Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,

turbos throbbing in the labored

dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing

pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,

smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though

he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,

snowy lights below. There might have been

freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know

I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,

glanced again at the two feathered props

out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.

But freed all at once from months of killing depression,

elated strangely, almost uplifted.

In Stockholm that icy day

the rain blew from the north and then

by noon the run broke through; by three

the Swedes were outdoors sunning in thin sleeves,

strolling as though it were Easter,

while you and I, like birds of paradise

lost in Lapland, huddled in doorways, bitten through.

Everyone about us smiled at one another; we fought our way

street by street to our hotel, and buried ourselves

under blankets. And sighed at the lonely

displacement. How little we knew then,

newly married, of the cold that finds

the remotest parts of the body to lodge,

that there’s no defense except by slow degrees

to become acclimatized. And for a cold this deep

it would take years of freezing.

The last of my father’s brothers, that year

(a year before my father died at fifty-seven)

Jack refused to say goodbye to anyone –

instead he’d laugh and only turn away

as if his departing guests were simply

stepping out a moment into his yard

to listen to nightingales or smell the jacaranda

and sweet magnolia thick as constellations.

The brothers seemed to have a clock inside them,

set at fifty-six or so, Jack said.

And the best of them go out face down in the leaves

at home, and the worst in a drunk tank

in borrowed shows. Lucky, he said, the man

who knows the number of his days. Lucky

twice over if it’s autumn and the red leaves

and yellow rain haven’t given all their kisses away.

In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.

She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.

Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint—trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston is return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in the chest, and would have emptied his shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

Clarice distributed masks. There was a Clarice-mask for Clarice, an Alvin-mask for Alvin, a Stonecipher-mask for Stonecipher, a Spatula-mask for Spatula. The masks were very good and very lifelike. Clarice made them out of plaster molds and papier-mâché and Reynolds Wrap, in a workshop in the basement. Clarice was in many ways an artist, Lenore thought, CabanaTan notwithstanding. She was particularly good at making things with people’s faces on them. Every year she gave her father, Lenore’s father, cans of tennis balls in which every ball was an eerie likeness of the head of Bob Gerber or Erv Beechnut. Stonecipher Beadsman III loved to play tennis with these balls. Clarice also on the sly made some Stonecipher-Beadsman-III-head balls that she and Alvin batted around from time to time. During a dark period, about a year before, there had appeared a can of Alvin-head balls.

We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve, one or two of her friends standing with towering hairdos off to the side, wary lest they be caught in the ropes of sexual tension that snapped and crackled in the air between Janet and me, the friends watching us, me, for the tiniest error, the Beatles on the record player playing “Eight Days a Week,” and my hands prepared some sort of hors d’oeuvre, what do I mean some sort, a fastened cylinder of bologna on a Ritz cracker, and she declined it, and stared at me kindly, telling me with her eyes that she was willing to play the elaborate and exhausting game, that it was all right, and I put the hors d’oeuvre into my mouth, and the cracker seemed to explode into deserts of dust, and there was meat, and I recall she was talking about the upcoming election, and the unavoidable and untalkaboutably horrible invitation to dance began its salmon’s migration from my intestine up toward the brain, and my hand was in the pocket of my slacks, soaking through the wool, and in a disastrous flash I thought of something witty to say, to delay the invitation, and my heart leapt, and my throat constricted, and I turned convulsively from myself to say the thing to Janet Dibdin, as she stared with undeserved trust into my eyes, and I tried to say the thing, and as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d’oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva in it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin’s nose, and stayed there.

I have a garden in my brain

shaped like a maze

I lose myself

in, it seems. They only look for me

sometimes. I don’t like my dreams.

The nurses quarrel over where I am

hiding. I hear from inside

a bush. One is crisp

and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push

them each somewhere.

They both think it’s funny

here. The laughter sounds like diesels.

I won’t come out because I’m lazy.

You start to like the needles.

You start to want to crazy.

It was 1945, and it was May.

