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like climbing the same three stairs over and over. We started making up songs that had no choruses, just one
cursed, merciless verse after verse, complaint like a flipping knife wandering around, debating, resting no place
at all. In line after line, we tried to compose meaningful phrases with twinned endings:sinister to rhyme with
minister, cubic with pubic, flatbread with flatbed,cheap ultima online gold, bearable reason with terrible treason, lucky with
Kentucky’well, the songs angrily made no sense. We took turns, each of our verses sounding like the rhymes of
stalkers bleakly drunk with love, a little hope like dust beneath our nails, from where we clawed, though all was
flawed,buy wow gold, still, now, our lives were shorn of plot,warhammer online power leveling, cuz baby you were all I got, waiting out here in the parking lot,
beneath the stars, outside of bars, there I am, baby, there, there, idling in the fescue, waiting for your rescue, but
you’re nowhere, why don’t you care that love is rare’ my love is rare!’I'm going to drive to see ‘ what you think
about me.
We reached a point at which it was a good thing there was no chorus.
One night we got dressed in bag-lady clothes, got a shopping cart filled with beer, and went down by the railroad
tracks just to howl like wolves. This was late-stage Sufism, mid to late.
‘When we make our CD?’ said Murph as we trudged back home, ‘we’ll put a razor blade right inside each and
every one.’
‘And those little bottles of gin,’ I added. ‘And a pistol.’
‘You’re great,buy world of warcraft gold,’ said Murph, putting her arm around me.
‘Yeah, well, I feel like I’m headed for a future where I’m just every guy’s sister,’ I bleated. ‘I think the fact that I
readThe Rules in Mandarin didn’t help any.’
Murph smiled, but what she said next was unsettling. She put her hands tenderly to my face and said, ‘Look at
you! You’re nobody’s sister.’
Outside in the flowerbeds the yellow irises had unfurled in the sun with their lolling nectarine-pit tongues. There
was a kind of ticking, humming all around, as if every living thing were contemplating bursting.
‘I’m wondering why Emmie has been singing this particular song,’ said Sarah, pointedly, in the kitchen. She had
her chef’s hat on, the one that wasn’t a conventional toque but a brimless canvas cap.
‘A song?’
?’Prairie Pete, he got cold feet?”
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘I made that up.’
‘That’s OK,’ she said, as if I needed forgiving, which I could see I might.
‘I’ve also been singing regular standards with her,’ I added hopefully.
‘Yes,’ she said. ?’I Been Working on the Railroad.’ I’ve heard her sing that. There’s just two things I’m worried
about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.’
I wasn’t sure I was hearing things correctly. Her sense of humor was still not always explicit or transparent or of
a finely honed rhythm, and it sometimes left me not in the same room with it but standing in the hall. The words
‘You’re serious?’ flew out of my mouth.
‘Kind of.’ She looked right through me. ‘I’m not sure.’ And then she went upstairs, as if to go figure it out. When
she came back down she added, ‘Correct subject-verb agreement is best when children are learning language, so
be careful what you sing. It’s an issue when raising kids of color. A simple grammatical matter can hold them

what a boy’s love could do in a poem or a song. ‘Driftless Dan, he had no plan / Prairie Pete, he got cold feet /
Great Lake Jake was hard to take ?’ And so we would give back our own grieving songs of sorrow at love’s
mystifying impersonations. We even had a song called ‘Mystifying Impersonation.’ Also a sad, slow one titled
‘Why Don’t the Train Stop Here?’ which Murph thought was too country; even when I changed the don’t to
won’t, she found it unfocused,2moons power leveling, with its verse about a church turned into condos, though I liked that part best. ‘It’s
like ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,?’ I protested.
‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘Believe me. It’s not.’ She knew how to speak without gentleness or malice, either one, and
preferred my song ‘Everyone Is You’in Your Dreams,’ based on something someone told me once about dreams,
but also a defiant anthem to rally us against the narcissism of the betraying lover! Oh, yeah: impotent vengeance,
baby, sing your song! What could be better than words that worked every which way’ Who cared if the train
stopped here or not’ I would lay in the rhythm with my electric bass and she would throw herself into that
xylophone with ecstasy and pain, a nearby cigarette perched on a saucer, sending out its smoke like the tiny
campfire of two tiny prisoner squaws. Who knew she could play’
‘It’s really just a toy,’ she said. ‘Anyone can.’
‘That’s not really true,cheap wow gold,’ I said, unconvinced and impressed. Murph’s hands and arms moved up and down the
keyboard with the undulating movements of a squirrel’sine and cosine interlocking. She would then suddenly
stop and point at me with her right mallet, indicating that it was time for my solo, and I would let it rip’or try.
Murph liked our collaborations better than such lone efforts by me as ‘Dog-Doo Done Up as Chocolates for My
Brother,’ and we seemed best on the rocking ones, like ‘Summer Evening Lunch Meat,’ a song we had written,
combining the most beautiful phrase in English with the ugliest, and therefore summing up our thoughts on love.
‘Summer evening’ was what God had provided. ‘Lunch meat’ was the hideous human body itself. When I lay the
rhythm in with my bass,warhammer online power leveling, when I did it right, Murph could take over with the xylophone and it sounded great.
Well, maybe not great. A little stupid, but sweet. ‘Let your bass-face shine!’ she shouted. Probably my features
were contorted in concentration and transport. In between the more rollicking stuff, in useful weariness, we
found ourselves sailing even on our waltzy ballads:
Did you take off for Heaven
and leave me behind’
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Darlin’, I’d join you
if you didn’t mind.
I’d climb up that staircase
past lions and bears,buy ultima online gold,
but it’s locked
at the foot of the stairs.

Are you in paradise
with someone who cares’
Oh, throw down the key to the stairs.
One can see shining steps
and think love is enough,
Then sit at the bottom and wait.
The climb up to sweetness needs more than my love:
Darlin’, please just open the gate ‘
Can someone just open the gate’
‘I want to write something, too,’ said Murph one evening, and because it was night, and because we’d had two
beers apiece,2moons power leveling, she grabbed my bass and picked awkwardly away at a new song, written right there from scratch,
from a four-stringed see-through, each of us making up a line and the other one supplying the next line, and so
on.
Why did I let you make off with my head’
Now when I go out I pretend that you’re dead.
But if I glimpse you,
don’t know what I’ll do,cheap uo gold,
’cause I’ve never been as crazy
’bout someone as crazy as you.
Madness is sadness’
I loved you the most.
Now my future’s the house
for your lunatic ghost.
Why are the leaves still bright green
and the sky so damn blue’
Can’t they see I’m just crazy
’bout someone as crazy as you’
She wanted to rhyme ‘don’t abhor us,buy world of warcraft gold, that would bore us, just adore us’ with?’Which is it?’ she asked. ‘Is
itclitoris or cli toris?’
I didn’t know. Why didn’t I know’ ‘It may depend on which you have,ultima gold,’ I said.
To say all this made us laugh our heads off does not begin to express its consolations. Soon every night I’d get
out my electric and we’d do every tune we knew how in easy keys of G-minor and E-minor, with riffs that were
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returned, which if it had been earlier would have been a slight bummer as I had recently been using her stuff,
bullshit things like her ‘hair ionizer,’ which I had imagined had made my hair shine and took the static out,buy wow gold, and
her mister’a ‘handsome mister,’ I used to call it’which lightly sprayed mineral water on your face. But as
brokenhearted as I felt now, I was using nothing, just letting static electricity streak my hair across my teeth! I
had let my face crumble to sand. And then I just walked in one afternoon and there she was,warhammer online gold, sitting on the couch.
She’d arrived the same day as the xylophone and had herself just wheeled it in off the porch.
