I had this dream that I had a baby. Rather, I was responsible for a baby, though it was unclear if I had actually given birth to it. The baby was still a newborn, unable to do anything but lay where I put her and cry. I was at a picnic with my uncle Steve, a bunch of kids I’d grown up with (who were still kids), my aunt’s high school best friend, and Cyndi Lauper—she was just there, as herself, our friend. Also, there was an assassin staked out across the street from the backyard we were hanging out in, but it was clear that he wouldn’t bother us if we just ignored him. I was carrying the baby in my laptop bag: an old backpack with a built-in laptop sleeve. This bag has never been washed and I have been using it everyday for five years. It also has so many zippers and compartments that I routinely lose things—even big things—in it for days. I always knew where the baby bag was, but in that vague way, like when I would meet up with people after work (when I had a job), and had to be always conscious that no one stepped on my bag or spilled wine on it because my work laptop was in there.

We were drinking whiskey and lemonade and Cyndi kept it coming (the girl, apparently, knows how to have fun). Everything was cool for quite a while. I was sipping on my drink, and occasionally feeding the baby crackers, and we all were having a nice, easy time. The weather was perfect. After a few hours, I had to pee, so I picked up baby and took her with me behind the garage (this is when I realize that it’s Cyndi’s mom’s house and that her mom doesn’t want people tramping through to use the bathroom). So I put baby-in-the-bag down in the alley, have a pee, and button up my shorts. That’s when I see the assassin has his gun out. He motions to me to get down, and crawl back to the party. He has really refined hand gestures. I point at baby and he gives me an exasperated look. I grab baby and do as I’m told.

I get back to the party and down the rest of my drink. Cyndi is not there as usual with the pitcher, so I help myself. I decide not to harsh the mood by telling everyone about the assassin but I notice that everyone is looking at me weird anyway. I take another drink and Uncle Steve mentions that maybe baby would like something more than crackers to eat. I notice that every one is pointedly staring at baby, and then at the drink in my hand. Back and forth. ‘Sheesh,’ I think, ‘look at all these back-seat moms!’ Then I look down. Baby’s face is a smear of cracker-encrusted drool, and she does look a little lethargic. Holy crap—I hadn’t even bothered to get a proper baby-carrying thing!

At this point, I feel pretty trapped because I have nothing other than crackers to feed baby (actually, I didn’t bring anything, I just fed baby the crackers that Cyndi put out with the cheese and dip, one bite for me, one for baby). Second, I can’t think of what I should be feeding baby.

My alarm went off at 7 a.m. and I was out the door 20 minutes later, and into the greenhouse to check the temperature and water the plants. (Joan and I alternate days, so that every other day we get to sleep in a little). Standing there, hose in one hand, coffee in the other, four-thousand-some small green things reliant on me to keep them alive. Me, who’d never touched a tractor. Me, who’d never been able to even keep a houseplant.

Those hanging red things are the heaters.

I talk to them, I play them classical music—even though I prefer classic rock. Whenever Skeet or Joan come by the greenhouse, though, I cool it. They’ve been around plants they’re whole lives. I’m not saying they’re not wowed by the wonder of life, or whatever, but this isn’t, like, their first baby.

On September 27, 2010, J’s phone rang at 11:57 p.m. J grabbed it: “Billie, Baby, I was worried!” J had been miserable for the eight days Billie had been gone. They had last talked at around 5:30 p.m. (11 a.m., Swiss time) and J had been expecting Billie to call back for over two hours. J had tried Billie’s cell, and their friend Thayer’s, but J had known there probably wasn’t good cell reception in the mountains.

The voice that answered J was male, with a tidy, British accent.

“Josephine Price?”

“Who is—”

“—This is Thomas McKenzie. I am Thayer’s brother. You are Wilhelmina Axel’s, uh, Billie’s domestic partner?”

“Is Billie—”

“—I’m afraid I have some troubling news. I’m calling from Sion, where I was to meet Thayer and Billie. As I think you know, they had taken off from Basel at noon, your time, and had planned to land here three hours later, going east over Luzern and southwest over the Alps. They didn’t land when expected, and they didn’t close their flight plan. I contacted Search and Rescue about half an hour ago.”

J heard Thomas say “mountains” and “unpredictable weather.” J gave Thomas an email, so Thomas could send J a ticket to Switzerland. Thomas assured J that Thomas’s father had put in calls to every Swiss official who might be able to help. J sat on the very edge of the stool in the kitchen with wide and vacant eyes.
Billie had gotten her pilot license just over a year ago, and had discovered flying was that thing, the first thing she’d ever done that was a part of her, that was just like breathing. J remembered Billie’s thrill when she told J that their friend, Thayer, had managed to borrow a Staggerwing-something-or-other plane from one of Thayer’s dad’s rich friends in Basel. (The only frame of reference either J or Bille had for a family like the McKenzies, who were not only loaded but also politically connected, was the soaps they’d both watched as kids, Dynasty, Falcon Crest…). J was always more relieved about Billie flying when she flew with Thayer. Thayer had practically grown up flying.

J managed to hang up the phone without hearing or understanding anything else Thomas said. J called Angel immediately.

J said something and then heard Angel’s voice: “Oh, buddy, I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Then Angel was there, and J’s head was on Angel’s shoulder, and J cried. And Angel ran his hands over and over the stubble on the back of J’s head.

Then J was dried eyed—though red and puffy. Still blankly staring, on the kitchen floor next to Angel, leaning up against the cabinets that Billie and J had built out of wood salvaged from a construction site, an old factory next door that had been gutted into new lofts. Angel got up, gave J his hands, and pulled J into the next room, into the cavernous brown leather rocking chair that J lived in. The chair—and a McDonald’s Dreamy Smurf glass, that J had been drinking out of since the early ‘80s—were what J had swiped when J’s dad died and J’s mom sold the house. Angel pulled a blanket around J and made J a cup of tea with a nip of brandy. Things, to Angel, that felt motherly.

J sipped tea and asked Angel if he thought J should to go to Sion. Even though it was the right thing to do, J guessed, waiting there with Thayer’s family and their worry and burgeoning grief seemed like torture. Angel asked J what Billie would want. J felt sure that Billie knew J was waiting for her here, in the home they built together. Angel said, “J, if there is anything you can do in Switzerland to find Billie I know you will. And if you need to go, I’ll go with.”

J asked Angel if he would stick around the house til Billie came back and Angel said he would.

J and Billie had built out the space above J’s bar, Sweets. And J, Billie, and Angel—who J had been friends with for almost 15 years—had turned the former bodega into a destination for Brooklyn hipsters and tourists. It wasn’t intentional. Just like the bar’s name. The New York Times dubbed the bar, Sweets, in an early review because that’s what the (never removed) yellow and red bodega sign read. J had actually intended for the place to be unnamed. Intentional or not, it made the three of them an outstanding living. Angel and J ran the place together. Billie managed the bar, and the money, because both Angel and J were crap with numbers.

When Angel went down to the bar, a few hours after he’d arrived at J’s, to close up for the night, J pulled a letter out from under Billie’s pillow and read it, again.

Sept. 8, 2010
My Bear,

To me, you are just Bear. I know that you’ve gone through several names in your thirty-six years. I feel proud that you chose to tell me all of them.

I’ll never forget why I started calling you Bear. It was when you grew into yourself, so soon after we met. J, when you first looked at me the way you look at me, I couldn’t believe my luck. Then, when you began to open up to me more and more, I couldn’t believe how much of you there was to feel so lucky about.

I witnessed a transformation: you became more beautiful in every possible way. Your eyes cleared. Your lips relaxed. Your belly unclenched. Your spine straightened. Your mind picked a direction, and you started walking tall and strong and steady toward it. That’s when Syd gave you the bar. That’s when you proposed to me, and we committed to be each others’, ready for the day when we could legalize it in the state where we live. That’s when you opened a savings account, and bought us both the first new couch either of us had ever had. These are the most important things I’ve ever seen another person do, not because they are so extraordinary, but because, for you, they were the hardest things you’d ever done. I know that, thank you.

I’ve thought about this a lot: You know how everyone, though most everyone tries to fight it, looks like how they feel, and what they do? You are what you eat. Well, I started calling you Bear when your fighting skills trumped your survival skills and I had no other way to say it. And when neither available pronoun, she nor he, were appropriate for the physical changes that came on the heels of your internal transformation.

Bear. Because you began to grow fur where you had none, and more fur where there had been a little, and an impressive amount of fur where there had already been quite a lot. After that had happened, strangers, boys and men, would look Bear in the eye, as an equal. Then, magic: Bear, my sweet little Bear, you would puff out your chest, round back your shoulders, and expand. You would physically transform, and I could see it was instinctive, your body doing the driving, right into the larger space it was being given.

With me, though, you are more like a puppy, all warm tongue and restless limbs, or sometimes like a bunny, curled in my lap while I pet you. Your boxers hitched down the curve of your hips, the little divot above your ass winking at me, your chest—free of the binder used to flatten it—bared, only ever, for me.

Bear, because I know this, because I love this about you, I am yours forever and you are mine. I know we have only spent three nights apart in five years. I know you don’t like to be alone, but it is just two weeks, my love. And I need to do this. I’ve watched you transform, now I want to give you the same gift.

I need you,
Billie

The letter had wrinkles from being in the bed, and more than a few tear marks. When J heard Angel unlock the apartment door, J stowed the letter, and pretended to be asleep. J let Angel pull the blanket up.

It was a restless sleep and J was up early, the light looked too pale and J’s arms were cold. Huddling back under the quilt that Billie had thrifted and patched up, J waited for her to make coffee—J remembered. How the fuck was J going to start a day without Billie, without knowing when Billie would be home? J had not yet allowed the phrase if Billie came home to enter, not yet. J always stayed in bed until Billie made the coffee. If J hadn’t gotten up after Billie had had half a cup or so, Billie brought J a mug. A thick, chipped thing, with faded writing that you could still make out, SMOKEY BEAR: REMEMBER… ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES, a picture of Smokey holding a shovel, and wearing his ranger cap, with his bare chest, and his belted jeans.

J tried to fall back asleep. Finally, after an hour or so of tossing, J said, “Angel—dude—you awake?” And louder, “Angel!”

Angel groaned, turned over on the couch. The space was small, with high ceilings, but nearly all one room. Angel saw J, and he remembered that he wasn’t just sleeping off too many drinks on Billie and J’s couch. He got up, and started making coffee, bringing J’s mug to the bed, and propping himself up against the pillows on Billie’s side. Angel and J drank coffee in silence. And when J got up to pee, Angel made some breakfast.

J was not eating (which was not usual for J, who was pretty husky, with a hearty appetite). J was just staring at the wall above the ancient table for two between the kitchen and the living room, which J had saved from a neighborhood wine bar’s garbage. It had been thrown out because it was missing a leg, so J had patched it with a baroque stump that had been discarded elsewhere, which J had spray painted gold. J was staring at a sticker that read: SPEED QUEEN – SIERRAQUEBEC.COM – “FLYING IN FOUR-INCH HEELS.” Above those words was an image that Billie thought up, a take on WWII “nose art”—those pictures of naked ladies on fighter jets. Done by a tattoo artist friend of Billie’s it’s a drawing of Billy in a tight powder blue jumpsuit and heels, her hair flying out the window of the cockpit. The sticker is for a blog that Billie started before she even signed up for flying lessons, when she got the itch.

Billie’s last post, sent five days ago from outside Payerne, where she and Thayer were staying in a house Thayer rented for them, described the event the two of them had gone to see. It was really Billie’s passion, but Thayer was game. Billie had become fascinated with a plane called Solar Impulse, which ran on solar power, and had already made a couple of record-breaking flights. Billie loved, she’d explained to J, the idea that it was possible to glide so slowly, so easily, through the sky, rather than thundering through all speed. It wasn’t so much the non-pollution factor, she’d said, it was the beauty. Billie had spent a lot of time on the Solar Impulse site, and had printed out press clips that were pinned up all over the walls in the little alcove that contained her turquoise velvet arm chair, where the she liked to sit and look out to the street. J loved the way Billie’s eyes lit up when she talked about the solar plane. Billie’s blog handle was Speed Queen and it probably was a desire for speed and power that had gotten her up in the sky, but she’d been going up every weekend since she got her license—either by herself or with other pilots who were licensed to fly machines Billie wasn’t. She would come back and tell J things like how it felt to look down and see nothing but white. In the last blog post, Billie had written, “I can only imagine the stillness: in my head, in the plane, til I can’t tell the difference.” J had read it, and had never felt so far from Billie, had felt that Billie was searching for a feeling that J didn’t understand.

For the first week Billie was gone Thomas called J, or J called Thomas, several times a day. Search and Rescue’s report used precise, language: they had done “a track line search of the aircraft’s expected path,” and had also used “computer assisted search planning (CASP) to help predict changes to the flight plan due to inclement weather.” Thayer’s family had insisted on every tool available, though there was ample evidence that Thayer had not lost contact, which Thomas explained to J meant that if they had veered off course for any reason, Thayer would have radioed her emergency plan.

