By Charlie Schneider

The Big Man was to walk five iron steps up to the linoleum ante-level behind the curtains; someone was to hold out a cup of water if he was thirsty. He was to turn left, flashing trademark alligator-print sock, then walk three paces into the danger zone near the edge of the camera’s eye, then look at the sign that said PAST THIS POINT YOU ARE ON CAMERA so he could adjust himself in any sense before seducing the millions, or trying to. There is a better world, folks, he was to say, where we meet the crawling deserts with a trillion trees, where we shake hands after work worth doing, where money’s just confetti for the grand opening of a high-speed train-line, where there’s meatless meat on every plate, local and delicious, where guilt is optional, a novelty, et cetera.

Trouble was, I didn’t tape around a single sniveling ruffle of carpet. Did the Big Man trip? He did. Did he fall? He did. Knee fractured, image dented. My job? Way gone. Three months later the primary draws near, and all I’m doing is plundering my savings and rollerblading. I’m the champion of Bleloch Street; I know all its heaves and divots. The larches in my apartment complex’s court- yard whisper: now is the time, get your job back, stop moping, call Tricia, find another candidate, get back in the ring, don’t forget us, call Tricia.

However, today is the day of her son Sullivan’s dance performance, which I refuse to miss. I throw some eggs in a pot and call Tricia. As an evangelical Christian, she believes the carpet ruffle was Providence.

Hello?

It was bad luck!

Albert.

I hope she can hear the eggs clacking against each other, wholesome and domestic. I ask if she can hear them.

Hear what.

I’m boiling eggs.

Great!

Don’t you have even, like, a minor annual gala? It’s gala season. I need to work.

Albert, I’m seeing someone else.

Where are you? You want some eggs?

You worry me. But, a lot of things worry me.

It’s not Jason, is it? It’s Jason. Fucking security detail. Don’t be fooled, Trish, he’s just a bicep.

How many coat hangers are in your trash right now? Remember you have to bend the hooks or you know what’s going to happen.

Is it Jason?

Ugh, no, you don’t know him. He’s in aerospace.

Satellites blink across my skull’s dark firmament. I ask what time Sullivan’s performance is.

Listen—

Actually, I already know. It’s 1:15. Do you know? He’s been practicing for months, Trish. And don’t tell me not to come, I don’t care if Jason’s there.

Don’t give this any oxygen, she’s thinking, I know it. If she stays silent, she imagines this passion of mine might disappear.

A vain hope, of course. I wait her out until she speaks.

Why are you calling me?

I love you, I say. Bye.

I will not sacrifice the shape of my day: there will be a talent show. To get there will necessitate rollerblading, and protein. Lucky these eggs are getting more perfect by the second.

Basically in advance logistics your job is to have panic attacks. You go two, three weeks early to Norway or wherever the Big Man is going. You construct a memory palace of every possible corner, hallway, conference room, and lobby along his public trail, and in your single off-hour per day yes you do amble the city but only to consider choke points and sniper’s nooks, divots of carpet and unmirrored corners. You’re laying arrows, squares, and Xs all over, chasing your own tail with neon tape. Clarity is essential; men like the Big Man are too important to think Do I turn right or left? Aside from one thing, I did this job very well.

The eggs are hard as river rocks. I toss them in the trash, and Tricia’s admonition proves characteristically apt as I lift out the bag: the many discarded dry-cleaning hangers have poked holes and provided egress for whatever thing has liquefied. Luckily, the shirts on the kitchen floor sop up most of the mess.

11:16. No better time to blade.

My blades are black, with four neon green wheels each, and white laces. They’re my mint-licorice lozenges, and as I blade to the A&P, I imagine they freshen the air, cut into the heat of June. Soon I’m whizzing past cold cuts, grab- bing new eggs without stopping, then rolling to the registers, where I imagine licking Snickers off of Tricia’s nipples, which I did, once.

Something brushes my shoulder, a baby finger, maybe. Turns out it’s a plant, a large philodendron with a lot of lean. It rests in the arms of a big-toothed lady in clogs and a brown peasant skirt. Her nametag says Pam Volpe. At the moment I’d peg her as a receptionist but in her smile I spy the ghost of a braces-wearing girl, one who’d have kept frogs in a twenty-gallon terrarium. We’d have been friends, at that time.

Sorry, he’s got ideas of his own, she says as she gives the plant a shake.

Is he drunk?

He could be. But I think he just likes your rollerblades.

Curious is the word that passes my lips; thank you is the phrase that does not.

