Paul Silverman Stories

We’ve just arrived, late, and we’re all crammed into the entry-way of a small efficiency unit. To our left is a tiny kitchenette, dimly lit with a flickering fluorescent tube. To our right is a shut door, presumably the bedroom. In front of us is a combination sitting and dining room that looks like a discount furniture sale, circa 1959. Under the surveillance of Al’s mother we begin to move into this area and find seating. The largest chair in the room has a pillow in a soiled pillowcase on top of its seat cushion, and gives off an air that it’s been reserved and is not to be sat in without the express permission of Al’s mother or some other authority. Oddly enough, the acrid, gagging smell of the corridor has not followed us in here, at least not in its entirety. In here there is a coverup atmosphere, an invisible cloud of floral-scented germicide.

New Mom Roberta, the shining star of the lobby and its fawning pack of blue-hairs, has lost at least half her luster and wears a new face that frowns with the pang of neglect. “Aren’t you going to say hello to Kayla, Mama? Look at how big she’s gotten. Kayla, say hello to Grandma.”

Al’s mother peers at the infant through her owlish, sparkly tortoise-shells. “I don’t know, she still looks like a peanut to me. Have you got enough in there?” And her liver-spotted hand shoots out like a talon and grabs Roberta’s left breast. Roberta jerks backwards, startling Kayla, who begins to howl.

Mark, the father, gets up from the discount sofa with a pleading look in his eye and stands beside his wife. Al’s mother turns her scowl on me.

“Mama, this is Jake. The guy from work. I asked him to come here so he could see the Feldstein House.”

She seems supremely unimpressed as she eyes me up and down. “What’s he going to do, buy the Feldstein House? If he does he’ll probably throw me out. He’d better not try.”

Mark, Roberta and the howling Kayla have moved into a corner for a family conference. Roberta turns her back to me, hunches her shoulders and fiddles with the front of her dress. When she turns around, Kayla is breastfeeding quietly and Mark is attempting to stand between mother and child and me, not without reason. He knows I’m looking.

“I hope there’s enough in there,” says Al’s mother. “That kid looks like a peanut.”

Al has already told me things about Eddie, his older brother. Eddie briefly worked for a printer, but that was years ago. He became disabled; or, to put it more accurately, his disability emerged. Eddie couldn’t focus on anything, not on anything with as many parts to it as even the simplest job. So Eddie collected disability checks, and the checks helped pay for his mother’s unit in the Feldstein House, whose charter specifically read that its occupants were to be elderly people in need of assisted living. Not even fifty two years of age, he is the youngest resident of the Feldstein House ever.

While Kayla breastfeeds, Al’s mother passes around a tray of Ritz crackers spread with a gray, briny mixture. “They had extra in the dining hall,” she says, “from the Oneg Shabbat on Friday night. Frank the cook gave it to me. He knows Eddie loves chopped herring.”

I try one and it’s better than I thought it would be, but one is enough.

“Don’t you want another one?” asks Al’s mother.

I tell her I’m saving my appetite for lunch.

“This might just be lunch,” she says, “so be careful. When Eddie wakes up he’ll be hungry.”

I excuse myself and walk the few feet from the sitting area to the bathroom, passing the shut bedroom door on the way. The bedroom door has a simple flush surface, painted the standard institutional beige that’s all over the Feldstein House. In the split second it takes to pass it I think I hear rustling or groaning, or just a fan, or nothing at all. Just outside the door, in a little corner, is a small brass urn with an umbrella and three or four wooden backscratchers.

I go into the bathroom and find myself in a space no bigger than a closet, a closet in which urine is the dominant smell, overpowering the floral spray Al’s mother uses. To the left of the toilet, on the wall, is a palm-sized grey disk with red letters that say push for help. On the right is a tall Detecto medical scale whose grey balance indicator sits near the numerical peak, on the notch that reads 300 pounds. Just above the scale is a shelf with numerous squeeze bottles lined up like rockets: Fleet enemas and Debrox earwax removal kits, together with cotton balls and Q-tips.

Something about the smell and the closeness of the windowless room makes it feel as though a big cat has been in here. I lift up the seat and stare down at a white porcelain rim spattered with thick, yellow-grey blotches of congealed uric acid, concentrated piss.