Besides getting up to pace while talking to Thomas, or to go to the bathroom, J did not leave the big leather chair. Angel cooked and washed dishes, brought things in and out, watched TV, or read magazines. J, meanwhile, read about the Bermuda Triangle pretty much every waking hour. Like a person who discovers a bump or a lump, and heads to the Internet to self diagnose, J had found a way to explain this unfathomable thing, without the guidance of any experts.

One time the first week Angel tried: “J, man, you should definitely take a shower, and then maybe we can go for a walk?” J just looked up at Angel and handed him a plate containing a two-day-old piece of toast. Angel noticed that J had stated taking notes using the first handy thing, the backs of envelopes from the pile of unopened mail that Angel had been bringing up from the box.

That night, when Angel went down to the bar, for some company more than anything, everyone asked him about J and Billie. There was a candle for Billie burning behind the bar, and people were asking what they could do for J. Angel had tried to respect J’s privacy and only told people the bare details. But he was starting to worry about the Bermuda Triangle thing. It was a slow Tuesday, so Angel asked Carly, their first bartender and now their friend, to come down to the office with him.

“Carly, J’s not doing good…”

“Of course he’s not, Billie was in a fucking plane crash and they can’t even find the plane—she’s just, like, gone.”

Angel tried again. “If J had gone to Switzerland, or wouldn’t eat, or was drinking way too much, or whatever, I’d get it, right? But J has been up there,” here Angel jabbed his index finger against the basement’s low ceiling, “fucking obsessing about the Bermuda Triangle. J won’t even talk to me.”

“Isn’t that off the coast of Bermuda? Billie’s in, ummm—went to—Switzerland. Bermuda Triangle’s water, anyway, and they were flying over mountains, right?”

Right.

When Angel went up to J’s later, he found J asleep, laptop on chest, reading about the parallels between the TV show Lost and Bermuda Triangle disappearances. There was an envelope, on which words were printed more neatly than usual. Angel couldn’t help read:

November 10, 2010

Dear Billie,

Oh, Billie.

People often say, in situations like this, that there are no words. Well, Billie, my beautiful girl, I have a lot of words. The problem is, you’re the only one I want to say them to.

I’m not mad anymore—at least not right this second—but these feelings come and go. They are like waves; it’s as if I’m in the bottom of a well; on the edge of a cliff… Shit, Billy, you know I’m no good at metaphors. Not like you. I just feel crazy, and I miss you.

I wish I could tell you this: if I could go back in time and stop you from getting in that airplane I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, even though you’d still be with me, because if I did some of the light would be gone from your big pretty eyes, and what the hell good would that be?

as ever,
J., your Bear

Fuck. Angel thought, as he covered J up, and put the computer on the table. (J was way bigger than Angel, so wherever J fell asleep was where J would wake up.) Angel opened a beer, stared out the window, and tried to figure out what to do.

The next morning J was the first to speak, and because it had been a while since he’d heard J’s voice, at first the sound scared the hell out of Angel. J’s voice: J had been on testosterone for about a year, wanting to transition from female to male, but it hadn’t been right for J, so J tapered off. J’s voice and body were now, again, not much different than they’d always been—smack in the middle of what most people recognized as male and female. Angel had always loved the resonance of J’s voice, which, to Angel, had always been perfect, where Angel had always thought his own voice still sounded girlish.

J said, “Did you know that its just gas that scientists think causes the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle? Just methane, like what cows fart out.”

“No—but J. You know Billie was flying over Switzerland, right?”

“Just methane. Disturbing the air currents.”

Angel handed J the Smokey mug, turned around, and started scrambling some eggs.

Later that day, just as the sunlight left the house cold, in shadows, J took off the old boxers and hoodie, took a shower, and opened the battered armoire that Billie had sanded down and repainted a pearl gray, one of J’s favorite colors. J picked out a pair of well-shined oxblood ankle boots, a pearl gray, pinstriped vest, a crisp white shirt, filthy black Levis, and a filmy scarf with tiny lavender polka dots. J dressed until satisfied and then said to Angel, “You wanna come with me?”

As they walked down the stairs together, Angel squeezed J’s hand and put his other hand on J’s shoulder. Angel had no idea where they were going.

J seemed sure. Hanging a left, J headed toward the water. They walked several blocks in silence, through a particularly grimy corridor. After another left, J ducked into a seemingly abandoned construction site. (When the economy tanked, in 2008, condo construction stalled, and J and Billie had loved walking through the ruins. Billie would take pictures, and J would find stuff to drag home and fix.) It was getting very dark. Angel pulled out his phone to provide some light. He needed it to see, even if J didn’t.

J was already out of Angel’s view. Angel headed toward a steel beam, propped diagonally in a nest of rebar and crushed cinder block, which J had disappeared behind. Just walking, it seemed, was kicking up dust—or was that fog?

“J?”

No answer, but Angel headed toward a scuffling sound he hoped wasn’t rats.

“J?” Louder. “I can’t see a fucking thing.”

Angel kept walking. This was creeping him out. More dust.

He got beyond the steel beam and aimed his phone around the pile bordered by the shell of the building. J was nowhere to be seen, but Angel could now see another site just beyond, and thought he saw a flash of movement there.

“Dammit J!” Angel said under his breath, as he set a course to the next building, shining his weak light through the dust.

As Angel passed through one site to the next, some graffiti on a cement pylon caught his eye. A Sharpie rendering of the tattoos that J and Billie had gotten (Billie on her chest, J on a bicep) the day they went to down to City Hall to become domestic partners: An anatomically correct heart, in shades of deep red, purple, and light blue. Their names, one each on tattooed banners, waved left and right of the aorta.

Angel’s light barely broke the haze between him and the next building. He took a step. As Angel looked back one more time at the tattoo, he felt acute vertigo, as an acrid flash of light snapped, way up ahead, like the second a streetlight burns out.

“J?”

The sun is getting higher in the sky. I just learned this yesterday: during winter, through February, the sun hits the earth at a lower angle.

Joan explained it to me while we were in the greenhouse. We had to get new heaters and we’re spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to maintain a constant temperature of no lower than 60 degrees and no higher than 80 (it’s way harder than it sounds). At one point we fucked up and it was suddenly 100 in there and we both took off our sweatshirts and we were both wearing white undershirts. I can only hope that all this physical labor gives me guns like Joan’s!

This just appeared one day, the remnant of an ancient Christmas decoration?

Anyway, I noticed later, at around noon (oh, because we’re starting work at, like, 7 a.m., too) that the sun has started streaming hot through the west windows of the barn, so I’ve started sitting there, just sitting with my eyes closed, like a cat, to soak it up.

I’m thinking about how, already, my existence here is different from what Sylvia’s was. I’m finding out a lot more about her because, in order to farm, I need Skeet’s help. So I’ve been asking questions. Apparently, Sylvia didn’t have anything to do with the town, or even, really, her neighbors. (Joan’s family, in fact, only saw her rarely, and met her once, during an ice storm, when Sylvia needed help getting up the road in her Subaru.) Sylvia didn’t need to be part of the economy of this town. She lived like a weekender from the city, but year-round. She got almost everything she used shipped in from other places, and even went several towns over, to the high-end hippy place for groceries. She never ate at the pizza place or the diner, she didn’t buy donuts from the bakery in town, and she didn’t go to the library. I wonder if she was lonely.

Thinking about how Sylvia lived, I realize that the disparity is not necessarily economic, but cultural. Sylvia, though she lived at Decoy Green, shipped in or travelled for her culture. Whereas the people living around her, the other full-timers at least, became part of the community because of economic necessity, or sheer human need to connect. For me it’s been both. Unemployment is going to run out some time, and I can’t (and no longer want to) survive as an editor out here. If I’m not living in the city, why solely rely on it for my economic and cultural survival?

I’m wearing this John Deere T-shirt that I bought at the Indiana airport on my way back home from Christmas this year. It’s my joke—that I’m so far keeping to myself—about going back to my roots.

Plus, you know, green looks good with my eyes.

Being in the greenhouse for hours, water occasionally dripping from the plastic domed ceiling down the back of my shirt, the smell of water on gravel as I spray down the floor to get the humidity up. The constant presence of dirt in the crevices of my fingerprints. My notebook, in which I’m recording every move I make, is constantly getting wet and drying. When I look at it at home, later, to figure out what to do the same or differently the next day, the blue and pink lines are blurred like watercolor.

Skeet tells me that he can help me till a field on the side of the house in the spring, so I can try transplanting some of my vegetables from Joan’s greenhouse. He told me that he used it for years as a garden for his family, because Sylvia wasn’t interested. It’s good soil, apparently. Skeet, I think, is surprised by my turn of interest. The other day he brought me a bunch of garden tools, old, which he’d repaired and cleaned up and sharpened. He’s started looking me in the eye, even.

Being physically, rather than mentally, tired. It feels wonderful.

Watching the sunset through the pine trees. They are so thin and frozen that they creak in the smallest breeze.

Before the ancient Romans decided to name it, the two deepest months of winter were just a non-time until spring, which we now know as January and February. Winter likely went unnamed because months used to be known for the agricultural activities that happened during them. So the pagans named May, for instance, Primilce, meaning “the month in which cows can be milked three times in a day.” January, when it was decided by the Romans that there should be twelve months rather than ten, was named after Janus: the god of gates and doorways, beginnings and endings. He’s the one with two faces, looking backward and forward at the same time. Janus, historians think, also had something to with war and that closed gates had something to do with trying to keep peace in, or war out.

Janus coin: wonder how much it was worth?

Of course in January we all think reflectively. Try to make changes. But I’ve literally been thinking about doors lately. Several times this month I have not been able to open the doors of the barn. I have actually been snowed in. Someone (thank you Skeeter) has had to come and shovel me out because no amount of kicking or cursing on my part could move the mound of icebound snow from my doorstep. The idea that I could not actually physically leave my house without assistance just deepened the sense of ambivalence that I feel is native to January. At least native to those who live in a four-season climate with harsh winters, like the folks who named January after Janus, who, with his two faces, is a picture of ambivalence.

Looking forward and backward like this, at the past and the future. I can’t look down at my own feet and I’m stuck.

Look how clean the snow is here!

Things I am deeply ambivalent about (besides waking up while it’s still morning, and leaving the house once every two days, which I’m doing only out of  habit):

– Bathing

– Eating healthy

– Not drinking bourbon before 5 p.m.

– My crush on Joan

– Getting a haircut

– My career prospects (and life trajectory in general)

– Figuring out where Sylvia went and reading through the huge box of Sylvia’s
letters that I finally found

I wonder if anyone notices that the trees up the mountain are spotted with smashed snowballs?

Things I am not deeply ambivalent about:

– Walking up the mountain when it’s sunny and not snowing, walking so fast that I start sweating.

– Walking slowly back down the mountain, making perfect snowballs, and throwing
them at trees.

December 23

met an old friend of my mom’s at the Chili’s by the mall for lunch. She picked it because it’s also by the hospital where she works. She arrived in pink scrubs and had a bunch of ID cards hanging on a string around her neck. Her car keyring contained, among other things, a soiled, furry, yellow duck. The meal was remarkable only in Chili’s culinary daring: I believe they use a marinara sauce made with hamburger as their chili! Seriously, it contains no beans whatsoever.

I found this computer printout face down in the parking lot. I picked it up, set it in my car to dry, and, when Sharon pulled away, I walked back into Chili’s, sat at the bar, and had two beers.

This stayed on the floor of my rental car, soggy, until I returned the car four days later to the airport.

You know what, fuck it! At this point I can’t believe it’s only Day Four and that Christmas hasn’t even happened yet. I’ll tell you right now how the rest of goes down: Tomorrow, I order Chinese food from the awful place in town that keeps changing owners every few years. I eat Mu Shoo Pork without thinking about how much MSG it’s laced with. I pick up a Prime Rib and cook it on Christmas day and me and my dad eat it with mashed potatoes and a nice bottle of red (OK, he has a Pepsi). We do the dishes in near silence and the we watch the Sergio Leone trilogy (or, as my dad refers to it, Clint Eastwood’s Big Three): A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly while eating cookies til we pass out. The next day, I say my goodbyes, go out to the bar with my cousins, and wake up hungover to get on the plane. I get stuck at O’Hare because there are blizzards everywhere and finally spring to spend the second stranded night in a hotel, luxuriating in bed watching the Discovery channel.

Alone in the airport hotel with cable, a half-bottle of Merlot, and a personal pizza is the happiest I've been in a week.

