•

Wild Turkey wakes up, but Jeannie has already left the bed. Wild Turkey can see her, if he hangs off the side of the mattress, down the narrow hallway: the bathroom door ajar, the bathroom light golden and warm in the cool, cesious fall morning. They’re at his place, the duplex right on top of the train tracks, across the street from the college. Jeannie is doing her hair, naked, still overheated from the shower. She stands in front of the mirror quietly, getting ready for class or work, he can’t remember which she has today. He’s been home from his deployment for two weeks now and he still can’t get a hold of time. In the afternoons he gets in the shower, wastes no minutes, gets out to find it’s two hours later.

Last night Wild Turkey took Jeannie out to the old school buildings, overgrown as they are, stilled between their days as the school he and Jeannie went to together and its current incarnation as some daycare’s repurposed space. This was something they did in high school too, back when Jeannie still had her green Mustang convertible; late October nights they’d drive out there with sleeping bags and put the top down and park in the middle of the erstwhile baseball field, already half-reclaimed by brush, and look at the stars. The buildings were abandoned even back then, or between abandonments; Wild Turkey and Jeannie having decamped for the public high school, the original private school having finally amassed enough nonscholarship families to fund a new building (itself a repurposed old country club) inside city limits.

Later still last night, after they’d gotten too cold and come back to his duplex, Wild Turkey had lain down naked with Jeannie on his mattress, which was on the floor, and curled his body around her in-turning fetal position and called out, “Jeannie in a bottle!” which was one of their old jokes, and she’d laughed, sounding half-annoyed at her own easy nostalgic amusement, but then Wild Turkey had repeated it and repeated it, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” over and over, with just enough slight vocal modulation and wavering emphasis as to keep it from seeming like a glitch, repeating and repeating, which he did helplessly, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” on and on until the sound became extenuated, then lost all tone, then resolved briefly into song before crumbling into over-articulation, each alien phoneme distinct and meaningless. Eventually he’d stopped. Jeannie lay there very quiet, very still, stiffened as she had been from somewhere around the twentieth or twenty-fifth repetition. Then, in the silence after Wild Turkey’s voice had ceased, when it was clear he had really stopped, when he finally released her, she very carefully unfolded herself up from the bed and walked silently to the bathroom. Though Wild Turkey knows at some point she must’ve returned to bed (did she? or did she sleep on the couch?), her presence now in the bathroom seems contiguous to her presence there last night, which makes it hard for Wild Turkey to tell how much time has passed, if any has passed at all.

She finishes doing her hair and makeup and gets dressed in silence. She does not avoid looking at Wild Turkey; she holds his eyes as she pulls on her jeans one leg at a time before turning and letting herself out, her expression level, empty of anger, empty of assessment. When she gets back, if she comes back to the duplex instead of her own apartment, Wild Turkey will be there or he won’t, she’s already used to that.

•

There was no baseball diamond in the entire city of New Jerusalem. The story went that the community of Fundamental Christians (“We’re Fundamental Christians,” Samuel Lincoln explained. “Back then all Christians were fundamental, so you didn’t have to say it”) that founded New Jerusalem did so largely in protest of the burgeoning mining and railway town to the east called Pittsburg, and principal in their complaints (after the brothel for the railroad men and the multiple purveyors of card games and spirits) was the Louis P. Stilton Municipal Ballpark, home of the rough-and-tumble Pittsburg Pickers, apparent corrupters of many a young Christian girl from the nearby Kansas State Teachers College. Whether or not this was the actual explanation for the continued absence of baseball from the town of New Jerusalem, it was at least true that it had never occurred to the powers that were of our New Jerusalem Christian Day School to build a baseball diamond or field a team, the only member of the Southeastern Kansas Independent and Home School Athletic Conference not to do so.

Strictly speaking, there was no baseball diamond at the Hope and Grace Bible Camp either. There was, however, the Dust Bowl: our space of cloddy soil and four honest-to-god bases and a six-foot-tall homerun wall of corn, kindly provided by the next field over, which had yet to be harvested. The previous summer’s Bible Camp had been full of near disasters (the crowning jewel of which involved an older boy named Calvin Jenks being discovered not only smoking marijuana, but doing so alone with a girl, herself apparently in what Elder Peters called a “near-Eve state of clothedness”), and it was perhaps because of this that we arrived that summer nine months after our fathers’ deployment to find that the church had miraculously invested in both a renovation of our mostly theoretical ball field and an official team manager, who turned out to be Brother Douglas Reeter himself. “IT’S THE DIVINE GRACE OF GOD COME INCARNATE,” big, jolly, slow-brained Hilton Hedis, who had no other volume than ear-blasting shout, said in awe that first day when we saw the field.

The Elders had turned two of the less trustworthy picnic tables on their sides twenty feet or so behind home plate, making a backstop. They’d taken what looked to be several fishing nets and strung them together, hanging them down from the high tree limbs that cast their shade onto the batter’s box. They’d also taken twenty or so bags of gardening soil and emptied them unceremoniously about forty feet from home plate, making a very messy pitcher’s mound. And finally, in the most incredible of all their additions, the Elders had built, via the stacking of many cinderblocks and two well-placed corrugated metal sheets, a pair of real dugouts.

That first day we found Brother Reeter, as Elder Peters instructed us to call him, with several nails in his mouth, standing in foul territory and pounding away at an arrangement of two-by-fours gathered at wild angles.

“I guess the carpenter’s our coach,” Samuel said, hugging his leather glove and spitting.

Ralph spat too and said leave it to the Elders to go out and get us a coach only to fix us with some grade-A Jesus luck, which is what we called luck that was likely to get you killed, like being picked to walk point on a security patrol, or being the Son of God, or having a dumb hick carpenter whom everybody hated for a coach.

“I DON’T KNOW,” Hilton blared, looking to Brother Reeter and then back at us, his eyebrows working, which meant he was thinking. “JESUS WAS A CARPENTER AND HE COULD DO SOME OTHER STUFF PRETTY GOOD TOO.”

Where was I during all this? I was on the top plank of the newly carpentered set of wooden bleachers, which none of the boys kicking dirt around home plate had yet caught on Doug the Reaper was crafting a mate for. I don’t think it’s true that my father wanted a boy. He was a kind, wilting, educated man who was taken to long moods of quiet melancholy and wistfulness. I had a better chance moving him to expression with an idea about a book I was reading than by making my throws pop into his glove in the warm evenings when he came home from work. If he minded much that I’d come out a girl, he never did let me see it, though it’s true that he taught me a mean sinking fastball. He used to play catch with my mother, before she died when I was eight, before she’d even had me, when they were just young married kids. I still have a picture of them as they stood lined up in the yard, my father crouched, squinting at something behind the camera, my mother scowling, the ball held trickily behind her back, ready to go into a windup. And it only occurred to me a couple years ago, once I had a house of my own, that it might’ve been her pitch that he taught me, that fastball with the slight downward movement. But anyway.

