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  ‘I cannot stress it enough: fiber fiber fiber! Do you think I chiseled my way down to 8 percent body fat with squat thrusts alone? Wake up, Terri Schiavo! This is science! And you, yes even you’ – he pointed at Douglas – ‘can follow my diet plan for a mere hundred dollars a month.’

  ‘No thank you,’ Douglas said, alarmed. ‘I don’t like science.’

  ‘Don’t like science!’ The man in spandex was cheerfully bewildered.

  ‘But science is everything!’

  ‘Yeah,’ the woman said. ‘Science is the sun and the moon and the stars.’

  ‘Ideologues on every corner!’ Douglas shouted, though he hadn’t meant to do more than think it.

  ‘Did you just call us idiots?’ the woman said. ‘Because I’m in college, you know.’

  ‘College!’ Douglas walked quickly into the office supply store to buy something he needed but didn’t remember anymore.

  Toward the beginning or end of an aisle, he picked up a tape dispenser, then put it down. He touched gum erasers and thick résumé paper. But it was no use. Everywhere it was college students and language and ideas and betrayals. Every item in his life had been coded to evoke her. There she was in diet propaganda. There she was in the city. There she was in every word, smiling, as she said she was leaving him for someone who knew how to talk to her.

  ‘Talk to you? What am I doing right now if I’m not talking to you?’

  ‘Talking to who you think I was,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not enough that you’re sleeping with somebody else. Now you have to be pedantic?’

  ‘But I’m not sleeping with someone else,’ she said. ‘Neil and I, what we have isn’t sexual. I find him actually a bit ugly. But he’s willing to think about what I think about. We have an ordinary language. He’s with me.’

  For a long time, Douglas had wished that he was the sort of man who could derive pleasure from the thought that Miranda was now with an ugly man. He could tell people that he used to be married to Miranda Shelby, the Wittgenstein scholar, and now she was with an ugly man. But the truth was, he didn’t even understand what she meant by with her. He only knew what it meant to be without. And to be without her was to see her always, as if the very symbols of his misery had married themselves to the designs of life. It was for the world never to answer his pleas.

  But should he see Miranda now, he would know finally what to say. If a man becomes better too late, he’d ask, was he worse than if he never got better at all?

  * * *

  KATHRYN MARIS

  It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible

  It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible

  for human dreams. Each bacterium was entitled to pay

  a fee in the form of mitochondrial energy to purchase

  a ‘dream token’ to be dropped into a Potential Well. These

  ‘tokens’ were converted to synaptic prompts and transported

  to the human brain in no particular order. So a ‘token’ for a

  ‘baseball dream’ deposited in the well when the human host

  was aged 8 might only be used by the brain when the host

  was 44, and this dream that might have been pleasant for an

  8-year-old could instead emerge as a nightmare for a woman

  on the brink of menopause who might worry about her

  appearance in a baseball uniform, or who no longer recalled

  how to hold a baseball glove and catch a ball in the field.

  * * *

  THE FLORIDA MOTEL

  Kevin Canty

  She sat on a tin chair outside of her room at the Florida Motel and thought about her children while she drank an iced tea. Her girl was thirty and had two children of her own now. Her baby boy was twenty-seven, an alcoholic in Olympia, Washington. Neither of them had time for Gertrude anymore, between the babies and the drinking. They had escaped, which she thought was probably as it should be. But most days she missed them.

  The Florida Motel had started somewhere in the middle then gone far downhill. The swimming pool was half full, shopping carts poking out of the green water. The air-conditioning unit under her window was striped all the way down the front edge with burnt black lines where somebody had put a cigarette down to rest and then forgotten about it. Only the big neon sign, a green palm tree and the red letters FLORIDA, survived from when 441 was the busy highway through town and not a potholed backwater. Evening heat radiated off the beige concrete. Flattened swamp creatures lined the edges of the road: snakes, lizards, armadillos, possums.

