The Utopian

By Sam Munson.

“Two days before his forty-fourth birthday the authorities release an obscure writer (whom I’ll call, with amazing presumption, Telemachus) from prison.”

A short story.

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So: two days before his forty-fourth birthday (according to whatever foreign power has seized control of my already cramped and stinging hand) the authorities release an obscure writer (whom I’ll call, with amazing presumption, Telemachus) from prison. He’s served eighteen years. He went in voluntarily. His interrogators threatened the life of his girlfriend. But when she heard how quickly he’d confessed, she ran off with someone, a guy Telemachus knew vaguely from university. He learned this second-hand, in one of the letters his editor (his only contact with the outside world, in those days) smuggles in through a bribed guard.

Telemachus produces six books while in prison. By some quirk in the habits of fate, their appearance causes him no trouble. (Conversely: the authorities lack the energy to display their strength.) Three of these books are memorable. Sublimity: the story of single hour, encompassing a tank driver’s death in the desert, told in agonizing, pellucid detail. Nights of Tycho Brahe: an asylum nurse’s chapters-long love letter to a blind female patient. And Archilocus: a Polish prince, during a night of revelry, recalls the victories and crushing defeats of his feudal childhood. All six enjoy undisputable critical success, although they sell fewer copies than his first book, The Sick Man, in which Jesus reveals his real motives. (Books about Jesus, and his inner life, have retained enduring popularity in my country.) Telemachus’s adventures in prison are too boring and jocular to recount in detail. As a political, he gets beaten up by real criminals a few times. He doesn’t get raped, not even once in eighteen years, which he finds out (also from his editor) is unusual. And in truth, because he works at such a swift and grinding pace, and because his cell-block’s head guard is corrupt enough to allow in reams of paper, he has only two real events to remember. His first epileptic seizure, which happens the morning after the final, untidy draft of Nights leaves the prison. And, falling shortly before release day, his last.

It begins as it always does, with the scent of a distant fire, a faint mechanical hum in his ears, and the image of his old girlfriend, the one who ran off, as she turns her face to him a final time and strides into the blank light of their open apartment door. Her clear gaze expresses not moral horror but disgust, disgust at a grievous solecism or a publicly-shown weakness. This is how he has, for nearly a decade, imagined her receiving the news of his confession. And this image has been his most constant companion, except for the feverish desire to write. Telemachus is lying in bed when he feels the fit coming on; he starts yelling for the guard, who is slow to arrive. Then light bulges and bursts inside of him and time dilates or contracts until it loses meaning. He falls out of bed and smashes his head against the black-painted iron frame. When the guard does come, walking his first-shift rounds, he discovers Telemachus in the aftermath of his seizure, face down on the floor. He’s torn a large gash above his temple, and his short graying hair is thick with blood. (His bare feet are the first thing the guard sees.) He’s groaning when the medics get him out of the cell, and fully conscious by the time he arrives in the infirmary.

Telemachus remembers that day clearly because of the break in routine, and because it is the day they award the Nobel Prize in literature. He knows this from a folded newspaper someone has left tented on the tacky, hairy floor. He scans the paper for football scores in vain, only then turning to the culture section, which trumpets the news of the Prize as though it isn’t awarded every year. The Committee gives it this time to a tall woman from Sweden with colorless hair rolled into a tire-shaped bun, whose face expresses an intense and pompous sadness. The article’s writer praises the recipient in a way that suggests she hasn’t read any of the woman’s books, and drones on and on about the history of the Prize. The picture of the winner, however, fascinates Telemachus, in his bed of convalescence, and he stares at her oblong face for hours at a time as he recovers, smiling to himself.