I was really mostly allowed as a de facto member of the ball team because my father was the commanding officer of our town’s Army company and, when his reserve unit wasn’t being called up to go to war, he worked as the floor manager in the pet food plant two towns over, which still employs most of the people around here. Everyone in New Jerusalem liked him because they thought he was fair. I was allowed more or less free range by the Elders, and the people in the town. The boys on the diamond (which is also to say, the boys in all my classes, the boys who were my friends) let me along with them in most things because both my legs were bound up in painful, complicated orthopedic braces and because when my dad was at home he was the boss of half of their fathers, until the reserves got called up to go to Iraq, and he became the boss of all of them.

2.

But does his foot know? Is it reacting? The extraordinary efficiency of the human sole cannot be denied. Think of the things it is capable of — eloquent distribution and redistribution of weight, shifting phalangeal deployment, a notable ability to take the changing physical demands of a normal day (sprinting toward a bus stop in wooden-soled business shoes) in stride. That Abrams has become aware of the contact plate at all is in fact proof of his foot’s intelligence.

And yet. And yet his right foot, encased in its boot, is not stopping, is not pausing in its rolling heel-then-arch-then-toe impression into the dirt. The heel strikes — it has no reason to pause. Even when the mid-sole falls, is pressed into the dirt — still no cause for hesitation. But then, finally, the ball. The hinge of the cuneiform bone (beautiful term) extending into the gentle metatarsal has predetermined Abrams’ fate. The application to the ground of the plantar fascia (horrible term) may not be stopped. And so the ball of the foot, the ball of the boot’s outsole, falls, and Abrams’ weight begins to shift onto its pad, and the strange texture beneath.

But already Abrams’ heel is rising (has risen) from the location of its initial strike, separating itself from the dirt, and the cuneiform bone is pulling at the local terminus of the metatarsal, taking it along in its launch back into the air and light.

This moment Abrams does truly grasp, understanding pluming up through all levels of processing — he can feel it in the arch of muscle between his shoulders. It is a kind of resignation — bodily, mentally — intuitive, but encompassing in its intuition. It is the feeling of helplessness at time passing, of the loss of experience even as it occurs.

Abrams has been aware of various declensions of this moment his whole life — one scene which now cloud-shadows its way across his interior vision.

He stands in an abandoned lakeside dairy, which has been repurposed for the night into an event space for his best friend’s wedding reception. He stands at the edge of the high room, a cuneiform alphabet of pipes still decorating the walls and ceiling; he stands there with Sarah, his girlfriend, who they do not know yet is sick, taking in at once the writhing organism of the dance floor, the large glass windows of what was once (he guesses) a loading bay. Beyond: train tracks, the black expanse of the lake, only a field of absence in the dark. It has been a wonderful wedding, held out of doors in the uncharacteristically brisk late August day, on a grassy knoll outside of a relative’s cabin. Beyond the pastor on the little platform there was the lake, its waters lacerated by the small, sharp edges of wind. And now: the night in the abandoned dairy, the reception. Earlier, someone passed out toy kazoos before the bride and groom arrived and when they finally entered everyone played “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Those without kazoos had sung. And now here Abrams is, standing very still. Sarah is exhausted, draped over a chair beside him. They do not know she is sick yet.

He can feel the mass of experiential detail swelling, as he stands there, a sundae in a Styrofoam bowl from the make-your-own sundae buffet melting in his right hand. He’s waiting for the train. It has come through once, not slowing, very early in the event, right after he and Sarah arrived. The tracks, once laid for easy loading from the dairy, pass within feet of what is now the wall of glass. It is fiercely loud, piercing in its intensity. It is truly a blast of motion, so near and pervasive that one’s body seems a participant in its very direction, to the point where the explosion of dark metal (and sound) seems to be emanating from the atoms of one’s own body. For a few seconds, while your consciousness is still catching up (slow, so slow), you are the train, barreling into the nothingness of the night by some propulsion that is beyond will or intention. The waiting has become excruciating.

The waiting has become torturous, less due to anticipation than the nagging sense that Abrams has understood the experience too late, that it is even now slipping from the grasping electricities of his memory. He will never be in this abandoned dairy again, he knows. There can be only tragic falling-offs from the first world of this night, from the train’s transcendent passage. The passage he is now waiting for, if in fact it ever comes, will be over almost even as it begins, exactly because Abrams has become aware of its singularity. It feels ridiculous to be made panicky by something so abstract and common as the passage of time, but the simple fact of it — Abrams understanding it on a muscular level — deflates the experience for Abrams even as the train does arrive, and the dancers are shattered into fear and surprise, and Abrams tries and fails to itemize his perceptions and observations and the ironies of the moment so extensively as to slow time to the point of cessation. Of course he fails, he must fail, and the rest of the night feels like a letdown, had already felt like a letdown, even before the train noise recurred.

But Abrams’ sense of anticipatory nostalgic loss is not altogether unpleasant, in its way. He doesn’t know when he developed it, how young he was when he first understood. The relaxation that he experiences in the moment of his knowing about the contact plate beneath the ball of his right foot and that same foot’s continued motion, is — it must be said — distinctly pleasurable. Another cloud-shadow of memory darkening the screen of his mind: the sweltering parking lot in Minneapolis, some forgotten road trip with his poor, nervous mother.

He is standing outside one of those old-fashioned Dairy Queen stands, this one planted in the middle of a gray concrete parking lot that seems to Abrams as vast as the sea. He is a little boy, and the stand, with its antiquated retro neon signage, looms above him spectacularly. His mother has let him order for himself, and in something like a fit of pleasure Abrams speaks up and asks wildly for the combination he’s noticed on the menu board, the synthesis of two of his favorite treats — a vanilla ice cream Blizzard, with (the electric quiver of joy) Nerds in it. “Nerds” being the sour, granular candy popular at the time, which came in unexpected marriages of colors, a small mountain spread in the palm of one’s hand turning into a pointillist residual portrait on one’s skin. A great deal of the pleasure for little Abrams is to be had simply in the breathless idea of such a thing: the play of the possible visual alone (the sharp, glossed color of the Nerds, implanted delicately in the creamscape of the vanilla ice cream) making his skin tingle. But also the taste — previously unthinkable — the contrast at once of the milky, cold, sweet vanilla against the eye-squintingly sour acid of the Nerds: an oral chiaroscuro never before conceived of by the staff of all other Dairy Queens Abrams has ever visited. This all not to mention the texture, the queer graininess of the ice cream with its hard secret of Nerds, the sensation carrying with it the unmistakable sense of transgression, as if eating rocks and dirt. And all of this present just in the thought, the galaxy of delight expanding rapidly, anticipatorily in Abrams’ mind and nerve centers as he orders — nervously, having to repeat it again louder for the visored teenager at the till. Abrams speaks his order again anxiously, as if a jealous deity might perhaps strike him down for requesting of the world such a thing as a Nerd-filled Blizzard, offered almost clandestinely by only this particular Dairy Queen.

