Jakob Nolte
ALFF

The Holy Spook

Meggy’s eyes snap open. She sees a child’s room, nine fingers, the alarm clock. Sagging tectonic plates. She showers. She brushes her teeth and pulls a sweater and jeans over her pajamas. She takes two stairs at a time, stumbles every two steps. She grabs the fridge door, the granola, the key to the lock, pulls down her visor and takes off. Lawns race by her, semi-detached houses, parents, and parents of parents. At the school entrance, she hears a badly parked scooter tip over behind her but carries on walking. In the math exam, she picks the right answers. Someone jams her in a locker. Someone slams the books out of her hands. Someone kicks the glasses off her face.

Behind the corridors, behind the swing door and bike racks, behind the schoolyard and baseball field hangs the body of a lifeless boy. His skin has been fastidiously sewn into the fence’s boring, symmetrical grid. Once the police have photographed the scene from all conceivable angles, they peel the corpse from the mesh with a carpet knife. The blade breaks at the right elbow and the right heel. Slowly he slides into the undertaker’s arms, into the narrow coffin, into the belly of the cemetery. Nearly everyone from the High & Low High School attends the funeral — teachers, students, caretaking staff, the lifeguard from the outdoor pool. Benjamin’s parents stand above the graveless rectangle and beneath an inconsequential sun. His father is wearing that skinny tie, his mother a necklace of orange beads. She says,

– He was never quiet and he was never loud.

One autumn, in the year 1994, ice cream sales are down. Homecoming weekend. Meggy’s face is pretty. Meggy’s face would be pretty if it weren’t for that birthmark under her right eye. Her face is a mess. Or totally exquisite. It depends. Her left eye is green, her right eye is blue. Her nose is delicate. Her fingertips are delicate too, as if they were carved from wood like those old wooden spoons grandma used to drag through the spinach. The ring finger on her left hand is missing. She wears layers of silk, cashmere, and knitwear, muted colors, and suede shoes. She was never quiet, never loud, never foolish. What troubled her about last summer was not so much the absence of beauty, but the loss of that cheerfulness that makes doing nothing peaceful and relaxing. A parasitic notion of self-reinvention and rediscovery took hold of her thoughts.

Benjamin wakes up, looks at his alarm clock and curses. He curses in every way that he knows; he curses life, time, the sky, and all animals in the forest. Why didn’t his Mom wake him up, as she does every morning? He finds none of his forebears in the bedroom, none in the living room. Maybe in the kitchen? No, not in the kitchen either. Benjamin cuts two slices of homemade bread, toasts them, garnishes them with sweet potato strips, sprouts, brie, pear slices, mayonnaise, and a leaf of leaf lettuce. It tastes good. He washes it down with orange juice and decaffeinated drip coffee. The word decaf makes him think of air force, because the f sticks out at the end like the wing of a fighter jet. If Benjamin were to find a genie in the coffee jar, one that carried out any and every command, he would order the bombing of Belgium. He thinks the Belgians got off too easily for the crimes they committed during the colonial period and after. Justice. To pay his mother back for not waking him up at the usual time, he’s not going to clean up the kitchen. For his mother, that open jar of mayonnaise will, for the rest of her life, bea symbol of God’s arbitrariness or, rather, His non-existence. Had Benjamin known this, he’d have picked something more interesting. Or less complicated. He gets on his bike, rides to school, French-kisses Nataly under the bleachers, disregards a joke about his freckles, rocks back and forth in his chair, chews gum, and falls. Why am I not on the baseball team? Why does Nataly have such small breasts? What does the immortality of the soul actually mean? Strangely, Benjamin only asks himself two of those three questions that day, though only one of them is truly compelling. The next day, shortly before noon, three boys are out in the woods smoking their first cigarette and stumble upon him. Nataly places the palm of her hand on his cheek, which bears a striking resemblance to the Milky Way. She says,

– See you soon,

and

– Maybe your T-shirt is too small after all,

or she says,

– I wish you were an antelope, standing alone on the prairie, and then a wild lioness comes and tears you apart. I would be the wildlife photographer.

But most of all she says,

– See you soon.

