Pariah

by Eleanor Lerman

Clay Banks

When he was finally released from the hospital, Paul stood outside the revolving glass doors that ushered patients, staff and visitors in and out, and tried to think uplifting thoughts about having survived the mystery infection that had nearly killed him. But he couldn’t seem to focus on anything other than the effort it took to stand on his weak legs, bandaged and studded with staples in the places where a surgeon had excised the abscesses that had been the final manifestation of his body’s collapse into near oblivion. He had been told that the operation was what saved his life and he was grateful — or he would have been, if, at the moment, he could feel anything other than exhausted. Drained to the point of emptiness and somehow beyond, as if in the process of purging the rampant infection from his body, his sense of self had also seeped away. The cure, it seemed, had contained a curse.

​It was a hot day at the end of August, with a hard blue sky overhead, relentless in its clarity. With great care, Paul eased himself into taking a seat on a bench near the hospital entrance and started scanning the roadway that led from the parking lot to the hospital’s front door. He was waiting for his dog walker, Brett, to pick him up. Brett had just spent an hour with him, sitting bedside as Paul signed the forms that released him from the hospital after having been presented with an alarmingly heavy folder containing his medical records — almost two months’ worth, covering the period of his hospitalization, more than anyone he knew or had even heard of. A nurse had also given him a white plastic bag, emblazoned with the hospital’s motto about hope and healing, that contained rolls of gauze, tape, and several pairs of hospital socks with grip treads on the soles. The socks, Paul assumed, were meant to be useful as he hobbled around his apartment in the coming period that the nurses and doctors assured him would feature “a full recovery,” or at least something resembling that hoped-for state.

Brett, the dog walker, was masquerading as a friend, since the hospital wouldn’t let Paul leave without someone to accompany him. His cousin, Mary, had planned to be here but the hospital needed the bed and so had released him a day earlier than expected and Mary was still on a plane, heading back from a business trip to the Midwest. They had talked on the phone last night and she was upset and apologetic but Paul’s mind was still not working on all cylinders; his thoughts were still mostly trapped in the closed-in, unreal, and semi-drugged world of the hospital, and as much as he had come to depend on Mary during these past weeks (she had questioned doctors for him when he couldn’t process what they were telling him and had been a dedicated advocate in dealing with his insurance company), he was fine with the change of plans. He was fine with almost anything right now as long as he could get as far away from this place as possible.

​“Paul? Hey, man, I’m here.”

​Paul was still having all sorts of trouble focusing; at first, he didn’t hear Brett speaking to him, but when the dog walker started honking the horn, Paul snapped back from wherever he had drifted off to. He stood up and walked slowly over to the car, some sort of sporty roadster that sat low to the ground. It was difficult for Paul to get into the front seat, and his legs ached painfully during the short ride from the hospital to Jersey City, where Brett lived. Brett had been boarding Paul’s dog in his apartment for all the weeks of his owner’s hospitalization and now, the first thing Paul wanted to do was take the dog home.

​Once they were parked in front of Brett’s building, the young man, long haired and affable, sprang out of the car and came around to the passenger side to help Paul get out of the vehicle. He hooked his arm under Paul’s and hauled him out the car door and onto his unsteady feet. As he did, Paul glimpsed himself in the side-view mirror and was shocked by what he saw. All during his hospitalization, Paul had avoided mirrors; the only one he had even peeked into hung above the sink in the hospital bathroom and that was only recently, when the nurses had gotten him out of bed and helped him begin to retrain himself to walk after spending so much time flat on his back, in bed. The image that the hospital mirror had showed him was blurry and — to Paul’s thinking, anyway — understandably disheveled. But now, what he saw was a sixty-year-old man with ashy gray hair and the lined, exhausted face of a defeated ghost. A ghost with no one to haunt but the shell of himself. Released from Brett’s grip, Paul turned away quickly and followed the young man into the building.

​Thankfully, it had an elevator. Brett worked in a local vet’s office and supplemented his income by walking the pet dogs of Jersey City and nearby Hoboken, a job that kept him very busy. These old, industrial cities across the Hudson River from Manhattan had lately morphed into pricey urban suburbs for young and young-ish commuters who had to cross the river to get to work. Many of them had small children but more of them had children and dogs, or just dogs who were as beloved as children. The fee for exercising them rivaled the cost of day care for the babies, so Brett could afford to live in a modern glass box of an apartment building with a concierge stationed in the lobby and green marble pillars rising like thick stone trees out of the marble floor.

​Upstairs, as Brett opened the door to his apartment, Paul readied himself for the dog’s reaction to seeing him after so much time had passed. He was prepared for one of two experiences: having viewed enough YouTube videos of dogs joyously welcoming their owners after months or even years apart, he was waiting for his dog, Buddy, to leap into his arms (in which case, Paul was going to have to act quickly to brace himself against a wall so as not to get knocked off his feet and likely end up back in a hospital bed), or else to greet him with the lost gaze of an abandoned pet and show little interest in any kind of reunion.

​But as soon as the dog saw Paul, he exhibited a completely different kind of behavior — something Paul had not figured on. Buddy was a medium-sized dog, thirty pounds or so, light brown in color with the tightly curled tail that was characteristic of pariah dogs, semi-feral animals found all over the world living on the outskirts of human habitats, eating discarded food and warming themselves in the ambient light and heat of urban dwellings. Now, as Paul stood just inside the doorway of Brett’s apartment, his feet squarely planted on the floor, the dog — who Paul had found as a puppy in a New Jersey pet rescue shelter — lowered himself into a kind of bow and slowly edged towards Paul in a posture of supplication. As he did so, he began to whine. To Paul, it sounded like the dog was crying.

​“It’s alright,” Paul said to the dog. He tried to bend down to pet the animal, but that proved to be very difficult since his body, which had been underused for so long, responded sluggishly and with groaning aches that seemed to echo through a skeleton creaking with rust — or so it seemed to Paul. “It’s alright,” he repeated, as he managed to fold himself low enough to scratch the crouching dog’s ears. “You’re a good boy,” he said. “A good boy. I’m sorry I was away for so long.”

​He pulled himself upright and accepted the leash that Brett handed him, feeling it was time to take the dog and get out of the apartment, before he found himself launching into a long explanation of what had happened to him, ostensibly directed to Brett, or maybe even the dog, but really, a tale told for his own benefit since he was still finding it hard to believe very much about what he’d been through. Now, though he tried to push them away, the basic details flashed through his mind: a few days of feeling weak and vaguely under the weather had suddenly led to his temperature spiking at nearly 104 one night. The following morning, he went to a local urgent care clinic, which had called for an ambulance that carted him off to the hospital, never to return home. Well, not for many weeks, anyway. Many, many.

