CHAPTER ONE

     For a second, he thought it was his imagination. But no. Now there were shapes of things—the bowl of the ceiling light above the foot of the bed, the closet door, the coat rack with his sweatshirt hanging from the top knob—all of it outlined by the faintly lightened air. And so this endless night had ended after all.
      He wasn’t sure—had he actually slept and come suddenly fully awake, or had he spent the whole night like this, eyes wide open and feeling like shit. Dreaming or divining ways to avoid what he had to do today. Do tonight.
     He turned his head and looked at the outline of Mrs. Cready’s big old scarred wardrobe, which, she claimed, her father had fished out of Dorchester Bay after the ’38 hurricane with a jet-black mother cat and nine pure-white kittens inside. One door stretched open, the way he always left it, marking an asymmetrical rectangle against the lighter wall, and he remembered that he’d wanted pretty much the same thing when he was a kid. To avoid what was coming. Or at least slow it down.
     It was, now that he thought about it, something he’d been pretty fervent about, as though it had got mixed up with Sister Mary Catherine’s miracle-a-day renditions. But then, if you believed the miracles, which he did then, what was so crazy about thinking you could slow down time. And thinking about it now, he decided what the hell…since nothing else had worked or was working or might ever work again…wasn’t just about anything worth a try?
     Imagining, more than remembering the process, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let his muscles go slack against the mattress, began to count his breaths backwards from fifty, and then heard the soft click from the beside table before he’d gotten halfway to zero, and before, far as he could tell, there was any hint of the time manipulation he was after.
     1950 blast from the past for all you early risers!!!
     Goddamn thing. He stuck his hand out and slapped the top of the radio, which never worked when it was supposed to, only when it wasn’t, the first few notes of The Tennessee Waltz lingering in the air for a nanosecond.
     He found himself picturing her—pretty, blonde, disappointingly wholesome—that singing rage Miss Patti Page. Or at least she had been forty years ago. Which meant her waltz could have been playing the last time he’d tried this. How fucking fitting.
     He smoothed the sheet across his chest, closed his eyes, took another deep breath, and instantly he was hyper-aware of the silence.
     No yelling, no doors slamming, no engines revving, no dogs barking. No jet roar overhead. As if the street, the neighborhood, maybe the whole damn city was bowing its head to the sun as it raised itself out of the bay.
     He pictured a pool of orange light spreading across Harbor Point, Savin Hill, Fields Corner, Codman Square, Ashmont. Day breaking across all of Dorchester.
     It had made perfect sense for a while. Three stops on the Red Line, twenty minutes tops even on a slow day, to and from work.
     The work he didn’t go to anymore.
     So it no longer made perfect or any other kind of sense, except now there was this—lassitude. And a fact to face. That he didn’t have anywhere better to be. Which meant that for no reason other than entropy, he woke up and went to sleep every day in this city of history—one whole month older than Boston, home of chocolate, pumped sewage, redevelopment, not to mention Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and Mr. Spock. And how about that, an Irish Catholic and a Jew. Just like him. Nate Madigan. Half and half.
     He thought about the crummy little apartment in Lynn he’d looked at first, cheap and crawling with roaches, though it wasn’t the roaches that had kept him from moving in. It was that damn rhyme that kept running through his head every time he thought about the place. Lynn Lynn, city of sin, you never come out the way you went in.
     He caught himself. Not even two minutes and he was already screwing it up. It seemed reasonable that slowing the world should require a heavy degree of concentration. That if your brain didn’t go into suspension right along with your body, it wouldn’t work. And where had such a cockamamie thing come from anyway—Captain Video? Buck Rogers? Or maybe just his own sad little imagination.
     He’d believed it intensely for what…a month, a year? When he was ten, eleven. Even though the clock had kept right on ticking until it was time for the torture by dentist or the polio shot or Sister Angelica’s multiplication test or having to get up and face his mother in the kitchen, see that she was still stone-faced and silent, still mad at him or at Priscilla. Or at least that’s how he’d seen it then. His fault. Pris’s fault. When crazy was what Esther really was. Sometimes just for hours or days, but more often weeks at a time. Long enough so you felt like all the starch had gone out of you, your insides full of mush.
