OCCASIONALLY SOMETHING HORRIFIC transpires—and in what seems like a minute, this something changes us. It changes us as sentient beings with souls and minds. It changes us as parents and siblings and children, as travelers and citizens and individuals. Certainly as artists and readers, certainly as writers.

After 9/11, writers wondered how or even if it was possible to understand the events that occurred. How and what and why to write now? What to read? Little seemed relevant or urgent enough. Were we as Americans anywhere near as savvy or admired as we had thought? One of our toughest, bravest, proudest cities was revealed to be susceptible. Even baldly vulnerable.

To me, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, was similar to 9/11 in its ability to demolish a country’s posture, not to mention its values and even aesthetics. As the news broke that day, disbelief rippled throughout the country and the world. No, we thought. Many of us glanced at each other, wondering whether this or that person was thinking the same thing: This cannot be right. THIS cannot have happened. This, here. And then, as confirmations came of all that had occurred in that school, a collective shudder and the impulse to turn away, perhaps inward, to regain our breath. To hold our children and our parents for dear life. And later, the impulse to assign blame (to graft meaning onto the meaningless)—to blame gun makers, the country’s health-care system for abandoning its mentally ill, politicians, a culture that glamorizes violence, video games that do the same, and the media for shining its spotlight on mass killers.

Again, the human capacity for violence has proven to be greater than we previously thought. Again, a dark cloud has settled over our country.

This unthinkable event, the sixteenth mass shooting of 2012, occurred toward the end of my reading cycle, just in time for me to freeze up each time I read a story featuring groups of children in harm’s way or gun violence or, heaven forbid, a school shooting. Pity the writers who may have still been trying to comprehend the shooting at Columbine High School. This was not the time to publish a short story about such matters.

A few months later, I write this with a still-jumpy heart. The reality and possibility of mass shootings have come to occupy my thoughts many times daily. When I walk my twin children into their kindergarten classrooms in their small elementary school. When I return to their school in order to drop off forgotten sneakers, when I stand beneath the camera that is now mounted beside the school entry in order to identify myself. When I go to any large, enclosed, crowded space. Malls, movie theaters—or not even large spaces. The subway, the train, any place where strangers find themselves in close proximity. There is a heavy stone in my chest during these moments that was not there before the shooting at Newtown.

I am enormously lucky—I have never witnessed or known anyone who was killed in a mass shooting. I do not and have never lived anywhere near where such a thing took place. I can only imagine how different every inch of the world looks to those who did lose a loved one.

In 1946, my predecessor, Martha Foley, wrote, “It is a literary truism that there must be a period of distillation before the real impact of some tremendous event, either historical or personal, can emerge in writing.” Now, due to the speed with which we receive our news and the graphic nature of its delivery, I think that the actual distillation time has shrunk, although I’m not certain that this yields writing as rich in perspective or depth of emotion. Before now, the strongest and most timeless stories about a transformative event had been written after a good amount of time elapsed. Now, writers’ frequent use of the present tense combined with our widespread exposure to up-to-the-minute news has led to a rise in stories and novels that trace the microscopic jigs and jags of grief itself. In other words, while we are grieving, we are now writing.

We may be sacrificing perspective or depth, but this does not necessarily amount to lesser writing. If anything, there is a new sort of immediacy, a newfound intimacy and urgency in our fiction these days. Witness, in the following pages, Karl Taro Greenfeld’s story of one man’s clumsy grappling with being let go from his job. Or David Means or Steven Millhauser as they tunnel so deep inside their characters’ fears and hopes that at least this reader was rendered nearly breathless. For evidence of technology’s increasing impact, see Elizabeth Tallent’s magnificent “The Wilderness,” which scrolls before us as if on a computer screen.

As I read in 2013, I will listen for a slightly faster heartbeat, one closer to our schools and children, one differently attuned to crowds and violence. And in years beyond, I hope to find a glimmer of meaning and the salve of perspective in some wise story about one of our saddest days.

Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content. Some years I work closely with guest editors as they read and hone their list. Other years, they prefer to read and select privately. Elizabeth was the latter sort, and delivered to me a terrifically diverse, interesting, and impressive table of contents. There was a bit of back-and-forth, but very little was needed in the end. Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.

The stories chosen for this anthology were originally published between January 2012 and January 2013. The qualifications for selection are (1) original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals; (2) publication in English by writers who are American or Canadian, or who have made the United States their home; and (3) original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not knowingly considered). A list of magazines consulted for this volume appears at the back of the book. Editors who wish for their short fiction to be considered for next year’s edition should send their publication or hard copies of online publications to Heidi Pitlor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02116.

THERE WAS A TIME when a telephone was something that hung on the wall or sat on a table, and when it rang you had no idea who was calling. “Hello?” People had different ways of saying this, of course. Those expecting disaster (my grandmother) would say the word with quiet dread. Those who wanted to appear friendly (my mother) would say it with perkiness: “Hel-lo!” Or a self-conscious adolescent might mumble “Hullo?” It was a question, more than a greeting. Before answering machines and caller ID, that word asked, Who’s there? What are you calling about? What is it you have to tell me? Rarely was one more attuned to the sound of voice than in the moment before the answer. Whoever had telephoned had done so for a reason: to deliver bad news or good, to report something overheard in the grocery store, to spread gossip or stop it, or to express concerns about the world. One anticipated the tone of the voice as much as the words.

A reader is in the position of saying hello. Tentatively, enthusiastically, or even with trepidation, the reader approaches a piece of writing with the unspoken question What do you have to say? And the writer answers, This. I have this to say, and I want you to listen to my voice, to the tone of my voice, because that will tell you what I have to say. In fact, in the first story of this collection, the narrator, an out-of-work actor, observes, “I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters.”

Quite naturally, we choose to listen to certain voices based on personal taste. And these days, as we glance at our ringing phone, we can make a decision: No, I don’t feel like talking to her right now, she goes on about herself and thinks every detail matters and who cares what her loser of a husband said last night. Turning away from a solipsistic, unedited voice. Or we think, Oh, it’s him, yay, I always want to listen to him. “Hello?” we say, with anticipation, because this guy knows when to spring the surprise, how to make us feel that what he says is confidential and important. His voice pulls us toward him. He lets us in.

I’D BEEN OUT of the conservatory for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died. We missed the funeral, but my father asked me to drive down the coast with him a few days later, to attend to some of the postmortem details. The house had to be closed up, signed over to a cousin. There were a few boxes to sift through as well, but no inheritance or anything like that.

I was working at the copy shop in the Old City, trying out for various plays, but my life was such that it wasn’t hard to drop everything and go. Rocío wanted to come along, but I thought it’d be nice for me and my old man to travel together. We hadn’t done that in a while. We left the following morning, a Thursday. A few hours south of the capital, the painted slums thinned, and our conversation did too, and we took in the desolate landscape with appreciative silence. Everything was dry: the silt-covered road, the dirty white sand dunes, somehow even the ocean. Every few kilometers there rose out of this moonscape a billboard for soda or beer or suntan lotion, its colors faded since the previous summer, edges unglued and flapping in the wind. This was years ago, before the beaches were transformed into private residences for the wealthy, before the ocean was fenced off and the highway pushed back, away from the land’s edge. Back then, the coast survived in a state of neglect, and one might pass the occasional fishing village, or a filling station, or a rusting pyramid of oil drums stacked by the side of the road; a hitchhiker, perhaps a laborer, or a woman and her child strolling along the highway with no clear destination. But mostly you passed nothing at all. The monotonous landscape gave you a sense of peace, all the more because it came so soon after the city had ended.

We stopped for lunch at a beach town four hours south of the capital, just a few dozen houses built on either side of the highway, with a single restaurant serving only fried fish and soda. There was nothing remarkable about the place, except that after lunch we happened upon the last act of a public feud; two local men, who might’ve been brothers or cousins or best of friends, stood outside the restaurant, hands balled in tight fists, shouting at each other in front of a tipped-over moto-taxi. Its front wheel spun slowly but did not stop. It was like a perpetual-motion machine. The passenger cage was covered with heavy orange plastic, and painted on the side was the word Joselito.

And I wondered: which of these two men is Joselito?

The name could’ve fit either of them. The more aggressive of the pair was short and squat, his face rigid with fury. His reddish eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. He threw wild punches and wasted vast amounts of energy, moving like a spinning top around his antagonist. His rival, both taller and wider, started off with a look of bemused wonder, almost embarrassment, but the longer the little one kept at it, the more his expression darkened, so that within minutes they and their moods were equally matched.

A boy of about eighteen stood next to me and my father. With crossed arms, he observed the proceedings as if it were a horse race on which he’d wagered a very small sum. He wore no shoes, and his feet were dusted with sand. Though it wasn’t particularly warm, he’d been swimming. I ventured a question.

“Which one is Joselito?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was crazy. “Don’t you know?” he said in a low voice. “Joselito’s dead.”

I nodded, as if I’d known, as if I’d been testing him, but by then the name of the dead man was buzzing around the gathered circle of spectators, whispered from one man to the next, to a child then to his mother: Joselito, Joselito.

A chanting; a conjuring.

The two rivals continued, more furiously now, as if the mention of the dead man had animated them, or freed some brutal impulse within them. The smaller one landed a right hook to the bigger man’s jaw, and this man staggered but did not fall. The crowd oohed and aahed, and it was only then that the two fighters realized they were being watched. I mean, they’d known it all along, of course they must have, but when the crowd reached a certain mass, the whispering a certain volume, then everything changed. It could not have been more staged if they’d been fighting in an amphitheater, with an orchestra playing behind them. It was something I’d been working out myself, in my own craft: how the audience affects a performance, how differently we behave when we know we are being watched. True authenticity, I’d decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, had quickly morphed into something fake. It happened instantaneously, on a sandy street in this anonymous town: we were no longer accidental observers of an argument, but the primary reason for its existence.

“This is for Joselito!” the little man shouted.

“No! This is for Joselito!” responded the other.

And so on.

Soon blood was drawn, lips swollen, eyes blackened. And still the wheel spun. My father and I watched with rising anxiety—someone might die! Why won’t that wheel stop?—until, to our relief, a town elder rushed through the crowd and pushed the two men apart. He was frantic. He stood between them, arms spread like wings, a flat palm pressed to each man’s chest as they leaned steadily into him.

This too was part of the act.

“Joselito’s father,” said the barefoot young man. “Just in time.”

AS A TEENAGER, her junior year, her favorite trick involved riding in cars with at least two other girls. You needed a female cluster in there, and you needed to have the plainest one driving. They’d cruise University Avenue in Palo Alto until they spotted some boys together near a street corner. Boys were always ganged up at high-visibility intersections, marking territory and giving off cigarette smoke and musk. At the red light, she’d roll down the window and shout, “Hey, you guys!” The boys would turn toward the car slowly—very slowly—trying for cool. Smoke emerged from their faces, from the nose or mouth. “Hey! Do you think we’re pretty?” she’d shout. “Do you think we’re cute?”

WHEN I WAS in college in Eugene I had a girlfriend named Nora Vardon. We had fallen together sort of accidentally, I talked to her first at a vending machine where we were both buying coffee, and things progressed in the usual slow ways, we went out one cold night to look at the blurry stars, and that led to some kissing, and from there we started the customary excavation of our families, revealing, not quite competitively, how crazy they both were, she with a raft of depressives and schizophrenics and me with a bunch of drunks, mainly the men on my father’s side. She had an open, genial, feline face, with big cheeks and dark eyes, and a big, soft body that was round in parts and that was covered, for three months out of the year, with the big textured bruises left by lacrosse balls. She was very pretty, really, and I counted myself lucky to be around her. I was skinny and out of necessity got cheap haircuts, so I wasn’t much to look at, and I tended to be secretive, I suppose you could put it that way, although I had nothing to be secretive about, being only twenty and unadventurous.

But Nora and I hit it off. She was studying botany, for which the college had a sort of reputation, and spent her hours in the long white greenhouses at the edge of campus. The heat affected her well. Her hair, brown and a little wavy, would become affixed to her cheeks, and as she worked at the potting tables her dark eyes would take on a comfortable, meditative languor there amid the odor of the soil and the dense humid air and the metallic smell of water dripping from the galvanized piping. To find Nora there I would have come from the library’s back door and out across a section of newly planted pines, which were staked to the earth as though they might otherwise pull up their roots and walk away. The sky in winter was usually sealed with a dense marine overcast, but inside the greenhouses the light was bright, brilliant, and contained. “My ride is here,” Nora would say to no one, as I came down the concrete walkway—or, “My Orlando,” with the accent purposely wrong, on the last syllable, and her mouth would make its charming little O, and I’d give her a kiss, and it would be enough to make me happy.

YEARS LATER, YOU would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother, would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.

You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.

And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.

BOB WAS IN THE DARK. He was looking down at his new home through the gap in the ceiling near the edge of the crawlspace, seeking where he could drop a coaxial line into his living room. His jeans and T-shirt were caked in dust, his Nikes were discolored, and he realized, as he squirmed between beams closer to the corner, that he had misjudged the location of the living room wall and was now above his thirteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom. He could make out a sliver of her stuff—a red plastic lampshade, a pair of old Converses—through the loose seals around an HVAC duct. There was also a sixteenth-inch hole he found drilled near the smoke alarm. From here, through an imperfect semicircle, as if he were staring through pinpricked cardboard at a solar eclipse, he could discern the area above his daughter’s bed where he had put up a wall-mount Ikea shelf. He had imagined that Becca would set out her crystals or KidRobots or some other colorful, youthful collectibles. But Becca hadn’t even bothered to unpack her boxes; his wife, Minnie, had been in several arguments with Becca over that subject. If he cocked his head, he could just make out the base of the monolithic pile of books and linen boxes with the moving company’s red-and-white logo on them. They stood in the center of her room, a monument to family discord.

What he had initially chosen to interpret as a sign of Becca’s inner strength—her indifference to moving to a new city and school even though she was in a phase of early adolescence her pediatrician labeled “the first change o’ life”—was actually confirmation of what Bob had silently suspected all along: Becca didn’t have any friends. Bob, who didn’t have many friends himself but tried to be an optimist, told her she would make plenty of friends at her new school. Becca just nodded and said, “Really? REALLY? That school, just a hundred miles away from my old school, will be so completely and totally different, in terms of people, personalities, demographics, THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM, that my whole, entire life will be MAGICALLY transformed?”

Bob had smiled and done an exaggerated shrug. Like, who knows? Like this was one of those crazy adventures that will be fun for the whole family.