Fourteen months later, a dog will retrieve a scrap of his clothing on the outskirts of an entirely different city in an entirely different state.

People who have so far gone unmentioned: the angry ginger with the pockmarks and the one-eyed girl.

The day after Benjamin’s naked corpse is discovered on the fence, Nataly and Meggy meet in the girls’ toilet. They stand next to each other at separate sinks, but a single mirror reflects back their faces.

– I’m sorry about the thing with — 

– Yeah?

– Yeah.

Nataly shows Meggy the hickey on her neck.

– You know where I got this?

– Is it — 

– It’s the only thing keeping Benjamin in this world. When this hickey is gone, that’s it.

Her eyes thick with tears, Nataly rummages in her handbag. It is full of notes and pens and hair clips and a nail file. She plunges the sharp cosmetic tool into the spot where Benjamin’s lips had been hard at work only yesterday. Nataly faints. Meggy is overwhelmed by the splutter of blood and faints. Susie, Susie, and Susanne enter the bathroom. Seeing the puddle of blood, they all faint. Fortunately, Susie tumbles into the doorway in such a way that a young voyeur is offered a glimpse up her skirt. He immediately faints. A few minutes pass in which nothing happens except that Nataly loses more blood. Meggy comes to. She pulls the nail file out of Nataly’s neck and stops the bleeding with her thumb. This is how they drive to the hospital. Nataly survives the escapade, though she spends a while on suicide watch.

School closes for a few days, and Meggy wonders how she will live from now on. She has a soft spot for radio shows, national anthems, and short books. She loves going to the movies because there you can stare into the sun without going blind. Here’s what she doesn’t have: a functional family bond, a horse, a functional hair band, a ponytail, cocks.

The members of the Party Party Club are in shock. How are they supposed to organize a decent Homecoming so soon after one of their classmates has been executed? And what about all the slogans they made up? MURDEROUS MEANS: SO MEAN or WE’RE HUNG UP ON VICE or LET’S HOPE BENJAMIN DIES SOON: all these were now out of the question. They would seem ironic now, insufficiently pious, even.

So Meggy is thinking and she notices something. She wants to do good and to help people. She doesn’t want to be the kind of girl one can accuse of having no purpose in the world. But the police won’t hire her anytime soon, so she decides to become a private detective. At the crime scene by the fence, she launches her own investigation into the murder of Benjamin MacNash. An icy wind blows against her eyelashes. The streets are gray, the cosmos cheerless. A clue, she thinks, there must be a clue. She pats the grass and mashes a bug between her fingers, sniffs them. She jots down: The murderer must have been tall and strong, technically skilled, perhaps with a penchant for sewing or knitting. He or she must lack all scruples, but be in possession of a scalpel; a serial offender, perhaps. But raindrops make the ink run. Who does this kind of thing, anyway? I mean, who even has extreme emotions like hate, love, or lust? Finally, she finds something substantial, a clue. She can’t understand how the police overlooked it, but at least it confirms her low opinion of them.

While Nataly’s in the hospital, she and Meggy seem well on their way to becoming friends.

– Enemies? I don’t know if he had enemies. Not really. Why would anyone have anything against him? He was a normal guy, he got along with the jocks, the math geeks, his teachers, people of all persuasions. His parents were good-looking, caring, thoughtful, and I loved him.

– Jealousy?

– No.

– Still, I would like to come over to yours for dinner sometime.

– Of course.

– I’ll give you a call. I most definitely will. Like, sometime in the early evening?

– Sure.

The asymmetry frightens Nataly. Meggy’s face reminds her of something — some thing.

The guts of November are cold. Meggy gets an A on her math exam. She is the best. Mr Cello praises her. After class, they jam her in a locker, knock the books out of her hands, and kick the glasses off her face. The starting roar of an airplane rings in her ears. She’s afraid that she’ll explode, alone, helpless in the dark. She screams and screams.

Nataly has signed up for the ski trip, but she feels uncomfortable because people see her as fucked by death and as an outsider. This annoys her tremendously.