When I rejoin the group, Mark is talking about what a good sleeper Kayla is and how much more of a person she’s become in a few short weeks.

“It’s amazing what a couple of pounds will do,” Mark says. “At birth she weighed only six pounds, seven ounces.”

“Eddie weighed seven pounds, six ounces when he was born,” Al’s mother says.

“Mama, Kayla’s ten weeks,” says Roberta. “Eddie’s over fifty years old.”

In my mind’s eye, the combination of the 300-pound notch on the scale and the urine blotches touches off a flight of fancy, and I begin to picture Eddie, this creature yet to emerge from behind the door in the bedroom, as a version of all the bizarre fat people who have ever come across my radar. I picture him as Steinbeck’s Lennie, and as one of those enormous, bedridden men the authorities have to free by chopping down walls, because they’ve eaten so much they can no longer fit through doors. When two full hours have gone by with no Eddie I get a flash picture of him as an obese Borscht Belt comic, making his entrance with a grunt and a fart, grabbing a backscratcher out of the urn and hoisting his huge ass onto the soiled pillow on the largest chair in the room. With the chair as his stage, he commences a routine of stinkers and clinkers. Two peanuts went into the woods. One was assaulted… Then a chicken went in. He was so cold he was walking with a capon…Hey, how do I know Jesus was Jewish? He lived at home till he was thirty three and his mother thought he was God.

I picture Eddie as one of those men who waddle on planes and can’t fit in the seats in coach. I picture him as a human hippo testifying in a Weight Watchers infomercial that he’s finally found the regimen that will turn his life around.

My pictures are shaped by snatches of conversation, by what I saw in the bathroom and overheard from the kitchenette, and by stories Al has told me. I see Eddie as an eccentric food addict, madly creating repulsive versions of ordinary dishes: stuffing the microwave with a dozen hot dogs and radiating them for an hour; then gulping down the residue, the pink, powdery cylinders of nitrate; pure deli dust, as parched as styrofoam.

And then I visualize him languishing in bed, obsessed with the orifices of his swollen body. Squeezing Fleet enemas into his ass; squeezing Debrox earwax removal liquid into his ears; plugging his ears with cotton to block out the sounds of the external world so that all he hears is the popping, rushing babble of the hydrogen peroxide mixture as it melts the wax and etches its way through the canals that twist into his skull; and when the rushing subsides plucking a Q-tip from the bedstand to probe and extract the thick inner ooze. I picture him doing this round the clock, not noticing date, time, day, night. Oblivious to his sheets, his bathrobe, his mother talking to him. Waiting and listening for each new crescendo of bursting peroxide bubbles; waking up to it and falling asleep to it. Focusing on nothing else.

But in all the time I spend at the Feldstein House that afternoon I never do get a good, close look at Eddie – I don’t get any look at all. As I remember it, I’m sitting there still figuring out what to do with the stained mug of coffee the mother gave me, still troubling myself about the wasted day when I see Al’s mother bolting out of the bedroom like a banshee and slamming the palm of her hand onto the push for help button on the bathroom wall. Next comes a crowded blur of paramedics, cops, firefighters, oxygen tanks, I.V. hookups and stretchers. In what seems like only seconds, so many uniformed people surge into the tiny apartment I never do see them transport Eddie out.

And then I am with them all again a few days later, still following Al the way a fingernail follows a swarm of blisters breaking out all over you, head to toe. They’re all there: Al, Al’s mother, Roberta and Mark, listening to the rabbi eulogize Eddie as a good son, a loyal son, a larger-than-life son who honored the Jewish way by staying faithful to hearth and home. As she hears this, the mother’s face twists with disapproval, as though she wants the rabbi not to talk but to act: To get back that which wasn’t just taken from her, but stolen. And I’m shocked to find that, even though I’m a total outsider, I’m feeling that way too. Only because of the moment of Eddie I never got: that glance, that whiff, that word or two – it didn’t happen and I’m suddenly a mourner. I feel he was stolen from me too, and here I am on my own, protesting and appealing, even as the rabbi calls him by his Hebrew name, Ephraim. Ephraim Ben Yakov.

