By Craig Bernardini

Featured Art: “Rainbow Gravity” by Mateo Galvano

My husband and I have two neighbors named Carl. One Carl lives in the house next to the house next to ours. The other lives seven houses away in the opposite direction, on the other side of the street. The nearer Carl—Furtive Carl—bikes around the neighborhood on an old Schwinn five-speed with an orange flag clipped to the seat. We’ll hear him coming before we see him, because he likes to ring his bell, as if to say, Carl’s here! He seems to ring it whenever it suits him; we’re never sure if he deliberately rings in front of some people’s houses, but not others’, and if so, what it means.

This bike-riding and bell-ringing would be tolerable enough if Furtive Carl didn’t fire up his excavator in the middle of the night to perform some ambiguous labor in his backyard.

We never see Furtive Carl outside his house except on his bike—never see more than the elbow of his excavator over the fence a house away. Gregarious Carl, on the other hand, spends entire days in his front yard, wearing nothing but Bogs and longjohns, hacking away with trowel or hoe. His work seems to involve the endless, tormented carting of wheelbarrows full of earth between one part of the yard and another. As he grunts and sweats, he caterwauls away to the opera that blares from speakers pushed up against his window screens. If anyone passes by, he calls out, loudly enough that he can be heard over the music, and waves his arms over his head, as if to fend off a buzzard that had mistaken him for carrion.

My husband says the opera is Wagner. Perhaps Gregarious Carl is German? We’ve never gotten close enough to ask. He is very pale, despite the long days spent toiling shirtless in the sun. Furtive Carl’s ethnicity is similarly mysterious. Some of our neighbors believe he is Korean, though they have never explained why.

The Carls are widely regarded as harmless lunatics, with some believing that Gregarious Carl should be labeled mentally deficient, rather than simply foreign. But are the Carls really harmless? Consider the matter of our property values. No one likes to live in the vicinity of weirdos. Consider our quality of life: the peace and security, C-plus schools, and extremely low taxes which were all factors in our decision to move here. Even as we do our best to dance around the subject of the Carls in our daily intercourse over our neighbors’ fences, and across the six-foot strips of grass between our perfectly-flat drive- ways, and from the windows of our adjacent automobiles, commenting on the unseasonable warmth, the performance of our high school varsity teams (go Hedgehogs!), or the fee increase for picking up our carefully sorted recycling, we recognize the tell-tale weariness around our neighbors’ eyes, and the way the corners of their mouths pull down, from looking at our own faces in the mirror.

At the same time, the Carls have created in us a certain wariness about how we are perceived: everyone fears that their neighbors will begin to regard them as Carls, even when their name is not Carl. No one wants to be responsible for the Carlification of their neighborhood, whatever their name happens to be.

At this point it probably bears mentioning that we have a son named Carl. Of course, we named him Carl before moving here, which is to say, before we lived near a couple of freaks named Carl, or maybe better, before we knew that other people named Carl, who happen to be freaks, were our neighbors.

For quite some time after we moved, we didn’t know whether our neighbors Carl knew that we had a son named Carl. We suspected not, and we did everything in our power to keep it that way. We did so by forbidding, or at least strongly discouraging, forbidding never getting very far with teenagers—more often than not it backfires—Carl (our son) from approaching the Carls (our neighbors), and cautioning him to avoid either Carl’s house. But with a Carl in either direction, and no other outlet, the injunction had no real force, since observing it would have made it impossible for Carl (our son) to go anywhere by himself, which, like any normal teenage boy, he onanistically craved, and which, after all, was one of the reasons we chose to buy in this neighborhood.

He might, in other words, take the long way around, to avoid Gregarious Carl (whose house, though further away from ours, is closer to the nearest cross- street), only to run into Furtive Carl. Or vice-versa. As such, the best we could do was to advise Carl (our son) not to stop when passing Carls’ (our neigh- bors’) houses; that if anyone should call out to him—anyone, that is, named Carl—he should pretend not to hear; and that, since we were afraid his bicycle would create a pretext for Furtive Carl to strike up a conversation—this even as we understood that Carl’s expensive mountain bike, with its two-dozen gears, preposterously large shock absorbers, and super-lightweight frame meant for hikers to carry up waterfalls and over craggy peaks, would more likely intimidate Furtive Carl than interest him; that, in fact, the opposite was more likely to happen, Carl (our son) being much the less furtive of the two—he should prefer bicycle to foot when passing Gregarious Carl’s house, and consider pedaling more quickly, while, if he had to pass Furtive Carl’s house, he should prefer to walk, or rather run. These were only recommendations, of course; Carl is his own person. But they were offered in good faith.