What’s your favorite candy bar? she asks.

The Big Man dreams of massive alterna-markets cooled by fans spritzing water, open-air places with fresh produce and honor systems, places far less sterile and anonymous than the A&P—places it feels good, physically and civically, to be a body among others. Pam Volpe, whether she knows it or not, is building a better world, to use a phrase the Big Man favors. And yet I’m scooting back and forth on my blades, glancing floorward, wondering if she’s got the wrong man. I see she’s in combat boots. This is not the footwear of your typical receptionist. As always I have rushed to judgment.

Kit-Kat, she says, I bet it’s Kit-Kat. She leans in. I’ll split one with you.

Where’d your plant come from?

She thinks a moment, then says she doesn’t know.

The cashier, a waif lost in a tan collared shirt, says the eggs will be $2.50, but he looks more concerned about the Kit-Kat.

I lay three dollars on the rubber conveyer and say, Sugar makes me break out, I’m sorry.

What are you, in showbiz? says the boy cashier. And Pam Volpe, she’s already asking the person behind her what their favorite candy bar is. I say, Thank you but no thank you, but it’s not clear she hears me. Her philodendron reaches toward her face like a clinging child.

It was in a bathroom line when I spoke to the Big Man, during a conference on the fate of the Hudson River hosted by the Secretary of the Interior. The Big Man was there in his capacity as a New York State Senator, before he announced his larger ambitions, and he insisted to his detail he could queue like anyone else. The two wide men in suits, one of whom was Bicep Jason, made it hard to pretend the Big Man wasn’t behind me staring at my rollerblade neck tattoo while he waited to void his bowels like a normal human being. He said, about the blades, Bet those babies are a smooth ride. Upon turning I took his secret weapons full in the face: crow’s feet, two of them. They might be his best argument for the White House—he’ll be the grandfather we need, the one who despite all our wayward- ness will not give up on us, who, in speaking to our best selves, will create them, whose practiced hands will steer the state through etc. Also, he is very tall. If he’d wanted, he could have planted a kiss on my forehead at ninety degrees.

Yeah, I told him, I do roller derby sometimes. My blades leave a trail of bodies.

We’ll put nozzles on them, he whispered. Get you power-washing streets.

Even me, I blurted out.

Especially you.

He’s not dead, by the way, the fall didn’t kill him or anything. It was just embarrassing, and he played it off pretty well. But when I saw him go down, I rushed onto the red stage and nearly dislocated his arm from trying so hard to pull him up. The wide men cast me aside, and I tripped over one of the pleather interview chairs. All this was on camera. Now, often at the most peaceful moments of my day, some demon reminds me that my freaked-out semaphore can be enjoyed on the internet—that there have been several memes. Within our world of advance logistics, it was a scandal, a catastrophe. Tricia stood shouting Mayday into a walkie-talkie, one hand over her eyes like blind Justice caught in a bad side-hustle, and the Big Man, he just looked like an old man, and the media, the media.

Sartre said that three o’clock was both too early and too late to do anything, but honestly, even half-past-noon feels this way to me now. My calves ache. I hold two brown eggs over a lukewarm pot. I’ve spent so much time waiting, just like this, for I don’t know what, even before my stint in advance logistics. Worked on a salmon boat in Alaska for a few actual years of my callow twenties until one of my colleagues asked, So, you saving up for a cabin in the country or just pretending you’re saving up for a cabin in the country? I promptly left Alaska. And, when I was even younger than that, a friend’s mom, a psychic in pearls, pulled me aside and said I had an air of destiny. It’s been my foolish secret shame that a part of me has always believed her. When I decided to approach Tricia at the Divorced and Mad Roller Derby, that was a moment I felt lucky, or chosen, or something. Whatever feeling it was didn’t matter because it faded anyway. When I look out the window now, and most days, it’s just day. My internet bill sits on the counter yesterday and tomorrow until I pay or don’t. Same with the light bill, the gas bill, the insurance bill, and the cable bill. I don’t even watch cable, though I do pay that bill, from nostalgia.

