The Big Game

Before the screens, clipboard in hand, the commander continued to pace. It had been nearly ten days of continuous occupation, and the space was now resembling a lair more than a conference room. Off-camera, food scraps cluttered yeastily around the bin, and combined with male sweat (and other eructations), they suffused the place with a positively feral aroma. The time was upon them, the suspense was knife-thick, expectations hummed, and a hundred other anticipatory cliches clamored for expression. Without warning, the general paused, eyebrows beetled into a contiguous, hairy V. He drew in a breath as if to speak, and the entire room inhaled with him. And held it.

His lieutenant spoke for them all. "Sir?"

"Hrrmf."

"Is it time to deploy the force-forward units?"

The general considered, as if this were a novel question. As if anyone might be thinking anything else. "We will coordinate deployment of the light mobile units with the enemy's first action," he said. He tapped the northwest corner of the map with his free hand, "almost certainly right here, if I know those Stanni bastards." He narrowed his eyes even more. "But we'll be on the watch for where they do in fact emerge."

"Er, yessir."

The general turned from the display, and faced the room of live and videoconferenced faces. "Needless to say, men, maintain maximum battlefield awareness. Watch the feeds. Record decisions of all units. This is war, after all." He resumed pacing.

"Yes sir!"

The general considered the way the patch of well-worn carpet kept receding in front of his polished boots. He knew, as did his lieutenant, that the actions in this room were largely formal at this point, close-up shots to be interspersed with live footage, or in the post-mortem. He may have set the process in motion, but field assets were sufficiently autonomous that even that impetus would be evaluated, optimized, and if necessary, countermanded before engagement. Training and programming was paramount, and winning, as one of the ancient forbears of his profession had once said, isn't everything...

Yes, he'd set the process in motion almost half a decade ago. By his estimation, the coming battle was nearly fifty-five full months in the making, and if in the final twelve, it finally developed that sense of its own existence as coding, production and transport finally geared up, as underlings bifurcated and responsibility metastasized, for all of the others it was only inevitable in his mind, and by his effort. What really brought this fight into being was his own--the general's--untiring efforts at marketing, networking and grooming. It took half a year to get the administration to finally agree to review his strategic proposals. Even if success was algorithmic now.

At the front of the conference room were three large screens. The center one, the largest, was a map view, lit up with icons, and was, in fact, a low-information representation of the display on his clipboard. The actual terrain was located somewhere in eastern Eurostan, covering a rough square of about 5000 square miles, with some shoreline on the east and west and mountains to the south. The region was largely depopulated but for some hardscrabble dissidents and primitives and so forth (the general was not entirely sure about these distinctions) in the plains. Forests, steppes, seas and mountains--it was perfect. On the left, the view switched between representative aerial and ground-based views provided by the remote drones, the first cut at the video feed which would be processed by engineering programs and broadcast after a suitable time delay. (In previous wars, the drones had been active units too, but ratings-rights were now protected by internatonal treaty. The general, like most modern men in his position, insisted on rudimentary defenses of the video feeds, in the unlikely event that any dirty tricks were employed by the enemy, but had no expectation of needing them.) Right now, the scene projected a village landscape as seen by a large ambulatory unit: craters lining a grubby street and bullet-holes blistering antique concrete. Standard stuff. The right-hand display was a confusing series of metrics and graphs presented for statisticians and for any citizens who were so inclined to analyze them. Much would be made of this information in the following days, but as with the map, it was designed for public consumption, and not particularly informative.

Suddenly, a red light started blinking on the map, and the supporting screens brightened and began to roil with activity. The general halted, his back straight. "Men, to your battle stations!" He took a moment to note to himself that the Industani attack had, indeed, come from the northwest.

#

"What I can't explain," thought John, "is why they're doing this to me now."

He had been spent his entire adult life around the level four growth vat. Over the years, he'd gone from fourth-class maintenance supervision, which involved trailing the low-level roombas with an assortment of shining cleaning tools to wipe or otherwise remove any errant trail of slime, ichor, broth, or medium that might have escaped their fastidious passage, to mechanical supervision, involving visual daily inspection of the vat-works and intubations, to catch any gross breaches of product that might have been missed by the automated ultrasonic, x-ray, or nuclear tomographic micro-analyses--never a single report to the central computer, he noted bitterly--all the way to chief human supervisor, which is to say that all the people working at the level four growth vat were personally monitored by him. He'd taken pride in his work, pride which even now, after everything, threatened to swell his heart. It took responsibility to recite the time clock instructions every day. It took skill to make sure people lined up properly. He clenched his fist and swung it at nothing, unbalancing himself for a moment. The memo advised that he was redundant, and indeed that a general electronic supervisory tool was replacing his entire division. If the propaganda feeds were right, and John tended to believe that they were, he was a victim of the newly touted Industani management model, which had been making their war effort as much as 2.4% more profitable. And now the powers were applying the enemy model to food production. As he approached his own sidewalk, he stopped to seethe a moment. He turned around a last time to look at the huge, smooth bulk of Ag Tower casting the town into an early sunset, and, wistful again, he tried to mentally map level four onto its light-absorbing exterior. "Will they still let us live here?" he thought. He wondered about the security of his wife's position in packaging. Maybe he'd finally be able to indenture one of the boys...if only either of them were more promising.

John opened the door to a smiling crowd. Behind his wife and children flew bunting and festive banners. One said 'TGIF'. Across another rolled cartoon artillery, dodging cartoon explosions. He could see that the kitchen table had been dragged into the entertainment room. "Wha--"

Kurt and John Jr. raced out to hug his legs, and his wife Sheila gave him a peck on the cheek, and pressed a Fortified Fungo-Brew into his hands. "Pre-game is going to start in an hour," she said, "and maybe while we wait..."

He grabbed the Forty, took a swig, and sighed. "Right. The game." He looked at Kurt and gave a small involuntary shudder. "Warmups going on now? Maybe some field reports? I could go for that." He tried to look past the table. "My chair still in it's spot?"

Sheila's eyes began to droop, but then perked up again. "Oh, and I have three days worth of appetizers, John. Is anyone up for Salti-Plax and Cheez to start? It's Crobia Cheez, Sweetie, nothing but the best for our family!" She winked at her husband.

"Yeah, look. About Crobia..."

"Is that the new infantry model, Daddy?"

"You know, let's check that out," he said, eyeing John Jr. appraisingly. He took another pull at the bottle and, perhaps already growing calm from the brew, worked himself around the table to where his favorite chair waited. He patted his lap for Sheila to join, a long-accepted compromise between them. "Who's ready for the big game?"

"And let's stick it to those Stanni bastards," he added to himself.

#

They, whatever "they" was left, called the village Pay Fyerma, and it was said to be as old as time itself. A handful of farms still dotted the countryside, even now. Barley and wheat grew in yellow patches, and sheep speckled the green hillsides like wildflowers. In the distance, the mountains loomed like magisterial old gods, witnessing the tragedies of the millenia. Local legend said that the first men worthy of the name walked in the hills around Pay Fyerma, and that the first empires of men fought here, between the seas, across the mountains. It was said that only a hundred miles away, peace was declared in the hemisphere. It was said that right here, a hundred years of war was brought forth in its aftermath. Without doubt, there was a sense of eternity to the landscape, that despite the vindictive movements of the ages, life and beauty endured.

Or so were Piotr's thoughts, as he watched one recalcitrant group of mammalian wildfowers. Up close, he considered, it was impossible to escape the notion of a sheep's insides, its stinking flatulent guts and, when circumstances so wrote, succulent flesh. (And were we vaunted men any different?) One of the great paradoxes of modern times, for those who cared to ponder it, was exactly that beauty of scale, how things got both more stunning and more disgusting the closer you looked at them. But then, how could Piotr really understand of modernity? He was practically alone out here. "Well," he thought, "the farther you got from it, the better you could see it." Another paradox maybe.

It was a difficult life, and an extraordinarily simple one (enough already!), what better for a human. A thought worth recording: he reached for his pocket computer, but headlines screamed at him from the other continent, and disgusted, he stowed it.

It was getting late as he wandered down the hill, and by the time the sheep were penned, it was dusk. By the time he got the methane pool seeded and warm, it was fully dark. Piotr offered a little generic prayer for another day fully lived. He pulled the door behind him, and considered turning on the generator. Charge the notepad? The world was abuzz with war, he knew--it was that time of year--and what the hell, maybe it even mattered who won. More importantly, his waffles were superior when he utilized a little electricity. He kicked open the back door and trudged off to the shed.

The generator normally had a small light, when it was working, but he hadn't opened the gas pipes as of yet. And this was bright--Piotr squinted at the outbuilding--and large.

And, he realized, not so close as he assumed. Silently, something blacker and much, much bigger than the shed, rose up on spider's legs. The red dot, an eye--no, an illuminator, he realized; this thing must have a NIR scope for vision--swung a great arc toward the sheep pen. It took a step forward on one of its improbable needle legs--

Piotr hadn't sensed the concussion, but his head, he realized, wasn't quite right. Recent: smoke was billowing from the sheep pen and rubble was smoking, steps from him, if he could step, something was still aflame. Discordantly, he smelled a roast, and within feet of him, was the upper half of a member of his flock, recently released of its glistening insides, flayed almost like dinner. It had its mouth open as if to speak warning, but its waist was seared and hairless. Piotr vomited, and tried to rise, failed. His thigh hurt too. When he looked at it, the panic set in.

Whistling, he heard, and his own eyes followed the red illuminator, possibly seeing as much. Explosions, and spindly legs gone the way of his own. A black mechanized hillside lurching and stuttering. Another whistle, another shock wave, and sound now, roaring. Old stones of Pay Fyerma raining. The red light was closer, on the ground vertical now, wrong. It was swinging his way again, noticing him another time. Crunch. Whirr. Roar. Red. Black. Silence.

#

The general looked at the screen tiredly. It was customary, he supposed, and he hoped the men didn't get nostalgic enough to dump a bucket of Fungo-Brew on him, which wasn't to say he didn't earn it. He looked at the summary stats on the clipboard: Industan withdrawn with at least twenty units; a surprising amount of collateral damage managed to surface on the video feeds; ratings topping even the historic slaughter of '98. It had been a long weekend, but the general was looking at national hero status. Medals, women, fame. He steeled up for a last moment, and for the benefit of the public, rose and faced the cameras.

"Thank you," he said. "And God bless our country."

A crisp salute, and it was done. A fadeout was palpable as he walked round the table to shake the hands of his staff. Good job, thank you, great work. He clapped the back of the lieutenant, and together, exhausted, they turned at last to the conference room door. A shower first, then makeup, and to the interview room. He had the speech prepared in his mind for months. A hero. He loved this game.

On the Median

April 9. I find many unusual things along the edge of the grass, many of the clothes I wear, for instance, and food sometimes, and other useful items. Today may have revealed the best find yet, or at least the best thing since I picked up my watch that tells me the days. It's a rigid folder with a lot of happy colors and animals on it, and inside there are three blue pads of paper bound with little spirals of wire, and several writing tools in a clear pouch. I am writing with it now.

I don't know if I will keep the folder, but I like pad and the pouch, and I have often thought I should keep more solid memories than the little marks I make on my tree to note the days.


April 10. One thing I can describe is my home. It is a small lean-to, packed tight with pine boughs, which keep me dry even when it rains hard. I can hardly see it even when I am looking right at it. At the very front opening, there are a few stones where I sometimes have a fire.

This lean-to is nested in a small stand of trees. This in turn is tucked into a little fold of hill, a narrow ridge on either side of me, as if I am in the center of a large "M". At the feet of the M, of course, are those long, black boundaries that define my space. My trees rise almost to the top of the ridge, it is one of many bunches of them. Swathes of grass weave in between, as if the little clusters of oaks and hickories and maples are bubbles in a green stream. There are stretches of bushes and scrub too, and in the summer, blue flowers pop up in the grass. My bubble has several nut trees, and it is cool (and sometimes a little muddy) at the lowest point inside. On the east side, there is a sandy bridge, a turnaround maybe, for the travelers on the blacktop, but a white plaque on a metal pole indicates that this use is forbidden.


