Then it became clear her out-of-sorts-ness those last couple hours meant nothing except she’d been incubating something outré to say.

“Saumtimes,” smiling sweetly at him in the café at the back of Olsson’s Books, “I theenk about you having sex weeth a boy.”

It made him put his face down on the tabletop, in the crook of his arm. Then lift it immediately back up again. 

“Why?”

She was embarrassed. Just like that. Evy. Glancing around to see if anyone had heard. 

“Eez hot, eez why.”

He squinted at her. Mouth open.

“You never theenk,” she said, “about me having sex weeth a hwhoman?” 

He kept squinting. Had to admit he hadn’t gotten around to picturing this. Probably because he spent all his time trying to imagine her having sex with him, never mind she’d been doing so for weeks by then.

Who knew what effect he’d hoped Old Town Alexandria would have on her. His off-the-hook Peruvian obsession. That she’d looked a mite forlorn, discombobulated, cowed, out on tourist-clogged King Street and its colonial-townhouse-enfiladed, October-sun-dappled, cobblestone-paved tributaries, Range Rovers and Jaguars jiggling haughtily by, wasn’t bad.

Now that went poof. 

“Do you want to have sex with women?”

She’d looked abstractedly out the window at the wide brown Potomac. Sitting on her hands. “Maybe,” shrugging her face. “Saumday.”

Someday when they were history, she meant. Or did she figure he’d be cool with her having a side chick? Something else to remind him how out of his depth he was, overmatched, struggling to keep some huge, leaping, writhing swordfish on the line when flounder and trout were obviously more his speed.

It was retribution for his overexplaining on the drive down that, no, civilization would not blow up when the computers had to flip three nines to zeros. Or maybe for inflicting this constipated American yuppieville on her. He thought this was a city? She’d grown up dancing, shouting, cavorting on the careening streets of Lima. That was a city.

No. Something else. She was telling him—realizing it made cold sweat prickle in his armpits—she’d looked right into his glass head two nights earlier at Preeda’s party. Seen his thoughts, or whatever, about Bjørn.

One sub-rosa swordfish, his grad-school “friend,” quoting his mother who’d meet her for the first time that same evening. Stepping back out into the autumn-cool, cigar-smoke-fogged air on Union Street was another chance to observe it. The obliviousness of nine out of every ten American dudes. To Evy. Some hotel housemaid drifting by. Some Bora barista. Some Quechua homunculus in denim and mudcloth, hemp and alpaca. Coal-dark eyes. Zero makeup. Half boy.

The tenth stared. Awash, suddenly, in a cloud of hirsute pheromones. Tonka. Palo santo. Glimpsing impossible cheekbones, two-toned lips. That bed-mussed sheeny black mop. So transfixed, attentive number ten, he’d do a one-eighty on the sidewalk for the aft-view. Never mind Schlubbo the Boyfriend scurrying along behind. Case in point: this linen-suited Miami Vice mofo eyeing her from the doorway of the old Fish Market. “Hot” dudes, always. The worst part. Except the other worst part: arty, invariably, all of them. Thespians. Writers. Guitar-and-amp slingers. He’d watched them all, on campus, trip over curbs staring at her. Light wrong ends of cigarettes. Walk into glass doors. Was amazed Bjørn, poet and could-be J. Crew model of their own grad program, had shown no prurient interest himself. Until, that is, he’d arrived at Preeda’s party with a boyfriend. In drag. Bjørn—not the surprisingly frumpy Welsh beau. Though “drag” didn’t seem the right word—not for the sleek snug black knee-length long-sleeve turtleneck tube dress he wore. In which he was simply pulverizingly beautiful. Zero camp. Zero makeup. Okay: a little eyeliner. And the only reason, he kept telling himself, he’d needed not only to cheek-kiss him—Bjørn—at party’s end but rush home to service himself whilst imagining himself kneeling servicing Bjørn was he was so oversexed already, limerent, junkified, drunk on everything that Peruvian half-boy could secrete, catching himself more than once licking and sucking some musky underthing she’d dropped on the bathroom floor, left foolishly unattended in her hamper. And it was such a short hop from one half-boy to another. 

To his father’s house he was taking this head.

The thought sent a cool snake of anxiety winding down his spine.

Then the magician appeared.

Dude was working the front steps of the Torpedo Factory—ye olde boujee Art Center. Standing in that chunky building’s deep, river-breeze-kissed shadow. No wand-and-white-rabbiter, though, this guy. No tux-and-top-hatter. Track-panted, he was. Adidas-footed. Tight-T-shirted. Yoga-bodied. Stubble-faced. Sloe-eyed. “Hot.” 