Finally the water’s rolling and churning. In go the eggs. Something in me believes, or believes it needs to believe, that when Tricia and I hooked up in her car those first weeks, receipts stuck to her knees, that was a promise of something, a turning of a card. And then months later was that one unseasonably balmy morning with Sullivan, when Tricia asked me to take her car and drop him off at school, she was running late, and at the school’s front steps I commented that I went to this high school, too, and that he’d be done with the place soon. Have a good day, I said, and he glanced at the steam coming off the pavement and said, My dad left on a day like this—wasn’t that destiny speaking? I keep puzzling why he strung this bare fact up between us, why then. Was it an ask? A dare? Or do people sometimes tell you something because they assume you won’t be around very long? I should have asked what he meant. Instead I said his name once or twice, took his hand, and told him how sorry I was he had to carry such a loss. I told him, I wish you as much comprehension as will provide relief but no more than that. Which surprised us both. He thanked me, I think genuinely, and I decided I wanted to be near him, even as an ad hoc not-father, but as something, someone, nonetheless. Then a wild turkey crossed the parking lot, and we looked at her in silence.

In my reverie I have forgotten the egg timer once again. The eggs are ruined. I hurl the pot against the half-wall, where boiling water spatters on the unframed picture of my mother. I blade over and wipe off as much as I can, then look up what boiling water does to a photograph, then close the page before I can read it. Instead, I head out the door and pull up Tricia’s number again. I can’t remember if I turned the stove off.

Albert, sweetheart, Tricia says. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but this calling me, this is fucked up.

Look, I just want to know: does God still love us if we don’t become who we’re supposed to be?

Her sigh limps along the phone line and dies before it can reach my cheek. Sullivan’s going to college in a few months, she says. When the campaign ends, I have to find another gig. And there is one, but it’s in Saudi Arabia, for a year. EDM concert series, something about an aquarium tie-in. Good money, maybe, but will my son visit? Probably not. He’ll be making out with people in a corn field or whatever, and you, you’ll figure your shit out or you won’t, but at least you’ll do it here. Do you have any idea how lonely that’s going to be? For me, I mean? Not for you.

What about Mr. Bicep?

She scoffs. You said it yourself. He’s a bicep. So it is him!

Doesn’t change anything for you, does it.

I’d curse at her but I don’t know if I love her enough.

Look, she says eventually. I’m sorry.

I tell her I’ll do anything to help.

Stop calling me!

Given where I’m headed, it’s not much of a personal victory when I tell her okay. A landscaping truck almost clips me on what is supposed to be peaceful Washington Street. Somewhere in his trail of exhaust and Lite FM the driver leaves a dirty opinion.

What was that, Tricia asks. Wait, are you rollerblading?

I think that was “Sara Smile” by Hall & Oates.

You know what—again I see her hand meeting her forehead—God loves you, Albert. No matter who you are or what you’re supposed to become.

But do you think God plans for us to fail? I mean, why do that?

I know there’s no answer, but I wait, and she waits, like we do. Once someone gave me The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and as I understand it the gist is that the waiting is the holy thing. So I try to believe that, that God’s in the waiting. That my general lack of clarity is what is blessed. But then I blade by a robin in a tree, and I find him enviable—that he is common and unworried about it, in his worm-abundant world. Let her go, the robin tells me, and I tell him to hush.

What, says Tricia.

Nothing.

Exactly, actually. That’s what we have to learn, that alone we’re nothing.

Why are you so certain about this? Like, did you grow up hearing it so it just seems obvious?

I raised myself, Albert. That’s how I know.

You’re right, I tell her, of course you’re right.

Oh, just stop. Stop. Okay? Stop. Can you stop?

I stop. A branch sticks out of Pedersen’s Pond. The reflection bends it at an impossible angle. On the tip is a bird, probably another robin. My breath and Tricia’s breath fry the phone line. There is this, I think. The wideness, the open plain of water. I feel them.

Can you just breathe, Tricia says.

I’m breathing.

Can you shut up, she says.

I’m shutting up.

Let’s just breathe, she says.

So we breathe, the two of us, and the robin, and the water.

What do you see, she says after a while.

I tell her: sky, water, the robin. And a bent branch. And I tell her they seem vast to me now that I’m really looking at them.

They are, she says. I’m holding a glass of water up to the sunlight and it seems the same. I know what you mean.

You know what I mean?

There is good here. That is what you have to see.

I’m trying, I manage to croak out. But the trouble isn’t this. I wave my hand across the landscape, as if she can see it. It’s after this, I say. I know you have to go.
And after me there will be another.

The way she says this so resonantly, it feels like she’s quoting someone, but even I know it can’t be Jesus.

Alone we are nothing, she says. I promise you will not be alone.

Would you say that when we learn that we aren’t alone, we enter the Kingdom? Mm, she says. I can hear her nodding.

I hope I see you there, I tell her.

This catches her. She clears her throat. I do, too, Albert, she says before she hangs up. It’s the kindest goodbye a woman has ever given me.