April 11. When I walk straight west from my home, the peaks of the ridges rise for a few dozen paces, and the middle valley spreads out. There is a little white molded streambed that fills up when it rains, and empties into a pond in there that is not large, and not deep, but it teems with frogs and turtles. The water is very still on it today, and the sun is very bright and high in the sky, and I spent a few minutes looking at myself just now. My eyes appear very deep and dark against my wide face. My hair and my beard are the color of bark. I think they used to be blacker.


April 14. Did not leave my lean-to today. Was not hungry, and it feels like it will rain.


May 5. A lucky find this morning: a deer, nearly whole, resting a few short steps from the shoulder. It must have happened in the night, but nothing woke me up. The poor creature's hips were shattered, but he was otherwise intact. I wonder how long he managed to survive after he was hit.

As I sit here, I can smell the meat roasting on my small fire, and it is nearly too tempting to wait. Up near the top of the hill, where the breeze comes, many strips are hanging from my makeshift drying rack (just some sticks really, that I stripped bare of their bark), still glistening a little in the sun, and the deer's hide is spread out over a rock, also drying, close by. I will boil the heart and kidneys tomorrow, and I may have some meat to smoke too, but I will have to move up the hill for that as well, if I don't want water to seep into the hole, and I do not know if I want a fire that high up.

I am worried that so much meat will draw rats or crows, but I will camp near there for a few weeks, and maybe I can catch some of them if it does.


June 13. I woke up panicked this morning. The buzzing and shouting was not another nightmare, it turned out, and as I crept up the bank, I could see unhappy men dressed in orange crowding the bank, swinging around machines on rods in the open space between the blacktop and the treeline, sending clumps of grass, still wet from the dew, flying from the business ends, offering tiny glints in the morning sun. A hundred paces behind them, a large green vehicle growled near the edge of some of the closer trees, with a great arm that reached up to the branches and rent them horribly, with a ripping sound, as much animal as it was mechanical. I could see two men in yellow hats in the cockpit of the machine, pointing up in my general direction, and I froze.

I don't believe I am highly visible in my deerskin, but I felt that these men and their horrible machine were going to cut through straight to my home. Moving carefully, and as quickly as I dared, I crept backwards into the shadow, out of the immediate reach of the thing.

The rock that my hand closed on was about half the size of my head. When the monster finally approached, I felt the sound would deafen me, a hundred times worse than the big boxes that pass by so frequently in the night. When it was nearly upon me, I looked up a moment at the end of the arm, and it was less a fist than a mouth, spinning with brown and gray teeth, chewing up the branches and spitting bark and leaves. I hurled the rock where I thought the cockpit would be, and abandoning caution, I flew back to hide under the branches. As I write now, the sound is fading.


June 18. They cut the other side today. The crews are not hard to avoid when you watch out for them. On this side, I didn't find any sign of my rock, or of anything else but piles of cut grass, now drying and brown, and speared through with new shoots.


August 28. Laying down last night, I could see stars peeking through the breaks in the trees. I am sure I have looked up like that a thousand times, but last night, there was something about how the canopy was broken open and I could see the ragged line that separated the black of the underside of the leaves from the black of the sky, the nearby darkness from the darkness that surrounds the stars, and I felt somehow big enough to reach through it, walk up that shimmering corridor to the endless reaches. It was very quiet, and maybe that was the difference, and no lights went by. Looking out under my stand of trees, I could see the thinnest sliver of moon, hanging low in the sky. I swear I'd never seen the moon before either, not really seen it.

It was a good night for sleeping, dry and comfortable with the faintest crisp taste of autumn mixing in with the air, but I couldn't sleep, worrying about the hole in the trees. I moved out to the edge of the copse, and that helped.


September 19. I am not in my little stand of trees anymore. I feel like I have been restless for many months, but looking here, I can see it hasn't really been so long. It didn't feel like there was a decision made, but this morning, I stuffed my odds and ends into my little pack, what was left of the jerky, my hoard of nuts, and a pastry, now very hard, that I found last night still in the bag. (The bags are excellent for starting fires.) I kicked away my little ring of stones and started walking, clomping over the rough surface of the turnaround, and then on through the grasses, the gray and beige tops of the plants gently brushing my knees.

Maybe I will read this later and wonder what I was thinking. But I am sure I don't know.


September 29. I am standing on an overpass, and have been looking down at the world below me. I have seen many of these continents that intersect my own, both over and under, and crossed them in the manner as the circumstances have demanded. (Usually, like now, they don't even touch.) On these overpasses, my long island has often been cut off by a sudden canyon--and I am forced to navigate along the shoulder if I want to cross. Sometimes I'll wait for night to do this, and I'll sprint along the edge, dragging my hand on the rail while trying not to peer over the other expanse. But now it is not so dark yet, and I have stopped halfway.

Below, another path stretches out perpendicular to mine. It shares the air as my path, and without doubt, leaves blow back and forth and up and down the gorge. Maybe an acorn rolls over the pass and germinates into a little oak, grows, is cut and pruned sometimes, and its roots tangle with the roots from my trees through the mass of soil which is shared too, pulling at the same rivulets of groundwater running through the common earth like veins. I can imagine a man like me walking the lower way, looking up at the overpass. I squinted into the dusk to see if I could see anyone. Did I imagine a flicker of orange? A fire? At this point in the season, it's just as likely to be bears as anything else. I should move into the trees, I think.


October 4. Another turnaround, but this one apparently in use, or at least sort of. The machine is blue and white, and I was surprised to see it occupied, by a clean man, keeping very still. As close as I was, I could see many neat bumps and buttons and clocks on the inside. The man was faced outward, and he was holding a smaller item, although it was not really that small. He supported it with both of his hands.

It took me a long time to creep up to him, but I never saw him move. I think he was asleep. Or dead. But if that was the case, he couldn't have been there that long. I moved quietly past him anyway, crossing from behind. He could have just as likely been sitting at my turnaround.

It is later now, and I am lounging all the way out near the rail and thinking. The blacktop has become much more crowded and faster than I remember. I have grown comfortable walking just the same. I am getting hungrier faster, which is very inconvenient, but there are also many more containers that I can scrounge.


October 19. Thankfully back with some grass around me, with rocks and squirrels.

I kept walking even after my continent shrunk to a strip only twice as wide as I am tall, with a white divider, waist-high, running right down its center. With my feet on the grass, I could still pretend everything was normally sized, and that wasn't so bad. After a day or so of this, however, my grass walkway squeezed in too, and the barrier spread out slightly, and soon all that was left was a solid raised path that I could walk on. As the world closed in, traffic and signs seemed to come from everywhere, and large structures loomed in the distance. There were light poles stuck into the hard surface, and I counted a hundred of these before I gave up.

Far enough along, there were objects that spanned the macadam, a row of little blocks with people in them. I got just far enough see the last lightpost on my walk, where the path finally gave way to nothing at all. The end of the world as far as I'm concerned. I turned back.

The return was much worse, with the lights glowing above me, and also streaming at me fast from both directions. It made my eyes hurt, and I almost lost balance. I slept for a while leaning against a pole, I don't know for how long, before continuing on. Now I am here again, back in some normal space. It's getting a little cold, but I feel safe, and I am thankful for my deer skins. I miss my old camp, but I am happy that I can read about it.


November 5. I know that the world doesn't end there. Obviously the machines are filled with people, and I know that the surfaces are passable--I have crossed turnarounds and bridges made from the same material, and I have retrieved items sometimes a few steps out. I can read signs, and I can see landscapes like mine on the other side. Nothing stops me, and other than the remote fear of getting broken like a deer, there is nothing to even harm me.

I walked out almost to the center line tonight. That far, and I stood for a second before coming back to the comfort of the brown grass and coarse sand. I am sitting now on that edge, having gone that small distance, which is only a tiny fraction of all I have wandered. Vehicles pass by one after the other, humming, and they sound like the wind. They flood my eyes with yellow beams, they light up my dirty and yellowing notepad for a moment before receding red points in the washed-out aftermath. It is dark, and I am sure that they can not see me.

Pierre Menard, author of Keifus Writes!

These days, it takes a true scholar to remember the work of one Pierre Menard (not the frontier politician, the other one). His legacy consists primarily of a few monographs published at the turn of last century, noted for their utter typicality and general existence within the academic circles of his own time, which to the wider world, not noted at all, even in the early 1900s. He did manage to achieve some passing fame, or notoriety perhaps, for generating a few original reproductions of a few paragraphs of Don Quixote, although most records of that have been unfortunately destroyed. I have frequently wondered about Menard the scholar in an abstract sense--I am sure I have referred to him before--and lately have considered that his legacy may be more significant than is commonly believed. Certainly he is no Cide Benengeli, but perhaps his painstaking transferal of cultural idiom went beyond the medieval Spanish that is normally considered his masterpiece.

Undertaking an anachronistic instrument of no small degree of futurity is a task with it's own set of challenges. The author must presuppose not only entirely new media (and the written forms appropriate to those media), but also a complete future history of war, civics, immigration patterns, communication, and all the other things that can inform a work fiction, memoir, criticism or commentary. By contrast, the task is significantly relieved by the fact that Keifus Writes! has little ambition for, and even less evidence of greatness or, even, any particular relevance. For Quixote , Menard called out in his letters as influential but sufficiently removed from his canon so as to allow premeditation. In the case of Keifus, additional difficulties arise in imagining any seriousness at all, divining the literary bona fides as they say, of a work that is so hopelessly amateur. Regarding Keifus' significance, one is tempted to quip about the legendary ingenuity of fools. (Timid and serous by nature, Menard was never known to pursue cliché or cheap humor, which is one point for the continued integrity of this blog, such as it is. But it must be kept in mind that any accurate transcription of Keifus Writes! would include a necessary element of low humor as well.) A prospective author of Keifus may further attempt a larger challenge, and write the blog through an entirely personal set of attitudes and histories, much as Pierre Menard did with the Quixote, which resulted in an impressive (or embarrassingly inaccurate, if you prefer the Beauchamps criticism) supra-textual nuance of the familiar words.

As for me, the first curious behavior was with Blogger's spell-check software. (That Menard might anticipate spell-checking, as well as the neologism-heavy verbiage of an M-list blog sounds impressive, but, I reiterate, nowhere near as impressive as creating an alternative presentimental mindset from which Keifus, and whatever he'd decide to write, including references to spell-checking, would emerge of necessity.) Several weeks ago, the program began identifying errors, but suggesting identical replacements. Now, I will frequently misspell words like "Massachusetts" (it has the opposite rule as all those English words), "receive" (except after c, dammit) and "manufacturible" (I am still not sure this is the correct way, frankly), as well as commit typographical errors with words like "radiation" ("radiaiton") in a maddening fashion that is clearly wrong in a way that is difficult to follow the lazy i (Menard was known to disparage puns as well), but lately, the computer has prompted me to replace the alleged error with the exact same word. And I have complied, every time.

Furthermore, anyone who knows me, or is familiar with "Keifus," realizes that I put a lot of myself into my blog. Not just for the boring anecdotes, or the vicarious naturalism, or the literature of the nerd that I so love. No, it's more: when I, for example, get worked up about the facile analysis of other commenters, it comes from what I see as an awakening of my worldview, that grew to include more situations than my own, while keeping some notions of fairness, pragmatism, and open-mindedness, at least when it's been convenient to. I like to think it's all been tempered by a well-cultivated tradition of distrusting true believers as well as a lot of deep, independent thought and observation, and even if I flatter myself with that interpretation, it doesn't matter. The point is that these observations, pointed and otherwise, the very language I use to describe them in fact, I have always considered to be in a fundamental sense a product of myself. Pierre Menard's upbringing did not include a modern science education that he would view as a vital tool in his personal crusade to entertainingly abuse of metaphors (Menard hated allegory, but by all accounts was entirely indifferent to the art of metaphor), nor did he suffer the scars of being rejected by Amy Johannsen in the seventh grade (a bachelor, he had a lifelong male roommate), and we can say with authority that he never watched Superfriends. When I create a post, it's with these accounts, as well as a thousand others, all deeply implicit, the product of a unique experience that lends Keifus Writes! my own shading, which simply can't be compromised. None of this mystical ghost-writing crap!