A dozen teens and twenty-somethings crowded him. Watching raptly as he thumbed languidly, poker-faced, insouciant, through the deck of cards he held fanned in front of them. 

Ben—that’s our schlubbo—barely had time to register the scene, process it, ponder evasive maneuvers, before realizing Evy was sleepwalking a bee-line towards him. The magician. Because of course she was. Because finally something streetish and hip in this Gingrichtown a city kid could warm her soul beside.

He hung back at the curb. Ben. Sagging at shoulders and knees. Agoraphobic. Defeated. Interested only to see what batshit thing would happen next.

This:

The magician did a double-take on Evy. Semi-comical. Then casually—face blank, eyes totally uninterested in the business of his hands, his art—finished the card trick that made a young woman in a Georgetown sweatshirt scream, a half-dozen other kids stagger away throwing their hands in the air or gripping their skulls to keep them from exploding.  

Pandemonium enjoyed a brief reign.

Then: “Hey!” the magician was calling. Even his raised voice torpid. Stepping through the remnants of his dynamited audience, addressing Evy. Because of course he was. Evy who, Ben knew, never mind he couldn’t see her face, had already locked eyes, if not minds, with him.

“Hey,” again, mere steps from her now, bowing on approach in deference to her shortness, tucking and ducking his head as if asking if they shared a language, if she’d run like a feral cat, if she was awake. “Can I show you something?” 

Ben saw the question as much as heard it, watching the stubble-bound mouth.

“Is that okay? If I show you—this?”

Some photo or postcard, maybe, he held up in front of her face. Ben got the fleetingest glimpse of, he thought, an antique candlestick-type phone before Evy’s head blocked his view.

Two or three members of the atomized crowd paid attention again, shifting glances back and forth between Evy and whatever the magician had procured. 

She turned abruptly, then—arguably rudely—on her huarached heel. Started walking back to Ben. Or in his general direction, anyway. His distinct impression was her eyes were open but she was out cold. Enduring some unhappy dream. Two or three steps she got before—like something out of an old silent horror movie—she crumpled, hitting the sidewalk hard.

Ben lunged but the Adidas-footed magician was there first. He and a still-lingering teenaged boy Ben had the wherewithal to realize was an apprentice/accomplice of some sort. They had her back on her woozy feet in seconds, the magician’s sheepish “Sorry, sorry, sorry” soundtracking the action.  

“Evy?” Ben said, peering over the apprentice/accomplice’s shoulder. Then he watched astonished as the magician put his hand to the side of Evy’s achingly pretty face, turned her head gently, guiding her dark eyes to his own. 

“¿Estas despierta?”

She nodded.

“Lo siento mucho,” he said. “¿Estás bien?”

“Sí,” she croaked.

“¿Cierta?”

“Sí,” again, nodding against his palm.

He smiled. The magician. Embarrassed at his insane powers. Examined her hands now, turning them over in his own, making sure no scuffs, cuts. “Así no es como se supone que debe ser ese truco,” he said. 

Then, perfectly simultaneously, he and the apprentice/accomplice swiveled their heads, looked at Ben. Seeing him for the first time.

One went north on the sidewalk, the other (identical lope) south. Someone applauded vaguely. Ben, feeling heat from nearby stares—like he’d put the cute foreign chick on the pavement—held Evy’s elbow, studied her eyes.

“¿Me acabo de caer?” she said.

He shook his head. Palms out and up now. “You know I don’t speak Spanish.”

It ruined what he’d been saving all afternoon: revealing they were parked across the street from the house where Kevin Costner, Sean Young, and Gene Hackman shot the best scenes in No Way Out. She hated that movie anyway. Another homeecidal-white-men flick.

“Well?” he said when they were back in his faithful old Civic. He didn’t start the engine. Sat half-turned in the grungy vinyl driver’s seat, examining her.

“Eh?”

“What was it? That he showed you?”

She was still dazed. Staring emptily out over the dashboard. 

“Eet was—strange,” she said. “Eet was—a peecture. But a peecture of two theengs at wants.”

“Two things at once?” he said. “Well, what? Two things?”

She looked weirdly warily at him. 

“Two boys,” she said. “Having sex.”

Prickly cold sweat again. Instantly. He replied with an exasperated headshake. A huff. “What is it with this? All of a sudden?”

She stared at him.

