Ben Winters - World of Trouble

“Well, I have to tell you,” she says, looking across the table at me with a tiny tree of broccoli poised at the end of her chopsticks. “I am quite taken with you.”

We’re eating at Mr. Chow’s. Our first and last date. She’s wearing a red dress with black buttons down the front.

“Taken, huh?” I say, playing at bemusement, teasing her for the outmoded turn of phrase, which I actually find poetic and charming, so much so, in fact, that I am falling in love with her, across the smudged table, under the blinking neon sign that says Chow! Chow! “And why do you think you’re taken with me?”

“Oh, you know. You’re very tall, so you see everything from weird angles. Also—and I’m serious—your life has a purpose. You know what I mean?”

“I guess,” I say. “I guess I do.”

She’s referring to a topic of conversation from earlier in the evening, about my parents, how my mother was murdered in a supermarket parking lot and my father hanged himself in his office six months later. And how my subsequent career, she suggested jokingly, has been like Batman’s, how I’ve turned my grief into a lifelong sense of mission.

But it makes me uneasy, I tell her, that version of events, that way of seeing.

“I don’t like to think that they died for a reason, because that makes it sound like it’s okay. As if it’s good that it happened, because it ordered my life. It wasn’t good. It was bad.”

“I know,” she says. “I know it was bad.”

She furrows her brow under her bald head and eats her broccoli, and I go on, explain the way I prefer to look at things: how it’s tempting to place things in a pattern, name certain events as the causes of certain subsequent events—but then when you think again you realize that this is just the way that life happened to happen—like constellations, like you blink once and it’s a warrior or a bear, blink again and it’s a scattered handful of stars.

“I changed my mind,” says Naomi, after I’ve been talking this way for a while. “I’m not taken with you anymore.”

But she’s smiling, and I’m smiling, too. She reaches forward and dabs ginger-scallion sauce from the corner of my mustache. She will be dead within forty-eight hours. It will be my friend Detective Culverson who calls me to the crime scene, at Merrimack Life and Fire.

“Can we agree, at least,” she says at Mr. Chow’s, still alive, still brushing sauce off my face with her thumb, “that you have put meaning in your life. Can we agree to that?”

“Sure,” I say. She’s so pretty. That red dress with the buttons. I’ve never seen anyone so pretty. “Okay. Yes. We can agree.”

The remainder of Tuesday, October 2, I spend burying my sister in a shallow grave between the flagpoles on the front lawn of the police station. In lieu of a service I sing while I dig, first “Thunder on the Mountain” and then “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” and then a medley of Nico’s favorites, instead of mine: ska songs, Elliott Smith songs, Fugazi songs, “Waiting Room” over and over until I feel like I’ve dug deeply enough into the police-station lawn to lay her body down and say goodbye.

For several hours after that I help Jean. I haul bodies up out of the bunker one by one; I move Astronaut’s Bunsen burners into the general store so she can use them to cook up macaroni and cheese, if she wants; I push and roll loose stones and hunks of concrete back down onto that first step, sealing the stairwell back up as best I can. I don’t know how long she’ll last down there, or how she’ll do, but that’s the best I can do for her, it really is. There is a helicopter parked in some field somewhere in these woods, but I don’t know how to fly one and neither does she, and where would she go?

She’s got guns, in case she needs to use a gun.

And then I roll out, just after midnight on October 3, with that one particular memory, of me and Naomi at Mr. Chow’s, threaded through my ribs like a red ribbon.

It’s a quiet ride. Not a lot of people out on the road tonight; not a lot of action on the streets. Probably most places in the world are blue towns tonight, everybody deep into their last round of praying or drinking or laughing, doing whatever there is left to do before everything changes or dies. I roll through Rotary and pass by the house with the semicircular blast wall, the redbrick ranch house on Downing Road. I don’t know if it’s the same fella who shot at me with the machine gun, but there is some fella up on the roof, with a John Deere cap and a massive belly, surrounded by his family: a middle-aged woman in her Sunday best, plus two teenage daughters and a little boy. They’re all up there on the roof, at rigid attention in the moonlight, saluting an American flag.

I find my way to State Road 4 going south. I remember the route. I’ve always been good at spatial geography: getting a sense of a place or a system of roads or a perpetrator’s place of residence, registering the small details in my head and keeping them straight.

In a perfect world I wouldn’t sleep tonight, of course, I’d stay up somehow, but my body doesn’t know what day it is, and my eyes are bleary and I’m veering off the road. I find my same rest stop as before and I fold up my coat in the same way and after three hours of sleep I am awoken by the bright distinct howl of a train whistle, which seems impossible. But then I open my eyes and stumble to my feet and stand there watching it pass, way off in the distance, wondering if I’m dreaming. A long freight train rolling slowly across Ohio, smoke pouring from the engine.

I pee in the woods, get back on the bike, and keep on going.

Pink sky at sunrise, autumn morning chill.

I heard Officer Burdell once, in the kitchen at Police House, talking with Officer Katz about her plans for the last day. She said she was going to spend it thinking about “all the things that suck eggs about being alive. Having a body and that. Hemorrhoids and stomachaches and the flu.”

I felt at the time like this was a bad strategy, and I feel that way now. I take one hand off the bars of the Schwinn and send the Night Bird an air salute, back in Furman, Mass. Send one along to Trish McConnell while I’m at it.

Then I put my hands back on the handlebars and make my turn at the fruit stand. Singing again, as loud as I can, each line caught by the wind and carried off over my shoulder, little snatches of melody, bits and pieces from Desire .

I hear the dog before I see him, three fine bright barks devolving into a growly canine coughing fit, cough/bark, cough/bark, then just cough, cough, cough as Houdini limps with determination from behind that shed out to see me.

“Here, boy,” I say, and my heart swells just looking at him, loping and shuffling along toward me across the slight roll of the farmland.

The autumn corn is halfway through its harvest, half the stalks still burdened, half tilting, barren. There’s a pumpkin patch I hadn’t noticed before, in a dirt corner just to the right of the front porch, green winding vines and fat orange globes. Two of the women are up on the porch, two of the daughters or daughters-in-law, sitting on hard chairs in their long dresses and bonnets, sewing or knitting, working on blankets for the winter. They rise at my approach and smile nervously and take each other’s hands, and I ask politely if I might speak to Atlee, and they go to fetch him.

Houdini ducks in and out of my footsteps, snorfeling at the dirt, and I bend and scratch the white fur behind his head, and he growls low and contented. Someone’s given the guy a bath. Someone trimmed his fur, too, combed out all the bugs and burrs. He almost looks like he did when I met him, puckish little creature scampering around the filthy home of a drug dealer on Bog Bow Road. We look at each other and I smile, and he smiles too, I think. You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen? You did, huh? Or not. Who knows? You never know what a dog is thinking, not really.