I will not have that heart-to-heart with Dad about me farming, or Sylvia, or the fact that I miss Joan like crazy. I will also think twice about spending another week in Indiana anytime soon. Ham and fried eggs are what’s for breakfast every morning, with weak coffee meant to be drunk all day. Everyone’s eyes glaze over so much when I tell them that I’m an editor, that I’ve finally started lying: I’m a high school English teacher, I manage a bookstore… Everyone is thrilled that my cousin Mikey is the manager at the grocery store in town, but a bookstore? That’s kind of gay.

Speaking of gay, have you seen the costumes in those Spaghetti Westerns? I can either watch for the plot, the content, or the clothes!

Dude. Picture me, ambling in, casing Christmas. Carving up a blood-rare Prime Rib. Facing off Dad’s stony silence and goofy jokes with more of the same. Having the fortitude to survey hours of TV while barely moving.

Since I was, like, thirteen I have wanted this whole outfit.

When I leave, I’ll pull my pancho around me, tilt my hat down, and say, “I’ve been reasonable, with no results.”

Roll the credits, Christmas is over.

December 22

speaking of the couch, every year I would come back to my folks’ house and the Christmas tree would be up, dressed only in colored lights, in the hallway by the stairs where it’s always been, so my mom could see it while she watched TV. I would open up the French doors, and my mom would kind of turn the TV down, and I would unpack ornaments from the big, dusty, plastic boxes that were still cold from the attic. My mom would open herself a fresh beer, light herself a new cigarette, and watch. (I would sip on bourbon or red wine). The minute I got one on the tree she would tell me where it really needed to go: “a little to the left, the top of the tree is empty, you’re forgetting about the back (which she couldn’t see from where she always sat anyway), don’t put that bird so close to the other birds…” One year I finally said, “you know, you can get up and show me where it goes!” She didn’t, though it made her smile, and she didn’t smile very often at all.

I only used about half the ornaments.

This year I decorated the tree alone. I wonder if dad got the tree for me, or if he wanted it, too. The thought that he just got it for me, and that I just decorated it for him made me feel lonelier than I can remember feeling, ever. Afterwards, even though it was only four in the afternoon, I got into bed and read Just Kids until I fell asleep.

December 21

ok. so honestly, I’m a little shy to tell my dad that I’m going to farm Decoy Green. He’s a farmer, for one. And he has been reminding me forever that he’s been driving a tractor since he could reach the clutch (depending on the mistiness of his memories, the age he became an independent operator of farm machinery fluctuates from seven to ten). The thing is, I was never that kid. I didn’t even touch a tractor, ever. If anyone thought that it was weird that my older and younger cousins worked on the farm with my dad and I didn’t, they didn’t mention it to me. Meanwhile, I was in my walk-in closet (no joke), which I turned into an office soon as I learned how to hold a pencil, reading The Diary of Anne Frank, or writing my memoirs, or something. Second, I’m still not sure I can do it, farming.

You know how a while back I mentioned that I had decided that moving to Decoy Green was about me enacting a total separation from my New York life—and that decision to go full on into that separation meant that, for the first time in my life, I was jumping all the way into something? I was so full of shit—about the separation part, at least. You can’t separate anything that’s a part of you from yourself. So, here I am, still a nerd (now overeducated), on my own farm, and I’ve touched a tractor for the first time. Maybe it’s all the online yoga I’ve been doing, but I feel fully integrated (my past, present, and future).

Also, Joan helped me. She’s been farming her family’s couple of acres for about five years. We met one day, at the end of November, when I was walking up the hill toward the mountain. She lives nearer to the top than Decoy Green. She was driving a 1970 Ford pickup (two-tone, white and baby blue). The bed was filled with a gang of long cardboard boxes that were all shrink-wrapped to each other. I noticed her because she’s the only gay person I’ve seen since I moved here. I figured she was just delivering something. But we gave each other that ‘I’m gay, you’re gay’ look, and she stopped, and I found out that she lives on my road, somehow, and I’d never seen her (probably because most of the summer I didn’t go farther than my back yard).

The greenhouse I helped build!

Turns out that what was in the back of her truck was a new greenhouse, that she wanted to set up for winter. Of course I asked her what it was, because it’s not that easy to make conversation with someone just because you’re both gay, even if you both really want to. And she told me about her family’s 100-something-year-old farm: Mountain View. And she told me that she was starting up a winter farm share. Before I knew it, I had opened my mouth and offered to help. Then I told her that I’d grown up on a farm in Indiana. What I didn’t tell her was that I had no idea what I was doing. And somehow she managed to move this conversation from the middle of the road to her porch, where we drank spicy, warm apple cider that seemed to come from nowhere.

My socks are on the outside of my jeans.

So now we’re in business. I helped her build the greenhouse, she has taught me to grow in it, and whatever I sell makes me a profit. It’s so great to work again (under the table, of course, I’m hanging on to my benefits)! I’d like to tell my dad. Instead, I amble around the house, watch TV, eat cookies.

I finally go see my mom’s grave. Mom was buried on what we call a hill but it’s nothing by East Coast standards. It just raises up a bit above the road instead of being level with it like most of the rest of the land here. The snow is shin deep and I trudge through. Something has changed in the way I feel about my mom–or at least in how I feel about visiting the place we buried her ashes. Everyone else in my family is planting flowers and stuff, but I don’t feel the urge. The last time I visited her, I cried and cried. This time, I don’t feel her presence at all. No one sits on her favorite couch anymore, even though it’s the biggest one in the house. I think she’s there. My mom didn’t like the cold.

I wish I could think of something nice to leave her, but I can't.

I bought my ticket at the end of October. Around the middle of November I was beginning to wish that I was going to, like, Costa Rica. Instead, I was off to Evansville, Indiana at 4:45 a.m.

December 20
You may not know this, but if you’re ever on the road and can’t find any decent coffee, Dunkin’ Donuts has all right espresso. I pull round the drive-through at about 4:50 and order a Red Eye. Thing is, you have to speak Dunkin’. Call it a small coffee with two shots of espresso, milk on the side, no sugar and you’re good to go. It’s not for connoisseurs, but it’ll do in a pinch. I arrive at the Westchester Airport at 5:45, park the car in long-term, and breeze through to security (I printed up my boarding pass at home). Everybody is extra chatty because of the holiday. I vacillate between playing the classic rock mix loud on my iPod, and trying to be a good guy and help calm down the older lady behind me, who can’t see the departures board and is sure she’ll never reach her grandchildren in time for Christmas. The old lady wins. I spend some time sharing my airport security tricks with her, she smiles, the line moves. I can still kind of hear Mick Jagger through my headphones, even though she can’t.

So my neighbor Joan, who lives down the road from Decoy Green, has infiltrated my solitude. She’s worn me down with gifts of food. Last night, because she knows I’m leaving first thing, she brought over some homemade ginger bread. I didn’t think I liked ginger bread—well, honestly, I never thought about ginger bread at all—until I tasted Joan’s. After I ate some, at her insistence, she wrapped the remainder up in holiday-patterned plastic wrap, covered that with aluminum foil, waved, and walked back across the street. The good people at security are curious about this foil-covered log, they open it, and, satisfied, they wave me on.

Westchester, ugh. I arrive in the departures lounge, which is about the size of my house, and look around for some more coffee and some kind of egg sandwich. Apparently, the vendors here—only one of which is not a machine—do not except cards. I have no cash. I begin to look maniacally through my duffel bag and backpack for change, then I decide to cool out. Surely there will be coffee on the plane.

There is not coffee on the plane. How can there not be coffee on the plane? I order a club soda with lime (there is also no lime) and wish I could sleep.

I arrive in Chicago, who cares what time it is. I have 45 minutes until my next flight. I get Starbucks and a salty egg and bacon bagel. I eat and read the Vanity Fair interview between Johnny Depp and Patti Smith. I love Vanity Fair when I’m flying. It’s like a fashion magazine, but with more content–and if you want, you can skip the political articles and consume the celebrity stuff, or if you’re really tired you can just look at the pictures. It’ll last me three hours, especially on an afternoon flight with a tiny bottle of scotch or two.

The flight is uneventful, which is incredible because I have been flying from New York to Indiana for ten years now at Christmas and I’ve never been on time–OK, sometimes that has been my fault. Me and the airlines, we’re 50-50 on blame. But they made good, they’re on time, and I got myself there, on the plane, and to the departure gate for my connecting flight in Chicago on time, too.

I’m in Evansville, at the Alamo counter, getting my rental car keys. There is a kids choir just warming up and I feel bad that the women at the car rental place will have to listen to them sing the same Christmas carols all day. I give them my apologies. In these cases I always feel compelled to mention that I’ve worked retail, as if I’m now a millionaire and need to let the people know that I feel them, or something. I wish I could stop doing that….

I’ve never rented a car before when visiting my folks. There was that thing with my expired license, but also, before my mom passed, I just borrowed her car. This year is different. I feel kind of sad, almost shocked that there is no one waiting for me at arrivals. I get to the car and find out that a blizzard has hit. Really? A blizzard. In Southern Indiana? I open the door of my car and there is instantly a pile of snow on the driver’s seat. There is, however, no snow scraper. I find a roll of industrial paper towels in the trunk and improvise. I start it up and am amazed at how tight this new car is. Mine feels loose, the breaks are lazy, everything jiggles. Shit, only 3,000-some miles, this little Chevy Aveo is bland but easy.

I crawl down the interstate at 45. In a little over a half an hour I’m home. I pull into the driveway and park where dad points. He’s shoveling, as I suspect he has been all morning. He asks me if I need any help carrying my bags. I shrug, give him a hug, and go inside.

Inside nothing ever changes. The TV is on, the Christmas tree has lights but no ornaments, everything is clean, big, and quiet. I take my bags up to the guest room, open the heat vent because its closed unless I’m staying over, and put on some sweat pants that belonged to my mom. The cuffs of my jeans are sopping wet. I’m not sure what to do with myself, or why I’m here for so long. The house has never felt so empty.

The house I grew up in is right around the bend.

Before I take a nap, I remind myself that I’m here on a mission: I am going to ask dad about Sylvia, and I’m going to tell him that I’ve decided to start farming Decoy Green.

spent over an hour waiting to merge onto the George Washington Bridge last Wednesday, trying to get to Fern and Sadie’s for Thanksgiving. Sitting in my car, alone, listening to my travel mix: classic rock and soul. As Jimmy Plant releases his falsetto a pale, hairy guy in a white van opens and closes his mouth angrily as I cut him off. He appears to be karyoke-ing to Whole Lotta Love.

There are no lanes: Shit, here I am, driving on the shoulder. There are five motionless cranes rising up from under the overpass, fresh-looking American flags hanging from their hooks; orange traffic cones in single file as far as I can see, some have fallen; piles of rebar and plywood are strewn in what used to be the second lane. I have to pee. Wondering if I can aim into my empty Starbucks cup and inch forward at the same time. I decide that I can’t. When I finally arrive at the bridge I see ten government employees in safety orange sitting on discarded pylons chewing the fat.

This came up when I Googled "gw bridge traffic" the morning I left Brooklyn to drive back to Decoy Green.

If NYC were a person, what psychosis would this maddening combo of inertia and mania indicate?

You know, friends, I have wild turkeys in my backyard now. Next year you are coming to Decoy Green for Thanksgiving. We’re going to nab one of these birds, and go into the forest to pick chestnuts for the stuffing. We’re going to buy a bunch of local hard cider and not let the fire go out for three days.

you know, i mentioned earlier that it is uncanny to get to know someone better, who you have known your whole life, by living with their stuff after they are gone. I struggled with that word uncanny. It’s too weighty a word to just throw around—although most words are, when you scratch the surface of their meanings. It’s enough to stop you mid-sentence. But uncanny is right, here. Getting to know Sylvia through her stuff, it’s a glancing kind of knowing.

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For instance, what to make of the fact that Sylvia never threw anything away? As orderly and well appointed as Decoy Green is, the storage spaces are stuffed head to foot with things: Flea market finds littering the upper kitchen cabinets, ancient Ferragamos in the back of the guest room closet…

Salvatore Ferragamo fitting a bored-looking Audrey Hepburn. I imagine Sylvia wearing her Ferragamos with an Audrey-Hepburn-welcomes-Punk kinda style, like just before it became really cool.

And crap: a cache of partially shattered china, each piece with its broken bits carefully wrapped and taped to it, a heavy-duty garbage bag stuffed with a serious vintage clothes collection—every piece of it in need of impossible repairs, cleaning, or alterations. I can’t get rid of anything; it’s not mine. I grew up on Oprah: what kind of shame do I feel for my aunt, the closet hoarder?

When my mom died, a few days after her funeral, I opened a bottle of Maker’s Mark, took a box of contractor bags up to her bathroom, and threw out everything that had part of her in it. The eye shadows, the cold cream, the bath salts, the pills. My dad came up to find me kind of drunk, throwing shit away like a madman, and said, “You don’t have to do this.” I knew what he meant, but I did. I did have to do that. I kept a bottle of her perfume, though. It’s tucked away behind my socks, double wrapped in Ziploc bags.