His sentence is officially up two weeks later. He’s been a model prisoner, so the political courts, encouraged by his meekness, allow his release back into society on schedule, no deceptions or foot-dragging. He returns to his old neighborhood in the capital and takes an apartment. It’s not far from the one he rented right out of university, into which he moved the meager lineaments of his life, his books and desk, the pallet he slept on. He remembers it all vividly. His room was small and square, with a skewed floor and grimy walls, harboring an eternally rattling toilet. The lobby was opulent, sentried with artificial, maniacally green ficus. The locations of our boredom and secret triumphs stay with us far longer than azure vistas, greenwoods, splendid deserts, faces. The morning after he moves into the new place, the showerhead comes away from the immaculate tiled wall and a battering column of water slams into his chest, and he laughs until he collapses. That night, he dreams the central structures of his next book, and they fill him with calm anticipation, instead of the usual paranoia and disgust. When he wakes he feels no panicked pressure to start work immediately. The book’s form grows clearer and clearer the more he refuses the urge to write. He busies himself with deliberately mundane and even sordid tasks. He badgers his publishers about money and sleeps with a prostitute. He hires an assistant, with the curious name of Marina Korb, who comes every day to help with business matters and correspondence. His fits, which had occurred roughly once every two weeks during his incarceration, stop entirely. And on a sap-scented October morning, after six months of joyous inactivity, he writes the first lines of the book now regarded as his masterwork, the keystone in the unbreakable arch of his reputation, the book echoing through all his other books, the book containing all his other books: Earthly Paradise.

Earthly Paradise opens with insidious simplicity. It’s set in New York City (a city Telemachus never once visited). The protagonist, Henry Stoner, is a young policeman, twenty-three, who has just been promoted to sergeant. One morning, one October morning, he reports for his shift. Two patrol officers are bringing a prostitute in for questioning, and as they march her past Henry, she shouts out his full name: Henry August Stoner. Nothing more. She vanishes into the complicated twilight of the city’s judicial and punitive apparatus, and Henry can’t find her. He also can’t sleep, though he’s not worried or frightened that she knows his name without ever having met him. He spends hours before and after (and sometimes during) his shifts driving aimlessly up and down the avenues and streets where the prostitutes ply their trade, peering out of his dusty car, looking for her. He tracks her with no success for weeks.

Until, in the teeth of a grey December dawn, he discovers her, leaning against a stone angel flanked by two orange mesh trashcans. She gets into his car without hesitation and tells him her name is Sophie. All this has happened before, she tell him, and Henry asks what she means, and she sweeps her thin, bruise-stained arm out in a gesture that encompasses the entire horizon. He can see that she is out of her mind on something. But he lets her stay in the passenger seat, and, after a minute or two of silence, she produces a package wrapped in brown paper, tells him again that all this has happened before, gets out of his car, walks past the angel and empty trashcans into an alley, and disappears from sight, her cheap heels clicking on the cold concrete. Henry hides the package next to his heart and rushes home at the end of his second shift (he’s signed up for a double) to open it. He can tell from its size, feel, and weight that it’s a book. It turns out to be the Collected Stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Someone has censored with a thick-tip black marker every line, every word, in it—title pages, introduction, and copyright information not excluded—except for the terrifying and comic philosophical detective story “Death and the Compass.” So ends the first part of Earthly Paradise, which is called “The Collected Stories of Jorge Luis Borges.”

The second part is called “Index Finger.” It consists of a police report filed by Officer Marcus Tull on the death of a white female, 24, 5’2, 118 lbs, rose tattoo on inner left thigh. A rape/murder: the victim shows traces of semen in her mouth, vagina, and anus. The killer, or killers, have inflicted mutilations on the woman, identified as Jane Doe, after death: left index finger removed. Time of death: Approx 2:14 AM December 12th, 1981.

Part three is called “In the Labyrinth.” It opens at the beginning of spring. Henry Stoner has abandoned himself wholly to the renewed pursuit of Sophie. He has read “Death and the Compass” twenty, fifty, a thousand times—he is no longer sure. Instead of sleeping, he drives through the wild darknesses of his New York, a New York wholly imaginary (Telemachus, never having seen the city, felt free to invent whatever he desired: an eternal bonfire burning in the middle of Central Park; a new river, dividing Manhattan into two uneven parts; wild dogs, a coliseum, bowers and bowers of orchids.) Stoner can find nothing, or only the barest suggestion of Sophie’s trail. Rumors about a rich client, about debts, about an obscure religion. Her pimp tells Stoner about the rich client, a man named Mr. Carstens—he can’t remember anything about him other than the size of his hands.

