it, devastated at everybody's leaving.

WORDS TO SPEAK TO THE WIDOW
At the Shakespeares' there was the business of walking into the sitting room, of sitting down, of the drinks. "A lot of ice, Leslie. Thanks." "Martini, please, and hold the vegetables."

Little, agile Joe Bernstine smiled sadly. "I wonder if we retained Jimmy."

Leslie Shakespeare said, "Alpha will schedule us a new search committee."

Nobody said, We could hardly do worse than poor Jimmy.

Jenny Bernstine said, "Ilka is being very gallant and terrific."

Nobody said, She didn't cry.

Alicia Aye said, "Ilka isn't one to throw her hands up."

"Or the towel in, or the sponge," said Eliza Shakespeare. "Joke. Sorry!"

Alicia said, "Ilka is not one to drown in her sorrows."

"Well, I'm going to drown mine," Eliza said, holding her glass out to Leslie, who refilled it.

Alicia said, "We live on borrowed time."

Alpha asked her husband, "The policeman said there was fire?" and the friends' and colleagues' imaginations went into action to dim or scramble or in some way unthink the flames in which Jimmy—this person they knew—was burning. They wished to avoid an image of which they would never entirely be able to rid themselves.

Dr. Stone replied that Jimmy's body had been thrown clear of the burning car. The fall had broken his neck.

The flames went out. The friends envisaged an unnaturally angled head with Jimmy's face.

Dr. Alfred Stone took his drink and sat down. He was a very large man, with a large head that, Ilka had once told the Shakespeares, she thought would look good on Mt. Rushmore. Eliza said that jaw, that forelock were from the Sunday funnies—the muscle-bound superhero with the heart of tin. "Aw!" Ilka had said. "Poor Alfred! I like Alfred." Dr. Stone looked around the room and located his wife, Alpha, sitting beside Eliza Shakespeare. Were they talking about the death? Alfred had, earlier in the day, looked across another room and seen Alpha talking with Ilka. He had wondered what words Alpha might be saying to the widow: To refer to the death would be putting a finger in the wound, but how not to mention it? And wasn't it gross to be talking of anything else? Alfred mistakenly believed himself to be singularly lacking in what normal people—the people in this room—were born knowing. He thought that other people knew how to feel and what to say. He watched them walk out and return with drinks. They stood together, they talked. Dr. Stone remained sitting.


At eleven o'clock that first night a brutal loneliness knocked the wind out of Ilka. Then her phone rang. "We thought we'd see how you were doing," Leslie said. "Did the baby get to sleep?"

"The baby is O.K. I'm O.K. Is it O.K. to be O.K.? I could do with some retroactive lead time. I need to practice taking my stockings off with Jimmy dead. Relearn how to clean my teeth."

Leslie said, "Wait." Ilka heard him pass on to Eliza, who must be in the room, who might be lying in the bed beside him, that Ilka was O.K. but needed to relearn how to clean her teeth with Jimmy dead. His voice returned full strength. "Eliza says we're coming over in the morning to bring you breakfast."

SITTING SHIVAH
"I don't know how," said Ilka. Joe Bernstine remembered that when his father died his mother had turned the faces of the mirrors to the wall. Ilka was struck by the gesture but embarrassed by its drama. "I know I'm supposed to sit on a low stool, but I can't get any lower," she said. She was sitting on the floor tickling Maggie, the fat, solemn, comfortable baby. Baby Maggie's eyes were so large that they seemed to round the corner of the little face, with its hanging cheeks.

"A baroque baby," Eliza said.

"She's fun to hold because she collapses her weight in your arms." Ilka jumped Maggie up and down. "She must have heard me scream when the policemen told me."

Eliza unpacked the tiny tomatoes from her garden. She had baked two long loaves of white bread. Jenny was arranging the cold cuts that she had brought onto the platters she had brought. At some point in the morning Joe and Leslie rose to go to the institute. They would be back in an hour. Leslie bent his fine head over Ilka's hand and brought it to his lips.

Ilka said, "I called my mother and she's coming tomorrow."