But more or less contemporaneously with the mystery of the spell checker, the blog has been going downhill. Or at least so it seems to me. Even I can notice that there have long been a few recurring themes and repetitive language patterns that I have always thought trivial, but perhaps those things make Keifus Writes! more predictable than similar publications. Maybe that's how Menard gets at it. When I type many of the same sort of text as awlways, it has a tendency lately to come out, well, wrong. The meaning of of the words skirls dismayingly away from my fingertips, so that even though the language is the same, all that I read on the screen is intellectual gibberish of the worst grade, with none of the wit or occasional clarity that I have come to associate with Keifus, nor even that had sounded clever as I recited it to myself moments before. Damn you Menard, why do you torture me like this! That's not what I meant to say at all!

Lupe's Christmas part 2: The King of Diamonds

Reginald Wayne Dupres cinched his immaculate overcoat against the wind as he stepped onto the porch. He breathed deeply of the city air--a small city to be sure, and a bit far from its heart, but then Wayne Dupres was a small man in many ways--and doffing his hat, a beret as neat as his overcoat, into the cup of his hand, he turned and bowed deeply at the front door of the home. It was an ineffectual gesture to be sure. By now, she'd already be returned to the fireplace or to the kitchen table, where she'd pore carefully over the family ledgers, drifting into the comfort of checking sums, lulled by the careful skritch of her pencil, till the safe smells of rubber and shaved woods calmed her, until her mind came to that rest state, where Wayne's meaty, visceral reality could dissolve back to that thing of straw she carried around in her mind, that sexless empty vessel that was wrong about everything, always, always wrong. Wayne allowed himself his moments of irony, at least when she wasn't watching.

Stepping down from the stoop, he walked into a surprise drift of snow that had come up the short walk from the street. The damn plow had come off schedule, burying the cars on the side of the road, with an extra swerve to the house he shared with her. Figures. Wayne brushed the snow carefully off of his wool leg, frowning. He had so few pleasures, so few that he could wear outside anyway. He brushed his lapel--ermine--and thrust out his lip with a brio that he imagined to be sincere. He strode through the snowdrift, finding it passably clean, and thrust his hands in the deep pockets of his overcoat, forced a whistle. Marie could sink into caricature as well when they were apart, and before long she was a supporting presence in Wayne's mind, that rare soul who matched his goals and whose pecadillos matched his own.

Pecadillos, you say? No, Wayne and Marie are not nice people, they're our antagonists in fact, but if our characterizations are bad, they're not quite that cheap. Marie, as we've hinted, resorts to accounting under those long periods of personal stress, and she possesses a shelf of many neat books, carefully maintained. What on earth does she account, haunting, as she does, that tidy kitchen table for so many hours on end? Well, we'll get there, but suffice to say that there are a number of government programs which warrant returns. Her enterprise has a lawful paper trail at least, and a carefully tended one. She keeps track of her husband's ample failings as well, and those of others around her, but I suppose we've hinted at that too.

For his part, Reg. W. Dupres is a grown man who plays with dolls. This, we admit, is a trifle stranger than his wife's compulsive bookkeeping. When Reggie (Wayne) Dupres was a boy, some of his sister's Barbies had met strange ends. This wasn't rare in the neighborhood, but as his schoolmates terrorized the girls' royal court with kidnappings and torture, firecrackers and disturbingly bloodless decapitations, Reggie secreted the disproportioned creatures to the back of his closet and set them on golden chairs, where they could sit judgement from a private Olympus. Sometimes the his sister and her friends would lose hats and clothes too, and if there were suspicions, they were never voiced. No one knew how the outfits would be carefully scrubbed and rinsed and matched, organized into tiny concealed boxes, and set to carefully occupy a series of nooks and keepsaked drawers, from which the queens could rise and rule on many a neglected evening.

Yes, little Reggie had cared a great deal for his appearance, and fine clothes mattered more to him than summer camp, or video games, or friends, but bullies nonethelss found little purchase in the boy. They'd scatter his perfect class notes, and he'd steel up his little neck and walk, seemingly oblivious, to his house. They'd brake their bikes in front of him, and get it in their minds to throw mudballs in summer and snowballs in winter, and yet Reggie was an unrewarding target, soon forgotten. He swallowed his dignity and continued on, marched home where he could take out his aggressions in private, and calm himself with the joys of accessorizing, braiding and combing little plastic tresses.

Fancying himself a businessman, he made it through a college degree, keeping a few private boxes from an assortment of obnoxious roommates, mostly successfully. One evening, he came home from classes to a small bonfire of Mattel treasures, but by that time, Wayne had already graduated to more realistic figures. He'd kept a wish list for American Girl, then Creedies and Kishes, and eventually a taste for antiques, perfect little Victorian girls and boys. Without appetites for alcohol, food, or sex, he'd started a few investments in the brands without any further reservation, each carefully arranged on, at first, particleboard bookshelves, and eventually in places of honor on the walls and corners of his various apartments. Meeting Marie was a surprising thing, and in those days, she admired his fastidious notes, complete with receipts and collectors' appraisals. Before long there were signatures, carefully recorded in front of a justice, and then, without much warning, it had been ten years.

They told themselves they were a fine match, and perhaps they were. The decade between had found them overseeing a few well-subsidized foster creatures, complete with complicated paperwork and a great deal of attentive grooming. They managed not to kill any of them, and each found new homes in the system or winded their way back to their old ones, but the lucrative nature of the arrangement was lost on neither of the couple, and they told themselves they were doing good deeds in the process. And the necessity of guardianship did draw a speck of personality out of Wayne at least, a jaunty smile that could match some of his more cavalier outfits, and he evolved into the couple's public face. The children generally met Marie a little later. It had been a year without a ward, however, and ice was setting in, a slow crackling freeze, as each of the two regarded the other's highly defective nature and picked yet another cold battle to fight.

Wayne clumped through the snow, letting his aggression dissipate with steaming breath. Before long, he imagined himself a nineteenth century gentleman, with fur boots, gloves, and capacious overcoats. Perhaps he should invest in a pipe, but regrettably times had evolved, and you couldn't smoke one of those things just anywhere. He decided it wise to be on the lookout as the weather turned. Winter could sometimes reveal a few strays, and it was a good time to look. He'd walk about town, starting at the library; they liked to gravitate to the warm places, and they rarely knew how to dress properly for the cold.

Wolfman and young Ms. Guadalupe had a deal: he'd take care of the provisions, so long as she agreed to learn something constructive once in a while. The learning wasn't challenging (or unwelcome) for Lupe, but the whole business of guidance certainly was another matter. Wolfman didn't think in terms like "single parent" and "homeschool" as a rule, but even without the legal distinctions, he'd wandered into such a role. He didn't think in terms of "education" even, but he certainly valued knowing stuff. Perhaps he imagined Lupe could grow into one of the powerful women of his occasional temporary acquaintance, and he was pretty sure that whatever the motions most of the world went through to go about their incomprehensible mass-produced lives, such players were a product of something else. Perhaps Wolfman wished to guide her into an adulthood free of the malice that seemed to fester in other effective minds like hers, or maybe he just acted in some vague sense of parental responsibility, or a more acute feeling of love.

And Wolfman's responsibility brought him closer to the manners of the masses than he realized. In the evenings, he'd study what Lupe had gone over the previous day, in a futile attempt to keep up with the girl: she flitted insatiably from physics to philosophy, from business to biochemistry, from mathematics to music. Wolfman did his best to keep up enough to propose leading questions (as I suppose we've previously mentioned). Their mornings would be spent on a meal, purchased from a rapidly dwindling bankroll, and some quality time (another horrifyingly unfamiliar term to Wolfman) before the girl was let loose to prowl the public institutions of knowledge. The public library had computer access, but the university library was, while she was not strictly allowed in there, much easier to lose herself in. In between, Lupe would trot about town, enjoying the weather if it was enjoyable, or causing trouble with the hapless townies (the students annoyed her particularly, dull and entitled and arrogant) when she felt secure, and pondering how to prank her mentor when she felt less so. She didn't have much heart to do that today. As Wolfman waved at her and turned around, she could almost see the tail drooping behind him. Like him, she had a finely tuned sense of indignity. She'd never tell him how much she admired his sacrifice.

Wolfman made his way back to the trailer, which from the outside looked like a derelict leaning against a brick building, butting agaisnt a weedy lot. Entering it was a careful deal though, and he checked the tracks in the unwelcome snow, and found the bit of string still pulled across the door. He figured sooner or later someone would notice the extension cord, or some light seeping out of the door, and if no other arrangements could be made by then, they'd have to find some other cave to huddle into. He sighed and his shoulders drooped, as if he could feel the weight of life on them. Freedom had never used to be such a challenge. He kicked his shoes at the base of the door and walked in.

Inside, Wolfman smacked his hand to his chest, and dug a paw into the pocket there, gave the deck a desultory shuffle or two, and pulled off the top card. We already know its identity.

Wolfman wasn't a fan of kings. It wasn't for the authority--queens are much more regal, really--it was more that they seemed such dissapointed, dangerous spirits, their sad disinterested eyes guiding hands of violent design. Three of the four were frowning (at least in the pack with the naked, bike-straddling cherubs), finding their own inevitable deeds distasteful. (The exception was Hearts, who smirks as he swings, and thank the gum-throwing boy Hey-zoos that it wasn't that crazy fucker.) Diamonds had cash though, cold cash, and an open hand giving, taking, or sometimes both. Wolfman shurgged, and pensively twirled the card over the back of his knuckles, hiding the stub of his ring finger for a moment. Well, he considered, looking at his home, what the hell did he have to take anyway? He flipped the card onto the floor and tore his hat off the surface of the table (an unnoticed triangle of vinyl came along for the ride). He supposed he'd have to ask for a new beard. He tilted the cap at the most rakish slant he could manage, and stalked out of the trailer. Wolfman was sure that he had the worse end of their bargain, but if you could press Wolfman, he'd surely admit that any such bargain was not what their relationship was all about. Some people just belonged together.

He leaned a block against the door to keep it shut while he was gone, fixed his primitive alarms, and slunk off to his thankless job.


[Finish this by Christmas? The cards see it as unlikely.]

Lupe's Christmas, Part 1: The Four of Clubs

The hat scurried across the card table chased by a growl. It pinwheeled across the scarred, stained surface, and caught on a tear near the edge, white polyester fuzz grabbing onto cracked vinyl in an ancient oleaginous liplock (hot polymer on polymer action), unlikely to be broken without tearing off a piece of one or the other. Wolfman eyed the hat, sighed, and slumped into his rickety folding chair.

"This is no way for a man to live."

He dropped from the chair to his knees and dug through the little fridge parked crookedly beneath the table, and pried the last beer bottle off the sticky surface. His red shirt hiked up to reveal his lean, hairy back. Lupe giggled.

"Not funny," he said. "Bullshit." He popped the beer and then sat back up, patting his pocketless shirt.

"It's called 'work,' Wolfman. I know you've done it before."

"Not even work. I can handle work--well, for a little while. No, this is more like 'bullshit.'"

Lupe lowered her book and looked at him with lidded eyes, said nothing.

"I mean, Jesus! One kid threw gum at me, it caught in my beard!"

"Where is your beard?"

"The white one? Who knows."

"Damn kids, huh?"

"You should talk."

"He probably pronounced it Hey-zoos, you know."

"What?"

"Not Jesus. He-e-ey-zoo-oos."

"Huh? Who's Heyzoos?"

"And you say I should go to school."

"I'd never say that. That was your aunt. Your last one, or maybe the one before that."

