by Eugene Mirabelli

Eugene Mirabelli lives with his wife Margaret near Albany, New York, where he taught writing for many years. His six novels include The Burning Air, The World at Noon, and most recently, The Goddess in Love with a Horse (and What Happened Next). His last F&SF story, “Falling Angel” in our Dec. 2008 issue, was an edgy modern fantasy. His new one looks like it will be in that same vein, but stick around and you might be surprised.

One minute he was there, the same as ever, and the next—Wham!—he was in this other place where everything had lost its thickness, was deflated, flat. For a moment he wondered if maybe the world was as solid as ever but his mind had collapsed—a thought that made his head spin, or would have if a young woman hadn’t turned up just then, saying, “Here we are.”

“Oh! I. Yes! Here we are,” he said, trying to gather his wits.

The young woman had her hand on the door of a life-size photograph of a glossy black sports car, a cut-out photo backed with wood or stiff cardboard so it stood there looking as if it were real.

“As you can see, the Alfa Romeo Spider is a beautiful two-seater convertible,” she told him, smiling. “It replaces an older version, the Spider Nine-sixteen model, which was introduced back in 1995.”

His head had cleared and he saw it wasn’t a photo but the thing itself, a gleaming black sports car, a two-seater with golden brown leather seats. The woman was in a skimpy white dress, more like a stretched T-shirt than a dress.

“Where am I? What’s happening?” he said.

“What’s happening nowadays is a Type Nine-thirty-nine with front-wheel drive and six-speed manual transmission.” She had leaned into the cockpit and, still looking at John, placed her hand gently, caressingly, on the knob of the erect shift. “As you can imagine, it has power and lots of it!”

“I’m not interested in cars,” he cried. “I don’t know what I’m doing here or how I got—”

Her smile vanished for a moment, but then she brightened. “I know what you’re wondering. And the answer is nine point four miles per gallon,” she told him, smiling once more.

“Listen, maybe you can tell me—” he started to say.

But she was walking away, her high heels making a brisk tap-tap-tap on the shiny showroom floor. Her back was bare just to the cleft of her buttocks and her dress appeared not filled by her body but merely held against it by the slender white ribbon tied in a bow knot at the nape of her neck.

“This is impossible,” he muttered, following her toward the big glass door.

“Impossible?” she said, turning to him with a smile. “Almost impossible. But, yes, this is a 1963 Ferrari, a Two-fifty GT Lusso.” She trailed her hand up the rear of a dazzling red car. “One of the most sought after classic Ferrari vehicles. Beautifully restored, the black leather interior is as soft as glove—”

John had shoved open the glass door, stepped outside, and was looking around. He didn’t recognize any of the buildings. He discovered he didn’t have his cell phone with him; he jammed his hands into his pockets, felt his wallet and his apartment keys—all there. He walked to the end of the block, stopped at the cross street and saw that the sign was missing—no surprise—then he turned around and began walking to the other end. The block was composed of expensive shops selling men’s shirts, electronic gear, wine, sunglasses, fancy driving gloves, and sports equipment.

He was standing on the curb, wondering if this was a part of Manhattan he didn’t know, when she said, “Here we are again.” Now she was wearing a yellow swim top and a short brown suede skirt.

“You’ve changed, but you look familiar,” he said, puzzled.

She laughed. “We were in the auto showroom, remember?”

“No, no, no. I mean from before then.” He had closed his eyes and was rubbing his forehead with his fist. “I don’t understand—”

“I do photo shoots. Not as many as I’d like, but maybe you saw one of my spreads.”

He looked at her. “You know this part of the city?”

“Not really.—Oh, look!” She had abruptly squatted, half kneeling to display a dazzling white inner thigh, and was now scratching the curly head of a friendly terrier. “Oh, you cute, cute doggy!” She rubbed her cheek against the dog’s muzzle. The terrier wagged its tail, jumped backward, and dashed off. “Bouncy little dog.”

“A Jack Russell terrier,” he said. “Not my favorite breed.”

“Can you imagine meeting a fun dog like that? So cute and friendly! That’s why I love the city.”

