But more often than not, she finds him outstretched upon one of the moss-covered boulders, eyes closed, breathing gently: the very picture of lupine bliss as he sleeps in the afternoon sun.
Errantry
I was hanging out in Angus’s apartment above the print shop, scoring some of his ADHD medication, when Tommy Devaraux ran upstairs to tell us he’d just seen the Folding Man over at the Old Court Grill. This was some years after the new century had cracked open and left me and my friends scrambled, even more feckless than we’d been thirty years earlier when we met as teenagers in Kamensic Village. The three of us had been romantically involved off and on during high school and for a few years afterward, held together by the wobbly gravitational pull exerted by adolescence and the strange, malign beauty of Kamensic, a once-rural town that had since been ravaged by gentrification and whose name had recently been trademarked by a domestic housewares tycoon.
Angus had never left Kamensic; he’d spent the last three decades nurturing a musical career that never quite took off, despite a minor 1977 hit that continued to generate residuals and a ringtone that now echoed eerily across the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. His most recent job had been with a brokerage firm absorbed by MortNet. The three kids from his first marriage were grown, but the younger ones, twins, had just started school, and child support and legal bills from the second divorce had stripped him of almost everything.
His ex-wife Sheila and the twins remained in the McMansion out by Kamensic Meadows, but Angus lived in a third-floor flat he rented from another old friend who owned the struggling printing company below. The entire rickety wood-frame building smelled of dust and ink, the faintly resinous odor of paper mingled with acrid chemical pigments and the reek of melted plastic. In bed at night in Angus’s room, with the old presses rumbling on the floor below, it felt as though we were on board a train. Walls and floors vibrated around us, and a sallow streetlamp coated the window with a syrupy greenish light. A few yards away, real trains racketed between the city and the outer exurbs.
I lived sixty miles north of Kamensic, in the next county, but spent more time in my old stomping grounds than reason or propriety allowed. Angus was my half-brother, the result of what Shakespearean scholars term a bed-trick. We didn’t know of our complicated parentage when we first slept together, but once we learned about it we figured it was too late and what the hell. Few people besides us ever knew, and most of them are now dead. My own career, as assistant professor of Arthurian studies at a small college upstate, had flamed out due to accusations of sexual harassment (dropped when a student recanted his story) and drug and alcohol abuse (upheld). Despite my dismissal, I found work as a private tutor, coaching rich kids on their college admissions essays.
“Vivian,” Tommy said breathlessly when I opened the door. “Angus here?”
I brushed my cheek against Tommy’s as he swept inside and crossed to where Angus sat hunched over his computer. Tommy peered at the monitor and frowned. “Where’s Estelle?”
Tommy had a little obsessive thing that dovetailed neatly with Angus’s frenetic energy, as in their latest collaboration, a thirty-seven-song cycle Angus was writing about Estelle, an imaginary woman based on a real woman, a stockbroker Tommy had dated once. She eventually hit him with a restraining order and moved to Vermont.
Angus scowled. “I’m taking a break from freaking Estelle.”
“Well, sacrifice that Voidwalker and log off,” said Tommy. “I just saw the Folding Man.”
“At the Old Court?” Angus ground out his cigarette and lit another. “He’s there now? Why didn’t you just call us?”
Tommy glanced at me imploringly. He was tall but sparely built, softer than he’d been but still boyish, with round tortoiseshell glasses on a snub nose, his long dark hair gone to gray; slightly louche in a frayed Brooks Brothers jacket and shiny black engineer’s boots. He was a Special Ed teacher at a private school and dealt with autistic teenagers, many of them violent. He’d been attacked so often by kids bigger and stronger than he was that he’d started to have panic attacks, and now took so much Xanax just to get through the working day that his customary expression was a rictus of mournful, slightly hostile chagrin—he looked like the Mock Turtle after a lost weekend.
“Well, he left,” he said. “Plus my cell phone died. But he gave me this—”
He sank into a swivel chair beside Angus, hands cupped on his knees as though he held a butterfly. The illusion held for an instant when he opened his hands to display a tiny diadem of russet and yellow petals that fluttered when he breathed upon it.
“Nice,” said Angus grudgingly. “He’ll be gone by now.”
I crouched beside Tommy. “Can I see?”
“Sure.
I picked it up and weighed it tentatively in my palm. Angus’s Focalin was starting to have its way with me, a diffuse, sunny-day buzz that meshed nicely with the day outside: mid-afternoon, early May, lilac in bloom, kids riding bikes along the village sidewalks. I drew my hand to my face and caught a whiff of the Old Court’s distinctive odor, hamburgers and Pine-Sol; but also, inexplicably, a smell of the sea, salt and hot glass.
I blew on the bit of folded paper. It fell onto the floor. Angus grabbed it before I could pick it up again.
“He gave it to me,” Tommy said in an aggrieved tone.
But Angus was already opening it. Tommy and I stood beside him as he carefully unfolded wings, triangles, unveiling creases in once-glossy paper, swatches of azure and silver, topaz, pine-green. The yellow and fawn-colored petals must have sprung from the other side of the page, torn from a magazine or brochure.
“Someone’s been to the beach.” Angus held up a finger dusted with glittering specks, spilled sugar or sand; licked it and smoothed out the paper on his desk.
“What does it say?” asked Tommy.
“‘YOU ARE HERE.’”
I edged between them to get a better look. The paper was four or five inches square, crosshatched with grayish lines indicating where it had been folded countless times. It was almost impossible to imagine it had ever had a shape other than this one, and impossible to remember just what that shape had been—an insect? Tiger lilies?
“Beach roses,” said Tommy. “That’s what it’s a picture of.”
“How the hell can you know that?” demanded Angus.
“It’s a map,” I said.
Angus’s cellphone buzzed. He glanced at it, muttered “Sheila” and turned it off. “Let’s see.”
I adjusted my glasses and frowned. “It’s hard to see, but there—those lines? It says Route 22.”
“That’s the Old Court there,” Tommy agreed, squinting at a blotch on a smudge of shoreline. “Those dotted lines, that’s the old road that runs parallel to it, out towards that apple farm where they want to put the development.”
Ashes dropped from Angus’s cigarette onto the ersatz map. When he blew them away, a tiny spark glowed in one corner.
“There.” Tommy stubbed out the ember with his finger. “It ends there.”
“Like I said.” Angus finished his cigarette. “X marks the spot. Let’s go check it out. Who wants to get stoned?”
Angus had retained a company car, I never understood how. The back was filled with his stuff, sheet music, CDs, manila envelopes, Happy Meals toys, a guitar case. I sat in the front with Angus’s hand on my knee. Tommy shoved stuff aside and slumped in the back, his face pressed against the window. He looked like a kid on a long drive, at once resigned and expectant. I thought, not for the first time, how little had changed since we really were kids: still bombing around on a Saturday afternoon, drunk or stoned or generally messed up, still screwing each other when no one else would have us, still singing along with the radio.