"Yeah. She didn't really get me."

"Who does?"

"Or you."

Wolfman made a face. "Yeah, well, the alternative is living like this--" He waved his hand around the den, stopping at the leather jacket piled into a corner. He put down his beer and dove at the coat, began rifling through the pockets. A deck of cards appeared in his hands, or maybe half a deck. Red bicycle backs.

"Or work?"

"Yeah, or work."

It's worth it, maybe, to expand the scene a little at this point, let the camera zoom out and examine the tableau from a second-person present tense that separates ourselves nicely from the action, such as it is. We now see Wolfman hunched over the grimy table, shoulders arched high as he fiddles with the cards. The Santa hat still clings to its filthy crag on the corner, ignored by everyone. Wolfman has his chin thrust out, and long brown hair spills out over the back of the hated red shirt. He's grinning lascivously at nothing in particular. Immediately to his right is an ill-fitting door, which, when the string holding it baack is released, opens outward into the dark and the cold. We can follow the extension cord from the crack beneath the door to the fridge and to the bare light fixture screwed into the plywood wall and fitted with a yellow bulb. Its soft light makes the interior feel more homely, and warmer, than circumstances would otherwise suggest.

With its back to the card table sits an old, formerly blue couch. From its stains and tatters, you might assume that its a roadside rescue, and you would probably be right. The short couch--more of a loveseat, really, or maybe a fat chair--is wedged in between wheelwells, and at its foot, at the rear of the trailer, are a couple of milk crates filled neatly with books, two battered suitcases, and an unkempt pile of blankets. (The blankets are Wolfman's responsiblity; Lupe is small enough to curl up on the couch, of course, and that section is relatively tidy.) The books might also be salvaged, or maybe someone has a library card, taken out bashfully, or with rolled eyes, under an assumed name. In any case, both books and luggage belong to Lupe, a scruffy but attractive girl of about twelve, who is doing her level best to exude a womanly calm. She does this not because she's good at it (although she's getting better), nor because the situation calls for it. No, it's an expression that she's picked up from an aunt (not a real aunt--the closest thing she had to one of those is now bolted up in a Canadian country club), and it has a remote possibility of annoying Wolfman, who can become comically irate those rare times that Lupe can break through. It's not working now.

All right then, let's bring the camera back in.

Lupe sighed and released her aloof vigil. "Did you really mean it about school?"

Wolfman gestured at the crates of books. "I think we've got that covered."

"How long do you think we'll be here."

Wolfman grimaced. "Wish I knew, Frankenstein. But I can tell you that something usually comes up." He tugged at the hat, which was indeed stuck.

"How about a card?"

Wolfman whimpered. "Aw, man."

"Maybe it'll tell us something?"

"Nah, it just tells us where we are, not where we're going to be. They, uh, respond to the present circumstances. It's not magic or anything."

"Then let's see."

"All right. Fine." Wolfman whipped off the top card from his partial deck and slapped it on the table.

"The four of clubs," said Lupe. "Boring and strong."

"Sure," said Wolfman. "It's telling us we're here. The four points, they trace out a door, right? With darkness behind it. Like that door" He gestured to his right. "It's just this bullshit little trailer, and this bullshit job."

"Maybe tomorrow will be better."

"Maybe."

Now, it could be noted that a door isn't just a place, but more like an exit, an observation that was not quite lost on Wolfman, who licked his lips when he thought about the flipped card, and possibly it wasn't lost on Lupe either, although neither mentioned it. A four is also a double pair, a dark twosome with its shadow close by. Could it mean an evolution of the first two into some different two? Is the shadow pair something external to the first one, trailing it? It's not as though Wolfman's astrology is an exact science. Indeed, divination is no science at all, even if some people are gifted in making the symbols look true.

Debate, 2088

The candidate was an imposing presence, with great bushy eyebrows hanging down over his eyes, themselves settled deep in their cavernous orbits. With his aquiline nose, somewhat reddened, and broad ruddy cheeks, and in his uniform, he looked like a figure pulled from some previous century, from the pages of Kipling maybe, or C.S. Forester, every inch the aging admiral. The truth was, he'd fought on the ground in Syria as a young marine, and had been injured by a bullet in the thigh which still caused him to limp, although he preferred to hide it. He was a career soldier in an era where there the need for his kind diminished by the year, as nations, those few civilized lands that had staved off anarchy anyway, had turned to maintaining the battle against dire domestic threats. The sections of the Department of Defense that hadn't been reallocated toward research and food distribution were aimed at controlling separatist movements that occasionally flared up among the variously indignant geographic and economic centers. As the titular head of these federalist endeavors, the candidate was beloved by his soldiers, which most voters did know, although his actual capacity was more as an administrator, which most voters did not. At his advanced age, the candidate spent most of his time, as he himself often phrased it, glorifying the troops. A real throwback.

He had a booming voice, and when it filled the room, it left little space for thought. "I, for one, am sick and tired of so-called 'infrastructure limitations' of the sun sector," he said. "As usual, it all comes down to the council that calls itself wise."

The audio techs amplified the crowd response for the purposes of the broadcast, capturing the predictable gasps.

The candidate went on. "Americans who should be able to use choose their hours of power use for their own benefit. When I was a boy..." he leaned his towering frame forward and glared at the camera, "we had something called the free market that we used to swap goods and services around efficiently. People got the power they were willing to work for!"

His opponent, by contrast, was a dark and wiry little man, with small round glasses that nonetheless made his eyes look enormous. He also wore a tight and archaic necktie, which coupled with is high smooth forehead and magnified eyes, gave the impression of a curious frog peeking from the mud. He needed to tip up on his toes to get his head over the podium and close enough to his mike to offer a rebuttal.

"Now look," he said, and the candidate did, turning his shaggy head toward the little frog man. "As something of a student of economics, I can inform you that most sources say that the rampant growth in capital of the last century was predicated on several irreproducible factors, to wit..."

"Haw! The last century would have turned out fine, if money was concentrated in the hands of the real movers. My Granddaddy used to tell me about Communism! Central government planning! My own father was head of the Walton Conglomerate, got the distribution done right, made the decisions himself!"

"...and growth that was unsustainable vis a vis the finitude of natural resources, and the short-term focus of the so-called capitalist model, which in fact was not capitalist at all, but was heavily supported by the government. In fact, the Wise Council even today encourages free markets on a local scale, but..."

"The council! Haw. The council is the one that declared itself 'wise.'" The candidate had copious gray moustaches, which he used for effect.

"Well, that's not precisely true, but--"

The moderator chose this moment to interject. "Excuse me, honorable candidate, honorable incumbent." The incumbent looked at the moderator, and the candidate glared imperiously at the camera facing him. "This conversation is getting far from the mark. Honorable candidate, how would you propose to increase the power flow to every American?"

The candidate harrumphed. "An excellent question, and I'm glad you asked it. First of all, power should flow to the honest citizens who contribute most to society. Second of all, it's common knowledge that the council hoards petroleum reserves.."

"Hoards? That is not true!"

"Sir, please. You will get an equal chance at a reply when it's your turn to speak. Go on, Mr. Candidate."

"Yes, thank you. As I was saying, if we concentrate the flow of power to honest hardworking Americans, families that have been contributing to our cause for generations, they'll know what to do with it. Make our economy strong. In my Daddy's day, we could always find more oil. If the Wise Council would bother to look for it--"

The incumbent had been fidgeted at his podium, but he couldn't let the last comment pass. "Sir! You know as well as I do that what oil deposist that are still known are preserved for research and in case of invasion. And for that matter, waste from that industry nearly destroyed our arable land and has surely limited our lifespans. If it were not for the work of Wise Council's life sciences commission--"

"Invasion, you say. And what about the South American menace? How will that affect our lifespans? I ask you Mr. Incumbent, and you, America, what about the South American fighters so eager to come across the border? The Free States of Venezuela is starving its people in the name of weapons research." He spit the word. "And breeding an army. They'll re-introduce the nuke, you mark my words. Can we afford to leave America underpopulated?"

"Underpopulated? Sir, have you no memory of the century you lived through? As it is, we already allow the maximum sustainable--"

"Do you want them to come over the border and attack us? Our precious sun sector rests right on their doorstep."

"First of all, the Mexican Federation, which borders us, is our ally. Second--"

"Gentlemen please," the moderator said, " both sides of this argument deserve equal time. Now Mr. Incumbent, why do you want to expose our precious power resources to the Venezuelan hordes? "

"The Venezuelan hordes aren't--"

"Do you see? He admits they're waiting just over the border! My Daddy, he used to tell me stories about what they do to their women. Can you imagine if they invaded?"

"Your assertions, sir, are simply bizarre."

"Now please, the candidate deserves his chance to speak."

"Thank you. As I was saying, our population would be stable without the South Americans coming over, and--"

"Our population is stable, thanks to the strict administration of the Wise Council."

"Haw. A matter of opinion, of course. Another talking point of the so-called wise. Can you even think for yourself, sir?"

"If it weren't for the Wise Council..."

"Who gets to be on the council? I, for example, am a decorated field commander." The candidate gestured at the patchwork of ornaments on his chest. "And yet, I am childless. I come from a long line of Americans, sir. My ancestors came aboard sailing ships, defying English elitism. My ancestors commanded the American economy, and yet, the Wise Council insists my line must end. You call this a system of merit? Nobler societies fought wars over this, sir."

"We all know the tests are extensive, Mr. Candidate. My own children have not--"

"Your children. So you admit you are a lazy, privileged elitist, then?"

"The council works as hard as anyone."

"Haw! My Daddy used to say 'show me a politician without a manicure, and I'll show you a chicken without henfeathers.'"

"Didn't your father sit on the board of the Walton Conglomerate?"

"And proud of it! A man of the people! Worked hard for his living, just like his Daddy did, on the very same board. With his own two hands!"

"Most historians agree that the loss of industrial base due to corporations like Walton's was one of the primary causes of--"

The moderator interrupted. "Sir, are you going to defend against the candidate's charges of elitism or are you not?" The camera turned to the man, who was shuffling papers, or what looked like them. Like the incumbent, the moderator wore glasses and a necktie, but was somewhat younger, and heavyset. The clothing was the fashion of the leadership academies and frequently it was adopted by the socially conscious, or worn in formal settings like this one. Arranging papers was an old-fashioned on-air gesture, but like the debates themselves, they were a part of American tradition. "Our insta-poll suggests that nearly 53%, an overwhelming majority of respondents, feel that you are not being honest with your responses."

The candidate cleared his throat, which, when processed through the gigantic speakers, sounded like stentorian thunder. Production assistants in the sound booth slid levers to tone down the effect for the viewing public. "The fact is" the man said, "is that my opponent is positively un-American."

"What?"

"And he is bordering on hysteria. Can we really entrust our national security to such an excitable little man?"

"Look, it's only because of the council that our children will--"

"Aha! He meanshis children, America. His children, he admits it from his own lips. Not mine, and not even yours. Who would you like to see living here in a hundred years?"

"Well, I admit," the incumbent said, "that in a hundred years, things will have hopefully improved, and--"

"Elitist!"

The incumbent jumped from behind the lectern, in order to be seen. "Now, see here, this is simply not fair." He took a step across the stage, but stopped when the towering candidate rotated his iron gaze toward him. The incumbent was not a physically imposing man.

The moderator pressed a button, and a bell rang. "I believe our mandatory broadcast hour is drawing to a close." He looked at his notes and raced through the catchphrases of the New American Federation. "Remember citizens, conservation-is-our-strength, and natalism-is-starvation. Good night."

As the cameramen dismounted their rigs, the production booth announced, "power out in two minutes." The incumbent, the moderator saw, was already making his way offstage, gesturing with animation at one of his assistants, something about South American diplomacy and damage control, and then onto something about how plastics mining was looking more productive than ever. The candidate remained at his podium, blinking and staring at nothing. His attendants were making their way over.