Leonora labeled him the Russian salesman, as though he were a kind of foreign pastry, but Maurice Baran wasn’t Russian at all. He spoke English with a perfect broad American accent. However, Maurice warned her that she could never be sure of his origins, because the KGB trained native Russian toddlers in perfect American all during the cold war – to be future spies. “Do the math,” he said. “Am I the right age?”

Their very first conversation was about sumo wrestling, which he said was his favorite sport – even though he was thin as a rail.

“Why do you like that?” Leonora asked. “Around here everyone loves yacht racing.”

They were at intermission during a small, private concert at a home known as The Ledges. Waitresses in black glided here and there with the crusted irresistables Leonora had designed – and champagne in heirloom crystal flutes.

“Sumo is older than yacht racing,” he said. “A lot older. It goes back to the Eighth Century, at least. These yachties think they’re so traditional. They’re just newcomers, really.”

Just as the intermission ended she asked him what it takes to build a normal male into a sumo wrestler. It was a subject she had thought about many times before – palpitating and salivating as she did.

Maurice drained his champagne and gave her a playful stare. He even did two big leg extensions ending in a mock sumo stomp, which turned a few heads.  “Training,” he said. “Years of it. And, of course, food.”

“I imagine lots of food.”

Maurice winked and returned to his seat. Leonora watched him. She remembered the softness of his mouth, the absence of any edge to his chin. She had seen the whites of the eyes, and she could tell he was no spy. She was ecstatic that his last word had been food.

*******

Leonora was a cook who didn’t mind how hot the kitchen got. For all of her renowned expertise, she blithely gave away her prized recipes to other women. She did it with moist eyes and warm smiles and earthy hugs. She wrote the recipes out on her finest stationery with a careful hand, as though she were inscribing an intricate cake. But, with the same careful hand, she omitted minor yet critical ingredients. A sprig of this, a pinch of that.

The women never blamed their inevitable failures on her – they remembered the smiles and hugs, the heartfelt words of encouragement. They were convinced it was they themselves who had failed Leonora. In the kitchen they simply weren’t what Leonora was.

In short, Leonora cooked to win, and she ate the way she cooked: for strength and pride. To her, an underfed woman was no better than a half-starved lioness at the edge of the pride: ribs showing, eyes glazed with fear, death stalking her on the grassy plain because she was too slow and weak to break the zebra’s neck. Leonora’s physical presence suggested she fed jubilantly on the marrow from large bones. She was broader than Maurice, and she had a couple of inches on him in the height department too.

*******

Leonora returned to her seat and watched the tall, wild-haired piano soloist perform a demanding piece, described in the program as Brahms Variations and Fugue in B-Flat on a Theme by Handel. The soloist had fingers so long they could palm a basketball, and he threw his whole body into the playing with such zeal his chin dripped sweat on the keys. But Leonora hardly took notice of him; or took notice of him as an accessory only. From where she sat - in the front orchestra, stage left - her view was the soloist’s heaving back, his crashing hands, the keys and the open book of sheet music just above the keys. And one other shape, the one that grabbed her eyeballs and held them like a vice. This was a small, slight Filipino youth standing straight as a board at the soloist’s side - in a state of rapt concentration. He was the page-turner: so child-sized he was no taller on his feet than the soloist was sitting down. Leonora’s eyes bore into the Filipino boy with the same burning intensity as the boy’s eyes bore into the sheet music. The ramrod stillness of his Lilliputian body accentuated the power of his stare. He never moved a flicker, except when the score thundered to the last written note in the bottom line, and then his right arm shot out like a striking snake, pincered the page at the corner and flipped it. The execution so efficient it was as though the page had turned itself.

*******

It was an eternity before Maurice was back in town long enough to have a meal at Leonora’s place. This visit was when she first heard about the Sharapova girl.

“What exactly is it you sell – to the Russians?” Leonora watched him mop up the last swirls of chasseur sauce and she immediately refilled his plate, with no objections from him at all. Just the thought of serving him chasseur excited her. The word meant hunter, and Leonora, as she watched Maurice bite and chew and swallow – watched him crave her sauce like a vampire craves blood - felt so much like a huntress her ladle could as well have been a crossbow.