Home-o-ween. The town is still in righteous mourning, so the Party Party Club has decided not to throw a party and to organize an illegal warehouse party instead, in an old machine plant that used to be a meat market and, before that, a crematorium. It’s Halloween, after all, and people eat pumpkins. Nataly, Miranda, and two boys, Joseph and Lenny, weave through the streets in a car, hoping to throw rotten eggs at buildings and smash letterboxes with baseball bats. Nataly met Miranda on the ski trip and at least one of their tensed calves touched the other’s. The idea of falling in love with a boy who’s not Benjamin seems repulsive to her and wrong, and so, to finally get back at God, she is now trespassing in female flowerbeds. But as same-sex love is never far from social exclusion, they both pretend to be on a date, driving around in a group of four, often not saying much, but at least there’s good music playing.

– So, at the party — 

– At what party?

– Haven’t you kittens heard?

– Kittens?

– Well, you’re some feisty little kittens, aren’t you?

The things one puts up with.

Meggy lies in the tree-lined street. She stares at the sky, which is being eaten up by treetops, left and right, above and below. Things drizzle down on her — leaves, leaflets, tree trash. The color spectrum resembles an autopsy. She lies on the asphalt and drinks rye. She tosses a black stone in the air and catches it in her mouth. She tries to chew on it, but it’s too hard. She sucks on it, twiddles the stone with her tongue, wants to find a place for it somewhere in the gap between two lines, but can’t. She realizes that the universe is not in equilibrium, and that the missing piece to the puzzle is the worst metaphor there is. She realizes that there are only knives that cut into everything and stomachs that digest. She bites down again and again on the stone until her whole mouth is full of blood and splintered teeth, and she pours some rye into the mix and it burns and in one sharp jolt she swallows everything — tooth splinters, blood, the whiskey, and the stone.

A four-four beat repeats itself over and over. Nataly, her secret lover Miranda, and two boys, Joseph and Lenny, stand in a corner that’s far too big for them, clutching their strawberry punches. To get an idea of what they look like, standing there, surrounded by dancers and disco balls, you have to picture them from far away, with heads and lives like empty microwaves and splashes of tomato sauce in the corners of their eyes. Everything is different until everything is the same again. While Nataly dances, while she talks about the pills that people there call XTC, the pills the boys got from somewhere or other, haggled off someone, scored off someone, while she takes a swig of her drink, while Miranda tries to slip her hand under her buttcrack — during all of this, Nataly asks herself if it’s always like that with the dead. Do they always stay behind in the past, or is there a way of getting them to come along? Are they watching? She remembers when she was in Hawaii with her parents once, she and her sister pushing puberty, with just a few nights to go — it was an untroubled, glorious time. Leaning on the counter at a beachside bar, an old man told her about the mechanics of voodoo. Camera flashes, fog, cigarette weather. Was all that dead people stranded in the present? Later, Nataly and Miranda sit in the back seat of a car. They couldn’t care less about the morning sun. They are looking for protection and warmth. They don’t touch one another, they just discuss what crime novels are worth a read and Nataly asks herself secretly whether its a gift from the universe that she’s so damn good at making other people happy.

Benjamin’s murderer is nicknamed the fencecutioner by the school newspaper.

– Why do they assume it’s a him not a her?

nobody asks.

Nataly didn’t do it. Meggy knows that. Sure, Nataly can be violent, she’s a member of the knitting and embroidery club, and emotionally reckless as well, but she’s really not the type. On the whole, Meggy thinks it’s unlikely it was someone from school. The type of murder, the blow of the hammer to the skull, the pleasure in cracking bones, and the meticulous presentation of the work — that doesn’t seem like something a student from the High & Low High School would do. Everyone she knows is far too lazy to go to that kind of trouble.

Miranda nods off, Nataly inspects her. Miranda’s chest heaves up and down, the air in her lungs is warm. Her skin, that skimpy rag that stops her from leaking, is soft. You could wipe spectacles with her skin. Nataly runs her fingers over Miranda’s lips, takes the bottom lip, grasps it between her thumb and middle finger. Pulls. And spits into the small vessel between mouth and teeth. Their faces are very close. She reaches deep into the left pocket of her pants, then the right pocket, and falls asleep.