South American diplomacy, eh? He'd have to remember that for the next debate. The moderator simply didn't trust those filthy little jungle howlers. American women! He knew as well as anyone that they were hoarding oil, living like Incan royalty in their tropical paradise, half naked women all around them, and dripping with gold, while honest Americans struggled just to keep alive.

The moderator shuffled his meaningless papers and stowed them under the production desk as the fluorescents clicked off, on cue. With the mandatory power-down, the only light was the late summer sun that filtered down through the high windows. Not fair? He'd always wanted children himself, but like the candidate, had never passed the tests. Still, he was smart enough to read history, and learn from it. With such limited and exclusive access to information, the media could be powerful once more, maybe more powerful than they'd ever been in the previous century. He thought of Venzuelan gold, nubile mestizo women, dozens of fawning children. The candidate must get his chance. His own prestige--no, America's prestige--depended on it.

A Candidate I Could Have a Beer With, Part III

It's been nice, in a way, to see the town so awake these past couple of weeks, responding to the presence of all these powerful strangers, but it's made for uneasy variations in the old routine, waking my mind up in ways that it's not really used to. Maybe one of these days I'll start to keep the same sort of cool that my wife manages. There is a woman who can make connections. On Friday, all three of us--Jane and I, with little Simon toddling along (he was an opinionated baby, and we named him after our favorite music critic)--over to Applebee's, which is something of a payday tradition. That place gave us the strangest run-in so far. Even at the entrance, you could tell something was off: there were these identical-looking guys in suits everywhere, and I had to push my way through them just to get over to the hostess and drop off our names.

Forcing my way back, I reported to the boss. "It looks like its going to be a wait, Hon. You want anything to drink for now?"

She shook her head, but since my teeth were already clenching, I decided to body surf my way over to the bar for an aperitif. I pushed my way through the clones, past some jokers setting up lights, and I squinted at the glare from those upside-down umbrellas. The very end of the bar had the only open space, and I wedged found myself there with my elbow between some cheesy decorations, a dusty football and a framed photo of a sunny family picnicking in Anywhereville, USA.

At Applebee's, I like to get a Yuengling or two, my weekly attempt at upscale beer-swilling. I drink 'em a little slower, and my wife doesn't give me as many funny looks as we get through our meal. I looked back over the crowd at her, and she was, to my surprise, looking right back at me, excited as hell.

I mouthed a brilliant response. "What?"

She waved her arms around, and made grimaces off to her left.

I smiled back and gave her a thumbs up.

She hitched her hands left again in an even more exaggerated fashion, almost pulling little Simon to the floor. I looked over, and under all the light--in the middle of the shoot I'd just bowled through--was this blonde woman in a pantsuit, looking right pissed off. I smiled dumbly at her and shrugged an idiot apology, and then looked back at my wife. Yeah, she looked familiar, I tried to say with my face, maybe she's on TV? I looked at the crew again to see if I could place her, and in her place was standing a long-haired hippie type (who reminded me of myself in college, before it all fell out) was looking at one of his colleagues. He pointed at me a couple times, turned and pointed to Jane and Simon, nodding so that his ponytail bobbed up and down. (Just you wait, pal.) I finally spotted Ms. Powersuit in that conferring as well, but she'd turned her back to me. She shook her head at some comment or other, and then nodded curtly. All at once, the three of them turned these steel gazes right at me. Ponytail whispered something to a guy behind him, and I could see, with growing apprehension, a ripple of gray twill moving through the crowd in two directions, one at my family, and the other straight at me. The last one, some unsmiling red-haired woman in a black business suit and wire glasses, who had until that moment been edging me into the wall-mounted Americana, turned her face right into my craw and said, "she wants you." I've never felt smaller. Weakly, I nodded.

The crew (I was thinking "press gang" by that point) somehow maneuvered me under the lights, which, I realized, were focused on a single table, which had chairs arranged on only one side of it. Jane and Simon were already sitting in two of them, she eager and he only a little bit terrified. Four plates were arranged in front of us, and as Red pushed me down into the chair, she said "eat some of it." I gave her a dumb look. "Don't worry, it's on the house," she said. Gingerly, I took a sip of my black and tan, thinking it would have to last.

"What's going on," I asked my wife.

"Can't you see the camera, Bob?"

"Holy shit."

Ponytail broke out of his endless conference and wormed his way over to the table. "Here's the deal," he said, "you need to act like your sharing some really interesting ideas with the candidate. Do you have family dinners?"

My wife interjected. "Is she--"

It got her a glare, shot her way over little round glasses. "She's going to sit and talk to you. Act like it's an fascinating family discussion." He looked at me and shook his head. "Okay, what I mean is, you can ask her a question if you like, but most of all, you need to look interested and engaged. You," he looked at me again, "just do your best to act like you're pretending to understand."

"I see..."

"Exactly."

My wife: "She's going to--"

"Yes. Quiet now."

He jerked his chin at an assistant, and a short man scampered up with a little plush animal to entertain Simon. The boy grinned, and soon he was happily chattering with a stuffed donkey. Of all of them, this assistant seemed nice: I considered asking him for a refill, but instead took another tiny sip. I took a bite of the hamburger they provided, which under the lights, tasted like something you'd get at a truck stop at 3 AM. The fourth plate, salmon and vegetables, had been carefully half-eaten, with bites strategically taken here and there.

Just as I dribbled a little mayonnaise (hate the stuff) down onto my chin, yet another assistant swung by. This one smiled at Simon (who was enjoying himself by now, with all the attention), and whispered to my wife in collaboration before dotting her forehead with a compact a couple of times. She turned and looked at me more critically. After she wiped the white goop off of my face with a napkin, she held me under her gaze, shaking her head but holding her powder puff at bay. "Authentic," she muttered. Some of us are perfect the way we are.

The ponytail came bobbing back. "Now, now!"

The crowd of bodies parted, and the woman in the pantsuit walked down the breach, framed by glaring light. Jane stood up, beaming, and I followed. The woman looked at me first. "Hi, I'm Bob," I said, and shook her hand, which she returned gently, but with authority. She was lovely for her age, but this close, I got a good look at all the makeup caked into years of stress lines. Damn, if she didn't look familiar. I tried to not let my eyes wander from the cracks around her eyes. "Hillary Clinton," she said, the very edge of wryness getting into her voice. Finally the recognition dawned, and I sat down fast. My wife squirmed a little as she introduced herself, but before she could speak anymore, the director started waving his arms, and babbled something about a strict timeline.

Jane and Mrs. Clinton both took their spots. Evidently, we were done eating, but I held onto my half beer, wishing I had a few full ones. The red-haired assistant was at my shoulder again, a constant hum of instructions directed right into my ear. I got the gist--act interested--and began practicing the art immediately on my temporary advisor. Clinton was looking away from us, listening to the last-minute directions from the ponytail man, and my wife nervously was nodding her own guide, no doubt listening for real. When someone yelled "go," Mrs. Clinton turned toward us again, and became effusive. Suddenly, Jane, Simon and I were not just at the center of her attention, but were the entirety of it. This calmed my wife down a lot.

"Is this a popular place in town?" Clinton asked. "How are the gas prices?" She went on with inconsequential small talk like that for a couple minutes, and as she went on, she patted the air authoritatively with her hands, making the most inane comments and questions seem deeply edifying. As Jane responded, the candidate would tilt her face toward the lights like a benevolent gibbous moon, and she laughed expansively or chuckled thoughtfully at my wife's most trite conversation.

She turned to me, "How are jobs here, Bob?"

I can't tell you how I replied, but it didn't seem to matter. She listened graciously, and when I was done gibbering, she grew serious without losing her appearance of camaraderie. She could communicate with her employees, but she was definitely in charge, the Cee-Eee-Friggin-Oh. "We have to keep industry in Pennsylvania," she said, "we can't let Republican outsourcing and mismanagement cripple the most vital sections of the economy." She made a fist for emphasis. She was tough. She cared.

Something occurred to me. "Mrs. Clinton?"

Perhaps taken aback at my interruption, she raised her eyebrows and smiled to wait for the question. It was a surprisingly disarming expression.

I stammered. "D-d-d..."

Pure patience from her, and I took the last swallow from my glass. "I, um, was talking to some guys at work last week. D-didn't you v-vote for--"

Ponytail snapped something. "That'll do it," he shouted.

The warmth instantly melted from Clinton's face, and I noticed the spackled crow's feet once more. She stood up, and thanked the crew. "I think we can use this," she said. Jane and I were dumbstruck (Simon was babbling sweetly), and as she got up to review the footage, the lights already began clicking off. Until then, I hadn't really appreciated how hot they had been. I looked helplessly at my wife, who didn't notice me, eyes glued to the candidate.

The red-haired woman was coming to the table with some papers for us to sign, but Mrs. Clinton strode our way for a last moment before joining her escorts, and the assistant dove out of the powerful woman's way. Clinton turned her camera smile on a last time for Jane, thanked her, and politely shook her hand. She clucked Simon under the chin, and then turned to me. "Please vote for me next week," she said politely, but the gaze she nailed me with could have frozen the sun.

A Candidate I Could Have a Beer With, Part II

I don't like to think of myself as a racist. I grew up without thinking ever about the subject, didn't need to, but the hateful crap that my in-laws shout about makes me feel guilty about all those times I ignorantly nodded along with someone's vague view of blacks and foreigners, always stealing someone's job or other. In college, I hung out with a few black guys, and didn't find them any more or less worthy than anybody else. Hell, one dude basically got me through P. Chem. But you know, that place was it's own expensive little world, and nowadays I hear my father-in-law's voice in a lot more white people, and it makes me uncomfortable. It's gotten to the point that when I do meet a black guy--pretty rare--I fall all over myself trying to treat him like a normal person, which you know, isn't normal at all. I don't like to think of myself as a racist, but I have to admit, that's kind of fucked up.

Anyway, it had to be this sort of thinking that got me talking to this Barry guy yesterday. Here he was standing outside of my lunch hangout, a gangly scarecrow of a man, talking to one guy with a camera, and another one with a handheld gizmo that he was taking notes on. I walked up to the door, and stumbled a little. There have been a lot of strangers around, but like I was saying, I didn't want this particular guy to think we aree all a bunch of backwards hicks over here. Like a moron, I hold the door open and asked if they're coming in for lunch.

It took Barry a second to really register what I was doing--the air felt heavy for a second there as his partners stared at me--but then he gathered himself and said, "sure, why not." Joining me at the counter, and after we introduced ourselves, he told me that he was visiting, doing some "politics work" he said, and maybe I could tell him a little bit about life around here.

"You want a beer," I asked?

"All right, Bob. Say, do you usually get a chance for a long lunch?" He was being diplomatic. No let's face it, he was being patronizing--he enunciated everything like a teacher trying to draw out a six-year-old, and when he wasn't speaking, he slowly rotated his head in a vaguely upward direction, to listen I guess, but seeing far, trying to fit the kindergartner's story into the scheme of his big grownup's world. But he had a smooth, deep voice, and to be honest, it's nice to have someone act like they give a damn for a change, even if they don't, and it did evaporate my nerves straight away.

I explained: "They give me Wednesdays off. Save's 'em a few bucks on benefits to keep me short of full time. I'm hired as a contractor, sort of."

He pursed his lips and nodded. "And what services do you contract, Bob?"

"Geology. I advise some different companies in the Westmoreland Group about mining operations." The guy with the Blackberry was taking notes. I was uncomfortable all over again.

Barry took the smallest sip from his glass. "This," he said, is really excellent beer," and then pushed it away, leaving it untouched for the rest of the conversation. (It's not excellent beer at all.) "Coal is a vital industry, you know. Domestic, plentiful, big donors, important lobby. I can see how skilled geologists are important to the industry. I believe Westmoreland is a member of the National Mining Association. Tell me, Bob, do you work with clean coal technologies?"

"Basically, my job is to keep track of runoff patterns that result from mining operations. Take some measurements and surveys, make some estimates, turn in a report every couple weeks. Clean? It's coal."

"And how does the runoff affect the local towns? The wildlife?"

