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by test

  When Len enters the coffee shop, he first sees Max's worried look, and then Max stands, a polite gesture that he doesn't understand until he sees the glossy dark hair in the seat opposite Max's.

  "Lennie," Max says, looking at the other tables, glad that there are not too many others besides Klinefelteran older woman with a grandson, both eating pancakes, two men at the counter, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, the drunk from the bathroom, his hands tentatively raising a glass of water to his lips. Max nervously shifts from foot to foot, hands restlessly jingling his change in the pocket of his standard, diocese-issue pants. "I'd like you to meet Virginia. Virginia, my brother Lennie Farrington."

  Her eyes are red, and Lennie is struck by these twin facts: first, that this woman is so young and beautiful, and second, that his brother could mean so much to such a woman to cause her to shed tears.

  In fact she has just told Max that this will never work. They were fools ever

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  to think it would. In the first place, she has realized that she loves him because he's a minister; she's attracted to menshe knows this nowwho represent stability and order, the sanctity and meaning of human life.

  "Don't you see," she has just said, "if I get any further involved with you, I'll start being the cause of evil in the world?" When she said this, her nostrils quivered as if she were about to cry, and it was all Max could do not to leap across the table, force her down onto the vinyl seat, and tell her in the language of sex that she had it all wrong, he was neither stable nor pure, she couldn't begin to corrupt him. But would saying that undo the attraction all the more certainly? He could feel a headache beginning to bloom behind his eyelids.

  "And truthfully," she added, "I think I just may be nutty about the uniform. You know, the vestments, all that brocade. The Eucharist at passiontide." And here she did begin to cry.

  Which was when Lennie entered, to shake her warm hand, to marvel at this young woman's presence, to feel the pulse beating steadily at her wrist, to wonder all over again what she could possibly see in this fat, confused older brother of his who once again is the perfect picture of misery caused, Len can see it now, by the pure pain of loss. He feels sorry for Max. He can't help it, even as he is relieved that such a messy situation might be so easily resolved.

  They are each given a moment of reprieve when the waitress comes with their orders. Virginia sniffles, says she must go. Max says, No, wait. And to his brother, he says: "We met at the movie theater, did I tell you that? At The Fisher King?"

  "No," Lennie says, "I hadn't heard that."

  "Isn't that right?" Max says to Virginia.

  "I have to go."

  The waitress has placed Lennie's breakfast in front of Max; Max's plate has landed in front of Lenniescrambled eggs, sausage links, hash browns, a biscuit and gravy. Intent on the byplay in front of him, he puts a sausage in his mouth without thinking, and is in the act of swallowing when the taste of pork grease hits him. When he tries to spit it out, it happens. This piece of pork makes the roller coaster ride over the top of his dumb, half-asleep glottis and wedges itself into his airway like a corkthunk!the sound of suction audible in his own ears.

  "No, please," Max is saying. "Stay a little longer. We need to talk."

  "No." She's crying again, dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin.

  "I'll call you, then."

  "Please don't."

  "I need you. I haven't talked to my brother for years, but here we areI had to tell him about you. You're good for me."

  His mention of Lennie reminds them that this is a scene with an audience, but when they look at him, everything else is forgotten. His face is red, nearly

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  bursting. Soft squeaking noises come from his wide-open mouth. His hands are at his throat. This has come as such a surprise that Lennie has had no chance to panic or thrash around. His body is rigid with confusion and puzzlement. In front of him are Max and his maybe-maybe-not girlfriend, and their faces begin to twist and run; he cannot get a fix on color or shape.

  "Dr. Klinefelter!" Max is screaming from somewhere far off. "My brother! Look!"

  The doctor rises slowly to his feet, pushes himself forward on his canes. "Heimlich," the old man says. "Do the Heimlich."

  Max dimly remembers descriptions from television and magazines. He pulls his brother to his feet, his fists underneath Lennie's breastbone. His efforts are spasms of anxiety. Lennie squeaks, his face the color of wine. Max feels tears of failure falling onto his brother's shoulders. He has wasted his own life on riddles and tootsies, tootsies and riddles, and by the queerest sense of divine fairness it is his brother who is going to die.

  Dr. Klinefelter fumbles in his large pockets, extracts a silver penknife. "Hold him good," he says, pulling the stiff blade free.

  It is the one thing Lennie sees, the bright bead of light from the silver blade as it erratically moves toward the hollow of his throat. He does not review his life, nor does he think with fond regret of Patrice. He does not ask forgiveness for his often uncharitable spirit. He only has room in his consciousness for the bright silver blade and the bright pinpoint of light that burns his eyes.

