Teaching [a New Yorker Fiction]

Fiction

Teaching

by Roddy Doyle April 2, 2007

Keywords

Teachers;

Sexual Abuse;

Pedophilia;

Alcoholics;

Catholic Church;

Supressed Memories;

Catholics

You know my mother.

The girl stood beside his desk. She was one of those big-eyed kids. She’d always look a bit like a kid. By the time she was thirty-five, she’d be a strange-looking kid.

—You know my mother, she said again.

Now, though, she was one of those lovely kids. She’d stopped, hesitated, on her way past his desk to the door. The last out. She’d probably made sure of that. It was her first full day in the secondary school.

He finished what he was doing. Searching for a red Biro at the bottom of his bag. And he looked at her.

—Is that right? he said.

—Yeah.

He looked for her mother in the kid’s face.

Big eyes. He stopped looking. He could feel the sweat on his forehead.

—Who is she? he said.

—Amanda Collins, she said.

—Amanda Collins?

—Yeah. Do you remember her?

—I do, yeah.

But he didn’t.

—How is she?

—She’s grand, said the kid.

—Good.

—She says they all fancied you.

She wasn’t the first. The last five or six years, kids had been stopping at his desk. Their first day, their big news. You knew my ma or my da.

This was killing him.

It was getting harder. Getting through the day, the nine class periods. It was the first week in September.

She was still there. He’d have to say something. Silence wouldn’t work.

—It’s hard to imagine, he said. Isn’t it?

—Yeah.

He looked at her. He laughed—relief. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. Even as he heard himself say it. Like some seedy old man, flirting or something.

She laughed, too. A lovely kid. Open. Like her mother must have been. Why he’d loved teaching, when he started, and for a long time.

He didn’t drink in the day. His head was telling him he should, something quick, to swallow the headache. But he didn’t. He never had, and he never would. There was no flask or bottle in his bag. No quick dash down to the local. Too many parents, too much self-respect.

He used to like it, kids stopping for a chat. What groups are you into, sir? Our cat’s after having kittens. D’you want one, sir? Things like that. He used to write down the best of them.

It didn’t really happen now. Kids didn’t stop. He wrote down nothing.

The kid here was going.

—See you tomorrow, sir.

He looked at his timetable. It was open, on his desk.

—Yes, he said. Tomorrow. Bye.

—Bye.

She left the door open. A lovely kid. He’d smile every time she walked in, for the next six years.

He went to the door. He used to stand there between classes and watch the world go by. All those tall and tiny children. More than a thousand of them on the move. He could have named most of them. He shut the door.

Things changed. It wasn’t just him. He wasn’t denying anything: his heart wasn’t in it. He wished he was somewhere else. But there weren’t as many students now; the area outside was changing. The corridor wasn’t as packed as it had been when he’d started, twenty-three years before.

He looked again at the timetable. He sat down. He had to bring the page closer to his eyes. He didn’t have a class now; he was free till eleven o’clock.

It wasn’t just him. Something had happened. A kid stopping at the desk, a boy or a girl, had become something to be wary of, almost to dread. They’d been given talks, in the staff room, on the telltale signs—the eyes, marks, cuts. He was probably the only member of the staff left who hadn’t been told an abuse story. He’d expected it to happen. For a long time. He’d felt left out when it didn’t. He’d even been ready to make up something, when a gang of the teachers had gone for an impromptu pint after work. The urge to tell, to get back his status as one of the nice teachers. But he’d been wise; he’d kept his mouth shut.

He looked at the timetable again. He had two classes left to lunchtime, and another two after. That wasn’t too bad. He looked at his watch. The headache was starting to lift. He’d be better in the next class; he’d get up and move around. He’d be Robin Williams for half an hour, in “Dead Poets Society.” One of those “Seize the day” classes. The way he used to be, all day. He’d even said it once. Seize the day, boys and girls. They’d cheered.

He had an abuse story of his own. He’d been in first year, like the big-eyed kid who’d just left. A few months in the new school, he knew hardly anyone. He’d been sent to the Christian Brothers and he still hadn’t got used to them. They were strange men, sometimes funny, but savage and unpredictable. The lay teachers were as bad. If he listened, he could hear shouting or crying, someone being hit, in another part of the building. The noises were always hanging there. Once, he remembered, a boy in the room next door was thrown against the classroom wall, and he watched the blackboard on his side of the wall come off its hinges and fall to the wooden floor. They’d laughed. They’d all laughed. They’d laughed at everything.

There was one of the brothers, Brother Flynn. Latin and Civics. He’d stand at the front of the room and smile and rub his big hands. But he could just as easily bring the hands down on someone’s face, one onto each ear. The front desk was a death sentence. But, really, Flynn was all right. He was the only teacher who used their first names. He didn’t go mad when he saw the names of English football teams on the covers of their books and copies. Flynn was a laugh.

But Flynn liked him. He’d smile at him when he was testing their Latin vocabulary. The others noticed.

—Smile back and he won’t give us any homework.

—Lay off.

—Go on, yeh queer.

—Fuck off.

Flynn patted his shoulder one day as he was going past. He wanted to cry. He wanted to get out the window, drop to the ground, run into the sea across the road. He knew the others were looking. He knew they’d be waiting to get him when the bell went and Flynn left the room. He hated Flynn and he needed him to stay.

It had only lasted for a while. He got to know a few of the other lads. They went on the same bus home; he made them laugh. They knew he was sound, and soon the stuff about Flynn became a joke. He was one of them now, so he wasn’t a queer. Flynn still smiled and it didn’t matter.

Then he was sick. One morning, he felt hot. His forehead, his whole face, was suddenly wet with sweat. He put his hand up.

—Brother!

He was going to puke. Flynn must have noticed, must have seen the color dropping off his face. He opened the door.

—Quick, quick!

Flynn was standing outside when he came back out of the toilet. He smiled at him. He said he’d drive him home. He told Flynn that his mother wouldn’t be there; she went to his granny’s on Mondays, two buses across the city.

Flynn took him over to the house where all the brothers lived, beside the school. He’d never been in the house before. He’d never really been near it. It was a rule that never had to be remembered: don’t go near the brothers’ house. Water dripped from the roof of the porch onto the red and black tiles.

—Mind you don’t slip, said Flynn.

He remembered shivering, remembered feeling the cold on his skin.

Flynn opened the front door. He followed him into the hall. The same red and black tiles.

—Shut the door.

He pushed the front door closed. The lock was colossal, a big black box screwed right into the wood.

Flynn kept walking. He stood for a while, then followed him. Flynn’s black shoes on the tiles, and his own shoes—they were the only noises. The house was empty. He’d seen the housekeeper once, a woman much older than his mother, walking toward the brothers’ house with a net shopping bag full of apples. But she wasn’t there now. He could tell: something about the cold—the house had been empty for hours.

Flynn pulled open a door. He disappeared behind it, then came back out, backward. He was dragging something. It was a fold-up bed, on casters. The casters squealed across the tiles. Flynn dragged the bed across the hall, to another door. He stayed where he was. Flynn was still going backward, pulling the bed, looking at him.

—Come on, he said.

He didn’t move. He remembered that. He remembered the slow terror, in his legs.

—Come on, said Flynn. Quick now.

He watched, stayed at the door, as Flynn unfolded the bed. He heard him grunt as he pushed the two sides down. It was the dining room, or something. Flynn pushed the bed against the long table.

—There you are. Lie down.

Flynn walked across to the window. He heard him pull the curtains. It didn’t make the room much darker. He sat down on the bed. It moved a bit, on the casters. He took off his shoes. He stood up again. He could hear Flynn’s feet. He pulled back the gray blanket. The mattress was bare, and striped.

He lay down. He felt the bed move under him again, just a bit, an inch. He pulled the blanket over his chest. The room got darker. Flynn was standing in front of the light coming from the hall.

—How’s the tummy now?

—All right, Brother.

—Are you going to be sick again, d’you think?

—No, Brother.

He felt the blanket being pulled away from him, but he couldn’t see Flynn’s hands. Then he saw Flynn’s face, close to his own. He was leaning over him. The blanket was gone. Then it was back; he felt it land on his legs, his waist, his chest. He felt Flynn’s hands at his neck. He could feel Flynn’s knuckles, on his chin. Flynn was holding the blanket. He was tucking it under his neck. He was looking down at him. He was smiling.

That was it, all he could remember. He half-expected more to open up—the hand grabbing his neck, holding him down—but it never did. He’d told someone about it once, a woman at a party. He’d stopped where his memory stopped, at the man tucking the blanket under the boy’s chin. He was sitting beside the woman, two kitchen chairs side by side. She looked at him, then told him that he was an apologist for the Catholic Church. She stood up as she said it.

There was something, color, at the corner of his eye. He glanced over at the classroom door. The principal was looking in the window. She waved, and went. He looked down at his desk. What had she seen? His diary was open, so was one of his books. His timetable. His pen was there as well. It was fine. He was working. He felt his face. He’d shaved that morning.

Not that it mattered. It had never mattered, that kind of idiocy, in this school. How you taught, not how you dressed; that was what mattered. It was one of the things he’d loved about the place. But he’d noticed. His beard had changed color. There was gray in it, even a bit of white. He looked like a wino or something if he didn’t shave every second day.

The principal was younger than him. She’d come to the school four years after he had. He’d kissed her once—he cringed now.