‘This is cool,’ she said, pointing at it.
‘Hi!’ I exclaimed. I dropped my books and hugged her. I was so happy to see her.
‘Yes.’ She smiled.
‘Are you’ High?’
‘As a kite?’
‘As the Hubble!’ She looked tired. ‘I feel like a veteran.’
‘Of highness?’
‘Of what, then’ Hineyness?’ Ritual ribaldry was part of the Muwallahin Sufic way, if I remembered correctly.
‘A veteran of the gender wars.’
‘Yeah, well, me, too. But I’m afraid those were never declared.’
‘Fucking do-nothing Congress! And we never got a parade or anything!’
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‘We’ve got marching bands,’ I said, pointing in the direction of the stadium.
‘That’s not a parade,buy ultima online gold,’ she said.
‘It’s a quasi parade.’
She and her boyfriend had also broken up. ‘He put me in the freezer,’ she cried, ‘and didn’t even have the
decency to chop me up first!’ And so together we stayed in our apartment, smoking cigarettes and making up
tunes for our grief. ‘He played me like a yard sale lute! If he calls here, give him the tone, man.’
But he never did.
‘Do you realize,’ I said, ‘that when women have orgasms scans show large parts of their brains go completely
absent on the screen?’
‘Yes, well, that corresponds with my anecdotal research in the field.’
‘Mine,cheap ultima gold, too.’
I would get out my bass, though the strap was always slipping?’Wait, let me put this strap on,’ I invariably said,
and Murph would cry, ‘Hoo-hee!’ There wasn’t an innuendo anywhere she couldn’t be the first to locate and
illumine with her hoots.
We played all the things I’d recently made up. Though in real life a boy’s love was a meager thing, we liked

be slow and sparse. I ran past a block I usually took but that was being ripped up for sewage pipe replacement,
and in the middle of the street was a municipal barricade with a sign that said ROAD CLOSED. Beneath it but
still on the sign a graffiti artist had sprayed, in black,I love you. In the sky were starry poisons, like the hundred
spiders that, throughout a human life span,tibia gold, are said to drop into one’s mouth, while sleeping with a dropped jaw.
I ran north and north and north and could perhaps have run all the way to Canada, where, paralyzed with sadness
and exhaustion, my arms and fingers would stiffen upward and I would, in one of grief’s mythic transformations,
become a maple tree, my sappy tears cooked down to syrup for someone’s flapjacks.
The interesting thing about a wound in the foot was that the pressure of just standing on it, not babying it,
stanched the bleeding and healed the thing: Was that a robustly New Age truth or what’ ROAD CLOSEDI love
you. When I got home I stripped naked and climbed into a filling tub, sat waist-deep in water and let loose with
deeper weeping. The toilet paper I had wrapped around my toe was shredded and came off in milky wisps and
fronds,12sky gold, floating all around in the water, and when I went under completely’to disappear, to clean, to alter my
conscious state, whatever that was’the shreds swam toward my head and clung to my hair. When I could hold my
breath no longer, I burst back up and saw that the warmth of the bath had caused my toe to start bleeding again,
so that bright crimson swirled riotously through the water like life sprung free’though it was really a hello from
death. I got out of the bath, wrapped myself in a towel, and then spun and spun,cheap tibia gold, the towel falling away, my wet
hair whipping droplets through the room, and I kept whirling until I felt neither death nor life but a kind of
dizzying transport, which I was pretty sure wasn’t Sufism, or the radiant depths of my soul lifting from
bottomland to lovely storm: it was more like low blood pressure combined with PE’something I’d experienced a
lot as a child’a slight separation from the body, to serve as a reminder of what you were.