Now, Paul found his checkbook in the inside pocket of the jacket he was carrying, the one he had worn to the urgent care clinic — back in late June! It was unimaginable, really, how much time had passed since that night — and settled up his account with Brett. Then, after calling a cab, he led the dog down the hall, back into the elevator and out into the bright daylight.​

​While waiting for the cab to arrive, Paul thought he’d walk the dog for a few minutes, but it turned out to be a problematic task. His legs were so stiff and achy that no matter how hard he tried to walk normally, he felt that he was clomping along the street with a Frankenstein gait. Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. It was embarrassing; he thought that he might as well have had bolts in his neck and a stitched-together face with a mouth that could only emit angry moans. Still, no one on the street seemed to be paying much attention to him except the dog, who kept looking back at him with what Paul judged to be a worried expression. He had a right to be worried, Paul thought. Neither one of them could be sure if these few minutes in the sunshine were a harbinger of better times to come or just a brief reprieve from another onslaught of the unexpected. The inexplicable.

​Finally, the cab arrived and carried him the short distance from Jersey City to Hoboken. The small city’s main boulevard was busy on this summer afternoon: the bars and restaurants that drew a crowd of the young professionals, who wanted to cut loose once they disembarked from the trains and ferries that carried them home from Manhattan to the Jersey side of the Hudson River, were already serving their first customers. Outside, attractive young women, mostly married moms with children in tow, strolled along the street, heading to the park named for Frank Sinatra, who had been born in Hoboken. Sinatra’s music drifted from the open doors of bars and boutiques. As the cab rolled on, Paul heard the first few notes of Sinatra’s honey-toned ode to the summer wind and a block later, the same voice had turned sad and smoky as he mourned the memories of a very good year.

​Paul’s building was down a side street that still retained the look of long-ago decades; here, narrow brownstones and brick-fronted tenements leaned against each other, their tar roofs softening and fading as the sun’s rays burned down through the overheated sky. Paul had moved to this apartment many years ago, when he was a young man working in Manhattan. Luckily, his building was one of the few in the neighborhood that, like Brett’s more modern housing, featured an elevator. It had been installed in the converted three-story townhouse for the original owner’s invalid daughter and was little more than an ugly iron cage that was barely big enough to hold Paul and his dog. Though he had rarely used it before, now, Paul gratefully inserted himself into the cage and pulled the dog inside with him. Slowly, they rose up to the top floor, where Paul lived.

​He had not been inside this apartment for almost the entire summer. Though an indisputable fact, the reality of his long absence still seemed like something he could petition to have adjusted. Who or what he would plead his case to, he had no idea but still — how could it be that he had locked the door behind him and then been swept away by fate? By an infection caused by a bacteria that had refused to grow any evidence of itself in any culture the hospital lab offered it? When told this by his doctors, the picture that had formed in Paul’s mind was of rows and rows of Petri dishes filled with different colored cultures — like dishes of Jello; cherry red, lime green, lemon yellow — all sitting in an incubator, remaining stable and serene, refusing to yield any evidence of the culprit that had nevertheless proven its existence by attacking his entire body, driving his internal organs (the masterworks, as one doctor had called them: heart, pancreas, kidneys, bladder) to near failure, and then finally, brutally, invading his legs. The proverbial unseen enemy. A master of disguise. But that was exactly what had happened. Now, Paul had to enter his home again and try to restart his life. With small steps, he reminded himself, repeating something one of his doctors had said to him. Step by step, you’ll get through this. You’ll go home and things will get back to normal for you.

​Paul put the key in the lock, pushed against the door, and entered an environment that smelled of lemon polish and clean linen. That, he knew, meant Mary had been here — as she had told him on the phone. She had come to the apartment in the early days of his hospitalization to clean out his refrigerator and had visited again, before she left on her trip, to dust the shelves and stock the fridge with comfort food: there was a container of soup and a tub of egg salad from a local deli, cookies, milk, ginger ale, and a fresh loaf of bread on the counter.

After thinking a few thankful thoughts about his cousin, Paul walked stiffly into his bedroom, where Mary had changed the sheets and covered the bed with a light summer quilt. As soon as Paul put his head on the pillow, he was asleep.

​When he woke, it was evening. The sky outside his window was streaked with gold and blue and fiery red. It looked, Paul thought, like the sky in a movie about the end of the world. Then he maneuvered himself out of bed. The dog, who had been sleeping beside him, jumped down from the bed to the floor and sat beside Paul, waiting for what would come next.

​Which turned out to be dinner for both of them. Paul heated up the soup and opened a can of dog food for Buddy. They both ate quickly, inhabitants of a hungry house. Then Paul went through half a box of the cookies Mary had left, sharing broken-off bits with the dog who seemed, finally, to be less nervous than when Paul had retrieved him from Brett’s apartment. Paul decided it was time to take him for another walk.

​So down they went in the cage, and Paul clomped along on his Frankenstein feet while Buddy relieved himself. Then they returned to the apartment, where Paul’s intention was to turn on the TV and think about nothing. That was what he deeply desired, because what he did not want — but where he knew his mind was heading — was to keep thinking about horrible days in the hospital when he was confused, drugged, chilled and then feverish, all the while suffering from leg pain that never seemed to go away. Terrifying days when he was tugged from his bed onto a gurney and wheeled through the hospital corridors for tests that required him to be shoved into man-sized metal tubes that made him feel like he was being pounded by hammers made of sound, by nuclear ray guns emitting invisible fire that sizzled through his veins. Then, in the night, when he couldn’t sleep (and it seemed to him that he never slept, not in any sequence of connected hours in all the weeks he was in the hospital) he would push the call button when he needed a bed pan or more pain medication and no one would come. How did he live through all that? He just did. That’s what happened to you when you were sick and powerless, he thought: you either lived through it or you didn’t. There weren’t many other choices.

​And now, he couldn’t choose anything to watch on TV. Or maybe he just couldn’t concentrate: his desire to clear his mind was being overridden by the flashbacks he couldn’t control. He turned off the TV and looked around the apartment. This is where he had wanted to be for the past two months — the place he had longed to return to — and yet, at this moment, this evening, it didn’t seem like the safe haven he had yearned for. He couldn’t think of anyplace that would. Still, he had to find a way to relax, so he tried a familiar remedy. His living room had a window seat, a wide, comfortable berth that overlooked the low rooftops of the surrounding buildings and gave him a clear view of the sky. Lifting himself from the couch, Paul walked over to the window and, with some difficulty, managed to position himself on the cushion that covered the seat area. The dog jumped up on the cushion as well, so Paul moved over a little, making room for Buddy to stretch out beside him. To Paul’s eye, his dog looked as long and thin as a brown bone, except for his wiry pariah-dog tail, so tightly curled that it seemed as if it must have been forged separately on the anvil of dog creation.