He looked at his timetable. It was darker in the room now; it was going to rain. This had been his room for more than twenty years. He knew the light and every noise.

He’d do something about the drinking. He’d give it up. He would—he could. He’d watched a football match the night before, the Champions League, on RTÉ, the whole thing. But he didn’t know who’d played. He remembered nothing. Not a thing. He’d have to read the report in the paper before lunch; the paper was in his bag. Then he’d be able to talk about it, if he talked to anyone. But he’d probably stay in the room. Plan his classes.

He’d stop. The drinking. He wasn’t fooling himself. He knew it was serious.

He’d kissed her. That first year she’d been in the school. After a union meeting.

He smiled. The absurdity. The idea of kissing her now. He looked at the window. There was no one there. He looked at the timetable. Sixth-Year English was next. A double class, Ordinary level. There were no Honors classes on his timetable. It was five years since he’d had an Honors class. Nothing had been said.

These kids were fine. He’d had them last year. But there was no life in them. He’d have sworn it was true. It just wasn’t like it used to be.

He wrote in his diary, “NOVEL.” He’d do the novel with them, a good start to the year. What novel was it? Had they done it already, last year? He looked at his shelf. He knew all the books, the shapes, the colors of the spines; he didn’t have to read the titles. Which one was it?

He’d do something else with them. He’d think of something. He was good at that. Seize the day. The spontaneity. Not with this gang, though. Those days were over. He’d have to have something ready.

He stood up. His knee cracked. Something dry in the joint. He went to the bookshelf.

That was something he definitely remembered, the first time he’d heard his knee crack. It was the last time he’d been with a woman, and sober enough to remember it.

—What was that?!

She’d thought it was an animal or something, under the bed. Gnawing a bone. She’d made him turn on the light. A disaster, the two of them. Squinting—reality. He got off the bed and heard the crack again.

—My knee, he said.

—What?

—The noise, he said. Listen.

He moved again. She heard the crack. She started crying. A disaster.

He still liked the teaching. He hadn’t changed that much. He liked the new kids who were beginning to turn up every year, the sons and daughters of the immigrants. Black kids with Dublin accents. And the East Europeans. Lovely kids. And it reminded him—now, he could feel it—of why he’d loved teaching. Empowerment. He’d loved that word. He’d believed it. Giving power to working-class kids. He could get worked up about poverty, and why he was there in the school. A word like “underclass” could still get him going, the convenience and cynicism of it. Hiding all that social injustice and inequality in a word like that. The working class became the underclass, and their problems became inevitable. His thinking hadn’t changed. When he thought.

He looked at his watch. He had twenty minutes left. There was a tiny crack in the glass, and a line of mist at the crack, under the glass. He’d no idea when that had happened.

There’d been one woman. She’d said it once: she loved the way he thought.

He had an address in his wallet. A.A. The address and the times. Alcoholics Anonymous. It was in his jacket, in the inside pocket, ready for whenever he wanted it. Someone had given it to him. A cousin of his. At his uncle’s funeral, at the few drinks after the burial. He didn’t get it at first; he didn’t know what she was doing. He thought she was slipping him her phone number and he was running through the ethics and legality of it, phoning his own cousin, arranging to meet for a date—because she wasn’t a bad-looking woman and, really, he hardly knew her. He hadn’t met her since they were kids. But it hadn’t been her number at all. It was an address for Alcoholics Anonymous, and the meeting times. He’d thought about going, to see if she’d be there. But he hadn’t gone. He hadn’t wanted to; he hadn’t felt the need. Still, he’d held on to the address. He knew it was there.

He looked at his watch. He had thirteen minutes, plenty of time. He’d give them the opening sentence of a story, and get them to continue. That always worked. He’d give them a good one.

He’d come close once, with a woman. Mary. They’d been together for two years. He’d just graduated, started teaching. She was still in her final year. She’d be finished in August, and he knew what would happen then. She’d get a teaching job like his. Their salaries would meet and they’d buy a house and get married. Because her mother would deliver the Great Silence until they did. They laughed about it, the Great Silence, her name for the mother’s war against any urges or opinions that might deflect her children from their proper course: the career, the four-bedroom house, the husband or wife, the happiness that was Southside, Catholic respectability. They laughed but they’d known: the old bitch would win. They’d never admit it, the choices would be theirs—but they’d do it. They’d get the mortgage; it was mad to carry on renting. They’d get married; for tax reasons. In a church; for the laugh. They’d known—he’d known. And he’d done the right thing. He sat beside her and told her it was over. He remembered the elation as he left her in the pub and went back to their flat, to pack. Throwing everything into two bags. Going. There’d been a few phone calls, then that was it. He was alone. He could live.

One night, a few years ago, he’d been watching a current-affairs program on RTÉ, after the news. He was only half-watching, and reading. He looked up at the screen. He recognized her before he knew her name. Mary. She was in some city in Africa and she was talking to people—children and women—who’d been deported from Ireland, interviewing them. In small, dark rooms, or rooms that seemed to be missing walls, that were sliding onto the street.

He watched. She stood on a street that looked like the scene of recent violence and spoke to the camera. There were two men with rifles just behind her. She looked well. She looked great. The report ended.

He had seven minutes. Seize the day, boys and girls. Teaching was a branch of show business. He’d always said it. Grab the kids and bring them with you. Empowerment. He stood at the board. He waited for the idea, the opening sentence that they’d read on their way into the room, the sentence that would have them grabbing their pens and folders from their bags. He hadn’t eaten in days; he wasn’t hungry. But he thought that food, anything, might help with the headache.

But, there was his idea. He wrote it on the board. “He hadn’t eaten in days.” He looked at it.

Six minutes.

He sat down. He was pleased. He was sorted, organized, up to lunchtime. Only nine more months to go. He made himself smile. He was back on track. He opened his diary again, put it beside his timetable. He’d plan ahead. He’d memorize the students’ names. He’d smile at them when they came into the room. He’d chat to them. He’d bring them with him. Empowerment. It was still there; he could feel it, across his chest. He wouldn’t drink today; he’d go straight home. He’d get food on the way. He’d get some new clothes at the weekend. He’d go to a film or a play.

That big-eyed kid, the one who’d told him that he’d known her mother. He wished that kid was his. It was ridiculous—the thought just rolled through him. Brother Flynn—the man’s smile, looking down at him. He wanted to look at someone that way, to smile down at his own child. To be able to do that. Whatever it took, whatever he gave up or didn’t give up.

It was ridiculous.

He stood up. He opened the door. He was ready for the bell. He looked at the board. “He hadn’t eaten in days.” They’d love that. Kidnapping, starvation; the boys would love it. But he had another idea. He went back to the board and picked up the chalk. He wrote under the first sentence, “She hadn’t eaten in days.” That was even better. They could have the choice. He could feel it in him. It was the old feeling, back. The hands would be up, asking him how to spell “anorexia.” He could already feel the buzz, the energy. He’d stay standing, walk among them. He’d smile. He’d laugh.

He looked at his watch.

One minute.

He was fine. ♦

Photograph: SA SCHLOFF, “CHAIRS” (2005)

History of a Disturbance [New Yorker Ficiton]

Fiction

History of a Disturbance

by Steven Millhauser March 5, 2007

Keywords

Words; Language;

Silence; Mute; Marriages;

First Person Narratives;

Moments

You are angry, Elena. You are furious. You are desperately unhappy. Do you know you’re becoming bitter?—bitter as those little berries you bit into, remember? in the woods that time. You are frightened. You are resentful. My vow must have seemed to you extremely cruel, or insane. You are suspicious. You are tired. I’ve never seen you so tired. And of course: you are patient. You’re very patient, Elena. I can feel that patience of yours come rolling out at me from every ripple of your unforgiving hair, from your fierce wrists and tense blouse. It’s a harsh patience, an aggressive patience. It wants something, as all patience does. What it wants is an explanation, which you feel will free you in some way—if only from the grip of your ferocious waiting. But an explanation is just what’s not possible, not now and not ever. What I can give you is only this. Call it an explanation if you like. For me it’s a stammer—a shout in the dark.

Do things have beginnings, do you think? Or is a beginning only the first revelation of something that’s always been there, waiting to be found? I’m thinking of that little outing we took last summer, the one up to Sandy Point. I’d been working hard, maybe too hard, I had just finished that market-penetration study for Sherwood Merrick Associates, it was the right time to get away. You packed a picnic. You were humming in the kitchen. You were wearing those jeans I like, the ones with the left back pocket torn off, and the top of your bathing suit. I watched as you sliced a sandwich exactly in half. The sun struck your hands. Across your glowing fingers I could see the faint liquidy green cast by the little glass swan on the windowsill. It occurred to me that we rarely took these trips anymore, that we ought to do it more often.

Then we were off, you in that swooping straw hat with its touch of forties glamour, I in that floppy thing that makes me look like a demented explorer. An hour later and there was the country store, with the one red gas pump in front, there was the turn. We passed the summer cottages in the pines. The little parking lot at the end of the road was only half full. Over the stone wall we looked down at the stretch of sand by the lake. We went down the rickety steps, I with the thermos and picnic basket, you with the blanket and towels. Other couples lay in the sun. Some kids were splashing in the water, which rippled from a passing speedboat that made the white barrels rise and fall. The tall lifeguard stand threw a short shadow. Across the lake was a pier, where some boys were fishing. You spread the blanket, took off your hat, shook out your hair. You sat down and began stroking your arm with sunblock. I was sitting next to you, taking it all in, the brown-green water, the wet ropes between the white barrels, the gleam of the lotion on your arm. Everything was bright and clear, and I wondered when the last time was that I’d really looked at anything. Suddenly you stopped what you were doing. You glanced around at the beach, raised your face to the sky, and said, “What a wonderful day!” I turned and looked out at the water.