As Stoner pursues his miserable and hopeless inquiries, Marcus Tull—whose suspicions have been fired by the dead woman’s missing index finger—begins methodical research back through old case files. He discovers that similar murders have occurred in New York between one and five times a year, always with a woman of the same age, build, physical characteristics. All of them are missing their left index fingers. He points this out to his superiors, and is met with open skepticism or veiled threats. So he abandons his public quest and engages in a wider program of archival research, interviewing retired detectives, trying to find the thread binding these murders, which started immediately after the Second World War. He catches hints of some occult force behind them, some ritual pattern, and directs his searches among other archives: books on magic, cryptogeography, the Knights Templar, the power of sacrifice, Nicholas Hawksmoor. (There is no passion more bathetic than the passion for the occult, Tull soon recognizes. Its devotes are universally failures.)

As Tull immerses himself in demonology and anti-religion, Stoner loses himself more and more in his own quest, begins to believe that he is Erik Lonnrot, the hero of Borges’ story “Death and the Compass,” and that he need only find the correct map of the city to locate Sophie. That, indeed, the whole of New York is a screen, a camouflage, for another city, a realer city, a city where, when he discovers it, he will be reunited with Sophie. So he takes up a second career as a book and antiquities thief, and he and Tull cross paths dozens of times, each without the other ever realizing it, as summer climbs to its furnace-like height, and in the blackness of one early morning, as Stoner is running out of a cavernous public library whose marble floor is inlaid with an enormous nacreous spiral, the alarms sobbing and sobbing, he is hailed by two police officers and shot through his left lung and spleen when he refuses to acknowledge them. The long, rifle-like bundle under his arm, they find, is not a rifle but a centuries-old Dutch map of the city (allegedly drawn by the grandson of the alchemist Christian Rosenkranz, also called Christian Rosenkranz). His defeat is total and irremediable.

Later that day, Marcus Tull, coming off his shift, arrives at the same library armed with the name of a single book, a book that has proven difficult beyond belief to locate, a book whose name courses through and underlies all the wretched lesser works Tull has been poring over for these agonizing, boring weeks: The True and Ancient History of Archontick Rite and Ritual, written in Prague in 1574 by someone calling himself Hermann Corvus, and translated into English by an anonymous philological historian. Tull strides past the on-duty police at the vaulted doors—Stoner’s theft has put the library administration on guard—and they seem to him representatives of a dark and otherworldly hierarchy, soldier-priests, their hearts cleansed and emptied by refining fire.

Part four is called “My Life.” It comprises an autobiographical sketch written by a prosperous and secure man in his late sixties. “My name is Gregory Joseph Castle, the only son of Joseph Harding Castle,” the author begins, and launches into the long and minutely-detailed history of his happy, wealthy childhood in the book’s phantasmal New York, his education at Oxford (though, as he points out several times, he is an American), his service in the Second World War (as an infantryman; three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star with oak leaf clusters, and the Medal of Valor; a bout of amour fou with a fourteen-year-old prostitute outside of Amiens); his travels in ravaged Europe and healthy, enormous America. He makes repeated reference to hunting expeditions in Germany and the Pacific Northwest, to diving, to yachting. He tells of the profound sadness his father’s death provoked in him, driving him to thoughts of suicide and the purchase of a cheap pistol for that purpose, as he did not wish to dishonor his hunting guns. From there we are led to his business career. He never, oddly, makes clear what this business is, but we sense it has to do with the pullulation and flow of money: he invokes Mercury (and other more obscure gods).