     He sighed, opened his eyes. Nothing was going to slow down the march toward the inevitable. Not then. Not now. He was going to have to tell Kim and Roberta the bad news, and he was going to have to do it in a little less than thirteen hours.
     Above him, in the merest hint of rose-tinted light, Nixon stared down from the cracks in the ceiling plaster, the nose impossibly long, but with just the right lift, the beady eyes, the jowls. Why the hell did Dick Nixon have to be on his ceiling when he’d never been able to stand the little bastard.
     He pictured the hunched shoulders, arms thrust in the air, fingers doing twin Vs.
     The one thing he could never figure was Pat. How she’d stayed with him through it all. Because there was simply no explanation. Except maybe an exceptional capacity for compassion. True compassion, the kind you gave to people who absolutely didn’t deserve it. Or was she simply incapable of breaking a vow?
     He pictured her standing behind her husband during the farewell speech, the wet eyes, the tight jaw. Was it possible she actually loved him? Loved Tricky Dick?
     He closed his eyes again. It was a line of thinking he wasn’t crazy about following. It made him start to wonder about his own capacities.
     The only person he knew for sure he’d always loved was Kimmy. But somehow fatherly devotion didn’t seem enough when he thought of all the people he hadn’t loved enough…Esther, even if it was tough loving someone who went from warm to steel cold in the blink of an eye. And Priscilla—though he had tenderness for Priscilla, a feeling of protectiveness that had been there as long as he could remember—both of them caught in the same crazy nest.
     And Roberta, had he ever really loved Roberta? Must have. Because how could you live with someone for over two decades, have a child with her, if you were never even sure you loved her. Which made him wonder if he was malformed. The dangerous genes passed on to yet another generation.
     All in all a less than stellar scorecard. A rotten son, a rotten husband, a rotten Jew, a rotten Catholic. An okay father.
     Almost fifty-one. And here he lay with a hole in his life the size of Milwaukee. Willing to try some cockamamie fantasy he’d made up almost half a century ago.
     The sad list ticked through his brain the way it did every morning. Divorced. Recently canned from the company he’d worked for since he was twenty-three. Living on unemployment. Occupying two sagging rooms in someone else’s house. A college tuition bill he couldn’t pay sitting on the table. Kim thinking she was going to Wellesley in September, when she’d be lucky if he could swing the ivied halls of the Commonwealth. A sister who’d tried to slash her wrists ten times in the last ten years. Not to mention the crazy, bitter, petulant, self-obsessed mother who railed twenty-four hours a day against the nursing home because she refused to believe she couldn’t walk six feet without falling over, that she’d left the burner going under one too many empty pots, that you couldn’t open all the windows in January and nearly die of pneumonia without being deemed incompetent.
     How, he wondered, had his life turned into such a fucking bowl of cherries?
     Outside there was the sound of a car starting. Six-thirty. Which meant at six thirty-two the dog would start.
     It had bothered him only peripherally up until the pink slip. Just an annoying snooze alarm still barking when he turned on the shower and when he turned it off. Barking while he shaved, while he fixed his tie, while he snapped the top down on his travel mug. Sometimes he’d watch it through the windshield while he sipped coffee and waited for the engine to stop skipping, a big dog, a black and tan collie, straining against the line that linked it to the fancy dog house. A shingled peaked roof, a window on the side for christ’s sake.
     But now he had to listen to it all fucking day. And it wasn’t like he hadn’t mentioned it.
     “Bark?” the guy said. Mel was his name, or was it Phil. “This dog?” Mel or Phil looked incredulous, shocked, disbelieving. “Bark? This dog?”
     He’d nodded. “Yeah. This dog. From the time you leave until the time you come home.”
      Mel or Phil had scratched his head. “Funny, you know? Cuz we’ve lived here nine, ten years. Had this dog four. And no one’s ever said a thing about barking. ‘Til you. And you been here, what ...?”
     “Six months.”
     “Yeah…well.”
     As if somehow that explained it.