Now, gazing again through the gap around the HVAC, he saw a flash of movement, the faded brown-blue of old, dirty denim, as Becca entered her room, her recently more protuberant rear end framed perfectly in the gap for an instant. He froze, suddenly ashamed. But this wasn’t spying, he assured himself. He tried to silently wiggle back through the attic, his thighs pressing down into old coaxial lines, perhaps staying too low in order to overcompensate for the occasional roofing nails that protruded down from the sloped ceiling, and then he felt something bite into his arm. Dropping his flashlight, he turned his elbow up, craned his neck, and saw two little pinpricks, as if he had backed his arm into the exposed prongs of a staple. Then he noticed, passing through the beam of the fallen light, scurrying away, a brown and orange, half-dollar-sized spider.

He crawled backward, not worrying as much about keeping his butt down, and swung out of the attic, down the ladder, and into the bathroom, where he checked his arm in the mirror to see if it was already swelling.

It was.

GOODWIN LEE AND his brother, Morehouse, had bought it at auction, for nothing. Even the local housing shark had looked down at his list and frowned and pinched or maybe itched his nose, but then waved his hand to clarify: no bid. The house was a dog. However, it had a bedroom on the first floor and was located in the same town as Goodwin and Morehouse.

They were therefore fixing it up for their parents. Goodwin and Morehouse were good with fixer-uppers, after all; they were, in fact, when they were working, contractors. And their parents were Chinese, end of story, as Morehouse liked to say. Meaning that though they had been Americans for fifty years and could no longer belay themselves hand over hand up their apartment stair rail to get to their bedroom, they nonetheless could not go into assisted living because of the food. Western food every day? Cannot eat, they said.

Goodwin had brought them to a top-notch facility anyway, just to visit. He had pointed out the smooth smooth paths, so wonderful for walking. He had pointed out the wide wide doorways, so open and inviting. And the elevators! Didn’t they make you want to go up? He had pointed out the mah-jong. The karaoke. The six-handed pinochle. The senior tai qi. The lobby was full of plants, fake and alive. Always something in bloom! he said, hopefully.

But, distracted as they could be, his parents had frowned undistractedly and replied, Lamb chops! Salad! And that was that. His brother, Morehouse, of course, did not entirely comprehend their refusal to eat salad, believing as he did in raw foods. He began every day with a green shake whirled in a blender with an engine like a lawnmower’s; the drink looked like a blended lawn, perfect for cows. But never mind. Morehouse accepted, as Goodwin did not quite, that their parents were fundamentally different; their Chineseness was inalienable. Morehouse and Goodwin, on the other hand, would never be American, end of story, which was why their parents had never been at a loss for words in their prime. You are finally learn how to act! You are finally learn how to talk! You are finally learn how to think! they had said in their kinder moods. Now, though, setting their children straight had at last given way to keeping their medications straight. They also had their sodium levels to think of. One might not think the maintenance of a low-salt diet could be a contribution to intergenerational peace, but, in truth, Goodwin found it made his parents easier to love—more like the diffuse-focus old people of fairy tales, and less like people who had above all held steadfast against the irresponsible fanning of their children’s self-regard.

LAMBRIGHT HAD SURPRISED everyone by offering to drive his son’s girlfriend home. The girl was three months shy of seventeen, two years older than Robbie. She’d been held back in school. Her driver’s license was currently suspended. She had a reputation, a body, and a bar code tattooed on the back of her neck. Lambright sometimes glimpsed it when her green hair was ponytailed. She’d come over for supper this evening, and though she volunteered to help Robbie and his mother with the dishes, Lambright had said he’d best deliver her home, it being a school night. He knew this pleased his wife and Robbie, the notion of him giving the girl another chance.

Driving, Lambright thought the moon looked like a fingerprint of chalk. They headed south on Airline Road. A couple of miles and he’d turn right on Saratoga, then left onto Everhart, and eventually they’d enter Kings Crossing, the subdivision with pools and sprinkler systems. At supper, Robbie and the girl had told, in tandem, a story about playing hide-and-seek on the abandoned country club golf course. Hide-and-seek, Lambright thought, is that what y’all call it now? Then they started talking about wildlife. The girl had once seen a blue-and-gold macaw riding on the headrest of a man’s passenger seat, and another time, in a pasture in the Rio Grande Valley, she’d spotted zebras grazing among cattle. Robbie’s mother recalled finding goats in the tops of peach trees in her youth. Robbie told the story of visiting the strange neighborhood in San Antonio where the muster of peacocks lived, and it led the girl to confess her desire to get a fan of peacock feathers tattooed on her lower back. She also wanted a tattoo of a busted magnifying glass hovering over the words FIX ME.

Lambright couldn’t figure what she saw in his son. Until the girl started visiting, Robbie had superhero posters on his walls and a fleet of model airplanes suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire. Lambright had actually long been skeptical of the boy’s room, worrying it looked too childish, worrying it confirmed what might be called “softness” of character. But now the walls were stripped and all that remained of the fighter fleet was the fishing-wire stubble on the ceiling.

Two weeks ago, one of his wife’s necklaces disappeared. Last week, a bottle of her nerve pills. Then, over the weekend, he’d caught Robbie and the girl with a flask of whiskey in the backyard. She’d come to supper tonight to make amends.

Traffic was light. When he stopped at the intersection of Airline and Saratoga, the only headlights he saw were far off, like buoys in the bay. The turn signal dinged. He debated, then clicked it off. He accelerated straight across Saratoga.

“We were supposed to turn—”

“Scenic route,” he said. “We’ll visit a little.”

But they didn’t. There was only the low hum of the tires on the road, the noise of the truck pushing against the wind. Lambright hadn’t contributed anything to the animal discussion earlier, but now he considered mentioning what he’d read a while back, how bald-eagle nests are often girded with cat collars, strung with the little bells and tags of lost pets. He stayed quiet, though. They were out near the horse stables now. The air smelled of alfalfa and manure. The streetlights had fallen away.

The girl said, “I didn’t know you could get to Kings Crossing like this.”

They crossed the narrow bridge over Oso Creek, then came into a clearing, a swath of clay and patchy brush, gnarled mesquite trees.

He pulled onto the road’s shoulder. Caliche pinged against the truck’s chassis. He doused his headlights, and the scrub around them silvered, turned to moonscape. They were outside the city limits, miles from where the girl lived. He killed the engine.

“I know you have doubts about me. I know I’m not—”

“Cut him loose,” Lambright said.

“Do what?”

“Give it a week, then tell him you’ve got someone else.”

Her eyes scanned the night through the windshield. Maybe she was getting her bearings, calculating how far out they were. Cows lowed somewhere in the darkness. She said, “I love Rob—”

“You’re a pretty girl. You’ve been to the rodeo a few times. You’ll do all right. But not with him.”

The chalky moon was in and out of clouds. A wind buffeted the truck and kicked up the odor of the brackish creek. The girl was picking at her cuticles, which made her look docile.

“Is there anything I can say here? Is there something you’re wanting to hear?”

“You can say you’ll quit him,” Lambright said. “I’d like to have your word on that subject.”

“And if I don’t, you’ll leave me on the side of the road?”

“We’re just talking. We’re sorting out a problem.”

“Or you’ll beat me up and throw me in the creek?”

“You’re too much for him. He’s overmatched.”

“And so if I don’t dump him, you’ll, what, rape me? Murder me? Bury me in the dunes?”

“Lisa,” he said, his tone pleasingly superior. He liked how much he sounded like a father.

Another wind blew, stiff and parched, rustling the trees. To Lambright, they appeared to shiver, like they’d gotten cold. A low cloud unspooled on the horizon. The cows were quiet.

“I see how you look at me, you know,” she said, shifting toward him. She unbuckled her seat belt, the noise startlingly loud in the truck. Lambright’s eyes went to the rearview mirror: no one around. She scooted an inch closer. Two inches. Three. He smelled lavender, her hair or cool skin. She said, “Everyone sees it. Nobody’ll be surprised you drove me out here.”

“I’m telling you to stay away from my son.”

“In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.”

“There’s no mystery here,” Lambright said.

“Silly,” she said.

“Do what?”

“I said you’re silly. There’s mystery all around us. Goats in trees. Macaws in cars.”

Enough, Lambright thought. He cranked the ignition, switched on his headlights.

“A man who drives his son’s underage girl into remote areas, that’s awfully mysterious.”

“Just turn him loose,” he said.

“A girl who flees the truck and comes home dirty and crying. What will she tell her parents? Her boyfriend? The man’s depressed wife?”

“Just leave him be,” he said. “That’s the takeaway tonight.”

“Will the police be called? Will they match the clay on her shoes to his tires?”

“Lisa—”

“Or will she keep it to herself? Will it be something she and the man always remember when they see each other? When she marries his son, when she bears his grandbabies? These are bona fide mysteries, Mr. Lambright.”

“Lisa,” he said. “Lisa, let’s be clear.”

But she was already out of the truck, sprinting toward the creek. She flashed through the brush and descended the bank, and Lambright was shocked by the languid swiftness with which she crossed the earth. Blood was surging in his veins, like he’d swerved to miss something in the road and his truck had just skidded to a stop and he didn’t yet know if he was hurt, if the world was changed. The passenger door was open, the interior light burning, pooling. The girl jumped across the creek and bolted alongside it. She cut to and fro. He wanted to see her as an animal he’d managed to avoid, a rare and dangerous creature he’d describe for Robbie when he got home, but really her movement reminded him of a trickle of water tracking through pebbles. It stirred in him a floating sensation, the curious and scattered feeling of being born on waves or air or wings. He was disoriented, short of breath. He knew he was at the beginning of something, though just then he couldn’t say exactly what.

SANDRA HOLDS HER eldest child, S.P., tightly on her lap while she listens to her sister, who is telling her about her husband, a heart surgeon. S.P. is for Sweet Pea or Sweety Pie or maybe it’s Simply Perfect, Sandra can’t even remember anymore. The child squirms a little, leaning forward as the mother runs her fingers through her fine brown hair. “Of course, his secretary adores him, his nurses adore him, his patients adore him. He’s wonderful with post-op care,” her sister is going on, talking about her blond, handsome husband, her large blue eyes shining with tears, while Sandra watches her two little ones, who sit facing each other on the slate that surrounds the big blue pool, their bare legs stretched before them.

Her babies are in their identical white swimsuits and their white sun hats, with the lace around the brim and the elastic under their chins. They are pouring water, which they scoop up from the pool in their green buckets, over each other’s legs and feet, wiggling their little toes and laughing loudly.

“They are too close to the water,” S.P. says, and Sandra laughs at her and says to her sister, “What a worry wart!” and leans back in the chaise longue.

“I’m not a wart!” S.P. says to her aunt, and adds, “And they can’t swim yet.”

“I’m only joking! You are my Best One! My Angel! My S.P.! who does know how to swim!” Sandra whispers in her ear, talking to her and squeezing her tightly, taking a playful nibble from her ear. The child shifts about on her lap.

“Do sit still, darling,” she says.

Sandra’s head is throbbing as she surveys the scene, shading her dazzled eyes from the glare. She stares in some disbelief across the vast, empty garden, the cluster of oaks, jacarandas, and royal palm trees, in the distance the brilliant beds of dahlias, strelitzias, and nasturtium, the fishpond, and the green lawns that stretch out before her. None of it seems quite real: the light too bright, the shadows too dark, the sky too blue. Even her sister’s blond curls and large blue eyes, which are filling with tears, don’t seem quite real.

There are few visitors visible at the hotel at this dead hour of the afternoon. Perhaps the guests are resting in their rooms in the heat of the day. Or perhaps everyone has gone down to the coast for the holidays, she thinks. The waiters stand about idly in their white uniforms, their arms dangling lifelessly, chatting to one another in low voices.

She feels a little sick, and she has the strangest dizzy-making feeling that she doesn’t know what she is doing out here on her own with the children. Why has she made this long, arduous airplane trip out to South Africa over the Christmas holidays without her husband? Why has she come back to the place where she was a child? She thinks of the almost sleepless night in the hotel room, the baby girl up so frequently, screaming with pain. Jessamyn often has the earache.

She holds on to her eldest child, S.P., who is squirming on her lap, but she has her eye on her youngest, who is, if the truth be told, her Favorite, her Pet, an adorable flaxen-headed baby girl only three years old who is carrying her green bucket on her arm like a handbag and tottering dangerously along the edge of the pool. “Careful, Jez, don’t fall in the water!” she calls out to her baby as her sister looks at her watch. She says she should be getting home. Her husband likes her to come home early in the afternoon.

“Don’t go yet. Stay and have a cup of tea,” Sandra says. She feels there is something else her sister wants to say to her though she is not certain what it is.

“I don’t have time for tea,” her sister says, but lingers on.

DAY AFTER DAY I went through the paternal motions, testing my son while he tested me, trying to teach him not only to do what I said, which seems like a given, but also to see and taste the world in certain ways, with an ideal in mind, a purified vision of the best way to live reduced to a rudimentary, five-year-old version: good eye contact with others, a sustained gaze, not just looking but giving an indication of having seen—a head nod—and maintained long enough to show respect and not too much fear. I wanted to be assured that he wouldn’t end up painfully shy. (He didn’t.) I feared he’d grow into one of those in-the-corner wallflower types, dainty and delicate, brooding, ponderous, sad as a young kid and then sullen when he hit the teenage years and then, as an adult, deeply depressed. (He didn’t.) I wanted him to open up to what was before him. So, I suppose, part of me—in the yard that afternoon, as I followed him up the hill—was happy that he was resisting my commands and remained slightly beyond reach. While of course, another part of me was ready to pounce on him as soon as he turned at the top and headed down to the retaining wall again.

You’re in the chair little man, right now, get inside quick, the chair is waiting!

I prefer a gentle pushing against my will—I was thinking in the yard that afternoon, as I got near the top of the hill. By the time I got to the top, he had turned and was jogging slowly north toward the Thompsons’ Scotch pines—the hiss, the high-up touch of wind in the crowns. Then he made a tight loop, wobbly with his legs in his jeans, with the cuffs rolled up, and his coat flapping (he refused to zip up, but I let that go), and, after glancing back at me, he pumped his arms up and down and screeched.