​Paul sat for a while, watching as the evening sky turned to night and decorated itself with stars. The moon rose, a flat, friendly circle of white light. Paul dozed for a while, but woke with a start when the sound of the dog barking tore into his dreams.

​He opened his eyes and saw Buddy standing on his hind legs, with his front legs scratching at the window. The dog was barking furiously, angrily, as if confronting an enemy outside.

​Paul’s first instinct was to look down — there was an alley between his building and one next door. Perhaps someone putting out garbage had spooked the dog? But he couldn’t see below him very well because it was too dark. Besides, the dog, who would not stop barking, was actually looking upwards. So Paul looked, too.

​At first, he saw nothing but the moon, which had retreated to a higher, more distant corner of the sky. But then, suddenly, Paul spied something come streaking across the night. It seemed to be a huge object, once solid but now melting into a blaze of burning sparks as it crashed through the Earth’s fragile layers of gases and air. Racing along with a rocket’s speed, the object created a long, fiery trail as it headed off across the river and the city, towards the open ocean beyond.

​There it was, ripping across the night sky, scorching it — and then it was gone. But Paul had seen it; definitely, indisputably. In fact, the sight had shocked him. But what was it, exactly, that he had seen? An asteroid? A comet? Something else? Paul had no idea.

​He pulled himself down off the window seat and lumbered across the living room to turn on the TV. The dog followed him, staying close but looking back at the window as if expecting some other threat to soon manifest itself. Paul tuned in the news channels, switching back and forth between the national and local stations, expecting some breathless reporter clutching a microphone to already be interviewing people on the street about the mysterious object that had burned its way across the sky. Surely, millions of people had seen it. Hadn’t they?

​Maybe not, because no one on any of the news programs was mentioning it. Paul picked up his phone and started searching the online news sites but saw no reports about unusual sightings in the night sky. For more than an hour, he went back and forth between the TV channels and Googling for news on his phone, but continued to find nothing. Finally, exhausted and frustrated, he went back to bed and slept until about eight the next morning when the dog began pawing at Paul’s hand to get him to wake up and go out for a walk.

​Paul pulled himself out of bed and struggled to his feet. He found a pair of sneakers, found the dog’s leash, and headed out the door. When he was finally on the street, he felt like he was being attacked by the knife-edged rays of sunlight, which left him light-headed and breathless. And he was still walking with his stiff Frankenstein gait, which somehow seemed even worse than yesterday. All of this was enough to suggest to Paul that he was someone living apart from the world around him, but there was even more evidence to indicate he was right: the morning belonged to the young men and women in their business clothes rushing to the trains and ferries that would take them across the Hudson to their offices and careers. Paul, in his T-shirt and sweat pants, looked completely out of place. In addition to feeling unwell, he felt embarrassed. Ashamed.

​When he returned to his apartment, his heart was pounding. The short walk he’d taken in order to let the dog relieve himself had drained all of Paul’s strength — physical, emotional, everything. He sat on the couch, just trying to breathe. The dog lay down beside him. He put his head on Paul’s leg and closed his eyes.

​A few minutes later, just as Paul’s heart was beginning to slow, it was startled back into overdrive by the clacking ringtone of his cell phone. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and saw that the caller was Mary.

​“Hey,” she said. “I got home too late last night to call. How are you? Are you alright? How do you feel?”

​“I’m not sure how I feel,” Paul answered. “I mean, I’m okay, I guess — I must be, right? They let me out of the hospital.”

​“You are okay,” Mary assured him. “Or at least you will be. It’s going to take time. That’s what all the doctors said.”

​“You mean the doctors who don’t really know what was wrong with me.”

​Mary sighed. She’d had this conversation before — with Paul, when he was still in the hospital, and with all his doctors, every one that had appeared at his bedside and said, We can’t figure it out. “You lived,” she told Paul. “You’re recovering now. Let’s focus on that.”

​“I just wish I understood what happened,” he said. “There’s a lot I remember — too much, probably. But I think there’s a lot more that I don’t.”

​“Do you remember telling me you were going to have me arrested?” Mary said, with a bright laugh. “By the time I got to the emergency room — maybe an hour after you called me — you were already out of it. You seemed to think I had somehow wrestled you into my car, brought you there and wouldn’t let you leave. You also said you were going to sic Buddy on me.”

​“I said that?” Paul felt embarrassed again; how could he have been so out of control? How could he have said crazy things he didn’t recall?

​“I wasn’t worried,” Mary told her cousin. “Buddy loves me.”

​“He does,” Paul agreed.

Just then, Paul heard some buzzing sound that must have been another phone line chiming in on their conversation. “Can you wait a minute?” Mary said to Paul as she clicked a button that put him on hold.

​Soft pop music drifted into Paul’s ear as he passed the time picturing Mary in her office in mid-town Manhattan, a brown-eyed blonde in one of the tailored skirt suits she favored, her hair in short, styled waves, her sharp-angled face wearing a look of professional severity that would ease as she rode the commuter train home to the house in suburban New Jersey where she and her husband Jeff had raised two sons, now grown and gone off to their own lives. Paul was fond enough of the husband and the sons, but it was in the bond with Mary that he had invested a constant trust. The two of them had been companions since childhood, each the other’s witness to the dark currents of rage and disappointment that coursed through the family life dominated by their mothers — warring sisters who were raised to pretend they liked one another and so went on pretending as they gave birth to their children, just months apart. As adults, the sisters lived near each other and often left their children, Mary and Paul, alone together in the basement playrooms of one of their cold, quiet houses, while they drank and bickered upstairs.

​“Paul?” Mary said, clicking back on the line. “Sorry about that. Seating problems for the donor appreciation dinner.” Mary was the development director of a nonprofit that awarded scholarships to high school students who wanted to pursue a career in the sciences; she knew a lot about coaxing money from rich people and even more about how to train physicists and astronomers. Thinking of that, Paul thought of something else, as well.

​“Mary?” he said. “Did you see that thing last night? I was looking out the window and I saw…I don’t know. Something looked like it was on fire in the sky. There was nothing about it on TV or online.”

​“Oh, that,” Mary replied. “No, I didn’t see it. But I caught something about it on the news this morning when I was listening to the radio in the car. It was the remnants of a space station, if I remember correctly. Launched by India, years ago — or someplace like that. It crashed into the ocean.”

​“I don’t think India ever had a space station,” Paul said. “The U.S., Russia, maybe China…”

​“Okay, I’m wrong,” Mary said lightheartedly. “Probably it was an alien landing craft and they’re on the march right now, heading for Hoboken. Don’t answer the door if anyone knocks but me. Jeff’s working late tonight so I’m going to stop by and bring you dinner. Don’t argue with me about that. I’ll see you around six.”

