The Standard Grand

by Jay Baron Nicorvo

Genres: War & Military; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

**One of the Brooklyn Rail's Best Books of 2017**

"Nicorvo is a bracingly original writer and a joy to read." —Dennis Lehane

"A desperate masterpiece of a debut" that tells a huge-hearted American saga—of love, violence, war, conspiracy and the aftermath of them all." —Bonnie Jo Campbell

"Nicorvo’s muscular and energetic prose will stun readers with its poignancy, while providing a punch to the solar plexus." —Booklist (Starred Review)

"A dash of Coetzee, a dram of Delillo, but mostly just the complicated compassion of Jay Nicorvo. The Standard Grand is a brutally beautiful novel." —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted

"It seems possible that Nicorvo has ingested all the darkness of this life and now breathes fire.” Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up sleeping in Central Park. There, she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown Borscht Belt resort. Converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans, the Standard—and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Shale Formation—is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. Toward what end, only a corporate executive knows.

With three violent acts at its center—a mauling, a shooting, a mysterious death decades in the past—and set largely in the Catskills, The Standard Grand spans an epic year in the lives of its diverse cast: a female veteran protagonist, a Mesoamerican lesbian landman, a mercenary security contractor keeping secrets and seeking answers, a conspiratorial gang of combat vets fighting to get peaceably by, and a cougar—along with appearances by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Senator Al Franken. All of the characters—soldiers, civilians—struggle to discover that what matters most is not that they’ve caused no harm, but how they make amends for the harm they’ve caused.

Jay Baron Nicorvo's The Standard Grand confronts a glaring cultural omission: the absence of women in our war stories. Like the best of its characters—who aspire more to goodness than greatness—this American novel hopes to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric.

Release date: April 25, 2017

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

SUMMER

2012


SPECIALIST SMITH GUNNED THE GAS and popped the clutch in the early Ozark morning. Her Dodge pickup yelped, slid to one side in the blue dark, then shot fishtailing forward. The rear tires burned a loud ten meters of smoking, skunky rubber out front of the stucco ranch house on Tidal Road.

She felt thankful for her bad marriage. It allowed her the privilege of living off base; she could go AWOL without having to bust the gates of Fort Leonard Wood. Her four-barrel pocket pepperbox, a COP .357—holstered, unloaded—rode on the passenger seat.

To be sure she was doing right, she drove by Big Papa’s Cabaret, a soda-pop strip club that entertained lonely soldiers and unruly locals. Half a dozen men loitered outside, swigging from bottle-shaped brown bags.

Sure enough, Travis’s rusted-out, rice-burner pickup still sat in the dirt lot, its Browning Buckmark decal, in Stars and Stripes, peeling from the rear windshield. A display of American pride on his Japanese truck.

Unemployed, entrepreneurial Travis, inside somewhere, waited for the final lap dance to grind to a halt. Then his business got busy: pillhead happy hour.

Smith could practically hear the last-hurrah clapping and thigh-slapping, the hands of the soldiers not always paired. The dented steel door swung open and out staggered the pokes. There was Travis, a townie, bringing up the rear. Travis Harmon Wallace, her civilian husband. Overweight Travis. Travis under the influence of lord knew what Travis. Shiftless, automatic transmission Travis. He got blown back a step by the sunrise, shielding his eyes. He regained himself and made way to the milling men.

She gave a long thought to killing him, Travis.

The powerful derringer on the passenger seat was a gift from him—he tried so miserably hard to be hard—a gun he thought sexy in her grip and gangsta in his. What he’d bought them for their last anniversary. His-and-hers concealed carries. Had them engraved I’m your huckle bearer. When she’d tried telling him it was huckleberry, he got in her face. Near pistol-whipped her with the present.

The idea of loading the gun raised a clot of bile into her tight chest.

On her way out of town, she drove back by the house—its sham mortgage they’d started falling behind on the day after their incomprehensible closing. She slowed, tried to hear Foxtrot pawing at the doorframe. Nothing. Likely asleep under the butcher block.

She admired the twin tire marks she’d made earlier. They would be her lasting goodbye to Devils Elbow, where every street name started with T. Steering clear of 66, she took Tidal to Teardrop.

Smith, keeping to country roads, channeled her daddy’s crass drawl. Antebellum, he said in her head, you ever find yourself on the lam, you shunpike it, hear me, grrl?

Shunpike, Daddy?