To my right, the river beyond the wall stretched at least three miles across, with the ebb tide and the flood tide meeting in the center to form a sheen of calm. The autumnal brown and gold leaves on the Westchester side threw long reflections that blended with the sky. Ah, glorious, I thought. Ah, a lovely and perfect fall afternoon. The sublime nature of taking care of my boy on one more bygone day. There was a deep, submerged loneliness in my chest as I stood feeling the wind, which was lifting, growing firmer and stronger from the north, bringing with it the first hints of winter—along with the sound of the birds, who had flown deeper into the Thompsons’ trees. Oh, the beauty of knowing that on that day I’d instruct the boy on how to listen carefully and establish proper eye contact, and how to hold his little wee-wee straight when he peed into the bowl, and how to manage his fork and take care with his chewing. Part of the glory of the moment, I think I thought, was in the pristine clarity of the innumerable potential teaching moments—Christ, I still despise that phrase!—that would bloom in the next few hours, as the light waned and the wind continued to lift and the remaining leaves twisted loose from their stems and were brushed away, skittering across the lawn, lying there, waiting to be blown away by the crew who would arrive midmorning on Saturday, four or five men, and lean down into the roar as their earmuffs snuffed them into a different kind of solitude. Evening would fall, and the lights on the bridge and across the river would throw themselves onto the surface of the water, appearing one by one as the sky faded, and then, safely inside the house, I’d look out the window and feel the fantastic unleashing of the pure, frank wistfulness that used to come to me at that time of day, and I’d feel, ahead, the future in one form or another, without which I could not endure the task. At some point in the future we’d be alone in the house and Gunner would be off at college, or married, and days like that would be sucked into a vortex—what other way to think of it?—of retrospect, with just a few memories of day-to-day tending: car-seat buckling, food feeding, punctuated by more pointed memories of trauma: stitches in his brow (lacrosse), asthma attack (holding him through the night, his tiny chest heaving against my palm), his separation problems at the preschool (me in the window watching him clutch hold of the old scratched-up piano bench, his mouth wide open in a scream, his face bright red and shiny). It was only with that sense that I could survive those moments, I think I thought.

Reaching the top of the yard, I became aware—in a kind of intuitive parenthood tracking mode—that I’d already given him one warning and release and another solid warning. It’s possible, I think I thought, that in the pleasure of running downhill, he had forgotten my first warning, which he never really let sink in, distracted by the sound of the birds in the trees (because he had turned to look at them), so that the second warning came to him as a first warning of sorts. I jogged behind him and kept the shadow/father distance and gave him space to decide what to do, wondering again if he’d just weave partway down, having absorbed my warning and then my second warning, which in theory nullified the first warning and showed my hypocrisy at not simply drawing the line and taking him inside, but figuring that another chance was warranted because it was possible that in his delight he simply forgot that first warning, but, on the other hand, I think I thought, this time he has at least two warnings echoing in his head, and so I held back on shouting to him again: if you run too close to the wall, it’s the chair. Instead, I stayed quiet and thought about how just that morning I had gone down and looked out the window at the river and thought it was strange that in the past two weeks Sharon had come home late each night, arriving after dinner, appearing in the driveway with perfectly fine excuses, saying the train was late, or there was traffic on the bridge. (Did she not know that I could see the bridge and the traffic, and looked at it in a habitual manner most days, glancing over there when I went down to the shore to examine the wall, worrying over the fact that it was crumbling, wondering how much weight the grass and sod and soil made pushing against the structure while, at the same time, worrying over the potential cost of repair, imagining the mason digging it all out, building some kind of temporary support wall, laying new rebar, framing it up, and then somehow getting a cement truck—Concrete, Sharon corrected me when I verbalized my worry one night. Not cement, it’s concrete—down into the yard?) Other excuses she gave included irate clients or long-winded partner conferences she had to attend because she was hell-bent on making partner as soon as possible. I’m hugely aware, I said, of the weird feeling I have about you and your work in relation to me and my position here as at-home caregiver, and sometimes I have to admit, I sit at the window and follow you to work in my imagination. Now don’t get me wrong, I cherish this time with Gunner and I’m happy to be doing this, but still, I feel strange about it at times, I said, while she pursed her lips and fixed me with her gaze, which included really fine, deep, dark, big eyes in a face that was smooth with lean cheekbones and a fine, fine nose. A fucking Helen of Troy face, I used to think. The kind of face that would start a war if you let it. And it did, eventually. I’d like to start a war, I used to think, seeing her face. I want to start something big and historic in her name. I want a monument to be built in honor of the torment her face creates in my fellow men. (I think I sensed—those mornings of window gazing—that she was being sucked into Manhattan. The pull of it was apparent to me in the jaunt, the sway of her hips as she skipped out to the car each morning. It appeared in the way she held her chin softly in her fingers, playing them out in a thoughtful manner as she listened to me describe my day while a slight—albeit graceful—incomprehension filled her eyes. All that beauty gave her a density that was prone to the pull of the city, I thought, I think.) Those mornings, with Gunner upstairs asleep—the soft sea-hiss snooze of his breath coming through the baby monitor—I sometimes had that deep, sensual foreboding that came when I thought too much about the short term and the way Gunner’s days, still fresh and new, his life just starting, stood logarithmically in relation to my own thirty years. A day was one small fragment of my life, and a day for him was a much larger piece of the pie. One day now is a big hunk of his five years on earth, I used to think, I think.

On those mornings, with my cheek against the glass, I imagined the soft rub of her attaché against her leg as she waited on the station platform, filled with a communal sensation of being in on a secret—a united sense of waiting to head to a common destination, and then on the train, with the attaché at her feet, the prim way she’d hold the paper, while over her shoulder old boat yards—bright blue tarps—and track detritus roared past and the river itself stayed calm and passive, blue on one day, gray on another. At the window, I anticipated the solitude of the upcoming day with Gunner for company, maybe some playtime with another kid and his mother, who would stand awkwardly as the erotic charge failed to form between us, and because of that fact we’d feel even more awkward, aware that it should form, if not a spark then at least a slight vibration of some sort as we watched and, on occasion, shouted instructive bits of information: Be careful now, not so hard, be nice, share, be good, Gunner, let her play with that. Annie, come over here and let me tie your shoe, not so hard. Or larger, more philosophical comments that covered the gamut from sharing to being kind to each other to the way the trees look against the sky, always pointing things out as a way to teach looking, to make sure they were seeing, and then, other times, encouraging them to find deeply imaginative modes—this happened mostly with a mother named Grace, who would instruct the kids to imagine elaborate pizza parlors, saying, Why don’t you cook some pizzas for me and Mr. Allison (Call me Bob, I’d say, please call me Bob)…

… again, at the window those mornings I felt the power of the city—all that culture and commerce compacted, hemmed in on all sides by water, held in to create a force powerful enough to radiate out all the way to our house, to the plot of land and the town itself, which, I imagined, was just at the edge of the force field, catching the last bits of energy before it was absorbed by the parkland to the north, the heavy stone Palisades and trees on my side of the river, and on the other side, the wide-open land and dirt roads and split-rail fences and horse stables and large estates in northern Westchester. (The field slides farther up on that side of the river, I thought at the window. There are fewer obstructions to dull its power over on that side.) At the window, I imagined Sharon entering her firm’s building near Forty-second Street, the glossy lobby with the security man up front, watching as she swiped her card. The glass partition zipped neatly open and she felt a grandness that came from her ability to pass through, while behind her messengers and visitors waited to sign in at the desk, looking somewhat distracted, holding on their faces the placid perplexity of the scrutinized, some part of them worrying the idea that a day might come when suddenly, on a big delivery or an important appointment, they’d be denied entry.

During those morning window sessions, I imagined Sharon as she entered a loaded elevator with her colleagues and felt that New York elevator pride that comes with squeezing close without annoyance, moving up into a moneymaking venture of some sort, lifted into the coffee smell of the office space, the brief hello at the reception desk… I imagined… the lovely entanglement in a web of selfsame need, risk, and obligation. Behind me in the kitchen the coffeemaker burbled and coughed.

We’re riding on an apex, I thought, standing in the yard that day, I think. We’re on a pivot. On one side is her career and her lively step out the door, while on the other is this deep solitude, with the birds still chirping madly, startling one another into a frenzy of noise, each one simply responding to the others and the others responding in kind. The afternoon light was starting to wane slightly over the water, catching riffles far out, as the smooth, wide, glossy patch near the center began to swirl itself away and waves worked themselves in, lapping the retaining wall. Then the birds seized up for a second, turned themselves into a fury of flapping, papery in nature, like long skeins of tissue being shaken out. I noticed all that as I turned to look at Gunner again. It’s not that I feel sorry for myself in any way, because I cherish these moments with my boy, delight in being with him. I relish the line I have to walk between being loving and soft and coddling one second, and the next, having to reestablish my command, or better yet, my guidance—a towering figure in his little mind—over his development at that particular point in time, I was thinking, I think. Love isn’t in the actual grab and heft of body when he comes out of school and runs into my arms, crying with glee. No. Love is the moment just as he comes out of the schoolhouse door, standing amid his friends, and searches for my eyes. Love is in the second he sees me, and I see him, dressed in one of his outrageous outfits, bright startling coats, weird hats, drooping strange pants (because we took delight in taking advantage of the fact that at that stage he had no idea what he was wearing, no sense of having to fit in, and we could get him dolled up—Sharon’s words—as cute as a button). That’s what love is, I thought each time I went to the school to pick him up. Then, as I lifted him and felt his weight, the purity of the moment vanished, and I would smell the stale, tart odor under his collar while he smelled, I suppose, the smoke and coffee on my breath and something else that later, at some point, perhaps even in memory, he would recognize as the first hints of decay.

The birds flew over the water and got about a quarter of the way across the river and then, suddenly, swooped in a wide arc back around toward the Thompsons’ trees again, catching up with one another in a teardrop, diverting me from Gunner, who, when he caught my attention again, was striking straight for the wall and the water. His tiny shrill cries mixed with the wind. In the compressed intensity of the moment, the birds were gone. The tide had shifted, heading down toward the city.

You’re getting the chair, I said, stop. No more warnings, I yelled as I charged down the hill. He was way ahead of me, of course, and in a moment he’d be at the wall and starting—naturally—his tiptoe tightrope walk along the structure, testing his own sense of balance and fear as it relates to the drop and the water below. (In the summer I’d lower him down to the beach, feeling his shoulder and joints and tiny chest at the tip of my fingers. Then we’d sit on an old pickle bucket and fish.) In a moment he’d be looking back at me, I was thinking, the wind in my hair, feeling, as I moved, a good, manly sense of dominion over everything. This is mine, I was thinking, I think. This is my chance at glory of a sort, perhaps I was thinking. I don’t remember. But he was at the wall, wobbling along, and then he tumbled backward, throwing his arms up in the air.

That’s it, I said. That’s it, Gunner. No more warnings. (Half thinking that perhaps this was actually my fourth warning, and that he’d long forgotten the first one, a few hours ago, before we went to preschool.) Across the river on the Westchester side, a train charged up the tracks like a sliver of glass, and when the wind died I heard not only Gunner’s giggles, as he swayed, but also the deep rumble of the diesel express that would go past Ossining, past Croton, and all the way up to Poughkeepsie, and I felt, hearing it, a sorrow that came not only of my inability to get to him on time but also something much deeper—I’d later think—that had to do with the fact that as he fell over the wall, he fell back with his eyes wide, terrorized by the way his balance had defied him.

Then I got to the wall and looked down and saw that the tide was still coming in and he was lying on his side in a few inches of water, with a shawl of wet, black sand around his collar, and his socks muddy, and his eyes guilty but also comic, looking up at me, establishing a long, sustained moment of good eye contact. Keep looking, I thought. Don’t ever stop. Continue to look at me like that for the rest of time, I think I thought. Then the fear that had began to form when I was halfway down the yard caught up, pure, sharp, and eternal in form, and struck me under the ribs. I was weeping softly as I lowered myself down to help him, lifting my palms and supporting his feet so he could clamber over the wall.

Then he stood atop it and looked down at me, his old man, as I wiped my eyes. He was looking down at a bright red face, bewhiskered and ruddy. A mouth moving on that face was saying, That’s it. You’re in the chair. It’s the chair for you, little man. No snack. Just the chair. I mean it. I gave you three, at least, maybe four warnings, the mouth kept saying. You’re damn lucky the tide wasn’t all the way up. Meanwhile, the day had folded into itself and combined with the terror to become vivid and pristine and perfect. Across the river the train was gone.

Then, as the wind roared along the Palisades at Hook Mountain and took on a northerly bite, as night began to descend upon the water and the tidal flow established itself in a southerly direction, working firmly past the bridge pylons, churning up white Vs, my son leaned and offered his hands to help me over the wall, and the air between us, before we actually touched, filled with an astonishingly pure love. It was there for a few seconds, and then it vanished, and I took him into the house to the chair, where I told him to sit until Sharon came home.

He resisted, squirming from the chair, but I insisted, saying, Sit there and wait until your mother gets home. Your time’s not up. Your time’s not even close to being up.

THE BOY SAMUEL wakes in the dark. Something’s not right. Most commentators agree that the incident takes place inside the temple, rather than in a tent outside the temple doors, under the stars. Less certain is whether Samuel’s bed is in the sanctuary itself, where the Ark of the Covenant stands before a seven-branched oil lamp that is kept burning through the night, or in an adjoining chamber. Let’s say that he is lying in an inner chamber, close to the sanctuary, perhaps adjacent to it. A curtained doorway leads to the chamber of Eli, the high priest of the temple of Shiloh. We like such details, but they do not matter. What matters is that Samuel wakes suddenly in the night. He is twelve years old, according to Flavius Josephus, or he may be a year or two younger. Something has startled him awake. He hears it again, clearly this time: “Samuel!” Eli is calling his name. What’s wrong? Eli never calls his name in the middle of the night. Did Samuel forget to close the temple doors at sunset, did he allow one of the seven flames of the lamp to go out? But he remembers it well: pushing shut the heavy doors of cedar, visiting the sanctuary and replenishing the seven gold branches with consecrated olive oil so that the flames will burn brightly all night long. “Samuel!” He flings aside his goat’s-hair blanket and hurries, almost runs, through the dark. He pushes through the curtain and enters Eli’s chamber. The old man is lying on his back. Because he is the high priest of the temple of Shiloh, his mattress on the wooden platform is stuffed with wool, not straw. Eli’s head rests on a pillow of goat’s hair and his long-fingered hands lie crossed on his chest, beneath his white beard. His eyes are closed. “You called me,” Samuel says, or perhaps his words are “Here am I; for thou calledst me.” Eli opens his eyes. He seems a little confused, like a man roused from sleep. “I didn’t call you,” he answers. Or perhaps, with a touch of gruffness, since he doesn’t like being awakened in the night: “I called not; lie down again.” Samuel turns obediently away. He walks back to his chamber, where he lies down but doesn’t close his eyes. In his years of attending Eli he’s come to understand a great deal about the temple and its rules, and he tries to understand this night as well. Is it possible that Eli called his name without knowing it? The priest is old, sometimes he makes noises with his lips in his sleep, or mutters strange words. But never once has he called Samuel in the night. Has Samuel had a dream, in which a voice called out his name? Only recently he dreamed that he was walking alone through the parted waters of the Red Sea. Shimmering cliffs of water towered up on both sides, and as the watery walls began to plunge down on him he woke with a cry. From outside the walls of the temple he hears the high-pitched wail of a young sheep. Slowly Samuel closes his eyes.