“What city?” he asked, intending to find out what city this was. “What city do you love?”

“I love San Francisco for its wonderful views. I love Boston for its historical sites. I love New York for its great museums. And also Washington, D. C., for its historical sites and great museums, I think.”

“I’m sure we’ve met someplace before,” he murmured. “You live around here?” he asked her, still hoping to learn where he was.

“Certainly.” She stepped off the curb into street traffic and hailed an onrushing cab. “Let’s go.”

In the cab he asked her name. “Veronica London,” she said. “What’s your’s.”

“John Mousse.”

“Moose? You mean like the animal? The one like the reindeer?”

He peered out the cab window at the building façade sweeping past, flat as a photo. “Yeah, the one like the reindeer.”

“Now it’s your turn, John, so what’s your favorite city?”

“I don’t like cities.”

* * * *

In her apartment Veronica asked, “Can I get you something to drink?”

John looked around. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he told her.

She smiled as if they were about to have fun. “Oh, I think you do. I think we both know what you’re doing here. Or going to be doing.”

“I’m just lonely,” he protested. “That’s all I am, and confused.”

“Forget about that,” she told him. “Let me get you something to drink.”

“It’s too early in the day for me to start drinking.”

“I have an ex-presso machine. I can make you some presso,” she said.

“Presso?”

“It’s European coffee.”

“It is? Oh, that! Yes. Espresso. I’ll have that,” he said.

She smiled. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll get things started.”

Veronica returned carrying a small tray with two diminutive cups of coffee. She was in a semi-transparent slip or nightgown or breakfast robe or peignoir or something—John didn’t know what it was called—a loose white garment that flowed in a cataract from her shoulders to her breasts, to her hips, knees and ankles, allowing the ivory-rose color of her flesh to show through. She set the tray on a marble-topped café table by the window where a gauze curtain was filled with blurred sunlight. John couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Here’s to you,” she said, raising her cup in a toast.

“I’m positive we’ve met,” he told her. “I just can’t place you. I recognize you but I can’t quite recall from where.”

“A lot of people think they know me,” she said.

* * * *

The bed upon which she waited was covered with thick rumpled folds of crushed amber velvet and as she unfolded herself in the rosy half-light the silver jewelry in her navel gleamed and winked, catching his eye. “Hey,” he said. “That’s a staple! You’ve got a silver staple in your navel. And—Yes!—Now I remember. You’re Miss November! In the magazine! Yes, yes, yes!”

“That was two years and seven months ago,” she said, her voice husky with desire. “And you’ve kept it all that time. Come.” She stretched, opening her arms to him.

“A magazine! Oh, God, what’s happening,” he cried.

The usual was happening.

Afterward he told her, “I don’t know why I did that. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. We have nothing in common, absolutely nothing, you and me.”

“Don’t worry,” she said languidly, but with an edge to her voice. “That wasn’t a marriage ceremony we performed.”

“I’m sure you’re a very nice person,” he hastened to add. “But you’re not my type.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. “You kept my magazine so long it must be a collector’s item. I’m flattered.”

“I was using it to hide a different magazine,” he explained.

They were lying side-by-side on the big disheveled velvet bed and now she turned her head to look at him. “Just who is your type?” she asked.

“You’d laugh if I told you.”

“Try me.”

He hesitated. “You know the L. L. Bean catalog?” he asked tentatively.

“Nope.”

“They sell regular clothes, mostly, but also canoes and tents—camping equipment.”

“So?” She sat up, pulling her knees to her chin.

“So there’s a woman in the Christmas issue two years ago and she’s my type.”

She glanced at him. “A woman in some outdoor clothing and camping catalog?”

“Yes.”

“You want her for this?” she said, incredulous. “She’s your type?”

He felt his face getting hot, flushing. “Yes,” he confessed.

Veronica looked at him a moment, then let herself flop backward onto the velvet bed cover. “You see, I didn’t laugh.”