Stuff is ugly. The ugliest part of life. Like moving into an apartment and having to scrub the residue of the former tenant from the walls and floors. I really get the Western obsession with minimalism. Put me in an airy, white box, please, with no hidden spaces, every hole sealed. I’ll start fresh, with functional stuff that all functions perfectly.

I’m talking like I don’t have a choice here, of where to live. Thing is, I’m here, or rather, I’m still here because I needed to separate myself. It occurs to me that that’s what Sylvia needed to do, as well. It begins to make sense: I imagine her hiding out on some actor’s private island, deeper in some less discovered forest… I’ll tell you what, though, Sylvia covered her tracks. I’ve looked for clues and there aren’t any. Not a scrap. She must have gone completely digital because there is not even a piece of paper with a phone number on it—remarkable for a person her age. Sixty-year old shoes, but no forwarding address.

So I had to bring my stuff from Brooklyn, of course. Now it’s here, too. My car was barely full, but still. On the drive up to Decoy Green, Jack was in the passenger seat, and I said, “I feel free.” Jack said she kind of knew what I meant, but I don’t know if I even knew what I meant. In the city, my life is divided into camps. The people in these camps perform for each other. One camp is obsessed with gender/sexuality /sex. The other is obsessed with art / writing / and other various creative activities. These camps don’t intersect as much as you might think, but enough to make it interesting. Both camps are heavy into hybridization. A lot of my friends have double lives (or triple, and so on) as boys and girls, or some gender entirely of their own making. And a lot of my friends are painters and writers and teachers or they do some kind of work that they’ve entirely made up. (Jack is great at all of this. Jack usually refers to herself as Jack, not she, not he. Jack was raised as a girl, but you know, that doesn’t matter. And when we stopped at a diner on the way upstate the waitress called us both ladies, but that also doesn’t matter. I struggle with calling Jack she in this blog but I write she mostly out of concern for you, the reader [if there are any readers out there who don’t know Jack.] I also have a real desire to be scrutable. I don’t want to go all Gertrude Stein here: Jack usually refers to Jack’s self as Jack, not she; Jack buttoned up Jack’s pants, etc… And if I call Jack he here, then you may imagine Jack as a straight, cisgender guy, and that’s not Jack. Jack is also in a band that has a hit song but is also kind of an art band. And Jack also does performance and installation, you know, in an art context. And Jack also cuts hair part time, for which Jack has been written about in sort of indie fashion magazines. Jack is like the Poster Child for contemporary culture.)

It changes every second in the light; I should have made you a video.

Of course, Jack jumps way the hell in to anything Jack decides to do. Jack is a jumper, I’m more of a lurker. I’ve never been a joiner or a jumper. I like being the guy in the back of the room, but only sometimes. An occasional face in the crowd. As a result, I tend to be the person that people come to for a one-on-one conversation. Sometimes I feel I’m on the outside of every camp, other times I just feel neutral. Maybe Jack feels free, too; maybe Jack has found Jack’s freedom through total immersion. I guess this is me jumping all the way in for the first time in my life: total separation.

So wordy! Fern would just say, “You’ll be back. But everybody needs to get outta the city for a while.”

One thing that I brought to Decoy Green from Brooklyn is a painting by Molly Dilworth. I’m guessing that when she’s painting she feels something like I feel when I look at her painting. So we’ve shared an experience.

It seems the goal of jumping all the way into anything is transcendence, right?

Dakis Joannou's Jeff-Koons-designed yacht, Guilty.

Let’s imagine Sylvia on a small, intimate yacht sailing from one port to the next. Places that aren’t on a tourist’s map, really, but can be visited if you know the right people. She is sure that continuing to move on to the next place is the only option but she is not running from anything. She desires only this: to keep her mind fixed in the present and the near future in that peculiar way your mind can be fixed you’re traveling. She desires not to think beyond the next destination. She is, however, in hiding. Picture her in an Audrey Hepburn-esque wide-brim straw hat with attached scarf, her hair tucked up underneath, large sunglasses, a sleeveless sundress. She is sipping fresh-squeezed orange juice and champagne. She is staring at the horizon because the horizon will always be there, as long as the boat keeps sailing. She is content to let the sun warm her face and to just feel like herself.

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I imagine Sylvia wearing her Ferragamos with a Hepburn-welcomes-Punk kind of style, like just before it became really cool to do that.

Salvatore Ferragamo fitting a bored-looking Audrey Hepburn.

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does it seem sudden?” I asked Jack. “Not to me. I guess I even thought you knew because I’ve been thinking about it so much for the past three months or so.”

“I mean, I’m not surprised–a little sad, but not surprised.”

“I’ve just been thinking about the balance between ambition and priorities–I mean…”

But Jack was already nodding her head. She knew what I meant: How much are you willing to give up for something that doesn’t even feel like a choice anymore?

Man, Sylvia's furniture is nicer than mine!

Posted to Craigslist at 7:47 p.m.:
CURB ALERT – two  folding chairs, mac plasma screen (broken), hardwood kitchen table, ten year old digital camera (still works!) – (Williamsburg)

It happened gradually, which I now know is extremely uncommon—not that it’s common for a twenty-five-year-old to go numb on one half of her body. It started in my right hand. I had been spending hours, hand on mouse, Photoshopping. Grafting together digital photographs that I took (a pigeon with one leg, a closeup of a houseplant, my friend Olive in giant sunglasses blown out against the ocean) with images culled from the Internet (I was especially fond of badly pixilated landscapes). Reveling in the sublimity of those little glowing squares. Hours of grappling with the fact that they looked so much better on the screen of my camera, on the computer screen—through all that glowing light—than they did on paper. See, you have to enjoy this process of working with a material, an idea, well enough that others apprehend it, believe in it.

It made perfect sense to that first doctor that I had carpal tunnel syndrome. I had all the symptoms. She gave me an electromyogram—inserting tiny needles into various muscles in my hand and wrist. As the needles entered, I felt something like a zap of static electricity. She was listening to my muscle activity through a speaker. The sound they made: imagine being in bed, one ear nestled into the pillow, in a house just close enough to an airport to hear the dull engine thrum of planes taking off and landing. Two weeks later, after the test results had come back, she ruled out carpal tunnel. About a month after that, I was in her office again, submitting to a nerve biopsy. I was surprised to find myself grieving for the small part of me that was removed and sent to a lab for testing. My diagnosis was “normal,” which meant that I did not have anything that she could name. I didn’t have insurance, so I saw no point in continuing to pay for tests to learn that there was nothing wrong with me. So I went home and hoped that my ailment would pass, while the numbness crept up my arm, and I would lie awake at night with irrational fears that it was headed for my heart. I would wake up and with my left hand, make tea, with a nip of whisky. My right hand was a balloon filled with wet sand. A Mickey Mouse hand. A ghost.

When I was a kid, nine or ten, my mom took me to the eye doctor. The doctor told me to look through a machine and to match the images from the left column on a piece of mimeographed paper with those on the right. Butterfly to butterfly. Star to star. Diamond to diamond. There was a block of bluish paper to rest my forehead against. The strips were removable, for hygienic purposes. The doctor tore off the top strip, which was blotted with the previous patient’s forehead grease. As I sat there, pencil in hand, drawing a line between the matching images on the paper, I worried that some of that grease had seeped into the strip that my forehead rested on, and then I worried that I was soaking the whole block. But I enjoyed being alone in the dark, warm, little room. The doctor returned shortly after I had finished, turned the light back on, and pulled out the paper. I was confident that I had seen my hand connecting the shapes with a perfect pencil line. It turned out, though, that I had drawn about half of the lines clear off the page, a couple of inches below and to the right of my aim. I’ve told lots of people about this test and though no one else I’ve talked to has taken it, that’s how I remember it. Later that day, we picked up my new glasses, and on the way home my mom stopped in a head shop. I walked around the cases of bongs and pipes, pulling my glasses down—seeing normal; pulling them back up—underwater. The problem, as I understood it, was that the left side of my body was clumsily out of sync with the right. I was not the kid you wanted on your kickball team, in other words.

Over the course of a few weeks, I adjusted to showering, shopping, eating, having sex, using only my left hand. Then the numbness began in the middle of the underside of my right thigh. As if a section of nerves had been severed and grafted onto a freshly burned-out tube of neon, still warm. Walking felt funny, as if there were a slice missing from my muscles. I would put my right leg down and it would suddenly feel as if I were walking off a curb. I could no longer accurately judge distances without paying very close attention. I picked up a little limp, which I feared seemed affected. I decided to go all the way and took to walking with a red-black knotty wood cane with a copper-colored handle that I found at the Salvation Army.

For a while, though I couldn’t use my right hand, I was able to use my right elbow in inventive ways. I became pretty good at scooping up something too unwieldy for just one hand—like a twelve-pack of toilet paper, or a shoe box, by clutching it between my left hand and my right elbow. Then a straw full of cement rose from the inside of my wrist up into my armpit. My right arm hung heavy. When I stuffed it into a T-shirt, it felt like I was working a toddler’s uncooperative limbs into a snowsuit.

It is difficult, when meeting someone for the first time, to only be able to shake with your left hand, or to only be able to give a one-armed hug to a friend. It is more unfortunate if you are only able to embrace your lover with one arm—to not be able to move in the way you used to, as if you had become a different person. My girlfriend felt betrayed, I think, though she never said. I was definitely less fun than I used to be. I could feel that she distrusted my maladies. Did she recognize that they were symptoms of an unease in me that neither of us had words for—an unease that had very little to do with her? We broke up late in year one.

After that, the last bit of my body to succumb was my right cheek—from below the eye to the edge of my smile. My left-handed handshake and half-faced smile began creeping people out. I’d always been a fairly social person. Not overpopular, not the life of any party, but I’d always been up for going out, always had a handful of faithful friends. And as I had grown out of that childhood clumsiness (turns out I did not need glasses), I had become active, no athlete, but someone who liked to move. After the numbness, though, life became a long list of things I couldn’t do: ride a bike, ski, climb, jump, clap… I couldn’t even eat, walk, laugh, dance, or fuck without making people uncomfortable.

After my girlfriend and I split, I found a very comfortable apartment, a sublet, fully furnished. It was supposed to last only nine months or so, but I couldn’t think further than that anyway.

The numbness didn’t migrate to any other places in my body. Rather, it solidified. My hand of wet sand became a lead balloon. The still-warm neon tube in my thigh became magma. A cement-filled straw fused my radius and ulna to my humerus in one unbending obstruction, as if I no longer had a flexible hinge at my elbow joint. These anomalies became fixtures. Once, in the winter of 2007, a little over two years since the first symptoms appeared, I went sixteen days without seeing or talking to another person. I was thirty years old. This was not what I had planned. I was working for a photographer who had employed me since college. She practically kept me on a retainer for years out of charity. I did low-key editing stuff for her, slowly, with my left hand. I also took care of her invoicing, booked hotel rooms and airline tickets, did research—anything I could do from bed (more than you’d think possible, actually), which is where I was increasingly spending my time. I also had one friend, my oldest friend, Olive. She came by with beer, with movies, with gossip. She got under the covers with me and hung out. Sometimes she stayed for a few hours, occasionally for a few days. I think my world was a nice escape for her. Olive. I loved Olive because I felt certain that there was no danger of falling in love with Olive—so I just enjoyed the slow and steady getting-to-know-you that happens between two very cautious people.

When I said, “Olive, I can’t move my arm and there is a volcano in my thigh. My damaged limbs are huge, Olive, and the working ones are atrophied.”

She said, “I know.”

She said, “Tell me about it.”

She’d pass me a beer and cue up some Monty Python or Clue or Jaws or Friday the 13th—something from when we were younger, stronger, more sure of our futures because they hadn’t happened yet—and we’d snuggle under the covers and against the pillows and get popcorn all over the bed and wake up with kernels stuck to our arms.

She’d just hold on to me as we fell asleep and then, gradually, everything would feel its proper size again. At least until morning.

I would have dreams about working. Real work, where you get out of bed earlier than you’d like, put on clothes that you’d rather not, and leave your house, cram yourself onto a train or the freeway, and do something repetitive in the company of other people for eight hours. Mostly it was the work I’d done for much of my life: waiting tables. I would be in charge of a dining room that stretched farther than the eye could see and then around a corner. All of the customers were waiting to order drinks. To get these drinks I often had to go through the hot, slippery kitchen, which went on room after hotter room. It was numbing, how long it took, the repetition.

I would wake up and forget the dream, like you forget a cold once it’s run its course. If Olive was around, she would make coffee and a good breakfast—scrambled eggs with goat cheese and herbs, bacon, toast—and I’d get up, wash my face, get dressed, and we’d eat at the kitchen counter, sitting on taped-up black vinyl bar stools, finishing with one more cup as the bits of egg on our plates congealed and stuck. Then Olive would leave for work.