It’s a summer night in Stratford, Connecticut, 1950. The boy, seven years old, lies awake in his bed on the second floor, under the two screened windows that look down on his backyard. Through the windows he can hear the sound of summer: the chk chk chk of crickets from the vacant lot on the other side of the backyard hedge. For donkeys it’s hee-haw, for roosters it’s cock-a-doodle-doo, but for crickets you have to make up your own sound. Sometimes a car passes on the street alongside the yard, throwing two rectangles of light across the dark ceiling. The boy thinks the rectangles are the shapes of the open windows under the partially raised blinds, but he isn’t sure. He’s listening: hard. That afternoon in his Sunday school class at the Jewish Community Center, Mrs. Kraus read the story of the boy Samuel. In the middle of the night a voice called out his name: “Samuel! Samuel!” He was an attendant of the high priest and lived in the temple of Shiloh, without his parents. When he heard his name, Samuel thought the high priest was calling him. Three times in the night he heard his name, three times he went to the bedside of Eli. But it was the voice of the Lord calling him. The boy in Stratford is listening for his name in the night. The story of Samuel has made him nervous, tense as a cat. The slightest sound stiffens his whole body. He never thinks about the old man with a beard on the front of his Child’s Illustrated Old Testament, but now he’s wondering. What would his voice be like? His father says God is a story that people made up to explain things they don’t understand. When his father speaks about God to company at dinner, his eyes grow angry and gleeful behind his glasses. But the voice in the night is as scary as witches. The voice in the night knows you’re there, even though you’re hidden in the dark. If the voice calls your name, you have to answer. The boy imagines the voice calling his name. It comes from the ceiling, it comes from the walls. It’s like a terrible touch, all over his body. He doesn’t want to hear the voice, but if he hears it he’ll have to answer. You can’t get out of it. He pulls the covers up to his chin and thinks of the walls of water crashing down on the Egyptians, on their chariots and horses. Through the window screens the crickets seem to be growing louder.

The Author is sixty-eight years old, in good health, most of his teeth, half his hair, not dead yet, though lately he hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s always been a light sleeper, the slightest sound jostles him awake, but this is different: he falls asleep with a book on his chest, then wakes up for no damn reason and strains his neck to look at the green glow of his digital clock, where it’s always some soul-crushing time like 2:16 or 3:04 in the miserable morning. Hell time, abyss time, the hour of no return. He wonders whether he should turn on his bedside lamp, try to read a little, relax, but he knows the act of switching on the light will wake him up even more, and besides, there’s the problem of what to read when you wake up at two or three in the godforsaken morning. If he reads something that interests him he’ll excite his mind and ruin his chance for sleep, but if he reads something that bores him he’ll become impatient, restless, and incapable of sleep. Better to lie there and curse his fate, like a man with a broken leg lying in a ditch. He listens to the sounds of the dark: hsssh of a passing car, mmmm of a neighbor’s air conditioner, skriiik of a floorboard in the attic—a resident ghost. Things drift through your mind at doom-time in the morning, and as he listens he thinks of the boy in the house in Stratford, the bed by the two windows, the voice in the night. He thinks of the boy a lot these days, sometimes with irritation, sometimes with a fierce love that feels like sorrow. The boy tense, whipped up, listening for a voice in the night. He feels like shouting at the boy, driving some sense into that head of his. Oil your baseball glove! Jump on your bike! Do chin-ups on the swing set! Make yourself strong! But why yell at the boy? What’d he ever do to you? Better to imagine the voice calling right here, right now: Hello, old atheist, have I got news for you. Sorry, pal. Don’t waste your time. You should’ve made your pitch when I was seven. Had the boy really expected to hear his name in the night? So long ago: Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders on the radio, his father at dinner attacking McCarthy. War in Korea, the push to Pusan. Those old stories got to you: Joseph in the pit, the parting of the Red Sea, David soothing the soul of Saul with his harp. In Catholic working-class Stratford, he was the only boy who didn’t make the sign of the cross when they passed Holy Name Church on the way to school. Girls with smudges of ash on their foreheads. His God-scorning father driving him to Sunday school but taking him home when the others went to Hebrew class. No bar mitzvah for him. His father mocking his own rabbi for making boys jabber words they didn’t understand. “Pure gibberish.” A new word: gibberish. He liked it: gibberish. Still: Sunday school, “Rock of Ages,” the story of Samuel, why is this night different from all other nights. The boy lying there listening, wanting his name to be called. Had he wanted his name to be called? Through the window the Author hears the sound of a distant car, the cry of the crickets. Sixty years later, upstate New York, and still the cry of the crickets in the summer in Stratford. Time to sleep, old man.

Samuel wakes again. This time he’s sure: Eli has called his name. The voice stands out sharply, like a name written on a wall. “Samuel!” He throws off the goat’s-hair blanket and steps onto the straw mat on the floor by his bed. He has lived with Eli in the temple of Shiloh for as long as he can remember. Once a year his mother and father visit him, when they come up from Ramah to offer the annual sacrifice. When he was born, his mother gave him to the Lord. She had asked the Lord for a son, and that’s why his name is Asked-of-the-Lord. That’s why he wears a linen ephod, that’s why his hair flows down below his shoulders: no razor shall ever come upon his head. Samuel: Asked of the Lord. He enters Eli’s chamber, where he expects to find Eli sitting up in bed, waiting impatiently for him. Instead, Eli is lying on his back with his eyes closed, like a man asleep. Should he wake Eli? Did Eli call Samuel’s name and then fall back to sleep? Samuel hesitates to wake a man who’s old and filled with worries. Though Eli is the high priest of the temple, his sons are wicked. They are priests who do not obey. When flesh is offered for sacrifice, they take the best part for themselves. They practice iniquities with women who come to the doors of the temple. “Here am I!” Samuel says, in a voice a little louder than he intended. Eli stirs and opens his eyes. “For thou didst call me,” Samuel says, more softly. The old priest raises his head with difficulty. “I called not, my son; lie down again.” Samuel doesn’t protest, but lowers his eyes and turns away with the uneasy sense of having disturbed an old man’s sleep. As he enters his own chamber, he tries to understand. Why has Eli called his name twice in the night? He called out in a loud, clear voice, a voice that could not be mistaken for some other sound. But Eli, who speaks only truth, has denied it. Samuel lies down on his bed and pulls the blanket up to his shoulders. Eli is very old. Does he call out Samuel’s name and then, when Samuel appears beside him, forget that he has called? Old men are forgetful. The other day, when Eli spoke to Samuel of his own childhood, he could not remember a name he was searching for and grew troubled. Samuel has seen an old man at the temple whose body trembles like well water in a goatskin bucket. His eyes are unlit lamps. Eli is old, his eyesight is growing dim, but his body doesn’t tremble and his voice is still strong. On the shoulders of his purple-and-scarlet ephod are two onyx stones, each engraved with the names of six tribes of Israel. When he stands in sunlight, the stones shine like fire. Slowly Samuel drifts into sleep.

It’s the next night, and the boy in Stratford again lies awake, listening. He doesn’t really believe he’ll hear his name, but he wants to be awake in case it happens. He doesn’t like to miss things. If he knows something important is coming, like a trip to the merry-go-round and the Whip at Pleasure Beach, he’ll wait for it minute by minute, day after day, as if by taking his attention away from it for even a second he might cause it not to happen. But this is different. He doesn’t know it’s going to happen. It probably won’t happen, how could it happen, but there’s a chance, who knows. What he really needs to figure out is how to answer, if his name is called. In the story, Samuel was told to answer “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” He tries to imagine it: “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” It sounds like a boy in a play. Better to say “Yes?,” which is what he’d say if his father called his name. But the Lord is not his father. The Lord is more powerful than his powerful father. He’s more like the policeman in front of the school on Barnum Avenue, with his dangerous stick hanging from his belt. Better to say “Yes, sir,” as he’d say if the policeman called his name. If he hears his name, that’s what he’ll say: “Yes, sir.” Don’t shout it: say it. Yes, sir. A voice in the dark, calling his name. The thought stirs him up again. He’s too old to be scared of the dark, but the fear still comes on him sometimes. He likes to play a scare-game with his sister, the way they did when he was four and she was two. She lies in her dark room pretending to be asleep and he whispers, “Booooo haunt moan. Booooo haunt moan.” Then they both burst into wild, scared laughter. But a voice in the night is not funny. He’s through with witches, ghosts, monsters, isn’t he, they’re not real, so why is he scaring himself with the story of Samuel? It’s only a story. His father has explained it to him: the Bible is stories. Like Tootle or The Story of Dr. Dolittle. Trains don’t leave the tracks to chase butterflies, the pushmi-pullyu with a head at each end isn’t an animal you’ll ever find in the zoo, and the Lord doesn’t call your name in the night. Stories are about things that don’t happen. They could happen, but they don’t. But they could. What if his name was called? He would want to be there. He’d want to know what comes next. What did the Lord say to Samuel? He can’t remember. The most important part, and he can’t remember. That’s one thing about him: he can’t remember the important things. He can remember the prince climbing the hair to the top of the tower but he can’t remember the capital of Connecticut. Is it Bridgeport? The library in Bridgeport has long stone steps and high pillars. It’s what he first thought of when he heard that Samuel was serving the Lord in the temple of Shiloh. A temple is different from a church. Jews go to temple and Christians go to church. But Catholics go to Catholic church. And everybody goes to the library. He’s getting tired. At the backyard hedge, Billy turned to him and said, “Do you believe in Jesus?” His eyes were hard. There’re two answers to that question. One is “No.” The other’s what his father said to him: “Jesus was a great teacher.” But he was a coward and looked down. A door opens and he hears footsteps in the hall. Do his parents know he’s lying awake, listening for his name? He hears the door to the bathroom open and close. Sometimes his father is up in the night. If he opens his door and waits for his father? Tell me about Samuel. Tell me. Tell me about the voice in the night. If you heard that voice, nothing would ever be the same. He pushes the thought away. Tomorrow they’re going to drive out past the Sikorsky plant to Short Beach, where he can wade out to the sandbar.

One-fifty-four in the morning. The gods are out to get him. Sleep for an hour, wake for no reason, stare like a madman, waiting for sleep. Dragging himself through the day like a stepped-on snail. Won’t take a pill, they leave him groggy. Sloggy and boggy. That all you’ve got? Draggy and saggy. Baggy and shaggy. Like a hag, haggy. Now he’s alert, full of useless energy. In the old days he’d recite fistfuls of sonnets. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. Three things there be that prosper up apace. Now all he can do is lie there thinking about things, far-off things, high school, grade school, the boy in the room in Stratford, listening for the voice in the night. Did it really happen that way, or is he embellishing? Habit of the trade. But no, he lay there waiting for his name. The two windows, the two bookcases his father had made from orange crates, the bed against the other wall for his sister to sleep in when one of the grandmothers came to stay. One grandma from West 110th Street, one from Washington Heights. Father’s mother, mother’s mother, first one, then the other, never together. Waiting for the train at the Bridgeport station, with long dark benches and the row of hand-cranked picture machines. The something-scopes. Turning the handles, making the pictures move. The grandmother with crooked fingers who brought packs of playing cards and dyed her hair orange and wore lots of rattly bracelets, the grandmother with the accent who made cold red soup with sour cream. Mutoscopes. Two women born in the nineteenth century, who can grasp it, one in New York, one in Minsk, before skyscrapers, before horseless carriages, before the extinction of the dinosaurs. His own mother growing up with Russian Jewish parents on the Lower East Side. Her father escaping the tsar, embracing America, naming his first son Abraham, middle name Lincoln. Moving them to a new apartment every few months, skipping out on the rent. She said he sat reading Dostoyevsky in Russian while his sons waited on customers in the store. The Stratford boy’s own early childhood in Brooklyn, all there in the photo albums: pretty mother with flower in her hair on a bench in Prospect Park, pretty mother in wide-brimmed hat standing with little son in sailor suit on the Coney Island boardwalk. The two of them riding the trolley. Trolley tracks in the street, wires in the sky, the grooved wheel at the top of the trolley pole: a forgotten world. His invisible father holding up the light meter, adjusting the f-number, staring down into the ground-glass screen of the twin-lens reflex. Then Stratford, working-class neighborhood, where else can a professor afford to live. Milk delivered in glass bottles to the back porch each morning. Italians and Eastern Europeans, Zielski and Stoccatore and Saksa and Mancini. Riccio’s drugstore. Ciccarelli’s lot. Ralph Politano. Tommy Pavluvcik. Mario Recupido. What is a Jew? A Jew is someone who doesn’t cross himself in front of Holy Name Church. A Jew is someone who stays indoors practicing the piano on bright summer mornings while everyone else is outside playing baseball. His mother playing Chopin nocturnes and waltzes, DEE dah-dah-dah, DEE dah-dah-dah, teaching him scales, reading on the couch with her legs tucked under her. The mahogany bookcase by the staircase, the wall bookcase by the fireplace. His father driving them home one night: “Did you see that? Not a book in the house!” What is a Jew? A Jew is someone who has books in the house. His father demolishing an argument for the existence of God, his lips twisted in scorn. Jewish Community Center but no bar mitzvah. A tree every Christmas, a menorah once or twice. No baby Jesuses, no Marys or mangers. A package of matzo once a year: like big saltines. The strange word: unleavened. Dyeing Easter eggs, walking under the roof of cornstalks and branches at Sukkoth, biting into hollow crumbly chocolate bunnies, lighting the yahrzeit candle for the grandmother from Minsk. What is a Jew? A Jew is someone who thinks of Easter as a holiday celebrating rabbits. His mother a first-grade teacher, his father a teacher at the university. The grandmother with crooked fingers, once a piano teacher. The whole family teaching up a storm. A tutor who tooted the flute. Tried to tutor two tooters to toot. What is a Jew? A Jew is someone who comes from people who teach. Erleen, from the project in Bridgeport, watching gently over him each day when he came home from school. The rhyme in the street: Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a nigger by the toe. His father serious, quiet-voiced, his mouth tight: “People use that word, but not in this house. It is disgusting.” Negro: a word of respect. Respect people. His all-Jewish Cub Scout troop. “You don’t look for trouble,” the scoutmaster said. “But you don’t let anyone call you a kike.” Not in this house. A new word: kike. He tried to imagine it: kike. Hey, kike! Hit him, kill him. Did he really lie awake night after night, listening for his name? The child Samuel. All about obedience. Saul’s flaw: disobedience. Samuel thrusting his sword into the belly of the king of the Amalekites. That’s what happens when your name is called in the night. The righteous life, the life of moral ferocity. His father and Samuel, two of a kind. Samuel: “Thou art wicked.” His father: “You are ignorant.” A special sect: the Jewish atheist. The thirteenth tribe. And you? Who are you? I am the one whose name was not called in the night.