By the time Benjamin turned fourteen, he and Nataly had been together for two years. She gave him a special present because they were sure they were made not only for each other but for ever and ever. It was the ring she found in the woods. It was made of wood and gold. In return, on Nataly’s fifteenth birthday, she got a ring as well. Benjamin had made it from the wiring of his beloved tube TV set. They were in love, they were serious, and it was good. When it became clear that Benjamin was a deceased juvenile, Nataly cut the ring off her ring finger and the ring finger off her hand.

One day, when spring is already around the corner, Nataly and Meggy meet outside on the fields. Winter never came and the ground is soft, though the light is still frozen. Each of them puts forward their scarred left hand. Their finger stubs interlock like the cogs of an antique machine.

– Did you hear? They’re saying that an old couple living in a hut in the woods took the life of your lover.

– I know.

– They’re being executed tomorrow.

– I know.

– But they didn’t do it.

– I know.

– Funny.

says Meggy.

– Not so important. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out, get out of everything.

But nothing can grow where once there was a wish.

The stadium is on the edge of the town, which borders a forest and a small mountain. This small mountain is the only elevation for dozens of miles, with the exception of the church steeple. It’s a flat little town. Its three-story houses have such low ceilings that they would elsewhere count as two-story houses. To make up for it, the streets are so wide that the wind hardly whistles. Everything is gray-green or white or red, except the telephone poles, which are remarkably black for their age. Even the cables have lost none of their blackness; they still map out the symphony of telecommunications installed in the early ’60s, when everything was redone around here: the houses, the streets, the sky. The church isn’t smack in the center (and it never was). If the town were a dartboard, you’d find the church on triple 19. The church steeple is there and you can see it from all over, and for anyone so inclined it’s a wagging index finger, protruding toward the sky. Of course it’s pathetically short and nowhere near scraping the sky, but it’s still higher than everything else, cold and severe. Its severity, though, stops short at its own facade, since the steeple clocks, projecting the time of day in all four cardinal directions, are each wrong in a different inexplicable way. Rumor has it that the clock on the north face is right three times a day, you just have to keep checking it. So that’s the church. But thanks to a grassroots campaign, an exception was made and the execution will be carried out in the stadium this time instead. Meggy and Nataly go together. Wood shavings are strewn everywhere and security people line the arena, holding buckets and blankets. The couple from the forest are led shrieking and begging into the center, where everyone in the sold-out bleachers can see them. The security people throw the blankets over the condemned and beat them to death with the buckets. The whole thing takes 47 minutes and although ice cream sales are not as good as expected, the peanut vendors make a killing.

After the spectacle’s over, Meggy and Nataly saunter through the center of town, a place of emptiness, dusty storefronts, and streetlights. There used to be a fish vendor and a cheese store here, there were specialist shops for shoe inserts, lottery tickets, and pistachio ice cream. There were bars and cafés that were truly one-of-a-kind, and hotbeds of expertise on subjects such as pumpkins. A lady owned a whole store here that sold nothing but pumpkins — pumpkins in the shape of snails, vials, and cauliflowers — but today it is closed. Everything in the city center has closed down, except the diner. For all other essentials, the residents of the town have to scavenge in basements and catacombs, the stretch of the sewage system where Darkmart opened in the summer of ’92. Quietly, Darkmart’s owner chiseled shelves into the underground, and from that point on, bit by bit, he squeezed out all other economic life in the city. Sometimes, during the short night hours when Darkmart is closed, steam rises to the streets through the storm drains, mingling with the stench of burned rock, and you can hear the store shelves adjusting their position quietly beneath the ground, a monstrous serpent of tupperware, preserved meat, and gallons of milk; its hot breath. Nataly talks about Miranda a lot, about the fact that her parents and sister aren’t allowed to know about their forbidden love, although it’s so beautiful, and about how the love of one lover can be so different from that of another. They sit in the diner, where a grouchy sailor serves them.

– What’ll it be? Are you bunnies here for some lettuce?

– No.

– Two large Cokes, zucchini burghers, and fries.

From her bag, Meggy pulls the evidence that she found and then forgot, then found and forgot again, found again, forgot again, then saw on the desk by coincidence and misplaced somewhere, and then salvaged from her memory to show to Nataly. That thing from the crime scene. Neither of them knows what to make of it.