  Adele the maid came out of the office, dressed to go home in an orange tank top and cut-off jeans, barefoot. ‘Y’all can go on up if you want,’ she said. ‘215’s empty now.’

  ‘He checked out?’

  Adele laughed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he never checked out. But he’s gone. Three-in-the-morning gone. They got the key in the office.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘It’s why I came here.’

  ‘Well, good luck,’ Adele said. ‘Y’all crazy if you ask me but you didn’t ask so good luck.’

  Adele got into her Focus, blond hair in a cascade of wooden multicolored beads, and drove off trailing sparks from a dragging muffler pipe. Maybe she wasn’t turning tricks after all, Gertrude thought. She would be driving a better car.

  ‘You want to rent it or you just want to look around?’ asked the manager.

  ‘I just want to take a look,’ she said. ‘I can rent it if you want me to.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the manager, a small, sweaty man in a white shirt and with a rodent face. He seemed to be made nervous by her. He put the key on the counter so he wouldn’t risk touching her. ‘Go right on up,’ he said. ‘Take your time. As long as you like.’

  ‘Why, thank you,’ Gertrude said. She took the key and left, as glad to be rid of him as the manager was to be rid of her. Lately she alarmed people. She didn’t know why and possibly didn’t care.

  Gertrude took the key to 215 up the stairs and along the second-floor balcony. The parking lot below was almost empty, cracked and oil-stained near the green rectangle of the pool. On the patio sat tin tables with attached metal umbrellas. She could sell them for a small fortune if she could get them home to Portland. They were Americana.

  Gertrude was killing time. She didn’t want to go into 215. Come all the way from Oregon and she couldn’t bring herself.

  She counted to eleven, a technique Bill taught her for jumping into cold water. The mind tricks itself, hesitates, plunges.

  An ordinary ugly motel room.

  Oh, she thought. Too much of a dream. Bill’s last pictures. This slant of afternoon sunlight, through the curtains, onto the faded brocade of the bedspread. This knotty-pine desk with its cigarette burns, and through the open doorway – she knew before she saw it – would be a tiled shower stall with random tiles missing, like a message in code. An after-image, double exposure, a ghost in the room. Gertrude shivered, rooted in place, smelling the dust as it drifted through the yellow sunlight.

  Bill had been her husband once, a long time before. He was a photographer and a drunk. The last pictures he ever took were here, in 215. He took pictures of the parking lot, the pool, of Adele the maid without her shirt on. He took pictures of everything. In his last days, he would pay strangers to drive him around and he would shoot roll after roll of Tri-X through the window of the moving car. When he died, he left behind 10,000 undeveloped rolls of film.

  Left them to Gertrude, his ex, executrix.

  There was really no reason for her to be here. Nothing but her own curiosity, which seemed morbid to her now. A long way for nothing. As the déjà vu faded away, she saw that she was in an ordinary rundown motel room, devoid of magic. A transient, public place, a bed that a thousand people had slept in. It was just an accident that Bill’s life had ended here. It could have been anywhere. A room that was made for sleeping with strangers, or drinking alone.


  Not just a regular bottle of vodka, either, but the big one, the kind with a handle. He drank the whole thing. Adele was the one who found him, a day after the fact, when he wouldn’t answer her knock. A bottle, a body, a few dozen rolls of film. They shipped the film to her, along with his wallet, his watch, his battered Leica, a pamphlet of Catholic prayers. He carried pictures of their children in his wallet like any common salesman.

  But had he meant to drink it all? A sober man would know that much alcohol was poison. But a drunk man wouldn’t, necessarily.

  No answers here. Gertrude sat on the edge of the bed with the sunlight falling across her legs. It was four o’clock. She had slept alone for several years now, or mostly so. She had lost interest, or had the interest beaten out of her. Men had worn her out.

  Four o’clock on a hot afternoon.

  The sound of slamming doors woke her out of her trance. The asphalt crew was home. They stood in the shade of the balcony, opening cans of beer and shouting insults at one another. Ate up with the dumbass, said one of them, and another replied, Cocksucker. Gertrude took one long last look around but the room was empty.