And so Abrams stands there on the concrete sea, in the sweltering heat, and looks down at his narrow cup, the red spoon stabbed into the blank territory of pleasure. Abrams feels the anxiety of the first bite spreading over his body like a very tiny horse race across his epidermis, Abrams tracing its progress from the environs of his anus up into the space below his belly button and then across the plain of his chest. He can feel his intestines spasm. He looks down into the cup and uses the spoon with its garish red to swirl the already melting contents. Shockingly, something Abrams has not foreseen: the color-coating of the Nerds, enveloped by the ice cream, has begun to bleed into the pure bed of ecru. Each individual Nerd leaves an arcing trail of hue, dissipating in intensity and, worst of all, revealing at its core a heart of whiteness, which all collectively sit on the field of ice cream like teeth thrown across an unwashed linen sheet.

Abrams supposes that this feeling, this loosening from between his shoulders through his core and reaching finally his sphincter, is what makes men, particularly soldiers, defecate in the process of their deaths. It is a kind of peacefulness, it is true. There’s nothing particularly special or original about the pleasure of abandon, Abrams knows. Perhaps there lies within the sensation of knowing, of (literally) striding forth into the moment of his fate, some sort of masochistic desire, a sense in which Abrams’ appreciation of the maze of light and the calm fall of shadow was in fact beckoning the violence of the thing in the dirt which he cannot see. A death wish. Perhaps this is what — underneath all the paroxysms of memory — he’s really wanted. Why else can he not stop his foot, really?

Just as he cannot stop now the memory of Lara Fugelsang, the tall, severe-faced, blonde lesbian in the philosophy seminar he’d taken back in graduate school.

Abrams had assumed Lara was a lesbian mostly because she had a girlfriend, and a face that featured prominent, martial cheekbones. She was writing her thesis on some inherently boring, ultraspecific example of gender politics in government language usage, and her comments in seminar were always throbbing with disgust and carefully curated anger. Abrams hated her. He hated her comments. He hated gender politics in general, and especially her diluted third-wave, recherché feminism which was really, he’d always suspected, just a collection of exceedingly normal personal anxieties. He had no idea what Lara was really like, or where she’d come from. He only really knew that she’d gone to Brown.

Abrams spent a lot of time staring at Lara in that seminar. And it was this that he hated the most about her: that the sight of her made Abrams wonder if, really, deep down, he hated women. He worried about this a lot. He did not feel that he hated women. He supported feminism, when it was not being annoyingly espoused in seminars, and generally shared the reasoning of many girls and women he’d known who hated men. He was, by all accounts, a conscientious, generous, and democratic lover. But there was the blowjob thing, which was undeniable.

What he would eventually begin to do, every single time the seminar met, was to look at the female members of the class and imagine, especially when they began to talk, forcing his penis into each of their mouths. He needed no extended barstool monologue from Lara (though he’d heard her give a very good one on the subject) to understand the inherent misogynistic issues involved in the act of oral sex itself, let alone what it might mean about Abrams that he sat there and imagined what he did about the women in the seminar, not all of whom he hated. He didn’t hate all of them, but the exercise was especially exciting, he squirmingly admitted to himself, when it was someone he did hate, when it was Lara herself. He was consistently taken aback, somewhat horrified in the midst of his helpless reverie, by the violence implied in this carnality. He often even felt victimized by it himself. He did not want to be the kind of man who sat there and imagined — with asinine pleasure — this act. And yet he was that kind of man, apparently. Which made him think he secretly — unbeknownst even to himself — bore some vast reservoir of hatred for women. Which made him hate Lara — Lara in the specific, he defended to himself, who happened to be a woman — even more.

But then the computer lab. The first deposits of their theses were due the next day, and Abrams and Lara were the only ones left at their workstations at 2:47 in the morning. Abrams had been reviewing leaked U.S. Government memos for his own thesis (False Narrative Constructions in Intelligence Reporting, 1976–2001), which would eventually get him the enlistment appointment with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and which in turn would lead to his job at the Combat Review Repository in Tucson (which itself would eventually lead to his attachment to this unit, in Iraq, in the dusty alley where the device of his fate awaited him). He didn’t know what Lara was working on.

What he did know was that they were both printing off large amounts of material, and had been taking awkward turns getting up from their seats and going to the boxy printer to retrieve their documents. As the hour grew later and later, however, their papers became mixed, and they kept getting in each other’s way during simultaneous fetchings. Abrams was pretty sure Lara had twice now taken a stack of documents that belonged to her and purposefully included in her grab the documents he’d printed off, then thrown them away on the other side of the lab. He retaliated by doing the same to a packet of hers at the back of his own pile. The next three times they got up, Lara became more physical, elbowing him out of the way. On the fourth time, when she went to elbow him, Abrams shouldered into her, which she responded to by hip-checking him sideways with surprising strength, sending him caroming painfully into the corner of the table the printer stood on and then to the ground. Abrams got up quickly, the blood in his face pounding, and pushed her.

By some tangoing struggle, Abrams ended up standing against her from behind, and pressed up against each other like that, they each suddenly and simultaneously became aware of his erection.

Abrams was so tired and supremely confused by the erection, and the situation that gave rise to it, that he took a small step backward, his face falling, feeling both ashen and humiliated.

“Listen, I—” he started to choke out. He was going to apologize. Lara did not turn around.

What Lara did was bend slowly forward, bracing herself against the table, which motion reclosed the space between her ass (its shape Abrams had noticed watching her go to and from the printer, covered thinly by her light dress and tights) and the taut front of Abrams’ slacks. She looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes flashing, almost angry, but sincere.

“Oh, just do it already,” she said, and without really thinking Abrams undid his pants and let them drop and pushed up the soft material of her dress and pulled down her tights — she wore nothing underneath — and commenced intercourse with her, just like that.

