The PEN,O Henry Prize Stories 2011 Part 11

In the evenings, we went out to eat oysters on the half sh.e.l.l, platters of fried shrimp and fish, french fries, and hush puppies, and returned to sleep in the luxurious window-unit air-conditioning of our room. Our mother would almost never let us use the AC at home, as it cost too much on the power bill.

Mornings and late afternoons, we went over to the beach and frolicked. I so love that word. Sand castles, not such artful ones, of mounds, moats, and tunnels. A tall woman with big blonde hair and t.i.ts like pale luminescent water balloons walked by in a green two-piece bathing suit, moving so carefully she seemed to be treading along the sh.o.r.e through a very narrow pa.s.sage only she could see. We glanced at our father, and he bobbed his eyebrows. We fell over into the sand, yipping like hyenas.

I once told my mother of being propositioned by a lascivious young country girl at a filling station in Buckatunna, Mississippi, on my way home for a visit. I'd been filling up my little Honda coupe and this woman ambled over and stood there leering at me. You sure are good-lookin', she said. I'm having a party at my house, you want to come on over?

Did you go with her? my mother asked me when I told her the story. Of course not, I said. I didn't know her from Medusa. Well, that's the difference between you and your father, she said.

At this time they had been divorced for about seven years.

My brother and I danced barefoot across the white-hot parking lot to the center of the Alamo Plaza's interior court-its plaza, I suppose. There beneath a small shed roof sat a humming, sweating ice-making machine. We would tip open the canted lid to the bin and scoop out handfuls of ice crushed so fine it seemed shaved. We packed it into s...o...b..a.l.l.s and threw them at one another, tossed them into the crackling hot air and watched them begin to shed water even as they rose and then fell to the sizzling concrete, melting instantly into wet penumbras that shrank and evaporated into smoky wisps. We opened the bin again and wedged our heads and shoulders in there for the exquisite shock of the cold. For at least a few moments as we reeled in the white-hot courtyard on burning bare feet, our heads felt as dense and cold as ice cubes on top of our icicle necks.

We drove to a group of small cabins on a cove and a grizzled man rented us a skiff. Our father sat at the stern and gunned the motor, buzzing us out into the stinking Sound, bouncing us through the light chop, our mother holding on to her sun hat.

We drifted a half mile or so offsh.o.r.e, baited our hooks, and cast out. For a while there was nothing, just the little boat rocking in the gentle waves of the Sound, the hazy sky, gulls creaking by and inspecting us with c.o.c.ked heads, a dispa.s.sionate black eye.

My brother pulled up the first fish. He swung it over my head and into the boat. It was a small fish, with an ugly face. As soon as it popped from the water it began to make ugly, froggish sounds. Croaker, our father said. He unhooked it and tossed it back into the chop. I asked about the strange noise it made and he said it was the sound they made trying to breathe out of water.

The truth is the Atlantic croaker makes its sound by tightening the muscles around its swim bladder, and uses the sound for general communication and to attract a mate. It's said to be a "prodigious sp.a.w.ner."

I reeled one in, too, the fight leaving it. Up it came, into the boat. Croak, croak. A brownish fish with a little piggish snout. A small mark on the back of its eye gave it an angry what-are-you-looking-at? kind of look. These fish looked p.i.s.sed off to be interrupted in the middle of their prodigious sp.a.w.ning.

Soon we were all pulling in croakers. The boat floor crowded with flapping, croaking fish. A chorus of their dry frog noises rose around us. After a while, my father had had enough and started tossing them overboard. Some smacked dead on the surface and floated away. Others knifed the water with a final croak and were gone, back to their sp.a.w.ning and general communication with their kind.

When I was too young to remember now how young I was, I began to have a recurring dream, or nightmare. The air in the dream was electric, much like the electron-buzzing screen of our television when the station went off the air. Jumping with billions of little black dots. A charged, nervous air, the atmospheric equivalent of the feeling you get when you knock your funny bone. In the dream I felt weak and heavy, as if my ma.s.s were compounding, draining my strength. I was aware of a h.e.l.lish din of angry voices, though there were never any distinct words. The room was often very small, the only exit a tiny door in the corner, little larger than a mouse hole. Other times, the dreamscape changed to one of dreadful empty vastness, all gray, in which the horizon seemed impossibly distant and I seemed very small, and the pressure of the air was heavy upon me. I suppose it was a simple dream of anxiety, though I have sometimes fancied it a latent, deeply buried, sensorial memory from the womb, and who knows but that this is possible on some level. Though I was too young to create such a memory from what little I'd heard about gestation. I probably knew nothing of that when the dream began. I may have been told where I came from-I don't remember. In any case, I have no firm idea where such anxiety in one so young could have come from-except that I'd had, from a very young age, the sense and fear that my parents would divorce and force me to choose between them. Maybe I had picked up on some general unhappiness. I don't know. I do know that, like my mother, I spent much of my time worrying that something terrible and heartbreaking would happen. For me, as with her, emotional dread of the probable was always more real and present than the moment something terrible actually occurred. It may be that my dream was just a subconscious expression of anxiety, but it seems comically apt to me to consider that even in the womb I was expecting the worst concerning my impending birth.