  She didn’t even know what the question was. She went to her room and changed clothes. The ones she had on felt dirty somehow, though the room had been slept in and cleaned a hundred times since then. She put on a red sundress with a lowcut neck and looked into her suitcase and thought fuck it and pulled her cowboy boots on. Ray-Bans and her hair tied back. She couldn’t stand her hair in this kind of heat.

  Purdy sat at one of the round tables on the patio, in the shade of the candy-colored metal umbrella, drinking a can of beer out of a foam rubber koozie that said FLORABAMA LOUNGE. He was the foreman of the asphalt crew, a big solid man in a dirty Panama hat and a short-sleeved shirt, untucked. The curve of his belly, the faint smell of diesel and sweat, even now, fresh from the shower. He reached into the cooler by his feet and handed her a dripping cold can of beer.

  ‘What kind of day did you have?’ Purdy asked.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘strange.’

  ‘Did you get up into the room?’

  Gertrude looked at him, trying to guess what she had told him on the bar stool the night before. More than she meant to. Drinking gimlets for Christ’s sake.

  ‘I was just up there,’ she said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing,’ she said. ‘No clues. I thought that I would get a feeling or something, I don’t know. It was kind of creepy walking in there, right at first. But after that, nothing.’

  ‘Well, now you know,’ said Purdy.

  ‘This is his watch,’ she said, holding out her left arm toward him. He took her wrist in one big hand and turned it this way and that.

  ‘Nice watch,’ he said.

  And, yes, there was a kind of man who would always find her attractive and Purdy was that kind of man. Gertrude had blond hair which she was not about to give up – no natural grey for her – and the big tits that Bill had loved so. Maybe these days it took a little intentional blurring to make her pretty, an uncritical eye. It was all fading, all falling apart, bit by bit. But not yet.

  ‘The other thing that was weird,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see anything in the room or anything but I remembered when I was up there that the pictures he carried, the pictures of the kids? They were from way back, like early high school or middle school or something. They were already grown. But he’d kept the pictures from when they were little.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem strange to me,’ said Purdy, and let go of her arm. ‘I do the same.’

  ‘Let’s see them,’ Gertrude said.

  Purdy shot her a quick appraising look. He didn’t seem to want to but he got his wallet out anyway: a pretty, skinny girl in glasses, about twelve or so, and a boy who looked like Purdy must have looked in high school, big but not soft, an athlete’s crew cut. Some little warning bell went off in Gertrude’s head but she ignored it.

  ‘Where are they now?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. Again, he didn’t want to. ‘Well, Sara’s in college. Terry died a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. What happened?’

  ‘In Afghanistan.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was something he believed in,’ Purdy said. ‘So there’s that.’

  Gertrude could think of nothing to say. Purdy opened a cold beer and she sipped hers, already warming in the blood-warm afternoon. That’s what Purdy called it, a coldbeer, all one word: get you a coldbeer?

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Purdy said. Then slammed himself upright. ‘I’m going to go for a drive,’ he said. ‘You want to come along?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Out in the country somewhere, I don’t know. Away from here. You coming?’

  ‘I guess,’ she said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. That false sense of security, a big man like Bill, the same easy smile and blank eyes: she sat near Purdy and she felt the same ease and security as with Bill. She thought of his cock in his pants as if she had seen it, big like Bill’s, a friendly thing. This was all wrong. She had no idea whether she ought to trust Purdy.

  But the other option was the Florida Motel and so she found herself in the cab of his Toyota pickup, Tennessee plates and a cooler behind the seat, rolling down a country road in the half-light of the afternoon, AC blasting, live oaks on either side whose branches met over the road, Spanish moss, boil p-nuts and holiness church signs. Purdy was still mad, still all closed up. Gertrude thought it wasn’t fair. She was only flirting, in this new sad late-mid-life style: tell me about your kids, how crazy your ex was. Would Bill have said that? Would he have called her crazy?