Even as he was doing it he was aware of the queasiness of it, the problematic nature of what was happening. There were so many things at once: Abrams had never had sex in public before; he was terrified that he was enacting some surely misogynistic male protofantasy about “turning” a lesbian by phallic force; he was also concerned that he was raping her, and he stopped cold at the thought, looking at his hands lightly grasping Lara’s narrow hips, trying to scan an objective description of the situation for any signs of resistance (was she being sarcastic? were her verbalizations now ones of pleasure or horror? was he in any way manhandling her?) but she only moved back against him more forcefully. And overlaid on everything was the childish surprise: he’d thought Lara hated him; he’d thought he hated Lara. With a shudder, and a sound from Lara, he ejaculated, and was done. They were still for a few long seconds, his heart beating wildly.

Abrams knows, if their seminar that semester had encountered this scene in a novel, the women of the class would have had a field day tearing it down as a completely unbelievable, pathetic projection of the author’s openly misogynistic domination fantasy, and moreover would point out that it was irresponsible to put it to paper under the aegis of fiction, that it took advantage of the faux-displacement of responsibility for the scene onto the (flawed, sexist) character, and also that it was just totally unbelievable — and Abrams would’ve agreed with all of that. But it happened! It really happened, just that way! This was part of the irony of it, he supposes, remembering how he’d backed away, softening out of her, the air in the computer lab suddenly licking at his slickened penis like cold fire. Lara had gathered herself silently, with effortless dignity, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. She’d left the building from the bathroom, and never said a word about what happened to Abrams. The ultimate irony being that even if he’d wanted to (which he did not), he could never have told anyone what had actually happened, because nobody would ever believe him. Thank god she had not performed the sex act he’d spent so many long hours imagining in seminar, Abrams thought, or there was no way he’d be able to live with himself.

The uncomfortable but honest point of all this being that, in those moments when everything began to happen — when she’d leaned back into him, and Abrams’ mind leapt forward, already thrusting away at her pale skin — he’d been possessed by the purest instance of joy he’d ever felt. His whole body became light and airy. This seems to Abrams on some fundamental level pretty unfair to the more meaningful and substantive things in his life that he has experienced before and since, but it is, nonetheless, true.

When it came time for them to peer-review each other’s theses, her notes were, oddly, both harsh and funny, a somewhat disturbing combination that over the years became even more so due to its tendency to inexplicably recur in other contexts around him.

3.

Abrams was so delighted by the last of these phrases, he didn’t even mind that it came back to him in the middle of a document dismantling (in methodical, phosphorescently intelligent terms) his first Combat Action Sustainability Tactic (or CAST) report at the DIA center in Tucson. Unrepentant lily-gilding, Abrams thought. If that’s not a perfect synecdoche for the joy to be had in life, there isn’t one.

The evaluation was written by Brockton L. Albright, technically Abrams’ only colleague in the CAST report pod. Abrams was pretty sure the DIA had picked up Brockton on waivers from the CIA, mostly because he simply couldn’t imagine Brockton — who had the dark brown ringlets and vaguely mournful mien of an Eastern hagiological icon — ever willfully enlisting in any wing of the military. Brockton, whose interface review setup was just across the pod, spoke very, very little. Sometimes Abrams would see him coming into the cavernous space of the hangar that housed the twin geodesic domes of the interfaces, as Abrams paused behind the small organ of super-servers humming diastolically to one side. Abrams would watch him move over the polished concrete floors of the heavily air-conditioned hangar soundlessly, as if gliding.

Abrams’ assignment was to prepare and submit CAST analyses of raw media from the field, which he displayed on the 3D viewing screens arranged in an angled cascade of triptychs around and over the desk in his interface office. Specifically, this was data focusing on the temporal environs of any American casualty that occurred in Iraq, as gathered by the many unblinking electronic eyes that the DIA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency might bring to bear.

The most helpful of these technologies was by far the improbably named Gorgon Stare Platform (basically: a hovering bundle of very high-performing, very expensive video cameras and sensors, which sits static high above an Iraqi town when U.S. forces are operating in the area), especially when used in conjunction with the somewhat more aptly christened ARGUS system, though it was unclear if anyone at DARPA was aware of that namesake’s ultimate fate. ARGUS, that is, being the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance system, the overall objective of which was “to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an ability [sic] to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time [sic] to influence events.” What these two utilities meant for Abrams was that, once he’d booted up the Casualty Data Packet for that week, he could start, stall, restart, and otherwise retard diegetic time, all while remotely controlling the focus, zoom, and direction of three-dimensional vision in order to examine any person, face, gaze, biometrical reading or sight-line in the town when someone was killed. It was such an advanced and acute technology, and was played out in 3D for so many hours on the towering, enveloping screens, that Abrams always ended up with the feeling of actually being there as the casualty event happened, over and over and over.

What a CAST analysis or report really was, according to Brockton, who spent three weeks of painful vocal communication and social company training Abrams, was a narrativization of combat casualty data. They were to place a special emphasis on creative conjecture with the ultimate goal of using all this literally fantastic technology and data to render a written narrative of the casualty’s subjective experience of the pertinent combat event. The precipitated narrative was, presumably, to be even more telling, accurate, and useful, from a procedural standpoint, than the soldier’s actual subjective experience, were he alive to describe it. Brockton, whose reports Abrams also peer-reviewed, was very good at it. He had the right kind of obsessive attention and (much rarer) eidetic imagination for the job, and, moreover, he seemed to be well enough acquainted with the kind of quiet, continuous inner suffering necessary to become each casualty, to know both the soldier’s mind and the technology’s omniscience at once. Abrams was not so well suited to the task, he thought. What Brockton made Abrams feel about himself, basically, was that he simply wasn’t intelligent enough to be in the pod at all.

This wasn’t Brockton’s fault. Each day, Abrams and Brockton ate lunch together at a picnic table outside of the hangar, in the falsely natural landscaping of the empty civilian industrial park. Each day they made polite if burdened conversation, and Abrams always felt like his pathetic eagerness, his desire just to listen to Brockton speak — about anything really — was writ large on their awkwardly syncopated conversational silences.

What Abrams really wanted to do, though, in those long hours of watching Brockton’s thin fingers expertly disassembling his daily orange, was to ask him about his childhood, what he’d been like as a kid; if his father (as was Abrams’ suspicion) had died when he was young; if, a little older, he’d had a girlfriend, and what that had been like, what the girl had been like, and had they ever had sex, and if so, how, and etcetera etcetera etcetera. It was a kind of aggression, Abrams understood, his desire to know — information being a kind of domination, a kind of ownership, when it came to another person’s life. And it was probably also a more or less understandable overspill from the task they paused each day for lunch; the delving into personnel files, the scans of letters home, but also the imagining, the conjecturing. What you’re really trying to do, Brockton had explained to Abrams, in a rare moment of fluster during those weeks of training, is not just explain why the subject died but what it was about the subject’s very being — i.e., the subject’s life, training, attention — that led to the casualty event.