When he awoke at noon she was gone and a note lay on his clothes which he’d tossed onto a bed chair last night. Good Morning John—Don’t forget to leave the door so it locks when you exit. Make sure you try it after you’ve shut it. And I’ve set the Ex-Presso machine so it will make regular American coffee.

Bye-bye,

Veronica (a very nice person)!!!

* * * *

If there had been a park across the street yesterday, John hadn’t seen it, but that morning he went into it because the greenery—the long view of the grassy field, the pond and grove of trees, the promise of rural life—was so inviting. Inside the park, nature looked too simplified. A bright yellow sun was shining, the sky was blue, the grass smoothly green on both sides of the nicely curved path. The man seated on the bench up ahead had folded his newspaper, had put it beside his briefcase and was smoking a pipe. A little dog dashed up from nowhere, paused to look at John, then scooted back across the grass. A moment later the mutt dashed across the gravel path, barking happily, a little girl in a yellow dress chasing it. The man with the pipe stood up. “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!” he cried. A little boy in a crisp white jersey and neat blue shorts had come running. “See Jane run. Run, Jane, run!” he shouted. When he saw John, the boy shouted, “Jane runs fast. Can Jane catch Spot?” John walked as briskly as he could and watched the kid out of the corner of his eye. The boy trotted beside him, saying in bold face type, “Jane plays catch. I play catch. Do you play catch? Jane plays catch.” John thrust his foot out, sent the kid sprawling onto the grass. The walkway branched ahead and John took the path that he saw led out of the park, letting the brat’s wild “Run, Jane, run!” diminish far behind him.

* * * *

Shutting up the kid made John feel better but the world still felt weird. Veronica’s apartment house was nowhere in sight. In fact, the street he crossed on his way out of the park didn’t look to him to be any part of the street he would have crossed on his way in, and now he noticed the city skyline had shrunk, as if from the cold. The automobile traffic and the people along the sidewalk looked all right. A rust-rotted minivan pulled away from the curb, its dented rear hatch springing open just enough for a thick snake of electric cord to slide out, dragging a guitar which John grabbed just before it hit the pavement. The van drove off, a whirlwind of advertising posters billowing up from the open hatch, then abruptly halted. A thin guy with a bone-white face got out and began to gather up the loose posters, jamming them under his arm while making his way, head down, toward the curb—then he saw John standing there with the guitar cradled in his arms. “It’s safe,” John told him.

“Holy crap! Thanks, man. I owe you.”

“You’re in a band?”

The thin guy took the guitar and handed him a poster.

ROD & ANNABEL LEE.

Crushed Rock

!We’re Getting Louder!

One week starting Friday

at Witt’s End

“Good name, sounds like a good band,” John said, just to be polite. “Maybe the poster needs a little work,” he added.

The guy laughed. “Yeah, the poster’s shit. We need a rewrite and a design or something.”

Apparently his face was that white by nature. He had deep socketed eyes, hadn’t shaved in three days, and his hair stuck out as if electrified. John had the uneasy feeling that he knew this face from someplace.

“You’re Rod?” John asked him.

“Right. And if I didn’t have my hands full I’d shake your hand. This guitar’s worth more than I am.”

“How do I get out of here?” John asked in a rush.

“What do you mean?” Rod asked.

“One minute I was in my apartment and—” he broke off, fearing he’d sound crazy. “What I mean is—My name’s John Mousse and I’m a graphic artist,” he blurted. “In my other life.”

“In your other life,” Rod echoed. “Hey, I like that.” He laughed. They stood there talking a while, then Rod said, “I got to get going. Hop in if you want. Got to drive around putting up these lousy posters. You can help.”

So John climbed into the van and they drove around putting up the lousy posters, wrapping them around lamp posts, tacking them to newspaper kiosks, pasting them to the front of brownstone townhouses. “Keep an eye out for the cops. They’re fussy-fussy about where we put these things,” Rod had told him. So John patrolled as lookout while Rod pasted another to the back panel of a pickup truck, a station wagon, a bus, and two posters side-by-side on the front door of the library.

Some hours later they were at a community bulletin board in a parking lot when Rod asked him, “You don’t like being a graphic artist?”

