This story could be called ‘The Christmas Blues’ if I told the story of Mama's Christmas eve swaying, watching the record player playing, glass glinting blue in her hand, tears, some dropping onto her festive plastic-aproned chest, and her blue-denimed legs, and the rest soaking into the faded-blue carpet pile, her bare feet pressing them in. This story could be called ‘No One’s Coming Home This Christmas’ if I told the story of why Papa, instead of just saying no, had to work Christmas day and every day, in some lab, lying to us about fixing acid rain, when we know he owes the ‘wrong kind of people’ money, from when he said to Mama on the house phone he can't come home or they'll make her work for them too, that he's gotta pretend it's just him, until he pays it all back, until maybe forever. This story could be called ‘So Santa Hates Poor Kids’ if I told the story of what was under our fake tree on Christmas morning, and how Mama held the telephone for Papa to hear us as we open presents, pointing at her face as she makes a fake smile and bops her head and waves her arms in fake delight and we play along, and really get into it, as we open newspaper-wrapped presents of our own stuff, wrapped up and it's not even a surprise, cos we watched Mama wrap them up last night, and we're just pinning all our hopes on the food today. This story could be called ‘The Christmas Happy Meal’ if I told the story of the four of us at the kitchen table, Mama in Papa's seat and me in hers, round the KFC bucket, Mama saying it's a tradition in some places and we nod, not caring, chewing on chicken bones and wearing the newspaper hats she made, and our paper-mache wings from the school Christmas play, and Mama says she's full from breakfast and smokes a cigarette instead, and the record player plays the song ‘Its Gonna be a Cold, Cold Christmas Without You’ and we sing along, mouths full and cigarette smoke blurring the edges of this happy Christmas scene.
The Christmas after Jo’s mom died was bad. Her older sister Jules showed up the evening before Christ’s birth, driving the 13-hour stretch from Chicago to Western Pennsylvania in one go. Jo and her dad watched on the front porch as Jules’ Prius rattled down the driveway, Brittany Spears blasting from open windows, tires crunching against the snow. The car was in poor shape, salt-covered, and trembling like a racing dog whipped past its limits.Jo’s dad shifted nervously as his eldest daughter climbed from the car and trudged toward them. His hands were folded down the front of his apron, which read: “My Spawn R The Coolest.” “Greetings, family,” Jules said. “The season is upon us.”Jo had seen her sister worse off, but not by much. Jules’ Boston University sweatshirt was covered in dark stains. There were raccoon circles where her eyes should’ve been. Her duffel bag was half-unzipped, a tumbleweed of cords dragging in the snow. “Jesus, kiddo,” her dad said. “Did you drive the whole way straight?” “I dozed off some in Ohio,” Jules said, wiping the back of her wrist across her nostrils. “And I’ve been banging down lines every ten minutes, which helps with the concentration.”Her dad made a face. “I hope that’s a joke.”“Fine, don’t believe me.” Jules pushed past him, hugged Jo, and took her bags inside.Her dad turned, bewildered. “She was kidding, right? About the drugs?”Jo lifted and lowered her shoulders.Her sister was skinnier than she remembered (“Soul Cycle,” she said dismissively), but Jo knew it was the cocaine. She figured that was why Tom, her husband, hadn’t joined her. Jules only did drugs when she felt insecure about her weight. She didn’t care enough about Tom to watch her figure when he was around. It must have been a new lover. “Don’t ask me about Tom,” Jules said. “Don’t ask me about my job. Don’t ask me about going back to school or having kids or anything that might ever come within the fucking realm of my personal life.”“Fine by me,” Jo said. Christmas Eve dinner was bottles of wine, plates of pasta as an accessory. In years past, they’d have something unique– sushi or kebabs, Mediterranean. Jo’s mom never liked typicality. The pasta was a deliberate choice, both in its blandness and the family’s ability to ignore it even as the food filled their bellies. The girls quickly finished a bottle and then another. When they drained the good stuff, they broke into the cellar and found a few old cabernets that had never been opened. They were questionably sealed, some rodents had gnawed little holes in the wax. But Jo thought it was excellent, well-aged, like drinking buried history. (This is what mummy semen tastes like,” Jules said). Jo drank until she felt sick, scarfing down breadsticks and trying not to cry when her dad started talking about the semester at school, which had been rougher than the ones previously.“Don’t worry about your major,” her dad said. He held up his smudged glass and tipped it towards her. “Explore your interests. That’s what college is about– shedding your old self and becoming the person you’re meant to be.”“I appreciate that, Dad, but I have to pick one by the spring,” Jo said. “Or else I can’t graduate on time.”Her dad was already tipsy. He waved his hand. “ You’ll find the right path, trust me.”Jules frowned into her pasta. “Jesus, Dad,” she said. “Pull it together.”“What?” “I’m just saying, don’t do that.”“Do what?”“Go all Mr. Rogers on our asses. Just admit it– your kids are fuck-ups.”“Hey,” Jo said. “Don’t lump me in with you.”“I’m so proud of you two,” Her dad said, teary-eyed. “You both are perfect. Perfect angels.”“No, I’m not,” Jules said. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”“Please stop talking.”“Guys,” Jo said.“Let’s just have a nice dinner.” Her dad let out a low sigh and rotated his eyes toward the ceiling. “Can we agree on that?’“I have to make a phone call.” Jules stood and drained her glass. “I have people who are relying on me. Business and associates and important things.”“Okay, honey,” Her dad said. “I’ll put your leftovers in the fridge.”“Whatever.”Jo and her dad sat in silence, clinking their forks against porcelain. On television, Ralphie from A Christmas Story demanded his parents purchase him a Red Ryder air rifle for the holiday. Shortly after, he beat the shit out of that hillbilly kid and betrayed his best friend for saying the F-word, nearly blinded himself with a stray BB shot. Ralphie was kind of a psycho, Jo realized. In modern days he would’ve fit the profile of a school shooter. Or a Republican candidate. Jo asked, “Can I have more wine?”“Sure, babe.” Her dad refilled the glass and looked up at the overhead fan, its blades shaking from the force of Jules marching back and forth in her room. “But you have to watch your consumption. Alcohol can be a gateway to a more–ah–complicated life.”After dinner, Jo helped with the dishes and poured herself another drink. She thought about school– whether she would major in dance or writing or maybe something useful in the real world– economics or whatever. In high school, she took Advanced Calc, and the patterns revealed themselves to her easily enough. But the idea of tabulating figures and sums for the rest of her life put a sour taste in her mouth. Being 20, being without a mother, she knew that life wasn’t as simple as all that. You removed something or someone from the equation and the results weren’t linear, or predictable, they were something else entirely. Finished cleaning, Jo grabbed her coat and decided to go for a walk while her dad wrapped presents. She cut a path across the yard, boots kicking up shallow tufts of snow in the late December light. Beneath the darkened tree line, she paused, bowing her head in reverence. The family pets were buried in the frozen dirt here– Toby the Dog, Sam the Cat, and Garfield, the defenestrated guinea pig, who met his maker via a leap of faith from the girls’ jungle gym. On nights like these– cold, forlorn, biting– Jo was grateful that her mother had chosen cremation. It didn’t seem right to put someone in the ground and forget about them, to have their only memory as a headstone, half-buried, collecting snow in the wintertime, a bunch of wilted flowers in the summer. Was that love? Paying tribute to something that wasn’t there, that had– as far as anyone knew– moved on to another plane of being? Fuck, Jo thought. The wine was making her philosophical. That happened sometimes when she drank; she felt a flash of wisdom that disappeared just as quickly as it arrived. Upstairs, Jo flopped on her bed, definitely drunk now, listening to Jules talk in serious undertones with her lover through their shared wall. It was easy enough to imagine him: older, flabby, likely with a kid in high school he never saw. The guy thought Jules touched something deep inside him– something “he never knew was there.” Jules had a type. Not a good one, but a type, certainly. In high school, Jo had found herself the unwilling recipient of many a lurid tale. Jules complained about her life, her teachers and boyfriends, varsity sports, the “hoes” talking shit. Back then it had irked Jo, her beautiful, do-no-wrong sister, bitching about the cosmic forces out to get her. Now that they were both older, Jo figured Jules had simply been ahead of her time.But here, on this night over eight years later, Jules vented to someone else. Jo heard the dry-nostril snort of her sister bumping a line and talking to this new guy, Kirk.“Kirk– no, shut up, this is serious. Okay, listen– and then my mom died. And my dad is a fucking weirdo–snort!– and I think Tom secretly had a vasectomy and is planning on moving out. Hold on a second– Jo, are you there?”Jo didn’t say anything. She was counting the watermarks on the ceiling, trying to recall what it was like to be a child, how life looked endless, rhythmic, inescapable.“I’ll call you back.”Click.“Jo.” Jules’ mattress creaked. “Were you listening to me?”Jo didn’t respond.Jules knocked on the wall. “Jo? Are you still up?”After a long time– too long– Jo said, “No.”There was a pause, and then Jules said, “Do you want to do a bump with me?”That night was the first time Jo did cocaine. She and Jules kneeled like Catholic schoolgirls on the fuzzy carpet, snorting messy lines off their Sleeping Beauty mirror. They giggled at this, the mixture of adult life and childhood sweetness, their sloppy handling of the drugs as they passed the rolled-up dollar bill back and forth. With each line, Jo felt increasingly lit up, like a candle was burning inside her chest. Overtop their frantic sniffling, the Irish Christmas song played from the living room below. It was their dad's favorite– that duet about the NYPD Choir and Galway Bay. The drunk couple calling each other every slur imaginable as they poured out their fucking hearts and prepared for the new year. “Tell me about school,” Jules said. “Any boys?” “A few,” Jo said. “But it’s whatever.”