In our room that evening, after the fis.h.i.+ng, we could hear people out by the pool talking loudly and laughing. We heard the splashes of people hitting the water and the thumping of the diving board, on its fulcrum, in the splashes' wake. A woman cried out, Stop! Oh, stop it! Laughter rose and drowned in the humid salty darkness, and I lay in bed and listened long into the night to the sound of cars cruising past on the cooling white-slab highway along the beach. My father snored lightly, while my mother, next to him, and Hal in the bunk above me lay in their beds as still as the dead. The Gulf breezes puffed against the windows, slipped between seams, and drifted through the chilled air of the room like coastal ghosts released from their tight invisibility, sustained for a while by the softly exhaled breath of the living.

My brother met another boy and began going off with him, around the Alamo's grounds or at the pool or, when I'd followed them to the highway, across to the beach, where I wasn't allowed without an adult. He became more of an absence, and so I drifted into the same safe quietude where I spent most of my time anyway, where most middle children spend their time.

At some point in my childhood I began to feel emotionally estranged from my family, although I loved my mother and father and tolerated my brothers as well as anyone else. I had fantasies of belonging to other families instead of my own-families of friends or even families I hardly knew, such as the missionary family from our church that spent part of every year in Pakistan. Or an imaginary family. When you are quiet, you are different, which makes everyone a little nervous and suspicious. It seems a small thing, unless you're the child who's aware of it. I was at ease if left alone in my room to read comics, comfortable alone in the large tract of woods bordering our cul-de-sac street. I loved spying on others walking in the woods when I was hidden and could see them without their seeing me. Sometimes I looked into windows at night, but only at ordinary things. People eating supper, or watching television. No undressing or showers or such. I only wanted to experience the mystery of seeing things as they were when I essentially did not exist to alter them. If you were quiet and still, it was almost as if you weren't there. It was like being a ghost, curious about the visible world and the creatures in it. As if you were dreaming it, and not a part of the dream but there somehow, unquestioned or unknown.

One day Hal asked permission to go out with his new friend's family on a charter fis.h.i.+ng boat. They would have to leave very early, before dawn. I determined to rise then, too, and see him off. But I wasn't able to, and no one woke me, so I didn't get up until light was seeping into the sky over the Sound. I rushed outside onto the motel lawn, stood there barefoot in the dew and the cool heavy breeze, and looked out across the water. On the horizon I could see the gray silhouette of a big s.h.i.+p, which in my memory's surviving image appears to be a tanker of some kind, an oceangoing vessel. But at that moment, on the lawn, I thought it must be the boat Hal had gone on with his new friend and family-these people I'd never spoken to, whom I'd only watched from across the lawn, complete strangers to me and already fast friends with Hal. Watching the ghostly s.h.i.+p far out in the Sound, I had the strongest feeling that he'd gone away and would never return. It was something I couldn't quite grasp just yet, someone going so far out in the water on a boat that you can't see him anymore, and then coming back in. I was very sad, thinking that he was gone forever. And I have lost the memory of his returning from the fis.h.i.+ng trip to the motel. I've often wondered why I felt so much sadder then than I did when he died. Antic.i.p.ation is expansive in the imagination. Memory is reductive, selective. And any great moment must be too much to absorb in that moment, without the power of genius or mental illness. When Hal died, years later, it seemed like the completion of something I'd been watching and waiting for all that time.

His last words, as the other car tumbled toward them out of control, were a blurted "Look out!" A driver's warning to his friends in the car. I doubt that alone saved anyone, but the survivors told me they remembered him shouting this just before they blacked out.

My father's last words, as he pressed his hand to the base of his neck, were "Something's wrong."

If my mother had any last words, they are a secret, as she was old and alone. And if any words formed in her mind as she lay unconscious and slowly dying on her bedroom floor, no one will ever know what they were.

It's hard to remember Hal in very specific ways. He was a small boy, and then a small man. I did not remember him that way, since he was four years older, and so until I was into my later teens he was larger than I was. I remember how shocking it was when, a couple of years after his death, I went into his room and tried on one of his s.h.i.+rts. It was tight across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. I had thought he was at least as tall as I was and stockier, but he was not. He had just always carried himself like a larger boy and man.

A second child will always feel displaced by the first. People say it's the other way around but it's not. Later in life there are the photographs you discover of your older sibling, before you were born, with one or both of your parents. It's then, after you've had children yourself and know the experience in your own life, that you understand the bond between the new, young parents and their first child. You understand how miraculous and illuminating it is. You know how the experience has remade the whole world for the parents, and how the only child's world, entirely new in the magnificent, solipsistic way only an only child's world can be, eclipses all else, and when the second child comes along it is only as if the eclipsing body has moved aside, moved along in its path. The parents' sense of wonder has pa.s.sed, leaving behind a washed-out and dazed sense of deep and cathartic change, a knowledge that such an experience will never be repeated for anyone in that little world, which leaves them somehow diminished. And as the second child you realize this when you are older and your memories have been informed, in a slow infusion of understanding, by the old photographs taken before you were even conceived.