​After they said good-bye, Paul turned on the television, still determined to find out what it was that had come crashing through the summer night. But there was still nothing about it on the news channels, which were now breathlessly reporting on a passenger plane that had taken off from a distant Asian country and then disappeared over the Pacific. Was it terrorism? Suicide by pilot? Mechanical failure? The talking heads contracted to speculate about airline tragedies — ex-pilots, ex-federal agency directors, ex-military investigators — were jabbering away on studio sets and Skype connections. Paul listened for a while but soon, he was dozing again.

​It was nearly noon when he woke up, feeling startled and confused. For a few frightening moments, he thought he was back in the hospital again. But as those flashbacks began to return, like a flip book turning its own panic-filled pages, he made himself replace them with others: Paul leaving the hospital, Paul getting into Brett’s car, Paul finding his worried dog and taking him home. Finally, he was able to wrench himself away from thoughts of the hospital and attend to the things he had to do now.

​First, he needed a shower. This was a complicated task, because it involved removing the bandages on his legs, stepping carefully into the shower where he focused on keeping himself balanced and on washing himself with a kind of wary caution that might be expected from a caretaker of rare and breakable objects. This was the first time he had seen his own naked body in almost two months; the first time, as well, that he had stood under running water. In the hospital, nurses and aides had cleansed him with bath wipes and towelettes, chattering away to distract him, to help him preserve a sense of modesty he didn’t have the strength to tell them that he had already lost. Now, his body looked damaged to him, almost unrecognizable. He had bruises on his arms and chest — from what procedure or rough handling, he had no idea. And he had no muscle tone, or almost none. His limbs looked like sticks, his hands and fingers like the dry, cracked appendages of the elderly.

​He survived the shower, then sat on the toilet rebandaging his legs with the gauze that the hospital had sent home with him. The dog stood in the corner of the bathroom, watching him. Sometimes his curled tail shook slightly, as if the sight of Paul donning a mummy’s wrappings was some sort of signal for him to go on the alert. He walked to the open door and barked into the air of the bedroom.

​ “Okay,” Paul said as the dog turned back to look at him but remained in the doorway, as if standing guard. “If you think the coast is clear, let’s go have some lunch.”

​He wasn’t very hungry, though, so he ate some peanut butter from the jar, sharing it with the dog as he watched TV. All the news channels were still featuring wall-to-wall coverage of the missing airplane. There were no new developments to report, so what Paul saw was mostly footage of surging crowds: grieving families berating airline representatives and reporters shoving their way past security guards to assail government officials who looked stunned and guilty. Sometimes the coverage switched to the same experts who had been onscreen yesterday, but now they were seated in front of maps of the Pacific that showed deep trenches and vast underwater mountain ranges where a downed airliner could disappear as easily as a tiny, drowned bird. The maps, Paul thought, made the world look upside down, like there was more secret geography below the planet’s oceans than had been measured above.

​And still, not a word about the other mystery in the sky: the supposed Indian space station that streaked through the night sky above the Eastern seaboard. After a while, Paul turned off the TV, intending to take the dog out again. He got dressed, picking out jeans and a gray T-shirt that he thought would help him impersonate a regular person, which was what he felt he had to do: think carefully about what a non-patient looked like, a normal guy who just happened to have a little time off from work and was about to take a stroll through the hot afternoon.

​Except he couldn’t exactly stroll and the late August heat was thick and stifling. He could hardly walk at all and felt like breathing required intense concentration. He made it about two blocks and had to turn back. The dog, who stopped only once to pee, barked at every stranger who came near them. Paul didn’t remember the dog ever doing anything like this before, but he was too tired, now, to think about it.

Back home, Paul slept through the afternoon and into the early evening, waking only when Mary called to tell him that she was in her car, about to enter the tunnel under the river, and would be at his house in half an hour. Paul got himself out of bed, feeling sweaty and weak. Clomping into the bathroom, he stripped off his tee shirt and splashed cool water on himself. The dog positioned himself in the same corner he had occupied in the morning, keeping an eye on what Paul was doing.

​When Mary finally arrived, she was carrying enough Chinese take-out to feed a dinner party. She put down the bags, hugged Paul, and then told him to sit at the kitchen table as she began to arrange the food on paper plates.

​“So,” she said, “first tell me how you’re feeling.”

​“Tired,” he replied. “Sore all over.”

​“But you can walk,” Mary said. “They told me in the hospital that you’d recover most of your function. Your legs will heal.”

​Mary started eating but would pause every now and then to give a few bites to the dog. He had positioned himself beside her, driven, perhaps, as much by the gene pool memory of a pariah dog seizing an opportunity to eat as by his own experience: Mary was a pushover when it came to feeding him scraps from the table.

​“Yes,” Paul finally responded. “I guess my legs will heal.”

​Mary looked over at him with a thin smile that was a signal of concern. “But that’s not the point, right? I know you, honeybun. Something’s wrong.”

​“Of course something’s wrong,” Paul said, hearing himself sound annoyed, almost angry. He wanted to dial back the sudden agitation that had seized him, but couldn’t. “I just got out of the hospital after almost two months of nearly dying from some illness that no one can really explain to me. Let’s stop worrying about what it was, they kept saying to me. Let’s just focus on the fact that you’re getting better. I don’t know if I can do that.”

​“They tested you for everything they could,” Mary said. “Believe me, Paul, I harassed those doctors. There must have been a dozen different specialists and I made them all talk to me. They all said pretty much the same thing: there are billions of different kinds of bacteria floating around the world and there aren’t tests for most of them. Did you hear me? Most of them are unidentified. Plus, they mutate all the time so that makes them even harder to identify. Somehow, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’re probably never really going to know what happened.”

​“Which means it could happen again.” This was Paul giving voice to a thought that he knew, immediately, had been lurking in the background of his every waking minute, framing the structure of every dream.

​“I could get hit by a bus,” Mary said. “My husband could get cancer. Anything can happen to anybody.”

​“It’s not the same thing,” Paul told her.

​“Okay,” Mary said. “Tell me why.”

​“No,” Paul said. “I should just stop talking about this. I’m going to make myself crazy.” His anger had flashed and then faded. Now he felt exhausted by the sound of his own voice. “I’m sorry,” he told his cousin. “I never used to act like this. Like a baby. An idiot.”

​“You’re just acting like someone who’s been very sick,” Mary replied sympathetically. “Who has to give himself time to recover.” She ate a few more mouthfuls of her dinner, fed more to the dog. Finally, having decided she’d let the conversation pause long enough, Mary spoke again. “Has anyone from work been in touch with you?”

​“Not yet,” Paul told her. “I have to call them.” He looked down at his plate, at the rice, bits of pork and vegetables, smears of bright sauce the color of a chemical spill. The food, he thought, looked like particles of oblivion. And what does that mean? he asked himself. Then he heard the answer come out of his mouth, in his voice. “I don’t think I’m going to go back,” he said.