The report that inspired the delightful formulation unrepentant lily-gilding was one Abrams wrote about the death of Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez in the gentle elbow of the Tigris. Abrams doesn’t know what it was about that particular Casualty Data Packet that got to him. Maybe it was the dumb nature of the casualty, pretty much an accident, a tank parked in an inopportune place. Or maybe it was the data from the operator-facing control-board combat camera, the way Ferrero had just been sitting there at his station, how he looked around at the first strange sucking sound, then tried to brace himself at the initial shift, the tank’s sudden, listing angle. Confused, a blank-faced teenager (Was this a prank? Ferrero was thinking. Or did the tread fall off or something? Did the navigator Ash-Dog steer them into another pothole, the idiot?). Then that data-stream cutting out as the tank made its slow topple into the river.

Or maybe it was the overhead view from the satellite, the pastoral beauty of the picture: the angle held wide, the waters of the Tigris a brilliant emerald snake in the sun. Or was it the maudlin thing, the scan of his last letter home, which they’d stopped: just a list of things he needed his mom to send him, that he couldn’t or was too afraid to ask for from the other guys: underwear, chapstick, something called Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. Well. It didn’t really matter what it was that made Abrams say screw it, basically, and write what he wanted to write.

He gave Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez a good life, a better life than he’d actually had. And he used the last half of the report to describe, in increasingly florid, turgid, self-consciously rococo language, the kid’s last moments. In his report the eternity of the tank’s dorsal rotation into the water stretched on and on, creating a sort of zero-gravity type situation where Ferrero Rodriguez could watch the grease pencils and loose snacks and dirt and strands of chewing tobacco float, weightless, in the air around him, and wonder, and reflect. And so, of course, Brockton’s lightly caustic evaluation of the report had been accurate, and fair, and had happened to include the phrase unrepentant lily-gilding. This is not the truth, he’d also written. This is you being desperate for some kind of validation. But the truth was that Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez drowned in the Tigris when the bank under his parked tank collapsed, drowned slowly, drowned knowing he was going to drown, drowned clawing desperately at the sharp metal of the blocked hatch that was now beneath his feet, drowned defecating all over himself in utter terror. And Abrams just couldn’t write that.

What is Brockton Albright doing now, this moment of Abrams’ foot’s fateful lifting progress? After they’d both left the pod assignment (Abrams reassigned to actual unit attachment, Brockton having finished his contract), Albright began a very successful career as an academic and a public intellectual. He’s now in residence at the Sorbonne, Abrams believes. And Abrams thinks of him now in some Latin Quarter square, almost dusk, his thin fingers lost in his lap, his tiny cup of tea forgotten on its saucer before him. Oh, what Abrams could’ve been in life, if he’d only tried a little harder.

But Abrams’ favorite thing to remember from his time in the pod with Brockton in Tucson is actually the rare instance of Brockton’s smile. Such a saccharine thing to willfully remember, but it holds the same relation to Abrams’ happiness (even now) as Lara Fugelsang’s smirking sneer does to Abrams’ shame. Brockton was an unexpectedly funny guy, Abrams remembers, though he never smiled at or after his own deadpan, absurdist one-liners. Abrams can’t actually remember what made Brockton smile those few times — surprise seemed to have something to do with it, and being unobserved — but Abrams can remember very clearly what it looked like. Brockton’s whole face changed, opening up, brow for once relaxing, lifting, spreading — and the impression of vulnerability flashing then across his features was so startling as to make Abrams look away. For just a second Brockton seemed just like a little boy, granted a pulse of pure, unmediated feeling.

“Momentary joy” was the phrase that always stuck in Abrams’ mind when he thought of it. A blooming. What a thing to have seen.

The principal legacy of the CAST pod assignment, though, these years later, now that Abrams has been attached to an actual unit in the actual Shit, is the ghosting awareness of being on the other end of the CAST technologies’ flow — of being in the midst of all the “data” that is really just the world, the village, the late afternoon, the alley. It’s stopped Abrams cold each time he’s allowed his mind to wince itself across the thought. What CAST data operator, sitting in what American hangar, was watching him now, displaced in time? That, of course, was the very worst part of that assignment: the nebulized awareness, as he worked, that the subject was being kept alive there before him for only the exact duration of Abrams’ close attention, and that, at some point — a point Abrams could feel dawning even as he opened for the first time each new Casualty Data Packet — Abrams would grow bored, and tired, and inured to the human life which he held in the circuitry of the control board before him — in the circuitry of his mind — and would allow it, finally, to expire. What finite expansion of memory and experience would he grant himself, if he found his own CDP loaded up on the screens, the cursor ticking away? And the irony, even in this moment of abandon, of there now actually being created, at this very moment, a CDP for this purpose, is not lost on Abrams, though he knows it’s not irony, really, just the remediated sadness of knowing.

4.

The contact plate itself is suspended, the tiny metal ridge on the underside of the plate now loosed from its delicate restraints by the pressure of Abram’s foot. Its destination — the small metal tab which will complete the electric circuit, thereby triggering the small detonation charge, which, in turn, will trigger the primary explosive (in this case, Abrams knows, probably an unexploded landmine salvaged from the Iran — Iraq war) — awaits, patiently. The contact plate has thus far been stilled in that motionless nadir of its spring-loaded inverted arc of travel but, as Abrams’ foot helplessly begins its lift (the pressure of his weight on the contact plate lessening every microsecond), the charged metal surface is now rising, heading toward its kismet of electronal reunion.

The alley’s stole of shadow moves again, Abrams thinks. The alley is attempting to shrug it off, it seems. The reverse inertia of what is about to happen is lightening the alley before him, it seems.

IED is really a terrible term for the device, for what this device that is agent of Abrams’ fate really is. There’s nothing “improvised” about it, first of all. There’s nothing spontaneous, extemporaneous, or accomplished without preparation there in its careful circuitry, its repurposed materiel. “Explosive” is a little better, but also fails to capture the true quantum entanglement of possibility in this alley-deposited incendiary: that is, that it could fail to go off, could not be explosive at all, ultimately. It is a possibly explosive thing, a probable explosive. This is a relatively unforgivable lingual oversight given the defiance of experience — of life itself.

