for someone who’d been around a long time.
“The Fricatash. Why are you wet?”
“Is it still December fourth?”
“No,” she laughed, “it’s the tenth,” although once she said it she was unsure. Something was—she’d seen this man before.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know, nine. Were you just swimming?”
“No. Did you see how I got here? Did someone bring me?”
“Oh hey!” she exclaimed. “You’re the guy who’s missing!”
“I’m Leon Meed,” he said. “I’ve gone missing? You’ve heard this?”
“It was on the news and—”
Eve was pushed forward by a wave of people moving in to hear Derivative’s next song, a gospel number, and in the resulting visual stutter she lost sight of Leon. People in the audience swayed and stomped and did little gyrations. They raised and lowered their hands like revivalists to these frail white boys, to the basso profundo “Our time it gets no righter/ Our load it gets no lighter/ Take me Lord to where the light shines brighter.” And everyone humming the way you do when you can’t contain the beck and call of whatever It is to you.
She looked everywhere and despite the density of people making escape impossible, Leon was gone. Her back was dry. There was nothing to say but amen.
At four thirty a.m., Silas Carlton stopped telling himself that he was asleep. His daily confession. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom and sponge-bathed his face and arms before padding into the living room, where he turned on the television with the hope of finding a local news story about the drowned man at the South Jetty. There was nothing on but a documentary about leukemia that spotlighted three American casualties of the war between good and bad white blood cells: a man, woman, and child whose stoicism never faltered on camera. Silas ate the remains of a ham sandwich he’d left on the coffee table the night before, fell asleep at a quarter past six, and, upon reawakening in an upright position on the recliner, patted his chest for his glasses that had slipped off. Failing to locate them, he muted the TV and stared at his fading reflection in the living-room window. Outside was a pallid gray dawn. He’d never before seen an accidental fatality such as had happened at the beach, someone overpowered by the forces of nature. Despite the frequency with which floods and earthquakes and erupting volcanoes and hurricanes took lives, he’d never—
Suddenly, in the window, instead of his dying reflection Silas saw another man’s face. He rubbed his eyes with one hand and resumed searching for his glasses with the other. The man must have been a visitor—at last someone dropping by to check on him—but Silas couldn’t see his features distinctly, could only generally make out curly hair and a brown shirt or coat. Pointing toward the front door, he said loudly, “It’s open! Come in!” The man didn’t move. “It’s open!”
Silas found his glasses, wedged between the bottom pillow and armrest, and put them on, though because of the poor lighting outside he still couldn’t recognize the man. Was it Beto the Argentinian stopping by to see if he’d like to fly his remote control airplane with him? Or one of his neighbors hoping to borrow a bicycle pump? Silas didn’t understand why the man wasn’t going to the front door, so he moved to get up and let him in, at which point the man disappeared. Silas was halfway out of his chair when he found himself looking through the window at nothing but a lava rock garden, mulberry bushes, mini lawn, street, parked cars, other houses, and wrought-iron sky. No man. He didn’t rush to conclusions, for he was perhaps hypnagogic, his sleepy eyes playing tricks on him. He sat back down to consider things and adjust his glasses as though they were a radio dial that, properly modified, would clearly broadcast what had been garbled.
He waited and waited and sensed nothing but static.
In a beige house in the Cutten neighborhood of Eureka, an orthopedic surgeon named Steve Baker entered the music room, where a dark cherry wood piano stood as a four-legged accusation, a sixty-one key universe of potential sound whose silence was the loudest he had ever heard. He sat on the bench in front of it, on lavender varnished cedar dimpled over time by the hard fingernails of hundreds of frustrated eleven-year-olds sitting through thousands of mother-mandated lessons while thinking of millions of other things. He’d fought over this piano, defended his love of it in sotto voce with nothing-could-induce-me-to-give-it-up conviction.
And Anne, his wife, appealing to reason, had pointed out with growing impatience that he never played it, that he’d bought it for their never-conceived child, for the express purpose of her teaching this phantom progeny how to play, because she had studied it all her life, and she loved it and looked forward more than anything to twice-weekly sessions with Wendy, if it was a girl, or William, if it was a boy. She had oiled its strings, tuned it regularly, polished its fine wood grains and lacquered its ivory keys and fluttered around it during the move from Egret Road to Kroeber Lane like a paleontologist transporting a dinosaur egg.
It was absurd not to let her keep it, especially since she’d been so generous toward him with everything else—with the bread maker and the twelve-horsepower rototiller and the waist-high Klipsch speakers—although absurd was exactly what he felt their whole breakup was. Absurd because it was so rational and calculated. Their love? Plus one. His sterility? Minus two. And it was absurd because she insisted on living in a small town (“Any small town, I don’t care. Can’t you see how much choice that gives you? How many options?” she’d asked), and because he couldn’t do little things like stay with her while she finished her breakfast on Sunday mornings—no, he had to retreat to his work study once he was done eating to work on his models, and he wouldn’t acknowledge the symbolic importance of these abandonments—and because they had voted for different candidates in the last mayoral election (“The presidential election, sure, I grant you,” he’d said, shaking the garlic press at her, “that would be enough for you to get angry and say that we’re incompatible. But the Eureka mayor? Who cares?”). The pros and cons of their relationship were weighed, and a gross imbalance was found. Scales didn’t lie. “But scales aren’t the only thing to go by,” he’d said. “Do you really want—because we could adopt and split our time between big and little towns and move toward political consensus in the future—do you really want to let it go just like that?”
Though it wasn’t just like that. She pointed out that he’d conspicuously not mentioned the issue on which he was solely to blame and which most upset her, his inconsiderateness when she felt alone and needed his company, those times when he’d disappear and say he had to be by himself and that it was chemical and nothing to take personally. But how else could she take it than personally? She wasn’t a machine, no matter how radically our language had upgraded from brain hemispheres to hard drives. And maybe this proved in a way that her love for him was insufficient and had always been insufficient, but that the possibility of raising children in a semirural community overseen by a wise, mutually agreed upon mayor had once been enough to supplement her feelings and make the relationship worth working on. Now, clearly, the situation had been exposed for what it was. She had accepted a job in the town of Willits, two hours south of Eureka—he hadn’t even known she’d been looking—and packed up her things and moved out, leaving Steve with an untouched piano and the feeling that he would soon fade away. This was what he heard in the silence, the sound of his own diminuendo.
He closed the piano lid and pinched the tip of his long aquiline nose. His hair, an auburn brown rusting into gray, dug softly into his neck. His fellow