"Most of the mass ends up in the back woods, really, so it doesn't get a lot of attention. And we try to keep existing waterways going, sort of. But there's a lot of shit--excuse me--that comes out of there."

The truth is, I hate my job. The towns don't go away, but there are valleys out there full of rubble, yellow streams running off of them that stink more or less, depending on how recently the mines dumped. I stopped looking at Barry and stared at my glass. The guy with the camera snapped my picture just at that moment. Thanks pal.

"Do you drive a lot, Bob?"

"You bet."

"How's gas prices?"

"Through the roof."

Barry, still holding that visionary stare, tapped his lips a couple of times. "Now Bob, you pay a lot for gas. The way I see it, we have a basic tradeoff here, wouldn't you say? We should clean up coal mining, and inspire the industry to abandon mountaintop projects." He was making connections. As Barry got animated, he started thumping his forefinger on the table with each point he made. "We should invest in clean coal technologies, technologies that require the industry to better study the runoff patterns and minimize environmental impact. We should look toward exploiting our fuel resources in a safe and friendly way! Wouldn't you agree?"

I nodded weakly, imagining how my bosses would buy this, but I had to admit that even if it didn't accomplish anything, they'd probably need me to take more measurements and file more paperwork. I nodded a little more certainly.

"What's more, if there were alternate technologies--and I'm not just talking coal here, Bob, not anymore, but wind and solar, and geothermal" he wiped his arm across the sky, "there would be jobs for not just geologists, but all kinds of technical people. Can you imagine it?"

I supposed I could. Barry talked about jobs for a good while, moved into the cost of housing, and religion, feeling out the corners of my life with Oscar-worthy empathy, and pontificating out a grand story every time enough concepts had gelled together to make one. As he got going, his stature seemed to expand, his chest inflated and an imaginary wind lifted his brow. Every now and then, he decorated the perforamnce with a passable regular-guy laugh, and most of these landed in the right place, but I wasn't really adding much to the conversation by the time I got to the bottom of my glass. I thought again about how ridiculous I must have looked trying to act casual when we walked in. At the end of it all, Barry God-blessed me (an expression which always makes me uncomfortable), and the guy with the handheld asked me to sign something. Barry marched straight-backed and loose-limbed out of the restaurant as if he were performing a stage exit. I could practically hear the brass section crescendo and then fade with the closing of the door.

I stuck around for awhile after he left, thinking it all out. When I finally did get home, my wife was pissed at me for being so late. I told her about the conversation. "Did you say 'Barry?'"

"Yeah."

"Do you know who that was? Jesus Bob, you're probably going to end up in a political anecdote."

I don't really follow politics, and my wife knows this, but here was my rare spotlight. I did my best to grunt something confident but noncommittal.

"Well," she went on, "what do you imagine he'll do about all of those things?"

"Do? You know Hon, I think he's going to do pretty much the same old shit. But it sure sounds nicer coming out of his mouth."

She thought about this for a second or two. "Bob?"

"Yeah?

"Let's not tell my Dad about this."

A Candidate I Could Have a Beer With, Part I

I hoisted the pint glass up to my eyeball and scowled down the frothy sides. Time for another, I decided, and made a twirling motion with my hand. I knew that the gesture pissed Mabel off, but it always seems to get me another cup the fastest. Maybe she spits in it enthusiastically or something. I don't care. The days have been feeling so long lately.

I looked at the rows of hooch lined up like soldiers under the bar mirror. I have my system: when their labels become too blurry to read easily, that means it's time to get back to the family. The bottle of bitters is one of my favorites to stare at. Tall and tapered like the end of a trumpet, it has been there since I first hoisted a stool at the Homely Barrel, some twenty years ago. Now and then, some young novice might come in and order a mixed drink that Mabel has to look up in a book, but not even college kids find a reason to drink bitters. It's safe to say that anyone who comes to this place more than twice is an Iron City man like the rest of us. I squinted at the old bottle, and noticed that there were handprints drug across the dust on its surface. The cap was clean too, and a drop of liquid glistened at its edge. What the hell?

I sat up straight, thinking I'd had one too many. I looked frantically around, and noticed this older guy, swirling his glass around jovially, looking puzzled at the new MP3 jukebox here, at the stained wooden walls there, and then at me. I tried to look away, but it was too late, I was spotted.

"Say Mister, can I buy you one of those?"

Well, he couldn't be all bad. He had a round wispy head with a big elfin grin pasted on it. It was hard to tell if the smile was sincere. He bobbed jauntily as he covered the three paces to the bar, like he was enjoying the novelty of it all, like he was lost, but didn't care. "Whaddya got there, son," he said, but didn't look at me when he spoke, rather glanced all around, taking in what passed for ambience at the Barrel, or maybe he was checking to see if anyone was watching.

"Um, just a beer," I said.

"Just a beer!" He beamed at this announcement like he'd made an unexpectedly brilliant deduction. "Waitress, just a beer for me and my good friend here." And he patted me on the back and took up the stool next to me.

"So," he said, "nothing like a beer between friends, um…"

"Bob," I said.

"Just a beer, for me and my good man, Rob."

"What is that you're drinking? If you don't mind me asking."

"I asked for something old fashioned." He paused, and his eyes got dark. His voice became low and reedy. "It tastes like piss if you ask me, Ron. Piss. Do you know what piss tastes like? The things they made me do. I'd kill every last…" He trailed off into a confused, threatening mutter.

"Uh--"

"…wouldn't give in to the bastards--"

We both stopped awkwardly. Desperate to change the subject, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. "What do you think of all the strangers in town, all the cameras and stuff?"

This perked him up. He lifted his head high and thrust out his jaw. I couldn't tell if the effect was more Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeve or Popeye elbowing his way across the deck. "My fellow Americans," he said, and winked at me.

"Yeah, it's an election I guess. Everybody's talking about it, but it's kind of hard to think about those things, with the wife and the kids to worry about, you know?"

"Yeah pal, you gotta pay attention to 'em. Or next thing you know, there's some hot young…"

"Well, it's not that. The gas prices and the health care are killing us, but we can't afford to move closer to work. Hell, I'm lucky that I got a decent job at all."

"Taxes, mate," he said solemnly. "The crisis government your investment housing money responsible subprime authority." He leered, and I noticed that the corner of his mouth was shiny. I hurriedly gulped at my beer. "I'm not really an expert on economics," he concluded. "Marry money, Tom, that's my advice, take the opportunities. Hire an accountant, and a lawyer." His laugh was as thin as his voice, and it didn't really seem to come very far out of his mouth, like most of it was directed inward. Hhnn, hhnnn, hhhhnnn.

I looked around, and twirled my hand desperately at Mabel.

"Heh, I don't know why they say you buy beer, more like renting it."

"Huh?"

"You like Arabs, Jim?"

"What?"

He glowered at me. "America's got to stand tall, wouldn't you say? Isn't that what you people say?" His moods, I was realizing, were unpredictable. His bitters and his Iron City were sitting at the bar, untouched.

"I don't really know any Ar--"

He was speaking through clenched teeth. "Look, it's military tradition Ben, and it's an American tradition. America needs to be strong, needs a strong leader, and sometimes we have to kill a lot of people. These are important times."

I was taken aback. I couldn't tell if he was talking to me or to himself.

"I want your solemn oath Fred, that you will go out and vote in the primary next Tuesday."

"Um, sure, okay."

"Put her there, my friend."

I rose (with gratitude, truth be told), but as I stretched out my hand, he cleverly dodged it and leaned into an embrace, his puffy cheek pressed right against my chest. Haltingly, I patted his back a couple of times.

As he walked out the door, I considered telling my wife about the encounter with the strange old man. Or maybe I'd just have another beer. Surreptitiously, I grabbed his, but left the tumbler full of yellow liquid. It was much too early, I could still clearly see the handprints on the bottle.

Christmas at St. Christopher's: Wolfman's Story

[The frame story was written by Kevin Fournier]

The snow fell crooked on Christmas Eve, blowing this way and that into every available gap, every orifice and cranny, swirling about and refusing to settle. Every time the doors to the emergency ward slid open to let someone in, a cat’s worth of snow would leap into the entranceway and dance in the air a while, as though animated not by the wind, but some impish inner will.

The doors never slid open to let someone out. One man had tried to escape that way, earlier in the day, deciding after seven hours waiting that maybe it wasn’t really that infected. But when he got to within three feet of those doors, he slipped on a puddle of melted snow and came down hard, twisting his ankle as he did a frantic dance to stay upright, and bruising his tailbone as he hit the floor.

The doors slid open after he fell – not to let anyone in, except some wind and snow, but almost as if to mock him. He was a middle-aged, business-looking man in an expensive suit; even as he fell, he hadn’t let go of his briefcase. His name was Martin, he said, and he sounded something between wistful and resigned as he thanked the young man. Henry wondered, as he helped drag the man off to the side, what a money-looking guy like that was doing, coming to a hospital like this. Maybe – like Henry himself – he was new to the city, and hadn’t known better. Or maybe the only money he really had was in his suit, his haircut and his briefcase.

The businessman was obviously embarassed. When he’d announced his departure – the only words he’d spoken since his arrival – he had, in a fit of bravado, given away his little ticket. His eyes briefly met the eyes of the woman he’d given it to, and then slid hurriedly away again, his face turning almost as red as his infected thumb. Massively fat and vaguely moustached, the woman sat around a pile of Christmas shopping like a silent brood-hen, and glared down anyone who even thought of sitting near her with those bulbous, wide and yellow eyes.

“I’ll go grab you a new one,” said Henry, patting the businessman gently on the shoulder and smiling. He was just glad to have something to do, and help him stay awake. The taxi driver had told him, as he’d dropped him off at the entrance, “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.” And Henry could swear he’d heard laughter as the man had pulled away – that had worried him more than the warning itself.

He threaded his way down the crowded hallway, up to the nurses’ station, almost tripping over a chubby, pasty little boy on a leash. The other end of the leash was tied to the leg of a gurney where an old man lay moaning periodically; but whether the boy actually belonged to the old man, or had just been left leashed there for convenience, Henry couldn’t tell. The boy, who looked about four, was trying unsuccessfully to untie the knot; the old man was using the flaps of his hospital gown to fan his left testicle, which was swollen to about the size of a butternut squash. Overhead, the fluorescent lights flickered and popped, adding no warmth to the cold winter corridors.

As Henry pulled a new ticket from the red plastic dispenser – B-23, it said – the frosted glass window of the nurses’ station slid angrily open, and a nurse with a ferrety, suspicious face looked out. “I know you,” she said. “You already took a ticket, hours ago.”

“It’s not for me,” said Henry, looking past her. Inside the room, he could see gold and silver tinsel, several open cartons of eggnog, and – just before the nurse slid the window hurriedly closed – what looked suspiciously like a nurse perched on the lap of a man in a Santa suit, fake beard dangling half-off, and either whispering in his ear or giving him a hickey.

“A-92,” came the woman’s voice, distorted over the intercom: “Now serving A-92.” The digital display above the frosted window, which had previously sat at “B-11,” flipped over accordingly. Henry wondered again, as he checked his crumpled stub, if they were pulling numbers at random or working some arcane system of triage.

Down the corridor to his right, over by the washrooms, there was an excited commotion and a round of applause as a man stood up, yelling, “Me! That’s me!” and waving his ticket in the air. He was a small, cherubic looking East-Indian man with a pair of oversized tortoiseshell glasses on his face and his big toe in a ziploc baggy, and he beamed happily as he limped carefully past everyone in that stretch of corridor, accepting people’s congratulations with a gracious, “Thank you! Thank you! Merry Christmas. Yes, you too – than you very much.” He even grabbed Henry’s hand and squeezed it happily as he passed him, causing Henry to wince in excruciating pain – the man had grabbed the hand with the pieces of glass still stuck in it. Luckily the little man was too caught up in his excitement to notice, Henry would’ve hated to spoil his moment.