“Drugs,” Maurice replied. “But it’s not exactly like it sounds.” He said he had flown Aeroflot so much he felt like one of those well-traveled goats he used to share space with in the airline’s earlier days, when the engines were so frail and the cargo so heavy the planes would stagger to get off the ground, then hover interminably until, finally, some gust or hand of heaven thrust them sputtering up to the clouds.

He said he worked for a pharma company whose business plan was based on the fact that Russian doctors are paid next to nothing, and that most of the Russian population would kill to get free drugs, any drugs. Maurice’s task was to round up the doctors and the human guinea pigs and form panels for testing new wonder meds. “It’s easier than doing it in America,” he said. “Here everyone’s afraid even to drink water.”

*******

Over the course of the next several dinners, Leonora moved Maurice to extreme lard-based preparations, even venturing to serve long slices of pure pig fat as an appetizer. This she called a rare white prosciutto, cochon de la neige, and he was thrilled to take seconds and even thirds. The more he ate, the more he talked. Both vodka and women in Russia, he said, are not unlike the Aeroflot planes – meaning that the old and the new are pretty much everywhere. “On any street you can buy vodka for two dollars or two hundred dollars,” he said. “In any city you can find old crones in babushkas or the leggy, gorgeous ones in La Perla thongs, the Sharapova type.”

Leonora sliced him another wedge of her mile-high Pavlova au crème Gargantua. “Really,” she said, “and what do you think of the Sharapova type?”

In short order, she learned that Maurice spent as much time in the bulkheads of America West as on Aeroflot. “Good as the Sharapovas are,” he said, “the most stunning ones of all you don’t find on the tennis courts in sneakers. You find them on the ice, on skates. They’re magnificent, and they’re even taller than your dessert.”

He accepted a third cream-drenched pyramid and slid a picture out of his wallet. In front of a purple and gold velvet curtain stood Maurice, a sheepish grin on his face, one arm at his side and the other wrapped around the waist of a girl who epitomized what he’d just been describing. “She skates in Vegas at the Riviera,” he said. “They have an ice show there, all Russians, all exquisite. The best seats are around this horseshoe of ice and they come skating right by you and your vodka, so close you can smell them. No one skates with more feeling than Russians. You want to lick their skates. There’s nothing, nothing like…”

Leonora moved like a big cat for the Chateau Y’qem and poured Maurice a double. She tapped a long nail on the photograph. “And what about her? Do they let her out to pose with the tourists? Did you have to pay?”

Maurice sipped, then sipped again. “Pay? Why pay anything? That’s Alyona, my girlfriend. All I pay for is a plane ticket and a room at Mandalay Bay.”

“A skinny old shit like you? I don’t believe it.” This is what Leonora wanted to say but didn’t let herself say, even though it took so much tongue-biting she could taste blood. Years of stalking the grassy plains had taught her that actions speak louder than words, and her plan of action, swiftly galvanized by the rage and hurt, was now solid as a rolling pin: Stuff the Russian salesman like a foie gras goose. Create so many rolls on his belly the Michelin Man looks starved by comparison; fatten his scrawny pecs into breasts so pendulous Alyona becomes repulsed by his every jelly-like shudder.

Leonora kept quiet, kept strategizing and kept cooking. While serving Maurice shovels of her five-cheese kugel one day, it occurred to her that if the Russian salesman didn’t pan out there was a most superlative Plan B.  Of course! - the Filipino page-turner. She became fixated on her remembered image: the pianist and the page-turner locked together before the great black block of a piano. She saw it as a Nineteenth Century tableau, a kind of sculptural group depicting the essence of colonialism. The tall Caucasian dominating the huge instrument and the torrent of sound and the entire audience, which sat mesmerized below. And at his side, dwarfed, anonymous and unnoticed, the subjugated Pacific boy: while he was flipping pages today, tomorrow perhaps he’d be fanning the air around the white oppressor with palm fronds or reeds of bamboo.