But I wasn’t looking at the water. I was thinking of what you had just said. It was a cry of contentment, a simple expression of delight, the sort of thing anyone might say, on such a day. But I had felt a little sharp burst of irritation. My irritation shocked me. But there it was. I’d been taking in the day, just like you, happy in all my senses. Then you said, “What a wonderful day!” and the day was less wonderful. The day—it’s really indecent to speak of these things! But it’s as if the day were composed of many separate and diverse presences—that bottle of soda tilted in the sand, that piece of blue-violet sky between the two dark pines, your green hand by the window—which suddenly were blurred together by your words. I felt that something vast and rich had been diminished somehow. I barely knew what you were talking about. I knew of course what you were talking about. But the words annoyed me. I wished you hadn’t spoken them. Something uncapturable in the day had been harmed by speech. All at once my irritation passed. The day, which had been banished, came streaming back. Spots of yellow-white sun trembled in brown tree-shadows on the lake-edge. A little girl shouted in the water. I touched your hand.

Was that the beginning? Was it the first sign of a disturbance that had been growing secretly? Two weeks later the Polinzanos had that barbecue. I’d been working hard, harder than usual, putting together a report for Warren and Greene, the one on consumer perception of container shapes for sports beverages. I had all the survey results but I was having trouble writing it up, something was off, I was happy to let it go for an evening. Ralph was in high spirits, flipping over the chicken breasts, pushing down tenderly on the steaks. He waved the spatula about in grand style as he talked real estate. That new three-story monster-house on the block, could you believe two mil, those show-off window arches and did you get a load of that corny balcony, all of it throwing the neighborhood out of whack, a crazy eyesore, but hey, it was driving property values up, he could live with that. Later, in the near-dark, we sat on the screened porch watching the fireflies. From inside the house came voices, laughter. Someone walked slowly across the dark lawn. You were lying in the chaise. I was sitting in that creaky wicker armchair right next to you. Someone stood up from the glider and went into the kitchen. We were alone on the porch. Voices in the house, the shrill cries of crickets, two glasses of wine on the wicker table, moths bumping against the screens. I was in good spirits, relaxed, barely conscious of that report at the edge of my mind. You turned slowly to me. I remember the lazy roll of your head, your cheek against the vinyl strips, your hair flattened on one side, your eyelids sleepy. You said, “Do you love me?” Your voice was flirtatious, easy—you weren’t asking me to put a doubt to rest. I smiled, opened my mouth to answer, and for some reason recalled the afternoon at Sandy Point. And again I felt that burst of irritation, as if words were interposing themselves between me and the summer night. I said nothing. The silence began to swell. I could feel it pressing against both of us, like some big rubbery thing. I saw your eyes, still sleepy, begin to grow alert with confusion. And as if I were waking from a trance, I pushed away the silence, I beat it down with a yes yes yes, of course of course. You put your hand on my arm. All was well.

All was not well. In bed I lay awake, thinking of my irritation, thinking of the silence, which had been, I now thought, not like some big swelling rubbery thing but like a piece of sharp metal caught in my throat. What was wrong with me? Did I love you? Of course I loved you. But to ask me just then, as I was taking in the night … Besides, what did the words mean? Oh, I understood them well enough, those drowsy tender words. They meant, Look, it’s a summer night, look, the lawn is dark but there’s still a little light left in the sky; they meant you wanted to hear my voice, to hear yourself ask a question that would bring you my voice—it was hardly a question at all, rather a sort of touch, rising out of the night, out of the sounds in the house, the flash of the fireflies. But you said, “Do you love me?,” which seemed to require me to understand those words and no others, to think what they might exactly mean. Because they might have meant, Do you still love me as much as you once did even though I know you do, or Isn’t it wonderful to sit here and whisper together like teen-agers on the dark porch, while people are in the bright living room, talking and laughing, or Do you feel this rush of tender feeling which is rising in me, as I sit here, on this porch, at night, in summer, at the Polinzanos’ barbecue, or Do you love everything I am and do, or only some things, and if so, which ones; and it seemed to me that that single word, “love,” was trying to compress within itself a multitude of meanings, was trying to take many precise and separate feelings and crush them into a single mushy mass, which I was being asked to hold in my hands like a big sticky ball.

Do you see what was happening? Do you see what I’m trying to say?

Despite these warnings, I hadn’t yet understood. I didn’t, at this stage, see the connection between the afternoon at Sandy Point, the night at the Polinzanos’ barbecue, and the report that was giving me so much trouble. I knew something was wrong, a little wrong, but I thought I’d been working too hard, I needed to relax a little, or maybe—I tried to imagine it—maybe the trouble was with us, with our marriage, a marriage problem. I don’t know when I began to suspect it was more dangerous than that.

Not long after the Polinzanos’ barbecue I found myself at the supermarket, picking up a few things for the weekend. You know how I love supermarkets. It excites me to walk down those big American avenues piled high with the world’s goods, as if the spoils of six continents are being offered to me in the aftermath of a triumphant war. At the same time I enjoy taking note of brand-name readability, shelf positioning, the attention-drawing power of competing package designs. I was in a buoyant mood. My work had gone well that day, pretty well. I wheeled my cart into the checkout line, set out my bags and boxes on the rubber belt, swiped my card. The girl worked her scanner and touch screen, and I watched with pleasure as the product names appeared sharply on the new LCD monitor facing me above her shoulder. Only two years ago I’d designed a questionnaire on consumer attitudes toward point-of-sale systems in supermarket chains. I signed my slip and handed it to the girl. She smiled at me and said, “Have a good day.”

Instantly my mood changed. This time it wasn’t irritation that seized me but a kind of nervousness. What was she trying to say to me? I realized that this thought was absurd. At the same time I stared at the girl, trying to grasp her meaning. Have a good day! What were the words trying to say? At the word “have” her front teeth had pressed into her lip: a big overbite. She looked at me. Have a good day! Good day! Have! “What do you—” I said, and abruptly stopped. Things became very still. I saw two tiny silver rings at the top of her ear, one ring slightly larger than the other. I saw the black plastic edge of the credit-card terminal, a finger with purple nail polish, a long strip of paper with a red stripe running along each border. These elements seemed independent of one another. Somewhere a cash tray slid open, coins clanked. Then the finger joined the girl, the tray banged shut, I was standing by my shopping cart, studying the mesh pattern of the collapsible wire basket, trying to recall what was already slipping away. “You too,” I said, as I always do, and fled with my cart.

At dinner that evening I felt uneasy, as if I were concealing a secret. Once or twice I thought you were looking at me strangely. I studied the saltshaker, which looked pretty much the way it had always looked, but with, I thought, some slight change I couldn’t account for. In the middle of the night I woke suddenly and thought, Something is happening to me, things will never be the same. Then I felt, across the lower part of my stomach, a first faint ripple of fear.

In the course of the next few days I began listening with close attention to whatever was said to me. I listened to each part of what was said, and I listened to the individual words that composed each part. Words! Had I ever listened to them before? Words like crackles of cellophane, words like sluggish fat flies buzzing on sunny windowsills. The simplest remark began to seem suspect, a riddle—not devoid of meaning, but with a vague haze of meaning that grew hazier as I tried to clutch it. “Not on your life.” “You bet!” “I guess so.” I would be moving smoothly through my day when suddenly I’d come up against one of them, a word-snag, an obstacle in my path. A group of words would detach themselves from speech and stand at mock attention, sticking out their chests, as if to say, Here we are! Who are you? It was as if some space had opened up, a little rift, between words and whatever they were supposed to be doing. I stumbled in that space, I fell.

At the office I was still having difficulties with my report. The words I had always used had a new sheen of strangeness to them. I found it necessary to interrogate them, to investigate their intentions.

Sometimes they were slippery, like fistfuls of tiny silvery fish. Sometimes they took on a mineral hardness, as if they’d become things in themselves, but strange things, like growths of coral.

I don’t mean to exaggerate. I knew what words meant, more or less. A cup was a cup, a window a window. That much was clear. Was that much clear? There began to be moments of hesitation, fractions of a second when the thing I was looking at refused to accept any language. Or rather, between the thing and the word a question had appeared, a slight pause, a rupture.

I recall one evening, it must have been a few weeks later, when I stepped from the darkened dining room into the brightly lit kitchen. I saw a whitish thing on the white kitchen table. In that instant the whitishness on the white table was mysterious, ungraspable. It seemed to spill onto the table like a fluid. I felt a rush of fear. A moment later everything changed. I recognized a cup, a simple white cup. The word pressed it into shape, severed it—as if with the blow of an axe—from everything that surrounded it. There it was: a cup. I wondered what it was I’d seen before the word tightened about it.

I said to myself, “You’ve been working too hard. Your brain is tired. You are not able to concentrate your attention. The words you are using appear to be the same words you have always used, but they’ve changed in some way, a way you cannot grasp. When this report is done, you are going to take a vacation. That will be good.”

I imagined myself in a clean hotel, high up, on the side of a mountain. I imagined myself alone.