“I like it most of the time. I can do it alone. A couple of months ago I quit the group I worked for. I work from my apartment now.”

“Could you design us a poster? Special lettering or a logo or something?” he asked, all the while searching for an open space on the crowded bulletin board. The cork was covered with loose sheets of paper—bus schedules, café menus, local events, part-time jobs, puppies, and second-hand cars—each note tacked over the other, like roof shingles.

“Sure. I can do that,” John said.

Rod had a cigarette lighter in his hand. “Anybody around?” he asked, flicking the lighter with his thumb.

“Two old ladies. A mother pushing a stroller with a kid in it,” John told him. “No cops.”

Rod had already run the small flame along the bottom edge of the bottom row, setting the papers ablaze. “All those missing kitty-cats,” he muttered, patting out the last scraps of fire. “They just want to be free.” He tacked his poster in the scorched center of the bulletin board. “I’ll take you to the house,” he said, turning to John. “You can meet my sister and Annabel. And if we’re lucky, one of them will feed us.”

* * * *

The house was a three-story yellowish stucco building with patches of moss growing on it. The façade looked oddly flat, as if it were a giant sheet of paper upon which somebody had meticulously painted windows and a door and greenish splotches of moss. And the sky in back, a shade of greenish gray, looked painted too. A young woman in black jeans and a black jersey was sitting on the front steps, peeling a peach. “Welcome to the low-rent area,” Rod told him. A long crack had opened down the front of the house and a stretch of stucco had fallen off. “It still needs a lot of fixing up, but it’s all ours. We own it.—Watch out for the ditch!”

John stood looking at the house. “I feel weird. I have the feeling I’ve been here before,” he said. “I mean, I’ve seen this before. Even all these dead leaves.”

“That’s called déjà vu,” the young woman said.

“This is my sister Madeline,” Rod told him.

“I’ve seen this in a book,” John said. “It’s an illustration for a story.”

“I’d shake your hand except it’s sticky,” Madeline said. “My hand I mean, sticky.” Like her brother, she had dazzlingly white skin, and hers was emphasized by black eye-shadow, black lipstick and black nail polish. Her black hair was pulled not to the back but to one side of her head and held there with a silver clasp.

“John’s a graphic artist, in another life,” Rod told her. And turning to John, he said, “Madeline’s a part-time waitress, but in real life she’s a songwriter, and a good one.”

“Come on in,” Madeline said. She swallowed the last chunk of peach, licked her fingers and looked around for a place to throw the pit, but kept it in her hand. “I’ll give you the tour.”

In the kitchen she tossed the peach pit into a crock labeled compost, washed her hands, and showed John room after room, up and down the house, then arrived back in the kitchen where Rod was looking into the refrigerator.

“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” she told Rod, “so I guess you’re ready for breakfast, right?”

“We’re artists, Madeline, we get up late.”

“I can make you a good salad. If you want the cold cuts you’ll have to fix them yourselves.”

“Maddy’s a vegetarian,” Rod told John. “She won’t touch meat, won’t handle it.”

“I don’t eat flesh,” Madeline said.

“Salad is fine,” John said, hoping to sound agreeable.

Sometime after lunch the second guitarist drove up with the drummer, and a while later Annabel Lee showed up (short platinum blond hair floating over her head like a halo), then everyone climbed the stairs to the third floor where they rehearsed. The band had echoes of 1970s rock, which surprised John, who had expected something bizarre, and Annabel Lee had a good voice. Madeline was on the keyboard for one piece but, as she told him, she preferred writing music to playing it. There wasn’t anything for John to do, so when Madeline went downstairs he went with her.

Madeline made a pot of coffee and John steered conversation away from himself as much as possible. Madeline said she and her brother came from a place in Philadelphia. “But it’s no longer extant,” she said, meaning, as far as John could tell, that it had been paved over. At first he had been distracted by the black eye shadow and black lipstick, but he found he was getting used to it. “Are you religious?” he asked her.

“Spiritual maybe, but not religious. Why do you ask?” she said.