IN THE INSTITUTE
Celie, the receptionist, sat at her desk across from the front entrance and fanned herself with an envelope, like someone trying to avoid fainting. She told Betty, one of the assistants, "I talked with him that actual morning! He comes running in, punches the elevator button, doesn't wait and runs right up those stairs, comes right down. He's stuffing papers in his briefcase. I told him, 'You have a good trip now,' and he says, 'Oh shit!' and he's going to run back up except the elevator door opens, and he gets in."

Betty was able to one-up Celie with her spatial proximity to the dead man, though at a greater temporal remove. The day before James drove to Washington he had tried to open the door into the conference room with papers under his arm, carrying a cup of coffee, saying, "Anybody got a spare hand?" Betty had held the door for him. He had said, "Oh! Thanks!"

Could a person for whom one held a door, who said, "Oh shit!" and "Oh! Thanks!" be dead?

WORDS TO WRITE TO THE WIDOW
Nancy Cohn and Maria Zee talked on the telephone and one-upped each other in respect to who was the more upset. "I got to my office," said Maria, "and just sat."

"I," Nancy said, "never made it to the office, because I kept waking up every hour on the hour."

"I never got to sleep! I kept waking poor Zack to check if he was alive. He was fit to be tied."

"Have you called her?"

"I thought I would write."

"That's what I will do. I'll write her," said Nancy.

SITTING SHIVAH, DAY TWO
"It's good of you to come," Ilka said to the visitors. The institute staff dropped over together, after office hours. Celie, Betty, Wendy, and Barbara sat around the table in Ilka's kitchen. The fellows sat in the living room. Ilka's mother held the baby on her lap. Ilka let out a sudden laugh, and said, "What'll I do when the party is over!" She rose, picked up little Maggie, and carried her out of the room, up the stairs, past Dr. Stone hiding in the foyer.

Dr. Stone believed that by the time Ilka returned he would be ready with a sentence to say to her, but he was relieved, when she came down, that the baby's head intervened between his face and Ilka's face, and the front doorbell was ringing again. Martin Moses, a junior member, walked in, took Ilka and her baby into a big hug, and said, "Christ, Ilka!" Ilka said, "Don't I know it."

"Give her to me," Ilka's mother said and took the child out of Ilka's arms.

Alpha came out of the living room, saying, "Hello, Martin. Ilka, listen, take it easy. You take a couple of days—as long as you like, you know that! Alfred, we have to go." And the Ayes and the Zees had to go home. Celie and the rest left. Martin left. The Shakespeares said they would be back. Ilka thought that everyone had gone when she heard a gentle clatter in the kitchen. Jenny Bernstine was washing dishes.

People trickled over in the evening—a smaller crowd, which left sooner. Jenny washed more dishes. When Joe came to pick her up, she looked anxiously at Ilka, who said, "I'm O.K."

WRITING TO THE WIDOW
Nancy Cohn went to look for Nat. He was on the living-room couch, watching TV.

Nancy said, "I'm embarrassed not to know what to write to Ilka. It's embarrassing worrying about being embarrassed, for Chrissake!"

"Calamity is a foreign country. We don't know how to talk to the natives."

Nancy said, " You write her. You're the writer in the family."

"I'm not feeling well," said Nat.

"She's your colleague!" said Nancy.

And so neither of them wrote to Ilka.


Maria Zee called Alicia Aye and asked her, "I mean, we went over there. Do we still have to write?"

Alicia said, "Alvin says we'll have her over next time we have people in."

A CASSEROLE
Celie cooked a casserole and told Art, her thirteen-year-old, to take it over to Mrs. Carl's house.

"The woman that her husband burned up in his car? No way!"

Linda, who was fifteen, said, "For your information, he did not even burn up. He broke his neck." She advised her brother to check his facts.

Art said, "Linda will go and take it over to her."

Well, Linda wasn't going over there, not by herself, so Celie made them both go.

Nobody answered the front bell.

Art said, "I never knew a dead person before."

Linda said, "You mean you never knew a person and afterward they died, and you didn't as a fact even know this person at all."

Art said, "But I know Mom, and Mom knew him. Ring it again."

They found a couple of bricks, piled one on top of the other, and took turns standing on them to look in the window. Those were the stairs the dead man must have walked up and down on. There was a little table with a telephone on it, and a chair. Had the dead man sat on that exact chair and lifted that phone to his ear?