The reinforced metal doors swung open just enough to let the one man through. He turned around in the entranceway, pumped his fist victoriously in the air, and started to yell, “Merry Chris—” when the burly hand of an orderly reached out through the doorway, clapped down on his shoulder, and yanked him through. The door closed and the lock turned with a click.

Wolfman's Story:

Henry looked at the source of the noise. It was a man, another patient, hunched down in a leather jacket, showing not much more than a mass of brown hair and denim knees. He massaged a deck of cards in his hands, Henry saw, caressing it back and forth over itself. One, two and then three cuts, he drew the top half from the bottom in a gentle pulling motion, a temporary string of cards trailing before they snapped neatly back into his right hand. Three times he flicked it under the left-hand stack, and after the cuts he fanned out half the deck in each hand, spread out for a moment like a bow of faded red bicycles, and then threw them into one another to shuffle. He did this repeatedly, unthinking. It wasn't until Henry got closer that he saw how impressive this feat actually was. The third finger of the man's left hand ended at the first knuckle in a bandage, crusty and brown where it was taped badly to his hand. The edges of the cards, he saw, had similar stains, and some fresher crimson ones as well.

"Jesus, what happened to you?"

"Divorce," he said.

"Usually they just take your money."

The man chuckled once in a quick burst, and not as bitterly as Henry might have expected. One corner of the shaggy fellow's mouth curled into a smirk, and he lifted his head an inch.

"Henry," Henry said, and held out his right hand for a moment, before remembering the painful squeeze of just a few minutes before. He put it down and jerked out his left even as he noted his new friend's similar incapacity. He put both his arms down awkwardly.

The other patient only began cutting and shuffling again. "You can call me Wolfman, I guess. Everyone else does." He cocked his chin to think for a moment, fingers and palms on automatic. "You lucky in love, Henry?"

"Well."

"You want to find out?" He looked around. "We're going to be here awhile. I can tell you."

"I guess I--"

"Excellent!" Wolfman finally looked at him, right in the eyes, and grinned. Henry could see how he earned the nickname. His hair was pulled back, not very effectively, from his face in a fuzzy brown knot, and the rest of it trailed haphazardly down his wide back. Smiling, his face assumed a triangular shape, with a broad, tanned forehead and a narrow jaw that was filled with fierce white teeth. He was strikingly handsome, and a loose, unpredictable charm seemed to hang around him like a scent. Henry was glad he was smiling. His long-fingered hands sped up with their motions. "Say when."

"Um, okay. When."

Abruptly, he stopped, and flipped the top card off of the left pile with his first two fingers. He pointed his face up at the fluorescents like they were the moon, shoulders heaving. "Oh man." He whimpered a little.

"Hey! What card is it?"

Wolfman handed it to him. The jack of hearts.

"So I'm lucky in love? Hearts are love, right?"

Wolfman wiped the corner of his eye. "Shit man, let's think about this. You've got the eleven card, let's start there. Odd number, and prime. The kings and queens, they're special in their obvious way. And yeah, the jacks are the lovable assholes of the gang, and they get some tail for sure, but that's not what we're saying here, we've got that one little guy, all alone. The prick." He looked at Henry knowingly. "The jack."

Henry sat down next to Wolfman in the next vinyl chair. "Long, lonely night, I take it." Henry thought of the nurses' party, and imagined he could hear the giggling all the way from here. He held up his own bleeding appendage. "And I'm not even left-handed."

Wolfman patted his shoulder. "Could be worse."

Some of the other patients were murmuring on the other side of the room. Henry saw that Walter had joined the group past him, and all of them were following their conversation from afar.

Henry blushed, but Wolfman grew expansive. He reached with his good hand into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, and pulled out a bottle of schnapps. He held both arms wide, as if expecting a hug. "Gonna be a long lonely night for all of us, looks like. You all want to hear about 'lucky in love?'" He shook the bottle. It was full.
Henry reached for it. "I'll have a pull, um, so to speak. What the hell." Behind him, the other patients shuffled tentatively closer. The man with the swollen balls moaned somewhere behind, but Henry didn't look at him. He didn't want to think about where a lonely night would end up.
#

Wolfman was not, strictly speaking, playing with a full deck. He was no more insane than your typical carnie, mind you, no more poorly grounded than your everyday roadie, occupations which would dot his lengthy resume if he'd bother to write one. No, his psychological profile didn't contain anything more defective than a mild obsession and compulsion, which in Wolfman's case, added to his overall rough mystique. He had a habit (you couldn't really call it a nervous habit, but it fit that sort of role) of manipulating, shuffling and working a pack that he always kept unbound in one of his jacket pockets. He'd learned all the hand motions during a brief career as a con artist (quit because he found his spirit was too generous for fleecing rubes), and had evolved it into a sort of lifelong tarot cult. Some people prayed to the gods--Jesus and Santa, because hey, it was the season--for meaning and guidance, but Wolfman's patron spirits occupied the deck. In the hijinks between the kings and knaves, lucky sevens and trusting fours, passionate hearts and cold diamonds, he could learn a little about himself and the people he touched. Lithographed nudes rode velocipedes on their red backs, and their powers grew stronger as the deck was broken in. When they revealed themselves in a significant way, Wolfman would retire them, which was why he didn't usually have all fifty-two. Once they had their say they were done, at least for that round. (The bloodstained deck he was currently working through, had taken him through this story, and it had turned out to be particularly powerful.) Not a full deck at all.

The carnival had been a brief affair, as all the jobs were, embarked because he impressed the cast with his dexterity. He'd done some card tricks for a show on that gig, and sometimes, on the side, would read people with them. He had strict rules for his personal deck. Red bicycle cards for one, and he'd only read for the people who interested him, whose lives would in some way affect his own. (Henry beamed a little at this part.) This was somewhat annoying for the carnival management, but to Wolfman this was no con: he believed completely in his powers of discernment, and thought it was only through his own semi-divine patrons he could get a glimpse of others' lives. Usually he'd offer a few a night for a fee, and with the modest percentage the owners pried out of it, they didn't make too much complaint.

The difficulty in the situation was with the fortune-teller already in the carnival's employ. The woman was a complete fraud, as much Gypsy as the Pope, as much crone as a pop diva, with latex warts and a plastic crystal ball. But she had been something of a scholar of the cards, and for this reason he interested her. Did Wolfman know, she'd go on, that there were originally a great deal more trumps? Did he know their significance? How coins and cups turned to diamonds and hearts? How they reflected the Zodiac, the thousand formal rules for how they talked to each other? Wolfman knew precisely zero of this esoteric nonsense, and moreover, he thought it was the was the most abject bullshit. He was too honest to not share this opinion, and he had to admit, he got a rise from knocking her off her perch. Unlike the crusty trumps in that moldy box, Wolfman had gotten to know the souls of his own suits, the numina of his numbers. What did formal rules matter when you had that connection? He'd worked out his own system, using common knowledge, a rudimentary numerology, and gut instinct, but unlike hers, it worked. What did an education have on that?

Their discussions got more heated and more frequent, and, perhaps inevitably, the rows gave way to violent passions. It should probably be noted that the fortune teller was married to the owner's brother. Lucky in love. Wolfman's career in the carnival business lasted about six months. On the day he ran, she tried to read him a fraudulent fortune. "Stay," she pleaded, practically moaning at him. That evening he turned over two cards of his own: the three of spades--a violent plot was starting to gel (spades as violence, as swords, he'd gotten on his own, and he took three to signify conspiracy)--and the ten of clubs--the card he'd come to associate with his own identity (great symmetry, easily underestimated, and he liked the black shamrocks for his brand of backhanded luck). It was time to go, and he did.

(But what happened to the finger, someone asked. What about those bloody Christmas cards? Pass that bottle.)

You could call this one a Christmas story. Start dates are as arbitrary as anything else in the constant rhythm of reshuffling and captured tricks and bad hands that life deals and deals again. There's a sort of universality to Christmas though, even to unbelievers, as the season descends down in late November. Probably it had something to do with the weather in these parts, the cold chasing the last wisps of an urban autumn away about then, but more likely it was because it's the only time of year that was really celebrated in the public square. Lights invade every staid storefront, garlands hang from lamp posts, seedy men dolefully ring bells on street corners, one bender away from being the very drunken bum that your nickel purports to save.

Christmas wasn't the beginning of his tale, but that's when it all started to wrap up. He'd been shacked up with Gwendolyn for the better part of a year by then, and was feeling pressure to find a way out. That she had him gift-shopping showed a particular disregard for his character, and he looked at every intersection as a freeway elsewhere, even if a Canadian winter was a less than ideal setting for flight, and too, there were certain attachments.

He'd come to associate this lover with the queen of spades. It wasn't any ethnic slur, but that character was cold, judgemental, and imperious, the card as much as the person. The deck's royal families had their part to play in explaining the world of course, but few people captured regality as a personal signature. (Few people, Wolfman noted, really channeled the spirits of any of the cards for very long, borrowing them, at best, in context and for a time. It might be a long, lonely night, he told Henry, but he'd yet to meet anybody who had Jack riding his back for a lifetime.) She was tall and cold and lovely, with dark lidded eyes as languid and as dangerous as a jungle cat's, a rounded forehead of unblemished chocolate, a luscious plum-colored mouth, and nostrils that would flare or contract those rare times when emotion gripped her (or those less rare times when passion did). She favored heels, red, black and white clothing, and furs, looking like some alternate-universe Cruella De Vil. She dressed precisely, and unlike many people, she wore her attire, mastered it. The clothes succumbed to her will as much as people did. Even naked, she wore her skin exactly as she wanted. She regularly gave Wolfman cash, but he didn't quite understand what she did for a living. Even after he'd moved in, seen all the trappings of professionalism, and uncovered some hints (a bit late, as it turned out), she tried to keep him apart from any aspect of her daytime self.

Back when she was beginning to show some real interest in him (he was, after all, lucky in love), he let himself turn over an ace of diamonds and an eight of clubs. The ace signified subsistence, not altogether a bad thing, but the eight was interesting. An eight is an infinity turned ninety degrees--he'd be eating for a while, it looked like, which at the time was exactly what he wanted--but more than that the twisty eight of clubs meant complication, depth, structure and the aforementioned prickly luck. The eight of clubs signified a story, which was by its very nature irresistable. (He winked at the patients in the corridor.) He would see where this one would take him.

There was a third hand in play here as well, a sad but mostly unpredictable little third, loyal as beaten cub, and, paradoxically, as independent as a panther. She had a great deal to do with why Wolfman did anything as undignified as braving the domesticated holiday shopping crowd, and why, despite the growing dissatisfaction with his current 'employment,' he had yet to walk. Lupe spent most of her time boarded away in the States, toiling in a miserable succession of private schools for the gifted, for the truant, for the difficult, for the criminal. Gwendolyn would surely have kept the child away from her pet if she could have helped it, but she'd shown up one afternoon early in the relationship, and unlike Gwendolyn's hypothetical coworkers, business associates, or clients, her niece Lupe had the household dialed in as home base.

It was early in the relationship, and Wolfman was still forbidden from visiting when the queen was not at home. He preferred, however, to mark his own boundaries, and Gwendolyn had left a second-floor window unlocked, which was practically an invitation. He'd be sure not piss in the corners. At any rate, he was rummaging around the delicate knicknacks, pricey art, and immaculate fixtures, rattling door handles for search of a pantry. He heard some bottles clinking behind him, and turned, shoulders up and lips peeled back over his teeth.

A taunting voice came out of nowhere. 'Hungry?' it said.

Hell yes he was hungry.

'You don't look much like Aunt Gwen's usual sort of pet. Not tame enough. She must be getting bored."

Wolfman was shocked. 'Aunt Gwen?' It fit the mind about as well as Aunt Grendel or Uncle Vader. Empress Gwendolyn did not lend herself well to domestic informality.

'You don't look like you're robbing the place anyway.'

'I'm not. Well, not much. Where are you?'