– So.

– It looks like some kind of geometric nebula.

– Or more like a piece of silverware.

– A key, maybe?

– Or a crank?

– A motor?

– Or a tool?

– Maybe it’s an artist’s tool?

– Or art?

– Maybe it’s just stuff?

They disagree. The food arrives and Nataly doesn’t feel like playing the guessing game anymore; she suspects that the girl sitting across from her despises her. Meggy is asymmetric, idiosyncratic, borderline uninteresting, and doesn’t take care of herself. Nataly knows that beautiful people are often exciting and charismatic, clever and quick, while less beautiful people tend to be more banal. But then who could help her — Meggy, that is — identify the piece of evidence? That would be Bobby, King of Boyhemia.

– Oh? And who’s that? And how can I meet him?

– I know somebody,

says Nataly. Fear, happiness, fear and happiness. They like the sailor, so they leave him a big tip. Meggy sticks around for a while and takes some notes.

Medium-sized birds sing as Nataly wanders between the town’s low-rises, losing herself in thought. Sticks, stones, and bottle caps pierce her sneakers’ worn soles. She chews on her hair. Then she chews on the knot of her friendship bracelet, her fingernails, fingers, and hand. Eventually she crouches down and chews on her knee. What if Meggy wants to meet up again? What if she wants to be my girlfriend? What if no one ever solves the murder? How much more time am I going to spend with this person? What excuses will she find to call me again? To hassle me with her presence? Nataly bites down. Her front teeth have gouged out a small hole in her knee, which she now laboriously tears open further. She lies on the ground, in the middle of the sidewalk, and dreamily licks her exposed kneecap. Later, much later, when she’s finally asleep, Joseph and Lenny swing by on their red scooters and take her away. They bring her home; Joseph cradles her in his arms and carries her through the door, past her mother and father, into her room, where he tucks her in. He strips off his jersey, his shirt, and lies down beside her, folding his arms into a pillow. He offers her a cigarette; she shakes her head. He offers her his tongue; she shakes her head. A small Jesus on a small cross gleams on his chest.

– Do you believe in God?

He takes off Nataly’s skirt, kisses her feet and shins, her thighs, her hips, the fabric of her underpants, lukewarm, while she shrieks, curses, and spits; it doesn’t stop. She balls her fingers into a fist and punches him in the neck. Her sister, who’s been watching all along, grabs a marker pen and rams it into Joseph’s ribs. He doesn’t fight back. Fine lacerations appear on his skin. The scent of lust mingles with a stench of fear.

There are strict rules at the High & Low High School, concerning, for example, who is allowed to eat what where and when in the cafeteria, and for how long. Of course, not everyone gets to have a meal without meat. Some students spend entire semesters eating ground meat, goulash, schnitzels, goulash, or goulash. Rules of this kind govern other daily routines — all of them, in fact. Students who follow them are essentially choosing ritual humiliation over the cruelty of improvisation, which can be a good deal more scary. Privileges fall to the older students, the more beautiful and wealthy students. Meggy takes issue with these structures. She simply doesn’t recognize them, so she cannot respect them, contextualize them, or reproduce them. Maybe this is because her whole life plays out exclusively in the present. Maybe it’s calcium deficiency. Maybe this problem, which is her great problem with life and the world, is in a strange and special way her great advantage over them both.

While Nataly stares at the ceiling of her bedroom, ignoring what her sister is saying, the phone rings and she tunes out her surroundings. She has no idea where Joseph is, nor even if he was ever there at all. She shifts her gaze from the ceiling to the wall. Benjamin once gave her Slayer’s Reign in Blood and called her his little angel of death. This prompted her to buy a Slayer poster and hang it on her wall. Miranda made her a mix tape of her favorite songs; now Nataly wonders if she should hang up a poster of Miranda or one of her favorite frontmen. Nataly’s father Henry, her mother Amy, and her sister Emily lie down in her bed, one after the other. Amy asks Nataly why she didn’t answer the phone. Didn’t she know who was calling? No, she didn’t know.

– How should I have known? Who was it?