  "Hold him now," the doctor says.

  "Oh God, oh God," Max says, then yells to Virginia: "Call 9-1-1."

  Then Lennie feels his legs go out from him. Has his brother dropped him? If he could just get some air, he would cry for this, he knows it. For his pain, for the unfairness, for the fact that Maxie the minister, his oversexed, irresponsible older brother, is the one who will get to live. And now other arms are around his ribs.

  Max has not dropped Lennie. The drunk from the bathroom has shouldered the doctor and his knife aside and pushed Max into Virginia's lap. He takes a large sour breath and jerks so hard that Lennie's ribs crack. The sausage flies across the room in a weightless arc, a lazy pop fly through a clear summer's day.

  Lennie comes to in the sour draft of his rescuer. As his eyes clear, he believes that God looks like Christopher Lloyd undersea, that he has died only to be revived into an odor of piss and rotten shellfish. Max is holding one of Lennie's hands in both of his own and crying. "Oh, dear sweet Jesus," he says over and over again, the strangest sort of mantra for this most professional of Episcopalians. "Oh, dear sweet Jesus, it was all my fault."

  "Let him have his air," Dr. Klinefelter says, his tone critical of the stranger,

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  who, although ignorant and unwitting, has succeeded where sobriety and knowledge failed.

  The man from the bathroom stall stands. The color drains from his face, he looks like he's about to faint, but he edges backward, surrendering himself into the waiting lap of an empty booth, and the critical moment passes.

  Others now cluster quietly around their little group. The waitress has come with water. A Vietnamese busboy flaps his apron, working a breeze.

  Virginia quietly leaves. She touches Max's shoulder with two fingers, leaving him with her blessing, although at this moment she is forgotten. He will, she knows, think of her later.

  For now though, Max cries. Lennie breathes. Breathing, for the moment, is sufficient. The front door opens, admitting a gust of sunlight and a large, startled trucker. All these people on the floor, he must think, what is he walking into here?

  ''The Frog Man," Lennie croaks, patting his brother's arm, "the Frog Man lives."

  Grace caroms around the room with the velocity of hockey pucks.

  <><><><><><><><><><><><>

  What am I to say to such things? That this is a small story after all? I suppose it is, I can't call it otherwise, even with its few moments of danger and risk. It would not even make a credible subplot for an hour-long courtroom drama. Two brothers, their wives, the young naive lover who comes to her senses, the aging doctor, the purple, bloated face of the virtuous victim. The improbable savior, a drunken deus ex machina. How can we believe it? What am I to say?

  That on an early June morning I had just sat down
at a booth in Gaylord's coffee shop unsteadily holding a water glass to my lips when a man began to choke? That I had most recently knelt down, my head inside a toilet bowl, vomit burning my esophagus? That my week's odyssey had begun when my wife and daughter and son packed our station wagon with the barest essentials, saying enough is too much, before driving west into the harsh central California sun? That I had begun to believe that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, and that the dreams of this life are nightmares only?

  I could say that, I suppose. But then, I could just as easily claim that I am Lennie or Max, or Dr. Klinefelter, or Virginia, for that matter. That these multiple lives are merely fractions of one life. I could say that in the moment when I fell backwards into the booth at Gaylord's, my vision blurred by strange clarity and the fluttering of some ethereal curtain, I saw in those figures before me my own life revealed, my own apocalypse, an uncovering, a lifting of a veil. I could say that. Absolutely. . . .

  Yet why not say what happened? That and merely that.

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  That in those dark hours before our early dawns, I would wake to hear the sounds of our house: my wife, her back to me, muttering in her sleep, confused even in her slumber over what was to be done with mewith my rages, my silences, my criticisms, my depressions, my sarcasm, my self-loathing; my daughter turning over, restless in the rush of change that was overtaking her; my son crying out against the terrors of the darkness. I would wake to the distress of these sounds, stripped of any capacity for compassion, overwhelmed only by the realization that I could no longer remember the slightly fetid taste of a particular girl's skin. A Gypsy girl with orange hair who made her living by vandalizing parking meters and duping unwary tourists. A girl so exotic to me now that she might as well have been a native of some south Pacific island. One who made me believe at the age of nineteen that the future was indeed limitless, that no wrong choice could not be undone.

  Some days before they left, my daughter asked me what it would take, since I was so obviously miserable, for God to forgive me. She is twelve, theologically precocious, with a penchant for Socratic irony. The lines above the bridge of her nose are clear signs of her resentment towards me. Arguing with her is a debate with the Grand Inquisitor; I lost without speaking a word. How could I begin to explain to her what it means to be forty-two years old, to read the next thirty years as if they had already been written, to be choked by the twin pains of longing and regret? That such pains, no matter how clichéd, can drive weak souls into the arms of willing accomplices, and souls weaker still into the passive madness of bitter daydreams? That to forgive oneself, and thereby embrace the forgiveness of God, would requirefor the sake of virtuesome forfeiture of dream and desire?