V
The clocks were wound forward an hour, and light flew down early and persisted into evening. My sleep was
shallow, and the nights were long and full of chiding conversation from people who seemed actually to be in the
room. But when I awoke there was no one. The apartment was muggy. The prairie, increasingly, I had noticed,
could not hang on to spring. It was as if there were not enough branches to grip it, hills to hold it’it could get
little traction,tibia gold, really, and the humid heat of summer slid right in. Soon the chiding conversation of hovering
people was replaced with a feeling that I was being bitten by bugs I couldn’t see. Everything I ate seemed to

collect in a clayey ball in my bowel, and my pulse would stop in my sleep then start up again in a hurry,
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discombobulated, waking me from dreams of blind alleys, naked running, and wrath. I would get out of bed with
the scary meat-step of a foot that had gone to sleep and toenails that had loosened oddly, lost a firm grip on the
actual toe’all this from a broken heart.
I had not mopped or swept the floors in months. I had used paper towels when there was a spill and hoped
that eventually the entire apartment floor would get wiped up this way. This method of cleaning the floor, in
patches, I imagined was like writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human
condition there was to be said. But it didn’t really work that way,twelve sky 2 gold, even in poetry: grimy corners remained while
certain floorboards got burnished to a slippery hellish gleam. Sometimes, when out of paper towels, I would use
one of the wipes I often packed in my backpack for Mary-Emma, and I would start with the counters and work
down: it seemed I could clean almost an entire room with just one’that was the sort of delusional housekeeping I
was becoming a devotee of.
Not one person asked me about Reynaldo, which made me realize just how private and isolated our affair had
been. Temporary and vanished. LikeBrigadoon with headscarves. My own emotions felt a disgrace. There was
apparently no indication left of me in his apartment’except the blood’and no one came knocking on my door. I
felt as blue as the lips of a fish, which was really just a line from a song I had going through my head. ‘The grass
don’t care / the wind is free / the prairie’once a sea’don’t sing no song for me.’ Bad grammar was totemic for
bass player grief.
What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling,12sky2 gold, and I was realizing that all new feelings
from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on
actual physical form,cheap tibia money, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse. I swung my hair
and slapped the face of my bass like Jaco Pastorius,tcos gold, squinting the neck into a fretless blur; perhaps one day I
would dig those frets out with a file and fill them with epoxy, too.
Sometimes I would awake too early in my bed and would feel my foot flap beneath the sheets, and I wouldn’t
know at first that it was mine. I felt only the movement of the cool sheet, and it felt like someone else was there,
in the bed with me, but I would quickly turn to see there was no one; it was always just me. At night before I fell
asleep I was not above staring at the phone.Are you there’ Yes. Are you falling asleep’ Not really. How many
fingers am I holding up’
In reality, no one asked me any questions whatsoever. No one said a word, except Sarah.
‘Did you see in the papers the story about this student who disappeared’ They found blood in his apartment but
they don’t know whose.’
‘Really,’ I said.
‘This wasn’t the guy who was taking pictures of Emmie, was it’ Or a friend of his?’
‘Not that I know of.’

‘You see, that’s the problem:Not that I know of. There’s room for possibility.’
Her look at me was a darting thing. I just stared at her without seeing all that much,12sky2 gold, and I must have looked crazy
with unhappiness, because she then came up to me and smoothed my sweater sleeve and petted my arm. ‘I’m
sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I’m going on like this.’
‘It’s OK,12sky gold,’ I said. It was quasi OK.
She returned to her theme menus. Invasive Species Night: the mustard-vine gnocchi; the steamed zebra mussels;
the soup of wild carrot and wild parsnip; the salad of chicory, mustard garlic, fig buttercup, watercress, and
burdock. Napkins of human hair! Well, that I just invented, piping up to amuse her, but she said, ‘Hmm. Yum.’
And then there was Endangered Species Night: wild rice and free-range bison; American eel gratin and
Chanticleer chicken with short and thick parsnips. Eating endangered species made some ecological sense, she
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claimed’if it was tasty and grew popular, people would save it?’but I wasn’t paying complete attention. The
general idea was that food always survived. I wondered.