Not surprisingly, our offers to drop him at the nearest corner, beyond where any Carl could see (barring, of course, the appearance of Furtive Carl on his bike), and our invitations to text us a pick-up time and location, were rebuffed. A typical exchange:

Carl: “I’m going over to Matt’s house.”

Us: “We’ll drop you off on Greenbriar.”

Carl: “No, that’s okay.”

Us: “Remember to keep walking. Don’t stop, whatever you do.” Carl: “I’m taking my bike.”

Us: “Not past Furtive Carl’s!”

Carl: “Which one is that again?”

Matt is Carl’s friend from school. Obviously.

The only other solution would have been to advise Carl to cut through our neighbors’ properties—the very normal neighbors in whose good graces we longed to remain, both for our own standing and for the health of our community. Besides, everyone has a fence around their property, even the Carls. One of our neighbors, an elderly widow, glued broken glass along the top rail of her fence. To keep the cats out, she said; the cats eat her songbirds. At first I thought she said Carls, not cats. I am aware they sound nothing alike.

I mentioned the lack of an outlet, so I should probably clarify that, even though our street is named Pine Tree Circle, it’s less a circle than a straight line, and has no pine trees that we’re aware of, though it might have at one time, before we moved here, say, or before the woods were cleared.

One further clarification. I said, “We have a son named Carl.” I probably should have said, “Our son is named Carl,” since we have only one son. Even this statement is not entirely free of ambiguity, since it doesn’t rule out the possi- bility that Carl has sisters, who may or may not be named Carl. It would be unusual, true, if less so than, say, twenty years ago, but you would still probably be safe to assume that we have only one child named Carl, as a sister would more likely be named Carla, or Carly, or Carlotta, or Karla, with a K, though the K doesn’t really help matters, unlike spelling Jerry with a G, say, which helps, a little. There is in fact nothing unusual about the spelling of Carl’s name, my husband and I made certain of this, it is quite standard, unlike mine, which has an extra consonant and an unorthodox vowel replacement. A celebrity whose autograph I asked for once told me that the spelling of my name was “wild.”

You might also opine that it would be strange to have more than one child with the same first name, not to mention confusing, and you might be right, if a little judgmental—uncommon might be preferable; but your conviction might buckle in the face of champion pugilist George Foreman, who called all his five sons George, and then gave each a number, as though they had descended from each other, rather than belonging to the same generation. He even named his popular grill George. And while you might consider this an extreme case, and narcissistic to boot, or simply a product of the brain damage often associated with middle-aged boxers, bear in mind that Mr. Foreman is a celebrity, just like the one who said the spelling of my name is wild. No one had ever said that to me before, the most I ever got was unusual. But after that I spent a lot of time looking over the spelling of my name, and it came to seem less and less like a sixth finger, and I decided against normalizing it, which I had once planned on doing when I grew up. Of course, my neighbors don’t know how my name is spelled, since it’s pronounced the same as when it is spelled normally. Anyway, you must know that celebrities make up their names, sometimes their celebrity names are completely unrelated to their given names, and other times they shorten them, to make them sound less foreign, and so easier to pronounce and remember.

By the way, where was Mrs. Foreman in all of this? Did she give her consent to becoming a George-making factory? It’s like the boys were all cloned from him, and she was no more than an incubator. I can’t help but see them as a graduated series of bald, avuncular little boxers, like disassembled nesting dolls; or like the transformation sequence in a Fifties science-fiction movie, where an otherwise-normal animal grows monstrously large due to radioactive fallout.

But I see I have digressed.