Hal was a prodigy, in many ways a typical first child in that he was precocious, gregarious, fearless, bestowed at birth with the grandest, most natural sense of ent.i.tlement. Every first child is a king or queen. A prince or princess, an enfant terrible of privilege and favor. And Hal was talented. When he was three, he learned the words to the popular song "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier" and sang it so adorably that our parents secured a recording session for him down at a downtown radio station.

He was introduced by George Shannon, a local radio and television personality. I imagine Hal wearing his cowboy outfit: a black hat, black sequined s.h.i.+rt, black pants, black filigreed cowboy boots, a toy six-shooter in a toy holster on his belt. He probably wasn't wearing this outfit, since it had nothing to do with Davy Crockett, but there's a framed photo of Hal at about that age, wearing that outfit, which hung for decades on our mother's living room wall, and so that's how I see him then. A musical cousin, Doc Taylor, strummed the song's tune on a guitar, and Hal sang the song in his piping voice.

Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee Greenest state in the land of the free Raised in the woods so's he knowed ev'ry tree Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three Davy, Daavy Crockett, king of the weeld frontier Weeld-that was how he p.r.o.nounced "wild," like some kind of flamboyant elf.

In the background on the recording, toward the end of the song, you can hear a baby crying a little fitfully, fussing. That was me, only a few weeks old, trying, as would become usual, to a.s.sert myself, to little avail.

This recording was of course a precious possession, always, but it became all the more so after Hal's early death, when he was a young man only recently married. It disappeared after the accident, and my mother bitterly accused Hal's widow of having taken it for herself. I took this for the truth. And then, many years later, after my mother's death, I found the record beneath a stack of papers and doc.u.ments in a dresser drawer in her bedroom.

Well, no, said one of my cousins. It was never lost, not that I know of.

She never told you that Sophie had taken it?

No, my cousin said. She never said that to me.

I could have sworn she'd told me the recording was missing, stolen, possibly destroyed out of spite. But even the memory of her telling me that comes from so long ago now that I can no longer be sure.

The day after Hal's fis.h.i.+ng trip there were a few people out at the pool, a woman with two toddlers down in the shallow end, a few grown-ups in loungers along the ap.r.o.n. The big fat man who must have been the one jumping and doing cannonb.a.l.l.s the night before was again on the diving board, leisurely bouncing and looking around, as if this were simply his place. He bounced easily, the board bending beneath his great weight and bringing him slow as an elevator back up again. His toes hung over the end, his arms at his sides, and he nodded to the four of us as we walked up.

Two men holding cans of beer stood on the pool's ap.r.o.n, watching the big man on the board, and Hal sat at the edge of the pool in front of them, his legs over the edge and his feet in the water. He, too, watched the man, with a rapt expression, as if he expected something either wondrous or entertaining to happen. Across the highway the beach was empty. The Sound lay flat and brown in the sun's glare.

Morning, the man called out to our mother. She smiled and nodded back. Morning, sir, our father said in his clear baritone sales voice. From my spot at the three-foot mark, I called good morning to the man, too, and he called back with a little salute and a wave, Morning, young man.

Standing there bouncing.

A long, big-boned woman lying flat out on a lounger, with a big broad hat over her face, called to him. The voice came from her, but you couldn't see her face. The hat didn't move. Harry, she said to the man. Don't go splas.h.i.+ng all over creation.

The man looked at her, still bouncing, then looked at me and smiled and winked. He pivoted and walked back to the base end of the board and turned back around.

Harry, the woman said.

The big man rose on his toes. It looked comical, the action of a much lighter, fitter man. He spread his arms like a ballerina, ran tiptoeing down to the end of the board, and came down heavily. The board slowly flung him up. He descended in a cannonball, leaning in the woman's direction, and sent up a high sheet of water that drenched her pretty good. She sat up and adjusted the wet floppy hat on her head. Harry swam to the pool's edge, turned, and grinned at Hal and me. I turned around and looked at our mother. She was staring at the man and woman, her mouth c.o.c.ked into a curious smile. She saw me looking and picked up a magazine and started reading it. Our father sat in a deck chair in his swim trunks, his elbows on his knees like a man watching a baseball game. A can of Jax beer rested on the concrete ap.r.o.n between his white feet.

I heard the board bend, release, and bounce against its fulcrum, and a broad shapeless shadow darted onto the dimpled surface of the pool. There again was Harry suspended in all his bulk high in the air, a diving mule pushed off the circus platform. At the last second he tucked his head and rolled over onto his shoulders, sending an arc of water toward the mother with her two toddlers in the shallow end. They screwed up their faces, cringing. When the water settled they all three turned, dripping, to stare at Harry, the mother annoyed, the children bewildered.