If Olive wasn’t around, I would lie in bed, sometimes for hours, with my eyes open. I would look out the window at the pink blinking neon cross on the top of the church across the street, just visible from my third-floor apartment. I would stare at it until I was breathing in sync with its blinks. After a while, though in sync, I would no longer see the pink blinking light. I would scan my body, like a CAT scan, from the inside out. I could see my bones, tendons, muscles…. Starting at my feet, which were fine—healthy actually, often tapping. They were fed up with this shit; they wanted to move. My calves were indifferent. They were only a weak connection between my restless feet and the good thigh on the left. The bad one on the right was full of magma—the consistency of charred campfire marshmallows (2,400 degrees Fahrenheit and orange like the sun). I pictured myself in a lab, creating a shovel—out of carbon steel, diamond, platinum—to dig that magma from my thigh. It had started as a narrow band years ago, but now it was bigger than my thigh, bigger than me, it was the size of a small lake. I was nearly drowning in it, my head just above the water line. I imagined the shovel as bigger—a bulldozer.

I would eventually need to get up—sweaty from the effort, and simultaneously calm and exhilarated, finding that I was just as satisfied by all of this imaginary CAT scanning and bulldozing as I used to be by the glow of those images I had spent so many hours fabricating on my computer screen. I remembered, too, that I had no longer been interested in the images when they had been printed onto paper. I didn’t miss making photographs, I did this now. Work, I decided, was a daily practice, hopefully one you enjoyed. But art is communication and though this practice I’d developed was exhausting, it was neither work nor art. It was only internal, unfathomable—and pretty fucking weird. I could not talk about it, yet it felt more useful than anything I’d ever done.

My day would begin. I’d make toast, drink some water. I would check my e-mail. I would make a cup of tea. I would read a magazine. I would do some work—the kind I got paid for. I would watch the shadows move around the room in a pattern I was well acquainted with. I would watch television. I would read a novel. I would drink a glass of wine with dinner. I would drink another. I had built a life that was slow and quiet—that began each morning transcendently and ended each night just kind of numb.

One morning when Olive wasn’t around, it happened—and I wish I had any other way to explain it, believe me. I was focusing on the magma, carefully scooping the lake of it out of my thigh with the diamond-platinum-carbon-steel bulldozer, and I felt a crack forming in the concrete in my arm, like in a highway under the ice in January.

At first it was just a crack, but I can’t tell you how good it felt—like sticking a pencil up into a cast to itch your arm. If you haven’t done it, you just don’t know. Oh man, I shuffled around my apartment, feeling that crack fill with spring green shoots and sunshine. I called Olive to tell her.

Olive. It was as if I’d told her I just won the lottery, the Nobel Prize—she didn’t care what. She heard the joy in my voice and if it was important to me, it was important to her: “Hell, yes—we celebrate tonight! Call the liquor store on your block and order some really nice champagne for delivery. Put it on my card! I’ll be by around seven.”

That night, after Dom Pérignon, some T-bone steak (which Olive had cooked), and some Burgundy, my body felt fluid, I was buzzing at a slightly higher frequency. I looked out the window and saw the pink neon blinking in the fluorescent purple sky—but instead of a cross, I saw a human body. The perfectly delineated outline of skin, and under that, muscle, and under that, bone wrapped with veins and tendons and nerves. All buzzing and blinking in intricate shades of pink. A harmonious frequency. For the first time my body didn’t feel like anything but what it was: no sand, no lead, no neon, no glass, no cement, no magma. Just body, warm, moving, and fused with Olive’s.

Olive and I passed out that night on the living room floor in a happy bundle of living skin, bone, and hair wrapped in blankets and too much drink. I don’t remember any dreams, but I do remember the feeling of her chest against mine, her breath on my neck.

When I woke up I didn’t move. I didn’t want to wake Olive, whose head was on my right shoulder. Her hair was curled around her ear, her eyelid twitched, her palm was cupped around my hip. I looked out the window like I always did. I paid attention to my feet, restless as always. My calves, though, were filled with small but usable muscles. The magma had left a cleft in my thigh but it was already healing. The cement was powder now and my smile felt stretched more or less symmetrically across my face. I didn’t blink and soon my eyes blurred. The neon spread, and I saw two bodies against the bright white sky, blinking softly, sleeping. Breathers in sync.

it’s been almost seven months since Skeeter called me, and I’m getting used to the idea that Sylvia is gone. I’ve started dreaming about her. I’m about nine years old but I’m also me, now. My whole family is in the house I grew up in: mom, dad, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and all of us cousins. And Sylvia, a little apart, because she is the different one. I open the avocado-green, family-sized refrigerator and instead of finding the three over-stuffed shelves I remember there is a walk-in unit, like in a restaurant. I don’t feel cold, only hungry: Ice-encrusted, half-empty cartons of generic Neapolitan ice cream; freezer-burned tubes of Jimmy Dean sausage and Pillsbury Cookie Dough; stacks of Stouffer’s French Bread Pizzas and Steak-umms; concentrated orange juice that is seeping through the cardboard seams, leaving sticky orange puddles; sticks and sticks of butter purchased on sale and frozen forward; Jell-O Pudding Pops, Popsicles, and Freezie pops so cold I can feel my tongue sticking to them. Thirty-four-year-old me is disgusted, nine-year-old me is methodically calculating the ratio of work-it-would-take-to-prepare:tastiness-and-amount-of-food. Both of us are left wanting.

I close the fridge door and go into the walk-in pantry, which is filled floor-to-ceiling with built-in buttercream-yellow shelves. I’m so short they are enormous. On the floor are big, long, paper bags full of bread: raisin bread, white bread, rolls with flour on top. I sit on the floor eating until it makes me sick. When I remember the taste of these breads later in the day, after waking, or when I encounter any foods that remind me of them, I feel sick until I force myself to think of something that is not food. I climb the shelves like a ladder, like a hungry monkey, and forage the pig-shaped cookie jar for Oreos, the rabbit-shaped one for Chips Ahoy!—the rabbit always smells a little stale, chocolate chip cookies being less popular. My family roams aimlessly around the house, smoking, drinking, watching TV—doing nothing useful as far as I can tell—while I search for a meal of substance. Sylvia wanders around more serenely, wearing bright red lipstick and with shinier hair than everyone else. In these dreams, she is like a bookmark stuck into a part of the book that I haven’t gotten to yet.

Date on back: 1967. The year Sylvia left for Bard.

I suspect that Sylvia isn’t coming back, but not knowing, it is difficult to mourn her. I am almost embarrassed to mourn her, thinking that she might just show up one day and be very casual about her “disappearance.” I think about her sudden retirement and convince myself that this is related, that she just wanted to get away from everything for a while.

It is uncanny to get to know someone better, who you have known your whole life, after they are gone.

it’s september 27, and I feel totally shellshocked by the summer I have had. Aunt Sylvia is in limbo and so am I—with all of her stuff. Everybody tells me I can just walk away, but that implies that I’m over this place. I’m not, I am merely overwhelmed by all the changes in my life. It also implies that I have something to walk away toward. I don’t, really. When I need to get a handle on things, I make a list. It calms me:

March 23, 2010
Skeeter realizes that Sylvia’s gone when he finds her note. He tells me he figures she’s been gone at least a week. He last saw her the afternoon of March 13. (He remembers, he tells me, because it was about ten in the morning and Sylvia was walking down the road, like she often did in the morning. He was driving to his brother’s wedding, which was that afternoon, an hour or so north of Decoy Green in—I forget the name of the town. He and Sylvia had stopped and chatted for a minute about nothing too memorable). Sometime in July, Skeeter tells me that he had waited for three days to call me, while wandering around letting the situation to sink in and wondering if he should start missing Sylvia (which means to me that he had already started missing Sylvia).

That’s it. She left me a key, Skeeter a first, signed edition of Look Homeward, Angel, and neither of us an explanation.

I read (a contemporary paperback edition) of the book but don’t talk to Skeeter about it’s significance.

March 24
First thing in the morning (first thing my morning, at least, 11 a.m.), I find a message on my voice mail from the night before from some guy whose name sounds, on the first listen, like Skee A. Savestah Bahlly. There had been a mention of some guy with a weird name in one of Sylvia’s letters. He was, I remembered, like a caretaker.

“Uh, Jules. This is Skee—ah, Sylvester Bailey. Your Aunt Sylvia left me your number—I help, ah helped, her out on the farm here. She has something for—she wanted me to give something to you. Uh, please call me back here when you get this. My number is….”

Sylvester, Skeeter, spoke soberly, with a strained voice that cracked more than once. I couldn’t tell how old he was. He sounded nervous, like a man very unused to calling up strangers.

I call him back immediately and he reads me the note, sounding like a schoolboy. I ask him the obvious questions, but it seems Skeeter knows even less than I do.

April 3
After wondering for almost a week what this could all be about, I am finally able to get away. I rent a car—well, I have my buddy Fern rent me a car because I let my license lapse six years ago and have since driven only occasionally. Fern rents me a car, throws me the keys, and I get behind the wheel of some hybrid or other and drive her home. To our surprise I end up being a great defensive driver, but I also do a host of absent-minded things like spacing out at red lights or honking and trying to plow through a throng of urban pedestrians when they have the right of way. Anyway, after I drive Fern from the Manhattan car rental place to her place in Park Slope, she deems me ready to drive up to Sylvia’s. “Good luck, buddy!” She says as she clamps her small, strong hands down on my shoulders before hugging me.

Spend my first night at Sylvia’s barn. It is pitch black and cacophonous with tree frogs, night birds, and ominous-sounding snapping twigs. I try to drive memories of horror movies from my mind and to forget that the doors “lock” with ancient hooks and eyes. On an up note, it is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in and Sylvia made the bed with fresh sheets, I notice.

I stay for a week, enjoying my reprieve from the city despite the sudden and unsettling circumstances. I read Sylvia’s note about 200 times: the pit of my stomach knows something that my mind is not quite accepting.

April 4
I realize that I could choose to live at Decoy Green instead of in Brooklyn. I simply register that I have a choice. I used to dream about having just one rent-free month. One month where I didn’t have to sweat over paying $1000 to lease my tiny part of the city. Now I have, well, who knows how long I could stay here. But since I have begun to realize that no profession in particular appeals to me….

On the kitchen table, I find a folder of papers with my name on it. Inside is a note from Sylvia’s lawyer, letting me know that the lawyer is paying the taxes and utilities on the property, and there is a fund set aside for necessary repairs and whatnot. I call the number on the letterhead and get the lawyer’s assistant. The assistant says that he’ll have the lawyer call me back as soon as she can, but that my aunt’s whereabouts are confidential.

April 10–April 28
A few lost weeks where I sublet my apartment, box things, store some stuff in my friend Angel’s art studio, give away other things. Drink, eat, and tell stories with friends. Buy Fern’s car—a ten-year-old Toyota Camry—for $364, the cost of getting the ‘check engine’ light to go off so that it passes inspection. It is a kind gift, essentially. Fern and her partner Sadie buy a used Subaru. I have to take a five-hour safe driving course, with teenagers and new immigrants, and then a driving test to get a current New York State drivers license. I’m a little embarrassed about how proud I am of being a licensed, insured driver—and even though I really want to post my learner permit, the thought of duct taping all my personal info out exhausts me, so you’ll just have to picture it: The image of me on my EBT card, but with a smile.

April 29
Drive up to Decoy Green, telling friends that it is “just for the summer” because I can’t yet admit to myself that I might stay—might try to stay—even if/when Sylvia comes back.

April–June
Idyllic. Take lots of pictures of crazy looking bugs.

Barbecue every evening when the sun comes around to warm the deck before nightfall. Eating primarily meat, French bread, and chilled Spanish Rosé.

There used to be a place in my belly that was constantly tense with concern. At times it felt like a rock. Now there is nothing alarming in between my navel and my spine.

Been here almost three months and still no word from Sylvia. The small amount of press she’s gotten has tapered off. Few of the facts are correct.

June 12–June 24
A big itchy spot appears, bigger and itchier than my other bug bites. Waking up in the middle of the night scratching it. On the back of my thigh and feels about as big the circumference of a beer can.

I don’t own a mirror except the one on the wall in the bathroom and the one attached to the dresser in the bedroom (actually, I don’t even own those). I drive to the Rite Aid, buy a hand mirror, and contort myself around the steering wheel enough to see my big red welt, with purple rings radiating out around it like a sunset.

I walk back into the Rite Aid and go to the pharmacy. Since I don’t have health insurance, I’ve relied on my local pharmacist to tell me what to buy to relieve the various allergies Decoy Green causes. I’m getting sheepish about it, but he smiles and walks out from behind his counter, so he can see my thigh. I’m hiking up my shorts and boxers, all red faced.

“Oh, that’s Lyme!” He says immediately. He refers me to the clinic three towns over and I head there, stopping for a chocolate shake on the way to calm me.