     So now Mel or Phil wasn’t friendly anymore, didn’t wave across the fence like he used to. And the dog barked. Bark bark bark.
     He swung his legs onto the floor and sat up, put his head in his hands. For thirty years his eyes had opened every morning by six-fifteen, but now, if it wasn’t for the dog that didn’t bark, he had the feeling he might be able to sleep all day.
     But not this day. Because for once he had something to do besides looking through the Help Wanteds or sending out another useless resume.
     Priscilla had hired him. Her deck needed staining.
     “Hundred and fifty bucks,” he’d told her after he looked it over. “Stain included.”
     “A hundred and fifty? Are you out of your mind? I can get the kid down the street to do it for seventy-five.”
     “Go ahead then, Pris. Be my guest. But don’t call me in two weeks complaining about the lousy job he did. How much stain he got all over the ivy, how he didn’t get the edges, how he laid his girlfriend on your chaise lounge and left the used rubber on the patio.”
     “Oh, shut up, Nate,” she’d said, “okay, a hundred and fifty.”
     The way she acted, you’d think she didn’t have two nickels to rub together. But he and Stan still ran into each other at the barber’s once in a while, and he was about the only person Stan could talk to who understood. After all, he’d lived with Priscilla even longer than Stan had.
     Poor Stan. But not so poor anymore. Because after fifteen years of hell, Stan had traded Priscilla for someone normal. Stan’s second wife didn’t pass out face down in her spinach quiche. She didn’t throw knives or lock herself in the bathroom just before everyone arrived for Thanksgiving dinner. She didn’t try to kill herself once a year.
     Stan’s ulcer was gone. Even his hair had grown back a little. And he was guilty as hell about it all. Scared that somehow the life he’d had was the life he was supposed to have. That this new life was just something the gods were only teasing him with.
     To appease them, he gave Priscilla more than she needed, more than she wanted, more than she could ever need or want. So now, instead of just being a schizoid suicidal alcoholic, she was a rich schizoid suicidal alcoholic.
     He decided to save the shower for tonight and pulled on an old pair of pants, a sweatshirt that had a hole over his heart, the sneakers he used to run in before he stepped off the curb and tore his trapezius maximus. He washed his face and hands, brushed his teeth and looked at the tint of blood when he spit. That was new. Relatively new. For a while he’d expected it to go away. But it hadn’t. It was there every time, an insult. As if his own gums had turned against him, waiting to go soft and puscular until just after he’d lost his medical and dental coverage. He buried his face in a towel that smelled faintly of mildew.
     One by one all the certainties of his life had deserted him. Santa. Love and sex. Happiness. Security.
     He dropped his toothbrush into a yellow plastic cup.
     He opened the front door on a day that couldn’t seem to make up its mind. The sun broke through the clouds, disappeared, broke through again, but thinly. No threat of more April rain, at least that’s what Dickie the weatherman said last night on channel five.
     Down the road, a motorcycle started up, revved, went steady. Across the street a sprinkler carelessly set was leaving most of its spray on asphalt instead of grass. Mrs. Cready, his landlady, was standing over an azalea that looked more dead than alive, a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. She was wearing the black and white striped house dress she lived in, and the dirty pink bunny slippers.
     “Morning.” He nodded.
     “Half a bag ‘a cow shit,” she said, taking a drag and blowing the smoke out the side of her mouth, “and this thing still looks like crap.”
     “Maybe it takes a while,” he said, “you know, for it to sink in and take effect. The fertilizer?”
     She shrugged. She wasn’t a bad landlady. She didn’t talk a lot. She wasn’t nosey. It wasn’t her fault the walls were thin. She had a bald friend who came every Thursday at four o’clock in the afternoon and stayed until the next morning. They played the same five or six records over and over...Guy Lombardo, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman. Doris Day, Rosie Clooney, Bing Crosby. He’d heard them so many times, he’d memorized all the lyrics. And then sometime around ten-thirty Thursday night, the last record would end and the needle would run in the groove for an hour or more.