RUNNING AWAY
Yvette Gordot, the institute's economist, who had not called on Ilka, drove over, rang the bell, saw the casserole by the front door, thought, She's out, skipped down the steps, got in her car, and drove away.

"She was out," Dr. Stone reported to his wife.

"Who was?"

"Ilka was out, with the baby. I practically fell over the stroller, corner of Euclid."

"What did you say to her?" Alpha asked him

"Say?" said Alfred. "Nothing. She was across the street on the other sidewalk."

Trying to imagine an impossibility hurts the head. Having failed to envisage Alfred falling over a stroller that was on the other sidewalk, Alpha chose to assume that she had missed or misunderstood some part of what he had told her.

Alfred came to remember not what had happened but what he said had happened. The unspoken words he owed the widow displaced themselves into his chest and gave him heartburn.

NIGHT CONVERSATION
"Celie left a casserole. Alfred fell into Maggie's stroller," Ilka reported to the Shakespeares when they phoned at eleven that night.

Leslie said, "Eliza says, 'What did Alfred say to you?' "

"He slapped his forehead the way you're supposed to slap your forehead when you remember something you've forgotten—and ran across the street to the other sidewalk. Poor Alfred! He's so beautiful."

Eliza took the phone from Leslie. "Why 'poor Alfred' when he's behaving like a heel?" she asked Ilka.

Ilka said, "Because Jimmy's death is making him shy of me. He thinks it's impolite of him to be standing upright."

Eliza said, "The good Lord intended Alfred to be your basic shit, and Alfred went into medicine in the hope of turning into a human being."

"Doesn't he get points for hoping?"

"Why can't you just be offended?"

"Don't know," said Ilka. "I mean, people can't help being heels and shits."

"You sound like Jimmy," said Eliza, and Ilka listened and heard the sound, over the telephone, of Eliza weeping for Ilka's husband.

INVITING THE WIDOW
Nancy said, "We'll have her in when we have people over. The Stones are coming Sunday. Only, you think she wants to be around people?"

"Call her and ask her?" said Nat.

"You call her and ask her."

"I'm not going to call her. You call her."

"She's your colleague, you call her."

"I'm not well."

"I don't think she wants to be around people," Nancy said. "And her mother is staying with her."

DR. ALFRED STONE
Dr. Alfred Stone continued to mean to say to the widow what, as a doctor—as the doctor who had been on the scene of the accident—he ought and must surely be going to say to her. He always thought that by the next time he was face to face with her he would have found the appropriate words, and blushed crimson when he walked into the Shakespeares' kitchen and saw little Maggie sitting in a high chair and Ilka crawling underneath the table. She said, "Hi, Alfred. Look what Maggie did to poor Eliza's floor! And now Bethy is going to take Maggie to play in the yard so the grownups can sit down in peace and quiet. O.K., Bethy. She's all yours!"

Bethy Bernstine had grown bigger and bulkier. The bend of Bethy's waist, as she buttoned the baby into her sweater, cried out to her parents, to her parents' friends, Watch me buttoning the baby's sweater! Bethy's foot on the back stair into the yard pleaded, This is me taking the baby into the yard. Notice me!

Murphy's Law seated Dr. Alfred Stone next to the widow. While the conversation was general, he tried for a sideways view of her face, which was turned to Eliza on her other side. Alfred was looking for the mark on Ilka, the sign that her husband had been thrown from a burning car and had broken his neck. Alfred studied his wife across the table. Would Alpha, if he, Alfred, broke his neck, look so regular and ordinary? Would she laugh at something Eliza said?


As they were leaving, Alpha asked Ilka to dinner and Ilka said, "If I can get a sitter. My mother has gone back to New York." Jenny Bernstine offered Bethy.

After that, and for the next few weeks, the friends and colleagues invited Ilka to their dinners. She always said yes. "I'm afraid," she told the Shakespeares, "that my first 'No, thank you' will facilitate the next no and start a future of noes." Then, one day, as she was driving herself to the Zees', Ilka drove past their house, made a U-turn, and drove home. She insisted on paying Bethy for the full evening.

"We missed you," Leslie said on the telephone.

"How come it gets harder instead of easier? You put on your right stocking and there's the left stocking to still be put on, and the right and the left shoe…"Ilka heard Leslie tell Eliza what Ilka said.