This leads him to discuss certain objects on his desk and in his office, describing them in disconcerting detail: a portrait of his dead parents, a sword brought home from Japan. One of the objects he calls, with easy cheer, his “curio cabinet,” and says no more about it. Castle’s story flows on and on, going into deep detail about tax law and boards of directors, about his country house (he maintains another cabinet there, he jokes). He has, we gather, no wife, no children. He encounters not a single obstacle or defeat, and the reader is left completely uncertain about the nature or meaning of this irrelevant intrusion. But the book’s final page contains a simple statement of Castle’s purpose, delivered with a subtle shift in style. His avuncular voice has gone cold with sudden and masterful irony. “A writer I love once remarked that office life belongs not to the realm of the comic but to the kingdom of the fantastic. Four decades have taught me to concur. I sit here in my silent offices, which occupy a whole filthily opulent floor, I am healthy, rich, well-known, and happy. And now that I have dispensed with the laughable public facts of my life (all public facts are laughable), I will reveal to you its true contours, its true map, and the numerous and necessary sacrificial acts I have performed in secret, since I was a young man, a young and irresponsible soldier, since that soft black spring night outside Amiens when the real powers of this world revealed themselves to me.” With that Earthly Paradise ends. The critics agree, vehemently, on the book’s merit. Telemachus enjoys his highest sales so far, and is able to purchases the small apartment he is currently renting (which he loves as much as his old cell).

The weeks and months after his completion of Earthly Paradise are hard for Telemachus to describe. They belong, it seems to him, to the life of someone much stupider and luckier. His refusals of invitations to speak only bring more invitations. His neighborhood is crammed with objects and occurrences that would endow life with a sublime and shattering aesthetic meaning in the eyes of a cretinous artist. The almond tree in his courtyard captures light with sentimental flair. The girl who operates the corner newsstand weeps as she stands in a slashing downpour. Drunks stumble and raucously sing their way down the avenue with comic regularity, like enameled figures emerging from an atrocious Tyrolean cuckoo clock. And so on and so forth. Telemachus pays no attention to these. He does, however, take increasing notice of Marina, whose quiet manner and confidence delude him into the belief that he is falling in love.

Her visits become a subject of anticipation. He asks her about her life, her studies (mathematics and sculpture), about her father, a bus conductor. After she leaves one afternoon, favoring him on her way out with a dry, sure-of-itself laugh, the title of his next book comes to him: Per Amica Silentia Lunae. It strikes like a moment of sunblindness. He sets to work immediately, that same night; he doesn’t sleep. By dawn the book is well under way. Marina’s laughter and smiles grow more and more frequent, she pushes her long, dark hair out of her face with a strong-looking hand the following afternoon and Telemachus almost blurts out that he loves her. They smile at each other, to hurry through the gap in their measured conversation. This small fracture happens exactly a year after he writes the last words of Earthly Paradise. The next day, his life, which has so far followed a familiar—i.e. absurd—pattern, diverges from any describable course.

In the morning, at the time Marina usually arrives, Telemachus answers his doorbell to find a young man, a boy, seventeen, eighteen, standing there with his hands in his pockets. I’m your son, he says, and in his shock Telemachus lets him enter. It’s spring, the air is cool, a breeze is coursing through the clean, sparsely furnished apartment. I’m your son, the boy repeats. And he gives the name of Telemachus’s old girlfriend, the one who ran off, as his mother. Telemachus sees no way this could be true: that woman’s face—dark and round, as though she had Indian blood, with rubylike pupils and lips, and somehow, within it, another face, a harder, clearer face, which never partook in her frequent laughs and smiles—that face has hung before his eyes for more than almost twenty years. Most of material existence is relegated, for Telemachus, to oblivion by the clarity and reality of this absent (and misremembered) face, which exposes for Telemachus the greater unreality, the common void that underlies everything. And the boy looks nothing like her, so she can’t be his son. His face is lean and light-skinned, with a baron’s nose and blue eyes. But he also looks as though he never smiles. Not out of sadness but out of a secret and incommunicable happiness. And when Telemachus notices this—it takes him a minute or two—his resolve to get rid of this lunatic weakens. Maybe it’s not impossible, he thinks, and gestures him inside with a headshake.