  No, Gertrude thought. She was the sane one, the bill-payer, diaper-changer.

  Purdy said, ‘Florida is a state for the simple-minded.’

  ‘I thought you liked it here,’ Gertrude said. ‘Last night, you said you did.’

  ‘You ever read about what’s in the tap water down here?’

  ‘I’ve yet to see you drink a glass of water.’

  ‘It’s not bad in January, when it’s snowing back home. But no. The only time we get the work is dead of summer. People think it’s a nice day because the sun is shining.’

  ‘Go home, then.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Purdy said, and relapsed into silent driving, thinking or brooding. Gertrude sipped her beer and watched out the window, the sand roads snaking back into dense greenery, black water, prehistory. In the passenger’s seat again. Sometimes Bill would let her drive but not so often, not back then. She thought lovingly of her little Miata resting snugly in her Oregon garage. Nobody but Gertrude had ever driven that car. It was red. Most of the time, she thought, the loneliness was worth it.

  They wound up at a restaurant on a lake, the sun still well above the horizon and blaring down onto the deck. Gertrude could not arrange the shade to suit her. She ordered gin to cool herself down. Purdy ordered a double Dickel on the rocks.

  ‘Happy hour, babe,’ the waitress said. ‘They’re all doubles.’

  The waitress, too, wore an orange tank top, blond hair, tan leather skin, like most of the others on the deck, some kind of uniform. Maybe Purdy was right, a state for the stupid. Gertrude was certainly among strangers. She had gotten used to a certain kind of person back in Oregon, a polite, well-meaning, orderly person, but the people on this deck did not look to be any of these things. Suddenly she understood what she was doing here. She was among strangers, the place where Bill had chosen to spend his life. He was never good at home. He needed new and strange. And she needed to find him.

  ‘See him?’ Purdy said.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Alligator,’ he said. ‘Right under the deck. You can just see his tail.’

  Gertrude looked over the side and there it was, a black rubber thing with scales and points, right under her chair. If the deck gave way – and it c
ertainly felt rickety enough – curtains for Gertrude. A little thrill.

  ‘I went hunting for gators with a friend of mine once,’ Purdy said. ‘Middle of the night. Look for the eyes. You stand on the front deck of a flatboat going about thirty miles an hour and you try to spear ’em. Very exciting.’

  Barbaric, she thought. She didn’t say so.

  Purdy said, ‘One time. We were coming back home at four in the morning with a fifteen-foot gator in the back and it starts thrashing and rolling around, and the next thing you know, it’s out on the grass strip next to the highway. Highway patrol comes up on us and we’re standing there trying to get this thing back in the boat. He stands there laughing.’

  ‘This is another being,’ Gertrude said. ‘You can’t take pleasure in that.’

  ‘He was dead already. Hit him in the head with a bang stick.’

  ‘Then how was he moving?’

  ‘They can twitch and roll around for a day or two. Just the way they’re put together. A very primitive nervous system. Anyway, this cop goes back to his car and I thought maybe he had something that would help us get that big bastard back up in the boat, a come-along or something. But no. Comes back with a camera. Stands there laughing and taking pictures. Your tax dollars at work.’

  A Mexican carnival, Gertrude thought. The waitress brought another round of drinks, unbidden. An arcade of life and danger, where Bill lived. She was there now. The sun inched down through the sky, toward a silhouette of primitive trees. Purdy ordered smoked mullet. Around her, middle-aged women in swimsuits slapped at bugs, while their husbands planned drug deals and house invasions. The mullet arrived, a brown slab of fish on a blue gas-station paper towel, dark with oil. It was delicious, especially with gin.

  ‘But what isn’t delicious with gin?’ she asked Purdy. He seemed to know what she was talking about.

  ‘Most places, this is bait,’ he said. ‘In Florida, it’s food.’

  It took her a moment to understand that he was talking about the mullet, which she’d thought was a haircut, until today.