He said he couldn’t help but notice she was wearing earrings with big dangling crosses. “Oh, these.” She smiled. “It’s just a style,” she said. Sometime later they heard the clatter on the stairway which meant the rehearsal had broken up and a minute later everyone was in the kitchen talking at once.

The second guitarist and the drummer drove off, but Annabel stayed and Rod volunteered to drive out to get pizza. “Let me come along, I want to pay,” John told him. So Madeline phoned the order in to Mama Mia’s Pizza while Rod and John drove out to get it. “Annabel comes from Boston,” Rod told him. “That’s why she says cah for car, and pahk for park, unless it’s in a lyric.”

“She seems nice.”

“Yeah. She is,” Rod said, thinking about it. “We used to be married. Actually, we still are, except we don’t live together much. We separated to get a divorce, but it turned out we got along much better that way, so that’s the way it is. The sex is hotter, too.”

John slumped down a bit. “Everybody I know is married. Some of them twice.”

“Ever been married?”

“No,” John murmured. He remained silent for a while. “That reminds me,” he began, then broke off. “I know this sounds strange, but I haven’t got a place—”

“You can stay at the house. We got room.”

“Thanks.”

They stopped at an ATM machine. John put in his card, tapped in his number and waited. Nothing happened. Rod kicked the machine; it buzzed to life and slid out the money. “I know this lousy machine,” Rod told him. “It cheats. Count the cash.”

“It’s real bills!” John said, delighted.

“What were you expecting, Monopoly money?”

John laughed. “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.” He paid for the pizzas, two six-packs of beer, a bottle of bourbon, a cheap razor, and a toothbrush.

* * * *

They sat around the kitchen table, devoured the pizza and washed it down with beer, then scrubbed the dishes and stacked them on the shelf. Everyone was tired. Rod and Annabel Lee shared a joint, and John leaned back against the wall, contented. The world didn’t seem quite so weird or, to be precise, the weirdness didn’t matter so much. When Madeline turned to him and said, “Name your opiate,” he said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

She smiled, showing her teeth, and poured a big glass of bourbon for him. “It’s refreshing to have someone sane in this house.”

“You flatter me,” he told her.

“Sanity is way overrated,” Rod said, sweet smoke drifting from his mouth with each word.

John knew he was drinking too much, but it didn’t seem to matter to anyone else, so he decided it didn’t matter to him either. It was becoming clear where he was and why everyone was so familiar here. It was coming back to him, or maybe coming forward; anyway, it was on the tip of his tongue to tell everybody that he knew. And he would have, but the weirdness, or whatever it was, didn’t bother him any longer. Rod’s deep socketed eyes and electrified hair and Annabel’s platinum blond halo didn’t seem so odd. Furthermore, he could see that Madeline’s work on herself—painting her eyelids and her lips black, the way she had swept her hair sideways across her head and down one side, even the silver crosses swinging from her ears—was a kind of art, a visual presentation, something like his own graphic work. Maybe that’s why he turned to Rod and said, “I like your sister. I’m glad she doesn’t eat flesh.”

“I guess she’s likable in her own weird way,” Rod conceded. “Listen to this—” He turned to the CD player that somebody had brought to the table. “This is a recording we made last year. Didn’t do much, but it’s good, really good.”

“For Christ’s sake, Rod, he was at the rehearsal, isn’t that enough?” Madeline said.

“Rod has found a new audience,” Annabel said.

Then there was a gap and Rod told him how when he was a kid there was this nice bit from “Hotel California” that fascinated him and he still thought it was one of the best guitar performances ever. In fact, they were playing the “Hotel California” now and the music was in the air all around them, and the lyrics were resonating in John’s head or, yes, in his heart, and the last thing he remembered he was running for the door, thinking he had to find the passage back to the place he was before, but the chorus said, Chill out, we are destined to receive, you can check out any time you want,

But you can never leave!

At which point John put his cheek to the kitchen table and wept while the guitars played on and on.