To take this jockey-sized serf and feed him and feed him and see him swell – until he was a boulder that might roll atop the high and mighty soloist and flatten him – the thought so stoked Leonora she began to see the Russian salesman as unimportant, as empty and pallid a vessel as a vodka bottle after the vodka has been guzzled.

While her tantalizing concoctions simmered and shirred, she warmed to the idea of the Filipino – in particular to a new image of him she couldn’t get out of her head. It was the concert piano onstage all over again, except this time the great black block was a stove, and she, Leonora, was in the role of soloist, fingers flying over all six burners.

And beside her, his head no higher than her apron-top, stood the page-turner - fat as he was tall and expanding exponentially - every ounce of him burning to bring her that one grain of salt or even sit and sizzle on the white-hot skillet, if that’s what Leonora commanded him to do.

She summarily dumped the Russian salesman and schemed her way into getting an introduction to the tall soloist, just to acquire the page-turner’s contact information.

But on the day they were to meet she had all her digits done at the newly opened Star of Paris Nails. The person assigned to her fingers and toes was a total surprise: a big-bellied, twenty-year-old Vietnamese boy. She became aroused, of course, when he bowed to her feet, but that wasn’t the reason she found him alluring. All the boy wanted, he confessed with a loud belly laugh, were objects made of steel or wires: hot cars and digital gadgets. His cravings struck Leonora as pure macho. And his tattoos said so even more: they were bad: jailhouse bad, cage-fighting bad. And yet he was a mani-pedi boy. What made him exquisitely delicious was he saw no contradiction in this whatsoever, no reason to feel guilty or sissified over his job. He did nails because his parents owned the store and the money was good. It was that simple.

Leonora had read, in the Guinness Book of Records, that not long ago  a fourteen hundred pound man had married a one hundred forty pound woman, setting the world mark for the greatest weight disparity of any married couple ever. She looked at the belly of the Vietnamese boy and saw possibilities. She made a new mani-pedi appointment and started planning the greatest, richest, most captivating menus of her career.

From the ferry, Ray and Maddie were limo-driven to the huge ebony doors right under the painting of the cane plant. From there, they and their luggage went into a golf cart and they were motored around to their suite. The driver was a silent islander who seemed disturbed when Ray tried to help out, grabbing his own golf bag – as though the bag was not Ray’s to grab. The suite looked out on a large koi pond with Asian statuary all around and a tall, time-blackened pagoda. The brochure said it had been shipped in pieces from China and painstakingly reassembled. Maddie didn’t wait long – one look at the pagoda, one wedge of pineapple and two sips of rum punch – and she was off and running for a three hundred dollar seaweed wrap. Ray stalked out of the suite in search of the bar.

It was roomy and ostentatious and it didn’t take long to find. The counter and back bar dripped more twisted wood than a Banyan tree, and was emblazoned with brass elephants and apes. Boston-born Ray, who had learned to smoke in a sewer worker tunnel just off the schoolyard – a popular venue for warfare with tire irons - had a quick, crazed impression straight out of his earliest history books. Redcoats drank here, fat-assed lordly colonials who had been told the sun never sets on their empire – and they believed it. And swarming around the bar, little dark men with fast hands grinned and kissed their asses and mixed the bully-boy redcoats their gin and whatevers.

But as he entered there were no such lackeys in sight, and the barman who came over to take Ray’s call for vodka on the rocks could have been a cop or a wharf gorilla from lower Washington Street, the old Combat Zone. He had a proper shirt with epaulets and the cane logo, even on the cufflinks. But he also had construction worker hands and the florid sly face you see at Bruins’ games. He was good slinging the booze, though – every pour, every spritz, eyeballed precisely. Ray watched him concoct pink and green frozen things, garnished with half an orchard, for a couple two seats away who were picking at little mounds of edamame and wasabi peas. It was mid-afternoon but they were still in their golf clothes, colors bold as a mandrill’s ass and matching from head to toe. Listening to them one-up each other on golf brands made Ray wish he had left his clubs at home, but then he remembered the mayor’s priest telling him one night in a prime Fenway field box, “you go to Cane Palace you play golf. It’s Christian charity to animals. The whales swimming right off the twelfth tee box have gotten used to a steady diet of golf balls. They’d starve without shankers like you…”

Ray ordered another vodka just as the woman whipped off her Guccis – with drama – letting the premises know her eyes were still worth a gander, like vintage beads. “Let’s talk about tonight, our first night,” she declared to her companion, “and champagne.”