Shun the turnpike, dumbass. Bumpkin county sheriffs a hell of a lot easier to outrun than revved-up state troopers. I should know.

She sped east out of the hotdamn Ozarks through the Mark Twain National Forest. She threw her ringing phone—Travy—out the window and into the parched summer. It smithereened in the rearview. She used her teeth to pull off her wedding band and engagement ring. Spat them into her hand and shoved them into the trash-crammed ashtray, mall-bought diamond solitaire be damned.

* * *

The temperature was already near ninety and Evangelína Ixchel Carrillo Canek savored the sopping warmth of the morning air like a sauna. She strode through it looking for a syrupy café con leche. Far as she could tell, she’d been assigned to the Mantenimiento Marino de Mexico project initiative because she was Mesoamerican. Possibly as punishment for botching Fort Worth. She had no training for the Tampico job. Oversee the replacement of two winches, a slew bearing, and the tugger hydraulic pressure unit on the LB Lacie Bourg, routine maintenance on a maintenance vessel. A week ago, she couldn’t’ve picked out a slew bearing in a pile of yoke hoists.

She found an open stall the size of a Texas outhouse, ordered in Spanish from an old Huastec woman missing a finger. Evangelína had little of her ancestors’ language. That didn’t stop her from offering a Maya greeting, “Bix a beel?”

The woman, shorter than even Evangelína, nodded but gave no indication of understanding. Ten minutes later, clutched in a scaly hand like the foot of ten-year-old hen, she held out the steaming coffee. Perfectly sweet and scalding hot, the split stalks of sugarcane brought to boil with beans pulverized in a guayacán mortar and pestle.

The domestic retrofitting crew was still not at work aboard the liftboat moored in the diesel-slicked Puerto de Tampico. A teenage infante de marina with a wispy moustache stood guard, a submachine gun slung over the shoulder of his baggy fatigues. The negotiations with the local union, backed by the Cártel del Golfo, called for a ten-to-four workday. Labor agreement or no, she was on Tampico time.

Evangelína spent twelve days seeing the sights, fending off the advances of the locals, known as Jaibas, Crabs. In the evenings that lasted for ages, she shrugged on her jogging vest, loaded with twenty pounds of steel weights, and ran. Masochistic with her runs, she needed to make the most of her time.

Later, in four-inch heels, she wandered Calle Aduana, bemused by the aspirational Old World buildings, their balconies accented with English cast iron.

After her strolls, every night for an hour or more, she talked to her mamí back in Houston, who worried about Cártel del Golfo or Los Zetas beheading her only daughter.

Between girlfriends for too great a stretch, Evangelína considered going home with the butch owner of La Gula—a waterfront restaurant that served one of the slowest, best meals she’d ever eaten. The excessive after-flan course, served with a glass of sparkling rosé, was a plate of percebes flash boiled in squid ink for as long as it took the chef to say the Lord’s Prayer. Evangelína chased the briny, elastic goose barnacles with puffs on a habano Bolívar Inmensas.

Drunk but not desperate, not yet, she entertained the older woman’s advances but, confident Tampico was tranquillo, she walked alone through the dark back to her hotel, pulling heartily on the Cuban cigar to fend off the bugs, a pack of feral dogs in tow. The tremendous teats of the yipping bitches brought her to tears. Maybe she was desperate. For the last six months, despite costly assistance from a Houston fertility specialist, Evangelína had been failing to get pregnant.

* * *

With each mile it got harder to turn back. Smith had done it, quick and simple. Absent without leave. She’d miss the dog most, was already wondering why she didn’t drag him along. Foxy-T would make for good company and decent protection—not as good or as responsive as her M4 carbine but for damn sure warmer.

This was simpler—alone—this was necessary. She had no girlfriends to talk her out of taking off. A tomboy raised by a hooligan single father, a dog person drawn to the doggy company of men—this disposition lent her advantage over the catty Army women.

Done two tours driving mostly men. Two tours more than most Americans. On her first, reassigned to Charlie Company, 321st Engineer Battalion, she made fuel runs. Al Asad to Camp Ramadi right after Op Murfreesboro. Then, K-Crossing up to Mosul. More than once during that first tour, she’d been on MSR Tampa behind the wheel of a HET hauling sand imported to the desert. Local sand was too fine for concrete. Sand everywhere and not a single grain to mix. Had to transport sand from UAE to make a blast wall for fucksake. As if sand was a form of government, and what the Iraqis had at home just would not do.

