South Pulaski, at around 87th, just north of the mass of Metra and freight tracks and Hometown’s Main Street with its antique artillery piece, sandlot, and eternal veteran’s flame, we were pulled over, or Z was, by a Hometown cop, mustachioed and unironic.

As she explained with her trademark pout, she can’t drive so well in her new shoes, outrageously tall platform wedges crisscross-strapped halfway up each calf.

It went on for a while, this traffic stop, Z dressed the way she dresses and this cop, straining in his polyester, taking some real pleasure from the angle and her squirming, questions about citizenship status, age, ogling her tits and reminding her to call him officer.

We were next to a sausage factory, its neon sign showing piglets leaping into a giant grinder. He watched her unstrap and remove her shoes, as ordered, told her that technically it’s illegal to drive that way too but today he’ll let her off with just this warning and his private cell number scribbled on his card. He told her he liked the way her hair smelled, that it would be a shame to make such a pretty girl pay a ticket, and he wondered if she was fast in other ways – an entendre completely beyond her grasp of the language.

To me he didn’t say much of anything. I have a way of fading in such scenes.

She was unsettled before, and tried to play it off like this, too, was just amusing. “I told you, no? Police, the security guard – the one what with the candy at work – these guys, they really like me. What is that?”



I’d come down to her place, in Palos or near Palos, one of the Paloses – it’s hard to keep track of geopolitics on the Southside, gerrymandered outskirts folding into villages and back into so-called city again, the only giveaway being the sort of cop cars parked outside the cloned plastic-sided single-family homes with their living-room-size swatch of chemically-treated grass – because Jakub, her son, had just turned seven and Z wanted to throw a party of sorts, meaning a handful of children, gleefully screaming, and ice cream sandwiches to wipe on the surfaces of things, and the big tree in the backyard, recently toppled, horizontal, by one of the storms, to climb around and jump on and fall off of.

She’d asked me to come down because her husband, Jakub’s father, was away, of course, as usual, in Gary, supposedly, drag racing with the family’s other car.

So as Z and her mother – who was visiting from Poland – lit candles and sponged spills and applied the occasional band-aid, I hung out with little Julka, who wasn’t quite old enough for all the boyish noise and fury.

We colored, following a technique she demonstrated for me called, I believe, “Make a circle,” where you put your crayon down, hard, on a given sheet of the Kung Fu Panda coloring book and make a circle, for fifteen minutes or so.

The pictures turned out nice. As I said to her, they had emotional power, truth.



Then Z drove me back up Pulaski to the Orange Line, and we talked about the other reason she’d wanted to see me today, “an adult thing,” as she said.

She’d just found out that her husband had been posting photos of her on a Flickr site, or the Polish equivalent of Flickr, with comments and requests for comments.

Old pictures, posed pictures, some vacation pictures, then pictures of her around the house, pictures of her sunbathing, pictures of her sleeping.

Photos, also, of her friends, other nurses, including one who’d recently left the Christ Trauma Center for a dayshift job at some West Side plasma bank, the address of which, along with her hours, were noted by one of the guys who had posted comments.

Z wasn’t so much worried as… Well, she didn’t know the word. “Like you bite into soft something, and there’s hard something, or like today, if you take bite of the candy or the ice cream or the cake and there’s the hair inside, the finger, you know? Surprise, but not the good one.”



“If there weren’t the children,” she said, which is what she’s said for as long as we’ve been friends.

“If they weren’t there, probably I would leave him, yes, and this new thing is nothing, you know. Everything else is what, is why I’d leave him. But this is creepy, yes. I don’t want my friends to find it, to see. I don’t want anyone to see.”



So a bitter, low-spirited parting at the pockmarked concrete loop of the Pulaski kiss-n-ride. And the rest of my day didn’t get any better. I had errands to run, in my neighborhood, and saw Larissa everywhere, or thought I did, visions, women with her basic shape, build, gait, hairstyle, or just her car, stalking me, parked everywhere and passing on every street, that stupid silver rollerskate, as she called it, which, apparently, is a very popular basic design, Scion and Honda and Kia and even Dodge all, from sufficient distance, looking like the same shiny reminiscence coming to run down my heart.