“Want to talk about it?She shook her head, “I'm good.”It was nice of Jules to ask, but Jo didn’t feel like delving into the events of her love life– disastrous as they were. There had been a fight over a boy, in particular, at a frat formal. Jo threw a drink at a girl and then the two of them were tangled together on the dance floor, swearing and shouting and hitting. Jo had been afraid of expulsion, but the school showed leniency, let her off with a warning. It was like that with her other faux pas, too– the late homework and passing out drunk in the communal bathroom. There was no shortage of sympathy from the administration or her group of friends. No matter how badly she acted, she was forgiven. After all, her mom had died. All roads led back to that. It was all anyone ever talked about. Sometimes, she thought, it was all she was.She didn’t even realize she was crying until Jules reached over and patted her softly on the head. “There there,” Jules said. “Do another line, kitten.”She decided to take Jules’ advice, dropping her face to the mirror. Immediately, she felt better. She liked the cocaine. The forcefulness of it. It was like a locomotive pushing all the bad thoughts from her head, clearing a path through the snow in her brain, the residual slush and soot. With a providential foresight, she could almost sense how tomorrow would go– Jules sleeping in late, vomiting in their joint bathroom, refusing to come downstairs for presents. Her dad, harried and emotionally drained, playing cheerful music to drown out the awkwardness. And there was Jo, stuck in the middle, feeling the cave walls of her heart collapse on itself. But that was tomorrow, and today was today. You had to deal with these things accordingly. You had to take them one step at a time.“Promise me you won’t make the same mistakes I did,” Jules said. Her eyes swiveled and popped in their sockets. Jo noticed for the first time how red and thick her capillaries were, like hard candy. “Promise me you’ll do something fucking important with your life.”Jo did another line and looked at her sister. “Yeah,” she said. “I promise.”“Good,” Jules said. “Good.She held out her hand, and Jo took it. Together, they sat with their backs against the wall, closed their eyes, and listened to the music.
He is the big stud with the big arm and the big serve and king of the courts. She is the glitter girl, the glamor queen, the incandescent prodigy of homecoming competitions. She consorts with star basketball players who are six foot eight and academically challenged but cocky because they can dunk blindfolded. However, everything changes the afternoon she looks at him in that certain way through the wire fence of the tennis facility and says something that is lost in the wind. But he rises to the occasion by asking, “what in the world are you doing on this side of campus when the basketball facility is definitely over there,” and points with his racquet. “I like tennis players’ legs,” she says, hooking polished fingernails coyly through the fence. “Yeah,” he says, “and they’re tanned too, not like that anemic white you get from running around in gymnasiums. Those guys might as well be living underground like goddamn Morlocks.” And she laughs. The two of them dine that evening in the university cafeteria and then stroll to the school’s arboretum—that facilitator of budding romances and carnal lust—where they neck for several hours. A month later they are sitting in the student lounge sharing an ice cream cone and discussing his plans to enter the professional tennis ranks. She shakes her head and says, “darling, you’re a wonderful tennis player, but only a few pros make any money on the circuit and I don’t want to be a tennis widow sitting around waiting for you to come home. I want to get married and live a normal life. You need to decide how important I am to you.” He will wonder many years later if he made the right decision. So they marry at a country club during the summer and very soon acquire a home on the eighth fairway of the same club. There follows a nice middle-class existence of friends, social events, theater tickets, and vacations to exotic locations. There is little to complain about
Antithesis
until he is sitting contentedly on the patio one evening with a half-consumed daquiri in hand and she sits down somberly to inform him that she is planning to visit her sister in Philadelphia and would be staying for a while so she has “time to think.” A vague ripple of anxiety passes down his spine and he wonders if perhaps he has not paid sufficient attention to the subtle changes that have been occurring in his marriage over the past year. William Shirer, the writer, once remarked that “time and circumstance take their toll” on marriages, but he never believed this applied to him. The following day he stands mutely in the driveway as she pulls away in her Toyota Avalon with hardly a backward glance, and returns to a home that has suddenly undergone a dramatic transformation. It is silent. In fact, the silence is palpable, infiltrating his mind and body like some poisonous radiation. He realizes for the first time that he has never been alone. In the beginning there was his family and then the dormitory with all the guys horsing around and then the marriage. And now . . . . He stands in the middle of the living room while a knot forms in his stomach. In the next few weeks the knot worsens and he begins walking around slightly bent over like an old man. He visits a physician and complains, but the physician is clueless. He asks, “have you been experiencing any stress lately?” He laughs. His wife phones and informs him that the marriage is over and she is “moving on,” plunging him into a profound depression. For months he goes through the motions of daily necessities but is curiously detached. He is reminded of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”: sealed off from the world while everyone else is blithely carrying on their activities. Food is tasteless, relationships don’t matter, work is a boring waste of time. Rage wells up inside him as he struggles to figure out what he has done to deserve this. Christmas eve arrives. He knows getting up in the morning will be a struggle. Why bother? Instead, he decides, take your useless, sorry ass down to Walmart and buy a nice Christmas holiday weapon of your choice and then go home and get your joyous holiday affairs in order and type out a note on the computer that serves as your Last Will and Testament for these wonderful holidays and make sure the cat has enough food and water to last a couple of days in case your sorry, useless ass isn’t discovered while everyone is celebrating the wonderful holidays and then put the gun into your mouth and squeeze the trigger . . . .
Synthesis
but a tennis court materialize before him, the university tennis court, the final match of the season, the conference championship, for all the marbles, with his eternal nemesis Harper Ruff on the other side, serving his last serve, that big kicking monster you can barely return, allowing Harper to volley sharply into the opposite corner, a shot seemingly out of reach, but you anticipate, sprint madly, racquet drawn, wrist cocked, for that final headlong dive to send the ball screaming over the net, just out of Harper’s reach, the ground crashing into your body, watching the ball as it soars down the line, as Harper looks on, as the crowd looks on, as time stands still, as the ball descends, drifts downward, gently, to kiss the outside of the white tape, leaving that glorious mark of victory, and you are, by god, for the first time ever, the conference champion. “Memories are not key to the past, but to the future,” Corrie ten Boom once said. Yes. It is time to move on. There may be a way out of this. Christmas is calling.
Lydia was in the Sam's Club reaching for a box containing three boxes of cereal when the lanky man pushed his flatbed cart uncomfortably close to her flatbed cart."As you can see, I have a compendium of canning jars," he said. "Are you also interested in canning?"She squinted at his selection, six jars with glass handles that said “Wine-O-Clock” instead of “Ball.” Feeling charitable and a little intrigued, she said, "Did a whole shelf of asparagus this weekend. You need the tall jars for those."The man nodded stiffly. "And do you enjoy dining at Cook Out? My favorite order is the chicken quesadilla with another chicken quesadilla and a third chicken quesadilla as well."Lydia laughed, leaning on her cart. He sounded like he'd watched a video called How to make casual conversation with new acquaintances. "I'm partial to the spicy chicken, the corn dog, and chili. With an Oreo shake.""Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh," the man said. "And do you also work at the spaceport?'"Well…I'd call it the flight center," Lydia said. "Or just Marshall. Are you new here?""No!" the main barked. "I am a longtime employee. And let me tell you. Those clowns!""Yeah, they got some problems, don't they?" Lydia said. "I tell you, if they do one more reorg and fuck with my reporting structure I'm about likely to drive a golf cart over a retaining wall. For all the good that'd do."The man looked at her intently. "Why do you think we've never gone to Mars?"Lydia gave the man a once-over. It seemed like a line, like he wanted to debate her. She straightened up, maybe trying to intimidate him a little. Lydia was tall and bulky, with short hair and wide pants. A woman of substance, an old coworker had called her, which pissed Lydia off until she realized he kinda liked women of substance. You're gonna get slapped if you try that line on some other lady, she told him, drinking coffee in her backyard a few weeks later, robe open to the autumn breeze."You know what?" she said. "You remind me of my ex-husband. Ed. Well, dead husband. He went to Afghanistan and came back different. More fun. Kind of a hoot, actually. But you know how it is. That brain stuff catches up with you eventually.”"Does it?" the man asked.Lydia retrieved a box containing two bottles of ranch dressing from a shelf. "Hey, you want to go out tonight? The Duke's Bonnet downtown, maybe 8ish.""I'd love to," the man said, a slight look of panic in his eyes.Lydia began pushing her flatbed away. "What's your name, anyway?""Tyvee," he said."Tyvee?" Lydia said, stopping short. "Like teevee but Tyvee?""Tyvee," he repeated, the panic seeming to mount.“Isn’t that funny,” she said. “A funny name for a funny guy. I’ll see you tonight.”