No one picked up the phone.

– Shall we eat dinner?

But they are full and stay in bed. They wonder who would call at this hour. Their relatives from Zurich? The defilers? The guard with the wooden eyes? The war dead?

They lie there watching the lives they didn’t live flicker by: days in the park, silent hours, and the hands — mostly, the hands — which would have stroked their shoulders and drawn treasure maps on their backs. Standing together at the station; a sudden shift from warmth to lust, sending a shock through their muscles — just to hold and hug that body, throw caution to the wind, and swallow it whole.

Lenny is skinnier than Joseph. You can see ribs and wrist bones under his skin. He has thick short black hair and wears metal-rimmed glasses, their right edge patched up with yeast and baking parchment. He owns a lot of music on vinyl and a record player and also a red scooter. At night, when his dad is asleep, he goes over to the liquor shelf and the bookshelf, selects the most beautiful items from each, and rides down the tree-lined streets on his red scooter. At every spot that makes him think of Joseph, he stops to read a chapter and takes a swig. By the time he realizes that Russian writers had the habit of writing very short chapters and that Scottish distilleries manufacture very strong liquor, it’s too late. He is incredibly drunk. He drives into a fence and into a ditch. Loses contact with his legs and other parts of his body. The accident changes Lenny. Not only does he drag his right foot when he walks, he has also gotten lighter. As he lay there, among fence pickets and the shards of his front light, with his face on the ground between the splinters, looking at his bloody hand, the drops forming on it and seeping into the ground, everything blending to a single blackness as he waited for someone or something to free him from this immobility, something took root within him — a plant that grew larger and stronger with each minute of silence. The power of a full bathtub. He reads all his father’s books and listens to all the records available at the record store. Joseph often visits him in hospital, but Lenny doesn’t care. One day, even Miranda and Nataly drop by.

– How are you?

– I know that you’re a couple.

– We know that you love Joseph.

With threats flying at them, they leave the room at once. Lenny has a Gibson SG delivered to his hospital room, along with several amplifiers and fuzzboxes. He records an experimental, expansive, loud, and sometimes extremely distorted guitar album called Doom Town Boys onto Joseph’s answering machine. Compared to the music that will emerge in the future, these compositions are nothing out of the ordinary, but for their time they are revolutionary, or rather, they would have been, if Joseph’s father hadn’t deleted that crap instantly to free up some space on the tape.

The principal of the High & Low High School runs into Meggy in the hallway. Meggy is alone. Her eyelids are twitching.

– What are you doing out in the hallway?

Meggy collapses into a pile.

– What’s the matter?

Meggy pushes her arms onto the linoleum floor, trying to hold up the weight of her body.

– Meggy?

She vomits.

– What’s up with you?

She shivers from the cold.

– A doctor, quick!

She gazes at the principal. She whispers.

– The newspapers are bad. They’re as bad as can be. I can’t stand it anymore. It’s too much. No one can stand it. These germs, this disease that calls itself journalism.

– Oh? Then join the school paper and make it better.

With her remaining strength, Meggy punches the principal in the face.

– Gosh, you’re so angry. I’d like to give you a hug.

– Never!

She rolls away, sobs into the distance, having only just dodged that hug, and when she stops, alone in the fields, nothing around her but the smell of buildingless air, Meggy spreads out her arms and waits for the wind to undercut her body. A kite. She flutters. Nataly pulls her back down with the kite string.

– I heard that you hit the principal?

– Yeah.

– Why?

– She defiled me.

– Oh.

– And nobody is allowed to do that.

– Why did you want to meet me?

– I’m very alone, Nataly.

– That’s why you wanted to see me?

– I’m afraid for you and Miranda. That couple from the hut: they weren’t murderers — not Benjamin’s.

– Benjamin?

– You’re my only friend and I don’t want anything to happen to you.

Nataly has to stop herself from laughing, she bends down, pretends to tie her shoelace, and cuts the cord attaching Meggy to the earth. She flies away and gets caught in a row of poplars jutting out of the horizon like long-range missiles.

Back home, Nataly’s sister Emily asks Nataly if she can have her vanilla pudding. Nataly agrees, though it’s her favorite dessert.