* * * *

When John awoke the next morning his head throbbed and he felt dizzy or nauseated, he couldn’t tell which. He climbed out of bed—the bed being a folded army blanket thrown over a mattress on the floor—and went down the hall to the bathroom. He was standing at the toilet in his undershorts and T-shirt when the memory came back to him of Rod holding his head while John knelt, vomiting into the bowl. He took a shower, went downstairs, and found Rod at the kitchen table, buttering toast. “How you feeling?” Rod asked him, his electrified hair glowing in the midday sunlight.

“Not good,” he croaked.

“Want coffee, toast?”

“I don’t think so.—I’m sorry about last night.”

“Shit happens,” Rod said, dismissing it.

“Where’s Madeline?”

“She waitresses mornings.”

“What’s good for a hangover?” John asked, seating himself cautiously at the table. “My head feels like a big, big bell.”

“Try the toast and coffee.”

John cleared his throat and announced, “Your full name is Roderick Usher. And your sister’s name is Madeline. And.” His speech was rather slow this morning.

“Right,” Roderick said. He paused, his toast halfway to his mouth, waiting for John to conclude the sentence.

“And you two are characters in a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Not really,” Rod said. He bit into his toast which gave a satisfying crunching sound. “We’re real and the story is make-believe.”

“In the story you accidentally put your sister into a tomb alive because you think she’s dead.”

“That’s what I mean. I’ve done a lot of crazy things but I’ve never buried Maddy alive. Or dead, for that matter.”

Half an hour later Madeline arrived back from her job at the café and Rod told her, “John thinks we’re escapees from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“I can’t blame him,” Madeline said. “Hi, John.”

John was washing out his cup at the sink and he said hi.

“He says I buried you alive,” Rod reported.

“I only look that way sometimes when I’m tired,” she told John.

“No, no! All I meant was that I recognized this house,” John explained hurriedly, turning to her. “It’s the house in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ I remember the illustration.”

“I read the story where somebody gets walled up in a wine cellar,” Rod said. “He gets buried alive that way, behind a wall. That was in Poe.”

“There’s something weird going on,” John said, shutting his eyes, rubbing his temples.

“When you have déjà vu you feel weird,” Madeline said. “You feel like, oh, I’ve seen this before, like, oh, everything is happening like it happened before. It feels eerie. It happens to everybody at one time or another.”

“It feels like I come from—I don’t know—another space or time.”

“You come from California?” Rod asked.

“I live in New York.”

“Well, you’re in Connecticut now,” he said. “A wholly different state.”

“I’ve got to get back. I can’t live off you guys.”

Rod laughed. “Hey, man, you’re not living off us. You’ve been here one night and you paid for our dinner and drinks. We owe you. So relax,” Rod told him. “Relax.”

That evening Rod and Annabel Lee shared some low-grade smokes—”True ditch weed,” Rod called it—and Madeline had half a glass of Jack Daniels and John drank coffee. Rod had told Annabel about John’s weird feelings and she had looked concerned. Later, when Rod and Annabel were getting ready to go out to a club, she turned to John and said, “Maybe you came in from a parallel universe, an alternate world.”

“Oh, sure,” Rod muttered. “Make it complicated.”

“It’s a respectable theory among physicists,” Annabel said defensively.

“Leave the poor man alone. He’s had a hard day,” Rod said.

“The idea is that when you look at a quantum wave it turns into only one of its possible states,” she told John. “But the others continue to exist, and those are the alternate worlds.”

“Do you want to see that singer or not?” Rod asked her.

“What singer?” Madeline asked.

“Some twenty-year-old who puts on a black leather corset and fishnet stockings and thinks that makes her a singer. She’s at the DownTown.”

Rod and Annabel Lee left. John reheated the coffee and poured himself another cup. “Well, that clears that up. This is an alternate world.” He gave a brief laugh. “What I don’t understand is why you don’t think I’m crazy.”

* * * *

But they didn’t think he was crazy. It was clear to them that he came from an alternative world and was quite sane. The next day at breakfast when he told Rod about walking through a park that looked like an old-fashioned first-grade reader, all Rod said was, “You did right to trip the little bastard.” And that night at dinner when he told everyone about his meeting the centerfold girl, they all accepted that, too. “Centerfold women do exist,” Madeline said. “They’re models or actresses.”