***
At the bar, Lydia introduced Tyvee to her friends, all widows or divorcees. She finished at Delia, wearing, as she usually did, a rock tee tucked into high-waisted jeans. "This is Tyvee," Lydia said, "I think he might be a spy. And this is Delia. She works at the base, too."Tyvee said, "Why do you think we've never been to Mars?""Mars?" Delia said. "You kidding me? We haven't even been to the moon in who knows how long.” The jeans allowed Delia to make strategic use of her butt, and she used it here to box out Tyvee, in favor of Lydia. “Always seemed like a suicide mission to me anyways. You’d just be trading bodies for data.""Do you work with Lydia?" Tyvee said. "Doing repairs?"Delia laughed. "Has she been feeding you a line? We do clerical work. They mostly only let men in the build spaces.""We started the same week," Lydia said. "My Ed and her Jesse got a job here together after their service was up. Deployed together, too."Tyvee nodded aggressively. "Did Jesse come back fun, too?""No," Delia said, "he did not."There was a silence, and then Lydia pointed out the front window, which had been painted with lizard green letters advertising 99-cent wing Wednesdays and three dollar Miller Mondays. "Holy shit. It's the guy with the hearse. You are in for a treat."They all piled into a long black car with bottles of liquor clanking in a plastic rack, and the driver took off, fast enough for Tyvee to look a little queasy. The air conditioner wasn't working, so they rolled the windows down, all sweating in the summer heat. Lydia and her friends began reminiscing about their husbands' funerals."Twenty-one gun salute?" one cried."Twenty-one gun salute!" the rest replied, cackling."Goddamn, that thing was noisy as hell," Lydia said. "I just about cussed aloud when that first volley pierced the clear blue sky.""Remember when I pretended I was so gosh-darned bereft that I was gonna throw myself on the fuckin' coffin?" Delia said.Lydia slammed her glass down on an armrest, splashing the brown liquid on fuzzed, blue fabric. "Oh my God, you were being such an asshole.""Everyone staring at me all sad-eyed. Thank God you were holding me back, like, Honey, cut it the fuck out, hissing in my ear. Otherwise I would’ve had to fake a Charlie horse to keep my own godforsaken body out of that hole.”"It was not the time for irony," Lydia said.Delia toasted her, ice cubes clinking wetly. "Then when is?"A few more turns and the hearse stopped, and the widows and divorcees all stumbled out. Tyvee grabbed Lydia's arm for support, his lanky body heavier than it appeared. He's drunk as hell, Lydia thought, but said, "You OK, hon?""I saw your house from orbit," Tyvee said, “knew it was a spaceport, a launchpad for probes or a maintenance shop. A place of expertise. It glowed from the air, a massive, brilliant display, blaring and blinking like the sign of some distant planetary system. A darkness evincing rotation. The unmistakable signal of an eclipse." "You saying you wanna get out of here?" Lydia asked. "I can show you the bright lights."
***
As Lydia drove through her neighborhood with Tyvee in the passenger seat—it was unclear where his car was—there was no mistaking which house was hers. Its glow rose above the roofs of her neighbors' brick colonials and vinyl-sided ranches, bursts of reds and greens interrupting brilliant white. She turned onto her street and the full scope of her Christmas decorations became clear. They engulfed the whole house. "There it is!" Tyvee said, pointing. "I want to see everything. The repair bay on the side. The research and development lab at the center. Your deck, where you lay out your plans for interstellar travel.""Oh yeah," Lydia said, "They're right in there with my Heisman trophy and Academy award."In the garage, an inflatable Jesus held an inflatable Santa by the neck. An inflatable banner said "JESUS FIRST." Lydia punched Jesus causally in the face, in a way that suggested she did it every time she came home. Inside, the rooms were piled with shipping boxes and parts. As Lydia made Tyvee another drink, he plucked a metal doodad from atop a table. "And what is this for?" he asked."Servo motor," Lydia said, putting her hand on his back and rubbing in little circles. "Moves Santa's hand so it looks like he's scratching his balls. Just like Ed used to. God rest his soul." She perched on the table and took a long drink. "But now it's just me here. We've got the place to ourselves."Tyvee seemed to steel himself. "Lydia, you're right. I am a spy," he said. "Oh, okay," Lydia said, freshly intrigued. "And I'm a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik.""I'm from another planet,” Tyvee went on, ignoring her, “far, far away from here. My project—the one I’ve spent forty of your years on—is to determine what's to be done about civilizations, thousands of them across the galaxy, that have the technical resources to travel between planets but never make it into the stars. How to get them there. And I think I've almost got it.""Mmm-hmm," she said, kissing his hand. "And what's your theory, Herr Doktor?""It's spaceports like these. Skunkworks, staffed by a hardscrabble crew of tinkerers and mercenaries. I've found them on every planet. Glowing dimly, but insistently, from space. If we just give them a little boost, all of you, well. You can all join us in the stars." He grabbed her hand. "And you're the perfect spokesperson for my project. Articulate, charismatic. I've already informed my organization about you. Preparations are being made. You're going to be famous."She grabbed her hand back, hopped down from the table. "Are you fucking with me? You gotta be fucking with me. Is this a prank? Did Delia put you up to this?"Tyvee ignored her, pawing through a green plastic bin full of parts."OK. I'll play along. These are decorations, Mr. Alien," she said, pulling up a cord from a winder on the floor. "Christmas lights. I don't build spaceships. I buy inflatables at the Home Depot and mount 'em on my roof. With some custom mods."This finally got to Tyvee. "I don't understand.""Come outside."She led him out her front door, which caught on its frame, as if it were rarely used. From the house next door, someone yelled "Lydia! It's July!" She stuck a finger their way.When they reached the middle of the street, Lydia said, "Now, turn around."Tyvee saw the glow of her house then, up close for the first time. Dots of tiny lights covered every inch of the walls and roof, criss-crossing lines of colored blobs snaking their way up her tree trunks. "It's not a beacon?" Tyvee said, "It serves no purpose?""Well, I dunno about that," Lydia said, "It has its uses."Tyvee looked closer, at the figures on the roof and the lawn. One Santa was helping a baby elf with long, straight blonde hair kick a ball. Another was holding the hand of Mrs. Claus, who was laid up in bed. Another Santa, behind a puffy craps table, had his hands in the air, cheering, clapped on the back by ecstatic-looking elves throwing red and green chips in the air, their arcs indicated by curved tubes of LED lights."Are they all your Ed?" he asked."Yep, that’s him helping our daughter learn soccer, that there's him taking care of me at the hospital, and that there's the time he went on a forty-eight roll run," Lydia said, lighting a cigarette. "And of course, being strangled by Jesus in the garage, like he was by all of his goddamn bosses. Same type of folks who decide things at the base. Who decide not to go to Mars, like you keep asking about. Who, in the guise of our local government, send me these fines and threatening fuckin’ letters." She took a drag, blew it toward the moon—a waning crescent. Almost extinguished, but soon to return. "Ed passed just before Christmas a few years back," she continued. "After the funeral and all finished up, and our daughter went back to Atlanta, I just didn't have the heart to take the decorations down. Came to like 'em up there, welcoming me home, so I figured I'd add some more. If I made it bright enough, maybe he could see me." She shook her head. "But I guess you saw me instead, huh?"Lydia looked down. Tyvee had collapsed to the street, arms around his knees. Lydia stuck the cigarette between her lips and tried to drag him up by his armpits. "Hey now," she said, "none of that.""You just leave these lights on all the time," he said. "There's no reason. It serves no purpose. This isn't a spaceport at all. You're nothing like the people I found everywhere else. Your neighbors hate you. I hate you, too. You're ruining my career."The man wasn't budging and Lyrida gave up on dragging him to safety. Some people just can't be helped, she thought."Well," she said, brushing her hands off, "you'll be happy to hear that the city is making me take 'em down. Delia's coming over this weekend to help. Thousands in fines I can't pay. Finally they said they'd shut off my power.""Why would they do that?" Tyvee said, coming out of his ball."Just jealous, I suppose,” Lydia said. "You don't know what it's like to be us, to be one of the little lights. God forbid you want to do something special. Or even just work a steady job and raise your family. They've got a purpose for you. Maybe that purpose is to be small and keep the books. Maybe that purpose is to die. And if you have the temerity to make yourself bigger, or to come back alive, they just chew you up and bury you in the ground.""That's so sad," Tyvee said, struggling to his feet, "You're all so sad."She clapped him on the back, like the elves did Ed. "Cheer up, baby," she said. "After all, it's Christmas." And her laugh, sharp and cackling, rose up through the night air like a lost rocket in search of somewhere to land.
