Added to this was my own tuned-in sense of the uncanny. When I was younger, odd strangers were said to be roaming the streets, perhaps space aliens looking for natural resources. Or were they tourists looking for space aliens or aliens looking for abandoned colonists and ancestors? Perhaps nothing had been a hoax after all. Perhaps body snatchers or the undead or creatures from another planet were really, truly attempting to walk among us here in town. My old friends from high school seemed proof enough: ominous androids who’d perhaps been hatched from young humans but who now were just inadequate and unattractive impersonations hoping to pass as actual people. They would loiter for a while on this planet, until they were summoned home, where they would be decoded and tossed in a junk heap, their zombie-cookie faces eventually devoid even of their faultily assigned facial expressions, their boring experience all stored on subcutaneous data-processing chips.
We are not alone. But, hell, we sure wish we were.
I was capable of little homicides like this. My mind, when I came home to Dellacrosse, became full of them. Which in its own way enlivened the town for me, the way an obituary briefly brings back the dead. It was a hopping town, people exclaimed in what was a community joke, because everyone’s toes had got cut off from frostbite! But that was the least of it for a town full of graduates of the Dellacrosse Diesel Driving School, for a town that was just one of a thousand forgotten poppy seeds scattered across the state map. Scorched grains of cornmeal on the bottom of a pizza. A thousand black holes. Pinpricks with little names. On New Year’s Eve I stayed in the house rather than accompany my brother up the road to join the rowdy group of neighbors who had gathered at Perryville and County M. I didn’t want to hear a single voice say, “Hi, Tassie, how’s college?” Or “You’ve been reading? Whatcha been reading?”
“Why, I’ve been reading Horace!”
The fireworks every year grew more explosive and raucous, beginning days before New Year’s Eve, and every year they were still legal. I could hear the whistle and pop of them, the metallic shower of pellets. They were no longer the fireworks of my childhood — simple ladyfinger firecrackers jammed like sausages into tangerines or dried goat bladders that had been hung on the Christmas trees, then yanked off and lobbed, loaded, across the field in a kind of snowball fight. (One did this with one’s friends to destroy the enemy. Who was the enemy? One’s friends. Who else would you want to see jump as a tangerine exploded at their feet?) As the winters grew less cold and white, the fireworks grew fancier. They now had evolved from homely grenades that could give you no more than a small blistery burn to cherry bombs and M-80s, weapons-grade devices used most often in military training. Last year the detritus of one had set a marsh on fire — in winter.
Outside, the lulls between explosions were accompanied by both children and grown men banging on tin pots and whooping. These were people who would be snowmobiling if only there were snow. If the lake were frozen they would drive their pickups out on it and go bar to bar, parked on the ice all night. They would be ice fishing from their shanties—“I got a hole out there dug!”—and they would be mumbling their taciturn joy over tip-ups and fish bites. But now there was just another round of heart-stuttering booms, the rat-a-tat-tat of war made jolly — but not for me. Oh, where was Ira Gershwin when you needed him for a real song, a country protest song, not just some whiny piano-bar lament? One year, I feared, someone would take the occasion to slyly shoot an actual gun, without notice, and I just hoped it wouldn’t be me. That was a bleak, wintry joke I told myself. And my brother. But still.
Late on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Sarah Brink called my house. My mother answered, said, “Yes, she’s here,” then handed me the receiver.
“Hi, Tassie,” Sarah said, sounding breathless. “Just calling to see if there’s any chance you’re coming back into town a little early.”
I looked out the window at the purpling patina of the snow. My father and brother were in the next room, talking about snowblowers. “Like when?” I asked.
“Oh, say …” She stopped not for consideration but for nerve, it seemed, and dragging out the words like that made them sound like the beginning of the national anthem. “I hate to sound pushy. But like by the third?”
“Of January?”
And then she laughed, and I laughed, and we were both sort of laughing at each other and at ourselves in a confusing manner, having no facial expressions to assist.
III
I took the bus back the next day, on the second. Having been, as my brother used to say, “crowded as a beehive” on my way out of town, the bus during winter break was now empty and clean and morose. In Troy at dusk, the isolated patches of gray snow were like dryer lint. The heat in my building had not been turned off — that would freeze the pipes — but had been cranked down to a chill fifty-five. Generous when the students were there, the landlord knew they had gone home and did not warm the house as amply. Not just for Kay. In my absence the floorboards had readjusted and acquired new creaks. When I stepped into my own living room, it felt like someone else’s house. There was some frost creeping up the panes of my windows, on the inside, and Murph’s long-bequeathed vibrator/immersible blender still sat on the counter. (She had purchased it at a shop called A Woman’s Touch, where I’d gone with her when she went to look for one. “Come on, come with,” she’d implored. My mind had been trying to be open to such an object but kept slamming shut. “A woman’s touch?” I’d asked her as we walked in. “Isn’t what we want a man’s touch?” The place had been a tiny chapel to the penis, phallic devices of all makes and creeds, on display like shoes in a shoe store though without the Brannocks and special chairs needed to be properly fitted. Two large, cheerful women behind the counter who installed batteries and would wrap and deliver in plain brown wrapping, if desired, smiled and asked us to be sure to let them know if they could help. All this had at first amused then oppressed me. For days, however, I thought about going back alone and having one of the more welcoming, less motorized versions — pink and pliable — sent to me in the mail.)
Because the apartment was so unusually cold, I made my way to a coffee shop to warm up. During the school year, for study breaks, I alternated between Starbucks with its Orwellian sizing—“tall” means “small”!—and a place near the law school called On What Grounds, where “tall” meant “medium” and which had, in addition to coffee, a variety of teas in glass jars, multicolored confetti as pretty as sachets, though once when I asked for a cup of one, the clerk shouted to someone in the back, “Hey, Sam. Is the lemongrass the one with the larvae?” After that I mostly ordered coffee — at first the espresso, in the tiny doll cups I’d never seen before moving to Troy, and then lattes in glass mugs to warm my hands. They sometimes had cookies, usually chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin, in the singular, it was said, because there was only one raisin or one chip in every cookie. Sometimes I went next door to Baby B Burritos — named after the owner’s child, supposedly, though Baby B was also said to be a kind of acronym: Burritos As Big as Your Bum. Or so said Murph. There was the pizza and shake shop two blocks down, with its sign in the window: NEVER FEAR, NEVER QUIT, STOP IN. There was also an Indian buffet: ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR A DOLLAR. But if you ate too much and stayed too long, they started showing you slides of their home village, which made you feel pretty awful.