Bottles again clicked behind him. He wheeled around to see a scruffy girl of about ten or eleven, decked out in sweats and pigtails. Her hair was as fuzzy by nature as his was by neglect, skin as dark by genetics as his was by the sun. She leaned a hip on the door frame, half predator and half prey, a beer in each hand.

'You're a little young for those,' he said. 'Much too young. I better take at least one.' He took both. 'Where's the fridge again? This place is huge.'

'Let me see your hand first,' she said. 'Other one.'

Wolfman held it out, the left. She grabbed it and twisted it about, looking the silver ring he was wearing, admiring it for some time. Finally she said, 'Cards and dogs, hey? She gave this to you. Pet.'

'Wolves,' he said. 'People call me Wolfman.'

'Yeah, and I'm Frankenstein.'

'Glad to meet you, Frankenstein.'

'Usually her pets are tamer.'

'You should stop calling me that.' He cracked the top on one of the bottles, looked around, and put the cap in his pocket.

Can I have a smoke?' She motioned to rectangular bulge in the pocket where he'd put the cap.

'Not even if these were cigarettes.' He pulled out the pack of Bicycles, and whipped them into a fluorish before returning them to their home. 'Cards,' he added unnecessarily.

'That explains the ring,' Lupe said, doing her best to sound unimpressed. Her voice got quieter, and less snappish. 'No cards on mine,' she held out her hand. A puppy fled a boot around her brown finger, bills and coins trailing from its guilty mouth. 'We're both pets.'

Wolfman asked if she was hungry, and together they ventured to the palace kitchen, a mass of stainless steel, gas, and gadgetry. Wolfman was impressed with the first two, although he found an egg cooker about as useless as a sandwich maker, and couldn't have told you which was which if he didn't read the labels. Wolfmen, he explained to Lupe, end up in food prep a lot more often than they end up as pets. He'd worked in the filthiest diners imaginable and in the finest restaurants, frying up pretty much the same slop, but one with wild boar instead of hamburger, one with truffle oil instead of ketchup. He yanked on the handle of Sub-Zero to reveal an arctic wasteland of empty shelves, the sterile and icy expanses dotted with a few lonely food debris. He pulled out some eggs and held them to the tip of his nose to inquisitively sniff them (Lupe laughed at this), and fished around for some onions (sprouting), some potatoes (likewise), rejected the fuzzy cold cuts, but explained to the girl how since cheese was moldy milk anyway, you could always cut off the green and eat it fine. Ever have a frittatta?

'Do you know how to play crazy eights?' she asked him as they waited for the eggs to set.

Wolfman laughed, 'I'd say I'm learning pretty fast.'

Gwendolyn found them perched around the kitchen counter about an hour later, giggling and flipping cards at each other (a borrowed deck, thank you very much, and perfectly safe), shouting to go fish and munching eggs. Her nostrils flared, in and out, for a good thirty seconds before she spoke. 'Back from school early, I see. Again. And answering the door. Please go to your room, I will call the adminstrators tomorrow.' Lupe gulped, and obeyed.

'She didn't answer--' Wolfman started, but Gwendolyn stilled him with an indrawn breath.

'As it happens, I am glad you are here. The shower is upstairs on the right. I will meet you there. Go.'

And so Wolfman added babysitter to his lengthy resume. Lupe came home every six to ten weeks for a week or so at a time, either for holiday or as some disciplinary action (she explained to Wolfman that she had a habit of telling her teachers exactly what she thought), and over the course of the year she had made a habit of sneaking away on weekends too, typically long ones, typically carefully engineered around whatever clues could be gleaned in advance about Gwendolyn's mysterious high-powered schedule. Lupe's school transactions were always done in cash, and the girl always managed to squirrel some for bus trips home.

Lupe's primary defense against authority was to outwit it, whether in a battle of trivia, or, more her style, in a showdown of sophistry. Wolfman was neither educated nor stupid (nor particularly authoritative), and he met Lupe's precocious banter with either sincere interest in the first case, or with a certain constitutional imperviousness in the second. He wasn't in the habit of elaborate thought, but, as has been mentioned, had a knack for calling bullshit, and in Lupe's case, although he enjoyed the hot-air balloon of quips, comebacks, and rationalizations that she could hoist, he had little difficulty deflating it when she got out of hand. On the other hand, he had a genuine curiousity about her endless supply of facts, and he liked a story as much as anyone, chuckling in appreciation at her tales of getting the best of her instructors. His interest in her intellectual world was so honest and childlike that Lupe found herself not unwilling to bamboozle him to the extent that she did her teachers and her aunt. Moreover, he would check the things that most piqued him, and took some enjoyment himself of making other people explain things, even when, especially when, he judged them to be dishonest. He did research for their conversations. Unlike line cook, online kook was a very rare occupation for Wolfmen, but he found himself digging into libraries (of all places!), and on Gwendolyn's home computer (without permission of course) for information from previous conversations, which would then start future ones. 'Did you know those Roman dudes didn't use stirrups on their horses?' 'How does carbon dioxide make the atmosphere warm?' 'What's insider trading, and what's the big deal about it?' When the school called Gwendolyn's household for the usual disciplinary reasons, Lupe always tried to arrange it when only Wolfman was in the house.

Gwendolyn at first resisted his guardian role, preferring to keep both her ward and her lover tightly compartmentalized, but given Lupe's unfortunate spontaneity, she soon found the convenience an unobtrusive, undocumented nanny irresistable. Just the same, the two usually conspired their weekends in advance, when Gwendolyn made it known with a few fifties that a paramour's services would not be required. (Usually he'd just grab a meal and stash the rest.) Lupe's eleventh birthday passed this way, evidently beneath the notice of the queen. Wolfman improvised (having no friends and having never had a birthday celebration himself). He pulled together some amusing trivia about the number eleven (he winked at Henry here), took her on a daylong romp among the autumn leaves in the park, and, at the end, they snuck back into the palace to deliver the elaborate cake he baked himself.

'Read me a fortune, Wolfman,' she said.

He shook his head. 'Fortune-telling's not where it's at. It only works like those stock market scams we were reading about, it only works because you already know a secret. So I don't tell fortunes.'

'Then what about--'

'Now, the cards are a little different. Not cheating at all, just a little thinking, and a lot of listening. Hell, life doesn't ever offer a lot of fortunes.' He looked around at the high ceilings, the art, the pristine floors and dust-free furniture. 'Not to most of us.'

'Who cares about money? What do the cards say about me?'

He looked so pained that Lupe thought he might whimper. 'I don't want to ask. This is nice.'

'It's my birthday.' She did her best puppy-dog impression, big brown eyes like needy oilslicks.

With a sigh, he pulled out the deck. 'Do you want to say when, Frankenstein?'

'When Frankenstein.'

'But I still haven't--'

'I said when.'

'I'll give you three then, one for each second you could contain yourself.' He flicked a trio of suits onto the table. He looked at them. Scratched vigorously at the side of his head.

'What?'

'Hard to say. We got two fours, I think the pair means me and you are attached, but fours are so, well, square. They're all innocent and strong, especially when they're together--it could mean my good influence,' they both laughed, 'or it could mean the cops or something. Fours aren't always bad, but I never trust them.' He scratched his scalp again, shaking out some flakes. 'And that five of diamonds is spiky and explosive, like claws. Man, it's a time bomb.'

'Time bomb,' she said. 'That's just what I asked for for Christmas!'

(About damn time you worked that in, one of the patients grumbled. Shut up, said another, something's gonna happen. The man with the elephantine nuts moaned again.)

Wolfman wasn't shopping for a bomb, but he could feel the ticking all day. Strange enough that she sent him out at all, as his lover wasn't the festive type, and she had, just a month ago, forgotten the little girl's birthday. If she felt guilty, or even knew that she'd forgotten, she gave no sign. But the task to buy the a gift had come directly from Queen Gwendolyn herself, and his first-ever foray into mainstream consumer life had left him feeling small and confused. From the view of the street, he had always associated the holiday with quiet dignity, lonely lights reflecting off of frozen squares, churches at midnight, that sort of thing, but seeing it from within was a nightmare of avarice and conformity, a swirl of snarling, empty-headed housewives with their screaming snot-nosed broods, of paunchy citizens, tame men in badly fitting clothing. He'd never been so close to so many of these people. He wanted to bolt.

Her Highness had meanwhile found a way to grow colder in that last month. She had nearly inhaled him that morning for answering the telephone (he'd been expecting the girl), but he kept in the character (Que bueno. El telefono ya trabaja, senora.), ingrained with a distrust of authority all his own. Investigatory panel of the CSA? It was his plan to look that up with Lupe as soon as the lioness was gone, although, as it turned out, he didn't get the chance.

He quit the gift quest early. The closest he got was to nearly take the advice to steal a book (said so right there on the cover) which contained all of the sorts of subversion that Lupe loved, but he figured it was more valuable for the girl to discover on her own, and there was, in his hairy bowels, some glimmer of culpability in the thought. He couldn't bring himself to go the opposite moral route, certainly no books that might contain lessons, and jewelry and clothing and toys all seemed too ridiculously irrelevant for him to comprehend. He'd try to get the queen to let him keep the money, he thought, even if he couldn't think of anything to buy with it. What Lupe might actually enjoy was getting online with him and maybe the two of them could figure out what this CSA thing was and how it worked, if she didn't know already. So he didn't respect Gwendolyn's wishes to be back late. When she gave him money, it usually meant she was traveling anyway, and he habitually disregarded such suggestions. Which is one reason he didn't see the gun.

He made a line for the computer, and was surprised to see Gwendolyn already there. She was quiet, sitting like a sculpture of road ice, and he could hear the street sounds beyond her slow, deliberate, breathing. 'I have been looking at my files here, Wolfman' (danger! she never used his nickname), 'and they have all been accessed, going back months in some cases. My browser history shows searches for very damaging, very illegal, things. Have you been in looking here, or was it the girl?'

'Hey, it was both of us, but it's coo--'

'I wish you didn't.'

The background sounds were not random, Wolfman realized, they were sirens, dopplering themselves closer, getting louder. His stomach went cold as he pieced some very obvious things together. He pointed behind him, and started to speak. 'Hey, I didn't have anything to do with--'

Gwendolyn put her hand on the pistol and raised it. 'You two shouldn't have been in my computer,' she said. 'Nobody can know about this. I'm very sorry.'

Wolfman growled, affronted, and suddenly alarmed at another obvious connection. 'Where's Lupe, you bitch?' He raised his hands and dove at her. A shot cracked, and he felt a gobbet of blood splatter his forehead before he went out.

#

Wolfman was standing on the chair, making pistols with his fingers when the intercom interrupted with the announcement of C-24. He looked down hopefully at his tab. "Hey, I'll be damned, that's me!"

"Wait," said one of the patients. "You can't stop now. What happened next? Where's Lupe?"

"Lupe? She's fine. She's admitted," said Wolfman. "She dragged me out of there actually. I came to, and we were in a parked cab. The dude taped up my hand, but he would only drive us straight here. Wouldn't even take any money." He held up the lucky four-fingered paw. "She musta hit the ring."

He looked back at the door, and then continued, muttering. "Couldn't get out of town tonight anyway. They yanked Lupe through those doors--she barely had a scratch--and wouldn't let me follow. I tried to push right through after them, but they locked 'em somehow."

"Wait a minute, were you talking about Gwendolyn Pryce?" said a pale, middle-aged woman. "From the news?"

"She was in the news?"

Walter coughed. "Gwendolyn Pryce was busted laundering money for the mob this afternoon, pumping it through investment vehicles somehow. Big showdown. She's likely going away for a long time."

"How 'bout that?"

"What about the police?" said someone else. "Won't they question you?"

"Nah, you think I gave 'em our real names? Doctors are almost as bad as cops. Worse maybe, you saw those nurses. Creepy. Anyway," he added, fluorishing his deck a last time, "we're going to be fine, Lupe and me." He flipped a card out into the room, where it landed face down. "I never had a daughter of my own, not that I know of, but I've always been lucky in love."