She called him a sexually transmitted disease. Carl doesn’t recall who shewas, but if he did, he’d send her a bottle of Dom Perignon for Christmas.“I am an STD,” he says.“You say something sir?” Rufus asks. He turns his sweaty face to the back of the car and grimaces at the effort. His thick neck strains and his cheeks, bright red, match the Santa hat Carl has him in. But he smiles through the pain and awaits a response. Carl hits the button. The partition slides shut.
***
The gym is nearly empty. A lone muscle-freak deadlifts in the corner. Rufus, under the air conditioner, greedily sucking down the free bottled waters and Carl, of course.Carl does not sweat. Does not allow himself to: a trick of the rich and one he has mastered. The key lies in comfort, never leaving it. No matter how hot Los Angeles gets, how thick and woolen his suits, he never degrades himself by sweating; unless, of course, it is time to sweat. Then Carl, like everything else he does, will do it to perfection.He decamps the treadmill looking like he swam the English channel.
***
Air conditioning works on the sweat and Carl feels coated in ice. He watches, comfortably, the discomfort of others. So many lost souls in the traffic. Unhappy, hideous people. Deep grimaces, shining foreheads. Wiping their heads with their arms and doing nothing but transferring the moisture in an infinite loop, amplifying their misery. Carl giggles. Wonders how many of them are in Los Angeles living the dream he sold.
***
Shower is perfect, of course. He doesn’t use a towel. Doesn’t need to. The temperature of the house just one degree warmer than that of his body. The mess made unimportant. Someone to clean it, assuredly. In the bedroom though a problem. Light peeking from behind the curtain, stretching the length of the floor, nearly striking his foot. “Sue,” he says.There in an instant. Doesn’t know how she does it. “Fix that,” he says, pointing to the light.Diligent but confused, she grabs the remote for the electric blinds and raises them. He does not reprimand her though, too amused by her attempts at avoiding eye contact with his exposed, glistening genitalia. Her head bobbles in unison with his cock, always a step ahead. He puppeteers her, spins her around like a dancing ballerina.Sue is fifty. Hair chopped bluntly in the shape of a rainbow. Lower teeth protruding like a chihuahua. She is hideous, by design. Work is work and fun is fun, never to mix again. He has learned this the hard way. Three divorces. Thirteen years of alimony. Payments to exes amounting to the GDP of third world nations. But now, suddenly, there is something desirable in the horridness of this idea, even in Sue’s complete and utter grotesqueness. Sex and Sue so incongruous, repulsive and unimaginable, it actually feels impossible. Out of reach. He must have it.“Sue,” he growls. He grasps her by the elbow and yanks her forward, but is momentarily distracted as the blinds complete their ascent and reveal the snow.Snow. Flurries of it, swirling and dancing outside his window. It is hypnotizing and by the time he remembers Sue, she has slithered free, heels clattering rapidly down the hall.Carl ponders the mystery of snow in Los Angeles for a moment more until he sees the two sour-faced men operating their respective machines and remembers he has paid for this. A memory. Linda, saying this, thinking it would be nice for the kids. It is a distant memory. Linda gone. The kids gone. The water slicking his body has turned, is now unpleasant. Carl closes his eyes. There is a feeling inside him, beneath his detachment and the carefully medicated euphoria. It hovers over his inner life like the sun: omnipresent, coloring everything but never to be looked at lest it burn his eyes. Carl, shivering, does not like this feeling, despite its familiarity.“Sue,” he calls.But she is gone. He knows.Carl, on the brink of something, becomes aware of the eyes on his body. His nude, glistening body. The two men operating the snow machine stare in a mixture of awe and disgust. It is power they see. Power in its truest form, a gleaming wet cock and balls destroying their Christmas morning, for reasons that escape them all. And as their faces show obvious signs of rage, as he notices the rings on their respective fingers, the tapping feet waiting to get back home to their families, the sun inside Carl sets. And now Carl, though painfully cold, cannot retreat. He stands in place, watching nothing for three deliberate minutes until it is certain he is exiting by choice and not bashfulness. And as he departs, showing his dripping wet ass, he is euphoric again.
FourteenIt’s Friday night. Not 24-hours into winter break. High school, 1994. Me and Simone go to the mall, like normal, although the arresting office will be sure to tell us, What you girls did was not OK. Do you hear me? Stealing is a crime, Girls. And it is a crime, but in my head it’s a normal one. The handcuffs they put on us, those seem normal. My mom’s response as she’s driving us home to face my father? Probably normal and anyway, I can take it from her, she has a right. She’s been overseeing my fuck-ups for a while now. He, though. He’s not allowed. And because I believe my father does not have the right to tell me anything, All of a sudden–now? when we butt heads that night, it’ll be so bad we never will again. Although it’s more than a butting of heads. When he realizes he’s on top of me, both hands around my neck, I can feel him know he’s lost control. His grip is ashamed. And my neck? Brave. Then guilty, for making him do it. When Christmas comes two days later, we exchange gifts like normal and no one says a word about it. Not ever again. Thirty-FiveIt’s the second week of December. I’m 9 weeks pregnant. We haven’t told our kids yet, he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t say those actual words–I don’t want to tell them, he just won’t say the other ones I want him to. It’s early Saturday morning and the fight is big and quiet like we’ve learned to be so the boys don’t hear. They’re playing Xbox in the garage we’ve converted into a room for them.You need to leave, I tell him, shaking and red with hurt. He shrugs, as if helpless. OK, he says. How can you just say it like that? OK!? All calm?! And he says, It's your house, and I say, So that’s it? That’s all you’re gonna say? Tears streaming down my face. Aren’t you even gonna ask what I’m gonna do about it?” I don’t call it a baby. But he simply shakes his head as he folds the clothes he’s packing to take, and I grab my red beanie from off the bed and walk from our bedroom and the quiet yelling, to the garage where the three boys are–his two, my one. Come on, Train, I say. You’re gonna be late for practice. When we get to the beach, Train grabs his surfboard from the back, shutting the trunk behind him. Then walks barefoot across the parking lot like someone who will not be having an abortion in seven days. Sitting in the car, I watch him slog through the sand to the frigid gray waves as I cry, silently. Even though I can be as loud as I want now. After a few minutes, I make the drive back to the house. Hoping that when I pull up, he’ll still be there, packing. But as I make my way up our street, my heart falls through my chest, through the seat, through the floor of the car and clear out into our empty driveway where his car is no longer parked. And as I turn off the engine, car keys in hand, I vow to myself that for as long as I live, I will never call it a baby. No matter what. Forty-TwoIt’s Christmas Eve and Grandma and Train and I have already done the three mile hike up Mt. Roubidoux in the 85 degree December heat and now we’re fresh out of ideas to occupy the next 10 hours together before we can each retire to our own rooms at Grandma’s house and not seem like we’re being rude for wanting to be alone, or just, not together. Train’s visiting from college and me, from the chaos of my new life without him. What about lunch? Grandma asks. Applebees?Train says sure.I say nothing.Before we leave for the restaurant, Train corners me in the hall. Wants to know what’s wrong?I’ve been trying not to cry all morning. Trying not to feel like whatever a mother with a birdless nest might. Looking down at the white 12x12 ceramic floor tiles, I say, I wanna tell you but if I do I’ll just cry. Distracted, he grabs his phone from his back pocket, looks down at it and says plainly, emotionless, OK. At the restaurant after we all order, Train heads to the bathroom. My mother looks at his empty seat, then at me. The Game’s on, or rather, they all are. Kelly Clarkrson’s I’ll be Home for Christmas desperately tries to cut through the din of the many T.V. 's. A few tears laze down my cheek and slip into my tea. Mom takes a sip of hers, trying not to notice. I think it’s going really well, she says, swirling her napkin along the table. Cleaning a mess that isn’t there. I’m in hell, I say. She smiles. Because she doesn’t understand. Well. You’ll always be his mother, she says consolingly. Don’t forget that. I nod. Then why do I feel like just some woman now? I sit stirring my drink that’s already gone. And my mother, she doesn’t have to smile. Because she knows just what I mean.