In the morning, Ilka called Maria Zee to apologize, and Maria said, "Don't be silly!"

"A rain check?"

"Absolutely," said Maria. "Or you call me!"

"Absolutely," said Ilka. But Ilka did not call her, and Maria did not call Ilka. One's house seemed more comfortable without Ilka from Calamity.

BETHY BERNSTINE
The Bernstines and the Shakespeares were the true friends. Ilka loved them and missed Jimmy because he was missing the pleasure of Eliza's risotto and of Leslie's wine that yielded taste upon taste on the tongue. Ilka held out her glass, watched Joe's hand tip the bottle, and thought, Joe will die, not now, not soon, maybe, but he will die. Ilka saw Jenny looking at her with her soft, anxious affection and thought, Jenny will die. "Will you forgive me," Ilka said to them, "if I take myself home?" Of course, of course! Leslie must drive Ilka. "Absolutely not! Honestly! You would do me the greatest possible favor if you would let me go by myself." "Joe will drive Ilka." "Let me drive you!" said Joe. "No, no, no!" cried Ilka. They could see that she was distraught. "Let Ilka alone," said Leslie. "Ilka will drive herself. Ilka will be fine."

Leslie and Joe came out to put Ilka into her car. She saw them, in the rearview mirror, as she drove away, two old friends standing together, talking on the sidewalk. There would be a time when both of them would have been dead for years.

Bethy was curled on the couch, warm and smelling of sleep, her skin sweet and dewy. Cruel for a sixteen-year-old to be plain—too much chin and jowl, the little, pursed, unhappy mouth. Ilka woke Bethy with a hand on her shoulder. She helped the girl collect herself, straighten her bones, pick her books off the floor. Ilka walked her out and stood on the sidewalk.

Maggie was sleeping on her back, arms above her head, palms curled. In her throat, and behind her eyes, Ilka felt the tears she could not begin to cry and she feared that beast in the jungle which might, someday, stop the tears from stopping.

When Leslie called to make sure she had got home, Ilka said, "I've been doing arithmetic. Subtract the age I am from the age at which I'm likely to die and it seems like a hell of a lot of years."


Though the words Dr. Alfred Stone had failed to say to Ilka had become inappropriate and could never be said, he tended, when they were in the same room, to move along the wall at the furthest remove from where Ilka might be moving or standing or sitting.

By Lore Segal

Lust, Survivor Style

From Just Dare Me…

For Gabrielle FlannerY, coworker Dell Kingston is off-limits. But when she finds herself alone with him in the wilderness, she can't resist his lips, his touch, his…

• Sexy marketing executive Gabrielle Flannery is determined to excel at her firm in Atlanta. But there's one person standing in her way: Dell Kingston, her hot, smooth-talking coworker who claims all the clients. When a highly coveted camping-equipment account is up for grabs, Gabrielle's boss can't decide whether to give it to Dell or Gabrielle, so he comes up with an unconventional solution. Dell and Gabrielle must camp out in a state park to compete in a series of survival contests — and whoever wins the most contests gets the account. By the second day, Gabrielle is kicking Dell's butt, but she wonders if her overly flirtatious colleague is letting her win so he can put the moves on her. When she's in her tent that night. Dell comes by for a surprise visit, and Gabrielle has to decide if she wants to keep things professional or put in some erotic overtime.

My Sleeping Bag — or Yours?
Exhausted from the day's competitions, Gabrielle Hopped down on a couple of sleeping bags spread out on the bottom of her tent. Even though she was pleased that she'd won the navigational and tent-pitching tests, she had to admit she was surprised that an avid camper like Dell was doing so poorly.

If he was purposely letting her win, Gabrielle figured, he could only be throwing the competition for one reason — to make it easier to seduce her. From the very start of the challenge, he had been trying to butter her up, and while she was unbelievably attracted to him, she didn't want to get involved with a coworker. Maybe Dell hoped that if she didn't think he was a threat, she'd finally let her guard down.

Suddenly, Gabrielle heard a scratching noise and realized that someone was outside her tent.

"Gabby?" Dell whispered.

Gabrielle unzipped her tent flap and poked her head out. "Dell? What do you want?"

