“Sir?”
Brettigan opened his eyes. “Yes?”
It was the war-torn veteran. “I am very sorry to bother you,” he said. “This is embarrassing for me. But I wonder if you have any spare change or perhaps a dollar. Please. Whatever you can spare? For a meal?”
The pain, which had been located in Brettigan’s chest, had moved out to his left arm and his neck, becoming its own universe, and with some difficulty he reached behind for his wallet, which he extracted from his trousers and opened in front of the veteran. Inside it were four twenty-dollar bills and two singles. He took them out and handed them over. “Here, take them,” Brettigan said.
The veteran studied the bills in Brettigan’s hand, and his eyes widened. “Please, sir, no jokes.”
“I’m serious. Take them.”
“That’s…you mean—?”
“Take them. I do mean it. Here. Eighty-two dollars. It’s not a fortune. It’s just eighty-two dollars.” Brettigan was beginning to wave the money back and forth and then stopped the motion because it hurt. “I insist.”
Very gingerly, the veteran reached out to take the money.
“Here,” Brettigan said. “Take my wallet, too. Take the credit card. Go ahead and use it. I don’t need it anymore.” He held out the wallet.
The veteran stared at him.
“I came naked into the world and naked I will leave it,” Brettigan said.
“No. I ain’t no thief,” the veteran said, rubbing the beard stubble on his chin.
“No, you’re not,” Brettigan said to him. “Okay, don’t use the credit card. I get it. There’s just one thing I ask.”
“What?”
“I want a blessing,” Brettigan told him. “Give me a blessing.”
“Why?”
“I’m in pain.”
“You been in the war, too, I guess. It shows on you, you know what I’m sayin’? Well, all right. God bless you, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“But I can’t take your wallet.”
“Sure, you can. Where’s your stop?”
The veteran glanced out the window. “Next one. Cedar-Riverside.”
“Take the wallet. If you don’t want it, just toss it in the trash. But I’d rather you keep it.”
“You are one crazy motherfucker,” the veteran said with an expression of deep pity. “What’s your thing got you here?”
“This is your stop,” Brettigan informed him, as the train slowed.
“Thank you,” the veteran said. “I ain’t gonna forget you ever. No shit.”
“Yes, I know.”
The man limped out of the car after the doors chimed open, and Brettigan watched as he stood pensively next to a trash container before pocketing the eighty-two dollars and tossing the wallet into the container’s open mouth. The doors chimed shut, and Brettigan closed his eyes as an involuntary movement took control of his left leg. A chill rose up his body. Abends, will ich schlafen gehn.
* * *
—
The train made a slight turn leftward, past a private novelty museum, House of Balls, where carved bowling balls with faces of cherubs and devils were on display, and then a paint factory whose exterior had been coated with primary colors. A large football stadium in the shape of a Viking ship loomed up on the left, and the train moved through several switches, lurching slightly as it approached the stop for the stadium, where several people boarded, including a woman pushing a small shopping cart on wheels. She glanced at the man with his eyes closed and took her seat close to the door.
* * *
—
Above the train, a flock of sparrows appear to be fighting with each other or are engaged in a mating ritual, and their collective mind takes them in the direction of a small city park in which office workers are even now spreading quilts out on the grass so that they can sit down and eat a midday sandwich. Four young men are playing hacky sack on the north end of the park. A light breeze cools the air, and overhead an airplane headed southeast gradually descends for its landing at the airport.
Gazing down from the plane, a passenger unfamiliar with the city and the Midwest might spy a commuter train, the light rail, making its way downtown, toward Target Field. Is it inward or outward bound? From this distance, it would be hard to say. But the chief flight attendant has just announced that everyone must secure their tray tables and move their seats to the upright position. “We will be landing shortly,” she says, so the passenger quickly gathers up his odds and ends of flight mini-garbage and hands it all to the attendant walking down the aisle and carrying a trash bag. The city looks great from the air, a place of lakes and a river, the Mississippi, that flows all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, cutting down the middle of the country like an incision over its heart.
Acknowledgments
Two excerpts from this novel appeared in The Idaho Review and Fogged Clarity Arts Review. Thanks to the editors of these publications. And multiple thanks also to the early readers of this book: Steven Schwartz, Robert Cohen, Chris Cander, Julie Schumacher, Matt Burgess, James Morrison, Sally Franson, Mike Alberti, Chris Bram, and Elizabeth Darhansoff. Daniel Baxter, P.E., was helpful with the structural engineering, and Dorothy Horns, M.D., was informative about solar retinopathy.
The beautiful poem “Storm Window,” by Conrad Hilberry (1928–2017), inspired part of the barbershop chapter and is dedicated to his memory. My late beloved friend Jürgen Dierking is not the same person as Jürgen the bank manager, but there are faint echoes set up between them. The final chapter uses a device invented by Wright Morris (1910–1998) and is dedicated to his memory.
Here and there, the reader may detect traces of Toward an Urban Ecology by Kate Orff, A Union Against Unions by William Millikan, Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit translated by A. V. Miller (portions of which Christina hallucinates, driving her Saab while high on Blue Telephone). President Thorkelson has plagiarized a line in his poem from Tim Robbins’s Bob Roberts. The passages from Marsilio Ficino are from a volume of his works edited and introduced by Angela Voss and published by North Atlantic Books. On page 220, the sentence “At night the familiar stars slipped further and further away” is a slightly altered quotation of a line from “The King and the Singer” by the Serbian poet Ivan Lali´c, translated by C. W. Truesdale.
This book was helped immeasurably by the attention and care shown to it by my editor, Dan Frank, the best reader and friend any writer could hope for. Great thanks also to Vanessa Rae Haughton.
Thanks and love to Pua Johnson.
A Note About the Author
Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Gryphon, Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. The stories “Bravery” and “Charity,” which appear in the collection There’s Something I Want You to Do, were included in Best American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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