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REVISED EBOOK EDITION COPYRIGHT © 2018 BY EUGENE MARTEN
COPYRIGHT © 2003 BY EUGENE MARTEN
ISBN 978-1-885983-63-3
LCCN 2002113821
FOR KELLY,
FOR GORDON,
AND TO
MY MOTHER
AND FATHER
CONTENTS
10 Chapter 9
11 Chapter 10
12 Chapter 11
13 Chapter 12
14 Chapter 13
15 Chapter 14
16 Chapter 15
17 Chapter 16
18 Chapter 17
19 Chapter 18
20 Chapter 19
21 Chapter 20
22 Chapter 21
23 Chapter 22
24 Chapter 23
DU’A FOR THE DECEASED
JUST a thin metal rod no longer than your finger.
A thin metal rod, looped at one end to give you something to grip, flattened and slotted at the other. She told me what there was to tell about it—even the sound it made, the blood it sometimes drew. She told me how a tab would fit into the slot, how when you twisted the loop a strip of metal or the lid itself would wrap around the other end. I don’t think you would open a can of shortening this way anymore. Or a tin of sardines. I don’t think anyone would open anything this way.
She told me other things: that I knew how to walk, that I slept in a bed, that I’d learned to talk but didn’t have much to say. She told me what I was afraid of.
She told me this about myself, and some of it hasn’t changed.
THERE might have been blood. There would have been sharp edges and, unwinding the lid or the strip of tin from it, she might have felt one before she gave it to me—just a thin metal rod that for a while was mine.
I don’t know what became of it.
I must have put it down. Sometime during the course of the day, I must have put it down and forgotten about it.
After the blood. Before there was a moon.
AT night, she told me, was when it happened.
In the small hours, she said, was when I woke up, if I’d slept at all, climbed out of bed and went looking for it. Roamed the dark sleeping house, working the shadows like a prowler. The hall, the bathroom, the stairs—I went everywhere but I never turned on a light. There might have been a moon. I looked until my looking woke them and she came for me. I could have been anyone. I could have been someone who’d come to take something, or everything, but she knew who it was, she said. She wasn’t afraid.
The stairs, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen.
It happened every night.
AFTER the second time, she told me, or the third time, she said, when she’d put me back to bed, she crawled in and stayed with me till I went back to sleep. She said it took me a long time, she had to come into my bed more than once. She said she stayed with me and told me stories, looking for the one that would make me stop. Sometimes she rhymed.
We looked out the window.
Out there, she said she told me.
The world, she said she’d said.
We lived at the end of the street. There was nothing beyond us.
Everyone in the world was asleep, she said, except for us. When the world sleeps, she said, everyone else must, too, because the world won’t wake up again, she said, until they do.
It would go right on sleeping. It wouldn’t let the sun come up. The night, she said, won’t stop.
She didn’t mean to rhyme but this is what she told me. I think I remember some of it, and I believe the rest.
I believe I do.
IT was still dark when I got back into town. I was last off the bus but still had to wait with the Mennonites while a porter emptied the luggage bin. The garage was a narrow cave with fluorescent tubes nine feet long. That diesel smell, Greyhound chug and hiss. Standing around in the black and brown, muted blues and purple, the men with wide brims and beards without mustaches and coats without lapels. The children like miniature adults. Their luggage was made of cardboard like mine, tied with jute or hemp, but the box I was looking for was small and had been used only once.
Inside the terminal a couple were making out next to a video game. The pilgrims steered clear and grabbed most of the seats in the waiting area so that anywhere you sat was near them. They drank their own coffee and ate their own sandwiches. An old woman peeled an orange. I saw that she was pregnant then and thought