They talk for an hour, two. Their conversation comes and goes in spurts. Telemachus, afterwards, will find himself unable to recall what they spoke of. His impassive, lean face, with its light skin and eyes, now seems identical to that of his mother, and Telemachus sighs without knowing it. I’ve read all of your books, says the boy. That’s not important, Telemachus responds. Silence again, and the engine-noise, now very faint, and more barking from the dog, a small white dog like a bundle of grimy cotton. Telemachus knows and likes this dog, but he feels an intense unprecedented anger towards it, and toward the loud, friendly woman who owns it, whom he saw once in the window opposite his nude and gleaming from the shower, her breasts large and high, her nipples dark. The boy is talking, Telemachus returns from his reverie to realize, about his mother, her kindness and her distance, her remembered quiet. Every Sunday she cut my hair, the boy says, as he snips air with two fingers. The dog keeps barking and Telemachus begins to sweat. The boy’s voice flows on and on, and out of its slow stream the word Sophie flashes at Telemachus, so he interrupts: her name wasn’t Sophie.

The boy denies saying it and narrows his eyes. But you did, says Telemachus. The boy tells him it’s all right and their spastic conversation continues, punctuated by the dog. Telemachus asks the boy what he’s studying, the boy tells him: physics and music. This pleases Telemachus, so much so that he forgives the dog and its owner and her nudity. And the dog goes quiet, and Telemachus hears steps in the courtyard and caressing speech, a door slams, and he knows that the dog has been taken inside, as though all that was required was a single instant of his forgiveness. The boy has gone silent, and Telemachus notices, with a swift blow of dizziness, that he is barefoot, his feet black and ragged. But he makes no remark: perhaps the boy prefers walking, perhaps he’s a defier of convention. The boy is speaking again about his mother, and again Telemachus hears the word Sophie. Gracchus, the boy replies, and tells Telemachus again that his mother used cut his hair, every Sunday. Now Telemachus can barely sit up straight, so he excuses himself to make coffee. By the clock in the kitchen, he sees that his assistant is almost three hour late, which terrifies him. He calls her house: no answer, he leaves a message. The engine-buzzing from outside has grown thunderous now.

When he returns to the living room, Gracchus is completely naked and pointing a dirty-looking index finger at him. Telemachus feels, to his surprise, only relief that the boy is not pointing a gun. He smells the scent of burning more strongly, and a fear pierces him: he is about to have a seizure, his first in years. But the boy begins to weep, really weep, and says My name isn’t Gracchus, it’s Henry, and Telemachus laughs against his will, and Gracchus weeps harder. His chest is narrow and hairless. Did you do something to Marina, Telemachus asks, and the boy slowly nods his head. Telemachus, not knowing what else to do, sinks back into his chair and begins drinking his coffee, and tears careen down the boy’s face, which even in the middle of this paroxysm retains it impassivity. He doesn’t even look like Henry Stoner, Telemachus reflects, at least not the Henry Stoner I created, who is short, muscular, and hirsute, though equally mad. And as Gracchus stands there, he pours out his story: I’m your son, and you set me on an impossible quest, and now I have to live forever in the eternal triviality of literature (and here Telemachus thinks that the boy must have borrowed that phrase, which he did, from Borges, though he mangled it), I’m your son and you made a fool of me, and everyone knows that a real father doesn’t make fools of his sons. Gracchus screams these last words into a resounding silence. Then the engine-sound returns. I’m going to call the police, Telemachus tells the shaking boy, who nods again. When he lifts the receiver, there is no dial tone. Sweat bursts out of his pores. He lifts the receiver again, and hears the croaky buzz.