“But I didn’t meet a model or actress, I met the sex pot she was pretending to be in the photo. She even had a staple in her navel where it holds the magazine pages together.”

Rod refilled John’s wineglass, saying, “What was she like, you know, in bed? What happened next?”

“Hey!” Annabel cut in. “Maybe he likes his privacy.”

“The only reason I had the magazine was to hide my L. L. Bean catalog inside it,” John said. “In the catalog there were photos of people skiing or buying Christmas wreaths and things like that, and one of the women was, well, I was attracted to her. It’s that simple. Crazy about her, actually. Obsessed, you might say. For the past two years.” He felt out of breath.

“What did she look like?” Madeline asked him.

“She was just nice, that’s all. She looked—I could tell she—she was authentic, real. She was beautiful, but that’s not important. She was—she was what you want when you want to marry someone. I want to marry her.”

There was silence around the table. John felt his face getting hot, his hand darted out for his wineglass but knocked it over—”Sorry!”—and he jumped up and got a paper towel to mop up the spilled wine.

The next day Annabel Lee drove over to Providence to visit a widowed aunt whose husband used to buy sporting gear from L. L. Bean; the uncle had died over a year ago and, sure enough, Annabel found the Christmas catalog from two years past and brought it back with her. That night she slid it across the kitchen table and asked him, “Which one is she?”

John opened the catalog, flipped a couple of pages, then turned the magazine around so the others could see it. “Look, the man with the string of Christmas tree lights in his hand is married to the woman who is about to hand him the cup of eggnog, and the woman off by the fireplace—that’s the one I told you about.”

“Nice sweater,” Rod said. “Looks warm.”

“How do you know who’s married to who?” Annabel asked.

“He’s decorating the family Christmas tree, right? Then the person bringing eggnog from the kitchen would be his wife. And there’s other scenes, too.” He swept three pages back. “Look. They’re outside in the snow and, see, the father is pulling the sled with the little girl on it and the woman next to the sled, looking down at her daughter, is the same one who made the eggnog. And this other woman—I wish I had her name—is looking at them and smiling. And there’s the farmhouse in the background.”

“Oh, yes,” Madeline said.

“There’s other indoor photos,” John said, sweeping several pages aside. “Look. Here she is alone. This is a bedroom, an old-fashioned bedroom. See the edge of the bed quilt? And the braided rug? She has no wedding ring.”

“Nice bathrobe,” Rod said.

“And this is one of my favorite photos,” John said, turning to the front of the catalog. “See. It’s the farm house, the wreath on the big front door, and the light from the window shining on the snow outside, and through the window you can see the people inside, standing by the fire, talking.—What do you think?”

“I think you should look for her,” Annabel told him. “Don’t go back to your other life in that parallel universe.” Rod and Madeline agreed with Annabel. “Stay in this one,” they said.

And that’s what John did. He stayed and got an outdoor job with a landscape company in Stamford, Connecticut. He insisted on paying Rod and Madeline for his room, despite their objections, and he contributed his share for food and other household expenses and, of course, he designed a new poster for the band, as well as helping to set up the lights and amplifiers when they played. He bought blue jeans, chinos, and a few shirts from—you guessed it—L. L. Bean. He had always had friends or, to be exact, friendly acquaintances at work, one or two anyway, one for sure, but he had never felt so at home in his life as he did now.

From time to time he thought about phoning his number in Brooklyn Heights, but a certain uneasiness or superstitious dread had always made him hesitate and he’d forget about it. Early in December he bought himself a cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone and on a whim he did phone his old apartment. It rang and rang and just as he was about to hang up there was a click and a woman’s voice said Hello. John fumbled for words, told her his name and asked about his furniture. “What furniture do you mean?” the woman asked, clearly baffled by the question. He asked was there furniture in the apartment. “No, it’s quite empty and ready to rent. If you’d like to see it, we can set up an appointment and....” He told her he had his graphics studio there and the woman said, “Yes, it would make an excellent graphics studio.” She was still talking when John hung up, finished with his old life. Anyway, by then he’d bought a green twelve-year-old third-hand Chevy pickup truck and was ready to go looking for the young woman in the catalog.