White crocus bloomed in St. Louis.

The Germans gave in but the war shoved on,

and my father came home from work that evening

tired and washed his hands

not picturing the black-goggled men

with code names fashioning an atomic bomb.

Maybe he loved his wife that evening.

Maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline

in her palm as he stretched out

on the couch with his head in her lap

while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio

and they both laughed. My father sold used cars

at the time, and didn’t like it,

so if he complained maybe she held him

an extra moment in her arms,

the heat in the air pressing between them,

so they turned upstairs early that evening,

arm in arm, without saying anything.

It shows up one summer in a greatcoat,

storms through the house confiscating,

says it must be paid and quickly,

says it must take everything.

Your children stare into their cornflakes,

your wife whispers only once to stop it,

because she loves you and she sees it

darken the room suddenly like a stain.

What did you do to deserve it,

ruining breakfast on a balmy day?

Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming.

There was no life without it anyway.

While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

“Charlotte!” Cinder said. “I know what this looks like, but I was an absolute wreck when Mitchell got here – wasn’t I, Mitchell? – and he literally glued me back together. You know what we should do, though. I’m absolutely starving. We should get some pirogi. Hey, I’ve learned this interesting new fact about men. The more weight they make you gain, the more attractive it means they are. God. Why can’t I be one of those little twitching things who shred their food when something goes wrong? I wish I were willowy and thin like you, Charlie.”

“You are willowy and thin,” I said. “I’m bony and big, like a dinosaur skeleton in a museum.”

“Dinosaur skeleton.” Mitchell centered me slowly in his gaze, and I faltered. “It’s been a long, long time since I thought about one of those,” he said.

“Mitchell, darling,” Cinder said, straddling him to massage his shoulders, “how could I get you to go next door and get us some pirogi? Like three orders, with extra sour cream. I am ravenous.”

“That stuff I glued you together with sort of absorbed my liquid assets,” he said.

“I have money,” I said, handing him a ten.

“Where do they live?” I said.

Lee took out a big U.S. road map. “They’re over here, in Baltimore.”

“That’s so far,” I said, following his finger.

“In a sense,” he said. “But on the other hand, look at, say, Pittsburgh.” His finger alighted inches from where we were. “Or Columbus.”

“Or Louisville!” I said. “Look how far that is – to Louisville!”

“You think that’s far?” Lee said. “Well, listen to this – ready? Poplar Bluff!”

“Tulsa!” I said. “Wait – Oklahoma City!”

We both started to shout.

“Cheyenne!”

“Flagstaff!”

“Needles, Barstow, Bishop!”

“Eureka!” we both yelled at once.

We sat back and eyed the map. “That was some trip,” Lee said.

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

The bartender was a fine distinguished mantis standing thin and alert and flexible with all the green grace of his species; it was very dark in there, and he never said anything, and the previous bartender (whom Mantis had killed and devoured) had never said anything, either, just pointed dryly to the cash register to indicate the amount owed for prior happiness; so nobody noticed the transition to new management; and anyhow Mantis conveyed an impression of sympathetic as opposed to apathetic acceptance and knew what was wanted and mixed very adequate drinks. The whores were nervous around him because he never pawed them or gestured for freebies like his predecessor when they gave him his share of their take (which the bugs used to buy anti-insecticide chemicals), just stared at them with his piercing bulgy eyes on either side of his green head. So the ceiling creaked and the toiled flushed and the cistern overflowed out back and life went on.

These bugs have the advantage. Not only do they outnumber us a million to one, not only do they live by alien insect creeds that attach no value to individual life, but they also retain the rectitude and purity of the underdog. And so it is that they have insidiously debauched the public mind, though we still control the larger cities. I myself have killed many bugs in my time, though of course I have never slain wantonly, only in self-defense, when no compromise could be a cure.

Well, what the hell. The situation is the same. While we have life, we have hope. While we have hope, we have courage. While we have courage, we have ingenuity. While we have ingenuity, we have flame-throwers. A state of war now exists between us and the bugs.