It was almost shocking, really, how easily he had said that, admitted to a decision he had probably been slowly making over the past collection of days, weeks. How easy it seemed to let go of a job that had long ago become a profession he enjoyed, working as the editor of art catalogues. The work allowed him to visit galleries and auction houses, to scrutinize photographs of both modern paintings and rare antiquities and to meet lively, interesting people working in both the business and creative sides of the art world. Yet, in the hospital, as he had fallen deeper and deeper into being sick, he didn’t care about any of that. He hadn’t cared about much of anything, really — not even himself or his own fate, sometimes. It was like he had turned his head, turned his attention away from the world and just drifted in the cloud of his illness. Even now, he didn’t feel able to come back. He didn’t think he knew how.

Mary heard what Paul had said, but found it hard to understand. “Do you mean that you don’t intend to return to work at all? Why?”

​The dog, who had been watching Mary, waiting for the next morsel to come his way, stood up and padded over to Paul. He settled beside the seated man, quiet but on guard. For now, he would forego any more food. He could do that. He could wait.

​Absently, Paul reached down to touch the dog’s head.

​“Because I’m not that person anymore,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper.

​A few minutes ago, hadn’t he declared that he wanted to change the direction of their conversation — to stop talking about what had happened to him and how to cope with its aftermath? But he couldn’t. That was all he could talk about right now. All he could think about, see, feel, and dream of. It was an iron suit he had to wear, an iron weight he had to carry with him, an iron sky pressing down on him every minute, all the time. It was everything.

​“It’s going to take a while to get back to yourself,” Mary said to him.

​“I will get back to being somebody,” Paul replied, “but maybe not me. I mean, the me I was before. I know too much.”

​“What do you know?” Mary asked. She put down her fork. She looked across the table at Paul, quietly waiting to hear whatever he would say next. She seemed to be waiting to hear an oracle speak.

​Struggling to explain himself, Paul finally said, “It’s like my eyes have been opened. I’m not this confident, strong guy who can go on forever, doing things the same way I always did. Thinking my life would go on forever. That I had control over things. I have no control over anything,” he concluded.

​“So you’re vulnerable,” Mary replied. “That’s news? We’re all fragile vessels.” She laughed at herself. “I’m sure I must be quoting somebody. I can’t have made that up myself.”

​Outside, the sky was darkening. The ferries hurrying across the river turned on their running lights so that, from afar, they looked like lanterns riding the silvery-blue currents of water. The paths of water reflecting the paths of stars. Paul, who had often walked the dog in the park by the river and watched the ferries crossing from Manhattan to Hoboken, tried to use these images like mental screensavers that could block out his troubling thoughts, but it wasn’t working.

​“Did you ask me something?” Paul said, thinking Mary had just spoken to him but he’d missed whatever she said. “I guess I was drifting. Did we move on from fragile vessels?”

​“Well, not exactly. I was saying that, being in a bit of a vulnerable state right now, maybe you should come stay with us for a while.”

​“Thanks, but I’m managing.”

​“I’m sure you are, but if that hurricane starts moving up the east coast…well, you know how easily Hoboken floods. And if you lose power…”

​“What hurricane?” Paul asked, genuinely startled.

​“It was on the news all day today,” Mary told him. “I mean, between reports about that lost plane. The hurricane that’s been brewing in the Atlantic — it looks like it’s getting stronger and might be heading our way. New Jersey is in its crosshairs, so to speak. That’s why I was suggesting staying with us for a few days.”

​How am I missing all these things? Paul thought. Space stations hurling themselves towards us, hurricanes threatening doom and destruction. In his other life — the life before the hospitalization — he would have immediately told Mary No, I don’t have to run off to your house. I can take care of myself. But right now, maybe that wasn’t realistic. If there were floods and a loss of power in his part of the city, the elevator wouldn’t work, he couldn’t get downstairs to walk the dog — if there was a dry street to walk him on — or get to the supermarket or the pharmacy…the problems he’d face would be unsolvable, even dangerous. Feeling a wave of depression sliding towards him, rearing up, getting ready to crash, he once again reached down to touch the dog’ head, as if checking for the presence of an ally.

​“Alright,” he said to Mary. “Thank you. If it looks like the hurricane really is going to head our way, I’ll come stay with you and Jeff.”

​Three days later, it became apparent that coastal New Jersey, from the shore to the small northern cities along the Hudson River, was indeed going to be in the direct path of the hurricane that had torn itself out of the Caribbean and was now hurling wind and flood waters at the mid-Atlantic states. Residents of low-lying Hoboken, with its riverfront parks and ancient, inadequate drainage system, were warned that they were in for some rough going. The afternoon before the storm arrived, when winds were already pushing people down the street and tearing tiles from rooftops, Mary left work early to pick up Paul and his dog, then drove them to her house in a town further inland that was likely to experience not much more than the storm’s outer bands of wind and rain. When they arrived at the house, Mary’s husband Jeff was already outside, tying down the lawn furniture and carrying potted plants into the garage. He stopped his work to greet Paul, pet Buddy, and say all the welcoming things a nice man says to a relative who is being offered safe haven in a dangerous time.

​And in some places, it was dangerous. For the next twenty-four hours or so, when he wasn’t asleep in the guest bedroom with his dog stretched out beside him, Paul sat in the living room and watched the news channels on TV, following what every reporter standing knee-deep in floodwater called “the hurricane’s path of destruction.” Hoboken was particularly hard hit: on the local stations, Paul saw footage of sailboats that had been lifted from riverside marinas and thrown onto the roadway of Frank Sinatra Drive, which ran along the banks of the Hudson. He saw drowned cars, their roofs looking like turtle shells floating in river water that had become polluted with oil and sewage as it poured into the city streets. He saw apartment buildings that would be uninhabitable for weeks because their boilers and electrical panels had been rotted out by the rising water and stores that would be able to sell nothing for even longer because five feet of water had climbed their shelves and carried away their stock. There was a dangerous fire burning on the city’s outskirts where an electrical transformer had blown up when it was flooded. There was no power in most of the city. No cell phone service. The water coming out of the taps in homes and shelters smelled like poison.

​One night, in the middle hours before dawn, Paul suddenly opened his eyes, shocked to find that an idea, floating through the stages of his sleep as shifting shapes and shadows, had spilled out of its dream wrapper to form the belief that he would never be able to go home. That Hoboken, inundated with water and rot, burning at its edges, nearly lost to the river like some ancient metropolis pulled under the waves by sudden upheaval of natural forces, would be declared a disaster zone and evacuated forever. Paul would be a refugee, exiled from a ghost town. All would be lost.