But instead of calling the police, he dials Marina’s number, and she answers with a flood of apologies. Her sister is ill, she’s had to watch her children all morning. Telemachus asks her if she can come right over, and she says she can, and he hangs up. The boy in the living room is on his feet, weeping, and Telemachus instructs him to sit. In the closet next to the bathroom door, where Telemachus keeps his two towels, is one of the few items he has purchased since his release, a horseblanket, blue- and red-striped, that he saw in a market stall. He drapes this over Gracchus’s shoulders and waits for Marina. The boy can’t look him in the face, he’s weeping so hard, and Telemachus wishes to comfort him but has no idea what to say. So they sit until the doorbell rings again. When Telemachus opens it, a man close to his father’s age (or what would have been his father’s age; his father died while he was imprisoned) is standing there in a dark, neat, cheap-looking suit. Despite the small shock he feels at the man’s being in his late seventies, Telemachus can tell at once that he’s a cop. The man asks him if he’s seen or heard anything unusual in the past few hours. Telemachus can think of no plausible response, so he asks about the engine sound. The policeman shrugs and volleys back a muted question about a fugitive—he won’t say from where, he won’t give a name or physical description, he refers to him only as “the convicted”—who has been spotted loping around the neighborhood. A smile, tight and secretive, bends the man’s thin lips. So Telemachus lies and says no, he hasn’t, though he can hear the boy sobbing on the couch he knows the officer can hear him too, because the officer flashes the suggestion of a wink before he says thank you and leaves, shoes creaking. As soon as Telemachus has settled himself again with his cold, burnt coffee, the bell rings again. This time it’s Marina, with a scepter of lilies in her hand.

Telemachus realizes, as he stares at the lilies, that the boy—who resembled, he thought, only that long-vanished girlfriend—looks like Marina. To an unsettling degree. Does this mean Marina, too, possesses that invisible, powerful smile? Or is it the property only of the insane? Was his old girlfriend insane? She might well have been, Telemachus concludes, without arriving at any solution to the problem confronting him, the problem presented by Marina’s imminent collision with her near-doppelganger. But Marina, when she sees the hunched and blanket-draped figure on Telemachus’s couch, responds only with tactful quiet. The boy stops weeping and even manages a direct and empty look into Marina’s face as she sits down. The two of them are not just similar but nearly identical, Telemachus sees. That Marina takes no notice of this fact—she smiles brightly at Gracchus—horrifies Telemachus, looms in his mind as the pledge of a hidden, bureaucratic complicity. The dog, let out again into the courtyard, has started barking and Marina shakes her head, to banish the sound or to show some private disgust. Thick sheets of sweat coat Telemachus’ arms and the nape of his neck. And the engine noise, which had faded with the arrival of the policeman, has now returned, thrumming and thrumming.

Until the end of his life, Telemachus will remember what follows as the prelude to his worst hours. His longest, most wretched hours. The boy has worked the horseblanket into a rudimentary drape around his hips and sits with a shy smile, his thin chest rising and falling. Marina, mocking her own forgetfulness, puts the lilies in water. And then she goes about her normal professional routine, cataloguing Telemachus’s love and hate letters, bank statements, the latest royalty check from Xanthos Press (the largest and final house to have assumed control of Telemachus’ affairs). The dog barks, never hoarsening, in an obscene fit of insensate happiness. And the invisible engine drones on, sliding in and out of earshot. As Marina speaks in her calm, kind voice, Telemachus keeps glancing out his window for a sign of the dog owner’s activity (or because, insanely, he hopes to see her naked body, which he finds himself craving as he might crave water or a cigarette). The boy does not speak, and his not-speaking is voluble and commanding. It deafens Telemachus and causes Marina to talk in an undertone. Her and the boy’s identical faces hang there, in a streak of amber sunlight. Telemachus fears he is about to go blind, or to see things as they actually are.