Jacobson's organ is an olfactory organ that helps animals detect chemicals in their environment. Located near the roof of the mouth, it’s present in many mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.*“Keep your distance from the river,” I told her. I ran my tongue along the roof of my mouth and felt the old, corrugated tin shed hidden up there with no tools in it to speak of, only a panting, half-dead snowbird. I was in love for the fifth or sixth time that week and my apartment was very cold. She went under the counter looking for another bottle of vodka, the pom-pom and point of her Santa hat bobbing along the bar’s sticky, tinseled horizon like a hand puppet. “Distance from what?” I stepped off the bar stool, then thought better of it, immediately repossessed the hunched posture no one ever seemed to want me to escape. I was always misunderstanding her—the important part was I wasn’t alone. One more. She was always asking about what happened to me as a kid, as a man, as a state senator and then saying oh wow under her breath like she felt sort of sorry for me while she counted bottles and flapped her wet hands at clouds of drain flies, squinting. She poured another one. I said, “Farmhouse. Falling apart.” I told her my childhood home was abandoned. I talked slow to make sure I was saying it right and not changing any details from the last time I told it. Where was she going again? I drove by it with my sister last year, the farmhouse. We got whoopings in there and worse. The bartender said, Ahhhhhhhh in a pouting way, then lit up when a guy walked in, a torturously duded guy in a billowing mustard-and-red sports outfit. He had a flattop and a smeared lobster or scorpion tattooed on his forehead in faded black ink, faded like he’d tried to rub it off with sandpaper. Randy! She ran from behind the bar, a bottle opener jutting out of the back pocket of her elf pants, and jumped into the man named Randy. I always struggle with this. The boyfriend is—okay, okay—Randy, and I know they both make fun of me when I’m not planted squarely in front of them. Though they do give each other little looks, I think, from time to time when I’m explaining something I feel is important. So maybe even then, too. Every outfit is a sports outfit for Randy and it corresponds with the seasons. It’s nice to see young(ish?) love…but what about me? Donna took off quite a while ago, right about when I got voted out and, after a few months of moping in the basement or garage, I started coming here and a few other dark places to do my moping. Randy held her by the waist and his mouth was open and his eyes were dead. I told them I used to be the Speaker of the House and they both laughed a little like I’d never said that exact thing and she took my fifty dollar bill. Randy was my signal to go.I went into the cold sunlight and the other one, other bartender, was out there, still smoking. We watched an extra-long Christmas stocking writhe in the breeze, squirm crazily across the parking lot like a crimson serpent until it wrapped itself around a parking meter and gave up. She squeezed my arm lightly and shivered back deeper into her long red-and-green sweater. Lisa? I think it’s Lisa.“Headed home, Senator?”There we were, two vertebrates shivering under an ice-drooped awning. “Next place,” I told her. Lisa. They know where I go. Hell if I’m going home at one o’clock in the afternoon. I walked to the bus stop. Chemical reactions filled every seat when the time came. The snow bird’s broken call was just a whisper, not nearly loud enough to cut through the chatter of people’s bodily functions and sparse applause. I kept my hands to myself. There was a time my hands wandered everywhere, over forbidden lands navigated by the most immaterial of senses.Senator Jacobson may now address the assembly.I bet Randy never passed a bipartisan appropriations bill or helped build a casino out in the middle of fucking nowhere. To be honest, I could never remember if her name was Maria or Marie or Mary. And perhaps his name isn’t Randy. I wished I had a piece of gum. I wished I had Donna. Memories. Growing up, our farmhouse had miles of flat sunflower fields around it on all sides. They had us surrounded back then! Long, uneven lines of spindly trees gave no encouragement and the little lackluster gravel road we all hated the sound of became an unanticipated benefactor: I ran and ran and ran. It turned out I had gone to seed. Fortunate things occurred that I struggle to understand, pheromones be damned, undecoded specters of possibility. Love wrapped its greedy mind around me. Respect came my way by way of Donna’s father, a State Supreme Court Judge. My constituents seemed to me to be androids assembled from unnatural components but I loved them—how couldn’t I? Service was my middle name. I voted with my subconscious to great effect. Intersections were scolded, freeway tolls burned alive screaming like children on a canyon-plunging field trip bus. I could smell the suffering and death. Bleeding. Stuffed animals. “Pass this or else!” I’d cry. At the end of my duties—the day some hidden things clamored, white and bleary into sunshine—the whole chamber echoed with a singular gasp when I collapsed at the podium, limbs folded underneath me like a chain-link fence in a windstorm. The whole tool shed was on full display: Ken Jacobson, State Senator. We knew he had issues.I remembered! She said Randy(?) wanted to take her sledding on the river!I pulled the string and the snowbird went ding.At the next place—a little dive with a circle bar and a statue of Elvis—the man at the curving counter said plainly with a new neon moustache, “No. Remember. We’re done here, Ken.” On to another bar a block down, I shoveled myself into the future past the shops with their windows dressed merrily and I thought, at the end of the day, I just don’t want that nice girl to drown. Not this time of year. The thing about the river in late December is it’s tricky. You can’t tell if its solid just by looking at it. You’re taking your chances. Will it bear your weight, bide its time, or split open laughing to leave you clawing and clamoring beneath its long, frozen tongue? At the next spot, Belinda or Becky had my drink made before I even sat down.“Merry Christmas, Senator. We close in half an hour.”
Dano wondered whether he might be too old to be a Dano. He got the name like he got self-consciousness. It had happened without a pinpointable moment of happening. When he came online, it was online with him. Now he was twenty-eight, a functional boozehound, in debt big time. He was a salesman at a local music shop and had been for ten years. He was regionally famous. If you said “Dano” in certain bars, at least one person would perk up and say, “Oh, Dano rocks,” or “Fuckin’ Danooooooo.” He was likely the most naturally gifted guitar player in the state of Nevada, though he rarely played in public. His headaches were getting worse and more frequent, his vision was becoming increasingly messed up by floaters, halos, and static. And Frankie, his childhood bud, one of his five roommates, had become an officially missing person. “Could I be a Daniel?” Dano wondered.
II
Because of Dano’s skill, people often asked him why he or his band weren’t bigger, why they never toured or moved out to LA or Seattle to try to make it big. He tried, for a while, to explain the space that music occupied in his mind. It was like an alternate dimension. A trip. Undulating colors. Shapes that bent the sense-making parts of the brain. Time as totality. Where there is no order but things are always happening. It demanded a certain form of attention. He needed to be careful with it. He so wanted to escape his life. This was dangerous. The path afforded by the music space was not a way out but a way in. A way into the present; a way to know, not run from, his suffering. He knew, if he let it, that chasing glory, the adoration of so many strangers, could warp that space. Turn the way in into a way out. A justification for his being alive. A form of redemption, the thing he wanted most. The thing he detested. After a while he just started saying, “That’s not the point.”The night that Frankie took off, some of the crew came by their place. Dano had some Millers. People were in constant motion, coming in from smoking, going out to smoke. Erika, jazz bassist turned grindcore vocalist, was there. Erika asked Dano for a cigarette. Dano said he loved her. “You say that to everybody,” she said. It was true. “Yeah, that’s true,” said Dano. “That’s true. Fair point. I’m sorry. I just. I feel good.” “You look it. Why don’t you go play us a little something on the ol’ acoustic?” “I can’t.”“How come?”“I just can’t right now.” “Our Dano is suddenly shy?” “Not exactly.”“People don’t get into music like you because they want to stand all humble in the corner.” “Why do you do it?” The smoke that Erika exhaled was exaggerated by her breath in the cold. “‘Cause I’m pissed,” she said. “And I want people to see that I’m pissed. And know why. I can’t talk about why I’m pissed without sounding weird. But I can show it. And I can turn this like ugly thing into ugly music that’s actually, kind of, beautiful,” she said. Dano’s cigarette had grown an ash appendage. He wanted to say something, a lot of something, but he didn’t know how, and he was sorry for telling Erika he loved her in the way he had. “Can I have a Miller?” she said. They went inside. Frankie was out of his room, shirtless and pale, holding a whiskey bottle with maybe a quarter left. “Let’s get one in ya,” he said to the room. The bottle went around. Dano got Erika a Miller. Which spilled over with foam as she opened it. The lines on her flannel shirt vibrated. How long had they been doing that, he wondered.“Danoman, can I talk to you a minute?” Frankie said. Dano was not up for talking the way Frankie wanted to talk. It was an almost nightly thing:1) Frankie gets drunk and needs Dano. 2) Frankie details every soul crushing aspect of his work day. 3) Dano makes him feel better. 4) Frankie says he’s miserable. Hopeless. 5) Dano tells him that it sounds real serious, that he’s sorry, that his friends are there for him, that life is worth living and is there anything he can do for him? 6) Frankie smiles, says, “That’s okay, brother. Thank you. You always know what to say.” Dano tried his best to focus on Frankie’s face. There was definitely a change taking place there, the eye bags no longer a byproduct of the partying, but of something heavier, something drawing deeper lines. “Sure, man. We can chat,” Dano said.