“Device,” though, is the telltale heart of the term. It marries in its etymology the essences of its Middle English, Old French, and Latin ancestors, pulling through the original sense of “desire” into “will” and even “last will,” and bringing the word to its dark end of signal with “means of division.” The IED is fate itself. Abrams was always moving toward it. It was created (he imagines some nameless scarred ghost of an insurgent bent over the basement table in perfect silence, with no morbid élan, even) for no other death than his. Time has existed in his life for no other purpose than to draw him through it, to guide him into this particular stride.

What has he imagined he’d think of, in this moment? All that most indulgent memory of private beauty, the jetsam of his thirty years blinking in the sunlight of this planet.

Abrams at twelve years old, on a trip to London, lost in the deserted financial district, when the clock hits noon exactly and suddenly the buildings burst with people, and he looks up, and all around him are men all wearing (thrilling, the coincidence) pastel shirts and ties, a shifting, towering forest of brightly-colored thoraces, Abrams overwhelmed with pleasure. Also as a boy, his mother calling him ABCD, instead of Abrams, for no good reason. Approaching a county fair’s carnival from a far field, the loopy, maniac music of the rides, the rich smell of funnel cake, it all reaching him before he can see anything but a sort of macula of light on the horizon. When he is older, a tour guide’s funny voice echoing around his visit of Pompeii. The grassy mountaintop campus in Sewanee, Tennessee. The shirt (long-sleeved, striped with a Creamsicle orange color) that his first girlfriend kept on the first time he ever had sex. Going to a local café late at night after a different girl’s volleyball games and drinking overly rich hot chocolate while eating artisanal pizza and pretending to be in Paris, or Rome, talking to each other about all the great sites they pretended to have seen that day. But also, the only perfect date he’s ever been on, much later, in Athens. They’d had gyros (the woman’s hair still wet from the shower) at a small corner restaurant in a very quiet neighborhood square, the dark face of the church at the square’s other end somber and still. Then they’d gone to an anonymous building, gone up the stairs to the top of it, to a rooftop showing of a terribly dubbed American movie on a screen just beside which, in the near distance, was the Acropolis, set ablaze in the sunset. At the intermission, they’d both bought strawberry-and-ices, and sipped them silently together back in their seats, in the warm night.

5.

What is he looking at? The maze of light made overhead by the high, mud-brick walls of the alley system. The aimless whorl of dust motes on the thick, slanted bar of brighter light in the intersection ahead. The synclinal area of darkened cloth at the back of the next man’s uniform, below the deeply umber, slickened skin of his neck.

And there in the very last glancing collision of thought in his mind’s eye, the realization: while the sole of his boot was there on the ground, a small system of trapped spaces must’ve formed in there between the rubberized nubbins and blocks, closed off by the sudden floor of earth beneath the boot. Closed off, a labyrinth with no entrance or middle or exit: a lightless maze. It is piercing to think of this miniature, lightless maze, enclosed by the fateful fall of his foot; a maze of darkness made of the once grand miniature landscape of Abrams’ obsessive attention, itself set within the momentary beauty of the maze of light made by the high walls of the alley. But just as soon as the image (or anti-image, as it were) is formed in Abrams’ awareness comes the hounding truth, the stomach-pit feeling of the truth: that the perfect maze of darkness within the maze of light only existed for the brief moment of the boot’s full contact; that Abrams himself has ruined it with his boot’s lifting progress; that it was ruined from that first moment of rising heel, which let in the light; that he has realized the truth about the maze within a maze just slightly too late to truly wonder at it; that it is all, in fact, already gone.

•

Soren waited until all the guides, redeployed for the day as messengers, had returned from the villages before ordering Sambul and Benny to wrap up the body and put it on the rear board of one of the jeeps. No one was missing, and there were no reports of an unfamiliar man in the area. Soren was quiet as they drove back to the compound. He made them go very slowly, and allowed no one else besides Sambul and Benny in the vehicle, as if to limit the number of people forced to have contact with the nameless man’s corpse, sheathed as it was in a way that looked both ridiculous and ceremonial. Benny had returned to the spring with several rounds of old, yellowed muslin. Standing there before the body, laid out in the dirt between Soren and Sambul, Benny had turned his round, pitted face up to them, only then recognizing the inadequacy of the cloth.

Now, riding in the back seat of the open-topped vehicle, Sambul had one hand over the swaddled form tied to the luggage board. Beneath his fingers the man’s body felt neither cold nor warm, only hardened. The deep tone of the man’s skin could not be masked by the thin muslin and its deeper hue shone through in an ill-defined way. As they entered the gates and slowly trolled up through the safari camp, a few guests leaned out the front flaps of their big tents or stood on the porches of packed earth and watched them pass.

Sambul knew it was not a good solution, but thought it was the only one. Soren for some reason hadn’t even wanted to move the body, other than to remove it from the water, as if to preserve the basic facts of the story that might be told to any family member the guides might bring back.

Sambul had squatted beside Soren and, quietly pointing with a pinky finger, suggested that the yellowed flesh of the calluses Soren was looking for did in fact pad the man’s palms, forming a ridge at the top of the ball of the right hand. Sambul knew that Soren knew that all the men had been thinking the same thing since first seeing the body: that this man was just another of the migrant workers who wandered undocumented over the border, that they’d find no name, no family, and no story.

“He doesn’t have anything with him for travel, though,” Soren had argued, looking up at the other guides, who watched from a small distance away, leaning against the vehicles and spitting.

“And there’re no wounds, no immediate cause for death,” Sambul added helpfully, without knowing why. The guides squinted at Sambul for a moment then shrugged and readjusted their feet. Soren had looked at Sambul for a minute, blank-faced, before sighing and turning away.

By the time all the guides returned, it was too late in the day for anyone leaving the estate in one of the Land Rovers to make it to town and the municipal morgue before nightfall, when control of the highway reverted to the rural gangs who financed the rebels with robbery and beheadings. There was also the matter of the party that had been planned for that night, for the twenty-five or so guests currently in residence at the safari camp. So Sambul eventually had to say it, because Soren seemed to need him to, had to suggest the walk-in freezer in the great house’s basement kitchen.

When he, Benny, and Soren reached the house, Sambul helped them carry the body into the frigid space, each hefting it under his right arm.

The party was held for each group of guests on the last night of their stay. The camp hosted guests on ten-day rotations and Sambul, overseeing the safari outings, had this summer become familiar with how Soren would appear about three days in, whipping one of the vehicles at high speed up to where the guests in their open-topped jeeps would be taking their break after the morning game drive, and hopping dramatically out of his car. This was how he began, Sambul knew, how Soren started his process. By the day before the party the guests inevitably felt that he had become one of them, and were excited by the presence of the master of the estate right beside them in the lounge chairs of the pool in the early afternoon’s clear sunlight.

