“But sooner or later, you’re bound to get hungry again,” I said.
She laughed again and said, “Maybe some day.”
In May, Denise will graduate. When I last spoke to her, however, she was not yet certain what she would do after graduation. Princeton has offered her a postdoctoral position, and she has had two interviews with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “I’m not sure, though,” she told me on my last day in Boston. We were walking along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. It was a bright, cold day. She stood staring quietly at the water as it moved sluggishly past. “I’m not sure what I want to do. Both of them — they’re both good opportunities, and my parents were happy to hear about them because, I think, in their minds, anthropology, when it comes to having a job or a career, isn’t any more promising than theater. But the academic world, it’s just… it’s so small, and now when people meet me, and at job interviews and job fairs, all they want to talk about is the Sebali thing. The more people talk about it, the more I think about what they did — Hammond and Grant — and what they’re doing now, whatever new con they’re playing now, and I find myself almost admiring what they did, the fact that they, by their own sheer force of will, invented a new life for themselves. And I’m beginning to think that, if there’s some way for me to do the same thing, I should maybe start working to find it.”
“Do you think they’re happy, whatever they’re doing now?” I asked her.
She was quiet for a moment before she looked at me and said, “If I ever find them, I’ll let you know.”
One-Horned & Wild-Eyed
A Chinaman sold it to me,” Ralph told me as he led me through his garage toward the side yard. I thought about telling him that whoever sold him whatever it was he was going to show me probably wasn’t a Chinaman — most likely, considering Houston, some Vietnamese guy or maybe a Filipino — but I figured it didn’t matter really, that it would only upset him, make him think I wasn’t taking him or what he was going to show me seriously, which, in all honesty, I wasn’t. “You’re not going to believe this shit,” he said. “You’re not going to fucking believe it.”
Considering all the shit I was never supposed to fucking believe from our past — schemes, foolproof business ideas, or just the crap he’d bought or found or built — my expectations were pretty low, but I smiled at him encouragingly because we’d been friends so long.
We stepped out of his hot garage and into the even hotter morning, humid and suffocating, and we walked into the side yard. When he and Melissa first moved into the house, he set to work on this yard with considerable intent, building a small coop and clearing the brush and weeds that had grown there and setting it up for a half-dozen chicks he bought, telling me he planned to raise chickens. “Fresh eggs, man,” he told me, as if that alone were all the explanation anyone would need, but in a matter of days, a pack of wild dogs ran through his fencing and broke through his coop and slaughtered those chicks. A month or so later, he tore everything down and threw up an uneven chain-link fence, which had since rusted and half fallen over. It wasn’t much space, really, a dog run and nothing else, and he’d done little with it since except plant patches of sod there a couple of springs back, which had browned and died. The rest of the ground was made up of weeds or loosely packed reddish sand, and I figured he’d left it to the wild, but now in the middle of it there was a good-sized shed, which he must have only recently built.
“You’re right,” I told him. “That shed is, um, a pretty nice piece of construction.”
He shook his head. “Not the shed, jackass. What’s inside it,” he said. Then he smiled and looked at the shed and then back at me and said, “You don’t want to guess? Give you a hundred guesses and you’ll never get it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t care. Just open the shed. I got to get back home.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. Then he pretended to fuss over the lock and the door, stalling to build suspense and whatnot, until finally he opened the shed and then, with a sweeping wave, he stepped aside to allow me a good look, and for a moment all I could see was a bright white light, ethereal and ghostly and frightening.
Ralph then reached his hand right into that light, and I wanted to grab him, jerk him back from it, sure if he dipped any part of himself in there it would be melted right off, but then I heard him grab hold of some jingling contraption, and what he pulled out wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen, and certainly wasn’t what I expected to see. It looked like some kind of pearlescent undersized horse or overlarge goat or some bastardization of the two, with maybe something else — moose? sea lion? — thrown in for good measure. It stood just a head or so taller than Ralph, who wasn’t too tall to start with, and it was thin and sleek and strong-looking, with something rounded and unhorselike about its face. In truth, though, these observations came to me much later. At first, I found I couldn’t look right at it, like I was looking right into a flashlight or like I was driving into a rising sun, but judging by what I could see of it, it was an unsettling thing to look at, not ugly, but not pretty, either.
“What the hell is it?” I asked.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he said, and then he grabbed it roughly by the top of its head where there was a nearly translucent and wicked-looking horn growing there or planted there or something. “It’s a goddamn unicorn, Mano. Can you fucking believe it? I bought a goddamn unicorn off a goddamn Chinaman. And for cheap, too,” he said.
I was late getting home. The house was a minor disaster, as was Victor, our boy, who was wandering around the house in just his diaper, something — mac and cheese? whipped cream? — stuck to his chest. I found Sheila in our bathroom, half-dressed and half — made up.
“Jesus,” she said when she saw me. “You’re an hour late.”
“Sorry,” I said, and I picked up Victor, who’d grabbed me by the pants and then held his arms out to be lifted up. “You know Ralph. It’s hard to break away when he gets going,” I said. I played with Victor, peekaboo mostly, and I watched Sheila finish dressing, and then I asked, “You ready for this?”
She stopped fussing in the mirror and turned and smiled and posed, her hands thrown up and out, her hip thrust to the side, more like she was a cheerleader or some Hooters waitress than a real estate agent. “What do you think?” she asked.
She looked lovely, and for the first time I could remember, the sight of her made me sad.
“You look great,” I said.
“It’s my first open house, you know,” she said.
“I know.”
“I need more than ‘You look great,’” she said.
“You look so good, honey, I could take you and throw you on that bed right now—”
“Fine,” she said, interrupting me before I could finish my thought. “On the bed, okay. But would you buy a house from me?”
I laughed. “I would buy a house from you, and I already have a house.”
“You couldn’t afford it. You can’t afford the house you already have,” she said, but she smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Next time, try not to spend so much time over at Rafael’s.”
“He hates it when you call him that,” I said.
“It’s his name. He should be used to it by now.”
“He goes by Ralph.”
She shrugged. “Ralph’s a boy’s name. What about Ralphie? Should I call him Ralphie?” She said this and went back to our room, and I would have had to holler to defend him, to remind her he hadn’t gone by Ralphie since we left middle school, and in the end decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Then she came out, an inch or two taller in her heels. She took Victor from me and kissed him, and then she kissed me, a long, deep kiss, and then she wiped the lipstick off my lips.