Three hours later, I’m back at the pharmacy with a script for an antibiotic, just like the pharmacist predicted. A weeks’ worth. I buy a Vanity Fair and an Esquire and go to bed.

I wake up in the middle of the night, after my second dose of antibiotic, sweating like a madman and hallucinatory. My neighbors are having a party and I keep thinking that they are headed over to my house, carrying a boom box, or a marching band, or something, because the music seems to be getting louder and closer. After a few agonizing hours, I fall deeply asleep and wake up around eight fiercely craving pancakes and bacon, which I feast on at the diner in town.

After that I’m fine, but a little tired for a while. I compulsively document my bulls eye, with the help of Jack, who finally came out to visit for a few days.

It’s 4:30 p.m., and the sun goes down sooner and sooner now. I don’t want to miss it.

The front door was right there. She was sitting on the roommate’s pristine, camel-colored leather couch, in the living room, on the second floor, fifteen feet from the hallway of their building, waiting for a food delivery. Separated from her neighbors’ thoroughfare by a thin stretch of drywall punctuated by the dented, hollow metal door, painted an unblemished powder white. The roommate, she was sure, was on a plane, yet she couldn’t help listening for the roommate’s footsteps on the stairs. She could tell the roommate’s steps from others, though any footsteps unnerved her. Close as they were to the living room, where she had been—for two weeks—anticipating cocooning herself this evening. On rare occasions, such as this, when the roommate left and she knew how long the roommate would be gone, she was able to fully enjoy occupying the living room.

The living room contained a plasma TV, which, in addition to cable, had several functions that she didn’t bother working. The roommate never used the TV—she suspected it was just a necessary piece of furniture to the roommate—like having at least one Eames chair. Also necessary (as evidence that the roommate knew an Eames chair alone is not enough) were such personal touches as a flock of casually framed and displayed artwork given to the roommate by good friends, a cornered jumble of large primary-colored, Jack Pierson–esque plastic letters, and a water-stained dressmaker’s dummy topped by an insouciantly angled felt top hat.

One might say that she had been lucky, in living. She’d always had a knack for finding a good situation. Though she didn’t come from an exactly charmed background, she liked good-quality things and had made it one of her goals to get them. This apartment, a loft, was also occupied by the similarly aspirational roommate—who was closer than she was to that goal. It was an airy place—the kind that populates magazines and movies—filled with modernist furniture that was sometimes very difficult to relax on. Fairly prosperous but not able to fully pay the rent, the roommate, like a feudal lord, gave her a share of the tenancy: a small bedroom, set into a shady recess at the back of the loft, by the bathroom. It was neat, angular, and a little more humid than the rest of the space. The walls of her room ended at eight feet, and were not weight bearing.

Sometimes late at night, when she was eating potato chips in the dark, the TV show on her computer screen glowing silently, the sound of her chewing reverberating cacophonously into her headphones, she was sure that the roommate, across the loft, was lying on high-thread-count sheets, bothered by the sound of her teeth grinding. She would then try to chew more quietly, but would soon forget. Like she would sometimes forget not to wipe her greasy hands on the low felt-covered chair that the roommate provided her with. The chips made her careless. Midbag, she wanted them to come more quickly. She wanted more than one in her mouth. She needed not so much to chew, but to swallow. This made her feel solid. It reduced the world to the space occupied by her, the chair, and the screen. On a night like this, once a week or so, she would usually nod out curled up in that chair, her legs tucked underneath her, head on top of her arms resting on the arm of the chair. She would wake up smelling the sour cream and onion (or the barbeque or the cheddar) on her hands, and she would see the salty residue on the arm of the chair. Her mouth shriveled by salt, dried by all natural snack flavorings, crumbs clinging to the invisible hairs above her top lip. She would wake up feeling hollowed out, in a good way, full but hungry. As a way to start the day, a food hangover left her with a slight deficit, which was, nonetheless, well worth it.

The roommate had recently been described in the New York Times as “globally hip.” On the opposite side of the loft from her bedroom was the roommate’s graphic design office. The office was separated from the living space by a sort of giant folding screen made of corrugated plastic, on which the roommate had arranged large printouts of work designed for past clients. She often wondered why, instead of looking like a junior high science-fair project, the roommate’s screen looked just right. She decided that it did very well with few resources, which she thought was admirable. She wanted to be more like the screen: able to be exactly what was needed, efficiently, without excessive materials. Once, when her friend O (just O) was over, and he’d made her a nice dinner and they’d had some wine, she’d tried to explain this to him: “The screen, it’s like this apartment… Maybe it’s what’s expected, but it’s just enough and not too much. It’s like—it’s almost anonymous in its rightness, you know?”

She’d seen herself reflected in O’s plastic lavender-framed glasses. She’d looked at the royal blue silk scarf knotted around his neck, his boyish torso framed by a gauzy flowered shirt—Marc Jacobs—his skinny jean cutoffs, and his hairless legs. “Not too much” and “anonymous” had made O curl his upper lip, put out his hip, and roll his eyes. Sometimes she was totally OK with her feelings about the screen. Sometimes those feelings, and even the screen itself, made her feel uncomfortable.

The roommate had told her almost two weeks ago that there was a design thing in Oslo, or was it Amsterdam, and would she water the plants for the four days the roommate would be gone. Four perfect spring days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday—not too cold, not too hot. She had felt a tingle that had begun below her belly and ran up her spine.

For those two weeks before her roommate left, she’d thought a little every day, mostly right before she fell asleep, about what she would order on that Friday, when she would be free to fully enjoy the living room. Pizza was always the first thought, of course. But she was never sure if she wanted the fancy thin-crust kind with fresh porcini mushrooms and good spicy sausage, or a plain New York pie, big and floppy. Or a Chicago pie, with cheese stuffing and burned-at-the-edges pepperoni on top, whose crust could put you into a coma, or a frozen pizza, out of nostalgia for childhood. Or, in the same vein, a Pizza Hut pizza, because she loved those salty little nuggets they call sausage. But there was also the allure of good fried chicken—the kind with buttermilk batter, with macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and gravy, and one extra biscuit. Or a burger, a big, rare Kobe beef burger with blue cheese, bacon, and a whole carryout tin of fries, with extra homemade mayo and organic ketchup. Sure, it was expensive, but she didn’t skimp on burgers. She never, ever longed for those thin, nearly meatless patties wrapped in Ronald McDonald yellow and red paper. Her dad had worked second shift at Brach’s, a candy factory several blocks away from the house she grew up in. She had always been always surprised, when he had brought home bags of Brach’s oversweet butterscotch lozenges, that the factory emitted a burnt fuel scent, which made the whole neighborhood smell like the side of a hot highway. There had been a McDonald’s midway between Brach’s and home. Her dad had sometimes awakened her and her two older sisters at ten thirty at night to join him for burgers and fries. Instead of making her nostalgic, McDonald’s made her resent the forced togetherness that certain foods, certain eating establishments, pushed.

For those two weeks, planning her four days of solitude had taken up the bulk of her waking hours. She was a graduate student in a self-defined program at NYU doing original research on Alan Turing. Turing is largely credited with creating the basis of contemporary computer science. He died, by his own hand, of cyanide poisoning at the age of forty-one, after being forced to chose, by England, between imprisonment and treatment with female hormones as punishment for homosexual acts. She had been in the library, doing her research, and she had found herself in a gourmand’s reverie. Or she had been out on a date—she found herself dating a lot, she’d always been told she had great skin, pretty eyes, nice legs, and she liked meeting people on a ritualized and distanced basis. She’d been eating, or kissing, or dancing, or walking with a girl who she had liked being with just a second ago, some girls more than others, and she’d caught herself thinking, “I would like to be alone now.”

She’d learned to listen to this thought. She had learned not to mingle her passions, like when she had made the mistake of spontaneously meeting up with a date late on a Saturday night a few months before the roommate’s trip to the design thing, when she had been planning to spend the evening alone. She had spent the evening before the date called slowly chewing her way through a DiGiorno Rising Crust Supreme pizza—she had gone to three stores looking and finally found it in the freezer section of a run-down Walgreens. The bag had been cold and boxy in her hands on the walk home. She’d spent time arranging the frozen ingredients so that each bite would have the right proportion of pepperoni, sausage, onion, and peppers. After it was safely in the oven, she had carefully accordioned the box, and, instead of adding it, naked, to the recycling pile, she’d put the box into its own bag, which she planned to discreetly dispose of the next morning on her way to the subway. She’d let the pizza cook patiently, till everything on top was browning and bubbly. And she’d eaten it slowly over the course of two hours, savoring the carefully manufactured flavors, feeling herself painfully full at first, then transcending fullness. Her stomach had opened itself, a gift, giving her as much room as she needed. Her body had felt flattened and infinite, yet immovable and solid. Her head had been enormous, merging with the air around it; her eyes had been watching color and movement on the TV screen, but she had felt distant from it. Nothing had existed beyond her and the pizza and the couch, and the surface of TV screen. She had made the pizza last for as long as possible.

Soon after she’d finished, around a quarter to ten, her phone had rung. She’d ignored the call, then listened to the voice mail. It was a girl she’d been going out with for a few weeks. The girl had wanted her to come out to a Madonna dance-a-thon at a boy’s bar. The girl had screamed into the phone: “It’s just starting—oh my god, it’s so fun!” She’d heard “Borderline” in the background and she’d wondered if the songs were being played chronologically. She had thought that she absolutely did not want to go. She’d found herself cleaning up the pizza remnants—not even a crust was left, just a greasy, sauce-spotted plate. Then she’d turned off the TV and put on The Immaculate Collection. Feeling as if she had just woken up from a too-long nap, she had brushed, flossed, and gargled Listerine. She’d washed her hands twice and her face once. She’d run clean water through her short hair and combed it back, applied mousse, and blew it nearly dry on a low temperature. She’d pulled on jeans and a T-shirt that was for going out in, rather than the T-shirt she had been eating in, which was for eating.

She’d found herself, less than an hour later, with an untouched beer in her hand—a necessary prop, like the roommate’s TV—buoyed by sweaty, shirtless, glitter-covered boys and following her date and her date’s friends deep into the club. She’d inhaled the smell of dancing flesh, of beer, of the smoke machine, of amphetamines evaporating with sweat. She had been right: they were playing through Madonna’s discography chronologically. She had arrived into a tangle of vogueing arms, jutting hips, arched eyebrows, and pouty lips. She’d felt like she was watching the video and that everyone around her was in the video, but she liked watching. When her date had taken her arm, pulling her into the fray, she had set her beer down on a narrow, cocktail-cluttered ledge. She had been so perfectly inside herself that she was her own colony. She hadn’t been able to antenna the motion of the people around her, who were buzzing like a synched hive with more honey to make.

Because she had been looking for an experience where she could connect with someone, she had ended up spending most of that night talking to a reserved transwoman at the bar, who had an English accent and was sipping red wine with her legs crossed and turned to the side, and checking her flawless lipstick in the mirror behind the bar on a regimented schedule. She had admired the woman’s discipline. They had gotten to talking about Alan Turing, and she’d remembered reading an article three years earlier about the woman, who had won a university prize at the tender age of twenty-three by solving a problem concerning a 2, 3 Turing machine. Their conversation had driven everyone else off.

Though she had been thrilled to have met someone capable of both lucidly and deeply explaining the math and engineering involved in her thesis, there is a time to dance, a time to talk deeply with a stranger, a time to tunnel deep inside yourself…. Once she’d made her choice, which, that night, had been to stay home alone savoring her pizza, she liked to stick with it. Moments, to her, were not spontaneous. They were chosen carefully and altering her plan upset her alignment. She had gratefully gone home alone that night. If she had felt bad at all, it was because she hadn’t known about the dance-a-thon beforehand so she could have planned for it. Because then, she thought, she might have really enjoyed it.

On the Friday she had been anticipating for so long, she had worked to ensure a carefully chosen moment. Before sitting down on the roommate’s pristine camel-colored leather couch to wait for her food to be delivered, she had come home from a meeting with her dissertation advisor. She had been nominated for a grant to do a web-based project combining her scholarship on Turing’s life and work with the factual data accumulated by the woman she had met at the Madonna dance-a-thon. After she had gotten home, she had put the news the advisor had given her away in a small package in her mind, to be retrieved whenever she wanted to enjoy it again.

She had changed from her pinstripe trousers and thin, gray wool V-neck over a hot pink button-down into her eating clothes. A pair of jeans so soft that they were turning to powder in the worn places and a roomy Kelly green T-shirt with the name of a San Francisco pub that she had never been to on the back. She had rolled the short sleeves of the T-shirt further up her biceps, and put on a baseball cap.

She had finally decided on fried chicken. There was an overpriced faux-soul-food restaurant in her neighborhood. Some would say it lacked authenticity, which it surely did. But she was fond of the organic chicken, the house-made applewood-smoked bacon and Vermont cheddar in the macaroni and cheese, and the biscuits served with a little portion of honey from the hive on the restaurant’s roof. She had called in the order. It would be delivered in forty-five minutes, the person on the phone had told her. She had buzzed in anticipation.