III
Frankie had been what people call “big hearted” since Dano had known him. When they were thirteen, loitering outside the Hilton casino as they did most summers, a drunk guy locked eyes with young Dano. The guy was shredded, salon tanned skin under a small tanktop. He was short for a grownup but seemed massive to Dano. “That fucking kid’s looking at me,” the guy said to his group. “That kid’s looking at me.” The group laughed. They tried to move on. Dano got nervous. He was small for thirteen. The guy would murder him. “He’s looking at me,” the guy said. He tried to move toward Dano. His group laughed, held him back, told him to chill. “They’re kids, man,” they said. The guy pushed his old lady off him. Was that his old lady? Or was that a random? The guy moved toward Dano. There were too many things moving all at the same time. Frankie stepped between Dano and the guy. The guy pushed Frankie. Frankie fell onto his ass. The guy swung wide, lost his feet. His friends rushed him and got him through the shoulders and were dragging him away as the guy screamed at Dano. “Sorry, he’s real fucked up,” the guy’s friends said. Dano tried to hide his shaking. “Thanks, man,” he said to Frankie. “No worries,” Frankie said. Frankie would have taken that beating for Dano a thousand times over, would have taken it for anybody gathered at their place the night he disappeared. Dano sipped his Miller. He knew. He followed Frankie down the hall. He knew, but he did not want to hear it. He wanted to go to his room and shut the door. He wanted to go to the space inside him that held the music. He wanted to find something that was in him now, something he could not name but was in there and important. Frankie took a pull from a half-full bottle on the dresser. He would have done anything for Dano. They had been through more together than either would say out loud. “What’s up, man?” Dano asked. “Oh, you know, bud,” Frankie said. Frankie offered Dano the bottle, and Dano had a little pull. “Work’s been getting to me,” Frankie said. “I feel that. We’re in our busy season too,” said Dano. “I know I just gotta keep my head down, but it’s hard.”“I don’t know that you have to keep your head down, exactly.”“I guess. I’ve already worked sixty hours this week. I had over 120 hours on my last check.” Static formed over Frankie’s skin. Pixels shimmering in waves. “How about we go outside? It’s a party. What if we drown our sorrows a little?” The static over Frankie’s face arranged itself in disbelief. Frankie thought. “Alright,” he said. “Do you want a smoke?”“Nah.” The kickback went on like it had. Frankie stayed in his room, door closed. Erika got up on the coffee table, sang about being young and wanting to leave the place you grew up in. Dano went to his room, searched the music space within. There was nothing save the party noise barely muffled by his door. He searched, fingers over string. Indents in his calloused tips. He stayed like that for a while, years maybe, until he heard a slamming door. The tenor of the party noises changed. Erika’s voice, concerned. In the front room, Frankie swayed, hand on the front door for balance. “You can’t drive, man,” somebody said. Frankie looked at Dano. Through him. Frankie opened the door. Was out in the cold desert night, alone for a moment. Dano followed, reaching for the waist of Frankie’s sweatpants. Dano caught him up. Dano tried to get his arms around Frankie. Frankie pushed, clipping Dano’s jaw with an open palm. Frankie was in his Ranger. Frankie had the doors locked. Dano pounded on the window and pulled at the door handle. Frankie’s engine started. Frankie was pulling away. Dano hit the driver side window with the butt of his fist and reached beneath the wiper blades and hoped for something holdable. He got himself in front of the truck somehow, and Frankie stopped. Dano’s breath was huge in the headlights. Frankie revved the engine, peeled. Dano fell. Frankie stopped. He revved again as Dano got on his feet. Frankie peeled again, and Dano knew he wouldn’t stop. Something in the truck’s motion told him that this time was for real, and he felt his body moving out of the way, reaching for the side view mirror that held Frankie in moonlit profile. He ran with the truck, with Frankie, as long as he could, reaching, kicking at the door. Their friends had gathered outside. Dano punched a hole in the wood fence that ran parallel to their street. Somewhere, outside the city, in the desert, a fanged and starving body hunted. The mountains continued their falling into gravel. Dano’s head hurt. He wanted to leave this. Get out of his life. The music space was far away. And he did not want to go there. He saw no way inward. He wanted out. A savior, a heaven to hope for, something. Frankie’s taillights were around the corner, gone save for the streaks of afterimage they left smeared beneath the streetlights for Dano alone.
IV
Dano wondered: “If I am not a Daniel, what am I?”The local music shop was in trouble. It was almost Christmas, and they were still sitting on most of their inventory. Foot traffic was negligible. They adjusted truss rods, swapped out pickups, repaired speakers and amplifiers, sold strings and vintage Gibsons and replacement parts for drum kits made in the nineties. To keep up his contracts with the major manufacturers, the shop owner had to purchase in quantities that hadn’t made business sense in decades. There were boxed guitars everywhere. Dano wiped countertops, updated inventory, tagged, labeled, arranged. A truck pulled up that needed unloading. The guys unloaded it. They smoked by the dumpster. Frankie had not come back. Dano was like you. All he wanted was a little mercy. “Kids don’t want to play rock music anymore,” said Sal, the manager. “Nobody wants a guitar. You know how much action you used to be able to get just by saying you were in a band? Now it’s, No, I’ll just sit on my ass with my phone, thanks. I’ll just be a DJ and press play on my computer like an asshole.” Sal looked toward some place that was just for him. “I don’t know anymore,” he said. “You know what, Sal?” Dano said. “Me neither.”Dano went down to the shop’s basement and stretched out in the narrow makeshift hallway where they kept the repair parts. The only cameraless spot left in America. He opened the band’s Instagram page and looked around. The initial wave of concern and support for Frankie had collapsed faster than he’d hoped. No more stories. Everyone that warranted contacting had been contacted. Dano had called, dm’d, driven. Frankie’s family had no idea where he might be, hadn’t heard anything, and other than his sister, none of them seemed to care much. There was nothing else to do. No one had even seen the truck. Dano’s eyes vibrated. Over everything, there was snow falling all the time that only he could see.The shop closed every day at 6:00. On Christmas Eve, after hours without a customer, Sal told the crew, “You guys can probably head out.” It was 5:27.
V
On Christmas Day, Dano and his brother met their dad for lunch at the Lucky Beaver Bar & Burger. “I heard about your friend. Frankie. It’s too bad. He’s a good kid,” their dad said. He was on his second beer. He looked old. “Yeah,” the boys said. There were a couple guys at the bar. Giants-Eagles on the tvs. One woman worked serving and bartending. When she opened the door to the kitchen, Dano saw, framed for a second in that space, two cooks kicking back, watching an unseen screen, smiling. “It’s what happens when you get older. Won’t be the last, I can tell you that,” their dad said. “He’s not dead,” Dano said. “Right,” their dad said.The snow in Dano’s eyes got bad. Randy said something Dano couldn’t follow. His brother’s mouth was moving, his eyes locked on their dad. His baby brother, a little kid crying through missing teeth and then a man, tall and imposing, with bigger and more capable hands than Dano’s, hands already bent from work, moving in wider and wider circles over empty beer bottles. The vein standing out now in their old man’s temple. Snow falling just for Dano. He remembered the first time Frankie hit him. They’d taken mushrooms before a house party up the street. He couldn’t remember who was there, only the sense of moving bodies. Doors. Carpet. Laughter. At some point, Frankie got down on his back on the concrete stoop, an X of limbs. He stared up the porchlight, smiling. Dano looked down at him. Frankie pointed up. “There’s snow everywhere,” he said. “I can’t even see you.” Dano got him on his feet. People on the stoop laughed. Their mouths were too long. “You don’t wanna fight me, do you?” Frankie said. “What?” Dano said. “You’re not trying to get tough with me?” said Frankie.Frankie contorted his face. The look became sound, a supersonic boom through Dano. “Are you trying to get tough with me?” Dano said. Frankie hit him square in the forehead. Dano didn’t even feel it, barely perceived Frankie’s fist in motion. Frankie recoiled, holding his hand. He held it up to the silent crowd on the stoop. It was already swelling. Laughter from everywhere again. Somehow the same laughter. As if the too long mouths had never stopped, as if they would always be there, on that stoop, laughing. Later that night, the night in which Frankie hit Dano for the first time, they walked home together. They sat on the couch in the front room. Dano showed Frankie a Youtube video. Frankie showed Dano a Youtube video. Frankie got on his knees and got Dano’s cock in his mouth. Dano didn’t realize what was happening until it was almost over. He did the same for Frankie. When the birds started chirping, when there was light outside and the spring smells came through the window, Dano put on Despisers of the Body’s new record. “What does he say right there, right before the drums come in?” Frankie asked. “I will not debase my suffering by seeking its end,” Dano told him. Dano’s head was on Frankie’s chest. His fingers moved over Frankie’s still swelling hand. “What does that mean?” Frankie said. “I don’t know,” Dano said. In the Lucky Beaver, as the bartender poured a double and Randy’s hands went around the table, somebody, a Giant or Eagle, scored. One of the guys at the bar stood up, hooted, hollered. Dano let the snow fall. His dad did not look beautiful in it. The Lucky Beaver did not suddenly glow. Dano did not need to convince his pops that Frankie was still alive. Frankie did not need to come back from wherever he’d gone to prove his being mattered. If you are really gone, he thought, I will never say that your life was not enough.