“Where you going to look?” Rod asked him.

“From the appearance of the white clapboard farm house and the depth of the snow, I figure Maine,” John said.

“Good, that narrows it down.”

On December Tenth, John Mousse said good-bye to Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline Usher and to Annabel Lee. He knew they were an odd looking bunch but, frankly, he liked them and they made him feel good. He had never asked Annabel Lee about her name, which was the same as the title of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, but he guessed she would have a good explanation for it. Pale Madeline had previously kept her hair dyed black to match her punk-Goth style, but last night she’d changed it to an electric blue. When he said good-bye he stroked her hair, saying, “It’s beautiful, Madeline, really beautiful.” Rod, his eyes looking even more deeply socketed than ever, gave him an envelope with all the money John had paid to rent the bedroom. Then John hopped into his rattle-trap pickup truck and drove off, hammering his horn and waving to them. Way down the road he turned on the windshield wipers because it had begun to snow in very fine little flakes.

* * * *

Ordinarily it isn’t a hard drive from western Connecticut to Maine. You take 91 north to Hartford, then branch northeast on 84 into Massachusetts and onto the Mass Pike going northeast until you cross 495. Then you make a big curve north and east around Boston and when you reach 95, the coastal highway, you go across a bit of New Hampshire and north, northeast into Maine. But John was driving straight into a northeaster, a New England blizzard. More and more of the world was being erased, and by the time he reached Maine everything outside the pickup was blank. He drove into the night, his headlights filled with a dense whirling white confetti, as if a deranged artist had torn the world to a zillion bits and was hurling them at the pickup truck. John must have turned off the highway, because when the storm passed and the sky cleared he was on a narrow freshly plowed road, driving between high banks of snow.

At the crest of a hill he pulled to a stop. In the moonlight he could see for miles over gentle white hills and dark pine woods. He got out, astonished at the quiet and the pure deep, deep space. He climbed the snow bank and saw lighted windows at the other end of a nearby snowfield, and lights down in the valley. He parked the pickup as far to the side as he could, then he climbed the snow bank and plodded through the dreamy deep snow to the house. Lamplight from big front windows spilled onto the snow, and he could see a man and two women decorating a Christmas tree. He knocked at the door and the man opened it. “Hi,” John said. “My name is John Mousse and I’m lost.”

“It’s a bad night to get lost in,” the man said, an easy-going guy wearing an L. L. Bean blue canvas shirt. “But it looks like it’s over. Come in, give us your coat, tell us where you want to get to.”

John stepped inside and, dizzy with anxiety, held the edge of the door frame while he took off his coat and knocked the snow from his boots. A woman in a new forest-green wool jacket handed him a mug of steaming cocoa, and the young woman coming across the room asked him, “Did you say you were John Mousse?”

“Yes,” John said.

“You’re not lost. My name is Kate Greenway. I’m the woman you spoke to a couple of days ago about renting a place. You asked if it was furnished.” She was in the China blue heather ribbed merino wool sweater from two years ago. “The phone got cut off and I was so afraid you hadn’t heard the directions on how to get here.”

“I recognize you,” John said, his heart banging so hard he was afraid she’d hear it. “Recognize your voice, I mean. For the apartment. Yes.”

“It’s just up the road about a mile, a refinished barn next to my house. Completely modern appliances inside. It’s small, but I think you’ll like it.”

The easy-going guy and the woman in the dark jacket had turned away to help a little girl hang an ornament on the tree.

“I’m sure I’ll like it,” John said. “I’ve wanted to live in a place like this for years. Away from the city, out in the country.”

“And here you are at last,” Kate said. “Because I’ve been waiting—I mean, the apartment’s been waiting—I mean, the apartment, it’s really nice.”

“So this is Maine, the real Maine,” John said, happy to be here. And Kate smiled, and it was a warm smile, and “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”