“That’s not even magic,” needing suddenly to take that asshole down a peg. Him and all the other poetasters and epigones always sniffing around her. He was ready to explain why, too—except:

“The other theeng”—her wariness, he saw, had blossomed into fright—“was a room.” 

“A room?”

“Con un piso de—” She shook her head. Blinked. “Weeth a—floor like a chessboard.”

His mouth, he knew, was hanging open again. Same as back in the bookstore. 

“Well, what’s so scary,” a hitch in his voice, “about a room with a chessboard floor?”

“No-theeng.” She’d shrunk from him, angled back into the car door. “Eet’s the man eenside,” she said. “I couldn’t see his face, but there was a man een that room.”

A long row of streetlamps blinked on ahead of the parked car. 

His left hand, Ben realized, had a white-knuckle death grip on the hard black rubber of the steering wheel. 

Gas-lamp flames danced above million-dollar townhouses’ limestone stoops as the tatterdemalion Civic nosed through historic hoods, St. Mary’s loosing a wedding-rehearsal party—pack of giddy young lawyers, doctors, lobbyists—onto orange-leaf-strewn Royal Street in front of them. Dogwalkers, too, out in the suddenly gorgeous gloaming, mountainous cumulus clouds piled high in the rutilant west. Corgies. Samoyeds. Afghan hounds. All your money breeds.

Within moments Ben had turned the Honda onto the sylvan GW Parkway. Aimed it south at Mount Vernon. 

Of course he knew what effect he’d wanted Old Town to have on her. He’d wanted her impressed. Didn’t care if she hated the place’s waspy unfunkiness. As he’d known perfectly well she would. Just needed her to form a hippocampus-deep association between all those historic plaques, lion’s-head doorknockers, wrought-iron fences, and him. 

“How did he know to speak Spanish to you?” 

She was watching Belle Haven’s golf course glide by. Big oaks and ashes swaying in a wayward Chesapeake breeze, shedding leaves by the barrelful. 

“Look at me,” she said.

“You could be Thai,” into the motor’s drone. “Samoan. Inuit. You could be a born-and-bred Vermonter, all he knows.”

For a little while there she’d seemed impressed. Sort of. Then she’d informed him she knew his head was a porno channel and she’d dial it up at will. How? Just by being a cool kid. Sure, the mechanism was opaque to dorks/schlubbos. But then that was just more evidence it was real! The Great Chain of Being. Angels rule mortals. Cool kids rule dorks. Since junior high he’d figured the hierarchy was rooted in some type of esoteric knowledge. Something recondite. Acroamatic. Now this admission on the universe’s part: a magician! Panty-dampening jerk. Cool-kid-cabala priest. Weird, admittedly, Evy wasn’t off necking with the dude somewhere that very minute. Under a fiery red maple in that Edenic garden behind the Carlyle House. Adam & Evy. But then the metaphysics around angels/cool kids was no doubt turbulent. Particle-collider violent. No telling what whacked thing might happen, two of them ran into each other. Things could go sideways fast. A magic trick implode. Some freaky accidental hypnosis occur. Or some dork one or the other trailed like heel-stuck toilet paper might bumblingly gum up the works, sabotage whatever was trying happen, trying to get conceived.

That double-take. 

Dude had recognized his own instantly.

Of course it wasn’t only cool kids lorded it over schlubbos. It was also—

It was also—

He’d seen pictures of her family’s terracotta-roofed hacienda, was the word for it, in Miraflores, and hello money. Goddamn Alamo it looked like. Her dad a TV-news producer, mom a gallery owner. She had an ex-beau in film school at USC, a cousin on post-doc at the Sorbonne. Undergrad friends in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Montreal, Chicago. Oh—and Rio. Which was the best because beach!

The Civic’s balding tires slapped seams in the Parkway. Da-dunk, da-dunk. 

Weird how oblivious she was to the shabbiness of his car. 

“Eet eez safe?” she asked suddenly. “Where you are taking me?”

It startled him. He looked over, found the coal-dark eyes shining back at him in oncoming cars’ headlights.

“You’re really asking that?”

But he felt that chill again. On his spine. A snake no longer winding but constricting. Then, in an instant—da–dunk—it was pity coursing through him, seeing her small and helpless and absurdly beautiful beside him, a soccer-netted owl, a lynx with its paw in a trap, heartsick at capture, and he thought about turning the car around, taking her back to her spartan little peripate’s apartment three hours behind them, leaving her there and staying away for good, only there was no flaking out on that house that was expecting them. None.