For quite a while after we first discovered the existence of the Carls, we were fairly certain they did not know each other. At the same time, we recognized that such an encounter was inevitable, that we could do no more than brace ourselves for the consequences via a sort of mental and social sandbagging. Before long, we knew that Furtive Carl would come along ringing his bell; Gregarious Carl, catching sight of him, would blurt something like Achtung! so loud it would almost knocked Furtive Carl off his bike; Furtive Carl, who in most such circumstances only pedaled faster, would stop and walk his bike up Gregarious Carl’s dirt-strewn driveway; and before they even knew each other’s names, they would recognize an indescribable affinity.

And so it happened that one day we saw Gregarious Carl, who we had never seen outside his yard, loping toward Furtive Carl’s house, a slantways, Bogs-heavy walk, as though one of his legs was fake, humming as he went. The following day, we heard Furtive Carl ride by, ringing his bell furiously in anticipation of seeing Gregarious Carl. We knew then that a pact had been sealed, a chain reaction begun, a countdown to reach minimum safe distance initiated.

Our chief concern was for Carl, our Carl, who had watched the whole debacle unfold from his bedroom window. We considered installing locking shutters. We invited him to switch to the spare bedroom, which looked out on the backyard; we dropped little hints, like, It’s amazing the way that room stays cool year-round, isn’t it? and, Don’t you think that life-size poster of Johannes Kepler would look even more awesome on the pitched ceiling of the spare room?

Carl rolled his eyes, reminded us again that it was Nicolaus Copernicus, not Kepler. Why couldn’t we keep them straight?

We knew that, when Carl went outside, the Carls united would be that much harder to avoid. Our house had been reduced to nothing more than a milepost along the highway of their weirdness. Once again we pledged to forestall the encounter for as long as we could. We made every effort to time Carl’s departures to the movements of the Carls, e.g., if we saw Gregarious Carl loping toward Furtive Carl’s house, that would mean the coast was clear in one direction, and Carl would be green-lighted to leave, once he had sworn to go the proper way. One of us would then shepherd Carl out the door, while the other kept lookout from behind the curtains. A Thumper-like tap-tap-tap on the glass would alert the other to a Carl’s approach, and the shepherd would attempt to distract Carl with a feigned health emergency, or gushing exclamations about the flora on a neighbor’s lawn, or some glory in the suburban sky.

Unfortunately, the Carls’ movements fit no discernable pattern, such as, Furtive Carl bikes toward Gregarious Carl’s house on Thursday evenings, or,Gregarious Carl lopes toward Furtive Carl’s on Saturday mornings. Furtive Carl was the real wild card: we never knew when his bike might appear over the nearest speed hump, the menace of his bell sounding in the distance. Vegetation on the surrounding lawns was too scant for cover, and there were as yet no trees mature enough to hide behind.

We invented new chores. We grounded Carl for the most minor infractions. We planned family outings to local cultural and historical sites that none of us had ever had the slightest interest in visiting. Weekends were a real game of cat and mouse, and I’m afraid Carl often got the better of us. But the most dangerous time was the couple of hours after school, before my husband got home from work, when creative vigilance was left entirely up to me. The Carls tended to be active at this hour, too, as much as they tended be anything. For a time I tried to mirror their unpredictability—picking Carl up from school, say, and then announcing that we were all going for ice cream, inviting his friends. But while his friends were by and large enthusiastic, Carl only grew more sullen, and suspicious, until he, too, became unpredictable, and even crafty about his movements—disabling the backdoor alarm, and never leaving school through the same exit.

Then one day Carl came home with an orange flag affixed to the seat of his bike. At first we thought he had borrowed Furtive Carl’s bike. But Furtive Carl’s bike, as I think I’ve already made clear, was a banana-seated throwback to the sorts of bikes my husband and I rode growing up. There was a certain felicity between such a bike and a flag. The incongruity between Carl’s rugged, reasonably expensive mountain bike and that bright orange flag struck us as simply absurd.

I should add that, if Carl’s bike seems a bit excessive for our development, whose streets are exceedingly flat, it was in no way out of keeping with the sorts of bikes Carl’s friends rode—in fact, this was one of our primary motivations for buying him a new bike after we moved. Nothing filled our hearts with greater joy than to see Carl lined up with the other neighborhood kids, to watch him pedal furiously and catch air over a speed hump. And yet at some point I began to feel misgivings; I came almost to pity him, and all the neighborhood kids with him. Even the sidewalks were devoid of the exciting unevenness of the typical sidewalk in the older communities where my husband and I grew up. There, the roots of old trees and the cycles of freeze and thaw had raised and driven apart the paving stones like continental plates.