He popped an answer quick as a ping-pong slap. “White Star. I like that the best.”

She frowned and wrinkled her nose. “But it’s so sweet…”

“Well, I don’t think so. Do you like champagne with orange juice?”

She was miffed, for sure. “Certainly not good champagne. Why would you spoil it?”

The woman paused, and there was a seriousness to it – as though she were deciding whether to spend the rest of her life with this man who killed fine bubbly by turning it into orange punch. “Do you like…Cristal?” she finally asked.

“Not really. What about Dom Perignon?” He had a mastiff brow, too big for the rest of his face, and it was already sun-fried. But now it reddened all the more. He seemed shamed by his own question.

“Dom, not Dom,” she snapped, whipping the air with the Gucci shades. “I really don’t like Dom. It tastes like aspirin. You know that taste – that Tylenol taste?”

The man seemed crestfallen, and said nothing.

“Cristal,” the woman said. “It’s perfect! The bubbles are perfect.”

The crestfallen man signaled for the tab, bringing over the barman, who, for the first time, gave Ray a look that wasn’t just official politeness. When the two of them finished making their exit Ray returned the look and moved his lips, voicelessly, so they formed a single word: “assholes.” The bartender gave a little smirk and said, “they better watch out or they might step on a snake.”

******

It so happened the bartender wasn’t from Southie, or Fields Corner, or any of the places Ray wanted him to be from. But he was from Newark and then Rahway, where, like half the town, he’d worked at the prison, and that was good enough for Ray.

“So here’s the first question,” Ray said, “is that where you learned to mix drinks, in the joint? And the second one: how did you get all the fuck out here?”

The bartender brought over a stainless steel bowl of limes and a small cutting board. He sliced one and said, “maybe the question shouldn’t be how – but why? When I landed here it was the rainy season, which you and your wife will never see, since you’re on the high-season rate plan. I always keep my shirts on those wire hangers, you know, and after two weeks I start noticing these big rust marks inside all my shirts. The weather is eating the hangers, the hangers are eating the shirts…”

“So why do you stay? Free shirts?”

“Hey, there are worse places. Ever been to Lucknow? This is my career, you know. I’ve shaken and stirred all over the known world. Besides, this place lets me play my music. They give me gigs, you know, minor gigs, the Tuesday Pig Roast…”

Ray, who had made his stash distributing liquor to half the Bay State, asked the question he always asked bartenders. “Move much Goldschlager?”

The bartender scooped a new round of limes out of the stainless steel bowl. “You mean the schnapps with the little gold flecks?”

“Eighteen-karat. That’s what they say.”

The smirk again, and much wider. “Not a Cane Palace favorite. They don’t do beer and shooters here. You heard the lady, they drink Cristal. But I like the gold shooters now and then. It’s always been my dream to shit gold. I’m still waiting.”

Cane Palace, as it turned out, was everything the brochure said it was, from the pearl beach to the emerald golf course. It was a place so perfect Bill Gates had gotten married on the greens atop the seaside cliffs, while the dolphins below leapt with glee.

All that remained of the old sugar plantation, and the days of the machete versus the lash, was the great manor house. It was now a five-star resort – for those who had five-star wallets: Maximum occupancy was forty eight people a week.

*******

On the return ferry ride, the Cristal couple toasted each other with champagne from a cooler: the woman’s favorite brand, of course. Every time she raised her glass she flashed an enormous emerald cut diamond. It looked like the prow-browed suitor had passed muster, despite his tacky fondness for polluting top-shelf bubbly with Minute Maid. Ray couldn’t stand to look at them, which made him look all the more.

Maddie tugged his sleeve.” Hey, you could buy them and sell them. Don’t you know that?”

“I don’t want to buy them and sell them. I want to throw them off the boat and let the sharks buy them and sell them.”