     There’d be grunts and various other animal noises, and sometimes he tried to imagine them, her without her black and white housedress, her saggy breasts between the bald guy’s arthritic fingers, her bulgy purplish legs up in the air, his hairless ass driving against her. But it wasn’t something you liked to linger on too long.
     “Hope it makes it,” he said, opening the gate and clicking it shut behind him.
     “Yeah, well...” She coughed. “I ain’t gonna hold my breath.”
     He slid onto the cracked front seat of the old Volvo, pulled the seat belt around him, sat there with his foot on the gas for a minute waiting for the engine to smooth out, listening to the announcer talk about orange juice. The collie was jumping around, straining at the end of its line and he brought the rpm’s up until the engine drowned out the noise and it was merely a dog miming.
     He watched it strain and jerk. Maybe it was insane, an insanity induced by being tied up every day of its life. Hitting the end of that rope over and over and over.
     “Christ,” he said under his breath.
     It ran in the family on both sides. Insanity. A great-grandmother and a cousin he’d never known, Aunt Trudi. And, of course, Esther, the non-certified one. The great-grandmother and the cousin he’d only heard vague mentions of. Auntie Trudi, though, they’d visited once when she was ‘away.’ A Sunday after church, driving in the opposite direction from home, Esther, his father, Priscilla and himself.
     His father was driving. Maybe his mother hadn’t learned to drive yet, but even after she did, his father always drove. He was sitting behind his father, Pricilla next to him, behind his mother.
     “Where are we going?” he’d asked. He remembered the moment of his asking and the almost immediate realization that he shouldn’t have. Remembered the silence that made the question seem like the wrongest thing he could have done.
     And as it turned out, the whole terrible day was his fault. For asking that one stupid question.
     He remembered Aunt Trudi, who seemed perfectly right and perfectly wrong at the same time. Her eyes darting from one to the other of them, chain-smoking, crying and then laughing. And her white slip showing all around beneath her skirt. He remembered the slip most of all, the white lace hanging inches down. A sign of carelessness, sloppy habits. A sign of detachment. Women worried about slips that showed. Is my slip showing? His mother said it all the time. Is my slip showing? Are my seams straight? But Aunt Trudi didn’t seem to care. Didn’t even seem to notice.
     It could come over you, the way it came over her. Everybody said it. It just comes over her. And she can’t do a thing about it. So he was always waiting for it to come over him, too. Sometimes it still seemed not far away, little inklings here and there, now and then. A random thought that never took center stage but knocked quickly and disappeared. Say when he was driving on the freeway. This is seriously dangerous this thing you’re doing, the thought would whisper, seriously fucking dangerous. And it would vaguely occur to him that if he held onto it, if he let himself really think about it, he wouldn’t be able to do it anymore. Wouldn’t be able to hurtle along with hundreds of other cars hurtling along at speeds that could kill you in the time it took to complete a breath. Strangers all around you at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour. Strangers you wouldn’t trust next to your bag at the airport. But on Route 128, going seventy-five miles an hour, then you trusted them.
     And the funny urges that came out of the blue. Senseless, ridiculous urges. Sitting across a table from someone—friend, foe, peer, stranger—and this crazy, almost overwhelming urge to throw his ginger ale or his beer or his coffee right in their face. The urge to blow his horn at the old lady passing by his car just to see her jump. The urge to reach across the counter and touch the blond teller’s nipple through her silk shirt. Then there were the road lines he counted, the numbers he repeated in his head, the silk blanket edge he rubbed against his nose in bed.
     He always managed to stop himself. Didn’t blow the horn, toss the drink, touch the nipple. He stopped the counting, the repeating, the rubbing. He drove the expressway. As if sanity was a decision, something you chose or didn’t choose.
     Lately though, it was insanity that seemed the saner choice. For one thing, it would be a whole lot easier. Because you wouldn’t be responsible then. Not for the fact your slip showed or your hand touched things it wasn’t supposed to. It would just be something that came over you.
     He let the engine idle down and the dog started making noise again. The announcer on the radio was in the middle of a tire commercial. Mrs. Cready gave the azalea a kick with one dirty pink slipper and went inside.