  In the room above our garage, the windows face east, and during the summer there is not a morning that is not clear. The sunrise above the Sierra is magnificent, the sky gradually lightening, the red glow of morning throwing the dark mountains into stark relief. These days, since my unconscious heroism and surrender of this past June, I am awake to see the daily miracle of rebirth and admonition; it washes me with its tides of honesty and grace, and I am reminded that long before my family left, I had already orphaned myself with yearning and self-indulgent woe.

  In the sunrise, for a small time I become them all. I know their lives intimately, projections of my own failure, my own pain: Max and Lennie, Patrice and Sylvia, Dr. Klinefelter and Virginia, my departed family, the cretin on the bathroom floor whom I no longer claim. They are mine, after all, my responsibility, my children, adopted without their knowledge or consent; I pray for them to understand that in a choice between inevitable evils, the noble embrace the greater hurt.

  What am I to say to such things?

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  That in this land of light and shadow and make believe, the dream may school the dreamer?

  Oh, yes.

  And that the character that is my ownpoor passing fact if ever there was onemay find within that dream the breath that will let him live?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Absolutely.

  Yes.

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  The Taming Power of the Small

  by Will Blythe

  Two men and a boy were driving in a battered Mustang toward the Texas border, with the wind and ahead of the rain. Every now and then, heat lightning flared in the night sky, illuminating the landscape like a photograph. Miles behind them were black cumulus clouds and what they believed was their old life. The men sat in the front seat, the balding, curly-haired one driving, cradling a quart of orange juice between his legs, the other one passing him french fries from a paper bag. "Boom," he said, aiming a gnarled french fry at the driver's head. Wedged over his thigh was a worn copy of the I-Ching. The boy was hidden in the trunk, wrapped in rope like a kite spool.

  Baron handled the wheel with one hand, ignoring Napperstick. "What does that chink book say about a motel?" Baron said.

  Napperstick just smiled, ketchup flecking his pale, wispy moustache. He shook his head like a man who was tired of the same old joke.

  They meandered down the moonlit highway, the center line phosphorescent, floating above the asphalt in the car's weak headlights. At last they came to a green sign with a longhorn steer and a moon rocket. Texas. For most of their hurried trip, Napperstick got excited whenever they crossed into a new state. He hadn't been many places. But this border let him down; his disappointment hung in the car like the odor of fried food and rotting upholstery. "Idaho was better than this," he said, looking up from his book.

  He'd never been to Texas, but the name had already betrayed him, had promised him more than this land, which was as bleached as bone, luminescent only in its blankness. Baron looked straight ahead and said, "We're in the middle of the desert. What did you expect?"

  "Something else, I guess," Napperstick said. He was ignoring the state of Texas, studying his I-Ching by the green glowing numerals of the radio dial. He'd picked up the book from a waitress he'd slept with in Las Vegas. She was a headstrong woman who used to dance at the Sands. She made everything she did seem appealing. She'd shown him how to toss the coins, the basics. She taught him to respect the book, to treat it with a dignity he granted nothing else in his life. "There are Chinese sages," she said, ''who study this book for forty years and still get surprised." But he told Baron that he'd already mastered the I-Ching. He liked the system, the way it applied to everything. He liked having something help him figure out what things meant, what was supposed to be.

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  In Baron's eyes, he acted like the book was something alive, something that sat faithfully with him on the hot car seat.

  "You'll get over it," Baron said. He rolled his eyes. Napperstick was such a boy. They were both in their late twenties, but Baron looked at himself as the leader, as the voice of experience.

  They drove on across the Texas flatlands, hewing to the speed limit like an old couple, pulling into drive-ins for food, buying gas at lonely self-service pumps, and stopping occasionally to empty their bladders on the shoulders of long stretches of road. As they pissed, they watched oncoming headlights looming faintly in the distance, drifting toward them across the desert night in slow motion.

  "What if he needs to piss?" Napperstick asked.

  "Then he'll piss," Baron said. "We're not taking the chance."

  "He doesn't cry much, does he?" Napperstick said.

  "It's tough with a gag."

  By afternoon of the next day, they crossed into Louisiana and entered the terrible green woods of the South, where the midday roar of locusts ricocheted in the greenery with a sepulchral buzz, like voices in a pipe. They passed by kudzu-covered fields and trees.