That's enough, Harry, the woman said. She'd s.n.a.t.c.hed her hat off and I saw she was wearing a man's heavy black sungla.s.ses, like our father's, and her wide mouth was painted bright red, her hair frizzled and graying.

All right, sorry, Harry said.

But as soon as the woman had pulled the hat brim back down over her eyes, Harry was up and tiptoeing back to the diving board. He made shus.h.i.+ng gestures to all of us, a finger to his lips. At the shallow end, the mother hustled her toddlers from the pool, grabbed up their things, and headed for their room.

Harry was poised at the base of the board. He spread his arms, rose on his toes, and pranced down its length. He swung his arms above his head, scrunched his big body down like a compressed spring. The board bent almost to the surface of the water, seemed to hesitate there, then cracked and split down its length and tossed Harry awkwardly into the air.

He hit the water with a loud, flat smack. The fissured board bounced a couple of clackity times and lay still. Harry floated motionless as the rocking water lapped the edges of the pool. A little scarlet cloud bloomed around him. Then he jerked into a flurry of motion. His head rose up and he bellowed, then sank down again.

The big woman shouted and stood up from her lounger, her hat tumbling into the gra.s.s. The two men standing poolside leaped into the water. They managed to subdue Harry and pull him to the pool's edge. The woman stood rigid, watching them, her mouth hanging open. Then she closed it with a clap and her face took on what looked like a long-practiced expression of disgust. Other people came and helped drag Harry out onto the concrete ap.r.o.n. He made a groaning, desperate sound. Blood leaked from a wound on his foot. One of the men who'd helped rescue him pulled a car around, and he and the other man helped Harry into it. The woman got into the backseat beside Harry and they drove away, to the hospital, I suppose.

I walked over to the diving board, leaned down low, and looked at the split board, its two pieces splayed, blond splinters sticking out like bleached porcupine quills. Hanging there jammed tight in the divide was a small blunt wedge drained of color. It appeared to be Harry's little toe.

It was fantastic. It made the whole trip.

Our mother was horrified, of course. One year, a drowning. The next, a dismembered toe. Not so disturbing as a death, but awful in its own way. I think it settled deeply into her subconscious, one more augury of vague misfortune looming.

For our father, who was her opposite in terms of being able to live in each present moment without a terrible awareness of the past and a foreboding sense of the future, the accident had a different effect. He would remember it with a kind of morbid humor, closing his eyes and pursing his lips and shaking with silent, wincing laughter. Ooo, s.h.i.+t, that had to hurt, he'd say. I still remember the time, riding with him in the car when I was a boy, and I had my arm out the pa.s.senger's side window. He glanced over and told me to keep my arm in the car, that he'd heard about a man riding along with his arm out the window who was side-swiped by another car that took his arm right off at the shoulder. Ever since, I've never been able to leave my arm out a car window if there are other cars present within anything close to striking distance. I live with a combination of my mother's morbid fear of danger and my father's irreverent appreciation of it.

Years later, long after my parents had divorced, I wasn't even sure if the incident with the poor man's toe had really happened. It had been so long ago and I had been so young and I hadn't thought about it in some time. But I was remembering it and trying to recall the details, when I had the disturbing thought that I may have invented it all. I asked my mother if she remembered it. She was eating a piece of toast at the breakfast table, so I suppose my timing wasn't good. She stopped chewing, as if stomach acid had suddenly boiled into her esophagus, and her eyes took on that vaguely alarmed and unfocused look she got when she was presented with something horrible. But then it pa.s.sed, and she swallowed.

It was his big toe, she said.

I found that hard to believe and said so. I asked was she certain.

I'm certain, she said. That's what made it so horrible.

I saw my father a couple of weeks later, though, and put the question to him. I told him what my mother had said.

He scoffed. It wasn't his big toe, he said. That would've been impossible. It was his little toe.

I didn't say anything.

It's just like your mother to make it into something worse than it actually was, he said.

We went back home that very afternoon of the accident, and a storm had pa.s.sed through. A tornado had hopped right over our neighborhood, which was in a low area between two modest ridges, and had snapped off the tops of several tall pines. One of the pine tops lay in our backyard, another in the street in front of our house. The air was gray and you could smell the spent, burnt residue of destructive energy in the air, feel it p.r.i.c.kling the skin, as if we were inside a big discharged gun barrel. Green leaves and small limbs were strewn across yards and in the street and on rooftops. A telephone pole leaned toward the ground, the wires on one side taut, those on the other side loose and hanging low toward the damp gra.s.s. Everything was wet and smoking.