"I cut my chin, and I need a bandage. Can I come in?"

Gabrielle hesitated. If she let him in, she might do something she'd regret. But he was hurt. "Uh, okay. I wanted to talk to you anyway."

Gabrielle's heart beat faster when Dell slid inside the tent. In the darkness, she could only see his silhouette, but his nearness alone was unnerving.

"This tent is big enough for two," he laughed as he glanced around.

Gabrielle didn't respond. She turned on a flashlight and rested it near her sleeping bag, then took out the antibiotic ointment and adhesive bandages from the tent's first-aid kit.

"Lift your chin," she ordered.

Dell did as he was told, and Gabrielle smoothed ointment on the cut with her fingers, distracted by his bottomless brown eyes and ruggedly handsome features. Just touching him sent her mind spiraling in a carnal direction. He smelled of the minty body wash from the showers, and she imagined Dell standing under the showerhead with sudsy water rolling off his fit body. Unbidden, her midsection instinctively tightened with desire.

"It's a little swollen," she whispered,

"Are we still talking about my cut?" he asked.

She was afraid that the longer he stayed, the more tempted she'd be to do something she shouldn't. "Well, that's it," she said. "Good night."

"But you said you wanted to talk," Dell protested.

I Gabrielle wondered how she could bring herself to tell him to back off. Before she could even begin, Dell reached up and brushed her hair behind her ear. Her mind went blank as longing coiled within her. He captured her mouth in an all-consuming kiss. A steamy fantasy unrolled before her: the two of them…in the woods…in a dark tent… alone. Except it was reality.

The Ultimate Seduction
Feeling dangerously close to losing control, Gabrielle suddenly pulled her mouth away from Dell's. "I know what you're up to," she said breathlessly.

Dell turned her flashlight off. He kissed his way down her graceful neck. "What am I up to?"

"Come on, Dell," she said. "You failed the navigation test."

"Uh-huh."

"And today in the contest, you couldn't get your tent up."

He laughed as he eased off her tee shirt. "Believe me, my tent is definitely up now."

Gabrielle pulled away from him.

"Dell, you're failing the challenges on purpose, aren't you?"

"Why would I do that?"

"So you can get me to do this!"

He was still for a bit, his face barely visible in the night. "I'll stop any time you tell me to," he whispered. She didn't know what he was up to, but as much its she wanted to resist, she couldn't bring herself to stop him. He lowered his mouth to hers for a long, languid kiss.

A Hot Night in the Tent
Dell slowly explored Gabrielle's mouth with his tongue. He undid her bra, drawing her nipples into his mouth, sending unbearable pleasure rushing through her body. He slid lower, licking a trail down her stomach as he unbuttoned and slid off her pants.

Once he got to her thin, cotton panties, he flicked his tongue over her most private parts. She melted into the ground beneath her and fisted her hands in his shirt to keep from crying out. He rolled her panties down her legs and buried his head between her thighs. Gabrielle bucked, unprepared for the erotic jolt that coursed through her system. She didn't want it to end, but soon a fierce orgasm claimed her body in waves of delicious spasms.

After Gabrielle went over the edge, she forced herself to sit up. She needed to taste Dell's body in the same way he'd tasted hers. She look of this shirt and jeans, then slid off his boxers. She licked and nibbled his nipples, working her way down to the prize that stood stiff and ready for her attention. She took him into her mouth, taking her cues from his moans. "Gabrielle," he exclaimed. "I need you now."

Dell reached for his jeans pocket, found a condom, and slipped it on. With a groan, he buried himself deep inside her. Gabrielle rocked her hips against his, all the while murmuring, "Harder, Dell. Harder."

A surge of adrenaline like he'd never experienced pulsed through his body as he met her challenge. She dug her nails into his back and let him know every move, every slight shift that felt good…better…best.

"Oh yes, yes!" Gabrielle tensed, then collapsed in a full-body shudder. Dell gasped, falling into her, feeling as if he were being turned inside out.

Later, Gabrielle listened to Dell's heartbeat as he slept. She wouldn't mind sharing her tent with him again. But before she got distracted, she vowed to do one thing: land that client.

"Her mind went blank as longing coiled within her. He captured her mouth in an all-consuming kiss."

By Stephanie Bond