The barks of the dog punctuate with Marina’s careful enumerations; she looks more and more like she’s trying not to smile. She and her brother (Telemachus is sure, by now, that they are brother and sister) preserve upright, sly postures, and the dog barks, and the breezes of spring pour through Telemachus’ apartment, and the image of his naked neighbor, of her generous nudity, her cleansing nudity, gleams more and brilliantly, filling more and more of his parched inner landscape. Marina is asking him questions now, questions he fails to understand: when did you first conceive of it? Who is it really addressed to? He asks her to repeat herself and she smiles and clucks her tongue. Why don’t we go outside, she says, out onto your balcony. She sounds concerned, frightened, but maybe it’s all careful dissimulation, Telemachus thinks. If the boy comes with us, I’ll know, he tells himself. And when they have reached the balcony doors, and the boy has not left the couch—he appears, in fact, to be asleep—Telemachus knows that he has survived the ordeal. The air outside is warm and breezeshot and smells of orange trees (the hidden, distant fire has burnt itself out), and he and Marina lean against the rail, inhaling and exhaling the sweet air. She remarks that it’s early for orange blossom, and then gently aims her left index finger into the blue, blue air. Look, she says, that’s what was causing it.

A plane, a prop plane, the source of the engine sound, is doubling back and forth above the city, whining and buzzing. It is the color of a tomato, with blue and white bulls-eyes painted on the tips of its oblong wings. People in the street below have stopped to watch it fly, tilting their noses skyward. One man’s hat slips off into a silty puddle in the gutter, and Telemachus hears him curse loudly: Fucking plane! As though in response, the plane coughs up two enormous black plumes of smoke and falls into a steep dive. A moment later, Telemachus hears the engine stall, he hears everyone on the street take in their breath with small sighs, almost a hopeful sound. The man who lost his hat picks it up out of the thin mud and bats at the dirt, before slinking away, looking left and right as if condemned.

The plane falls, its descent lasting much longer than Telemachus would have thought possible. Marina has seized his forearm, and her blunt and competent-looking fingers dig into his flesh. He thinks she might be smiling but he can’t force himself to look at her face, so he stares at her hand. The breeze whistles and the falling plane makes no sound. That’s what was causing it, Marina repeats, with a suppressed giggle. Telemachus glances at her calm profile. It’s disfigured by a grin that reveals her flawless teeth, her eyes seem to be reflecting some outer source of light not visible to Telemachus. The black smoke, kicked by the wind, drifts off to the east, above the stonelike plummet of the red plane. Who would do such a thing, he murmurs to himself, unaware that he is speaking, and finds that his hands are clenched into fists. Marina has let go of his arm, and he massages the bruise her grip left. The plane has reached, nearly, the teeth of the skyline, and its silence has poured into the silence of the crowd, when it pulls out of its dive and begins to ascend again. The drilling roar of its engine returns as it climbs into the heartless, bodiless blue air. And now it levels off. Everyone says nothing. The plane increases speed and then, with a banal, brief percussion, it unleashes a long white banner with black letters reading HOFFMANN’S from a hidden capsule affixed to its tail. (Hoffman’s is a convenient and popular department store, with locations all over town. I’m writing this, in fact, with paper and pen I purchased at one.)

The banner crackles. No-one applauds, no-one speaks. The plane heads west and banks over the bay before it leaves the common field of vision. The now-companionable sound of its engine fades. And Telemachus is so entranced by the display, by the colorful pointlessness of existence, by the mud-fouled hat and the pilot’s skilled hands, by the smoke waning into the fathomless blue, that he doesn’t hear Marina say Are you ready, and she has to repeat herself, and he fails to understand her, and he fails to look through the glass balcony doors to see the boy, Gracchus or Henry, rising from the couch, draped in his striped blanket, so he can admit the serious neat-suited old policeman into the clean, light-scoured apartment. The plane-watching crowd has dissipated, except for one man warily staring up at their balcony. The white dog stops barking, in a single instant. Marina takes Telemachus by his thin, corded arm—and the sharpness and nearness to the skin of his ulna surprise her; she sees him as a battered man, one more victim of the human process, and this doubles and triples her rising delight—and asks him a final time Are you ready.

Sam Munson’s first novel, The November Criminals, will be published in April by Doubleday.