At home I drank more, because it was Saturday night and I was alone or maybe just because drinking was what I did, increasingly, and the neighbors, the ones with the prayer flags and the planting boxes and the flower beds and the old blind retriever with stomach cancer, goiters, and the VW bus parked permanently on flat tires in the backyard as a kind of storage shed for gardening equipment, they were up on the roof, the roof right below my living room window, affixing owl decoys to the edges, hulky, hard plastic imitation predators, menacing of silhouette, designed to scare away the pigeons, maybe the crows, the sparrows and starlings and songbirds.

They were nailing them down, or nailing down bases and then screwing the things down on them, facing them at all angles, looking in and out from the roof itself with one even sitting there in the dead center, its eyes glassy, red and black, aimed right at me in my living room holding a bottle of grainy Chianti by the neck.



Later I woke up on my couch to a text from Z, already on shift: “Here goes with security guard again, today is Twix bar!”

Her emoticon winked, but that was likely just a mask on true feeling.

As she’d said earlier, about this guy, who follows her into empty rooms at Christ and has twice now brought flowers, old enough to be her grandfather and married and “always with the gun, on his belt, grabbing the belt, adjusting, like, look at me, I have big gun, I am real man, but come on…”

It was beginning to get scary, she said, and she was afraid she’d have to complain to the charge nurse.

My blinds were still open, and in the glare of the lamps across the street the hunched, horned forms of these little plastic monsters were visible, congregated across the rooftop, ravenous, plotting, biding their time…



I still slept with my cell phone on my pillow, and often, too, with my laptop there at the side of the bed, the side of the futon, on the floor, trailing its cord back to the outlet, the room lit by the dull grey glow of the blank, black, back-lit screen, though Larissa didn’t email anymore, except for the occasional group thing, an announcement that she’d be out of town or that some really hot open house was going on, notes which hurt more simply because they showed she hadn’t bothered to take me off her mass mailing lists.

She didn’t text anymore.

She hadn’t called for months.

But I persisted, out of hope or despair or whatever, and Z would text, sure, from Christ’s Trauma Center, usually when something particularly funny or gruesome happened, like when another nurse brought up the cart from the morgue, for them to load a fresh body on, and the cart was already occupied: “I tell her, you got to always check. That’s the first thing what I learned down there, check the cart, is the cart empty.”

And then, lately, Eileen had taken to calling, very early in the morning, just as the first glimpse or visible foreshadowing of dawn was coming through, which apparently she’d wait for, staring out the window, wanting to be considerate.



She’d been coming to some real revelations of late, or so she told me, having some total breakthroughs, painful stuff, hard truths, but rewarding.

Like, for instance, how the whole thing with her ex and the TENS unit, the electro-play, was, she now realized, thanks to a juice fast and some body work and a Rolfing session and the insight of her therapist, just sick.

As was that her ex-boyfriend’s idea of sex was for her to play dead – the kind of dead that is blindfolded, gagged, heavily bound, with remote-switch electrodes attached to clit hood and nipples.

“At the time, you know, I was confused, I wanted to please him, but now I can see that all it ever made me feel was insufficient, like I wasn’t enough, like I wasn’t skinny enough. He’d tighten the straps and I’d think, Oh, God, I should skip some meals, I’m a whale. And I’d want him to shock me, then, to burn me a little even. I’d want to puke, which I haven’t done since high school. Even now the smell of latex brings it back, I’m a very sensual person like that, sensitive to triggers like smell and taste, color. It’s an overdeveloped seventh chakra; I just can’t get past it, can’t move above the third eye and really liberate myself from this body, this coarse material shell with all its, you know, desires and childhood issues.”



Talking to Eileen on the phone was really just listening to Eileen on the phone, or, better, just getting talked at by Eileen. Listening was optional, didn’t really seem to make a difference to her.

Sometimes, I admit, I dozed off.

Sometimes I didn’t answer, would wake to the phone lit green and vibrating and just let it shiver itself out, alone, but other times I’d pick up and tell her that of course I wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t sleep, then give feedback noises as I folded straight back into dreams, into nightmares.