‘I’m off to the Mill!’ Sarah would shout up the stairs. I could see the edge of her white jacket.
‘Ciao, Mama!’ Mary-Emma would shout down. She was saying so many words these days. ‘I feepy,’ she said
when she wanted to go to bed. She loved to watch old Esther Williams movies, which I brought her from the
university library, but they either revved her up or wore her out.
‘OK. Let’s go.’
‘I die,’ she said.
‘Well, someday. But not for a very long time.’
‘I die into the pool!’ And she took a flying leap onto her new futon, which Sarah had just bought to transition her
out of the crib.
Twice,12sky2 gold, back in my apartment, the phone rang, and when I went to answer it there was just all this terrible noise:
muffled speech, electronic moaning, whooshing sounds of water. ‘Hello?’ I cried repeatedly into the mouthpiece.
But I heard only eerie underwater groans. The caller ID on our Radio Shack phone said ‘cellular call,tibia gold,’ nothing
more. Dialing star-69 gave me nothing. Later, comically and perhaps correctly, I imagined it was Reynaldo’s cell
phone, that he still had me on speed dial and accidentally bumped the keypad and was taking me into the
bathroom with him. Some bathroom somewhere. Probably it was flushing noises I was hearing. Or maybe he
was on the other side of the world in a hot zone and his phone was trying to blow up something’it wasn’t called a
cell phone for nothing’and the secret blow-up code had instead misdialed and reached romantic interference: me.
I began to miss Murph. All I needed was her company, a sense of her presence again. Every day I felt that if
she would somehow come back into my life, things would be brighter.
And then astonishingly, she did. As if I’d wished it on a lucky penny: at this perfect time for me, Murph

‘Maybe. But maybe not.’ These were the words of a child. But it didn’t mean they were untrue. ‘Perhaps you are
being recruited by a plant. What if you are a victim of a scheme?’
‘What if Iam the plant,’ he said, feigning playfulness. ‘What if I am the scheme?’
‘Listen! The jihadist leaders’they don’t respect outsiders. They think these fervent recruits are all crazy, coming
from another country as they do, and they use them and laugh at them.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘The Donegal don. On a day when you were absent.’
‘He knows Arabic and collects chatter. That’s what someone told me.’
‘He ‘collects chatter’! Listen to you!’
I just stared at him,swg power leveling, feeling this was it: that I would never see him again.
‘It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing,’ he repeated. ‘It is not a war that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong
things that are the wrong things.’
It was like Gertrude Stein speaking from inside a burka. I continued to step backwards, and my bare toe hit
something sharp, perhaps a tiny carpenter’s nail poking up from the floorboards. In a kind of yoga stance I lifted
up my foot, which was bleeding. I squeezed and I could see blood drop darkly to the floor, though nothing was
stuck inside. Lifting my foot, however, just seemed to cause it to drip more. There was that roll of toilet paper on
the windowsill,cheap tales of pirates gold, and I hobbled over and ripped some off, winding it around my toe.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked, sounding almost like the sweet boy I knew him to be, deep down, although that part no
longer mattered.
‘Yeah. It doesn’t hurt,’ I said.
‘They think I’m part of a cell, but I’m not,star wars credits, I swear. I hope you will always believe that.’
‘In the name of Allah’oh, yes, I believe.’
I put my shoes back on.
It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train
starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives
up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the
platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.
‘In the name of Allah.’
In the name of la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. I took off, out into the street, crying. I ran and ran and never turned
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around and no one came running after me. I ran past the Muslim Students’ League, a small house not far from
Reynaldo’s, painted turquoise and white; a makeshift mosque of some sort, I knew, had been constructed in the
back. Reynaldo himself had been part of a team that had helped paint it. At this time of night no one was in or
near it at all; at times during the day I had seen it ominously busy. Nothing,tcos gold, I thought, should be busy. All should

completely packed up and gone. Locating the living him would be like finding a miner in a collapsed mine: I
could drill and dig and shine lights into various passageways,tcos gold, but the likelihood of my seeing him again, at least
as he once was,sotnw vis, well, the chances were not that good.
