Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

Nathan's face hardens into a plastic smile.

"Baby, why don't you masturbate?"

Thunder blows open a door down the hall and Nathan whirls on the bed, eyeing the fogged window, the icy radiator.

"Scared?" the girl asks, her eyes filled with maternal certainty that it is the good things that will come to stay. But she's back to work, "Baby baby baby," filling the clammy room with her hasty crescendo, stopping before the climax with a deep-throated "Yes!" drops the chair to all fours and looks up, fully recovered and breathing normally. The idea, as usual, has been no idea at all.

His eyes fall on a dead roach in the corner. "Que hora?"

"I told you, no Spanish. Speak English, hey? Hey, what do you want? "

"Do you have a phone-a phone? I just need-a quick call?"

"A phone? Here?" Eyeing him, the girl quickly covers herself with a dingy robe. "Are you going to throw up?" she says, without sympathy. "You look like you're going to throw up."

Twigs whipping his face, Santos sprints through the corridor of woods. "Nathan!" He has been wandering over an hour. Around him, the snap of splintering branches. His feet numbed by the snow, he braces against the rail. "Nathan!" There is no waterline. Waves explode up and down the beach in random detonations. One rears up and collapses and drops the body of an animal in a boil of driftwood and foam.

Santos takes the stairs two at a time. Nathan's dog is spinning in an eddy. He takes it by the collar and drags it up. One of its eyes has been gouged, or shot through. The other stares emptily, a glass bead, the tongue pooling.

Santos runs, then stops, worried that the exercise will trip the switch that turns on the asthma and shuts down his lungs. He walks the steps slowly, deliberately, then begins a slow jog through the path and along the street toward the house. But, spotting the flickers of light through the trees he is running again, pumping, forgetting himself. Claire is standing at the foot of the driveway, staring emptily upward toward the house. Her hair and clothes are sodden. Her face drenched. "I saw it," she says. "I never believed-"

The door is flung open. The van is gone. Every window is alight. The trees overhead are shrouded in red haze. Yellow flames climbing the back of the house, columns of sparks riding the updraft. Ash pools atop the snow in the front yard. He hears the crackling and everything is burning, the house is burning, his lungs are burning, the dream is burning, but here they stand, he and Claire, inside the house, where everything once seemed fine and the slippery poolwater bathed them in all their incarnations and the air conditioning silently washed them in luxury and the various roads to the future and the law and their affections were secure and they would live forever. There was nothing there. And now the curtains Claire made are crawling with fire, the flames spreading faster and faster, crackling, minor explosions in the kitchen, a large one in the basement, an eruption from below, the world around him now collapsing. The snow around the house is melting. The trees are burning. His chest is burning.

He hears Claire's voice, sobbing now: "Nathan! No! No! Oh god – ”

A figure crosses the front doorway, silhouetted by the orange flames behind. Short, pear-shaped, it is Krivit, he sees, dangling from his hand some sort of container, the kind gasoline is carried in.

Leaning into the wind, gasping for his breath, Santos pats his coat for his inhaler. He finds nothing and runs to the car. He empties the glovebox, flinging its contents behind him. He sweeps his hands inside. Nothing. His lungs are hardening, his air coming in thin. He slips behind the wheel and turns over the engine and begins to back away. Claire is beside him. The wheels grind to a stop in the snow and they look together as flames pour out the upper windows of the house. The wipers flail. The car rocks. The fresh tire tracks before him are all but gone. Where can he go to breathe? Where can they go? Where can they go?

Hugging himself in his blazer, Nathan staggers down an alley toward the boardwalk. Behind him, a pair of headlights flash on, wink off. Above the thunderous surf, the gale winds moan through the spokes of the Wonderwheel, back toward the Luna Park Houses continuous and monotone, as if some collective remembrance of the pillared hotels, the old-monied homes, the lights whose aura could once be seen at night thirty miles from shore when Coney Island was the center of the aristocratic world. The larger, permanent suffering of the freakshow freaks and the whores who worked the hotel lobbies. Those living and dead now passing through the outlying slums.

He picks his way along vacant streets, shutting his eyes often, feeling his way. He knows this place. And he knows of another that waits and sees in his mind's eye his sliver of white beach and understands now that that's not the one; that though it rightly, if not completely legally, belongs to him he'll never get there. He goes through the addresses of his mind to find a door ajar and he pokes his head in to find himself in his bed; he tip-toes to the sleeper but finds no sign of life. Drenched in sea-spray and sweat, Nathan comes on Famous's food, eternal with its marquee lights whirling like birthday sparklers every day of every night, but not now, the lights are off, everything is off, shuttered to the storm. Debris and ice ride the current through the streets.

He wades through to the boardwalk. To face the sea he must put his weight forward, hung by the air. The line between the sea and the sky has been rubbed out, all of it a shade of dark past night. The wave-breaks are overwhelmed, the beach nearly submerged, the water running up to the boardwalk, which is buried in spray ice. Up and down, stretches of rail and walk are gone altogether. The thunder, continuous, no longer distinct from the rumble of the sea. It says, Get out of the car. It says, Save her.

The two shots are spaced, deliberate. At first, on one knee, Nathan feels numb relief, then, with a sigh, feels himself stumble backward and turn on his. stomach. Nonthoughts drift through his mind accompanied by music he can hear only because now he is finally listening: as if it has been there all along. Wagner? No, something funereal, something quiet, like a lullaby, Chopin, maybe, which in the bedlam of the storm is just like a tiny boy's cries of sorrow. That is it. With a groan he begins to claw at the icy slats of the boardwalk, pulling himself along one then the next as up a ladder. Shapes hover around him, holding his hand, tugging on his fingers, trying to help, pulling him on, or still just trying to pick his pockets-the fold of his jacket is pulled back and what is left of his brick of cash jiggled out. Footfalls fade behind him. His life is slithering away, mingling with seawater, and he feels some mild pleasure in the possibility that those things for which he has traveled a long and undesirable way, things he may not necessarily be able to name but which construct his life-long dreams, he will no longer require. With his last effort Nathan Stein laps at the boardwalk and tastes his own metallic and salty warmth, and raises his eyes to look ahead and up and finds himself alone, absolutely alone, wrapped in numbing silence. Where is the Chopin? Where has everyone gone? His face burns. He decides, because he thinks he should, to think of people to forgive – forgiveness is big in his heart – and begins with himself. But he cannot remember his own name. He has begun to scream. But the gale smothers what he says, and choking now, he cannot hear.

Then he rises. Off the boardwalk, his arms lift, then his legs, floppy in dangled flight like a marionette. Nathan can't wait. Here he goes, found by some good samaritan, rushing along, to a hospital, he hopes. He cannot believe in his arms or legs and he cannot move, but he is aloft, heading for shelter, and awaits the soothing voice, the assurances of safety, the needleprick, the saline solution. So the world is good after all. The world is good.