“It’s just culture shock you’re feeling,” he told her.

He didn’t know there was a moon out till he saw its rippled reflection on the surface of the mile-wide Potomac. Racing them.

The ex at USC liked to call sometimes. Late. Just to shoot the shit. He’d listened—Ben—through the bedroom wall to Evy’s mysterious murmurings to him for an hour one recent night before bounding, apoplectic, from her bed, stumbling half-dressed to his car, speeding home to his garage-top apartment on the other side of town. Spending a dark night of the soul on his threadbare futon, wrapped in a sweaty comforter, shivering and grinding his teeth like a junkie gone cold turkey. Thinking he literally might not survive this. Her.

The touch to her cheek, it must have been. Spanish, he’d immediately known. The whole language suddenly there in his brain, complete, entire.

(It was also—)

He’d rather lose a thumbnail in a hammer accident than spend an afternoon on a sunny fucking beach.

She was a sophisto; he was a plebe. Whatever ruse to the contrary he’d manfully maintained those last five weeks would come crashing down in just a few minutes’ time when they pulled into the driveway of a Nixon-era split-level faux-colonial crime against architecture (fatuous columns, ersatz gable vents) sans even one clear memory in her head (the whole afternoon tornadoed away, he felt sure, by a peecture of two theengs at wants) of the meretricious Real Place he’d grown up not in but merely near to blunt reality’s blow.

“Maybe,” he heard his mouth say, “skip the spider joke when we get there?”

She looked at him. Wan. “The wheech?”

“About how your mom makes the best tarantula?”

A pause. Then a tiny, sad, incredulous puff of air out her nose.

“And please don’t ask if it’s okay to smoke your pipe.”

Her gaze now out at the carapace of half-denuded tree limbs rushing into, over the Honda’s anemic high beams. Like she saw—

Two weeks to Halloween. Last one of the century. 

(Like she saw—)

Way too big a fish he’d hooked. Ought to cut bait before he got it in the boat for real and it thrashed him to death.

Like she saw devils roosting there.

Some malevolent spell, it was, planted him in this life. This life. In an unplace whose Safeway and La-Z-Boy heart they were just four or five turns away from. (There went Washington’s home, other side of that saturnine crest of trees. Adios to illustrious things. Why point it out? She’d ask about slaves.) A nothing. A lacuna. A changeling—him—in the guardianship of a—

(Of a—)

He nudged the turn-signal stalk.

Throat-lumping stuff. Even when he was thirteen. Twelve. Seeing them on those field trips to Gadsby’s Tavern or Christ Church. To whatever musty tall-ship was docked. Those Old Town rich kids. Chasing each other’s tails through mossy brick alleys, in and out of foo-foo shoppes. Living, to see them, in some John Hughes flick or MTV vid. Jams shorts and rumpled Oxfords. Devo tees and glinting Vuarnets. Puissant-private-school tartan skirts and ties you know they bitched about having to wear.

Some malediction, for sure. And still he didn’t know how much GRE vocab it took to vitiate it.

Vitiate. 

Vishy. 

He nudged the turn-signal stalk again.

Vishy like the swoop of Bjørn’s blonde hair across his forehead. Vishy like his calves above those punk-rock work boots, below the hem of that tight dress. Smooth and round and perfect. Places you could hold onto—hold onto—

“I saw you keess heem, you know,” Evy said. 

His long-ago elementary school they were passing now. A concrete-block box glowering in dusk. Orange construction-paper pumpkins in all its windows. A thousand crows swirling helter-skelter above it.

“Bee-yorn,” she preempted.

He nudged the turn-signal stalk again.

“This is the nature of parties,” he said hollowly. “Right?”

She considered it.

“Your hand was on hees heep,” she said. “A long time.”

The quarter-acre yards all around now. Concrete curbs. Chain-link fences. A mutt chased the Honda from behind one, yapping, dervishing, making leaves fly.

“Anyway,” he said, “what happened to hot?”

A lonely kid tossed a basketball at a garage-mounted hoop.

“Eez hot,” Evy said. “I just waunder if there’s saumthing I should know.” 

He nudged the turn-signal again.

Something she should know.