But the trouble is the film continues: I am thirsty. Probably I am dehydrated, what with all the blading. Around the corner is Tito’s Market & Gas, where I know Marvin, the counter guy. He’s Senegalese, lives in Buchanan, runs occasional soccer clinics for the middle school boys’ team, preaches at a storefront church in Peekskill. When I come in, he says, Hey, crazy man, and I say, What’s up, Senegal, and he says, At your service, crazy man. He holds his arms wide toward me, the shelves, and the two televisions filled with the Big Man’s affable face. The primary draws near. I almost roll into the display of half-price Ruffles. Whoa, says Marvin, what’s so exciting? But my mouth is already lip-syncing the speech it knows backward and forward.

We will not address our crises by rage or shame. Yes, we will agitate for struc- tural fixes, but such fixes only get us halfway to the world we want to see—if they’re not founded on love. And what is this love, is it love of God, is it loving our neighbors, our families?

God, says Marvin. He yawns.

And, you might well ask, how are we supposed to love each other when we all hate each other? My fellow Americans, by listening. That’s how we’ll love again, through our attention to one another. It is the one thing we all have to give. My campaign is that we give it. Meet each other in streets, cafes, study groups, and breakrooms, meet in neighboring fields and on mountain trails . . .

Crazy man, are you memorizing this on YouTube, what? I’ve been telling my kids to get off YouTube. They spend hours watching people eat, It’s unseemly.

My employer, I tell Marvin, my thumb indicating the screen because I can’t bear to look.

You are Chief of Wheelies?

Former employer. Be right back.

I pluck yellow from the rainbow of enriched waters and quaff it, and it is good.

We want every rooftop a garden. We believe billionaires are profoundly lost souls for whom taxation is a kindness. We believe that tax revenue should quench our most parched communities. But all my competitors say this. They do not say that we must talk to each other, one at a time, to build a world beyond rage. They do not say that our hope lies in this.

It was the hope I never could stand. Like a screech in a symphony. Hope. In that bathroom line I should have asked him when he last listened to what people—people like me—really say. The patient exchange of inanities will not redeem the world. I should put that on a T-shirt.

Pas mal, Marvin says as I reach across the counter, snatch the remote, and change the channel to an ad for hernia mesh. Hey, wait—

It really veers off course from here, I tell him as I dig in my shorts for two dollars, of which there is only one, and ask him to put it on my tab.

You think I own this place?

No, I know, but tell your boss—

Crazy man. You drink, you pay. I will pay.

This is why you got fired, things like this, no? Don’t make me fire you, too.

Why I got fired? Elementary, mostly. Material cause: a carpet. Efficient cause: evolution, i.e., bad peripherals. Formal: the speech, labor relations. What I want is a reason beyond causes, Marvin. What was I supposed to learn? You suspect there is something cut-rate about me. Start there.

He shakes his head and says, Dear, dear me. But then he meets my eyes and lays his hands on top of mine.

Crazy man. All I suspect about you is that you are very, very sad.

His hands are warm and buttery. I close my eyes and nod yes, yes, and though Marvin doesn’t know much about me, it feels like he does, or could. This is the touch of a man to whom touch is not a question. When he gets home today, his kids will climb all over his body. As he lifts his hands I almost shout no until I realize he’s about to take out his wallet and put a dollar in the till, for me. It makes me want to cry, or at least thank him, which I do, when he produces the dollar.

Thank you so much, Marvin. Thank you.

I can’t look at him. He shrugs. C’est—

Why do I snatch the dollar and roll out the door?

If memory serves, white roses can be found at Da-Ro’s, a sundry store next to the high school. Last I went to Da-Ro’s was to get posterboard for a 2-D model of the atom. Recently I read that instead of empty space, atoms are filled with probability: of electrons, energy, movement, exchange. No one knows what this actually looks like, of course, but I think it’s good news. It brings to mind Penny Newman, whom I dated for a year in college. A year felt so long then, even as she and I talked so often about how fast time was passing. Penny favored physics and pastels and smiled a lot, as some people do regardless of mood. Eating ice cream on a bench in a small New Hampshire town the first and ultimately last time I visited her, she told me I made her happy down to the atom, and I pictured atoms as little steam rooms filled with possible futures. That’s what it felt like the one night I spent at Tricia’s.

My blades have collided with the metal grate outside the storefront and sent me careening through the glass door. It won’t stop me remembering.

