say where she had gone.
Ville Tolvanen shot pool every night at the bar on the corner of Eighth and Vine. The friends he had at the bar were the same friends he had known when he was alive. There was something they used to say to each other when they went out drinking in Oulu, a sort of song they used to sing: “I’ll meet you when I die/At that bar on the corner of Eighth and Vine.” One by one, then, as they passed away, they found their way to the corner of Eighth and Vine, walked gingerly, skeptically, through the doors of the bar, and caught sight of one another by the pool tables, until gradually they were all reassembled. Ville was the last of the group to die, and finding his friends there at the bar felt almost as sweet to him as it had when he was young. He clutched their arms and they clapped him on the back. He insisted on buying them drinks. “Never again,” he told them. And though he could not finish the sentence, they all knew what he meant. He was grinning to keep his eyes from watering over, and someone tossed a peanut shell at him, and he tossed one back, and soon the floor was so covered with the things that it crunched no matter where they put their feet. For months after he died, Ville never missed a single night at the tables-and so when he failed to appear one night his friends went out looking for him. They headed straight for the room he had taken over the hardware store down the street, where they used their fists to bang on the door and then dislodged the lock with the sharp edge of a few playing cards. Ville's shoes were inside, and his wristwatch, and his jacket, but he was not.
Ethan Hass, the virologist, drank not in the bars but from a small metal flask that he carried on his belt like a Boy Scout canteen. He had been watching the developments in his field for thirty years before he died, reading the journals and listening to the gossip at the conventions, and it sometimes seemed to him that every government, every interest group, every faction in the world was casting around for the same thing, a perfect virus, one that followed every imaginable vector, that would spread through the population like the expanding ring of a raindrop in a puddle. It was clear to him now that somebody had finally succeeded in manufacturing it. But how on earth had it been introduced? He couldn’t figure it out. The reports from the recently dead were too few, and they were never precise enough. One day, he locked himself in the bathroom of the High Street
Art Museum and began to cry, insistently, sobbing out something about the air and the water and the food supply. A security guard was summoned. “Calm down, guy. There's plenty of air and water for you out here. How about you just open the door for us?” The guard used his slowest, most soothing voice, but Ethan only shouted, “Everybody! Everything!” and turned on the faucets of the sinks, one by one. He would not say anything else, and when the guard forced the door open a few minutes later he was gone.
It was as though a gate had been opened, or a wall thrown down, and the city was finally releasing its dead. They set out from its borders in their multitudes, and soon the parks, the bars, the shopping centers were all but empty.
One day, not long after the last of the restaurants had closed its doors, the blind man was standing on the steps of the church, waiting for someone who would listen to his story. No one had passed him all day long, and he was beginning to wonder if the end had come once and for all. Perhaps it had happened while he was sleeping, or during the half minute early that morning when he had thought he smelled burning honey. He heard a few car horns honking from different quarters of the city, and then, some twenty minutes later, the squealing of a subway train as its brakes gripped the tracks, and then nothing but the wind aspirating between the buildings, lingering, and finally falling still. He listened hard for a voice or a footstep, but he could not make out a single human sound.
He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello?” he shouted. “Hello?” But no one answered.
He experienced an unusual misgiving. He brought his hand to his chest. He was afraid that the heartbeat he heard was his own.
Michael Parker
The Golden Era of Heartbreak
from The Oxford American
AFTER SHE left, the town where we lived grew flat as an envelope. Sound carried: the song of a truck driver showering five miles east. Nothing could block his dirge. Long-distance misery leaking across the fields while he scrubbed away the road grime. He, too, had come home to a top drawer cleared of underwear.
I could hear him night and day, asking her forgiveness, beg your pardon, baby, for the times that she’d arrived home to find him gone. I knew from the rising strings that she’d never come back, that he would never get clean. Those strings: sweet Nelson Riddle arrangements, country meringue from the ’50s. Pinnacle of lovelorn lament. Fine time for misery.
My house filled to the eaves with this song. Moths waved in the soaring orchestration. They dusted the lampshades with it, painted the medicine-cabinet mirror. Up half the night trying not to listen, I reverted to an opinion I had given up forty years earlier, along about kindergarten: globes were wobbly lies. The earth was flat as the muted-by-miles-of-not-much-of-nothing notes of the trucker's song. Nowhere to hide and no escape, just sleep for the lucky and, for me, punishing runs.
After she left, I ran hundreds of miles along those low-shouldered roads. It got to where Mexican migrants would stop work to bring me a cucumber when I slashed past in the lethal early afternoon heat. Then the hospital, where they gave me medicine that turned me into a loaf of bread. The cheerful foreign doc asked me what year it was and I told him pointedly- I mean to say that I got up in his face so close that his pocked scars from a wicked case of acne were craters on a magnified moon-that the major daily of our Nations capital was contaminated because she had scoured its ads in want, want, want-I always got stuck on that word. I said to the doc, Her want spreads spores like anthrax. Say
She’d been gone for a year and a half and I had not heard word one. I knew where she had alighted and with whom, but had no street address, no lover's last name. Just major metropolitan area with this Rick she met at a conference. Work-related: how I hate having first scoured the want ads that brought us here to this town.
“You could just as easily hate the conference where she met him,” said my sister when I complained about having helped Fran find the job. That was when I was still fool enough to commiserate with family members and worlds-at-large. Back before, one by one, they all turned on me. Went from suggesting acupuncture to signing me up for some extended-stay hospital. People have no sympathy for the brokenhearted because it's what they fear the most. They pretend it's as minor and obligatory as having your wisdom teeth pulled, getting your heart ripped from your chest, having feral mutts tug-a-war the bloody organ in your kitchen while you lean white-veined against the rusty refrigerator, drowning in schmaltzy string arrangements.
So I had no one-only the Mexican migrants who offered cucumbers and water from the bossman's cooler and must have recognized in my desperate stride a fellow alien. The only person I got around to trading words with was the laconic, chain-smoking Deb-or so her name tag read-who worked at the market where I purchased my few provisions. It was a sticky-floored, dirty-ceilinged store which Fran had favored over the chain grocery because after the dogwoods bloomed Deb and her coworkers would take out the magazines in aisle seven and stock it with chilis and tortillas and even Spanish videos for the migrants.
One night I drove over to pick up my stock groceries: Band-Aids, ginger ale, Saltines, bulk raisins, chicken broth, and white rice. I could live off this list for weeks at a time. And had been doing so, and the pounds sweated away in the eighteen-mile runs, and there weren’t that many to leave puddling the road in the first place and so many times in the days after she left I would not have been able to tell you the correct use for, never even mind the name of, a fork.
“Give me one of those Pick Ten tickets,” I said when I had my groceries all lined up on the belt. Deb wasn’t there that night. In her place was a high-school boy. His head was chubby and dripping with red-blond lanks. Used to be, in a town like this you got beat up for wearing your hair long. Now the ones doing the beating are the only