My dreams cycled through themes, and in one of these, ever since Larissa went to Montreal and came back marginally engaged, or in negotiations toward engagement, and cut off even the destructive, many-strictured imitation of friendship we’d stabbed at, post break-up, for months, I’d dream of body hair, the always unwanted, and removing it, needing to remove it, shaving, trimming, sometimes with the safety razors or clippers I really used, sometimes with straight razors, which I did not keep around on principle, or fantastic creams, waxes, laser devices, Flowbees. Always, in these dreams, there was more hair, too much, tufts and patches, long bits, missed, unnoticed, sprouting…



Today, Eileen said, the western suburbs were a wreck. Two tolls just to get to a bikram masters class that had been cancelled, the power out, cell phone service down, some streets actually closed.

She’d seen a flock of birds, necks broken, scattered across a strip mall parking lot where she’d stopped for a chai latte.

How’s that for an omen? she said.

The air smelled like chlorine, for whatever reason, the quality of the storm, the steam heat in its wake.

“The air smelled like swimming pools,” she said, “like sperm.”



Rain made Eileen feel both empty and bloated, spiritually depleted and excessively fleshy, too full but utterly unsatisfied.

“It’s the weather of childhood,” she said, “bad hotel memories on sticky film loops, the smell of swimming trunks, the smell of what’s inside them.”

She wanted to meet, later, she said, switching the subject. It was going to be a clear day, we could brunch, outside.



And so it was, hours later, Sunday, almost too perfectly blue, moderate and bright, a calendar ad for spring, and everyone was out in it, which made it seem more of a minor miracle that we managed to find a table, open, right in the sun, against a high brick wall, angled for watching the street and the rest of the patio and the sky and whatever else. Eileen fished the olive out of her martini, laying it aside and wrinkling back her upper lip.

“Calories,” she said.



Eileen in person is like Eileen on the phone.

I just sat there; she discoursed.

As a child, she told me, her favorite game was Chutes and Ladders: “But the object, right, was not to land on the chutes, on the slides, because that sent you backwards, down the paths you had already traveled. But I used to aim for them so I could slide my pointed man down with flare, eager to start again, because what did I care if the game went on for hours?”

Her theory – “my therapist’s theory” – was that maybe this, too, had something to do with why she stayed in it for so long, that relationship, being abused.

“I just don’t think I’m the victim type,” she said, “Do you? No, really, I need to know your opinion here…”



But I’d already noticed the reason the table was free: a bird, a pigeon, on the ground between her chair and the wall, alive, but barely, crippled, the feathers of its wing tips crusted over in gutter trash, glittery cobwebs and thick dust, something hanging from its beak, its eyes pinprick, red, dehydrated.

I bent down to it as Eileen warned about disease.

It was missing a foot, had a bulge where the foot should have been, ragged.

“It’s dying,” she said, “Jack, it’s dying, let it be.”



That was our brunch.

A busboy came out with a shovel, which he did not use to dig.

His first strike glanced, then he added a few more.

Eileen cried, but that was just one of the things Eileen did.

I walked home, past too many sporty silver cars, already drunk but not drunk enough, and somehow I got the idea to climb out there, out my living room window and onto the roof, to tear them down, throw them off, those fakes, those horned-headed, mean-spirited gargoyles.



I didn’t.

I just sat there, glaring at them, drinking whiskey ‘til I didn’t care anymore.

Z called at some point to say she’d just woken up and that she would have texted more last night but it was crazy, a guy coming in with the bone sticking out of his leg.

“Fell off the ladder,” she told me. “Stinking of vodka or the wine or something, and why’s he on the ladder in the middle of the night, outside the house, with a saw?”



Omens were everywhere, all season, and the world kept getting more wrong.

In my sleep, hair sprouted across my face, over my eyes, weaving my mouth shut and blocking up my ears.

Then the busboy would come, with his bloody shovel, and the sound of it, the whacking, the accumulated weight of circumstance would jolt me awake, bludgeon me out of understandable terror and back into the vague, incomprehensible reality of my waking life.