​But it only took a few breaths for Paul to be able to offer himself a different scenario. The picture he was seeing in the dark — himself clomping towards some midnight crossroads with a pack on his back and his fellow-refugee, the dog, following behind on ragged paws — was so melodramatic as to be ridiculous. There had to be some middle ground to this story that involved the lights coming back on, the streets being cleared of debris. The elevator in his building would work again. The stores would sell medicine and food.

​And indeed, a week later, a neighbor called to tell Paul that their block had been spared the worst of the flooding and power had been restored to their building so it was safe to come home. The water had receded from his street and a massive cleanup was underway. The National Guard had brought in backhoes and earth moving equipment to clean the silt and debris that clogged the streets and gutters. And the Red Cross was handing out drinking water, blankets, canned goods, and hot coffee. When Paul finally persuaded Mary to drive him home, volunteers from the ASPCA waved them over at a stoplight in the center of the city and, having seen the dog sitting in the back seat of Mary’s car, gave Paul a twenty pound bag of kibble just in case he needed help feeding his pet in the still-difficult days ahead. Paul said he was grateful but didn’t need the gift since he and Mary had already stopped at a supermarket and bought enough supplies to keep himself and the dog in relative comfort for quite a while, but the ASPCA people insisted he accept their donation. You never know, an earnest blonde girl with wide blue eyes told him. How could he possibly argue with that?

​So Paul lived through the time of flood. The summer ended, fall intruded on the sunny days and lowered the clouds, turning them gray and unruly; they scudded up and down the river on gusts of chilly wind. Then it was winter; Paul no longer needed to keep his legs bandaged but they were still scarred and stiff. He struggled with pulling on boots, with balancing on icy streets when he walked the dog or ventured downstairs to wait for a cab when he had to travel more than a few blocks to complete some errand.

​Deep in the winter months, Hoboken seemed to have recovered from the storm. Shops were open again, the bars and restaurants were busy, trains and buses came and went on schedule. But to Paul’s eye, damage remained: there were still businesses and apartment buildings that were boarded up because insurers wouldn’t pay to make repairs and a large section of the riverside park, where mountains of wreckage and debris had been piled up in the days after the flood receded, still looked like a wasteland. Paul tried not to walk down the streets where evidence of the deluge was still visible. And he avoided the park because the stench of garbage often rose up from the ground. The polluted water had so deeply penetrated the fields and pathways that the local newspapers wrote half-joking editorials about the mutant flowers that might appear in the spring: fish shaped blooms with broken leaves, their stems and stamens humming with hybrid energy that would electrocute any bird or bee that ventured near. It would take years for the mutilation of the landscape and its manmade alterations to become just one more story in the narrative of this time, this place. Paul, thinking about his own story, eventually came to the conclusion that he couldn’t wait that long.

​But he did wait until spring. On a warm day in April, Paul invited Mary to have lunch with him. They sat in the rooftop garden of an old industrial building that had been newly converted into a restaurant. Below them, the river glittered in the sunlight.

​The cousins chatted through their first glass of wine, the first bites of the omelets they had ordered. Then, just after Paul signaled the water to refill their wineglasses, he said to Mary, “So. I think I’m going to move to Milersville.”

It took Mary a few moments to register what he’d just said. She shook her head as if she wanted to deny that his words meant what she thought they did. “Milersville? You mean that little town in upstate New York — in the Catskills — where we used to go in the summers when we were kids? Paul, that was centuries ago. Why in heaven’s name would you want to do that? Do you know how cold it gets up there in the winter? And what about your health? How can you possibly live alone in some rural county where the nearest doctor is probably an hour away?”

Paul let her go on spilling out questions until she had raised every possible objection she could think of, pausing only to think of more. When she finally stopped, Paul tried to explain, though he wasn’t sure he had yet fully explained his decision to himself.

“I just can’t be here anymore,” Paul said. “Everything in my life has changed. I walk down the street and I feel like a ghost. People are running around doing things that have no connection to me anymore. Also, the flood,” he added. “It doesn’t flood in Milersville.”

“Maybe not,” Mary said gently, “but I don’t think that’s a reason to move a hundred miles away. Paul, maybe you’re just remembering an idyllic childhood — one we really didn’t have. Who are you imagining we were? Jack and Jill running through meadows? Floating down the creek on inner tubes? Even if you and I did have some fun, remember what we always came home to? Your mom and my mom — God knows why they had to vacation together. One rented house, two warring women both of them usually drunk by noon. You think it was for convenience that both our fathers stayed in the city all week and just came up on Friday nights then left as early as they could on Sundays? What are you trying to recreate, Paul? Some peace that never really existed?”

“I’m not trying to recreate anything,” Paul insisted. “I just want to get away. And at least I know Milersville. I know how to live there.”

“Not when it’s freezing,” Mary told him. “And anyway, what are you going to do about money?”

“I have a pension from work. And — unbelievable as this sounds since I can’t imagine I’m really this old — I can collect Social Security in two years. Plus, remember that I live in hipsterville now. I can sell my apartment for a ton of money and live on that for a long time, even if I buy a house in Milersville for cash. Houses are cheap up there.”

“They’re cheap for a reason,” Mary replied.

“I’m going to do this,” Paul answered. “I have to. I just…have to. Look, you and Jeff can come visit. You’ll have a mountain retreat on weekends. You can go skiing — there are great slopes nearby.”

“You know neither one of us skis,” Mary said.

The conversation finally petered out. The cousins finished their meal and hugged as they said good-bye. As Mary was leaving, she turned back to Paul, as if she had something further to say, but instead, she just waved and walked away.

Once Paul set his plan in motion — If what I’m doing could be called a plan, he often thought — everything seemed to happen quickly. He still had difficulty walking for any length of time, but driving was fine so, with the dog in the passenger seat, he was able to make the two-hour trip across the northern border of New Jersey and on to upstate New York without a problem. He arranged to meet a local real estate agent and on their first day of seeing houses, he found one he liked that was near Milersville’s tiny main street. It was an old house with a clanky furnace but all the rooms were on one floor and it had a back yard ringed by woods and a view of the Catskill Mountains in the distance. Paul put down a deposit and sold his Hoboken apartment within a month; just after the closing, he bought a car, a used Volvo that seemed as rock solid as a tank. He hired the ever-resourceful Brett to pack up his apartment for him and oversee the moving company that carried his things from the city to the country. Then, in what seemed like a very short time, Paul found himself sitting in a new living room, surrounded by boxes. A local market had already made a delivery, so he had food and cold beer in the fridge. He took a bottle from a six pack of golden ale and went to sit in the back yard, on a beach chair the former owner had left in the garage. The dog sat beside him, leaning against his leg.