The voice calls again. This time Samuel doesn’t hesitate. He swings his legs out of bed and rushes through the dark to Eli’s side. “Here am I,” he cries, impatient now, “for thou didst call me.” Eli is lying on his back, his eyes closed, his hands crossed on his chest. All at once he’s leaning up on an elbow, searching Samuel’s face. Samuel feels aggrieved, anxious, expectant. What is happening? Something is happening. He doesn’t know what. The long hand of the priest rests on Samuel’s arm. Samuel suddenly understands two things: Eli did not call his name, and Eli knows who did. Does Samuel know? He almost knows. He knows and doesn’t dare to know. But Eli is speaking, Eli is telling him who it is that has called his name. It is the Lord. “Go, lie down: and it shall be, if he call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” The searching look, the hand on his arm: Samuel understands that he must ask no more questions. He returns to his bed and lies down on his back with his eyes open. He wants to hear with both ears. One hand is pressed against his chest. His heart is like a fist beating against the inside of the bone. What if his name isn’t called again? Eli said, “If he call thee.” Three times, and he failed to answer. Should he have known? He knew, he almost knew, he was about to know. Now he knows. What he doesn’t know is whether he will hear the voice again. If his name is not called, he will never forgive himself. And if his name is called? Then what? What should he say? Oh, don’t you remember? Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth. Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth. He remembers the first time he saw Eli, the high priest of the temple. A powerful man, with shining gems on the shoulders of his ephod. His legs were like tall columns of stone. His hands the size of oil jars. Now Eli’s beard is white, he mutters in his sleep. Difficult sons, wicked sons he cannot restrain. Calm yourself. Stop trembling. Listen.

The third night, and the boy in his bed in Stratford still hasn’t heard his name. He’s not really listening, is he? He thought he heard it once, a distant call, fooling him for a second, that cat cry or whatever it was. He no longer expects to hear anything, so why’s he still waiting? By now there’s a spirit of stubbornness in it: he’s waited this long, might as well wait some more. But that isn’t it. What’s it is, he doesn’t believe the voice in the night will come, but his unbelief upsets him as much as belief would, if he believed. If the voice doesn’t come, it means he hasn’t been chosen. He likes being chosen. He was chosen to represent his class in the school spelling bee. It’s easy to spell, he doesn’t know how to spell words wrong, but it still feels good to be chosen. He’s not so good on the playground, can’t kick the ball as hard as most of them, lucky if he gets to first. He wants the voice to call him in the night, even though it won’t happen. He doesn’t believe those old stories, doesn’t believe the prince climbing the hair or the thorns growing up and covering the castle, so why should he believe the story of the voice in the night? His father doesn’t believe those stories. His father doesn’t believe in God. But when the boy asked, his father didn’t get the angry look, he got the serious quiet look. He said you have to think about it yourself and make up your mind when you’re older. The boy wonders how old is older. When is when? If he hears the voice now, he’ll know. But he already knows. He knows he won’t hear the voice. Why should he be chosen? He’s no Samuel. He’s a good speller. He plays the piano with two hands, he can write a poem about George Washington and draw a picture of a kingfisher or a red-winged blackbird. But Samuel opens the doors to the temple when the sun comes up, Samuel fills the lamp with oil so that it burns all night. Down below he hears a car going by. It’s passing his yard and the vacant lot, the two bars of light sliding across the ceiling, now it’s passing the bakery down by the stream, he loves the bakery, smell of hot rye, the gingerbread men and the muffins with raisins, now it’s climbing the hill, sound of tires like the waterfall in the park earlier this summer, over the hill toward Bridgeport. He feels old, very old, older than Eli, he wishes he were young again, a child. He wishes he’d never heard that stupid story. Sh-h-h. Sleep now.

Another night, another waking. Not a good sign. Death by insomnia at sixty-eight. All Samuel’s fault, keeping everybody up when they ought to be snoring away. The boy in Stratford battling it out at the age of seven. By high school, no tolerance for the once-a-week churchgoers. Priest or atheist: choose one. The move to Fairfield, the beach, Protestant churches galore. Presbyterian, First Congregational, Episcopalian. Roper. Warren. Kane. No Jews allowed in the beach club. Who’d want to join a beach club? Reading the five arguments for the existence of God and their rebuttals. The ontological argument. The teleological argument. Walking along the beach at night, the deserted lifeguard stands, the lights of Long Island. Challenge to a friend: Why do you go to church? Why only on Sunday? He knew what he knew: always or never. If the voice calls your name, your other life is over. No going back. Short of that, sorry, please pass the ketchup. By the age of fifteen, done with religion, like the baseball books of his childhood. No regrets. Girls in tight skirts reaching up into lockers, girls in tight blouses hugging books to their chests as they hip-swing down the halls. Let me touch! Let me see! The house for sale on his friend’s street out near the junior high. “They’ll never sell to Jews.” “Why not?” “You know how those people are.” “How are they?” “They take over the neighborhood.” “You’re talking to one.” “Oh, you’re not that kind of Jew.” At age eleven, the talk with his father: “We don’t do anything in Sunday school. Just play games and fool around. I don’t want to go anymore.” His father taking his pipe out of his mouth, looking at him gravely: “You don’t have to go.” He’d expected resistance, a look of reproach. Might as well blame it all on Jehovah. Could have called his name in the night. The boy in Stratford, listening. Something extreme in his temperament, even then. Shy and extreme. Stubborn. You don’t call my name, I won’t call yours. Even Steven. Dr. Dolittle and Pecos Bill instead of Samuel and King Saul. Don’t have to go. The neighborhood goes to church, the family stays home and reads. In high school, asking his father whether he liked teaching. His father’s pause, his grave look, his utter attention: “If I were a millionaire, I would pay for the privilege of teaching.” The son knows he’s heard something important. He is moved, he is proud of his father, he’s envious. He thinks, I want to say that someday. They call it a calling. Samuel’s call in the night. His father’s calling. Lying awake remembering these things. Walking in his bathing suit, towel around his neck, to the beach in Fairfield with his parents’ friends from the city. Janey with her long black hair and tight white one-piece, waving her arm at the street of ranch houses: “Suburbia.” Her voice mocking, disdainful. New York judging Connecticut. Jews moving out of New York: abandoning the tribe. Always the connection to the city. The four years in Brooklyn, corner of Clinton and Joralemon, the grandmother on West 110th Street and the grandmother in Washington Heights, mother growing up on the Lower East Side, father on the Upper West Side. Childhood trips to the city, the stone bridges of the Merritt Parkway. The Museum of Natural History with dinosaur skeletons like gigantic fishbones, lunch at the Automat: the sandwiches behind the little glass windows. Horn & Hardart. Early admission to Oberlin, but he chooses Columbia. Walking along the eighth floor of John Jay Hall, the thrilling sound of violins and cellos behind closed doors: the good Jewish boys practicing their instruments. Weinstein, or was it Marinoff: “What kind of Jew are you?” A Jew from suburbia. A nothing Jew, a secular Jew, an unjewish Jew. A Jew without a bar mitzvah, a Jew without a bump in his nose. Later he develops the idea of the Negative Jew. A Negative Jew is a Jew about whom another Jew says, “You don’t look Jewish.” A Negative Jew is a Jew who says to another Jew, “Judaism is a superstition that I reject,” and to an anti-Semite, “I have Jewish blood.” A Negative Jew is a Jew who says, “I don’t believe in Judaism,” while being herded into a cattle car. Hitler, the great clarifier. His father’s German Jewish colleague, Dr. What’s-Her-Name, one of the first women admitted to a German university, her passion for Kant, for all things German. Stayed put till 1939. Blamed it all on the Polish Jews. “They gave us a bad name.” The boy in Stratford, lying awake at night. Hard to remember how it was. A game, was it? Scare yourself with witches, scare yourself with Jehovah. A shudder of delight. All those old stories, wonderful and terrible: the voice in the night, the parting of the Red Sea, Hansel in the cage, the children following the piper into the mountain. Hamlet and Oedipus Rex as pale reflections of the nightmare tales of childhood. Everything connected: David playing the harp for Saul, the boy in Stratford practicing the piano, the cellos and violins behind the closed doors. The boy listening for his name, the man waiting for the rush of inspiration. Where do you get your ideas? A voice in the night. When did you decide to become a writer? Three thousand years ago, in the temple of Shiloh.

And the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. Commentators disagree about the meaning of the word “stood.” Some say that the Lord assumes a bodily presence before Samuel. Others argue that the Lord never takes on a bodily form and that therefore the voice has drawn closer to Samuel, so that the effect is of a person drawing closer in the dark. In one version of this argument, the boy hears the voice and imagines a form standing beside him. All this, the Author thinks, can be left to the interpreters. What matters to us is that the voice of the Lord calls Samuel’s name. After all, Eli had said, “If he call thee.” For it was not inevitable that the voice, which had called three times and not received an answer, would call again. Now the boy Samuel has heard the voice a fourth time and knows who is calling him. He doesn’t yet know why the Lord is calling him, but he knows how to answer, for Eli has told him exactly what to say: “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” Samuel resists, the words refuse to come, then he says it aloud: “Speak; for thy servant heareth.” He hears his words clearly in the dark: “Speak; for thy servant heareth.” There is no doubt: he has said “Speak” and not “Speak, Lord,” as he was instructed to do. Was he so frightened of uttering the sacred name? He feels a rush of self-reproach, before commanding himself to be still and listen. He lies motionless, alert all over his body, fiercely calm. He has served in the temple of Shiloh ever since early childhood, but nothing has prepared him for this moment. He does not try to imagine what the Lord will tell him, but he readies himself to remember every word, in the order of speaking. Eli is awake, waiting in the next chamber. Eli will ask him what the Lord has said. Though the voice of the Lord is strong, Samuel knows it cannot be heard by Eli, and not because Eli is too far away to hear. The voice is for him alone. He knows this without arrogance. And he will remember. He has a good memory, he’s proud of his memory, though he watches over his pride so that it doesn’t become vanity. Words read to him or heard by him remain unchanged inside him. It has always been that way. Now the Lord speaks, and Samuel listens. There is nothing in the world but these words. The words are harsh. The house of Eli will be judged for its iniquity. The sons of Eli are wicked and Eli has not restrained them. Therefore the Lord will perform against Eli all things which he has spoken concerning his house. The sons of Eli will die on the same day. The House of Eli will come to an end. When the Lord departs, it is like the silence after thunder. Samuel lies awake in the dark. It seems to him that the dark has become darker, a dark so dark that it is like the darkness upon the face of the deep, before the Lord moved upon the face of the waters. The words have shaken him like a wind. He can feel Eli lying awake in his chamber, waiting for Samuel to tell him what the Lord has said. But Samuel cannot bring himself to leave his bed and go to Eli’s chamber. If Eli asks him, and Eli will certainly ask him, he will speak the truth, but he does not want to speak the truth unbidden. Samuel lies in the dark a long time, listening for the Lord, listening for Eli, but all is silent. Has the darkness become less dark? Can darkness be less dark and still be dark? The darkness is growing lighter. Soon it will be time to open the temple doors. Eli will ask what the Lord has said, and Samuel will repeat the terrible words. Samuel understands that nothing will ever be the same. But now, as the darkness is fading, without yet losing its quality of darkness, he wants to lie in his bed as if he could be a child forever, he wants to lie there as if his name had not been called in the night.

It’s the fourth night, and by now the boy in Stratford knows he’ll never hear his name. Still, he’s awake, and in case he’s wrong he’s still listening, no harm in that, though at the same time he makes fun of himself for lying there, waiting, and for what? His name? It’s only a story in a book. You might as well lie awake waiting for a genie to rise up out of a lamp. And even if it isn’t only a story, why would the Lord call his name? Samuel was an attendant of the high priest of the temple, Samuel was already favored by the Lord. The boy in Stratford goes to the Jewish Community Center on Sunday for two hours and skips Hebrew lessons. He doesn’t make the sign of the cross in front of Holy Name Church, but he looks forward to Christmas as if it’s the greatest day of winter. No crosses or angels on his tree, no lit-up statues of Mary blinking on the front lawn, but still, stockings, colored tree lights, glittery tinsel, presents piled high. Christmas: a holiday celebrating the end of the year. Rosh Hashanah: a holiday he can’t pronounce, celebrating something he can’t remember. The Lord, if he’s even up there, shouldn’t call his name. And that’s fine with him. He doesn’t want his name to be called. If your name is called, everything changes. It would be like going to Sunday school all week long. He likes the way things are: catching fly balls and grounders in the backyard, walking in the hot sand at Short Beach, firecrackers on the Fourth of July, sitting in front of the fireplace in winter reading a book while his father grades papers at one end of the couch and his mother reads at the other end, birthday parties, reading The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins to his sister, playing double solitaire with Grandma Lena, watching the black-and-white pictures rise into the white paper in the developing tray in his father’s darkroom, riding slowly in the boat through the Old Mill at Pleasure Beach. He doesn’t want to leave his family, doesn’t want to leave his room with the two windows looking down at the backyard, the big record player in the living room, where he and his sister listen to Peter and the Wolf. His mother looking at him one day, touching him, her eyes shining: “Oh, my firstborn.” His father answering all his questions with that serious look, as if nothing is more important than those questions. What happens when you die? What is God? What is the most important thing in the world? He doesn’t want to leave it all for the temple of Shiloh. School starts in a few weeks, he’s still got lots of summer left, picnics by the river, drives into Bridgeport, the smell of hot roasted nuts in Morrow’s Nut House, the elevator operators in their maroon jackets and white gloves in Read’s department store, the wooden ships with rigging in the window of Blinn’s. He’s done with Samuel, done with the voice in the night, but now, as he feels sleep coming on, he gives a final listen, just in case, straining his ears, holding his breath, listening for the voice that came to Samuel in that old story that’s only a story but one he knows he’ll never forget, no matter how hard he tries.