I think it was at this period that my own talk began to upset me. The words I uttered seemed like false smiles I was displaying at a party I’d gone to against my will. Sometimes I would overhear myself in the act of speech, like a man who suddenly sees himself in a mirror. Then I grew afraid.

I began to speak less. At the office, where I’d established a long habit of friendliness, I stayed stubbornly at my desk, staring at my screen and limiting myself to the briefest of exchanges, which themselves were not difficult to replace with gestures—a nod, a wave, a smile, a shrug. It’s surprising how little you need to say, really. Besides, everyone knew I was killing myself over that report. At home I greeted you silently. I said almost nothing at dinner and immediately shut myself up in my study. You hated my silence. For you it was a knife-blade aimed at your neck. You were the victim and I was the murderer. That was the silent understanding we came to, quite early. And of course I didn’t murder you just once, I murdered you every day. I understood this. I struggled to be—well, noisier, for your sake. The words I heard emerging from my mouth sounded like imitations of human speech. “Yes, it’s hot, but not too hot,” I said. “I think that what she probably meant was that she …” The fatal fissure was there. On one side, the gush of language. On the other—what? I looked about. The world rushed away on all sides. If only one could be silent! In my study I avoided my irritating desk with its neat binders containing bar charts and statistical tables and sat motionless in the leather chair, looking out the window at the leaves of hydrangea bushes. I felt tremendously tired, but also alert. Not to speak, not to form words, not to think, not to smear the world with sentences—it was like the release of a band of metal tightening around my skull.

I was still able to do some work, during the day, a little work, though I was also staring a lot at the screen. I had command of a precise and specialized vocabulary that I could summon more or less at will. But the doubt had arisen, corroding my belief. Groups of words began to disintegrate under my intense gaze. I was like a man losing his faith, with no priest to turn to.

Always I had the sense that words concealed something, that if only I could abolish them I would discover what was actually there.

One evening I looked for a long time at my hand. Had I ever seen it before? I suppressed the word “hand,” rid myself of everything but the act of concentration. It was no longer a hand, not a piece of flesh with nails, wrinkles, bits of reddish-blond hair. There was only a thing, not even that—only the place where my attention fell. Gradually I felt a loosening, a dissolution of the familiar. And I saw: a thickish mass, yellowish and red and blue, a pulsing thing with spaces, a shaded clump. It began to flatten out, to melt into surrounding space, to attach itself to otherness. Then I was staring at my hand again, the fingers slightly parted, the skin of the knuckles like small walnuts, the nails with vertical lines of faint shine. I could feel the words crawling over my hand like ants on a bone. But for a moment I had seen something else.

I am a normal man, wouldn’t you say, intelligent and well educated, yes, with an aptitude for a certain kind of high-level work, but fundamentally normal, in temperament and disposition. I understood that what was happening to me was not within the range of the normal, and I felt, in addition to curiosity, an anger that this had come upon me, in the prime of life, like the onset of a fatal disease.

It was during one of those long evenings in my study, while you prowled somewhere in the house, that I recalled an incident from my childhood. For some reason I was in my parents’ bedroom, a forbidden place. I heard footsteps approaching. In desperation I stepped over to the closet, with its two sliding doors, then rolled one door open, plunged inside, pushed it shut. The long closet was divided into two parts, my mother’s side and my father’s side. I knew at once which side I’d entered by the dresses pressing against my cheeks, the tall pairs of high-heeled shoes falling against my ankles as I moved deeper within. Clumsily I crouched down among the fallen shoes, my head and shoulders buried in the bottoms of dresses And though I liked the sweetish, urine--sharp smell of the leather shoes, the rub of the dresses against my face, the hems heavy on my shoulders, the faint perfume drifting from folds of fabric like dust from a slapped bed, at the same time I felt oppressed by it all, bound tightly in place by the thick leathery smell and the stony fall of cloth, crushed in a black grip. The dresses, the shoes, the pinkish smell of perfume, the scratchy darkness, all pushed against me like the side of a big cat, thrust themselves into my mouth and nose like fur. I could not breathe. I opened my mouth. I felt the dark like fingers closing around my throat. In terror I stumbled up with a harsh scrape of hangers, pulled wildly at the edge of the door, burst outside. Light streamed through the open blinds. Tears of joy burned on my cheeks.

As I sat in my study, recalling my escape from the dresses, it seemed to me that the light streaming through my parents’ blinds, in the empty room, was like the silence around me where I sat, and that the heavy dresses, the bittersweet smell of the shoes, the hand on my throat, were the world I had left behind.

I began to sense that there was another place, a place without words, and that if only I could concentrate my attention sufficiently, I might come to that place.

Once, when I was a student and had decided to major in business, I had an argument with a friend. He attacked business as a corrupt discipline, the sole purpose of which was to instill in people a desire to buy. His words upset me, not because I believed that his argument was sound but because I felt that he was questioning my character. I replied that what attracted me to business was the precision of its vocabulary—a self-enclosed world of carefully defined words that permitted clarity of thought.

At the office I could see people looking at me and also looking away from me. The looks reminded me of the look I had caught in the eyes of the girl with the little rings in her ear, as I tried to understand her words, and the look in your eyes that night at the Polinzanos’ barbecue, when I opened my mouth and said nothing.

It was about this time that I began to notice, within me, an intention taking shape. I wondered how long it had been there, waiting for me to notice it. Though my mind was made up, my body hesitated. I was struck by how like me that was: to know, and not to act. Had I always been that way? It would be necessary to arrange a sick leave. There would be questions, difficulties. But aside from all that, finally to go through with it, never to turn back—such acts were not at all in my style.

And if I hesitated, it was also because of you. There you were, in the house. Already we existed in a courteous dark silence trembling with your crushed-down rage. How could I explain to you that words no longer meant what they once had meant, that they no longer meant anything at all? How could I say to you that words interfered with the world? Often I thought of trying to let you know what I knew I would do. But whenever I looked at you, your face was turned partly away.

I tried to remember what it was like to be a very young child, before the time of words. And yet, weren’t words always there, filling the air around me? I remember faces bending close, uttering sounds, coaxing me to leave the world of silence, to become one of them. Sometimes, when I moved my face a little, I could almost feel my skin brushing against words, like clusters of tiny, tickling insects.

One night after you’d gone to bed I rose slowly in my study. I observed myself with surprise, though I knew perfectly well what was happening. Without moving my lips, I took a vow.

The next morning at breakfast I passed you a slip of paper. You glanced at it with disdain, then crumpled it in your fist. I remember the sound of the paper, which reminded me of fire. Your knuckles stuck up like stones.

When a monk takes a vow of silence, he does so in order to shut out the world and devote himself exclusively to things of the spirit. My vow of silence sought to renew the world, to make it appear before me in all its fullness. I knew that every element in the world—a cup, a tree, a day—was inexhaustible. Only the words that expressed it were vague or limited. Words harmed the world. They took something away from it and put themselves in its place.

When one knows something like that, Elena, one also knows that it isn’t possible to go on living in the old way.

I began to wonder whether anything I had ever said was what I had wanted to say. I began to wonder whether anything I had ever written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, trying to push its way through.

After dinner that day, the day of the crumpled paper, I didn’t go to my study but sat in the living room. I was hoping to soothe you somehow, to apologize to you with my presence. You stayed in the bedroom. Once, you walked from the bedroom to the guest room, where I heard you making up the bed.

One night as I sat in my leather chair, I had the sensation that you were standing at the door. I could feel a hot place at the back of my neck. I imagined you there in the doorway, looking at me with cold fascination, with a sort of tender and despairing iciness. I saw your tired eyes, your strained mouth. Were you trying to understand me? After all, you were my wife, Elena, and we had once been able to understand each other. I turned suddenly, but no one was there.

Do you think it’s been easy for me? Do you? Do you think I don’t know how grotesque it must seem? A grown man, forty-three years old, in excellent health, happily married, successful enough in his line of work, who suddenly refuses to speak, who flees the sound of others speaking, shuns the sight of the written word, avoids his wife, leaves his job, in order to shut himself up in his room or take long solitary walks—the idea is clownish, disgusting. The man is mad, sick, damaged, in desperate need of a doctor, a lover, a vacation, anything. Stick him in a ward. Inject him with something. But then, think of the other side. Think of it! Think of the terrible life of words, the unstoppable roar of sound that comes rushing out of people’s mouths and seems to have no object except the evasion of silence. The talking species! We’re nothing but an aberration, an error of Nature. What must the stones think of us? Sometimes I imagine that if we were very still we could hear, rising from the forests and oceans, the quiet laughter of animals, as they listen to us talk. And then, lovely touch, the invention of an afterlife, a noisy eternity filled with the racket of rejoicing angels. My own heaven would be an immense emptiness—a silence bright and hard as the blade of a sword.

Listen, Elena. Listen to me. I have something to say to you, which can’t be said.

As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me. The old world of houses, rooms, trees, and streets shimmers, wavers, and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces, bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world—how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It’s as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there’s no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into each other, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among galaxies.

I am often tired. I am sometimes discouraged. I am always sure.