Ray fell silent, fixated on his second-day visit to the Cane Island bar – when the real reason he went back was to ask the bartender what he’d meant by that snake remark. The bartender told him about an incident that was rumored to have occurred several years ago, when Cane Palace was a more sketchy operation. There was a kind of fashion show in one of the gardens, which at the time was overgrown and badly tended. The concept of the show was female guests as models, wearing sarongs made by island women.

“In this business,” the bartender had said. “There’s only one thing worse than a guest that trashes the room. It’s a guest that trashes the help. You know what I mean…”

As the rumor had it, one of the “models” was a woman, a lot like the Cristal lady, whose help-trashing was the talk of the back rooms and the villages. “She came down the garden staircase dressed like a bird of paradise,” the bartender said. “But she stepped right on a viper, a little tiny guy, who gave her an unfortunate nip on the toe. Nobody put it there or anything. It was an accident, of course.”

“Of course,” Ray had replied, in that knowing voice. But what did he know about the Cristal lady, or the Cristal man, for that matter – whether they treated the help like shit or like sugar. All he really knew was they were rich and liked to show it.

But so did other people.

“Hey Ray,” Maddie announced. “Maybe you need shock therapy. Maybe you should buy me a rock like that. You could land a plane on that stone of hers.”

“Maybe I need to get drunk,” he said, “till I can’t think about this shit any more. I don’t know who I am…”

Back in Boston at last, Ray had his pilot take him to Teterboro, where his New York driver picked him up and motored him down to Rahway.

Ray had the driver drop him at one of the dive bars where the prison workers go after their shifts. For the first time in twenty years, Ray sucked down Goldschlager until it was coming out of all apertures, until he had to change his seat from the bar to the men’s room. “Fuck,” he said to the occupant of the adjacent stall, whom he could see through a drilled hole you could drive a truck through. “All my life I made gold. Tonight I shit some.”

“Good luck,” the occupant said. “And if you don’t?”

“Then I puke some. This is my lucky night.”

Ray looked away for a minute. When he looked back he saw the dick push through the hole in the stall wall. It made him think of the Cristal lady and the viper. But by now his gullet was a geyser, and he retched until he felt his stomach would shoot right out of his mouth. When it stopped, he was on his knees before the reeking can, and the dick was nowhere to be seen. Vanished, along with its owner, as though offended by the gushing and the stench.

Another eruption followed, but this time it was wild laughter – from an even deeper part of Ray’s gut. And he turned to the more important business of the evening, beaming his eyes into the porcelain bowl of upchuck, mining it for that little fleck of gold.

In less than an hour, the ferry was at half-speed, the wind had died and the magnificent flora of Cane Island was in full view. They were in the brochure again, the one the travel agent had given them: Lush, tall trees, a great belt of them bent by the trade winds into an arched solid shape, a kind of terrestrial tidal wave challenging the sea. Ray watched as Maddie shouted, “Hallelujah!” She said she couldn’t hit the spa fast enough.

They unpacked and she was off for a seaweed wrap – and, by default, Ray was off too, walking for no other reason than to walk. He told himself he was headed for the bar, any bar. Resorts like this had them inside and outside, anywhere and everywhere. But where he found himself, once he’d turned a corner or two, was nothing like a bar. He was at a place that lacked congeniality of any kind. It was one of those border points where the manicured resort property - the mowed grass and the procession of specimen plants – came to a dead stop and changed into something not for the eyes of guests: a parched patch of limbo that looked hacked and burned and abandoned. Judging by its size, it could have been a field for croquet or badminton at one time, but now it contained four Cane Palace dumpsters, big as army tanks, and their unpleasant overflow. At the sight of them Ray automatically turned away, but a flash of turquoise water to the right of the farthest dumpster gave him a different option – a path that ran to the side of the dumpsters rather than towards them and beyond - and when he had taken it he found himself looking out on a little empty cove, shimmering like a sapphire. It was bordered by a wall of forest so thick the bunched green shapes were almost black - as though pressure from the jammed trees had squeezed the shadows in the forest until they poured out, the way ink might seep from a monster squid.