When I was eight, my dead-broke dad tried to sneak us into Toy Story, but we were caught not five minutes in. As the usher led us out, I glimpsed my dad’s wreck of a face, and how much he didn’t want me to look at him, and how helpless he was to stop me. I kept looking. Over the years my guilt-ridden mind has come up with numerous reasons why I looked and looked—the curiosity of the young, the sadism of the young, the sight of a new, bad emotion coming into being—but all I know is I wish I’d given him privacy.

I land, and for now I feel nothing. I look up. Hobbling toward me is the portly proprietor of Da-Ro’s, whom I also remember. What used to be thick hair now lies in strands across his pate. He’s yelling into a corded phone at the crook of his neck. At the register behind him the same photos of his grandkids from twenty years ago have sprouted descendants, cats. I always wanted to ask him what he was warding off with all these pictures, but I never had the words, or maybe the guts. On the wall another TV’s on, currently an ad for silent leaf blowers. I know this ad—What do you hear? Nothing!—and I know whose face will succeed it. The Big Man won’t win his primary, not even close, on account of being a laughingstock and of this world being Hell. That is precisely why he has my vote. When I stand and dust myself off Mr. Da-Ro’s yells, Stop, stop, you’re bleeding, but before he lunges I’m already rolling toward the flower fridge. It’s 1:06. I have nine minutes to achieve some modicum of clean- liness before entering the auditorium. In the fridge door I catch a glimpse of a blood-streaked arm—still no pain, but yes adrenaline, and wow it is great—and behind that arm a further image of myself roughly an hour from now, when Tricia and Jason and I are waiting in the lobby to congratulate Sullivan, and I’m standing there in rollerblades.

This is a bit of a left-field question, I call down the aisle, but do you guys sell shoes?

The man seems to have forgotten the corded phone tucked under his ear. He takes it away and holds it behind his back, embarrassed. He looks like a schlubby appliance. Perhaps this is the fate of all men.

He’s yelling, Shoes are not your problem!

But, I say. What if they were?

Idiot, he mutters. You’re red everywhere. As he goes to unlatch his belt buckle the phone clacks against it. It’s one of those large southwestern jobs all studded with turquoise. There’s something in how Mr. Da-Ro’s tosses the phone away—off it goes, done, dispensed with, forget it. Something certain, maybe. A definiteness. I remember it from twenty years ago, when at lunchtime I’d come here for turkey bacon, egg, and cheeses, and he’d plonk a brick atop the meat. I guess I thought definiteness like that was my birthright.

Tourniquet, he says, mostly to himself. Shouldn’t have thrown the phone away. 911. Come on, Khoury.

At last he unwraps his belt from his waist and snaps it, walks down the aisle toward me. I start rolling backwards, into a rack of paper towels, some of which fall over my shoulders and onto the floor. He kicks them out of the way and barks, Don’t move. Tourniquet! Pressure! Now!

The hands are on my arm, wrapping the belt around it, tight, tight, tighter— Ow, I say, and he says, Shut up, and I find myself inhaling his yeasty breath. The buckle is cold against my bicep and shines out like a badge: it’s stamped with mountains, clouds, and a looming pistachio. Under that in tiny letters is the name of the roadside establishment from which he got this fine article: PISTACHIO KING.

You’ve braved the real America, I see.

Sit down, he growls, I’m calling the police.

My phone vibrates—a text from Tricia. Before I can decide to delete it or save it for later, the man snatches it from my hand and throws it down the aisle.

Hey—

Hey what. He looks me up and down, sniffs. You have glass on your knees.

He sinks to the bottom rim of my vision and begins sweeping my kneecaps like I’m his great-nephew stopped in from a busy childhood. Some glass falls into my blades and will dig into my calf for the rest of my day. The man pats my legs and rises to brush off my chest until I tell him, Jesus, enough, enough, and I look into his face, his salt-and-pepper street-sweeper of a mustache, his twitch of jowl. Like his voice, the mustache must be a kind of assurance that there is an order to things. The manic fear on his face gives the lie.

You need medical attention, he says less to me than past me. The man runs to get the phone again, I call out and, in the rush of warmth I’m feeling for him, I say, It’ll be okay. This makes him pause mid-stride but only for a fraction of a second. Then he’s saying something about all this fucking glass, the carpet, the blood. And, he yells, The fucking door!

Incidentally, medical attention strikes me as a beautiful phrase.

