On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.

The year of the suicides the Lisbons’ leaves went unraked. On the appropriate Saturday Mr. Lisbon didn’t stir from his house. From time to time as we raked, we looked over at the Lisbon house, its walls accumulating autumn’s dampness, its littered and varicolored lawn hemmed in by lawns becoming increasingly exposed and green. The more leaves we swept away, the more seemed heaped over the Lisbons’ yard, smothering bushes and covering the first porch step. When we lit bonfires that night, every house leaped forward, blazing orange. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames. As weeks passed, their leaves remained. When they blew onto other people’s lawns there was grumbling. “These aren’t my leaves,” Mr. Amberson said, stuffing them into a can. It rained twice and the leaves grew soggy and brown, making the Lisbon lawn look like a field of mud.

…about the time the first cold spell hit, people began to see Lux copulating on the roof with faceless boys and men.

At first it was impossible to tell what was happening. A cellophane body swept its arms back and forth against the slate tiles like a child drawing an angel in the snow. Then another darker body could be discerned, sometimes in a fast-food restaurant uniform, sometimes wearing an assortment of gold chains, once in the drab gray suit of an accountant. Through the bronchioles of leafless elm branches, from the Pitzenbergers’ attic, we finally made out Lux’s face as she sat wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, smoking a cigarette, impossibly close in the circle of our binoculars because she moved her lips only inches away but without sound.

A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me he had shot his own dog. He’d already told me about his crazy female cousin who locked herself into the bathroom every Sunday and pounded nails into her hands in bloody imitation of Christ, about the jars of ears he saw in Vietnam, and his dramatic escape from Cuba—swimming across Guantánamo Bay under fire, dragging a rowboat full of relatives to the safety of the American base. I’d also heard about his Mookie-dog, part beagle, part Doberman, so smart she could carry an envelope to Severo’s mother across a mile of Little Havana, or climb a tree to find Severo in a woman’s apartment. When he said he’d shot this unbelievable animal, his dearest friend, there was a crack in his voice through which I could see him doing it, and suddenly I wondered whether everything else I’d heard from Severo might also be the truth.

At the end of three weeks, Victoria can see the map of France in her sleep. She can make sentences for combing hair, riding the bus, detesting tomatoes. At the Pan American Academy, she gives her pupils secret French names and thinks in French about them as she listens to their hesitant clacking on twenty-four ancient black typewriters: “Je deteste Léonie. J’aime Suzanne. Hélène est belle.” She finds it strange that the same word is used for loving a man, liking a woman, and liking to eat meringues.

Every Saturday I shaved my head. At a stale hour of the afternoon I would retire from the meditation hall to the green-tiled bathing room with its dark, cool tank of water. My equipment was a mirror, a thermos of hot water, a bar of blue Chinese soap, and a Gillette Trac II cartridge razor I’d brought in from Bangkok. Shaving took an hour, and except for the bliss of leaving behind the hall and my companions, suddenly comical in their diligence, I hated it. The textures put my teeth on edge—cheap lather like saliva, sandpapery stubble, sticky smoothness of my scalp. Next day, the back of my head always erupted in a thousand tiny pimples. Irritation, I suppose. Eventually I learned that a hot washrag cured this.

Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.

The day Cristo died, his mother’s secret life ended. She used to take off her wedding ring to wash dishes, and drop it into Cristo’s baby cup on the windowsill while she worked, and when she had finished at the sink, and the counters and the stove were wiped clean, she’d smooth almond lotion onto her hands and massage it in, then slip her ring back on, always doing this, every time, except when she fled on one of her musical and sexual fugues, taking nothing but the northbound bus, no luggage, no ID, nothing pawnable, just cash in her pocket for bus and concert tickets, coffee and cigarettes and incidentals—someone else would pay for the drinks and meals and room, if it came to that, and that’s what it usually came to, and her staying gone as long as her mood and mad money held out.

That boat had been there all along, and he’d ridden past it—the bus crossed high over the marsh at that point, on the Interstate, and the view unblocked, the last gold-dusty light almost signaling in its slant, drawing his drowsy eyes to the skip-planked dock and barnacled pilings. He’d always sat on the other side of the bus, or was dozing, or talking, or getting things together for when they got to town. There the boat stood, his future, shining in the raveled fringe of the marsh, the sungold as thick as pollen, every blade of grass burnished, and the creek with that same gold in its reflected sky. The weathered wood looked gentle, gracious, elegant in its curves, in that light. He loved the boat at first sight.

“Malcolm is dead,” Eddie kept hearing as he raced to the shop. As he got closer, he saw the flashing lights, and the siren that had been only an eerie, barely audible musical accompaniment to his thoughts began to register as belonging to an ambulance and not as being a regular plant alarm. He knew that he would not cry no matter how awful it was; he never cried. That was one thing he never had to worry about. If one of them had to be killed here, it was better that it was Malcolm—because if Eddie had been killed, Malcolm would have cried like a baby.