While waiting, she had arranged the living room, moving a lamp so that its dim light would come from behind her and she would not be distracted by a light bulb in her sightline. She had dusted the TV and the remote and moved the coffee table closer to the couch. She had brought a pillow from her bed and tossed the ineffectual pillows that were splayed up against either arm of the couch, for decoration, into the Eames chair. She had dusted off the coffee table and brought a place mat, silverware, a liter of mineral water, and her own, favorite pearl gray linen napkin.

The doorbell buzzed. She had minimal contact with the delivery guy, was glad none of her neighbors were in the hall, and tipped well. She shut the door, turned around, and stood for a few seconds, the bag in her hand, feeling its warmth, a warmth not alive and yet not inanimate either, inhaling the smell of warm, grease-soaked paper bag and scalded Styrofoam. Carryout food is a gift so volatile that it has the capacity to destruct, then fuse to, its packaging.

As she plated her food in the kitchen, she anticipated the euphoria of her precise consummation. As she carried the plates out (biscuits and honey on a side plate), she registered a sudden shift in the light. Although just dusk, it was too dark, as if water vapor had crowded the sun out of the sky, drops quivering in the atmosphere for a pause until falling fatly as rain. She walked to the window and looked out, plate in hand, resisting the urge to nibble distractedly at her food, wanting to give the meal, the evening’s main event, all of her attention. The street looked too dark. She walked over to a slim tripod lamp and clicked it on. It did not respond. Frustrated now, she put down her plate, resting it on its right place on the coffee table, and crawled on her belly to peer at the outlet near the floor behind the couch to make sure that the lamp was plugged in. It was. Assuming the bulb was out, she tried the overhead lights, which were fluorescent and usually cackled and thrummed for seconds before lighting. They did neither. Suspicious now, she grabbed the remote and found no power there, either. Her food was getting cold.

She went to the refrigerator and found it dark. It dawned on her that the power was out. Looking through the kitchen window made it clear that the outage had affected at least a several-block radius, though a soft glow proved that the whole city was not dark.

She walked purposefully back toward her room. The darkness here was deeper, fuzzy and charcoal gray. For a second she pictured Smoky, the mean, shadow-colored cat that she and her mom had taken in one summer when she was seven, ten? The next second she turned her gaze to the squat red candle on her dresser (the roommate’s dresser, actually, a maple-veneer Knoll knockoff). She took the candle to the living room, lit it, and reached for her plate.

Staring at the void of the TV screen, she found that she had a hard time getting comfortable on the couch without moving images to lull her. She got back up and found more candles in the bathroom—plum and ginger scented, which would interfere with her food but she hastily arranged them anyway on the coffee table. She grabbed the current, unread Vanity Fair, putting the plate on her lap, holding the magazine in one hand. She shifted the position of the magazine after just one bite of rapidly congealing macaroni and cheese, trying to get comfortable. She put the plate onto the table, put the magazine beside it, and sat on the floor, her back against the couch. That was better.

She grabbed a biscuit, pulled it open with both hands, and halved one half. It was moistly warm, and soft with butter. She dove a corner into the gravy pooled in the center of her mashed potatoes, soaking the bread, and pulling a bit of potato up, as well. She swallowed, urging the salinity of the gravy to soothe her. She did not like how the food looked in the candlelight. While people often look best in that soft orange glow, food does not. The chicken skin looked grayish and the gravy was almost black. The yellow was gone from the buttery potatoes and biscuit, while the macaroni and cheese looked beige. The light was too dim for reading, and anyway, reading was too active. She wanted all of her focus on the eating. She wanted to seal the triangle: her, the food, the TV screen.

She closed her eyes and passed her hands over her plate. They felt moist and itchy as they made contact with the remaining steam. She touched down at the chicken, blindly, the skin of it feeling alien, rough, like very fine, wet sand. She pulled a bit of chicken up to her mouth. There was a gaminess under the salted skin that didn’t jive with her memory of the taste.

She stood up, brushed her crumby hands against her jeans, and took a deep swig of mineral water to wash away the taste. She walked again to the window and looked out. From this side of the building, everything was dark except for the odd—blinding—car headlight, and the dozen or so cell phones people were attempting to use to illuminate streets that were no longer familiar.

She opened the window and ducked her head under the frame and out. She opened her mouth and felt the spit running toward her lips. She closed her mouth, gathered it, and let a glob fall. She couldn’t see where it landed. She thought about her food cooling on the table without her, the TV shows playing though she couldn’t watch them, the roommate in some strange hotel, and herself, invisible in the blackout, and she felt like she would be content to continue like this for a while longer.

during the first couple of days Skeeter came around and showed me the quirks of the place: a cracked window in the kitchen, loose floorboards, ancient hardware on doors and cabinets that frequently got stuck, and several once meticulously kept gardens that needed attention. My attention—I realized with a jolt.

I could tell that Skeeter wasn’t used to being upstairs. This was the only time I’d seen his unselfconscious, efficient movements become wary. He drew his body in and up, like there wasn’t enough room for him in the big, airy space. Likely because, I thought, the space was still filled up with Sylvia.

I was fortunate to be occupied with cleaning the house, which only Sylvia had done—and only sporadically, it seemed. I like to clean. It saves me from thinking about the future—and on the yoga video I just downloaded from the Internet the teacher, Dawnelle, says, “The present is the only place you ever have any power.” I’m not thinking about the future because I just got laid off from my job as the online reviews editor for an art magazine. You know, it always freaks me out a little when I read fiction in which the main character doesn’t have to account for making a living. This happens a lot in Haruki Murakami’s books (his main characters are often just regular guys who have nothing better to do than moon around, listen to jazz, cook spaghetti at all hours, and even though they’re hiding out in their places all the time hardly talking to anyone, girls just seem to find them.) OK, you should know that, in addition to being an editor—or ex-editor—I’m also trying to write fiction. I’ve resisted the impulse for years, though once in a while something has leaked out (you can look to your left for an example, in fact.) Part of the reason I’ve resisted is money, and part is fear—and the money part is at least three-quarters part fear. What’s so scary about writing? If you haven’t tried writing, you may never know—and you’re lucky. If you have tried writing, and it’s not scary for you, you may be doing it wrong—or you, too, may be lucky. (As aside: the thing about blogs is that, as we have structured them, they cannily mimic the way our synapses fire, finding linkages from one thought to another.

illustration of a firing synapse

For example, here, as I’m thinking about the linkages between money—class—and writing, I’d love to just link you to Eileen Myles’ work The Importance of Being Iceland, particularly the third paragraph of “Iceland,” the book’s opening essay, which begins: “The working class prepares you to be a player in a very unspecialized arena. Because you have been educated to support the way the world turns.” [You know, sometimes talking or writing about my family, how I grew up, who we are, makes me embarrassed—but it’s important to know that I’m not embarrassed about the facts. I feel the embarrassment, which is sometimes more like impatience, because it is necessary to mention these facts at all. I’m not saying I want to be middle class—even though I sort of am now—or that I want my family to be or have been—even though I did for many years. But if I was, if they were, I would not have to mention the fact of class at all. I feel like I would have saved some time. I would have begun this race at a little faster pace, maybe—which is another thought that brings up Myles’ writing.] But if I link you to her work, then I am letting a small clip of hers stand in for my thoughts—and the whole of her thoughts—on the matter of something as complex as class. Another blog danger is that a writer has infinite space to digress. To avoid that, if its not already too late, the crux of my issue is this: after six years of studying to be a writer, I spent eight more years trying to find the skills to support myself so that I could actually do it. I have long dreamt of employment marginal enough that I could devote all of my energy to anything but what I was being paid to do. There’s another route that I hadn’t considered: the other day a friend emailed me that she had overheard a guy at a party say that he didn’t understand why anyone would go to college now, when you can learn anything on the Internet.)

I also realized that what I had always wanted was to be a part of something—a group or community—at least it seemed to me to be a community from my position on the outside. So I took that job editing the reviews section not necessarily because it was what I had always wanted, but because the higher-ups at the magazine had decided to give the job to me—a random applicant, a cold caller—rather than someone that anyone knew. Once in, sort of, I just didn’t know anymore. I still don’t. The decision was made for me: our reviews section was cut because our budget was cut by the conglomerate publishing company that funded us. (Seriously. We couldn’t afford to pay a handful of writers fifty dollars each to write art reviews. I don’t even want to tell you how much I got paid, but let’s just say I had to take in proofreading, which made me feel like a nineteenth-century seamstress taking in piecework and ruining her eyes staying up all night sewing by firelight. OK—I proofed by desk light, hot white spot on the bright white proofs, while playing movies on my laptop and drinking beer, red pencil in hand. No. I’m not such a careful proofer.)

Unemployment insurance came down like an angel and I was grateful. Unemployment insurance, at last!

With a little creative accounting, I qualified for $200 a month—my picture says: 'second full day in a row at a government agency.'

First thought: Will I qualify for foodstamps? Then I realized that I was faced with a new dilemma: I could stop thinking about money for a short period of time and write.

It’s been good to have the extra time, too, because Sylvia’s disappearance brought to the surface a lot of feelings about my mom’s death. I don’t know what they all are, nor do I know how to separate them, to feel them fully, or to process them. Feelings are only announcing themselves as quickly as I can handle them, incrementally, or they would overwhelm me. There is anger, mixed with some tears, absolute incomprehension, and the dumb, numb shock of grief: last night I forgot grief completely as I drifted off to sleep, all of my attention lost in a book—this morning grief is right in my face again. The shades of feeling that make up grief are not stages. They are messy, they don’t go in order, and they sneak up on you all the time. I realize that, in order to ever be happy, or even productive, or at least to keep moving forward, I’ll have to keep fooling myself into forgetting grief, for stretches at a time, for my whole life.

aunt sylvia—sylvia—had a lot of style. She’d left Bard after two years and moved to NYC. Don’t think that fact went unnoticed back home. We thought she’d be the first person in the family to graduate from college but she wasn’t. I was. She drifted around for a while. She worked behind the scenes on some movies—at least that’s what I’d heard as a kid. But since that was the first time I had realized that someone could do that for a living, it didn’t occur to me to ask what her actual job was. For almost ten years my mom, especially, had been worried and resolute that Aunt Sylvia needed to grow up, get a real job, or get married. Above all the words grow up were used, as if Aunt Sylvia were only cheating herself thinking that adult life could be something more than drudging work. She was cheating herself, I now realize that my mom must have concluded, because as a woman she was running out of time all the way around. But Sylvia ended up with a plum job as a set designer for film and TV.

I was shocked the first time I googled Aunt Sylvia–I had no idea how famous she is.

You know, since my mom’s death, my dad and I have become closer—well, we are trying hard to understand each other. We call once a month or so, but it seems to me like he needs a reason to call, because, like Skeeter, my dad isn’t any kind of a small talker. And even though I don’t understand him very well, I want him to like me—I mean, I know he loves me, but I want him to like me. So, at first he would call to ask me a question about his computer. One day, as he was painstakingly reading over the phone to me all of the text from each error box that popped up on his troubled PC screen (Dad’s a PC, I’m a Mac), and I was impatiently listening before telling him to just hit the red x in the upper-right-hand corner: (“Hit the x.” “But another box is popping—” “—Hit it, Dad, hit the x.”) Dad’s a farmer, and so I said to him, “Dad,” I said, “imagine that I called you one day and told you that I’d just bought a new tractor. Let’s say I bought a Volvo instead of a Deere, and I asked you to talk me through fixing it over the phone, because I know you know tractors, even though, of course, you’ve always owned Deeres.” “Why would you buy a Volvo?” he asked me. I never knew how to say something direct enough for him, and always ended up talking myself in circles through his silences, which is why he often thought that I needed help with the simplest daily tasks—though, for some reason, he thought I could help him figure out how to use his computer long distance. “The point is, it’s really hard to know what’s going on with a machine until you have your hands on it, you know?” I think he got it, and though he still calls me about his computer, now we both are sure that it’s not really about the computer.

That first night at Sylvia’s farm (I still thought of it as hers), I felt very close to her. We were two people who understood, but, I think, also felt a little outside of both the world where the computer makes sense and the one where the tractor makes sense. Actually, to be honest, I feel a little useless because, when it comes down to it, I don’t have much skill with either, but I use my Mac laptop daily, clinging to it sometimes like it’s my sole connection with the rest of the world (iMac, iPod, iSolation). For a minute, I wished Sylvia were around because I bet she would have taught me some of those things that I wish my mom could have, and some of those things that I wish my dad could have.