Again. Enough already. But hey, look on the bright side: four in the morning, three hours of sleep instead of one. The long walk after dinner, more than an hour, hoping to outwit insomnia. Walk for one hour, wake up at four. Walk for two hours, wake up at five. Walk for three hours, wake up at six. Walk for four hours, drop dead of a heart attack. His flab-armed father’s muscular calves. Walked all over Manhattan in his City College days, late nineteen-twenties, Harlem to the Battery. A safe city. The boy in Stratford walking up Canaan Road to the White Walk Market, walking to school along Franklin Avenue and Collins Street and the street that led past Holy Name. Calves skinny as forearms. His father walking a mile to the bus stop each morning to catch the bus to Bridgeport, no car till the boy is in second grade: city people don’t drive. No television till fifth grade: TV is for people who don’t read. Last in the neighborhood. Back from Manhattan with a ten-inch box, an Air King, set up on a table next to the piano. The feverish pleasure of black-and-white cartoons. Czerny exercises and Farmer Al Falfa. Mozart and Mighty Mouse. His mother playing Schumann and laughing with him at The Merry Mailman. His grave father bent over the Scrooge McDuck comic, praising the diving board in the money bin. Reading Tootle to him, telling him how good the first sentence is. “Far, far to the west of everywhere is the village of Lower Trainswitch.” Far, far to the west of everywhere. His father said, “There are three great opening sentences in all of literature. The first is ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ The second is ‘Call me Ishmael.’ The third is ‘Far, far to the west of everywhere is the village of Lower Trainswitch.’” A father who’s serious and funny: you have to watch his face carefully. The book about the whale: he knows where it is on the shelf, he’s held it in his hands, thinking, When I’m older. The whale, God: when he’s older. Books, always books. Ten years old: his father lashing out at Eisenhower. “He doesn’t open a book!” The trip to Spain after Columbia, one-way ticket, two pieces of luggage: one for clothes, one for books. The boy in Stratford lying awake at night because of a story in a book. What’s a story? A demon in the night. He wants to protect the boy, warn him before it’s too late. Don’t listen to stories! They’ll keep you awake at night, suck out your blood, leave teeth marks in your skin. Let him sleep! Let him live! His New York Jew parents in working-class Stratford, with their books and their piano. The professor who doesn’t do work with his hands. Joey’s father a machinist at the helicopter plant, Mike’s father a carpenter who builds his own house in the vacant lot on the other side of the hedge. Joey turning to him with a fighting look: “Can your father make a wheel?” The old sun-browned Italian men working in their gardens. The grapevines growing all over Jimmy Stoccatore’s high fence, the bunches of purple grapes, heavy in the hand. Old man Ciccarelli chasing kids out of his lot. Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe. Not in this house. The Jewish Boy Scout troop, where he learned to tie a sheepshank but never could identify poison sumac. His refusal to be Jesus in the Sunday school play. Mrs. Kraus’s shocked surprise. “But why?” “Because Jesus betrayed the Jews.” Her confusion, fear. “I never taught you that!” His father: “Jesus was a great teacher.” Sixty years later, awake at night, at the mercy of memory. Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair! And the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. The boy in Stratford, listening. Thank you, Old Man of the Sky, for not calling his name. Better for all concerned. He can’t really have believed it, can he? Working himself up into a temporary blaze of half-belief, a possibility: a ghost in the dark. Better for him to stay out of the temple of Shiloh, better to go play in the green backyards of Stratford, grow up in a world of family excursions and shelves of books until the writing fever seized him and claimed him for life. A calling. Not Samuel’s call but another. Not that way but this way. Samuel ministering unto the Lord, his teacher-father ministering unto the generations. And the son? What about him? Far, far to the west of everywhere, ministering unto the Muse. Thanks, Old Sea-Parter, for leaving me be. Tired now. Soon we’ll all sleep.

FOR THE THIRD TIME in three years, they talked about what would be a suitable birthday present for her deranged son. There was so little they were actually allowed to bring: almost everything could be transformed into a weapon, and so most items had to be left at the front desk and then, if requested, brought in later by a big blond aide, who would look the objects over beforehand for their wounding possibilities. Pete had brought a basket of jams, but they were in glass jars and so not permitted. “I forgot about that,” he said. The jars were arranged by color, from the brightest marmalade to cloudberry to fig, as if they contained the urine tests of an increasingly ill person. Just as well they’ll be confiscated, she thought. They would find something else to bring.

By the time her son was twelve and had begun his dazed and quiet muttering, had given up brushing his teeth, Pete had been in their lives for six years, and now four more years had passed. The love they had for Pete was long and winding, with hidden turns but no real halts. Her son thought of him as a kind of stepfather. She and Pete had got old together, though it showed more on her, with her black shirtdresses worn for slimming and her now graying hair undyed and often pinned up with strands hanging down like Spanish moss. Once her son had been stripped and gowned and placed in the facility, she too had removed her necklaces, earrings, scarves—all her prosthetic devices, she said to Pete, trying to amuse—and put them in a latched accordion file under her bed. She was not allowed to wear them when visiting, so she would no longer wear them at all, a kind of solidarity with her child, a new widowhood on top of the widowhood she already possessed. Unlike other women her age (who tended to try too hard, with lurid lingerie and flashing jewelry), she now felt that that sort of effort was ludicrous, and she went out into the world like an Amish woman, or perhaps, even worse, when the unforgiving light of spring hit her face, an Amish man. If she was going to be old, let her be a full-fledged citizen of the old country! “To me, you always look so beautiful,” Pete no longer said.

Pete had lost his job in the recent economic downturn. At one point, he had been poised to live with her, but her child’s deepening troubles had caused him to pull back. He said that he loved her but could not find the space he needed for himself in her life or in her house. (He did not blame her son—or did he?) He eyed with somewhat visible covetousness and sour remarks the front room, which her son, when home, lived in with large blankets and empty ice-cream pints, an Xbox, and DVDs.

She no longer knew where Pete went, sometimes for weeks at a time. She thought it an act of vigilance and attachment that she did not ask, tried not to care. She once grew so hungry for touch that she went to the Stressed Tress salon around the corner just to have her hair washed. The few times she had flown to Buffalo to see her brother and his family, at airport security she had chosen the pat-downs and the wandings rather than the scanning machine.

“Where is Pete?” her son cried out during visits she made alone, his face scarlet with acne, swollen and wide with the effects of medications that had been changed, then changed again, and she said that Pete was busy today, but soon, soon, maybe next week, he would come. A maternal vertigo beset her, the room circled, and the thin scars on her son’s arms sometimes seemed to spell out Pete’s name, the loss of fathers etched primitively in an algebra of skin. In the carousel spin of the room, those white webbed lines resembled coarse campground graffiti, as when young people used to stiffly carve the words “PEACE” and “FUCK” into picnic tables and trees, the “C” three-quarters of a square. Mutilation was a language. And vice versa. The cutting endeared her boy to the girls, many of whom were cutters themselves and seldom saw a boy who was one, and so in the group sessions he became popular, which he neither minded nor perhaps really noticed. When no one was looking, he sometimes cut the bottoms of his feet—with crisp paper from crafts hour. In group, he pretended to read the girls’ soles like palms, announcing the arrival of strangers and the progress toward romance—“toemances,” he called them—and sometimes seeing his own fate in what they had cut there.

Now she and Pete went to see her son without the jams but with a soft deckle-edged book about Daniel Boone, pulled from her own bookcase, which was allowed, even though her son would believe that it contained messages for him, believe that, although it was a story about a long-ago person, it was also the story of his own sorrow and heroism in the face of every manner of wilderness, defeat, and abduction, that his own life could be draped over the book, which was simply a noble armature for the revelation of tales of him. There would be clues in the words on pages with numbers that added up to his age: 97, 88, 466. There would be other veiled references to his existence. There always were.

They sat at the visitors’ table together, and her son set the book aside and did try to smile at both of them. There was still sweetness in his eyes, the sweetness he’d been born with, even if fury could dart in a scattershot fashion across them. Someone had cut his tawny hair—or, at least, had tried. Perhaps the staff person hadn’t wanted the scissors to stay near him for a prolonged period and had snipped quickly, then leaped away, approached again, grabbed and snipped, then jumped back. That’s what it looked like. Her son had wavy hair that had to be cut carefully. Now it no longer cascaded down but was close to his head, springing out at angles that would likely matter to no one but a mother.

“So where have you been?” her son asked Pete.

“Good question,” Pete said, as if praising the thing would make it go away. How could people be mentally well in such a world?

“Do you miss us?” the boy asked.

Pete did not answer.

“Do you think of me when you look at the black capillaries of the trees at night?”

“I suppose I do.” Pete stared back at him, so as not to shift in his seat. “I am always hoping that you are okay and that they treat you well here.”

“Do you think of my mom when you stare up at the clouds and all they hold?”

Pete fell silent again.

“That’s enough,” she said to her son, who turned to her with a change of expression.

“There’s supposed to be cake this afternoon for someone’s birthday,” he said.

“That will be nice!” she said, smiling back.

“No candles, of course. Or forks. We’ll just have to grab the frosting and mash it into our eyes for blinding. Do you ever think about how, at that moment of the candles, time stands still, even as the moments carry away the smoke? It’s like the fire of burning love. Do you ever wonder why so many people have things they don’t deserve but how absurd all those things are to begin with? Do you really think a wish can come true if you never ever ever ever ever ever tell it to anyone?”

THIS IS A SLOW TRAIN anyway, and it has slowed some more for the curve. Jackson is the only passenger left, and the next stop is about twenty miles ahead. Then the stop at Ripley, then Kincardine and the lake. He is in luck and it’s not to be wasted. Already he has taken his ticket stub out of its overhead notch.

He heaves his bag and sees it land just nicely, in between the rails. No choice now—the train’s not going to get any slower.

He takes his chance. A young man in good shape, agile as he’ll ever be. But the leap, the landing, disappoints him. He’s stiffer than he’d thought, the stillness pitches him forward, his palms come down hard on the gravel between the ties, he’s scraped the skin. Nerves.

The train is out of sight; he hears it putting on a bit of speed, clear of the curve. He spits on his hurting hands, getting the gravel out. Then picks up his bag and starts walking back in the direction he has just covered on the train. If he followed the train, he would show up at the station there well after dark. He’d still be able to complain that he’d fallen asleep and wakened all mixed up, thinking he’d slept through his stop when he hadn’t, jumped off all confused.

He would have been believed. Coming home from so far away, from Germany and the war, he could have got mixed up in his head. It’s not too late, he would be where he was supposed to be before midnight. But all the time he’s thinking this, he’s walking in the opposite direction. He doesn’t know many names of trees. Maples, that everybody knows. Pines. He’d thought that where he jumped was in some woods, but it wasn’t. The trees are just along the track, thick on the embankment, but he can see the flash of fields behind them. Fields green or rusty or yellow. Pasture, crops, stubble. He knows just that much. It’s still August.

And once the noise of the train has been swallowed up, he realizes there isn’t the perfect quiet around that he would have expected. Plenty of disturbance here and there, a shaking of the dry August leaves that wasn’t wind, a racket of unknown, unseen birds chastising him.

People he’d met in the past few years seemed to think that if you weren’t from a city, you were from the country. And that was not true. Jackson himself was the son of a plumber. He had never been in a stable in his life or herded cows or stoked grain. Or found himself as now stumping along a railway track that seemed to have reverted from its normal purpose of carrying people and freight to become a province of wild apple trees and thorny berry bushes and trailing grapevines and crows scolding from perches you could not see. And right now a garter snake slithering between the rails, perfectly confident he won’t be quick enough to tramp on and murder it. He does know enough to figure that it’s harmless, but its confidence riles him.

TIRED OF TELLING her own story at A.A., Hil was trying to tell the story of her neighbor. It had been a peculiar week. “So she comes to my house a few nights ago,” Hil began, “like around nine, bing-bong, drunk as a skunk, as usual, right in the middle of this show my roommate and I are watching. I go to the door and there she is, fifty-something, a totally naked lady standing under the porch light.” At the time, it had seemed designed to charm, her coy drunken neighbor sporting a plaid porkpie hat and holding a toothbrush like a flag or a flower or a torch. Choreographed, at least, and embarrassing to behold. Bergeron Love, grande dame in her own mind and all around the block.

“Looks like somebody’s not getting enough attention,” Hil had murmured as she unlocked the door. The night was soggy, Houston autumn, frogs like squeezeboxes wheezing in and out. Her neighbor’s nakedness seemed sad and enervated, breasts flat on her chest, a kind of melted look to her flesh, ankles thick on splayed bare feet. Southern belle in decline, a dismal After picture.

What had Before looked like?

“You gonna invite me in?” Bergeron demanded, raising her eyebrows flirtatiously in an attempt to rally her own outlandishness. She was known in the neighborhood for being a character—some composite of Miss Havisham, Norma Desmond, and Scarlett O’Hara—her ancient family manse, with its aspect of ruined wedding cake, fenced off as if to contain inmates, its fetid kidney-shaped pool, by which her multiple orange cats congregated. Sometimes Bergeron’s antics were whimsical—crashing a dinner or a cocktail party, for example, or hiring someone in a gorilla suit to deliver balloons—and sometimes they were a serious pain in the ass: reporting overgrown lawns or loose dogs or long-term parked cars.

“You can’t exactly say no to a naked lady on your doorstep, can you?” Hil asked rhetorically at the meeting. She glanced at the smiling older man holding the leash of his helper animal. There ought always to be a blind man grinning encouragingly, receptively, at meetings, she thought. The dog lay panting at his feet, its head held a little unnaturally high by the leash. The man’s genial countenance was generic—through every story, no matter how unpleasant, he smiled benignly beneath his lovely hair, wavy and white like meringue. He had, Hil thought, become like a dog himself, unable to judge.

“My roommate had never met my neighbor before, so I introduced them.” How strange to see a clothed person shake hands with a naked one; it was like the meeting of two utterly different tribes. Bergeron Love, this is Janine.

“Nice to meet you,” Janine said, averting her eyes.

“Janine is getting her degree at the U.,” Hil offered. “In social work,” she added, since Janine was shy.

“Ha!” Bergeron Love said, raising her toothbrush. “You can consider this visit a piece of immersion homework! What the hell is that?” she asked, aiming the brush at the paused image on the television.

“A bullet puncturing somebody’s heart in slow motion,” Janine said. On the screen, a few perfect circles: bullet, organ, splatter. “Not actually,” she added.

“Well, obviously not actually,” Bergeron said. “One of those true-crime shows? I love those, but my boyfriend, Boyd, can’t take it. He literally can’t watch gore. Isn’t that just typical?” Boyfriend Boyd was a mousy man who hid behind a pair of giant square glasses and a push-broom mustache. Every school day morning he donned an orange vest and stood blowing into a whistle on the corner of Westheimer and Taft, waving his arms to help the children across. Only with that vivid vest and shrill whistle did he seem to have much confidence. Then, or after a few stiff drinks.

“You want a robe, Bergeron?” Hil asked. The woman was going to either sit or fall down, and the nearest chair was the one Hil’s fifteen-year-old son usually used.

“Why would I want a robe?” Bergeron demanded. “You got a problem with the human body? You’re watching that shit on TV and you can’t look at me?”

“I just didn’t want her naked butt on the chair where my son liked to sit,” Hil explained to the A.A. meeting. “But she kind of collapses in his chair anyway and starts to ramble on about her fucked-up life. Sorry, Jim,” Hil added. The blind man had flinched; his single admission, in all the time that he’d occupied his position as accepting group focal point, was that the word fuck hurt his feelings. He nodded now, recovered, absolving.

“Friday night,” Bergeron Love had said. “I’m walking buck fucking naked up and down the street, and I can’t even get arrested!”

“That’s partly your fault, you know, Berge,” Hil said, explaining to Janine that Bergeron, years earlier, had been almost solely responsible for rousting a homeless shelter and the homeless who lived there from the neighborhood. “Remember all those drunk bums?” Hil said.

“Pissing in our yards,” Bergeron recalled. “Leaving all their Sudafed trash in the park. You don’t know the half of what I kept off this street. And then they wanted to turn that flophouse into an AIDS clinic. No, ma’am, said I.”