One Sunday in June, they were a family strolling on the beach. The sun was blazing, making the sand feel like hot coals beneath their feet, but also brilliantly splashing light on the ripples in the lake. And the hypnotic, undulating motion of the waves called to them to come and wade in the coolness. He and Betty hesitated—as always—neither knowing how to swim. Always drowning on the mind. Always drowning.

A chill flew through Eddie, who refused to believe his own eyes, for, staring back at him, smiling his inimitable smile, was Malcolm—dead for almost six years. Yes, he was dead. Eddie had seen the body with his own eyes. He had seen the blood. And yet here he was now, Malcolm, smiling to him across the smoke-filled room. A scream was caught in Eddie’s throat. Water instantly flooded his eyes, blurring his vision. He blinked to clear his eyes, and when he opened them he no longer saw Malcolm at the back of the room. All that he could see, as far as he could see, was a wall made of mirrors. And in the mirrors, he saw faces, fronts, a line of opposite profiles, and finally, not Malcolm, but a reflection of himself…

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.

At the gate of the Grand Hotel du Mali, a brothel that served as an inn for the rare tourist in Oulaba, Darren paid her first guide. The child had only carried her pack up the short path from the road, and his dark eyes grew round as he took the one hundred C.F.A. coin into his fist. Immediately, the other boys attacked him, pawing for the money. “White lady!” one of the children shouting in French. “We all led you here. We are all your guides, and you must pay all of us!”

Along the road the flames from black and gutted cars licked up toward the sun, turned white, and shimmered. Balls of smoke hung in the sky. Darren drove past hordes of women running down the street, holding their pagnes around their waists with one hand, babies jouncing on their backs. Children streamed around them, laughing and crying. A Senegalese tank rolled by, scattering some sheep who ran first one way and then the other, their heads jerking up, eyes rolling back with terror.

“Do you masturbate?” he pried.

“Only alone, by myself.” I felt him bristle at my insolence.

“Do you work with appropriate fantasies?”

“Work?”

“You know, do you masturbate to appropriate fantasies before indulging in your inappropriate ones?” He’d given me very specific instructions about this. He scolded my silence by scooting his chair forward till I could smell the odor of his leg.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I forget.”

THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

No stars pierced the sky, nor lights reflected back off the overcast. A fire burned high on the bare hillside. Its orange flame danced weakly in the frozen air, offering the occasional blackened silhouette of branches and a tiny, fluttering tricolor being carried around the flames. Was Hakan up there, I wondered, with them? Would her song be sung, again, wobbling richly through the winter air to touch my ears, and why? What standard did she bear for them, what spirit? Was the night their enemy or friend? I watched the Prime Minister wander away into that same night and could not help but love him whose demise they sought; I felt, for the first time, that they loved him too. They could not say it, and perhaps did not even recognize the embrace contained within their hatred. I wondered how much he knew of their plot against him, and whether it was an end he in some ways desired. And what did he know of me?

THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

The light made my skin look orange, and I started thinking about what Wickham had told us about light. She said that oranges and apples, leaves and flowers, the whole multicolored world, was not what it appeared to be. The colors we see, she said, look like they do only because of the light or ray that shines on them. “The color of the thing isn’t what you see but the light that’s reflected off it.” Then she shut out the lights and shone a white light on a prism. We watched the pale splay of colors on the projector screen; some people oohed and aahed. Suddenly, she switched on a black light and the color of everything changed. The prism colors vanished, Wickham’s arms were purple, the buttons of her dress were as orange as hot coals, rather than the blue they had been only seconds before.  We were all very quiet. “Nothing,” she said, after a while, “is really what it appears to be.”

Danita miscarried. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know what a miscarriage was till then. I mean I’d heard the word before, but I really didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t know it would make me feel so bad either. I felt bad ‘cause for a whole month I’d been thinking about what it’d be like to be a pop.

It was a pretty weird time. Little Martinez was dead, and so was Zoot the Boot. Little Martinez got drunk when his fiancée pink-slipped him for some long-haired dude, and so driving on some highway in Texas, drunk like he was, he stopped his car – just like that – got out, and started directing traffic. They say when they found him he’d been run over four or five times. Guy’s head was about as thick as a T-bone steak, they say. And like Zoot had been shot right between the eyes by some gang dude in East L.A. Zoot’d gone home for the weekend. Corporal Ski and PFC Mike O.D.’d on angel dust. Lopez was dead and Forehead was dead. Car wreck. Bob the Hick was dead. Wife capped his ass with his forty-five. Sergeant Eyeball was dead. Suicide. Got busted to PFC for stealing a guy’s radio. Couldn’t hack the pay cut, I guess. Anyway, all these dudes were dead as fuck.