Anyway, when Sylvia sent a postcard back to my mom and all of us, with a picture of a movie set, writing that she was working on some movie called Paris, Texas, which we’d never heard of (I mean, it wasn’t Star Wars, or Terminator—and it didn’t even come to our town!), it was about as understandable to us all as those error messages on a computer are to anyone but a programmer. The thing I realized that first night, the thing that seeped deep in like the moist air rolling down off the mountains surrounding me, was that Sylvia had known how we felt, she had known before she even sent the postcard. But she also had known this: a limberness, an adaptability, in the face of unfamiliarity is a skill learned with practice. She had known we were all very stiff, but that we loved her. We did. She seemed happy, we were proud. I feel so bad now that she was constantly stretching toward us, and we would all wait for her to arrive, rather than meeting her. Then I feel bad for myself, because that’s what’s happened between me and my family now, too. What is left of us.

I tried to settle into Sylvia’s house. Like I said, she had style. And I know enough by now to know that her style was informed and unique and not at all scared of being different. First of all, Sylvia had moved into the barn and rented out the house, which was about a quarter mile away, closer to the road, though no one was living there now. Sylvia had completely rehabbed the barn, though, and it was stunning. It was wide and narrow and tall and painted that rusty red that barns are, and trimmed with butter cream around all the windows. There was a crescent window up near the roof peak, and below it a large deck with two sets of French doors with screens. At the back of the house, another screen door opened into the squat kitchen.

This was the kind of kitchen that only exists in really old houses, or in our memories of them, fed by books and movies. Picture a low-ceilinged hovel, two straw-caned chairs, two short adults, a baby, and like a sheep and a dog, or something, all huddled in hay around a fireplace. OK, that’s kind of it. Wide weathered floorboards that are gappy and uninsulated; in a few places, there is ivy growing up, straight from the earth, which is just a few inches down. (I know that Sylvia traveled for as much of the winter as possible, though she did get the upstairs insulated, and a dusty wood stove stands in one corner of the kitchen.) There is a dark-stained wood table, round, with a complex system of clawed feet and expanding leaves. A collection of Shaker-style chairs fitted with ancient looking, sturdy cushions. Built-in shelves, painted butter cream, stuffed with good crystal, glass vases… Sisal mats cover the floor. A newish fridge and a narrow stove, a big farmhouse kitchen sink, and windows overlooking a nearby cemetery (more about that later).

The first part of the house you see, though, is the mudroom, unless you go in via the deck, but that doesn’t seem like the front door. The mudroom is a real disappointment. Just a foot inside, a rustic narrow staircase greets you, about three feet from your face. Bad feng shui. Underneath the stairs are all kinds of cleaning supplies, an ancient vacuum, gardening detritus, a moldering straw hat… To the left, the kitchen. To the right, around and up the stairs.

Up is where this house really begins. Everything below is merely functional. Sylvia shines on the upper floor. You really should just walk up the stairs and all the way to the back wall (that set of French doors that I first saw off the deck, from outside). You should then be instructed by whoever’s showing you around this house to walk straight ahead, underneath the crescent window, and then to turn around slowly. But before you do, notice that under the crescent window is a nice-looking hardwood buffet, stacked with crystal glasses, and a dead flower in a vase (picture it in bloom). A framed map (the celestial globe) hangs above. When you turn around,

Sylvia's celestial globe.

to your right is a giant picnic table—no way you’ve ever seen one so big, not at camp, not at the state park. You have never seen a table this big, unless you’re Scandinavian or a Viking or something. The table has two massive detached wooden benches, yeah, so if you want to scoot away, your neighbor has to come with you. “Feast and fuck!” is what this table’s saying. There is a stack of woven mats at one end, each yellow or red or blue, the colors opaquely saturated, like dried Popsicle juice on a Popsicle stick. Farther to the right is a built-in relaxation center. An all-in-one couch, end table, shelving system, dark wood again, with a bare-futon-colored cushion, and lots of pillows, two lamps, books tucked into shelves, plenty of room for drinks and sprawling. To the left, another sisal rug, the color of sand, and a living room area: a low, round coffee table, more antique lamps, a circle of cushion-laden chairs. In the far corner, a writing desk. But straight ahead is where you want to be looking, because there is a divan/a settee/a fainting couch, whatever you want to call it, which I collapsed on immediately (after giving the bedroom and the bathroom a cursory glance). That first night, I felt like a queen, a courtesan, a high, happy guy in an opium den—someone with a hell of a lot of leisure—and I liked it. I got myself a beer. (I’d brought a case from the city, and a whole cooked chicken, a loaf of French bread, coffee, and some cereal). I grabbed an Agatha Christie novel from the one of the six or so massive shelves of books: The Mousetrap. The back cover reads:

Three Blind Mice… There are seven of them, five men and two women, trapped in a snowbound manor in an atmosphere taut with terror.

For one of them is a killer, who has struck twice and is about to strike again.

I’d read all the Agatha Christie I could get my hands on in junior high, but hadn’t read any since. I felt a warmish beer buzz radiate, the early evening sun washing across the floor, and I was eager to tuck in—when a postcard fell out soon as I opened the book.

Dearest Syl,

What the hell are you doing with yourself? I can’t believe you’ve been out on that farm for six months now and no one I know has heard a word from you or about you. We miss you, New York misses you—I daresay we need you.

At least send a bloody picture so I’ll know what color your hair is now. Here’s an Agatha Christie I hope you don’t have. If you still lived around the corner, I’d just bring it to you. Finished it Friday and thought of you all night.

All my love (would be better if you were nearer),
Fra

On the front of the postcard was a picture of a garage door, the kind that folds down over storefronts in the city, which had been painted with the image of a palm tree and a small, sandy island.

What kind of a name was Fra? It was postmarked August 1986.

NYC, 1986.

sign in Sylvia's (my?) driveway

to be honest, I can’t remember the last
time I’d seen her, Aunt Sylvia. She was my mom’s sister and she was on that “farm” out East. We lived on a real farm, in the Midwest. Difference being, we grew things: corn, soybeans, cows, pigs… Aunt Sylvia’s farm was mostly forest and a couple of flower gardens—at least that’s what my mom said (though she’d never been there). I’d never been to Aunt Sylvia’s farm either, until just now. But when I was a kid, I heard the adults chuckling about Aunt Sylvia “playing farmer” (with affection and, I realize now, a little something like jealousy—it’s a feeling we don’t have a good word for). She would send back pictures of herself. In one, she’s leaning on a shovel, wearing a big, straw sun hat, a tailored, sleeveless blouse, and seersucker shorts, in a mazelike flower garden. Now I wonder, who was taking the picture?

I wonder who she was posing for?

Aunt Sylvia was never married, so everyone was real quiet and weird about her. It was like 1984 when I started to notice the weirdness. I was only eight, but I never thought she was gay. At the time I didn’t know what she was. Now I think she just always had wanted to be some kind of an artist.

She was always “Aunt” Sylvia to everyone in the family, regardless of their relation to her—even my mom. Not ahnt, either, but ant, like the bug. Every five years, or so, Aunt Sylvia would come “home”—it was always home, even though she hadn’t lived in Indiana since she was sixteen, when she left to go to Bard College, which no one in my family had ever heard of. I still wonder, pre-Internet, how the hell she found that place…. She would come back looking like nobody I’d ever seen: dyed hair, ’50s and ’60s vintage dresses, stockings, red lipstick, a hairdo. The only time my mom wore a dress was for a wedding or a funeral, and sometimes not even then, and her straight, fine hair was always limply hanging, no curl, no spray. I always thought Aunt Sylvia was pretty glamorous, even though I suspected she could not differentiate me, her only niece, from the other ten or so neighborhood kids that were always around in the summer, all about the same age, some of the girls looking like boys, all wearing hand-me-downs, and hyped up on Pepsi.

I always felt like I needed to wash my face and brush my tangled, shoulder-length hair before Aunt Sylvia came over from the hotel she stayed at in town. The hotel had a swimming pool and once per trip mom would take us there and we’d swim in the pool. Mom wore a weathered brown suit, with a little flap around the waist that was supposed to cover the cellulite on her butt and thighs. It came with a yellow belt, and just made her look older than her thirty-six years. Sylvia, on the other hand, wore a bikini—and she was the older sister. A few years later, when I was fourteen, I went to the pool with Aunt Sylvia for the last time, so that must have been the last time she came home. Anyway, the only thing I remember about it is all of this dark, curly hair had been growing down my thighs, and I felt really embarrassed in a swimsuit for the first time in my life. And I wore shorts until I was almost in the pool, and put them on again as soon as I was out, and my mom yelled at me for getting them wet, ’cause that was all I had to wear in the car on the way home, and on the way home I left a wet butt mark on the passenger seat, which my mom rolled her eyes at.

I also remember that Aunt Sylvia always had to do things slightly differently—and she’d always tell us kids to call her “Sylvia, puleez, no ‘Aunt’…” Sylvia smoked like everyone else, though not Marlboros or even Camels, but some French cigarette that I sounded out over and over again as the pack lay on the kitchen table while the adults were sitting and drinking highballs (Sylvia’s was mostly just the whiskey on ice, I noticed). I would hover, trying hard not to get noticed so I could listen in on their conversation, and I would sound out silently: Gallwasseez, Goalowsees… I was out of college, I’m pretty sure, before I heard anyone pronounce Gauloises Gul-wahz—though I’m still not totally sure about the pronunciation.

Another thing Sylvia did differently: she disappeared instead of dying. The women in my family die early. Sylvia outlived her only sibling, my mom. Their mom, Louise, died at thirty-seven, in 1969, of what our family later began to suspect was a heart attack—women didn’t have heart attacks back then, though. When Grandma Lou went to the hospital, they treated her for a severe allergic reaction and the allergy shot was probably too much for her heart. My mom had smoked two packs a day, washing them down with black coffee in the morning and lite beer from sunset to sleep. She died at the age of fifty-two.

It was a surprise when my dad and I heard about Aunt Sylvia. First of all, the three of us weren’t what you’d call close. And though Sylvia was always impulsive and traveled all the time for work, this was different somehow. She’d quit working about ten years ago and this just didn’t seem like a vacation—what was with the secrecy? It was surprising, too, that she had left me a key to her house, with instructions to keep an eye on it for her. She didn’t specify anything, including how long she’d be gone. I was thirty-four, but not anyone’s idea of responsible. I’d been living in Brooklyn and sleeping on a saggy ten-year-old mattress on a bed frame that was held up by books. My dad was frankly skeptical of my ability to handle this situation, but he had his own farm to take care of.

So, I went up to check Sylvia’s place out. I rented a car, and arrived forty-five minutes late, after a wrong turn on a rural highway that I’m pretty sure was totally unmarked. There to give me the key was a neighbor, a friend of Sylvia’s, who everyone called “Skeeter” (I swear). Skeeter and I had spoken over the phone a few days before. He was sitting on the high deck, off the side of the house, waiting, smoking, and watching me impassively.

This Google Earth image was the first view I had of Decoy Green.

The gravel driveway seemed to end too soon, at the house’s foundation, so I awkwardly pulled all the way up, my bumper inches from the house, and parked on a slant, as if I were pulling into a grocery store parking lot. I wasn’t very familiar with driving.

“Sorry I’m late,” I called, walking up the deck stairs, noticing that he was calmly not standing up. “I was on 84 for twenty minutes until I realized I’d missed the turn onto 95, and then I stopped in a gas station for directions—that must happen a lot though, out here, the roads are hardly marked…” Over the phone, I’d had trouble placing his age, but in person he looked to be anywhere from thirty-six to fifty. He had one work boot on the railing of the deck, the other splayed out in front of him. He was wearing a camouflage baseball cap, with a big leaping fish (a trout, maybe) on the foam panel, and I wondered briefly what camouflage and fish had to do with each other. A pair of Oakley sunglasses was dangling from his ears, lenses hanging under his chin. He had on dirty Carhartts and a bluish T-shirt with a couple holes along the stretched-out bottom seam.

The pileup of butts floating in the liquid left at the bottom of a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew on the deck next to him illustrated how long he’d been waiting for me to arrive.

I smiled. I had this annoying habit of really wanting everyone to like me. It usually had the opposite effect. He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look put out, either. He finally stood up, stuffed his cigarettes in his pocket, screwed the cap tight onto his bottle of butts, and walked down the stairs. I was impressed that he didn’t seem to regard anything I’d said as needing a response. He shifted the bottle from his right to left hand, stuck his right hand in his pants pocket, and pulled out a set of keys.

“I gotta be in town in half an hour,” was the first thing out of his mouth. “I’ll show you the house now, come back tomorrow morning and show you the rest.”

He turned and I followed him. As he showed me around, I realized that he only responded to direct questions. He wasn’t rude, or terse. He just wasn’t a small talker. He was remarkably self-contained yet took up just as much room as he needed. His presence made me feel like a spaz. About twenty minutes later, I watched his truck disappear down the long driveway, and found myself alone in a house, now mine—at least temporarily—that I’d never been in before.