It was late afternoon now, late in the summer. Sunlight moved through the rippling grass, unmown for months. The woods that marked the boundary at the far end of the yard looked impenetrable; the mountains rising above the trees seemed to be clamped against the high blue sky, creating a barrier to safe passage beyond — though beyond where, Paul wasn’t sure. There were no neighbors near enough to hear the sounds of others’ daily lives, no cars on the road that passed by the end of Paul’s driveway, so the world seemed to be silent. Breathing, maybe, through the ribbons of breezes, but there were no other whispers. No signals, no words.

Okay, Paul thought. Okay. This is what I did. Then, he found himself framing that thought another way: This is what I did after what happened to me. Now I have to figure out a way to deal with it.

So, he worked on creating a routine for himself. Every morning, he led the dog out of the house and together, they made their way down the road to town. Paul still felt significant pain in his legs, still knew his gait was stiff and awkward looking, but he managed the ten-minute walk without having to stop for a rest, which was a daily victory. He had eggs and coffee in a small eatery owned by a woman who had come upstate for the Woodstock festival decades ago and never left. She sold second-hand clothes in the back of the store and had a few tables up front where they served sandwiches and whatever they could cook on a two-burner stove. She welcomed Paul as a new neighbor and let him bring the dog inside while he lingered over his breakfast as long as he liked. It was a safe and cozy place and Paul felt comfortable there.

In the afternoons, he either drove half an hour to the nearest supermarket to stock up on groceries or did other errands. And every few weeks, he visited the doctor in a nearby town that his physician in New Jersey had referred him to. The doctor said that Paul’s health was good, that he had nothing to worry about. At least, that’s what his blood tests showed, what his heart and lungs suggested when probed by a stethoscope. They were doing their jobs, they were steady, reliable parts of the whole. Keep exercising, the doctor said. Keep building your strength.

Mary called every other week or so, or Paul called her, but the conversations seemed to grow shorter as time went on. Once, on a sunny weekend in mid-summer, she and her husband had come up to Milersville to visit Paul. Together, the three of them drove around the countryside, admiring the mountain views, the green meadows and rushing streams. Paul took Mary and Jeff to a restaurant in a converted mill that had been built before the Revolutionary War. Everything about the weekend was enjoyable, but Paul felt mostly exhausted when he waved good-bye to his cousin and her husband on Sunday night. And he felt lonely in a new way, like he was watching a chapter in his life come to a close.

It was not long after that weekend he enrolled in an online art course. He missed visiting galleries and art dealers, so the online class, offered by a university in Chicago, was a way of connecting with the work he had once cared so deeply about. That he had been good at. That had ended so abruptly. His choice, yes, but still, feelings lingered for familiar ground that had been lost.

The first course he took focused on Egyptian antiquities. Twice a week, Paul stared into kohl-rimmed eyes of jackal-headed gods with the bodies of men; he examined the painted faces of women with dark, oiled hair wearing golden headdresses and serpent bracelets. He read the translation of hieroglyphic messages carved on pyramid walls, on the doors of temples, and at the feet of statues that spoke of how souls would sail on silver boats across rivers of stars to reach an eternal other-world where their pleasures would continue and their lives would never end.

In Paul’s world, sunlight and shadow moved across the floor in the day’s late hours, while the dog slept at his feet. Outside, the still-unmown grass let the summer breezes create thin furrows in the yard that were exposed for only a moment, like temporary roads that disappeared as soon as they were revealed. And after half a dozen afternoons at the computer, Paul decided that he could not continue the course: the more he stared at the Egyptians and their painted faces and elaborate sarcophagi, the more he had only one thought: that these people were dead. Long dead. Their silver boats, their rivers of stars — all gone, all dark and dead. He couldn’t stand it anymore, so he abandoned the course and did not sign up for another until later in the summer. This time he took a leap forward in time to study abstract art, but the subject proved as difficult for him to settle in with as the Egyptians had. All the work seemed to Paul like an attempt to confine chaos into grids and boxes; even the paintings that looked like chaos presented themselves as the creation of an anxious hand that meant to transfer its own fear onto a canvas. In the night, in bed, Paul found himself wondering, But fear of what? Time passing, the future closing in, death, God, the absence of God, the absence of reason, of purpose, of meaning, of finding the empty, soulless roads and lonely mountains at the end of the world?

Eventually, he abandoned that course, too. And in doing so, admitted to himself what the problem was: now, everything — the art he had loved, the history that had provided context for that art, along with new work, new statuary and paintings and collages and mosaics destined to be carried forward into new centuries, a new future — all of this, plus the everyday world around him, the roads and trees and grass and flowers and the rooms of his house and the hours that spent themselves on the faces of his ticking clocks, every bit of everything he now experienced or encountered seemed to point only one way, to only one thing: the inevitable presence of the finite in infinity. The unquestionable fact that the brief lives of human beings were no more durable than breakable goods; vulnerable, defenseless, beginning and ending for unknowable reasons. Or maybe no reason at all. Fragile vessels. That was how Mary had once described what Paul was now feeling. But how was he supposed to live with that idea haunting him all the time?

Towards the end of August, on a bright, sunny weekday morning when he actually didn’t feel much like getting out of bed, Paul made himself rise, dress, and take the dog into town to his regular breakfast spot. Because he was late in arriving, there were more people at the surrounding tables than he was used to. As he ate his food and drank his coffee, he overheard some of the conversations going on around him. These were locals talking, people who lived in this rural area year round. Paul heard them chatting about the coming of autumn; how it meant that bears would be prowling around before heading off into hibernation and had to be scared away by gunshots; how deer hunters — often amateurs with an inadequate understanding of the difference between sport and trespassing — had to be warned off private property, if necessary by firing a rifle into the air before the intruders accidentally shot a horse or a cow innocently grazing in their owner’s fields. Or, Paul thought, before they shot someone’s dog.

Walking home through the sunlight that laid itself before him like a shining golden path, he wondered if he should get a gun. Bears, hunters, protection — those were the words that ran thought his mind. Later, sitting in the yard, he looked into the depthless wall of trees beyond the grass and thought about what might come out of those dark woods and head straight at him. He was still thinking those thoughts later, when he went to bed. When his pariah dog climbed into the bed beside him, stretched himself out like a thin shadow on the blanket and went to sleep.

The following morning, instead of walking, Paul drove into town with the dog and had his breakfast. Then he got back in the car and drove down the road, heading towards a place he had heard mentioned the day before. Am I this kind of person now? he wondered as he drove.

After about twenty minutes, he pulled into the gravel parking lot of a store called Catskill Guns and Sporting Equipment. It was located in a pretty spot near a creek edged with willow trees. In the distance, the low, summer-green mountains looked as decorous as a daisy chain. Flowers grew in pots outside the front door. Not death and danger, Paul thought, which is what he had been prepared for: a store selling hard solutions to bad problems. Inside, the long-haired young man in jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt standing behind the counter also surprised him, as did the moody jazz wafting from speakers set high on the wall above the racks of rifles and shotguns. The place reminded Paul more of a head shop than a store selling weapons.