Civic duty had once been a Love family hallmark; there were bridges and schools and state parks commemorating the name. But the more recent generations had had to spend their money on lawyers instead: fighting class-action suits over working conditions at their oil refineries or covering up the scandalous dalliances of other Loves.

“But, Berge, if those homeless guys were still around, there’d have been more action out there tonight. They would have been ecstatic to see you coming,” Hil said. And Bergeron laughed appreciatively, conceding the point, then wondered aloud what a person had to do to get a drink around here. “I had an open container until just a little bit ago,” she explained. “There might be some broken glass out on your walkway—sorry about that.”

Janine jumped at the chance to leave the room to make drinks.

“That is a big old gal,” Bergeron Love whispered.

Hil couldn’t disagree; Janine was three times her own size, a woman who must have had to eat most of the day to maintain her weight, and yet Hil had never seen her do it. Janine had her own shelves in the fridge and cupboards, plastic grocery bags came and went, and still Hil had never shared a meal with her.

“You’re lucky she’s not the nudie here,” Bergeron said, then added, in her normal voice, “Where’s your son? Out on a date? Raising some high school hell?”

“He’s here,” Hil said. Had he heard Bergeron’s arrival, from his bedroom? Declined to enter the fray? No doubt he was just listening to music on headphones, reading a philosophy book, texting with his school-hours-only girlfriend. Jeremy led a quiet, self-contained life; his peers seemed to frighten him a little. He wasn’t ready, quite yet, to go unguarded into the night. It was he who every evening checked the locks and switched off the lights. After Hil went to bed, he and Janine would play complex and violent video games into the wee hours, speaking a fascinating coded language together while adroitly operating their controllers, never taking their eyes from the divided screen. For this and other reasons, Janine was an excellent roommate to both Hil and Jeremy, her own social life nearly nonexistent. Like Hil, she went to meetings to discuss her defining, overwhelming weakness; in the kitchen now she was no doubt devouring a frozen chocolate bar in addition to mixing gin and tonics. She insisted on keeping the chocolate frozen, despite the crown she’d broken just last week. Addicts, Hil marveled: so dedicated!

THERE IS A PICTURE of me standing with my cousin Nemecia in the bean field. On the back is penciled in my mother’s hand, Nemecia and Maria, Tajique, 1929. Nemecia is thirteen; I am six. She is wearing a rayon dress that falls to her knees, glass beads, and real silk stockings, gifts from her mother in California. She wears a close-fitting hat, like a helmet, and her smiling lips are pursed. She holds tight to my hand. Even in my white dress I look like a boy; my hair, which I have cut myself, is short and jagged. Nemecia’s head is tilted; she looks out from under her eyelashes at the camera. My expression is sullen, guilty. I don’t remember the occasion for the photograph, or why we were dressed up in the middle of the dusty field. All I remember of the day is that Nemecia’s shoes had heels, and she had to walk tipped forward on her toes to prevent them from sinking into the dirt.

DAYS BEFORE SHE MET the novelist, Cora went to the library and brought home a stack of plastic-sleeved hardcovers with one-word titles like Heirloom and Ruffian and Seductress. Her favorite was an early effort with an unusually loquacious title: The Illegitimate Prince’s Child. At first it was unclear who was illegitimate, the prince or his child. It turned out to be both. During the Hep C Support Group at the drop-in, Cora read aloud sentences like “Evelina knew Rolf would never marry her if she revealed her true station, but having been a bastard himself, how could he inflict the same fate on the unborn child inside her?” She regaled the needle-exchange staff with passages from Ruffian, substituting clients’ names for the well-endowed hero’s. She knew she was being inappropriate but she couldn’t stop. She studied Yvonne Borneo’s soft-focus author photos and imagined the hilarious incongruity of her vaunted good works—scattering gold pieces to hookers as she was borne down Mission Street on a litter, that sort of thing—and now that the appointed time had arrived for them to meet, she wanted Yvonne Borneo to deliver. She wanted a white mink hat and coat, a thick tread of diamonds across the collarbones, peacock-blue eyeshadow and sharp swipes of blush and impossibly glossy lips: the rigidly contoured, calculatedly baroque opulence of an eighties soap star auditioning for the role of tsarina. And Yvonne Borneo disappointed her by showing up at Capp Street Women’s Services in a plain taupe skirt and suit jacket. Her sole concession to decadence was a mulberry cashmere scarf, soft as a runaway’s peach fuzz, held in place with a metal pin shaped like a Scottie dog’s silhouette.

“Well, you’re just a tiny little mite” was the first thing she said to Cora. Her voice was butterfat-rich but filmy, like an old bar of dark chocolate that had taken on a gray cast.

The novelist/philanthropist was more vigorous than her wax-figure photographs, and at the same time much frailer. She thrust her shoulders back with a martial bearing when she laughed, which was often, but Cora noticed her hands trembling slightly when they weren’t clasped in front of her. Her hair was beginning to thin. She was grandly imperious in a merrily half-ironic way. When Cora offered her a slice of red velvet cake, which she’d read was the novelist’s favorite, Yvonne said, “Bikini season’s upon us. I daren’t indulge!” Yet she didn’t flinch at the posted Rules of Conduct, scrolled in silver marker on black paper, hung above the TV in the main lounge, and frequently amended for circumstance. In the past few months, necessity had compelled Cora to add NO SHOWING GENITALIA, FLUSH THE TOILET AFTER YOU SHIT, and DON’T JERK OFF IN THE BATHROOM. This last rule was intended for the pre-op MTFs.

Yvonne read the rules from top to bottom, and when she was done she ruffled herself slightly, as though shaking off a light drizzle. Then she smiled brightly at Cora.

“Well,” she said. “Girls will be girls.”

Cora reminded herself that Yvonne Borneo was not easily shocked. How could she be? Her only child, a girl named Angelica, had stepped in front of a bullet train at twenty, after years of struggling with schizophrenia and—it was rumored—heroin addiction and sex work, although Yvonne had never confirmed this. She focused on the schizophrenia, referring to her late daughter as having “lost a battle with a significant and debilitating mental illness.” The foundation she established after Angelica’s death, the Angel Trust, gave money to provide mental health care for young women who had “lost their way” and were at risk of suicide.

Angelica had been the same age as Cora. As teenagers in the same Utah behavior modification program for troubled youth, they had known each other slightly. Cora was waiting for the right moment to tell Yvonne this. She tried to engineer an interval of quiet, seated intimacy, lowered voices, eye contact. But Yvonne moved too fast and talked too quickly, asking about city contracts and capital campaigns and annual reports, and Cora needed her money—the money from airport book sales and Hallmark Hall of Fame movie rights and the pocket change of millions of frustrated housewives—so badly she could hardly keep the desperation out of her voice. The city cuts had been devastating.

The Department of Public Health’s deputy director, who had set up this meeting, warned her to cover her tattoos.

“Even the ones on my face?” Cora had said.

“I forgot about those. Okay, just don’t say anything about her daughter being a dope fiend.”

In Cora’s tiny office, Yvonne lingered a few moments before the Dead Wall, which featured photographs of kids who had overdosed or killed themselves or been stabbed. None of these photos were appropriately elegiac, since the bereaved families usually couldn’t be counted on to give Cora a cute school picture or a Polaroid of the deceased with a puppy. Most of the dead were memorialized in the act of flipping off the camera or smoking a bowl.

Yvonne put a hand to her chin. “It’s so sad,” she said. “Such a waste.”

“Yes,” Cora said.

“Well,” Yvonne said. She sat down, crossing her legs. “What do you envision the Angel Trust being able to do for you?”

She asked this without real curiosity, her tone silky, keen, and as expertly measured as a game-show host’s. Cora began to sweat.

“Well, first of all, I wouldn’t have to lay off any more outreach staff,” she said. Without realizing it, she was counting on her fingers. “And there are basic expenses like rent and utilities. And I’d love to increase Sonia’s hours—she’s the psychiatrist—because we’re seeing a lot more girls with serious mental illness out there right now.”

Yvonne frowned. “Well, the psychiatrist’s hours, yes, I can get behind that. But as for the layoffs—it’s always our preference that my funds not be used as a stopgap for deficits in government funding. My board prefers not to dispense bail-out money.”

And this, Cora told herself, was why she hated philanthropists. Their dainty aversion to real emergency and distress, their careful gauging and hedging of risks, their preference, so politely and euphemistically stated, for supporting programs that didn’t really need help to stay open, but sure could use a shiny new foyer, complete with naming opportunity. This was what she hated about rich people: their discomfort with their own unsettling power to salvage and save, the fear of besiegement that comes with filling an ugly basic need, their distaste for the unavoidably vertical dynamic of dispensing money to people who have none. The way they prided themselves on never giving cash to homeless people on the street, preferring a suited, solvent, 501c3-certified middleman, who knew better. For Cora, the hardest part of running the drop-in was not the necrotized arm wounds, the ubiquity of urine and rot, the occasional OD in the bathroom, the collect calls from prison. It was the eternal quest for money, the need to justify, to immerse herself in the fuzzy, lateral terminology of philanthropy. Over the past ten years Cora had learned that donors don’t give a program dollars to save it from extinction; they “build a relationship” with the program. They want “partners,” not charity cases. And deep down, they believe in their hearts that people in real, urgent need—the kind of person Cora once was, and the kind she still felt like much of the time—make bad partners.

Cora cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “increasing Sonia’s hours won’t do much good if we don’t have a roof for her to work under, or a way of bringing clients to her.”

She thought she saw Yvonne stiffen. Cora knew she was terrible at diplomacy. When she got angry, she preferred to yell; and if she were in front of the board of supervisors or the mayor’s staff instead of Yvonne Borneo, she would have. But this woman, this sleek, self-made authoress—that word, with its anachronistic, feline hiss of implied dilettantism, seemed made for her—had to be handled differently. She had no civic obligation to stem disease; she helped at her whim. It had to be some little thing that reeled her in, some ridiculous coincidence, some accident of fate. And Cora remembered her trump card.

There was no time to wait for a transition. She opened her mouth and prepared to blurt something out, something inappropriate and apropos of nothing—I knew your daughter when she was a dope fiend, maybe—when a pounding on the gate stopped her. Then a wailing. Someone was wailing her name.

Yvonne Borneo perked up so markedly her neck seemed to lengthen an inch. “Do you need to see to that?” she said.

Cora excused herself and went to the back gate. It was DJ, a regular client who had come to the door and screamed for her plenty of times before, but never when anyone important was present. Cora had once lanced a six-inch-long abscess on DJ’s arm—she’d measured it—and when the clinic doctor pared away the necrotized tissue, bone showed through. DJ had started coming to the women’s center at nineteen, freshly emancipated from foster care, clearly bipolar, and Cora had been trying to get her to see Sonia for seven years. She was twenty-six now and looked at least forty.

Today she looked worse than usual, in army pants held together with safety pins and a filthy tank top that revealed the caverns of scar tissue on her arms, the bulging sternum that seemed to twang fiercely under her skin like outraged tuning forks. When she saw Cora, DJ thrust both arms through the bars of the gate, like a prisoner in stocks, and wept.

“You came to see me when no one else did,” she sobbed.

“Okay, DJ,” Cora said. “Okay.”

DJ did this a lot: went back and forth in time. She was talking about when she’d been stabbed by a john two years before and Cora had been the only one to stay with her at SF General, eventually securing her a semiprivate room and making the nurse give her painkillers. “Yeah, she’s an addict,” she had snapped at the young woman on duty. “It still hurts when she gets stabbed.”

Sometimes DJ would recount an unknown past assault, or several, quietly sitting in the corner of the needle exchange and saying, “He raped me, Cora,” while peering through the twisted vines of her hair. “I know, hon,” Cora would say. “I’d cut his balls off if I could.” This always seemed to calm DJ down.

After Cora’s sister had a baby and the baby got older and began to speak in lucid sentences, its vocal patterns and flattened sense of chronology reminded Cora of DJ: that tendency to recount, repetitively, in the balanced and slightly bemused tones of a person under hypnosis, past events as though they had just happened. No “I remember this,” just “Mama dropped a plate and it broke,” meditatively, with an air of troubled, grieving reflection. It seemed to her that DJ, like the baby, was stuck in some cognitive cul-de-sac and, unlike the baby, would never develop a perspective layered and three-dimensional enough to find her way out.

Now Cora looked into her wet face and said, “DJ, I’ve got someone in there. Someone I’m having a meeting with. If you come back in an hour, when I open the exchange, we’ll talk. Okay?”

DJ gazed at her. “An hour?” she said hollowly.

“Yeah.”

The girl’s face began to twist and shift like there was something behind it, trying to get out. She slumped forward, forearms still resting on the bars of the gate, and moaned. Cora smelled alcohol and urine.

“DJ, please. One hour. I’ve got someone who might give us money in there, and I can’t just leave her sitting in my office.”

DJ slumped on the concrete, fingers still poking through the grates, and muttered, “Okay, okay, okay.”

When Cora returned and apologized to Yvonne, the novelist said, “Everything all right?” Before Cora could answer, the screaming started again. DJ was now banging her head against the metal bars of the gate and howling, “I’m sorry, I know there’s a rich lady in there, but I need to come in!”

Cora grabbed her ring of keys and hurried down the hall. It was starting to get dark outside, but she could see a wet patch of blood on DJ’s lip from the banging. When she unlocked the gate, DJ fell against her, almost gracefully. Cora staggered under the weight and struggled to dig her hands into the girl’s armpits, hoisting her up to standing. She lost her grip, and they collapsed together on the concrete floor. The crotch of DJ’s pants was soaked through. “It’s just so cold,” the girl slurred. “It’s just so cold out there. I keep peeing myself, Cora.”

Cora took DJ’s chin in her hands and looked into her eyes. They were unfocused and dilated, but not fixed. She was just very drunk.

“I can’t be out there right now.”

She pressed against Cora. They were entangled now on the floor of the hall, and Cora felt a hot dribble of urine slowly trickle across the floor underneath their bodies. “It hurts,” DJ said.

“I think you might have a UTI again, hon,” Cora said. “Remember when we talked about pissing right after you fuck?”

“She’s fancy,” DJ said.

At first Cora thought DJ was going back in time again, but then realized she was referring to Yvonne Borneo, who stood in the middle of the hallway in her gray suit, arms at her sides, projecting the deliberate, neutral composure of a wartime nurse—one of her own heroines, perhaps, kindly but remote and weighted with an incurable private grief.

“Is there anything I can do?” she said.

And so Yvonne Borneo helped Cora haul DJ into the bathroom. It was Yvonne who picked through the clothes bin and found clean pants and a sweatshirt, who went and bought three black coffees at the diner down the block while Cora helped DJ shower. And later, it was Yvonne who sat in the needle exchange with Lew, the volunteer, while the on-site nurse gave DJ a dose of antibiotics and Cora spent an hour trying to find her a shelter bed for the night. It was fruitless. There was nothing.