Back home, Meggy’s mother asks Meggy why she’s so cruel but Meggy doesn’t say a word. The two of them are sitting at the kitchen table. Meggy’s mother is drinking half a bottle of red wine and Meggy is eating figs with cream cheese. Meggy’s mother can’t look her daughter in the eye. Throughout the cramped, self-defeating conversation, her eyes stay glued to her glass of red wine. Meggy keeps silent. They watch a documentary on TV. Her mother spouts endless variations of her incessantly dumb, cowardly opinions. Her mild sociopathic tendencies are diffused by drunkenness. She drinks half a bottle of red wine. Meggy does her homework in her room. Meggy’s mother drinks half a bottle of red wine. Meggy locks the door. Meggy’s mother drinks half a bottle of red wine. Every step to her daughter’s room, she drinks another half a bottle. Meggy props a chair against the door handle. She lies down in bed. She is wearing jeans and a sweater over her pajamas. A blood vessel in her eye bursts. When her mother leaves her to drive to work the next morning — going for at least a week, darling, to Santa Fe — Meggy pretends that it’s not her mother kissing her, but a lusty boy trying to steal her soul. She leaves Meggy a lot of money, but her daughter isn’t particularly good at spending money. She acquires ever more simple, drab items. She doesn’t know how to live large or live it up or anything like that. So, rice puddings and Lucio Fulci films; today, for instance, Paura nella città dei morti viventi. If it were up to Meggy, she would live in Italy in the 1980s and be called Mario. Maybe she (Mario) would meet a young woman at a café and take her to the beach on a bicycle to sell melons. The sea would be all water, and the water would be deep and blue and clear and salty. Its surface would never be smooth. In the sea, their heads would bob up and down, to and fro. Perhaps he (Meggy) would put the young woman in a headlock and force her to eat theseeds that tourists spat out on the sand.

When Benjamin MacNash was born, his parents held him up to the light like a letter one is not allowed to open but still wants to read. They were hoping to find a coded message inside his baby body. A note. If we destroy our language, we will all be saved, redeemed. We must disembowel the words and stuff their innards into the carcasses of other words. Crudely and cruelly. Until all words are hacked into tiny pieces, the remnants of unreadable symbols. Only when there are no remaining differences between words will there be no differences between people. But little Benjamin turned out to be a normal boy, not an oracle. When he turned twelve, the MacNashs accepted his conventionality, and started to smile again in their everyday lives. They also had sex. It wasn’t so easy at first; the thought of having his member near a birth canal and penetrating it made his father feel quite unwell. It wasn’t just called a birth canal now; as he had proudly witnessed with his own eyes, it actually was one. But after some candid conversations, he ardently and passionately reconsidered his wife’s genitalia. He had seen an ad for exotic dances from Bulgaria and Romania at the Milk & Milk dance school, and soon, in their early old age, aside from raising their son, dancing and sex became the MacNashs’ thing. Until their son was murdered, that is. They blame themselves, because they spent the night before Benjamin’s basal skull fracture practicing a tricky sex position in a cabin loaned them by a friendly couple from dance school. The rest of their life feels very short.

Joseph lodges his complaints:

– When I’m showering in the morning and lathering myself up, who will wrap their fingers around my penis? Have I not gone long enough without the beautiful, the noble, and the good?

What he also saw was a figure, probably a person or a shadow, a faint shadow, maybe with a face, but he wasn’t sure. Numerous parts of this apparition appeared oddly encapsulated within one another. It was wearing a fur coat or a feathered dress.

– Where was that?

– The figure snuck across the school campus. I’m not sure anymore. I think I saw something but forgot it immediately.

Joseph fiddles around with the napkin dispenser. There’s a large strawberry milkshake in front of him.

– If you hadn’t hypnotized me, I wouldn’t have remembered anything.

– When did this happen, when exactly?

– Early morning. It had just begun to get light.

– That same?

– That same day they found Benjamin’s body.

– And you didn’t tell anyone?

– Not until just now, no.

Good work, Meggy thinks to herself and orders a beer.

– 21 already?

the grouchy sailor asks.

– Nope, it’s my first today.

– Well then.