One pollen-dusted summer afternoon when he was eight he convinced his three-doors-down classmate Gary and Gary’s little sister Meg they should hold a séance in their house’s penumbral basement rumpus room. See if they could summon from beyond a neighborhood kid named Jack who’d drowned vacationing in Florida with his family the summer before. Somehow convinced them, too, they’d have to be nude for it to work. As they knelt holding hands, on Ben’s instructions, around a lime-green space-age plastic dinner plate with an array of clangingly scented mall-store candles burning on it—buck naked, all three of them, on a dingy, rock-hard, Big Wheel-scuffed polyvinyl floor expressing a chessboard motif—there came the familiar concussive thumpings of Thom McAn-loafered feet on the wooden staircase. These announced Ben’s father’s arrival in the room—a room in another family’s house. Though in a certain sense he wasn’t there at all. Not judging by his expression, at least, still conjurable to Ben those twenty years later. Blank. Vacant. Non-sentient unto cadaverous. Oblivious, we’re talking, to the reality, or whatever, of his breaking-and-entering-ness, of his current physical whereabouts. A zombie, by all appearances, in the service of some Being residing considerably elsewhere on the Great Chain than that spot reserved for middle-class American dads whose pastimes might include diaper-buffing a Ford LTD or grilling up Oscar Mayer wieners. A zombie despite all the speed, scramble, purpose his still-youthful second-baseman’s body displayed in swooping over those black and white squares, descending on a naked supplicant whose mind (its last observation that of two goosefleshed, candlelit friends’ decidedly distracting prettiness) collapsed into a quasi-narcoleptic nothingness—the place, perhaps, to which the possum famously goes—affording him no further memory of the event. Not that it was the first time his father had so shocked and awed him. At six he’d watched the man draw a gush of blood from the bathtub spigot. At five don a live snake for a belt. At four step through a bedroom wall like it had no materiality to speak of.  

Gary. Meg. 

Two things at wants.

“There’s nothing,” riding past the dark windows of his long-ago friends’ house, “you should know.”

Funny: he had, twenty-five years later, no clear memory of Evy’s only visit to his childhood home. This fact seemed abstrusely connected to another: he didn’t know what had become of her—in, like, life. Google shrugged at her maybe-now-née name. Long-since née, could be: she’d dumped his ass just a fistful of days (happy Halloween) after their return from Alexandria, moving home to Lima for thesis-writing (her mother had had a stroke, was Ben’s dim recollection) just weeks after that, days shy of the dawn of the endlessly unnerving new millennium. It had indeed about killed him. Four nights in a psych ward. His parents—his ghoulish father—all over him. 

His parents. He often wondered if they were still alive. Couldn’t trust the dreams suggesting they were, since the same vehicles regularly deposited various of his exes—even end-of-the-parader Angela, now a decade’s worth of cancer-snuffed (her last straw with him: his drunkenly explaining that he preferred flounder to swordfish)—in his tired little rambler outside Des Moines for visits invariably involving lots of long silences, head-shakings, sighs.

Suburban Des Moines.

He’d had no idea what an unplace was.  

The only really unbearable visits were Evy’s. Because she always showed up young and beautiful. And disastrously kind. He’d hoist his head from his pillow, smelling palo santo. Find her perched on the edge of the bed in coral-pink dawn, smiling sweetly at him. He’d clutch his forehead, wait for his heart to quit hammering. Then dog-crawl to her, lay his head in her lap, sob like a toddler whose favorite Tonka truck someone had just kicked away. She didn’t seem to mind he hadn’t shaved in days. Or brushed his teeth. Or showered. Same as she never minded his grungy car. 

“The theeng about loneliness,” she’d tell him, stroking his thinning hair, “eez eet cannot last forever.”

One late-November morning he got up, went down to the cobwebby cellar where he spent his days playing with antique electronics. And there she was. Evy. Standing waiting for him in the light of the bare ceiling bulb. Buck naked. So outrageously beautiful even glancing at her felt impertinent.

She was over-the-moon happy.

“I came to tell you you can still ween!” 

“You’re joking,” he answered. Hands on knees. Wind knocked out of him. “Too old. Christ’s sake. Too tired.”

“No!” giddily, bouncing on her toes. “¡Solo tienes que llamar a tus padres!”

He shook his head. Studied the cold-stunned wolf spider by his foot. 

“You know I don’t speak Spanish,” he told her. 

He woke up again. 

In the kitchen he made coffee. Checked the iPhone for the daily nothing. Shuffled in his Crocs down the creaky wooden staircase to the basement. Discovered there the shimmering two-inch-deep lake the craptastic water heater in the closet had dribbled out overnight. It hardly seemed fair. He couldn’t have neglected the thing more than seven years. 

The contractor he called out ripped up the cellar’s nasty old wall-to-wall carpet. Exposed the chessboard floor that had been down there all along.