There you lie, lifeless on your back, plastic eyes staring, smile stitched between felt beard and moustache…it’s not awkward; it’s a perfect morning after.I've missed wrapping my arm around another body in bed. Hugging my hot water bottle from October to March, holding its slop-slop to my chest, while soothing, makes a lonely picture. It’s like hugging water: you can’t hug love. It slips past your fingers, steals pieces of yourself as it trickles or rushes away. I’ve learned to hold myself. But when Christmas clutters city streets and people’s minds, when the nights grow long and deep, that’s when I crave the warmth of someone wanting to be with me, long for a beating heart in bed with me. You’re the perfect Julklapp gift for us. Mhm, I figured you out at sunrise; the way you said, sleep tight. Your voice—that rumble lipping my neck—it ghosts into the wound Finn left in the back of my chest. Fills it, rubs it warm, smooths the tension between my shoulder blades—Does hugging you make me more or less pathetic?Last night at the restaurant, I laughed so hard when I unpacked you, saw black boots, no trousers: blue boxer shorts with bright yellow stars. I swore to throw you away. Someone, Levik surely, tied the jute bag you came in to the straps of my handbag.And now, here you lie, red faux coat over a rotund bulge—I like that you have a belly when you turn man. Your velvety hat’s torn askew from where I clung to you as you set off an avalanche with your tongue and fingers. You promised more of this every night of the season. If I kept you. Ugh, look at this bruise—ah, you can’t see. Not until sunset? You could’ve arrived sooner, you know…could’ve prevented my somersault in front of the restaurant, placed Levik close enough to catch me. I could’ve landed on you, not an icy patch of snowy pavement. Might’ve softened the blow; back-planting before the entire office, agh.Levik’s voice was first to register after my viewpoint flipped. There’s something about that voice. The rumbling of an approaching storm—not the dangerous kind—I mean there is something foreboding about the sound of his words rolling up his chest, but then it softens, turns liquid, travels down my spine, like warm water…that temperature that’s just right for a bath? A bath, that’ll help the soreness from my fall. And our night. Meh, too cold outside of bed. The bath can wait. Besides, it’s Sunday, first Advent—Families at breakfast tables, kids reciting “Advent, Advent, ein Lichtlein brennt,” parents guiding tentative fingers to light the first candle—might as well stay in bed. Cuddle you. Christmas season goes from 1st Advent til January 6th, but you said that’s not true. A stereotypical Santa—one without trousers, that is—saying Christmas magic has nothing to do with Santa or even Christmas. You deepened your voice to say: My magic is older than the peregrination and coalescence of myths and customs; it’s the Sun’s magic in its Winter expression. A recitation, surely. Then you declared: I will warm you as the sun slips from the days until she reshapes them with her ever-brightening light. Grr, give me dates! Your voice rumbled like a growl when I kept asking. Then it rippled, laved my ear, my neck. And that was that. But really, how long will we have these nights? I’ve promised myself to singlehood, but sometimes it absolutely sucks. I thought one-night stands would patch the void, but they’re too troublesome. Either they demand more than was agreed—desperate to be wanted more than they want themselves—or it turns out they’re cheating. But sex isn’t the only void. Last night, after thudding the pavement and confusing the street’s fairy lights with myriad stars, after registering Levik’s, “You OK?” and someone’s “Have another Glühwein!”, the thing my eyes focused on were sneakers. Levik always wears them—black or brown. Never other shoes, not even to court. I think it’s because he moves so much. Whenever his lean figure, shirt sleeves rolled up, prowls the corridors, I know he’s on a tough case, and it’s time for a mutual lunch or dinner. I wonder what my tell is.I swear you just leered. So we enjoy each other’s counsel, a few times a week. Nothing hedonistic about discussing cases over food and a glass of wine. It’s not dating. He’s brilliant, but dating in the office?Once, I’d have rolled my eyes at someone transferring after a breakup, but that July night when Levik told me why he left the Stockholm office, I understood. We were celebrating our first win, playing round after round of Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, our pawns jumping over or kicking the other’s pawns out, neither willing to end the night in defeat. My response was: “Coupledom makes us needy and gormless,” and then I spoke about Finn. I’m not sure why…it was an unusually warm night.Your eyes didn’t leave my lips—you were biting your bottom lip, revealing the most enticing row of teeth. I wanted to run the tip of my tongue over them, nip that plump lip. “We’re lone wolves,” you said. Then you raised your glass, red liquid sloshing halfway up one side, and said, “To our pack of two”. I clinked with my white. “Let’s not shit where we eat,” I said. You sipped and nodded.Lone wolves. And you, little Santa? Let the office believe you’re a gag gift to the office’s Christmas grouch. We know you’re a doorway for water to flow through unpossessed. You’re the comfort of a filled bathtub, outside the rumbling approach of thunder, but knowing I’m safely grounded…Who cares if I’m being sappy; I can’t wait for his voice to trickle from your lips, pebble my skin, submerge me in hot…steaming…bathwater.
She was told to smile. She was always told to smile at the start of her shift. Cammie, give ‘em that smile. Not a suggestion, but mandatory. And she’d give it to ‘em.But tonight…The clients in here tonight crave holly jolly and so most say Smile, baby as they slip a tip in the thin hip strip of her thong. It’s the floor clients who say this mostly––the newcomers, the one-and-done-ers, the lonely men looking at her instead of looking at those waiting for them to get home this eve. The ones who walk in unnoticed. The ones who order the Santa’s Steak & Spaghetti Special, rare and wet, and slurp the blood-soaked noodles and smack open-mouthed and stare at her like a toddler holding an iPad as she gives them a preview of what they could get the full attraction of in a private room.They say Smile, baby with words traveled on breath tomato-tanged and beer-burped.And, of course, she does.It’s just business, a job. Nothing personal on her end. Everything personal on theirs. She’s used to it by now. There’s a joke about a guy who gets a dancer’s number and tells his friends No, dude, she actually likes me. Usually she laughs at this.But tonight…Each time she hears Smile, the words are like whispered slivers of glass in her heart. She tries not to assume to know anything about the clients or picture in her mind the lives they wear beyond the doors. Being neutral to who they are helps her play her role and convince these clients to give up what they would to someone else if it wasn’t her. A job. A game. It’s her life.But tonight…All she can picture are the families these men hide away from, sees these wives and children and she wants to think Taking them for granted but that’s the kind of thought that makes smiling real hard. Harder than it already is on days like today. This time of year… The idea of taking people for granted and then you no longer have them around, can’t tell them Thank you for being in my life because they no longer are…She struts by a man who sucks salt and cream sauce off his sausage-thick finger and runs that spit-slick finger up her arm as she passes. She stops, wags a finger at him, slow like wheat fields in the wind, and through the best smile she’s got says, “No no, sweetheart. No touching.”And the man laughs and chokes a little on the food in his mouth––a mouth so full that the mashed up food is both on his tongue and already halfway down his throat. His other hand, the one not still uncomfortably close to her, caresses his crotch in a three-finger pinch and roll.She keeps moving.The DJ crackles over the intercom with, “Now on the stage. Vixxxen.” Stretching out the “x” so that it hisses like a snake. The high-twang guitar of “Jingle Bell Rock” kicks in and half the place starts clapping along vaguely on tempo.Vixxxen comes out in her all-red break-away one piece and thigh highs. She’s got bells attached to the ankles of her 8-inch platforms and they jangle each time she heel bangs. The Santa hat on her head doesn’t move as she does a brass monkey.Cammie turns away from the stage and notices a man sitting at a high top against the back wall. Alone. Maybe forty or fifty. Not eating the special. Not watching Vixxxen. Just sitting and sipping. Waiting for someone to come to him. So Cammie does.She slides up next to him, runs a finger from one shoulder to the other. Up close she can smell his cologne and see that his hair is more gray than color and that his face has more lines than smooth. Older than she thought. Maybe sixty. Not wearing a ring––because most men who have them keep them on when they come in here. Want all the girls to know, thinks it makes them forbidden. But it just makes them look like schmucks. And this one isn’t wearing a ring. When she touches him, he seems to both tense up and resign. Almost like his head drops.She says, “Hi, baby. What’re you doing over here alone?”“Just sitting…”“And no one’s come talk to ya?”He shakes his head.“Well I’m here now. So time to cheer up.” She puts her face down closer to the table so that he has no choice but to look at her. When he does, she plasters that mandatory smile on her face, cartoonishly wide. Trying hard to be the right shade of aggressively cute men his age melt over.“Yeah,” he says, but doesn’t show any sign of cheering up.Any of the other girls would’ve rolled their eyes or walked away or both. But Cammie presses on. Knows what’s here in front of her.“You look like you got a lot on your mind.”“I do.”“Well… You wanna go to a private room and we can talk about it?”He nods. He feels around his pants like he’s looking for lost keys. Takes a quick hitched breath.And she takes his hand. But he doesn’t move. His feet stay anchored to the floor. He grabs the glass of wine and downs the rest of it.