And still you’re waiting, Elena—even now. Even now you’re waiting for the explanation, the apology, the words that will justify you and set you free. But underneath that waiting is another waiting: you are waiting for me to return to the old way. Isn’t it true? Listen, Elena. It’s much too late for that. In my silent world, my world of exhausting wonders, there’s no place for the old words with which I deceived myself, in my artificial garden. I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

And you? Maybe a moment will come when you’ll hesitate, hearing a word. In that instant lies your salvation. Heed the hesitation. Search out the space, the rift. Under this world there is another, waiting to be born. You can remain where you are, in the old world, tasting the bitter berries of disenchantment, or you can overcome yourself, rip yourself free of the word-lie, and enter the world that longs to take you in. To me, on this side, your anger is a failure of perception, your sense of betrayal a sign of the unawakened heart. Shed all these dead modes of feeling and come with me—into the glory of the fire.

Enough. You can’t know what these words have cost me, I who no longer have words to speak with. It’s like returning to the house of one’s childhood: there is the white picket fence, there is the old piano, the Schumann on the music rack, the rose petals beside the vase, and there, look!—above the bannister, the turn at the top of the stairs. But all has changed, all’s heavy with banishment, for we are no longer who we were. Down with it. You too, Elena: let it go. Let your patience go, your bitterness, your sorrow—they’re nothing but words. Leave them behind, in a box in the attic, the one with all the broken dolls. Then come down the stairs and out into the unborn world. Into the sun. The sun. ♦

Illustration: EDWARD RUSCHA, “HEY WITH CURLED EDGE” (1964)/GAGOSIAN GALLERY/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART/SCALA/ART RESOURCE

The Swan [New Yorker Fiction]

Fiction

The Swan

by Tessa Hadley February 19, 2007

Keywords

Marriage;

Accidents;

Automobiles;

Children;

Suicide;

Cardiff, Wales;

Swans

David knew that something was wrong as soon as he saw Suzie. He had noticed as he parked on the drive that her car was missing, but he’d assumed that she was taking Hannah to ballet class or Joel to swimming; he didn’t always remember the busy running order of the children’s arrangements. Through the lit window as he came around the side of the house he could see his family in the kitchen eating pizza, and it did occur to him then that it was late for them to be having supper. They couldn’t see him, in the dark outside. They lived in a new estate at the growing tip of Cardiff, near the motorway that circled the periphery; beyond them there was only a golf course and then fields. David paused before he opened the back door, enjoying a moment alone in the humming dark that was always nervous with the noise from the motorway: not a roar, but a thin murmur of movement that sucked substance from everything it reached. David didn’t mind this; he even felt it as a kind of lightness.

“Where’ve you left the car?” he asked as he wiped his feet on the back-door mat.

Suzie was putting something in the microwave; she didn’t turn.

“Smashed up,” Hannah said, relishing the words. She was standing at the table to eat her pizza, and had a piece of tomato on her chin. She liked crisis. Joel, who didn’t, sat absorbed in some game with his Beanie Babies.

“You’re joking.”

“I was involved in an accident,” Suzie said calmly. “On the motorway, on my way home from the teachers’ center. But I’m all right. It was raining, and the car in front of me hit a lorry pulling out. No one was hurt, amazingly enough. But the car’s a write-off.”

“Good God,” David said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Suzie shrugged. “I was O.K. There was no need.”

But he knew as she turned around that she wasn’t O.K. Usually Suzie was sturdy and steady; she had a wholesome, closed muzzle of a face that made him think of a fox, with her sandy coloring and the fine fair down that showed in a certain light. She was tall and lean and big-boned, her broad shoulders set defiantly; only now something had been jangled loose in her, as if she’d touched a live wire. Her hair had dried in a dark mat that clung to her head, and it frightened him to see her blue eyes startled open.

“I wish you’d called me.”

She tried to smile at him. When she put Joel’s plate down on the table, he saw that her hands were shaking. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

David made her describe to him exactly where the accident had taken place; he wanted to understand why this lorry had pulled out into traffic so carelessly. Suzie couldn’t remember things precisely. It had all happened very fast, she said. He imagined the chaos, the rain, the scorch of horror that had brushed close.

“Where’s Jamie?” he said angrily. “Why isn’t he helping?”

Jamie was David’s seventeen-year-old son from his first marriage.

“Upstairs. Why don’t you call him? Ask him if he wants pizza.”

“You shouldn’t be standing here doing all this. Go and lie down. I’ll take over. I’ll bring you a cup of tea, or a drink.”

“I’d rather be busy, really.”

Jamie was in his bedroom, in the attic. He lay on his back on the bed, smoking, and he didn’t even turn his head as David lifted the trapdoor and climbed through; the room was thick with the rank smell of weed. A familiar sensation of impotence seized David; he didn’t know how to talk to this boy, how to guess his thoughts, or how to forbid what ought to be forbidden to him. Jamie didn’t rage or fight. He simply ignored whatever they told him: don’t pull the ladder up into the attic behind you; don’t smoke in the house; don’t stay out at night without letting us know where you are. When they tried to be outraged, he just smiled as though he were embarrassed for them. David opened the skylight to let out the smell.

“Suzie wants to know if you want pizza.”

“Is she O.K. now?” Jamie said. “I’m sorry about the swan.”

“What swan?”

“Hasn’t she told you? The one that came down on her car.”

“On her car? What are you talking about?”

He thought the boy might be befuddled with marijuana.

Jamie propped himself up on his elbow. He was wearing some sort of torn sleeveless vest; he shook back the thick hair that he chopped off with scissors at shoulder length. Something in his wide face—a faint adolescent rash over the thickening cheekbones, distinctive creases under the eyes, and black brows like quick pencil strokes—stirred and pained David; the boy resembled his mother, Francesca, which was not reassuring. His big brown feet at the end of the bed were bare, with dirty soles and coarse knobbled toes; they had transformed from soft child feet in some instant when David wasn’t looking.

“A swan came down and hit her car, made her swerve into the fast lane. It must have hit the power lines. Then it bounced against the side of a lorry and onto her bonnet.”

The picture was vivid to David for a moment: melodramatic, not Suzie’s kind of thing at all.

“Why didn’t she tell me it was a swan? Perhaps she didn’t want to talk about it in front of the children?”

“That’s probably why,” Jamie said. “You know what Hannah’s like. She’d be more upset about the swan than if people had been hurt.”

The children reacted in the aftermath of the accident. Hannah thumped through her keyboard practice with hot cheeks and wept extravagantly when Suzie told her off for tickling Joel. Joel lay mute and still in his bath, then shivered in his Spider-Man pajamas and refused to get into bed because he had caught sight of the moon through his bedroom window. He had been afraid of the moon when he was a baby. When David came downstairs after reading to them, he found Suzie standing in the kitchen over a sink full of winter branches that she’d cut to take to school for her nature table: bedraggled yellow jasmine, gnarled apple, and silver birch thickening and reddening with buds. Her hair was wet again, and in the centrally heated air he could smell the cold breath of the rain-soaked garden. She pretended to be busy, tying up the branches with twine. Her hands were big and unbeautiful: skilled at cutting out pictures with children’s scissors, tying laces, rubbing cream into grazed knees.

“You shouldn’t be going in to school tomorrow.”

“I’m all right,” she said heavily, without looking at him.

He expected her to tell him then what had really happened on the motorway, but she didn’t speak. After David had watched “Newsnight,” they went upstairs. He lay in bed going over a paper he had to deliver at a Health Protection conference the next day while Suzie sorted piles of clean laundry and put them away. The children had fresh clothes every day; the airing cupboard was piled high with ironed sheets and towels. Even though the house had been newly decorated when they bought it, four years earlier, Suzie had redone every room. Her little touches were everywhere: curtain tiebacks, friezes pasted onto the wallpaper, bowls of potpourri, carved acorn light pulls, dishes of glass pebbles, thriving houseplants. The children’s toys were tidied away into labelled storage boxes every night. The only place that Suzie hadn’t reached was Jamie’s attic; Jamie had once calmly said that he would leave home if she ever touched anything in there, and Suzie had agreed that if he wanted to live in a pit then who was she to interfere. All the transactions between these two used to flare with violence, even though Suzie had looked after Jamie since he was small, but things had been better lately.

Suzie finished putting the clothes away and began to undress for her shower; she fumbled out of her clothes with her shoulder blades hunched, as if she were uncomfortably aware of being watched. Usually she was blithely indifferent; the readiness with which she stripped had shocked him when they first slept together.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the swan?” he asked, looking at her over the top of his reading glasses while she was smothered inside her T-shirt. When she pulled off the shirt, her hair, still stiff with rain, stuck up in ruff around her face, as if she were roused against him.

“How did you know?”

“You told Jamie.”

“Did I? I suppose I did.”

She sat down in her underwear on the padded chest at the foot of the bed, hugging her arms around herself, her long back bent.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to make you talk about it. All that matters is that you’re not hurt.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” Suzie said.

“What wouldn’t I like?”

“What I felt I saw.”

“How could I mind?”

She lifted her eyes; her face was cloudy with the effort of thought.

“When this thing came hurtling down out of the sky at me, I thought it was Francesca.”

Suzie had never known David’s first wife, who had killed herself by jumping off a balcony.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I hadn’t been thinking about her. I never think about her. Then: thump, on my bonnet. It was her—intuitively I just knew.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You see? I knew you’d hate it.”

David took off his glasses and folded them. “I don’t feel anything about it except that it doesn’t mean anything. The mind throws up all kinds of rubbish when you’re in shock.”

“She wasn’t rubbish.”

He was patient, looking away from her. “I didn’t mean her, needless to say. I just meant your making any kind of association between that and what happened to you today.”

“We never talk about her.”

He shrugged. “Why would we? What could there be to say, after all this time?”