Are you insured, I ask, though he doesn’t hear. He’s speaking to the phone in an urgent murmur. If he’s not insured it would be sad for us both. My phone says 1:18. A soggy red grief wells up in my boots. I bet he’s not insured. As I roll out of the aisle I can’t help but contrast this sorry situation with my imagining that Bicep Jason has just silenced his phone as he settles into the seat beside Tricia, and that when he un-silences it later, his sister will have sent him a cute picture of a dog, maybe in a sweater (June notwithstanding), and he’ll show this picture to Tricia, and they’ll laugh, and so on. Tricia doesn’t love him, he probably doesn’t need her to.

Apparently the flowers are still in my hand. It’s funny to me now that they are there rather than anywhere else. I smell them. They take me to Tricia’s room, the one night. I’m on her four-poster bed, my back against one of her five hundred throw pillows, and in the heat of inspiration I unwrap a Snickers bar and hold it above the candle flame. Tricia straddles me. Before either of us can think about it she takes the chocolate bar from me and smears it across her breasts. And what I felt then is what, despite itself, my heart now wants confirmed: What was that if not a promise? Even if it will never be fulfilled, was it not a promise?

The morning after, I watched Sullivan leaping around Tricia’s backyard, and he jumped so high it felt like he could pause in mid-air, turn toward me, and begin walking. But what then? When I stick my nose deeper into the flowers, they’re just flowers.

And when I look up again, Mr. Da-Ro’s is motionless against his void of door, breathing heavily. I tell him I’m sorry. He replies that he’s always worried someone would fly in like I did.

I delivered.

There is no mirth in his laugh. I could sue you, he says. I probably should. In fact you probably shouldn’t say anything.

I tell him I have no assets but add that in no way should that be a deterrent.

I realize I’m shivering and shake it off and inform him that I used to come here in high school. I bet that when you saw me then, you never thought, Yes, I will sue this kid one day.

Why would I think that? We work to live, that’s what I tell my wife. We’re not trying to get rich.

I remember her. Green headscarf and nose ring, right?

She’s gonna die when she sees this. She’s said for ages that we need reinforced glass. I argued with her, but the truth is I always thought she was right. I resisted. I just never wanted it even though I knew it was a good idea. We came over here a long time ago, do you understand? There was a lot of hope. But I knew. So why didn’t I listen? When I knew just like she did what would happen?

He looks at me sadly, with less blame than I’d expect, and I find I don’t have any words, though I reach for them and none are there. So that is what I tell him, that I wish I had words.

What do I need words for, he says.

Then he disappears into the aisles, and then returns with three fresh, red roses. The white ones disappear from my hands into his. If you’re going to take my flowers, he says, and trails off. Then he shouts, Fuck! Fuck!

I jump back, lanced with guilt, then thrust the flowers at him and tell him, Take them, take them, for God’s sake.

Barbara, he says softly. Then he lurches to the door, where sunlight glints off his bald head. Over his shoulder he gives a look edging on a stare, and I wish he’d stop. He appears to hold all of me up for inspection while he decides on something specific, something personal and valuable and rich with ambivalence. He doesn’t share what it is. Don’t move, he says again, and before I can protest he runs out the door. The last I see of him is his laceless leather shoe.

All I have are my imaginings. Barbara: she’s injured, whoever she is, a daughter, a lover. She’s abandoned in a carpeted room in a cul-de-sac. She’s been left shivering in a bathtub. Whoever she is, I think with a tightness in my chest, I have thwarted her. Because that is what I do to people. It’s a compulsion, a disease. I’m a heat-seeking missile, helpless to myself. Why else would I leave untaped that offending patch of carpet?

I’m light-headed, but I feel my way along the shelves to the cashier window, where I study the photographs of children building sandcastles and old people cutting turkeys. In one Polaroid, a young Mr. Da-Ro’s—Cpl. Dawoud Khoury, ’72, written in neat permanent marker on the bottom—sits in fatigues on a box with a red cross on it. Even then, there is that mustache, though much darker. Mr. Khoury is smiling, and beautiful, with a serene set to his broad shoulders. It hits me that I’m standing now in what was then a glimmer in his eye. Elsewhere on the register is a birthday card with a photograph of a Maine coon cat and a message reading Happy 18th Birthday, sweet Barbie. There’s a litter box behind the register. Here should be Barbara the cat, but there’s nobody. Was it her pitiless eyes I felt as I sailed through the door? In all the versions of herself pasted on the register it is her hateful glare that never changes. I suppose there’s something to admire in that. When I remove my hand from the glass of the cashier window, I discover I’ve left a smudged, bloody handprint.

No matter. It would be good to find Barbara.

---

Charlie Schneider’s work has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland, Meridian, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.