“Hey there,” the clerk said, looking up as Paul walked through the front door, leading his dog on a leash. As Paul approached the counter, the clerk presented him with a friendly smile.

“Anything in particular you’re interested in?”

“Not really. I don’t actually know anything about these things,” Paul replied, gesturing at the ranks of long-barreled firearms. “It’s just…well, I live in Milersville and people in town have been talking about bears.”

“Davey Crockett,” the clerk said. “Killed him a bear when he was only three.”

“What?” Paul said. He thought he vaguely remembered the song lyrics the young man was quoting; something from an old TV show, perhaps. “I couldn’t kill an animal. I was just thinking of maybe needing to scare something away.”

“Well, look around,” the young man said. “See if anything appeals to you.”

Paul stood at the counter and stared up at the weapons displayed on the wall. Then he examined the handguns laid out in a glass case just below the counter: rows and rows of black and silver handguns that looked to Paul like movie props, too deadly to be real.

“Wow,” he said, eyeing the guns. “These look pretty serious.” Without thinking, he took a step back from the counter and the dog, who had eased himself into a sitting position, immediately stood up.

“It’s okay,” the young man said as a mellow saxophone played soothing notes that dipped and floated, like clouds wandering through the sky. “They’re just guns.” He looked straight at Paul. “You probably played with toy guns when you were a kid, right?”

“But these are real.”

The young man shrugged. “So what?” he said. “They can’t do anything unless you use them — and we can teach you to use them safely. We give lessons. You need to get a license for a handgun but not to buy a rifle. Pick out one of those and we can have you shooting like a champ in a few days. Scare off anything that comes at you, day or night.”

Day or night. Day or night. Why did that phrase suddenly remind Paul of the hospital again? Maybe it was because there was something about the atmosphere of this quiet, isolated place that seemed to complete a link in his mind to the drug-addled, pain-infused days and nights when he was stranded in a bed, in an institution, defenseless against the mystery illness that had ripped him away from his life. The days and nights when he wanted to roll back the clock to a time when he was strong, and healthy; when he did feel that he could have killed someone, anyone — anything — that had caused him to be so broken, even though there was no culprit to be identified. To be named.

“I was really sick last summer,” Paul heard himself blurting out, perhaps meaning to apologize for his reaction to the weaponry on display.

“Oh?” the clerk said in response to Paul’s confession. “Are you okay now?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Still on the road, you know. To recovery.” He tried to laugh, to sound casual. Whatever sound actually came out of his throat caused the dog to look up at him and tug at his leash. “I guess he wants to go,” Paul said to the clerk.

“Okay,” the young man replied. He smiled at Paul again as the music playing behind him faded away, only to emerge from the speakers as something different: soft piano chords, summery and nostalgic. “Come back anytime. We’re open twenty-four seven.” Then he laughed, too. “Well, almost,” he said.

A week passed. Paul sat in the yard, in the sunshine. He spent a lot of time reading; mostly police procedurals that kept him from thinking about anything else because it was necessary to closely follow the plot in order to keep up with the unfolding story. The detectives in these books were almost always disillusioned, brooding types, relentlessly pressing forward in their pursuit of murderers despite their secret suspicion that their efforts to achieve some kind of justice were probably meaningless when weighed against the rising tide of pure evil in the world.

Then, in the first week of September, at his usual breakfast in town, Paul heard about the Jubilee Day Parade, a local celebration of the founding of Milersville and a nearby village called Caton. As she poured Paul’s coffee, Susie, the owner of the shop, said, “Did you know that your house is on the Jubilee Day parade route?”

“Really?” Paul responded. “The parade passes by the road in front of my house?”

“It sure does,” Susie told him. “Next Saturday. The parade starts here, in Milersville and ends in Caton. It’s just a hodge-podge of school bands and people waving flags and banners, plus some floats that people slap together in their garages over the winter, but it’s a lot of fun.”

“Well, I’ll have to watch. Thanks for telling me,” Paul said.

On the following Saturday, Paul broke his usual routine by staying at home in the morning. The Jubilee Day Parade was scheduled to start in a few hours and Susie had warned him that the town and her shop would be crowded with people planning to march the parade route. Paul wanted to avoid all that so instead, he made himself a cup of coffee and let the dog out in the yard. It was a morning of mists and birdsong, with watery sunlight just beginning to filter through the damp branches of the trees.

By noon, the mists had long sailed away. It was hot outside. The sun was sizzling in a clear blue sky. Paul carried the beach chair from his back yard to the front of the house and set it in the shade of an overhanging eave. He put out a bowl of water for the dog, who had followed him outside, and settled in with the book he was currently reading. A British detective was searching for clues that would reveal the murderer of several people whose bodies had been discovered in an ancient bog. In the story, it always seemed to be raining. The detective always forgot his raincoat and complained to his assistants about ruining his shoes.

It was around noon that Paul began to hear music drifting down the two-lane rural road by his house. The dog began to growl, so Paul put down his book and laid his hand on the dog’s head to reassure him. To remind him that there was no danger represented by the strangers who would be passing by the house.

A few minutes later, the first of the marchers appeared on the road and were followed closely by dozens of others. Soon, Paul found himself watching a disorganized but happy stream of men, women, and children, marching along in the sunshine. Some of the marchers were accompanied by dogs in costumes. The dogs, some big, some small, looked pleased to be dressed up as sausages and lions and dinosaurs and greatly delighted to be walking beside their owners. A school band passed by, playing an old military march on their golden instruments. Next, a few floats appeared, decorated with hay and glitter, advertising businesses located in the towns connected by the parade route. Paul saw Susie on one of the floats and she tooted a toy horn at him. Then a group of marchers dressed like it was Mardi Gras tossed Paul some beaded necklaces. He rose and walked down the driveway to pick them up. He was walking a lot better now. Frankenstein was gone, replaced by an ordinary man with a limp.

Then Paul went back to his beach chair and sat down again. His dog leaned against his leg. As the marchers kept coming, those who recognized him from town, and even many who didn’t, started waving at Paul and he waved back. He began to realize that he liked this, liked the parade, liked sitting in front of his house, in the sunshine, which seemed to have become milder, more buttery. And he liked that this was a guaranteed day of celebration. A day, surely, when bad things would not happen. And a day, he said to himself, when no one would even think of buying a gun. When doors were likely to be left open and light would wash through the rooms like a tide of joy.

Paul sat outside until the parade ended, until he could no longer hear any music floating back to him from down the road. Then he stood up and, followed by his pariah dog, went into the house to begin living the rest of his life.

---

Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry and short stories, and several novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, the recipient of the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2016, her most recent novel, Radiomen, was awarded the John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her latest novel, The Stargazer’s Embassy, is being published by Mayapple Press.