Was I the only parent who felt this way?

My husband and I were out tidying up the yard, the day we heard the bell and looked up to see Carl, ringing furiously as he pedaled toward a speed hump. Furtive Carl materialized a half-block further down. Then Gregarious Carl came loping from the other direction to meet them, waving his arms contentedly.

The scene we had so long dreaded coalesced before our eyes. As the mounted Carls eddied around him, Gregarious Carl began holding forth about something in his window-rattling baritone. Even this close, we couldn’t understand a word he said.

That night in bed, my husband and I held each other for almost a quarter of an hour. It had been some time.

The next day we called a family meeting. We forbade Carl from seeing the Carls, knowing how little good this could do, particularly now that the circuit had been closed. My husband made a series of snide remarks about the orange flag. He asked Carl how he could ever expect to grow up to be a man, to take his rightful place in society, make a contribution, sire a family, if he rode around practically bedecked in orange like a crossing guard, and ringing his bell like an ice cream vendor. Through it all Carl said not a word, just watched us like we were some particularly loathsome species of alien, with tentacles, or pincers, or pedipalps.

It was worse; for, in the moments of silence between our exasperated interrogations and harangues, Carl hummed quietly to himself, as though his mind were entirely elsewhere, wrapped around an elusive melody beamed to him through the cosmos.

“Carl!” I shouted. “What do you see in these people? What do they offer you that your father and I don’t?”

He stared like he didn’t understand the question. Shrugged. “We just hang out,” he said.

Later I asked my husband whether he’d heard the humming. “Wagner,” he said. “It’s goddamn Wagner.”

I waited.

“I recognized it from Carl’s stereo. Didn’t you?”

Predictably enough, Carl’s friends began to take an interest in the Carls as well.

Soon, we were sure, Carl’s friends’ parents would see Carl as the rotten apple that had spoiled a perfectly good batch. The blame for their sons’ downfalls would then spread to us. We, too, would become Carls.

They were a posse, with their orange flags and their bells that whirred like cicadas. Something about the way the sound reverberated between our tightly packed houses made our blood freeze. They were like Vikings, bellowing into their shields as they entered combat. And beneath it all, the distant rumble of Wagner, the siren-song they rode toward, as toward an immolation, Furtive Carl leading the way, Gregarious Carl bringing up the rear.

We refused to be cowed; we were, after all, the authority figures. We descended to the street to intercept them. But when we arrived, we found the Carls themselves had disappeared. The boys had all stopped, straddling their bikes, their thumbs poised on their bells. They stared at us in the new quiet with an eerie focus, almost feral. That terse friendship of teenage boys, where everything is blood pact, and little need be spoken. We wheeled around looking for Carl, our Carl, in the crowd. But we could no longer tell which was son and which was neighbor; every boy was indistinguishable from every other. We dreaded to call his name, only to receive a chorus of replies.

One afternoon I went into the garage on some garden errand and was surprised to find Carl’s bike there, sitting quietly, its front wheel cocked like a ballerina’s foot, orange flag hanging limp in the gloom. I straddled it, and then slowly eased myself down onto the seat. It was firmer than I expected. Suddenly, I remembered the way my haunches would hurt after a day of riding. I remembered the hills of my old neighborhood, the way we would walk our bikes up them and then ride down, over and over. I remembered the feeling of the wind in my hair, and how my mother would complain when she tried to get the brush through it. I remembered skidding out and scraping my elbow and knee on the gravelly road, and wincing as my mother scrubbed pebbles and dirt out of the wound. The marvelous smell of A&D ointment. I remembered all these things, like Carl’s bike was Don Quixote’s wooden horse.

I opened my eyes again and looked down at the bell. Had I had a bell like this on my bike? I must have.

So why couldn’t I remember?

I rang it, and was so startled by the noise that I quickly cupped my hand over it. In the sudden silence I could just hear the traces of reverberation off the concrete walls and cans of turpentine.

