All the way across the ocean he dreamt of Willie Shavers, the little clicking of his mechanisms, his square shoulders, his thick wig. His slumber beneath Lottie’s bed. Jack should have known that one of them would have to stay behind.
Thereafter, and for years, whenever he was in public—telling a story at a party, delivering a lecture to undergraduates, holding forth in a meeting—he would feel Willie Shavers, not upon him but in him: sliding glass eyes and deadpan disbelief, quirking eyebrows and carved wooden palate, even the dimple that Willie had and Jack didn’t. Even that he could feel upon his cheek. And somewhere behind him, between the small of his back and the nape of his neck (though his body had no other nape and no other small), the ghost hand of Lottie flexed, otherwise uninvolved. She operated no important part of him, nothing at the level of soul or sympathy. Just the bit that allowed him to believe that people might want to hear what he had to say. The part that let him ask strangers for their love, and not care if they said yes.
Mistress Mickle All at Sea
New Year’s Eve in a Rotterdam garret, the whole block blacked out, bottle rockets rattling the casements: Mistress Mickle, villainess of the children’s game show Barnaby Grudge, off duty and far from home, ate a cold canned hot dog in the dark and pronounced it delicious. These were the last minutes of the old year. She’d come from Surrey to visit her half-brother, Jonas, whom she’d last seen in Boston just before their father had retired to Minorca. Expatriation was the family disease, hereditary: thanks to an immigrant ancestor, they all had Irish passports. The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone.
“This happen often?” she asked. “Blackouts, I mean.”
“Off-ten?” he mimicked, then he said, “Nah. I don’t know what’s going on.” His Boston accent was thick as ever, but years in England had bent her diction, and she couldn’t decide which of them should feel superior. The blackout was in its third hour. She’d hated the darkness at first, but it had gone on so long it had become essential. Let the New Year arrive unelectrified, she thought, lit only by pyrotechnics.
Rotterdam did not wait till midnight to celebrate; the enamel tabletop vibrated with the detonations of fireworks, explosion after explosion overhead. It was like life in wartime, if you knew nobody was dying, probably, and the privation would end by morning. She jumped at every salvo; she was a nervous woman. When Jonas fished out a joint she didn’t turn him down, though it had been decades. Maybe it would calm her. Last year she would have had a drink, but she didn’t drink anymore. She was forty-nine, Jonas forty-two, a shock. He had long, insufficient mousy hair he was trying to drum up into dreadlocks and a thick dark beard he’d trimmed to round perfection. Why couldn’t he take care of anything else so well? He was a fuckup. He said so himself. It was as though fucking up were his religion, and he was always looking for a more authentic experience of it: bankrupted by Scientology, busted for selling a stolen antique lamp, fired from an Alaskan cannery for filching salmon, beaten up by a drug dealer—that is, a ham-headed college kid who dealt ecstasy but took only steroids himself. For the past six months, Jonas had lived in this garret, renting the space beneath an Irishwoman’s kitchen table, with access to her stove and sink and toilet and, occasionally, herself. The Irishwoman had gone back to Kilkenny, would return tomorrow. Tonight her bed would be occupied by Mistress Mickle. The Irishwoman must never hear of this. Jonas’s pallet was still spread out under the table at which they now sat, his pillow at Mistress Mickle’s feet.
At eleven thirty the lights came back on.
“Oh good,” said Jonas.
“A shame,” said Mistress Mickle.
Jonas shrugged. He was a lifelong shrugger. It was the genuflection of the devout fuckup. “Let’s go to the street,” he said. “Midnight will blow your mind.”
Outside they stood by the murky canal that ran down the street like a median strip. All along the block people set off their rockets, nearly dutifully, and gossiped and smoked. She felt the peculiar calm of not understanding the ambient language, a state she loved: it was like having part of your brain induced into a coma.
“Just wait,” said Jonas.
What were they waiting for? Oh yes: midnight. Mistress Mickle checked her heart the way she might reach into her handbag for a wallet she was continually certain had been pickpocketed but never was. How was her heart? There, but working? She took her pulse at her neck: steady, fine, though her torso felt percolated. She’d read an article online about women’s heart attacks, how they presented differently from men’s, how nearly anything (it seemed to Mistress Mickle) might be evidence. Was that pain in her chest, or in her back? In her chest or her breast? What bodily border must a pain cross to enter another bodily meridian? Insomnia could be a symptom, the article said: well, she had that now. She had all the symptoms, though fly-by-night versions. Intimations of symptoms. Not pains, but twinges. Not racing but trotting. She was dying, she was making it up, she wouldn’t go to a doctor. She had no natural fear of death, and was vain about this: it was what separated her from the rest of dumb humanity. But she was phobic about embarrassment. That’s what the death certificate would cite under cause: embarrassment, congenital and chronic.
In the middle of the street, a small boy knelt beside a man with 1970s Elvis sideburns. Not father and son, she didn’t think. There was a formality: the man seemed to be the