Sambul always wondered at Soren’s ability to recognize the urge in one or another of these guests, and at these other men’s ability to recognize and respond to it in Soren, all without any doublespeak or sidelong look — without any sign, as far as Sambul could tell, at all. It was as if they were speaking a mental language encoded in the very facts of each other’s bodies: in things like the effortless order of Soren’s combed hair, of course, but also in the high cheekbones and dark stubble of one particular guest’s face, in the litheness of another’s body, the lack of resistance in his shoulders. Sambul was witness to these exchanges, could tell clearly when an understanding between Soren and one of the guests — usually a young, single professional on this trip with a large group of other young, single professionals from the same company — had been reached, but what bothered Sambul was how at ease each of these chosen guests was with the situation, the way after dark they walked up the path for their personal audience with Soren without shame but also without flippant striding.

In these last weeks of summer, the estate had been hosting mostly long strings of high school and college tour groups, led by huffing geography teachers from the middle of America and spouse-chaperones along for the ride. Accordingly, Soren’s taste had gotten startlingly younger; Sambul watching in disgust as Soren flirted openly with the thin, tan boys who did knifing dives into the pool, skimming along its bottom, their half-developed muscles rippling in the water before surfacing, the air filled with their surprised, buoyant laughter. Is this what Soren wanted? Sambul found himself thinking, watching the display. This idiotic lightness?

Soren’s interest in these youths (the exact ages neither Sambul nor Soren were ever certain of, though what did it matter when they all looked to have been stalled in some vague prepubescence, their only body hair a delicate blond undercoat that served merely to bring the curve of their tanned lower backs or stomachs into further definition) was made even more unsettling given Soren’s changing appearance. As Soren’s lovers had gotten younger Soren himself, or at least his body, had begun to age considerably. He was back to losing weight again, helplessly — the bedclothes that Sambul had the maids change every morning sopping with sweat, the full plates of food pushed away in defeat. To the men and boys who stayed at the safari camp, however, this only accentuated Soren’s natural good looks, his face even more angular and sly. His small shoulders kept his fleshless torso from appearing skeletal, and his entire body only got even more out of the way of the unexpected pale green eyes that, as a boy, had flashed but that now gave him a calm, distanced air.

Soren had prepared Sambul and some of the servants for this yo-yoing health that would eventually just never rewind itself, but when Soren’s first descent into sickness had started no one had been ready for the racking coughs, the inability to eat, the wandering, temporary dementia giving way finally to the immobility, the weakness so great that Soren could barely even move his cracked lips to request the water that Sambul had to drip into his mouth. How had that not been the end? What was that, if not the end of Soren’s life? But it wasn’t: he’d more than recovered, everything happening in reverse, abilities one by one regained and remastered. And this robust infection of good health hadn’t stopped there, but continued until Soren was more hale and lively than he had been upon his adult return to the country. “Har har, just kidding,” Soren had joked to the servants after this recovery, without smiling.

So everyone at the estate knew that the plateau of good health would end, knew that what they were doing was waiting. That had been a year ago, though. Then this summer had come with the boys and simultaneously, as if mocking their youth, the stirrings of the weight loss, the shaking hands at dinner as he tried to eat his soup.

Soren was doing fine for the moment, though, with the body safely away in the freezer and him free to return his attentions to the young Indian man from somewhere back in Britain. Soren had seated himself beside the Indian and kept leaning slightly over to deliver his punch lines so that their shoulders touched lightly, though this was the only contact they had. The man, impossibly young-looking, with rounded cheeks, a shock of black hair and big, earnest eyes, had already agreed, Sambul could see. He was smiling, happy to be taken in by Soren’s older, comforting grace. When the dinner petered out and the other guests took their big bottles of beer to the pool, Soren quietly got up and made his way back to the great house. A few minutes later the boy got up and followed. When it was possible, Sambul left too, walking the long way up before taking his usual position.

Technically, Sambul used the small room off of Soren’s quarters when Soren was sick, or when someone needed to keep a vigil over him as he slept. In healthier times it was used as a sort of all-purpose folding room by the maids who kept up the great house, with the understanding that they quietly slip out the door that led to the back stairs whenever Soren entered his quarters. There was no door between Soren’s living room and this small space; instead, a long, gauzy curtain hung in the doorway that was generally respected as if it were solid.

Sambul thought of what he did in these situations in a vaguely proprietary way. Soren might need something, for instance, might get sick, with no one there to help him but his clueless young men. But Sambul also knew it went beyond that, felt that Soren somehow needed him to see, to witness, in the same way that he had no compunction in calling Sambul to his quarters when he’d lost controls of his bowels in the night.

Sambul could see them now, through the narrow space between the curtain and the doorframe. The young man was standing, Soren kneeling in front of him, head bobbing, reduced in his disease to this exercise, this pleasuring of the other. There seemed something off to Sambul about this setup, something wrong about the young man being the one experiencing this feeling, his eyes closed, his body stiff. When he was done Soren slowly stood and said something to the boy. They each moved around each other awkwardly, actors ignorant of the scene’s proper blocking, until the boy was bent, kneeling forward on an ottoman facing the other wall and Soren was behind him, arm working at himself, head looking down at the boy’s full buttocks, where Sambul knew Soren was not even touching him, masturbating instead into a doubled condom. Sambul sat like this for a long time, unfolding the linens and then refolding them, looking up after each one to check that Soren was still there, to see that there was still the fact of his body: naked, pathetically curved into itself, his diminutive, shallow buttocks very pale and cupped in the effort. Sambul watched him begin to shake weakly, and waited for the familiar moment, the climax that would not come, that would be replaced with the strangely banal sound of Soren’s infirm weeping.

•

That night the three were to make one of the long clothing runs up to Dahuk. There was a man there, a night watchman at an airplane hangar that had been converted by the Americans into a storage warehouse for the pallets of aid materials that now came over the Turkish border. As a toddler Araz had been adopted, taken from a religious orphanage by the widower Bertrand Baradost, a lawyer years ago returned from Beirut; the night watchman had once been a client of his, and it was understood that the clothing arrangement was in service of his fee. Bajh drove his father’s rickety old flatbed pickup while Araz and Asti sat between the squares of stale hay in the back. By this time they knew what would be waiting for them after the two-hour chugging ride along the throughway into Dahuk: the gray canyons of buildings; Bajh’s craning neck as he carefully backed the truck up to the side of the hangar; the watchman, rousing himself from sleep to sip at a thermos of tea, watching them roll up the loading-bay door with a series of metal clangs. And inside, the dark labyrinth of shrink-wrapped pallets, stacked higher than their heads.