“You can’t imagine the force of the blow when it hit me, how heavily it fell. The whole car leaped—it leaped. Surely too heavy for a swan. And then everything went dark. I didn’t have time to think of any rational explanation.”

“But now you know what the rational explanation was.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Suzie stood to go and take her shower. When she climbed into bed, he had already turned off the light on his side, and he closed his eyes as if he were asleep. Pressing up close against his back, she made him too hot.

“Tell me about Francesca,” she pleaded into his pajama top, her voice muffled, so that at first he wasn’t sure what he’d heard.

“Whatever for? I’m asleep.”

“Tell me. It’s important.” He turned over to face her in the dark.

“You know all there is to know.”

“No, I don’t. We hardly ever talk about her.”

“When someone’s dead, after a while there’s nothing new to say. That’s natural.”

“If I died, would you be this calm about it?”

“You used not to want to discuss all this.”

“I know. But now I can’t stop thinking about her. How did you go to sleep together, when you were lying in bed like this? Which side did she like to lie on? What did she wear to bed?”

David dutifully thought about it. “I can’t remember,” he said. “It’s been fifteen years.”

“Fourteen.”

“I don’t know what she wore.”

“You must be able to remember.”

“We kept such different hours. I’d be getting up to go to work sometimes as she was coming to bed.”

He did remember that when Fran-cesca was very pregnant she had been able to sleep only sitting up in an armchair. But that was also the time when she began to imagine that it wasn’t a baby growing inside her but a demon that would split her open and kill her when it was born. He didn’t want to tell Suzie about that. Instead, he kissed her, and she fell asleep easily, despite everything, breathing lightly through her nose, radiating clean heat scented with whatever shampoo she’d used.

David lay aridly awake. Long afterward, he heard Jamie dropping down from his trapdoor like a cat, prowling the house, helping himself to food in the kitchen, letting himself out the front door with his bike; he cycled for hours at night and then slept half the day, probably missing classes at school. David tried to imagine how it would feel to sleep and wake when you wanted to, to choose your life without thinking of anybody else, not to be broken into the hard frame of adult necessity.

David and Suzie had met in Regent’s Park. Neither of them had ever been there before that day, and neither ever went back, so it remained a bright free space in their imaginations: sunlit stately walks, aisles of tall flowers, fountains splashing. Suzie was in the second year of her teacher training, skipping lectures. David, who was working for his Part One medical exams then, had a morning off; he was wheeling Jamie in his pushchair. Jamie was really too old for the pushchair, but he refused to walk anywhere; he’d sit with his knees almost up to his chin, weaving his old rag of yellow blanket into its ritual knot between his fingers and sucking the corner that was wrapped around his thumb, frowning out at the world from behind its shelter. That morning in the park, he had hurt himself. Probably he’d trailed his foot and David had run over it; that was always happening. Suzie was a tall fair girl in a sleeveless flowered dress, passing; at first, David had only resented the fact that she was a witness to his shame, his helplessness, the screaming child. That year after Francesca’s death was the hardest year of his life.

Suzie was eating an ice cream. She hesitated and looked at Jamie.

“Would he like some?”

David had lifted him out of the pushchair and put him on a park bench; Suzie sat down and tentatively held out her ice-cream cone.

“If you want it,” she said, “you have to stop crying and come and sit on my knee.”

Jamie had looked at her suspiciously, but then, to David’s surprise, climbed into her lap; he wasn’t a child who cuddled easily, but he allowed himself to be hugged against her chest in return for licks of ice cream; his sobs subsided. Suzie’s freckled arms around him were awkward, as if she weren’t used to little children.

“I’m afraid he’ll make you sticky.”

“I don’t care. This is only an old thing.”

When David said then that her dress was pretty, he was just being polite—he didn’t take much notice of women’s clothes—but Suzie misinterpreted. She’d only stopped in the first place, she told him later, because she thought he was attractive.

“Where’s his mum?” she asked, appraising David frankly.

That scene—the child calm and surrendered on her lap—hadn’t been at all representative of what was to follow. Suzie had found mothering Jamie fraught and difficult; Jamie had not often allowed her close. But in that decisive hour Suzie had seemed to David uncomplicatedly open, like a door out of the dark maze of his troubles.

In the days after the accident with the swan, Suzie began to talk about a new friend at school, a teacher who was fill-ing in for a woman on maternity leave. She said that this new teacher, Menna, had read her palm in the staff room one lunchtime; Suzie tried to laugh as if this were just funny, but David could tell that it excited her. She wouldn’t look him in the eye—she’d mentioned it deliberately while she was filling the dishwasher, so that she didn’t have to see his response.

“So what did she tell you?”

“It’s not what you’d think, not strangers and crossing the water and all that. She told me about my mother—that was the amazing part. She said that my mother was careless with precious things. She said that a ring had been lost, which is exactly what happened to my grandmother’s ring; my mother lost it when we were on a beach. I’ve never told anyone about that. I’d forgotten it until she said it.”

“So what did she see in your future?”

She was vague then. “I don’t know. The useful stuff. Change.”

David was embarrassed for Suzie, because the trickery seemed so obvious; his own rationalism was complete, penetrating all his instincts. He imagined this fortune-telling woman at first as frumpy and middle-aged, but, when she came to give Suzie a lift to school one morning, Menna looked like a child, not much older than Jamie. She was tiny, with a white face and black pits of eyes and dyed-black hair braided with beads and ribbons; she stood in the doorway straight and unsmiling, and reminded him of one of those old-fashioned dolls with jointed wooden arms and legs. Suzie began to see Men-na in the evenings, too, at her house. David suspected that they were having some kind of séances. It even came into his head once, when he found Suzie rummaging in the desk in his study, that she was looking for photographs of Francesca.

One warm weekend, Suzie took the children camping in west Wales with Menna and her boyfriend, Neil. On Sunday night, they came home late, hours later than she had told him to expect them, by which time David was frantic with worry. An old Dormobile van, painted with flowers and with a fart-ing exhaust, dropped them off in the drive. By the time he opened the door, it was gone. Suzie was stoned, really stoned; when he looked for her in her eyes he couldn’t find her. His children, too, seemed transformed by their short time away, tanned and dishevelled and staring with exhaustion. They even smelled alien: of some mixture of smoke and earth, pee and petrol. He was outraged at Suzie’s irresponsibility, getting into that state while she was in charge of the children.

“We had a good time,” Hannah and Joel insisted, but didn’t smile.

He bathed them tenderly and put them in clean pajamas; they didn’t even ask for stories—they melted into sleep almost as he was lifting the duvets over them. As he did all this, he heard Suzie throwing up noisily in the bathroom.

“What is this about?” he said. “What were you doing?”

She was propped against the sink in her bra and trousers, her hair dripping wet as if she’d been pouring water over her head to try to sober up.

“Having fun, that’s all,” she said idiotically, with the water running down her face and neck. “But you wouldn’t know about that.”

“It’s a peculiar kind of fun. Look at you. The children are wiped out. They have to go to school tomorrow. So do you, but that’s your business.”

“What are you accusing me of?”

“You can go where you want,” he said. “But you’re not taking the children off with that crew again.”

“They had a fantastic time. Just because they’re tired now—”

“Who was driving?” David said. “What had he been smoking?”

“Oh, I’m going to go and sleep in Joel’s room,” Suzie said, pushing past him, picking up her pillow from the bed, rummaging for pajamas in a drawer, slamming it shut with the clothes still hanging half out of it.

“I’ll go and sleep in there,” David said with a sigh, performing weary patience. “You stay here. You might need to be near the bathroom.”

He moved to close the drawer.

“I don’t want you to touch me!” she exclaimed, backing off, hugging the pillow to her chest. “Don’t even touch me.”

He hadn’t thought of touching her, but when she shrieked at him he felt a vivid tingling in his hand, as if he’d slapped her face with all his strength; he stood away from her quickly, letting her go, then he slumped down onto the side of the bed. He heard her vomiting again, in the other toilet.

In the morning, Suzie was chastened. She reassured him that Neil had been perfectly safe to drive, Menna had been fine, she had been the only one who was poorly—she must have reacted badly to something, she was sorry. And the children, although they drooped and whined all week, slipped fragments of their adventures into their conversations with him in delighted voices that didn’t expect him to understand: the nights so dark, the torch that failed, the barbecue built from stones, the thieving goats. Jamie remarked conversationally that the skunk that Su-zie’s friends had been smoking was proba-bly hydroponically grown and much stronger than anything she was used to, which would be why it had made her ill. David heard him out in silence, then shrugged, as if it were a matter of indifference to him. Suzie went on sleeping in the top bunk in Joel’s room.

She began to be out at Menna’s all the time. David had no idea what she got up to there—she wouldn’t talk about it. She neglected the house, which had always been immaculate. The children missed her; they grew sulky and unhappy. Jamie often had to look after them until David got home from work. Suzie brought home New Age books that David couldn’t bring himself to look at. On a few occasions, he thought she was high on something again: short of breath, hectic, with dilated pupils, looking at the children as if they weren’t there. He didn’t know what her new friends were giving her—magic mushrooms or cactus or pills—and he wouldn’t inquire. She seemed to get to school most days. Once, when he tried to ask her what the matter was, she put her hand over his mouth, shaking her head to warn him off, as if someone were watching them and she was under a vow of noncommunication, although they were alone.