Days would go by without either of us knowing where Carl was, or what he was doing. It’s not as though he was sneaking around; he didn’t even bother to disarm the backdoor alarm anymore. If I heard the three beeps, I didn’t get up to see if it was Carl, or whether he was entering or leaving. My husband turned up the volume on the TV. For all we knew it could have been a burglar. The next morning I’d find muddy shoeprints leading from the backdoor to Carl’s room. I’d throw open his door, expecting to find them sitting together on Carl’s bed, truants all. But the most incriminating thing I ever found was an open window. After a while I stopped bothering to close it; it would just be open again the next day.

I considered asking my husband to call another family meeting, the two of us confronting Carl again, demanding to know where he went, what he did. As if, when I leaned my head against the warm glass of his window, the cool air rising up through the vent at my feet, I didn’t see the tracks left by the excavator. As if, lying in bed at night, I didn’t hear the snorting motor, and the whirring bells cheering it on, the miasma of opera undergirding it all, like the dark against which a wilderness of stars once appeared. As if I hadn’t gone to the window and watched it roll by, the boys all following it like a parade float, each with his flag and bell, and then convinced myself the next morning it had been a dream. As if I hadn’t seen the lights come on in the upstairs windows of the surrounding houses, the silhouettes of neighbors tying on their robes, their heads haloed as they pressed their faces up to the glass.

There were days I dragged the hose down the driveway and sprayed off the street. I liked watching the muddy water burble along the curbstones. But I never did more than make a few puddles for mosquitoes to breed in. I could no longer tell the beep of the reversing excavator from the beep of the backdoor alarm, or the beep of the microwave Carl used to heat up his frozen burritos. Night sounded closer with the windows cracked, the neighborhood cinched up, the fences torn down. The houses were just as defenseless: the excavator’s palsied mechanical arm would start digging into one side, clawing away at the wound it had made. Before you knew it, the whole structure would collapse.

The lawn took on a few extra inches of grass; the house looked like it had grown a beard. On my way to get the mail, I tripped over a hole the size of a groundhog’s burrow. There were three others, all about the same size, their edges level, the dirt carted away. I still hadn’t hazarded to take Carl’s bike out of the garage—it was always there now—though I spent long afternoons mounted on it, sweltering. I fantasized about my husband coming home early from work and finding me here. He would open the garage door and stand for a moment in gunfighter silhouette, before bending me over Carl’s bike and taking me in full view of the neighborhood.

But when at last he did find me, he came through the side door. His eyes were bloodshot, his face haggard.

He said, “What happened to your hair?”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I asked him if he liked it.
That night, I woke up to find the bed empty beside me. The bathroom light was off. I crept into the family room, where I found my husband in his pajamas sitting on one of the ottomans we used with the recliners. He had scooted it up next to the stereo, his head bowed close to a speaker. I could just make out the strains of the melody we had heard Carl humming at our first and last family meeting.

It was almost dawn when he came back to bed. I feigned sleep. When his breath grew regular, I went down to the kitchen and took the pad I used to make shopping lists off the refrigerator. I didn’t know what I intended to write. Maybe nothing, because I ended up writing my name, just my name, over and over, on those lines meant for food items. When I had covered the page, I tore if off and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet, as though it were a note saying where I was going. Then I took Carl’s bike and started to ride.

The sun was just up. The flat streets steamed slightly. Birds hopped on the lawns, chirping. I rang the bell, not caring anymore if anyone heard me, if anyone saw me. No one but me, I said to myself, over and over, no one but me. It sounded so pleasant in the fresh morning air. The orange flag nodded and fluttered over my head; I could just see it when I tossed my head back, or looked over my shoulder. Wind tousled my hair to the point that no brush could ever get through. I rode all the way to the end of Pine Tree Circle, which is not a circle, and does not have any pines.

---

Craig Bernardini’s stories and essays have appeared in AGNI, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, and many other journals. His story collection 12 Oxen Under the Sea won the 2023 New American Press Fiction Prize and is forth- coming in 2025. He teaches at Hostos Community College, a CUNY school in the Bronx, and lives in the mid-Hudson Valley with partner, dogs, and chickens.