Some incredible violence had occurred, and yet almost everything remained intact. There sat our little brick ranch-style house. There, the pair of mimosas in the yard where I crouched concealed in the fernlike leaves, dreaming of Tarzan. There, the azaleas beneath my and Ray's bedroom window, where every year our mother took an Easter photo of her boys, our bow ties and vests and hair flipped up in front. There, the picture window of the living room we used only at Christmas or when she and our father hosted their supper club. There, the inexplicable everyday, the oddness of being, the senseless belonging to this and not that. I was barely able to contain myself. Something in me wished it had all been blown to smithereens.

Chris Adrian.

The Black Square.

Henry tried to pick out the other people on the ferry who were going to the island for the same reason he was. He wasn't sure what to look for: black Bermuda shorts, an absence of baggage, too-thoughtful gazing at the horizon? Or just a terminal, hangdog look, a mask that revealed instead of hiding the gnarled little soul behind the face? But no one was wearing black, or staring forlornly over the rail. In fact, everyone was smiling. Henry looked pretty normal himself, a man in the last part of his young middle age dressed in plaid shorts and a T-s.h.i.+rt, a dog between his legs and a duffel bag big enough to hold a week's clothes at his side.

The dog was Bobby's, a black Lab named Hobart, borrowed for the ostensible vacation trip to make it less lonely. It was a sort of torture to have him along, since he carried thoughts of Bobby with him like biting fleas. But Henry loved Hobart as honestly as he had ever loved anything or anybody. And, in stark opposition to his master, the dog seemed to love Henry back. Henry was reasonably sure he would follow him, his paws fancy-stepping, through the black square. But he wasn't going to ask him to do that. He had hired an old lady to bring Hobart back to Cambridge at the end of the week.

He reached down and hugged the dog around the neck. Hobart craned his neck back and licked Henry's face. A little girl in enormous sungla.s.ses, who'd skibbled over twice already since they'd left Hyannis, did it again, pausing before the dog and holding out her hand to him. "Good holding out your hand for the doggie to sniff!" her mother called out from a neighboring bench, and smiled at Henry. "What's his name?" the girl asked. She hadn't spoken the other two times she'd approached.

"Blackheart's Grievous Despair," Henry said. Hobart gave up licking her hand and started to work on her shoe, which was covered in the ice cream she'd been eating a short while before.

"That's stupid," the girl said. She was standing close enough that Henry could see her eyes through the sungla.s.ses, and tell that she was staring directly into his face.

"So are you," he said. It was one of the advantages of his present state of mind, and one of the gifts of the black square, that he could say things like this now, in part because his long sadness had curdled his disposition, and in part because all his decisions had become essentially without consequence. He wasn't trying to be mean. It was just that there wasn't any reason anymore not to say the first thing that came into his mind.

The little girl didn't cry. She managed to look very serious, even in the ridiculously oversize sungla.s.ses, biting on her lower lip while she petted the dog. "No," she said finally, "I'm not. You are. You are the stupidest." Then she walked away, calmly, back to her mother.

He got surprises like this all the time these days, ever since he had decided to give up his social filters. A measured response from a five-year-old girl to his little snipe, a gift of flowers from his neighbor when he'd told her he didn't give a flying f.u.c.k about the recycling, a confession of childhood abuse from his boss in response to his saying she was an unpleasant individual. The last was perhaps not so surprising-every unpleasant individual, himself included, had a bevy of such excuses that absolved them of nothing. But there was something different about the world ever since he had discovered the square and committed himself to it. People go in, someone had written on the Black Square Message Board, which Henry called up over his bed every night before he went to sleep, but have you ever considered what comes OUT of it? Most of those who wrote there were a different sort of freak from Henry, but he thought the writer might mean what he wanted him to mean, which was those sort of little daily surprises, and more than that a funny sense of carefree absolution. Once you had decided to go in (he didn't subscribe to the notion, so popular on the board, that the square called you or chose you) things just stopped mattering in the way that they used to. With the pressure suddenly lifted off of every aspect of his life, it had become much easier to appreciate things. So many wonderful things have come to me since I accepted the call, someone wrote. It's too bad it can't last. And someone replied, You know that it can't.

The girl's mother was glaring now, and looked to be getting ready to get up and scold him, which might possibly have led to an interesting conversation. But it didn't seem particularly likely, and one surprise a day was really enough. Henry got up and walked to the bow of the ferry. Hobart trotted ahead, put his paws up on the railing, and looked back at him. The island was just visible on the horizon. Henry sat down behind the dog, who stayed up on the rail, sniffing at the headwind and looking back every now and then. Henry laughed and said, "What?" They sat that way as the island drew nearer and nearer. The view was remotely familiar-he'd seen it countless times when he was a little boy-though it occurred to him as he stared ahead that he had the same feeling, coming up on the island, that he used to get facing the other way and approaching the mainland: he was approaching a place that was strange, exciting, and a little alien, though it was only the square that made it that way now. Nantucket in itself was ordinary, dull, and familiar. You are especially chosen, a board acquaintance named Martha had written, when he'd disclosed that he had grown up on the island. f.u.c.k that, he had written back. But as they entered the harbor, he hunkered down next to the dog, who was going wild at the smells rolling out from the town and the docks. "Look, Hobart," he said. "Home."