One night, he and Suzie went out together to a party at the house of some friends, beside the lake in one of the old city parks. He tried to enjoy himself, but all the time he was aware of her moving back and forth between the rooms, not talking to anyone. They were his friends, really, people he knew through the hospital. Suzie was wearing a white trouser suit, with a blouse of some blue silky stuff that shifted over her breasts when she breathed; it looked good on her but was perhaps a bit brash for this party, where everyone else seemed to be wearing subtle, sombre colors. They left after only an hour or so.

“It wasn’t too bad, was it?” he said hopefully once they were sitting in the car.

Instead of replying, she exhaled as if she were getting rid of something, and threw her head back, staring up through the dark at the felt lining of the roof.

“Will you let me out?” she said then, as they drove along the lake, which sent its pale light flashing like a signal between the passing trees.

“Let you out?”

“Not here. I’ll give you directions.”

Baffled, he held his hands in the air above the steering wheel. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“You wouldn’t know. Turn left here, and go back down the park. It isn’t too far. I’ll get a taxi later. I’m not ready to come home yet.”

Dumbly, he drove where she told him to go. Eventually, beyond a railway bridge, they pulled up in front of a row of little mid-Victorian cottages he’d never noticed before. He couldn’t make them out very well in the dark; behind the huddle of their overgrown front gardens, they seemed cozier and more secretive than the usual austere long terraces in this part of the city.

“This is it,” Suzie said. “I’ll see you later, but don’t wait up.”

“Can’t I come in with you?”

“No,” she said, and put a hand on his arm, as if postponing something, promising something for another time.

He watched her pick her way up a path whose faint paleness was blurred by overgrowing shrubs and then lost in the thick overhang of shadows from the house; he knew that she turned to look at him once, because he made out the weak blob of her face. Then another car, lights glaring, came up behind him and he had to move. He drove around the block to go past the house again, and paused with the engine running, peering into the garden. There was no sign of habitation, apart from a dim gleam in the glass fanlight above the front door. But Suzie in her white trouser suit had vanished, presumably inside.

David gathered himself in a great effort of concentration on the children, his younger children. He tried to reëstablish their routines: mealtimes, Hannah’s piano lessons, Joel’s pottery on Saturday mornings, bedtimes, baths, tooth-brushing. Joel didn’t like his new teacher. Hannah feuded, crossed out and rewrote names on the list she actually kept, in a notebook, of her best friends. He took for granted that these difficulties were manifestations of their distress over the situation at home; he told them that their mother was overtired, that she had problems at work. He couldn’t, on top of all this, begin to think properly about Jamie. If he did think about him, he felt sure that he wasn’t doing enough work for his A levels. Whenever David had reason to go up to the attic, the boy was lying on his back on the bed, smoking, doing nothing; he had difficulty controlling how angry this made him, the empty space of his older son’s life.

Suzie came and went; she wouldn’t talk to him beyond practicalities, and she wasn’t very interested in those. She slept, when she slept at home, in the study, downstairs. What happened to her touched him only remotely now; it had begun to seem improbable that they had lived together for all these years. He judged her coldly. Their arrangement, living apart in the same house, ought to have felt eccentric; robustly, they adapted.

One evening when the weather was fine, they drove over to the nearby parkland together. David had said that they ought to discuss things. They sat side by side on the grass at the top of a long sloping field where, at the weekend, families picnicked and played cricket and flew kites; midweek, they had it to themselves. David kept an eye on his watch, afraid they would miss the locking of the park gates. Even as he worried about this, he was carried away by a rage that seemed to blow into him from nowhere. He began shouting at Suzie. What he resented most about what was happening, he told her, was that she was making a stupid person’s mistake, falling for fakery and tricks. He wouldn’t have minded if she had fallen in love or was going through any other sort of crisis, if she would only talk to him about it, like a grownup. This came out so clearly formulated that David realized he must have been working it all out to himself at home. His whole body shook as the words flooded out of him. Suzie lay back on the grass.

“It’s you who’s stupid,” she said. “Something’s happening to me—the first sign of it was the accident—but you’re too busy seeing through everything.”

“How dare you blame me? What is this thing, anyway, that’s supposed to be happening to you?”

She rolled over so that her face was buried against the ground and her voice was muffled. “I don’t know.”

“Is it sex? Are you having sex with someone? With that girl? Or with both of them?”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t know what I feel.”

She was wearing some kind of thin print skirt. He could see through it to her curved buttocks and brief knickers. Without knowing he was going to do it, he lifted the skirt and smacked her hard with the full weight of his hand across the back of her thighs; astonished, she scrambled to her knees and pounded at his shoulders and chest with her fists. For a few strange minutes they scuffled together viciously: at one point she tangled her fingers in his hair as tightly as she could and tugged hard at it; he slapped her again, on the face this time; she scratched his neck. A dog-walker emerged from the trees at the bottom of the field and looked up toward them, then retreated; he must have thought that they were making love, but in fact their fighting instinct for those minutes was pure and unsexual. As soon as David realized that Suzie was crying, he stopped in dismay. They got to their feet and brushed themselves off shamefacedly; she found a tissue in her bag for both of them to wipe their tears. On the way back to the car, Suzie wrapped her arms around herself, clutching her shoulders tightly; once or twice he touched her on the elbow to steer her onto the right path. Afterward, because they never talked about it, he found it hard to believe that this scene had actually taken place. It didn’t seem to make any difference to the way they lived together.

In the summer, they spent a week at the house in west Wales with David’s parents. Suzie insisted that she wanted to swim, although the weather was cold and wet. David warned that if she was taking pills or any sort of hallucinogen this would be dangerous, and then he stood watching while she stripped, shivering, on the stony little beach in front of the house. It was late afternoon. The children were exploring among the rocks. A low, blurred, chilly sun was reflected in the rocking water, making a dim silver path from the horizon. Suzie had her black swimming costume on under her clothes; she stepped, long-legged, across the shingle, laughing and grimacing, balancing with her arms held out.

“You’re making a mistake,” David said. “I really think you’re making a mistake.”

Suzie stepped in, tottered at the shock of cold, forged on up to her knees, then with a shriek plunged and swam the crawl with strong strokes into the glittering path. She was a good swimmer, better than David. He and the children watched the shape of her head bobbing, disappearing and reappearing against the dazzle. He was wrapped in the sensation of her absence, the gulls crying and circling, the crash and drag of the waves, a cold wind slicing underneath his clothes. He worried that Suzie was going too far; the idea seized him that he would be left alone on the shore like this forever, holding the towels. Accidents really happened: it was idiotic to swim in this cold, in her state. He even took off his coat and went to the edge of the water, to go in after her. Then he caught sight of the bobbing dot of her head again: grateful, he saw it turn and head back toward the beach.

After Francesca died, David had cleared out her flat. They hadn’t been living together when it happened; she’d moved out a few months before and got a place of her own from the council. The flat was on the sixth floor of a bleak tower block in Islington and he hadn’t liked her having Jamie there; they’d quarrelled over it. As he sorted out Francesca’s belongings, putting aside Jamie’s clothes and toys, it occurred to him that this woman who was the mother of his child was hardly known to him at all. He felt as if he were folding the skirts and dresses of a stranger: he found it so difficult to recognize anything in her cupboards or her drawers that he even wondered if she had replaced all her possessions since they’d split up, in some spasm of disgust at him. It was all in such a mess, anyway. He went through her makeup bag and the rubbish in the dusty bottom of her handbag, thinking that there might be something left behind that he recognized—just a hairgrip or a bead or a receipt from somewhere they’d been together.

Francesca, in the days before she died, had seemed more stable than she had for months; she had been taking her medication. She was even supposed to go to a party that night—she had left Jamie with her mother. People reassured David that he mustn’t feel responsible for what had happened, but he never really felt responsible—he only felt angry with her. In all the time he spent clearing out that flat—it took him two days—he never once stepped out onto the balcony from which she’d jumped. It had been swelteringly hot, and he had dripped with sweat as he stuffed Francesca’s suitcases with things for the charity shops; he would have been more comfortable with a bit of air circulating inside, but he hadn’t even wanted to open the sliding doors. Afterward, he sometimes regretted this. He thought it might have been good for him to look down and see only the ordinary scruffy paving below.

In September, Suzie’s headmistress rang to ask why Suzie hadn’t been in school for the first day of the new term. David didn’t know where she was. In the sitting room, the children had drawn the curtains against the daylight. The television capered weakly, and they hardly looked up as he peered in. Jamie was on his back on the sofa, Hannah sitting under his raised knees, Joel at his head, with an arm thrown carelessly across his big brother’s chest; like somnambulants, they gazed at the screen. David put some sausages to cook under the grill, opened tins of baked beans, cut his hand on the sharp edge of one of them, and leaked surprisingly thin wet blood onto the bread. He sat with the children in front of the telly to eat his heavy plateful, although he couldn’t remember later what he’d watched; he imagined the fatty food dissolving sourly in his stomach, sending spurts of acid into his esophagus, squeezing his heart. Then he piled up the dirty dishes in the kitchen, left the children with Jamie, and drove out to where he had dropped Suzie off in the spring, after that party; miraculously he remembered the way, didn’t make a single wrong turn, as if the little cottage in its close-nestled row behind overgrown gardens had lurked, waiting for him all that time, beneath his conscious thoughts.