“Oh, baby… You can take it to the room with you. You don’t have to––”But it’s gone, down his throat.She says, “Okay then.” And leads him out of the main room. Down a blue hallway, into Private Room 2. And shuts the door.She eases him into a recliner that no one can tell is Costco cheap because of the room’s redlight darkness, and the two agree on a ten minute private dance. She sets her phone timer, opens Spotify, and pushes play on a holiday playlist. She eases out of her clothes.Halfway through those ten minutes she’s perfected counting up in the head, she notices wetness on his face. Some clients sweat in the private rooms. Sweat bad. Nerves and old age and the tension that maybe this is the time the dancer will finally give them something extra. She’d feel that wetness on her bare skin through their clothes or on her fingers, salty slick, as she caressed their faces or necks. The reek of their bad diets and bad habits seeping out in that sweat.But tonight…This isn’t sweat.She slows, hips pumping gently on his lap. She looks him in the face. He doesn’t look up at her, still hasn’t, eyes finding everything else in the room but hers.She says, “Babe… Are you crying?”A beat, like he’s trying to dig up a lie. But he doesn’t say anything.“I ain’t that bad, am I?” A joke because who wants to give a private dance to a crying man. Though it’s hardly the first time. Usually the tears come from guilt. But that’s not what this is, is it?“No no no. Not at all. It’s not you. It’s just…” And like he can barely find the words: “I miss my mom.”She stops moving, sits still in his lap in a thong and nothing else.He adds, “I always miss her this time of year.” And because she's already been tiptoeing around the thought tonight, already been fighting the stomach pit numb that tonight and tomorrow bring for her now and for the last six years, and because the sudden change catches her off guard, she says, “Me too.”He looks at her. “You too? But you’re so young.”“Sometimes it happens, baby.”“You think it gets easier but it doesn’t. Tonight… This, all this, holiday or whatever… It’ll never be the same for the rest of my life and… I just want to give her a gift tomorrow. Or open something she thought I’d like.”“Sometimes that’s just how it goes. No more gifts when they’re gone, ya know? But…”“But what?”She tosses her hair back with both hands. Runs her fingers through one side. Rubs an itch at the tip of her nose with her palm. Then looks at him with that mask she’s been wearing gone. This is her, really.“Can I tell you a story that might cheer you up?”“Please.” And he really means it.She adjusts how she’s sitting in his lap, like she’s preparing herself for a story that she’s been holding onto for too long, hasn’t told anyone. She shakes out her nerves, tossing around her hands and hair in a playful way, and then performs.“Can you keep a secret?”He nods, already leaned in and interested.“Well… My real name…is Ezlynn.”“Oh… It’s not Cammie Soul?”“Ha ha, funny guy. Thought you were supposed to be sad or something.”He looks down with his whole head. But she didn’t mean it like that. She lifts his head back up with a finger to chin so that his eyes are on hers again as she talks.“So my name is Ezlynn. Which is a good name if you ask me. But it’s an unusual name. You ever met an Ezlynn before?”He shakes his head, eyes stationary on her.“Right. Me neither. I was named after my grandmother. My mom… She said she loved that name––Ezlynn––and wanted to say it all the time. Growing up I hated it, wanted to be Christine or something. But now… I love it too. Mom was right.”“It’s a good name.”She puts a finger on his lips.“So… I was at the store the other day. Thinking as I always do but especially this time of year––I wish I woulda spent more time with mom. When all a’sudden this lady comes down the aisle, looking right at me. Like I’m in trouble––maybe a wife whose husband gave me up when the bank statement came in. And she says Are you Ezlynn? and I think Oh shit. I’m ready to start throwin hands, ya know? And so I say Yeah, so what? and she goes Your mother is looking for you.“And I kinda went all cold, couldn’t really say anything. Maybe I said something like My mother? because the lady goes Yeah, this real petite woman with red hair. And now I don’t know if you can tell in these lights, but two of the many gifts my mother gave me is this head of luscious red hair and this petite body.”She bounces on him once. The side of his mouth lifts in a half-smirk that feels like a courtesy. His eyes look like they’re begging for this story to give him something. So she continues.“I got my nose from my daddy. But so this woman is describing my mother. My mother. Who is dead. And she’s looking for me? And this lady goes Yeah, she’s up at the front of the store. Come with me. But I can barely move cuz I’m kinda like freaking out. Right? Who wouldn’t? But I start following her. And the closer we get to the front I’m like fully expecting to turn the corner and see my mom up there waiting for me, that the last six years have been some kind of mistake.“But…“Of course it’s not, ya know?“We get up there and it’s this women who looks nothing like my mom, even though she’s petite and her hair’s red. And she’s talking to this little girl, maybe ten or something, saying things like Ezlynn, I told you not to blah blah blah. Standard worried mom stuff.“And so the lady who came up to me in the aisle stops and goes Oh… I guess she found her. Guess you’re not the right Ezlynn. And I just kinda go Yeah cuz what else can I say? “And had that been the end of it I woulda been like That was weird and moved on but the lady said What are the odds? and I said What do you mean? and she said Well it’s weird… My name is Ezlynn too. Named after my grandmother.“My mouth musta been wide open cuz she said I know. Three Ezlynns in the same place. What are the odds? But it wasn’t just three. It was five. Three here and the two we were named after. All there in that one moment.“The lady smiled at me in a dismissive kinda way and then left. And I kinda shuffled back to my cart thinking Your mother is looking for you.”She stops talking. Realizes he’s staring at her, tears in his eyes again.He says, “You are very lucky.”“Lucky?”“People go their whole lives without getting a gift like that. Something to help them… believe.”“Or it was a coincidence…”“No… That was something.” “There ya go, sweetheart. That’s the good thinking.”And then he says, “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”“About what?”“That you got an answer. That you were thinking of her and she answered. Let you know she was there… That you aren’t alone.”Her phone jangles a fake fire alarm. The timer she’d set just in case the up in the head counting got away from her. Which it did.She says, “Oh geez… I’m sorry. I spent all your time talking. Here… Let me set it again so that––”She reaches for her phone, but he reaches out and grabs her hand. Stops her. She lets him.He says, “No.”She feels her eyebrows go up high. “No?”“This was more than enough. Thank you.” Says it like he really means it.And they don’t say anything else as she stands and gets dressed. Stage music throbs through the walls, fills the silence with some heavy metal version of a Christmas melody. He stands, adjusts his clothes. She guides him to the door with a hand on his shoulder. She can’t feel sweat through his clothes. He stops in the doorway and she looks at him, the two standing close. She has to look up to meet his eyes. Tall.He says, “Do you think she was there?”“Maybe…”“Do you think she’s here now?”She lets out the weakest laugh you’ve ever heard. Then, “No… I think she knows to give me some privacy.”He smiles, nods. His eyes break away from hers. Go up to the door frame, to the mistletoe hanging there. She sees it too, wonders who put it here. She smiles at him, then kisses the tips of her three fingers––ring, middle, pointer––and places those three fingers gently on his forehead. He closes his eyes, breathes in deep. Like he’s just been given a blessing.“Thank you.”And then he hands her five hundred dollars, crisp bills folded over. She takes it.And before he’s gone and she never sees him again, he says, “I don’t know if anyone has said this yet and meant it but… Merry Christmas.”The smile that comes across her face doesn’t feel like one she’s been told to give. She says, “You too.”And then he’s gone.She goes back out to the floor and wanders, not really looking for another client. Not really interested in anything other than what he said. It was something.Because maybe it was.But tonight…She watches Crystal on stage, also all in red, also with a Santa hat stuck to her head.“Saw you go private with that sad one.” Prancer walks up to Cammie and gets within kissing distance. She always does this. “You told him that one story, didn’t you?”She shows Prancer the money.“Biiiiiitch,” stretching it out in that playfully jealous way. “You buying me a drink later.”“Alright, alright.”And then Prancer struts away on heels tall enough to be illegal, throwing her ass-length blonde hair around like it’s her best quality. Maybe it is.All of the girls think it’s a made up story, just something to tell when she finds the sad ones. A way to scheme them out of a few more bucks than they were willing to give. Maybe it is.But it’s also real. It happened. Exactly as she told it. Not something recent, but it happened. And she knows exactly what it means to her.So tonight…Ezlynn stands there, not seeing. Only listening. Trying to feel that something he said it was. Trying to feel like her mom was there is there always will be there. And just like the five Ezlynns all in the same place at the same time, the song playing as Crystal dances brings all of that coincidence that maybe isn’t coincidence at all into a new kind of focus that makes smiling feel okay and makes her heart do exactly as the song says for the reason the songs says:And hearts will be glowing when loved ones are nearIt’s the most wonderful time of the year.And then Crystal’s heel bang brings her back and she’s okay with it.She squeezes the money and says, “Thank you, mom.”