Those who ascribed a will or a purpose to it thought it was odd that the square should have chosen to appear on Nantucket, one of the least important places on the planet, for all that the island was one of the richest. Those same people thought it might have demonstrated a sense of humor on the square's part to appear, of all the places it could have, in the middle of a summer-mansion bathroom, where some grotesquely rejuvenated old lady, clinging to her deluxe existence, might have stepped into it accidentally on her way out of the tub. But it had appeared on the small portion of the island that was still unincorporated, in a townie commune that had been turned subsequently into a government-sponsored science installation and an unofficial way station for the ever-dwindling and ever-renewing community of people who called themselves Black Squares.

Every now and then someone posted a picture of a skunk or a squirrel on the board, with a caption naming the creature Alpha or Primo or Columbus, and calling it the first pioneering Black Square. It was true that a number of small animals, cats and dogs and rabbits and even a few commune llamas, went missing in the days before the square was actually discovered by a ten-year-old boy who tried to send his little sister through it. Around her waist she wore a rope that led to her brother's hand; he wasn't trying to kill her. He had been throwing things in all day, rocks and sticks and one heavy cinder block, and finally a rabbit from the eating stock. His mother interrupted him before he could send his sister through. He had put a helmet on her, and given her a flashlight, sensing, as the story went on the board, that there was both danger and discovery on the other side.

There followed a predictable series of official investigations, largely m.u.f.fled and hidden from the eyes of the public, though it seemed that from the first missing rodent there was mention of the square on the boards. The incorporated portion of the island wanted nothing to do with it. Once the government a.s.sured them that it would be a very closely supervised danger, they more or less forgot about it, except to bemoan the invasion of their island by a new species of undesirable, one that didn't serve them in their homes or clubs. The new arrivals had a wild, reckless air about them, these people who had nothing to lose, and they made one uncomfortable, even if they did spend wildly and never hung around for very long. The incorporated folks hardly noticed the scientists, who once the townies had been cleared out never left the compound until they departed for good within a year, leaving behind a skeleton crew of people not bothered by unsolvable mysteries.

By then it had become obvious that there was nothing to be learned from the square-at least nothing profitable in the eyes of the government. It just sat there, taking whatever was given to it. It refused nothing (And isn't it because it loves everyone and everything perfectly, that it turns nothing and no one away? Martha wrote), but it gave nothing back. It emitted no detectable energy. No probe ever returned from within it, or managed to hurl any signal back out. Tethers were neatly clipped, at various and unpredictable lengths. No official human explorer ever went through, though an even dozen German shepherds leaped in obediently, packs on their backs and cameras on their heads. The experiments degraded, from the construction of delicate listening devices that bent elegantly over the edge of the square to the government equivalent of what the boy had been doing: tossing things in. The station was funded eventually as a disposal unit, and the government put out a discreet call across the globe for special and difficult garbage, not expecting, but not exactly turning away, the human sort that inevitably showed up.

Henry had contracted with his psychiatrist not to think about Bobby. "This is a condition of your survival," the man had told him, and Henry had not been inclined to argue. There had been a whole long run of better days, when he had been able to do it, but it took a pretty serious and sustained effort, and exercised some muscle in him that got weaker, instead of stronger, the more he used it, until he succ.u.mbed to fatigue. Now it was a sort of pleasure not to bother resisting. It would have been impossible, anyway, to spend time with Bobby's dog and not think of him, though he loved the dog quite separately from Bobby. It was a perfectly acceptable indulgence, in the long shadow of the square, to imagine the dog sleeping between them on their bed, though Hobart hadn't been around when they were actually together. And it was acceptable to imagine himself and Bobby together again-useless and agonizing, but as perfectly satisfying as worrying a painful tooth. It was even acceptable to imagine that it was he and Bobby, and not Bobby and his Brazilian bartender husband, who were about to have a baby together, a little chimera bought for them from beyond the grave by Bobby's fancy dead grandma.

Yet Bobby wasn't all he thought about. It wasn't exactly the point of the trip to torture himself that way, and whether the square represented a new beginning or merely an end to his suffering, he wasn't trying to spend his last days on the near side of the thing in misery. He was home, after all, though Nantucket Town did not feel much like home, and he didn't feel ready, at first, for a trip to the old barn off Polpis Road. But there was something-the character of the light and the way the heat seemed to hang very lightly in the air-that though unremembered, made the island feel familiar.