Shapes were silhouetted in the twilight against a clear sky; he could see that the wildness of the gardens, which he had remembered as dense with foliage, in fact consisted only of broken sofas, concrete, buddleia, a fallen wall, a garage sunk under the weight of its ivy. The fanlight above the front door through which Suzie had disappeared shone feebly yellow, as it had the last time. Children still played out in the streets around here: a gang circled on bikes, shouting to one another, two boys to a bike, the front one standing to pedal, the one behind with his legs splayed wide. David got out of the car and locked it behind him, scowling at the boys, then strode up the path, pushing through the bristling shrubs that blocked his way. There was no doorbell, only a taped-on note that said, absurdly, “Knock three times,” so he hammered with one fist, then both. When the door yielded and a man stood warily, holding it half open, David pushed forward across the threshold.

“I have to speak to my wife. Suzie. Suzanne.”

The man was slight and wiry, with tanned skin and a ponytail; he might have been a boy if it weren’t for the tight crinkles at the corners of his lips and eyes. He stood firmly in the doorway.

“She’s not here.”

“Suzie!” David bellowed past him. “Suzie!”

A female shape moved into the shadows at the end of the hall. Too slight for Suzie—he made out the pale oval of Menna’s face.

“You don’t have any right to come bursting in here,” she said.

David had never been in a fight in his life; he knew that even though he was bigger he wouldn’t have a chance against this man, if it came to that. Everything about Menna’s boyfriend suggested the capable male, his strength held decently in reserve. David pushed past him clumsily nonetheless; the dingy narrow hall was just as he would have imagined it, down to its smell of dirty carpet overlaid with incense.

“Neil,” Menna said. “Let him, if he wants to. We’ve got nothing to hide.”

“You can take our word for it, mate,” Neil said, not offensively. “She isn’t here. We haven’t seen her for a few days.”

David was immediately sure that they were telling the truth. Yet in a parade of angry expectation he had to storm about, searching, slamming open all the doors; he ran upstairs, blundered into the bathroom, switched on glaring central bulbs in two little bedrooms draped with patchwork, scarves, and beads. They didn’t even follow him: Menna made a sign to Neil. The house was surprisingly neat, in its junk-shop way. He looked for signs of whatever witchery it was that Suzie got up to in this house, but he couldn’t find anything sinister. There were piles of schoolbooks for marking, socks hanging on the radiators to dry, in the bathroom henna hair dye and a stained towel. Eventually, he came to rest in the kitchen, breathing heavily, propped with his knuckles resting on the little table where they had been eating when he came pounding at their door; their soup—lentil—was getting cold in green pottery bowls. He considered throwing the bowls wildly onto the floor, but didn’t do it.

“Then where is she?”

“If I did know I wouldn’t tell you,” Menna said. “But to simplify matters, as it happens I don’t. She must have been at school today—why don’t you ask them? We haven’t seen her for a week. She doesn’t live here, you know; she’s just a friend. We don’t insist on knowing her whereabouts.”

“Then is there someone else?”

“Someone else?” she mocked. “I don’t know what you mean-.”

“She didn’t turn up at school today.”

Menna shrugged. “We’re not her keepers. Obviously, you think that’s what you are.”

“I’m the father of her children,” he said. “If she’s gone, I only want to know it.”

“If she’s gone,” Menna said, “I’m not surprised. Not after this.”

While David was inside the house, the evening light had blinked and gone; it was suddenly night. Blundering down the path, he ran right into someone turning in from the street; David let out an astonished, winded noise, although they hadn’t actually hurt each other. It was Jamie. David was so surprised at meeting him here that he almost didn’t recognize his own son; the closeness of Jamie’s face in the dim light confused him, those broad cheekbones, his eyes somehow masked in irony behind thick short eyelashes. He was supposed to be at home with Hannah and Joel. And how could he possibly know about this place?

Jamie seemed just as surprised to see him.

“Dad? Fuck.”

“For Christ’s sake, can’t I even trust you to do one thing for me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What have you done with the kids? I can’t believe you’ve left them at home on their own.”

“Of course I haven’t done that. Suzie’s there.”

“Oh. She is?”

“She came back just after you left.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you know these people? Did you meet them through Suzie?”

“Sort of.”

Jamie stood obstinately, not moving either way on the path.

“I’ve got the car. Do you want a lift anywhere?”

“No.”

In the end, it was David who had to move first. The boys were still circling on their bikes in the street. When he looked back at the house, he couldn’t see Jamie; he must have gone in through the front door, which David had left open behind him.

On his way home there was traffic, people driving into town for the evening. Lit--up shop fronts swam in a blur of the rain that had begun to spatter in angry fistfuls across the windscreen. For minutes, David peered stupidly, forgetting that he could turn on his wipers. It took him half an hour to get through the thick crawl of cars, woven with crossing pedestrians, on the main roads; released at last into residential streets, he pressed his foot too hard on the accelerator, leaping forward. At the same moment, in a sudden squall, a white shape broke out in front of him from nowhere, or from between two parked cars. He stamped on his brake and swerved, and the car slewed, screeching sideways, but surely too late. He must have struck something: the blow seemed to resonate in the bodywork; his heart thumped out of his chest as if he’d been hit himself. He threw himself out of the car door to see what he had done, ready for the worst.

He found nothing, only an empty street. Perhaps the sheet of sodden filthy newspaper under his wheels had been his phantom, inflated by the wind into a moment’s lifelikeness. He had been imagining things. He felt so sick that he had to pull in at the side of the road and rest his head against his arms on the steering wheel. For some time he couldn’t drive on.

When at last he got home, the smell of sausages lingered, but the mess of supper had been cleared away. The children were sitting painting at the kitchen table. Their tranquillity seemed uncanny after the weather outside: their absorbed breathing, the stroke of their marks on big sheets of blue paper, the chink of their brushes in jam jars of clouding water. The tip of Hannah’s tongue stuck out in concentration; unnoticing, Joel sucked his brush, so that his lips were blue. Suzie must have put out the china dish piled with apples for them to paint; gazing at it, they seemed themselves as deliberate as a composition.

“Is Mummy here?”

They blinked at him, surfacing reluctantly.

“Having a shower,” Joel said, frowning.

He took the stairs two at a time. Suzie had begun to tidy up here, too; some of the piles that had waited on the landing to be sorted into different bedrooms had been put away. She was not showering: she had run herself a bath, perfumed with something; she was floating in it by candlelight, her body showing vaguely pink through the foamy water, her knees islands. Little candles on saucers were burning at intervals around the edges of the tub and on the windowsill. David put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat; Suzie hardly stirred the water, only turning her head to look at him.

“Are you going to be cross about the candles?”

“Cross?”

“Aren’t they dangerous?”

He sighed. “Am I really so dreary?”

“I’m sure they are dangerous, but I’m being very careful. I just wanted to relax. I want to have a nice weekend at home, with you and the kids. Did you see that they were painting downstairs? David? Are you all right?”

“I bumped into Jamie.”

“He went out a while ago.”

“I went to your friend’s house—Menna’s. I was looking for you. Then, as I came out, Jamie was going in. What was he doing there?”

“You went to Menna’s?” she said, as if she were amused and curious.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “Jamie was probably just buying weed. Neil sells to a few friends. What did you think he was doing?”

“I don’t seem to be able to talk to him. I can’t get any sense out of him.”

Suzie waited a few moments. “You know, he’s a nice boy,” she said. “He’s grown into a really nice boy. You’re too hard on him sometimes.”

“I’m a bit out of my depth,” he said eventually. It was very difficult for him to make this confession.

“David, you’re not all right, are you?”

“I nearly crashed the car on the way home.”

“How do you mean, you nearly crashed it?”

“I thought someone ran out in front of the car. But there wasn’t anyone. I was imagining things.”

Suzie stood up in the bath then, water sluicing off her thighs and her breasts; they were still pointed plump girl breasts, even after two children. She pulled a towel off the heated rail and stepped out; rubbing at her hair to dry it, she stood carelessly naked in front of him.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “So long as nothing actually happened.”

As she towelled her hair, with her arms lifted above her head, he could see the red-gold wiry fuzz in her armpits; he was distracted by the long oval swell of her abdomen and the knot of her navel, so close to his eyes.

“But what about you?” he said. “What is it that’s been happening to us, these last few months?”

“Oh, that,” she said lightly. “That’s all over.”

“What’s all over?”

“Whatever it was. My crazy fit. Whatever got inside me when I killed that swan.”

“Crazy fit?”

“Abducted-by-aliens kind of thing. I can’t explain it.”

“Is that all you’re going to tell me?”

Suzie drew a smiley face in the condensation on the washbasin mirror. “I know you always think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t, Suzie. That’s not—”

“But I had this dream last night, about ice cream. I was trying to buy it or something, some special kind with fruit in it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. D’you remember that I don’t really like ice cream, and we always wondered afterward why I was eating it that first day we met? So when I woke up I thought I ought to come home. I thought the dream was a sign. A good sign.”

The hot steam in the bathroom was making David feel sick and weak. “And where were you sleeping, when you woke up out of this dream?”

She bent down over him where he sat, wrapping the towel around both of them for a moment, printing her heated body wetly against his clothes. He closed his eyes.

“You don’t need to know,” she said to him in the warm dark. “It doesn’t matter. It’ll be O.K. now, honestly.” ♦

PIPILOTTI RIST, “(ABSOLUTIONS) PIPILOTTI’S MISTAKES” (1988)/ELECTRONIC ARTS INTERMIX/HAUSER & WIRTH, ZÜRICH