This warehouse was where the NGOs for the northern half of the country stored secondhand clothing donated from America. The tightly wrapped plastic glistened in the dark, catching the dim light from the opened bay as Araz walked down the rows. The best pallets had many T-shirts of bright colors or thick clothes good for the winter or anything that had a prominent logo, and the three had been instructed to try to discern the contents of the pallets and pick one that looked to have the most of these. Though Araz knew the pallets were basically all the same anyway; he had watched the children employed by his father in the market hawking the T-shirts with large seals of American sports teams, the endless Christian youth group fund-raising slogans, the button-up shirts with armpits yellowed by years of sweat. The warehouse was endlessly refilled, and the watchman insisted that the NGO in charge of distribution didn’t even keep records of what it received.

This night, the trip had been quiet so far. Twice before, on previous runs, they’d been stopped by local security of the towns they guided the truck through (Bajh had been instructed to stay off the main roads on the way back), but each time they’d gotten by with only the loss of a few shirts and a blazer. They’d only had to go through an American checkpoint once, very late at night, with Araz whispering translations of the soldiers’ orders through the back window of the truck’s cab, where Bajh, fingers white around the wheel, carefully obeyed them.

Now Araz and Asti lay as they always did on the return trip, squeezed on either side of the mound of clothing (once the pallet was loaded, the plastic had to be cut away and discarded so as to avoid suspicion), pressed against the low containing rails of the truck’s flatbed. On the more bumpy roads, they were to keep the clothes from flying off.

Araz sighed and put his hands behind his head, looking up into the litter of stars that shifted slightly with each jounce of the truck. In the cab, Bajh turned off the radio he’d been listening to and a silence surrounded the exertions of the engine. After a while there were the sounds of other cars, and distant voices, and the truck eased to a stop.

Araz sat up and looked around. The small side road they’d taken, which ran parallel to the highway, was full of headlights and the sounds of motors stopping and starting. There was a traffic jam, stretching as far down as Araz could see. Maybe a breakdown, or a convoy moving through.

“What’s going on?” Araz said through the back window.

Bajh pointed to the slim, false horizon of the actual highway dimly glowing in the distance to their right. “It’s stopped there too,” he said. He opened the door and leaned out to look behind the truck. There was no one there. They were the last car.

“No problem,” he said. “I guess.”

Bajh got back in and reversed, using the shoulder to turn around. They traced back to the nearest turnoff and followed it, the tires making a dull thump as they went from the paved road to the dirt one. They traveled like this for a while, the roughness of the road causing Araz and Asti to sit up. The commotion of the late-night traffic jam eventually receded until its luminescence only barely troubled the dark of the sky behind them.

Araz watched Asti, who was sitting with her legs pulled up beside and under her. He thought again of her body, the form that her simple long-sleeved shirts and jeans under dresses both embraced and obscured, of the quality of her skin, the way it held light, its grace over her naked hollows and rises as he had seen her the afternoon two weeks before, laid along Bajh’s body on the cot in the abandoned guard hut outside town. The afternoon light had been warm and came tripping down through the gentle movement of a tree’s lower limbs outside, finally falling through the glassless window, making of their pose a shifting chiaroscuro, revealing then hiding Bajh’s huddled nakedness behind her. They were asleep, pressed together in the slight chill of the hut’s shadows, even though it was a balmy day. Bajh’s face was turned down, nestled between the stiff material of the cot and Asti’s shoulder blades. Asti’s hair was folded under and hung over the metal brace of the cot, where the long sun of the afternoon alighted on it in bits and pieces, leaving the rest to sit darkly in the shadow of her body. Araz had stood for a second, stilled at the doorway, and carefully taken in the fact of her nakedness, letting his eyes run down to the dip of her stomach and the rise of her hip, Bajh’s own hip behind hers, the slim line of his body, mostly hidden behind hers, grayed and blued by the foregrounding distance, even in that small room. There was the pocket of dark hair, surprisingly silky and flat, where her legs met, and the easy curve of her calf, her delicate ankles. They did not wake as he turned away and left.

•

“Did you sleep?” Gershon says, the next morning.

He’s found her standing in front of the widest window, the one in the sparsely furnished living room, looking down, or out. She turns to him slowly.

“You should sleep, if you haven’t,” he says. “I know it can be hard. People have trouble, because of the sky.”

The sky: clear, cloudless, a piercing black at night while at day only ripening to a lightless cobalt, insinuated with vaguely amethyst underhues at dawn and dusk. The impression, especially upon new arrivals, is of limitless depth, or height, and sometimes the new settlers experience a kind of vertigo. But he’s talking too much.

She turns to him, is facing him now, silently, her eyes wide, though not with fear. Instead, it is a sharp look, one of alert appraisal, and somehow this in conjunction with her delicate attractiveness feeds Gershon’s anger.

“I’m ready, if we need to do something in the city,” she says softly. “They told me we’d probably need to do something in the city.”

Gershon nods, his jaw tight and aching, and tries to keep from speaking again.

•

That night she took me to her apartment. It was in a nice complex, built up just on the edge of campus in that bright, blocky way that often makes student apartment buildings indistinguishable from prisons.

As we took the first few steps into her apartment, I looked around. The entire apartment was empty — not a stick of furniture, nor decoration. When I turned my face to Charlie’s I remember the look on her face. It seemed such a vulnerable, honest expression — an ingenuous shame.

It turned out she spent all her money on rent, knowing she’d be able to afford nothing else, just to claim a space in this upscale complex. It turned out, as we sat on the carpeted floor Indian-style, like little kids, that she spent half the night in the old auditorium to minimize her own heating bill, which she could barely make. In the fridge there was nothing but a magnum of vodka and a bag of thawing corn, the former of which she retrieved.

Later, when we finally stood next to her surprisingly ornate bed (“moving day dumpster dive”) I moved to kiss her. With a graceful motion, she locked my face into a tight hug, pressed side by side to hers, her grasp strong. I blushed.

“I’m nervous, OK?” she said.

“You’re nervous?” I said, her soft, anxious breath in my ear.

To what end these sentimentalisms? To what fire go these uncorrupted bits of memory? I suppose Haim was there, even then, mixed up in all of it, our little homunculus observer, energies still coiled in a quiet, patient ovum inside of her, years away from his birth. He will not even live long enough, it occurs to me now, to posses it as his own story, privately recalled.

But that night I looked down at Charlie under me, her leg bent slightly to the side, us both moving, her eyes glued downwards to where we intersected, mouth and brow formed into (mysterious to me, even now) surprise, and I remember the way the air seemed to crackle with a kind of ambient electric static as I looked down at her, as I watched her body as it moved and writhed and squirmed, unbearably sensate, alive.