‘You avoid a lot of difficult things in conversation,’ I said.
‘I hope so!’
‘You lied to me,’ I said finally.
‘A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.’
This sounded like one of the many fortune cookie fortunes marking time in the pages of my books. ‘I was never
faithless to you.’
‘Not in your definitions, no.’
‘Is this where you go on about desiccated America’ Don’t you understand’ I agree with you!’
He said nothing.
‘You’re not taking flying lessons, I hope!’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
A roll of toilet paper and two white pills shone from the windowsill near me as I backed away. ‘What are those?’
I said,cheap tales of pirates gold, pointing at the pills. In my chest my heart had gone from the rapid flicking of a playing card on bike
spokes to the loud erratic knock of a sneaker in a dryer.
‘They are for emergencies. And for cleanliness, obviously. The pills’ They’re from Brazilian potatoes’two
interests of yours.’
‘Really.’
‘Potatoes and Brazil.’
? 105 312 163 3
‘I understood what you meant.’ Fear and sorrow flared up simultaneously like fires that put each other out.
Feelings of any constructive sort deserted me. ‘As much as you want this world to end,cheap star wars galaxies credits, it can’t. The seeds to
everything are being stored, as we speak, in boxes in the permafrost of Norway.’
‘Who will find them?’
‘People will.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’
‘You are?’ On the other windowsill was a small package of tampons. ‘Why do you have those?’
‘In case of emergencies. Worst-case scenarios: they stanch wounds.’
‘When they ask you to name my friends, you will have to say you don’t know, because you don’t know.’
‘I don’t know.’ Why didn’t I know’ ‘This kind of political and spiritual despair,’ I said desperately, recalling
something once heard on a Wednesday. ‘It’s mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small.’
He smiled but he kindly didn’t laugh. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said.

‘One must listen to God.’
‘Well, God should speak up. He mumbles.’
‘He has made us his messengers.’
‘How nice for him that he has his own staff and some out-of-town offices.’
‘We are his sheep?’
‘I didn’t mean that kind of staff.’
?’as well as his wolves.’
‘That sounds really, really complicated.’
‘Mankind is the source of all suffering.’
‘And the source of all God.’ I had crossed a line. ‘But as I said, the creation is often greater than what created it.’
Hubris or intelligent design’
He was silent, with a smile that wasn’t a smile. I found myself falling toward him, as if the rush of feeling tearing
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through me could magically be made into useful affection: perhaps if I tried to kiss him’but he pulled away. And
then slowly I got up, stepped back, one careful step at a time as he spoke. My crabapple branch had fallen near
‘There are a billion Muslims in the world,tales of pirates money,’ he said.
‘So, what’ I should be able to find another one?’
He fixed me with a powerful stare. He had that ability to summon up great concentration in his face and eyes.
‘There is that possibility.’ For a moment pity for us both glistened his eyes. ‘You can’t get blood from a stone,’
he said sadly. Referring, I supposed, to love. It was an expression he liked and had used before with me.
‘Yes, you can,sword of the new world vis,’ I said. I was always trying.
‘You can?’
‘One can. You can.’
‘How is that done?’
‘You go to a quarry.’
‘A quarry?’
‘Yeah, if you go to a quarry there is always some body that’s been dumped there.’
He laughed.
‘The Koran doesn’t prohibit you from laughing at gruesome humor?’ I would mock him a little’why not’
‘No,’ he said.
‘In every book there’s a lot of white spaces?’
‘Silences ?’
‘So who knows what’s going on,tales of pirates money, really,tales of pirates money, between the lines’ All those meaningful silences!’
But then, feeling he was being mocked, he let his face go bloodlessly stony, and suddenly he looked finally and