Ray stopped, looked and listened, and was about to head towards the cove, but a disturbance in the mass of branches and vines stopped him in his tracks - and out of the forest burst an island man riding a horse with no saddle. Both the man and the horse had a feral, starved look, ribs as prominent as sticks, the man nearly as naked as the horse. Ray crouched and watched as the man dismounted, led the horse into the waves and carefully splashed sea water all over the animal. He spent a long time at it, the water up to his waist, as though he were dousing a fever. Then the man re-mounted, and he and the horse rose out of the water like a ravenous centaur. They vanished at full gallop into the forest, and Ray, nerves pounding, made his way back to the barren field. The moment he reached the paved pathways – there were several of them joined in a circle - he was startled by an engine sound. It was a luggage cart about to cross in front of him, driven by a resort worker, an island man in crisp white shirt and shorts. The man stopped the cart abruptly. “Ride, sir?” Ray hesitated but finally climbed in, simply because it felt easier to say yes than no. “Where are you headed, sir?” the driver asked, speaking politely, but staring in a way that was too cold for what the voice was offering. Ray stammered his request: the beach-side bar, and the island man gunned the cart. But the path he swerved into wasn’t the path Ray expected. In fact, it appeared to go in the exact opposite direction, back towards the cove, and for a brief time they plunged into forest so dense Ray saw nothing but jungle, yellow-green walls, and he found himself thinking of locked places: bunkers and vaults.

Just as Ray was one blink away from jumping out of the cart, they emerged from the jungle and re-entered the streaming light. And it was as though a dungeon had crumbled and disappeared. The walls of wilderness gave way to Asian gardens and statuary. They went over a rise and the beach-side bar appeared. As they sped toward it, Ray fumbled in his pocket for bills…

That night he and Maddie shared an exquisite dinner, food so carefully raised and prepared even the mince of chicken could be eaten raw. They were in the brochure again, the storied and much photographed dining room, with its paddle fans and fantastically carved ceilings from the old plantation days. But in his mind, Ray stayed in replay mode, his thoughts a running spool in which he was forever pulling out bills and handing them to the luggage cart driver. When he tried to break this loop all he could do was switch tracks and go back to the cove and the wild-looking man and the horse. As he sipped the wine – they’d ordered so pricey a Burgundy it was decanted by a candle-holding sommelier - he obsessed over the forest rimming the cove: whether it was home to other desperate men and their fevered, starving horses, and even whether the man on the horse and the man on the cart were connected in some way. It worried him that he could not, for the life of him, think of the bills he’d handed the driver as just a tip.

Instead he saw it as ransom, and this thought alone robbed him of sleep, even though he kept drinking on the bedroom balcony long after Maddie had nodded off. Even though he threw down a double Ambien.

Just as the night sky faded from black to grey, Ray finally fell into a brief swirl of half-sleep, a delirious place where he was back staring up at the dumpsters and then pushing himself to go right past them, straight into the forest. He stepped over a swarm of roots and found himself face to face with a huge snake, hooded like a cobra, except the cobra face was gone. In its place was the head of a starving dog, fur withering and raw bone showing through the patches; fangs bared and foaming, eyes that were blood red yet bluish cold.

In the morning, croissants were brought by a man who could have been the same man who had driven the luggage cart. He set out the linen and silver with a flourish. Yet there was something Ray saw in the eyes: a chilled look that seared, somehow defying and denying every act of hospitality the man performed. He had seen this in the eyes of the cart man, a knife-cold flash, and now Ray knew it had been in the eyes of the cobra-dog and the man with the horse as well.

He choked his way through the croissants and busied himself until Maddie took off - for a morning of yoga. Then he turned to the only task that seemed to matter: finding peace on Cane Island, peace for which he was prepared to pay a bigger price than the fat sum he had handed the travel agent. What that entailed was still uncertain, yet one aspect of it was ridiculously clear. He would have to forget golf and dining and basking and everything else the brochure had touted as the essence of a Cane Island experience. In the brochure these things had been trumpeted in bold type, even heralded with a title splashed across the cover: The Great Cane Island Escape.

But now Ray had his own idea of escape, and there were no options, no other possibilities. Escape meant he would have to go off to the dumpsters again, go to them and go beyond them. He dressed quickly, without brushing his teeth or shaving. Before he closed the door behind him he seized the brochure and tore it to pieces. There were no dumpsters in the brochure.