He showed the dog around. It was something to do; it had never been his plan to go right to the square, though there were people who got off the ferry and made a beeline for it. Maybe they were worried that they might change their mind if they waited too long. Henry wasn't worried about changing his mind or chickening out. The truth was he had been traveling toward the thing all his life, in a way, and while the pressure that was driving him toward it had become more urgent since he came to the island, he still wasn't in any particular hurry to jump in. There were things to say good-bye to, after all; any number of things to be done for the last time. He had spent his last sleepless night in Cambridge in a bed-and-breakfast down the street from where Bobby lived with his bartender, lying on the bed with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling and enumerating all those things he'd like to do one last time. He wasn't organized enough to make a list, but he'd kept a few of them in his head. It turned out to be more pleasant to do them with the dog than to do them alone, and more pleasant, in some ways, to do them for the dog instead of for himself. Last meals were better enjoyed if Hobart shared them with him-they ate a good deal of fancy takeout in the hotel room, Henry sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, Hobart lying on his belly with his face in a bowl resting between his legs. Henry made a tour of some dimly remembered childhood haunts, rediscovering them and saying good-bye to them at the same time: a playground on the harbor, a pond that he thought was Miacomet but might have been Monomoy, and finally the beach at Surfside.

He had pictures of himself at that beach on his phone, taken by his father during Henry's very well-doc.u.mented childhood. He was his father's last child, and the only one from his second marriage. His brothers were all much older than him, born when their father had been relatively poor, when he still made his living, despite his Haverford education and his well-received first book, playing piano in bars. Henry came in well after that, when there was money for cameras and camcorders and time, attention, and interest to take a picture of the baby every day. He had thumbed through them in bed the night before, showing them to Hobart, who somehow got conditioned to yawn every time he saw a picture of Henry at the beach with a bucket and a shovel. It was a less melancholy pastime, and less pathetic, to look at old pictures of himself, instead of pictures of himself and Bobby, though he did that, too, late into the night, with Hobart's sleeping head on his chest.

They spent the morning making their way slowly down the beach by throws of a rubber football the size of a child's fist. Henry had a reasonably good arm: once or twice he threw the ball far enough that Hobart disappeared around a dune to go in search of it. He daydreamed considerably as they went, and thought indulgently of Bobby as Hobart leaped and galumphed and face-planted into the sand. He had to be persuaded every time to give up the ball, running back as if to drop it at Henry's feet, then veering away and playing a prancing, high-stepping keep-away until Henry caught him around the neck and pulled open his jaws. It made him a defective sort of retriever, and it doubled the work of play with him, but Henry didn't mind it.

He laughed at the dog, and thought of his father laughing behind the camera at him, and thought of something Bobby had said to him more than once. He'd accused Henry of being unable to delight in him, and had said that this was part of the reason that Henry had never been properly able to love him, or anybody, really. Bobby had said deflating things like that all the time-he'd kept an a.r.s.enal of them always at hand and ready to spoil any occasion-and the Bobby in Henry's head still kept up a running commentary years after they broke up. But it had been fair, for Bobby to say he was delightless, a million years before, when Henry had been an entirely different person, selfish and self-loathing and more in love with his own misery than with the man who wanted to marry him.

All that had changed. It was far too late to make any difference with Bobby, but now he was the sort of person who couldn't help but take pleasure in the foolish exuberance of a clumsy black Lab. "Look, Bobby," he said quietly as Hobart raced after the football. "Look at him go." He shook his head at himself, and sat down, then lay down on his back with his knees bent and his arms thrown out at his sides, staring up at the sky for a while before he closed his eyes. "I'm tired, Hobart," he said, when the dog came back and started to lick his face. "Sit down and relax for a minute." But the cold nose kept pressing on his eyelids, and the rough tongue kept dragging across his cheek and nose and lips. He swatted at the dog's head, and grabbed his collar, and reached with his other hand to scratch the Lab's neck.

In another moment his face was being licked from the other side. When Henry opened his eyes he discovered that this was Hobart. The dog he had been petting was someone else entirely, another black Lab, but with a face that was much pointier (and frankly less handsome) than Hobart's. The owner came trotting up behind him. He was standing in front of the sun. Henry only registered his hairy chest and baseball cap before the man asked him, "Why are you making out with my dog?"

One heard various stories about Lenny. He was alternately from San Francisco, or Houston, or Pittsburgh, or Nantucket, or someplace no one had ever heard of. He was a teenager, or an old man, or in his middle age. He was perfectly healthy, or terminally ill. He was happily married, or heartbroken and bereft. He was a six-foot-eight black man or he was a diminutive honky. He might not even have been the first one to go through. It was only certain that he'd been the first to announce that he was going, and the founding poster on what became the Black Square Message Board. As the first official Black Square (the anonymous individuals who might have pa.s.sed in before him, as well as the twelve German shepherds, together held that t.i.tle unofficially) he had become something of a patron saint for everyone who proposed to go after him. Lenny knows was a fairly common way to preface a plat.i.tude on the board, and his post, this is not a suicide, had become a motto of sorts for the whole group. The post had a ceci n'est pas une pipe quality about it, but it was consistent with what became the general att.i.tude on the board, that the square offered an opportunity to check into another universe as well as the opportunity to check out of this one. He should have said, This is not MERELY a suicide, Martha wrote. Not everything she wrote was stupid, and Henry was inclined to agree with her on this count. There was an element of protest to Lenny's leap into the square: it was a f.u.c.k-you to the ordinary universe the likes of which it had not previously been possible to utter. By entering into the square you could express your disdain for the declined world, so far fallen, to some people's minds, from its potential for justice and beauty, as effectively as you could by blowing your head off, but instead of just dying, you might end up someplace else, someplace different-indeed, someplace full of people just like you, people who had leaped away from their own declined, disappointing lives.

