Blue Field(2)

Stay with me tonight? he said.

Can’t. Early meetings tomorrow.

He knocked the truck back into gear. Right, he said. I get it. Too far, too fast.

Not what I meant, she said, mind skidding toward tomorrow’s mirror-skinned towers and similitudes of corridors and parking lots, the nodding and rictus-smiling as she laid out her wares. And then the rush-hour armadas of oncoming headlights, possible curbside immolations backdropped by six-story digi-boards promising the latest administration’s RenewalWorks! campaign. All this near-life she’d been ungrateful for since her parents’ deaths.

But once upon a time—the summer she was fourteen—time had stood still. She’d followed her best friend in breaching a newly discovered gap in the chain-link fence behind the convenience store and descended a honeysuckle dripping, thorny realm to a hidden creek forbidden throughout their childhoods. She and her friend returned daily but what was a day then? Cicada-time, girl-time of cigarettes filched from parents turned statues by coursing girl-hormones, of hash brownies and baked-baby brownies and other sundry legends. Wild dominion of fast friends who traced freckles on each other’s backs and told fortunes that turned into toads or jumped ship hands clasped and never let go. Glorious escape and then no escape when, just before school started that fall, Works! Workers razed and landfilled the ravine for BestBet Towers soon ringed by SureBets and SafeBets.

In the truck beside her, her date stage-coughed. Verdict still out? he prompted. There hope for me yet?

Early-season flakes melted through the gusts outside. She laughed and squeezed her eyes shut. Retinal noise lit up behind her closed lids. Floaters and fireworks, her optic apparatus peacocking, she knew. But still. She opened her eyes again. The urgent stare on him. And that blue oddly still at his temples. Charmer, she said.

He shipped to attention then lashed back against the seat. He raised both hands high as if under arrest.





3


A third consecutive morning she woke freezing in his bed. Her new normal. He was turned away with his face buried in one of the king pillows. A miracle he wasn’t suffocating. Rain frosted the tall windows in his upper-floor suite. She wrapped herself around his warmth as if he might tug her to wherever he was afloat in his own slack unconscious, one that ran at a higher temperature than hers. Water ticked from the tap in the next-door bathroom. She pressed her nose harder to his back, eliciting a grunt. The best response, she decided, to her handset’s unreturned messages from her friend—where r u? u alright?—ghosting on the bedside table. Because how account? At least she’d dragged through most of her work these past days—as had he, for that matter. No harm done. No harm! And if she got up soon and got dressed and to her apartment on the district’s far side, plunked at her desk and last-gasped through her latest project, she’d crank it out on time. She would. Or else. Still, she touched him now above his buttocks and along his outer thighs. He mumbled awake, turned onto his back and lifted the sheet for her to mount him.

An ugly man. Raw-knuckled, raggedy-nailed. Accretions of muscles on his torso like carbuncles on a powerful creature’s hide. That blue by his temples now an efflorescence like pin-dot schools of fish. Here and not here. Here, over here. Come here.

He sweated salt. His short hair quilled like a crown.

Enough with the pissing and moaning. She waggled aboard. Shadows flowed from the walls. She worked out how to arch her brittle-star spine and bloom algae between her thighs. Her ribcage a lyre. Strum-strum, strum-strum. What she’d confess to, and what she wouldn’t, was no matter. No matter at all.





4


For the first time in over a week she poked her car through the cemetery’s entrance. Pardes Shalom, peaceful garden. Up the rise the granite rows winked against the sun. She cut the engine and got out. She’d run late all morning—sex, meetings, traffic by the crap-ton—but here everything seemed suspended in the freak heat haze. She tucked her damp dress between her thighs and knelt at the Y-joint of the paved path—a left into a hedge-rimmed distance, a right along the scalloped edges of sprinklered turf—and when she clawed inside the steel bucket, quartz dust rose like steam. She stood and sneezed. Dizzy, panting. The stones glittered in her palm and her fingers itched. Days ago there’d been sleet and hail. Though admittedly she’d hardly noticed much of anything aside from her sudden preoccupation, with its nearly assassinating private pleasures. But now, here, the white sky boiled. The Scotch pines were like green flames.

She rubbed her eyes. They felt like grit in her face.

She spiked her heels up the incline then stopped part way and scuffled off her tight shoes. Underfoot, a spongy hint of cool. If only she weren’t stuck topside, AC-less and bereft and scorched at the clavicle, nipples seared. Ridiculous at noon. Mom? Dad? Her throat smoked and hoarsened. She imagined swallowing swords. Hunched like a shrinking sideshow attraction—de-salinizing, feeling every inch of her twenty-nine years going on ninety-nine—she resumed huffing the hill, one of a series of concentric waves stretching to the east and ending in a diminutive red-pine forest. Beyond the cemetery’s carefully cultivated repose—pricey, for certain, though her parents had thoughtfully shelled a bundle twenty years previous, and then worried loudly ever since about their rapidly diminishing investments—lay hundreds if not thousands of developments serpentining in linked byways and then chopped into inscrutably isolated parcels. Townhouse and compound and browning golf course. Strip mall and mall brightened by glorious, invasive ground cover. She pictured never finding her way back home. Better off tramping here forever, forever shielding her eyes with a hand and searching for her parents’ marker but never making it out. Never arriving, as if she were hauling rope and more rope, nothing but ever-growing rope.