“What if we book a decent hotel room for her and you take her there in a cab, make sure she checks in?” Yvonne suggested.

Cora shook her head. “If she’s going overnight somewhere, it needs to be a place where people know what they’re doing.” She looked down at her lap. “The only option is to 5150 her.”

Yvonne didn’t ask what a 5150 was. She said, “Well, if the alternative is to be on the streets…” Her words trailed off. From the exam room came the sound of DJ alternately screaming and sobbing. The sounds were a kind of last gasp, witless and terrifying as the crunch before a piece of machinery breaks down for good. Cora stood up and shut the door to her office.

She made the call. Half an hour later, when the paramedics burst in the front door of the drop-in, four big burly men, louder and stompier than necessary in the way paramedics always are—the way anyone is, for that matter, who comes in the guise of eleventh-hour rescuer—and strapped DJ to a gurney, Cora ran alongside the stretcher and told the girl that things would be okay. But she knew this was unlikely, just as she knew her chances with Yvonne Borneo were blown, because the woman had borne witness to Cora’s greatest failure, a failure multiplied by the scores of clients just like DJ: girls who could not change. The part of them that knew how to accept help, whatever that part was called—hope? imagination? foresight?—had been destroyed. And what Cora and her staff did for such girls, day after day, felt more and more like hospice care: an attempt to minimize the worst of their pain until death.

Cora stood in the alley after the ambulance took off. It was Friday night and all the barkeeps along Mission and Valencia were dumping empty bottles into recycling bins. The sound of breaking glass seemed gratuitously destructive, nihilistic. She watched a woman walking down Capp Street in a short swingy coat and heels. A car pulled up alongside her and idled. Some idiot from Marin, thought Cora. The woman and the man in the car conferred for a moment, and the woman drew herself up and hurried down the sidewalk, shaking her head, outraged, as the vehicle pulled away.

When Cora came back into the exchange, Lew was alone.

“Where’s Yvonne Borneo?” she said.

“You mean that lady? That narc-looking lady?”

“Yes,” Cora sighed. “She left, didn’t she?”

Lew shrugged. “She left when the paramedics got here. She looked freaked.”

‘Did she say anything?’

“Nope. Maybe toodaloo or something.” He flapped his wrist.

Cora sat down. “She did not fucking say toodaloo.”

“No,” Lew admitted. “She did not.”

September 3rd

Sunday 1 January

HER STUDENTS ARE the devotees and tenders of machines. Some of the machines are tiny and some of the machines are big. Nobody wrote down the law that students must have a machine with them at all times, yet this law is rarely broken, and when it is, the breaker suffers from deprivation and anxiety. Machines are sometimes lost, sometimes damaged, and this loss, this damage deranges existence until, mouseclick by mouseclick, chaos can be fended off with a new machine, existence regains confidence, harmony, interest, order, connectedness. Sleeping, certain machines display a dreamily pulsing heartbeat-like white light meaning this machine is not dead. Human voices, fragments of text: even in a silent room the machines are continually storing these up. The students never advance into a day or even an hour without the certainty of voices waiting for them, without the expectation of signals and signs. Rendered visible, the embrace of hyperconnectivity would float around their heads like gold-leaf halos. During class the machines grow restless and seek students’ attention. Certain machines purr, certain machines tremble; certain machines imitate birdsong. Whoever invented the software that causes the machine to sing like a bird must have foreseen not only bewilderment like the professor’s but also the pleasure her mistake, if visible (it is: flushed from her lecture notes, her gaze swerves around the room), gives to those in the know—that is, her students. For the fraction of an instant that either makes or breaks her authority (she would say she is not interested in authority)—the fraction when pure exhilarated hard-wired startlement tips into that very different laughter-inviting cognitive slough, bewilderment—the professor can’t make the correct attribution. The realistic sequence of ascending trills is, for her and her alone among the two hundred and forty-three listeners in the lecture hall, “bird.” To see the lift of her brows is to know that a bird flits through the wilderness of her brain, to understand that in the professor’s life there have been far more instances of birdsong from birds than from machines. To her students this is endearing: she can’t help letting it show that she belongs to the world that preceded theirs.

THE NEWS FROM SPAIN is terrible. A bomb under a park bench in a small town near Madrid. Fifteen people have been killed and dozens injured. Harriet tells the aide, who crosses herself; the nurse, who says, “It makes you want to stay home and never leave the house—but that would just be giving in to terrorism”; and her daughter Rebecca, who says, “Why do you spend all day watching that stuff?”

Rebecca is tired. Harriet has been sick on and off for years, more than a decade. Rebecca has just driven four hours from Boston to get to the Connecticut nursing home where Harriet now lives. She is taking two days off from the small bookstore she owns, paying her part-time assistant extra to cover for her. She’s brought a shopping bag full of things Harriet likes: rice pudding with raisins, shortbread, fresh figs, and a box of lamejuns from a Middle Eastern bakery. She has walked into the room, and Harriet has barely looked away from the TV to say hello.

What Harriet says is “They just interviewed a man whose granddaughter died in his arms.”

Rebecca puts down the shopping bag and kisses the top of her mother’s head. Someone has given Harriet a haircut, a surprisingly flattering one. Her head smells faintly of shampoo.

Harriet puts up a hand and feels for Rebecca’s face, briefly cupping her chin. “They think it was a Basque separatist group.”

Rebecca nods, and goes down the hall to the kitchen, to put the rice pudding and lamejuns in the fridge. The hallway is full of wheelchairs, a straggly becalmed flotilla of gray people just sitting there, some with their head lolling on their chest. On the way back to her mother’s room, she runs into the social worker assigned to Harriet’s case. Today is Halloween; the social worker is wearing a pirate hat and an eye patch. “How do you think your mom is doing?” she asks Rebecca.

“I think she’s still angry about being here,” Rebecca says. Harriet moved into the nursing home a month ago, after the rehab hospital said she had “plateaued” and the assisted-living place said they couldn’t take her back.

“I know,” the social worker says. “But they adjust.”

When she goes back into her mother’s room, Harriet is watching for her. The TV is off. “I’m so glad you came,” Harriet says.

“I just ran into the social worker in the hall. She says you’re adjusting.”

“Bullshit,” Harriet says. “Did you bring stuffed grape leaves?”

“I didn’t remember that you liked them.”

“I love them.”

“Next time,” Rebecca says. She pulls over a chair and sits facing her mother. Harriet is in a wheelchair, paralyzed again—it has happened before, she has some rare chronic spinal disease, but this time the neurologist says it is permanent. Rebecca had listened while he talked to Harriet about suffering and acceptance, about how what was happening to her was truly terrible, worse than what anyone should have to go through. Rebecca liked the doctor’s humanity and thought it might be somewhat comforting to Harriet; certainly Harriet has always found it gratifying to be admired for her bravery. But Harriet was furious. “He’s talking philosophy when what I really want to hear about is stem-cell research.”

Rebecca feels guilty about not making it down to see her mother more often. Harriet is always mentioning something she needs—lavender talcum powder, or socks, or an afghan to put over her legs when they wheel her outside, or, she sighs, “Just a really good turkey club sandwich.” Rebecca mails what she can, alternately touched by and annoyed by the many requests. (Are they wistful or reproachful? Both, she thinks.) (But they are also simply practical. These are the small things we live with, and Harriet now has no way to get hold of them.) She has talked to Harriet about moving to a nursing home in the Boston area. “It would be more convenient.”

“For you, you mean,” Harriet said. She is adamant about staying in this particular nursing home because the man she’s in love with is in the assisted-living place next door, and comes over to visit her nearly every day. Rebecca thinks it’s great that her mother has someone, though she could do without some of Harriet’s more candid reports. (“Ralph called me this morning and said, ‘I wish I could make love to you right now.’”)

“How is Ralph?” Rebecca asks now.

Harriet shrugs. “He thinks I’m mad at him because he didn’t give me a birthday present.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” They laugh. They talk. Rebecca heats up some lamejuns in the kitchen microwave and makes Harriet a cup of tea. They hear the woman in the room next door say loudly, angrily, “Who washed my floor?” A low murmuring answer; then the angry woman again: “In the future I must ask that you not wash my floor without first giving me notice.”

Rebecca looks at Harriet. Harriet says, “That’s all she ever says, on and on, day and night, about the floor.”

Some lamejun has fallen onto the front of Harriet’s sweatshirt; when she finally notices and brushes it off, it leaves a spot. “Damn it.” She wipes furiously away at it, but in the midst of the fury is also grinning ruefully at Rebecca—Can you believe it? How does it happen every single time? She’s a very large woman, and she’s been dropping food on her shirt for as long as Rebecca can remember. The last time Rebecca visited, on the day Harriet moved to the nursing home, the aide swathed Harriet’s front in an enormous terrycloth bib before bringing in her dinner tray. Harriet allowed it, looking at Rebecca with a kind of stunned sadness; of all the enraging indignities of that day, this was the one that undid her. “She doesn’t need that,” Rebecca told the aide.

“We do it for everybody.”

“Right, but my mother doesn’t need it.”

So that was one small battle that Rebecca was there to win for Harriet. Without Rebecca, Harriet could have won it just fine for herself. Both of them knew this—and yet, between them, love has always had to be proved. It is there; and it gets proved, over and over. Some of their worst fights, confusingly, seem to both prove and disprove it: two people who didn’t love each other couldn’t fight like that—certainly not repeatedly. Still, Rebecca has often wished for something quieter with Harriet. Are there mothers and daughters who can be happy together without saying much?

“You know,” Harriet says now, frowning, clearly resuming an argument she’s been conducting in her own head, “you jump on me about watching the news all the time, but it’s not because I’m just some morbid tragedy hound, it’s—”

“I know why it is,” Rebecca says.

THERE WERE CATS in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters—some thin or misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.

“Get rid of the damn things,” August’s father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You’ve been after me for school money? I’ll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board, and then after a few days we’ll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it’s all the same.”

The cats—calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny—sat among the hay bales, scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but, like most farm boys, he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the rules of husbandry that governed man’s relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain—they knew they could expect to feel a man’s boot if they came too close; in return, they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.

A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some strange Martian bank. He could earn fifty dollars at least, maybe seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters.

He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal. August often went there when it rained. He thought it was like being a small creature trapped inside a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll, punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space.

In the shed there was a long, low workbench covered in the tangled intestine of machinery: the looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, Mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval-looking welder’s mask, and, interspersed among the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying stages of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a mower blade the size of a broadsword, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it too. Then he uncovered a three-foot-long torque wrench with a slim stainless-steel handle that swelled at the end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few horrendous death-dealing swing techniques—the sidearm golf follow-through, the overhead back-crushing ax chop, the short, quick, line-drive baseball checked swing—the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat and then shouldered his weapon, put the gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother.

DANIEL ALARCÓN is the author of two story collections, a graphic novel, and Lost City Radio, which won the 2009 International Literature Prize. He was named one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 in 2010, and his new novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, will be published in October 2013.

• I’ve spent the last seven or so years working on a novel, so most every story I’ve published in that time began the same way: it was meant to be part of the bigger book, but somehow outgrew its confines.

I think of these as sketches for the novel, and in the case of “The Provincials,” there’s quite a lot of overlap: this piece and the novel share a protagonist (Nelson), an obsession (acting), a troubled relationship, a father, an absent brother, a dreary coastal town. When the play began I knew it wouldn’t be part of the book, but I wanted to follow the story and see where it went.

ALMOND, STEVE

Gondwana. Ploughshares, vol. 38, no. 1.

APPEL, JACOB M.

The Price of Storks. Western Humanities Review, vol. 66, no. 2.

Able Muse Review

467 Saratoga Avenue, #602

San Jose, CA 95129

$24, Nina Schyler

ELIZABETH STROUT, editor, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London.

Copyright © 2013 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Strout

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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“The Provincials” by Daniel Alarcón. First published in Granta, Winter 2012 (No. 118). Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Alarcón. From the forthcoming The King Is Always Above the People: Stories by Daniel Alarcón. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

“Bravery” by Charles Baxter. First published in Tin House, Spring 2012 (Vol. 14, No. 1). Copyright © 2012 by Charles Baxter. Reprinted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill literary agents.

“Malaria” by Michael Byers. First published in Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2012 (Vol. 12, No. 2). Copyright © 2012 by Michael Byers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Miss Lora” from This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, copyright © 2012 by Junot Díaz. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First published in The New Yorker, April 23, 2012.

“Horned Men” by Karl Taro Greenfeld. First published in ZYZZYVA, Fall 2012 (No. 95). Copyright © 2012 by Karl Taro Greenfeld. Reprinted by permission of ZYZZYVA.

“The Third Dumpster” by Gish Jen. First published in Granta, Summer 2012 (No. 120). Copyright © 2012 by Gish Jen. Reprinted by permission of Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.

“Encounters with Unexpected Animals” by Bret Anthony Johnston. First published in Esquire, March 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Bret Anthony Johnston. Reprinted by permission of Bret Anthony Johnston.

“Magic Man” by Sheila Kohler. First published in the Yale Review, Spring 2012 (Vol. 100, No. 2). Copyright © 2012 by Sheila Kohler. Reprinted by permission of the author and her literary agent, Robin Straus Agency, Inc.

“The Chair” by David Means. First published in the Paris Review, Spring 2012 (No. 200). Copyright © 2012 by David Means. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

“A Voice in the Night” by Steven Millhauser. First published in The New Yorker, December 10, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Steven Millhauser. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Referential” by Lorrie Moore. First published in The New Yorker, May 28, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Lorrie Moore. Reprinted by permission of Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.

“Train” from Dear Life by Alice Munro, copyright © 2013 by Alice Munro. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc., for permission. First published in Harper’s Magazine, April 2012.

“Chapter Two” by Antonya Nelson. First published in The New Yorker, March 26, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Antonya Nelson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Nemecia” by Kirstin Valdez Quade. First published in Narrative Magazine, Fall 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Kirstin Valdez Quade. Reprinted by permission of Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

“Philanthropy” by Suzanne Rivecca. First published in Granta, Summer 2012 (No. 120). Copyright © 2012 by Suzanne Rivecca. Reprinted by permission of Suzanne Rivecca.

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” from Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders, copyright © 2013 by George Saunders. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc., for permission. First published in The New Yorker, October 15, 2012.

“The World to Come” by Jim Shepard. First published in One Story, March 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Jim Shepard. Reprinted by permission of Jim Shepard.

“The Wilderness” by Elizabeth Tallent. First published in Threepenny Review, Spring 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Tallent. Reprinted by permission of the Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc.

“The Tunnel, or The News from Spain” from The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham, copyright © 2012 by Joan Wickersham. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc., for permission. First published in Glimmer Train, Issue 82, Spring 2012.

“Breatharians” by Callan Wink. First published in The New Yorker, October 22, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Callan Wink. Reprinted by permission of The New Yorker.