The pointy-nosed Lab's name was Dan; his master's name was Luke. Henry ought not to have talked to him beyond saying "Sorry!" Meeting yet another handsome, witty, accomplished fellow who was utterly uninteresting on account of his failure to be Bobby was not part of the plan for his last days on the near side of the square. Henry tried to walk away, but the dogs were already fast friends, and Hobart wouldn't come. The man was smiling and looking at Henry in a particular way as Henry tugged on Hobart's collar. He was short and muscled up and furry, and had a pleasant, open face. Henry was trying to think of something inappropriate to say, but nothing was coming to mind. The man stuck out his hand and introduced himself. Henry, his left hand still on Hobart's collar, stuck out his own, s.h.i.+fting his balance as he did, so when Hobart lunged at his new friend he pulled Henry over. Henry ought to have let go of the stranger's small, rough, appealing palm-he thought as he squeezed it harder that it felt like a blacksmith's palm, and that it went along nicely with the man's blacksmith build-but he gripped it harder as he fell, and pulled the other man over on top of him. They were momentarily a pile of bodies, human and canine, Luke on Henry on Hobart, with Dan on top of all of them. Henry got a paw in his face, and a dog nail scratched his cheek, and his face was pressed hard into Luke's chest. Luke smelled like coffee and salt, and tasted salty too, when Henry thought he had accidentally tasted the sweat on the man's hairy chest, but it turned out that it was his own blood on his lip, trickling from the scratch.

The injury, though it wasn't totally clear which dog had inflicted it, prompted profuse apologies and an invitation to dinner. Henry felt sure he should have declined. All his plans aside, he knew that he wasn't going to be interested in this man as certainly as he knew that the sun got a little colder every day, or that eventually the whole island would be incorporated as surely as Hilton Head or Manhattan, and that the rich folk would have to ferry in their household help from Martha's Vineyard. It was inevitable. But he considered, as he wiped the blood off his face and listened to Luke apologize, that he might be overlooking another gift of the square, and that it didn't matter that loving Bobby had ruined him, and smothered in the cradle any possible relations.h.i.+p with any other man. He had no future with anyone, but he had no future at all. That took the pressure off dinner. And it was something else to say good-bye to, after all: dinner with a handsome man.

"Sometimes I kind of like being the only h.o.m.o in a ten-mile radius," Luke said while they were eating. "Or almost the only one." Henry had asked what had possessed him to come to Nantucket for a vacation. When Henry c.o.c.ked his head at that, Luke asked him the same question.

"Something similar," Henry said, reaching down to pet Hobart's head, a gesture that was becoming his new nervous tic. They were sitting outside at a restaurant in 'Sconset, both dogs at their feet and a bowl of clams between them. Dan was just as well-behaved as Hobart was. They both sat staring up at the sky or at another table, or staring intently into each other's eyes, leaning forward occasionally to sniff closer and closer, touching noses and then touching tongues before going back to looking distracted and disinterested until they started it all over again with a sudden glance. Henry and Luke took turns saying, "I think they like each other."

"I was born here," Henry added. Luke was smiling at him-he seemed to be one of those continuous smilers, the sort of people that Henry generally disliked (Bobby, until he had left, had always appeared perpetually troubled), but there was something sad, or at least resigned, in Luke's smile that Henry found appealing.

"I didn't think anybody was born on Nantucket," Luke said. "I thought people just magically appeared here once they made enough money."

"They do," Henry said. "Sort of. There's a ceremony. You claw your way naked through a pool of coins and they drape you in a white robe and everyone chants, 'One of us! One of us!' But if you're poor you just get squeezed out of a v.a.g.i.n.a and they put your name on a plaque in the hospital."

"You have a plaque?"

"Sure. Henry David Conroy. May 22, 1986."

"I figured you were special," Luke said, managing to smile differently, more warmly and more engagingly and more attractively. Henry looked away. It was part of his problem that flattering attention from handsome men only made him more sad, and made him feel Bobby's rejection more achingly and acutely. The handsomer the man, and the more flattering the attention, the greater his sadness. To date, anybody else had only discovered in miserable degrees how thoroughly and hopelessly they were not Bobby. But there was always that homunculus in Henry, weakly resistant to the sadness, that protested in a meek little voice whenever he said good-bye early, or declined an invitation up to someone's apartment. Proximity to the square made it a little bolder, and Henry thought he could hear it shouting something about saying good-bye to sucking on a nice c.o.c.k.