In Afghanistan, tour number two, assigned at the support battalion level moving cargo to P1 units, it was a lot of Ghazni to Bagram Airfield and back. Got so she sometimes forgot where in BFE she was, Iraq or Afghanistan, engaging urban ex-Ba’athists or rural Taliban with terrible teeth, hearing Arabic or Pashto. The Hindu Kush mountains in the distance helped get her bearings; most of Iraq was flat as Florida. On both tours she saw a good bit of checkpoint detail. As a woman she got to pat down women and kids.

She’d been reassigned and set to deploy once more; third time’s a charm. Two turns playing grab-ass with circumcised women in burqas. Driving disposable half-million-dollar trucks on those clusterfuck roads. Getting two kilometers per gallon of diesel. Having had her unfair share of wrecks. She couldn’t stomach risking her life yet again. She didn’t want to drive, the one thing she was good at.

Didn’t even realize it was the driving till she got back stateside over a year ago and a quick giddy-up to the grocery store sent her into a longwinded panic. Spent a panting lifetime picking out a prewrapped head of iceberg lettuce from the pyramid of identical heads only to leave it in a magazine rack before bolting the checkout line with what felt like a heart attack. Didn’t even like iceberg lettuce.

Diagnosed her with PTSD—big surprise, who wasn’t—prescribed her Ativan for her anxiety, Risperdal to calm her, plus an antidepressant. Mix her a prescription cocktail and send her on her hazy, libidoless way. That was their idea of maintaining troop morale. US military become a pharmacological force. Soon soldiers would be wearing Pfizer patches on their uniforms. It made sense. It’d been grass and junk in the jungle, allowed if not approved, and a generation later designer pharmaceuticals had been sanctioned for the sandbox, where the recreational drugs of choice were domestic hash in cubes like beef bouillon easing you down off all the imported caffeine and methamphetamine, cans of Red Bull more important to the Surge than mortar rounds.

Once her scripts kicked in, she’d lost a year and a half, little idea where it went. Here she was readied to redeploy, just like that. Medicated, she felt as though her life had been pirated and broadcast over the internet, without her permission, at a crappy connection rate on an ancient computer, audio muffled, video pixilated and herky-jerky. Her old life—high-definition, painfully vivid, sexually driven—was available if she wanted to pay admission. The price was her posttraumatic stress.

As she sped along, doing 75 in a 55, half wanting to get busted and turned back, the degrading voice of her crackerass daddy was replaced by the calm monotone of her shrink, Major Olmstead: You internalized the war, Smith. Attuned yourself to the tensions and stresses of grave danger. Doesn’t make you dysfunctional. Makes you a good soldier.

But Olmstead’s aim had been to ready her for a return to a drawdown war forever flaring up. In addition to his scripts, he kept giving her reading assignments, self-help books with embarrassing titles. An advocate for the power of positive thinking, he said the simple act of reading was an exercise in creative visualization.

She instead engaged in destructive visualization. Daydreaming ways to kill Travis. Then there was a scene—one she thought unrelated to her husband—she evoked over and over. She’s in the heart of the Islamic world, infidelling. When she confessed the fantasy to Major Olmstead, he suggested she imagine doing something constructive there, something helpful. She said it was helpful cussing Mu?ammad in Mecca, helped put her to sleep. Her honesty earned her another ridiculous reading assignment.

That’s when she started plopping her daily dose in the toilet, birth control and all. Sure enough, back came her bad case of the war jitters, where the sudden sound of Travis yelling her name about bounced her out of her boots. But her desire also came roaring round the bend, and she felt a bit like her daddy’s reconditioned ’70 American Motors Rebel Machine, the V8 engine with its four-barrel Motorcraft carburetor.

Smith gave a thought to visiting the old bastard of a biker—all his Warlock buddies called him Crease—wasting away with wife number five along a rural length of the I-4 corridor, bitching about spics this, wetbacks that. She hadn’t seen him since she shipped out for boot camp—she’d rather hang herself with a rusty length of concertina wire.

Instead of turning south, she could head north, toward Canada. Seek asylum. She’d have to steal across the border. All she brought was her driver’s license and military ID.

* * *

Ray Tyro opens his compact. His camouflage cream is spent. He tosses the tin into the dying fire. Barehanded, he picks out a couple of warm coals. Cups the embers and blows till they glow. They catch. For a moment, he holds a flame wavering in his palm.

The burn, its seared-skin smell, flashes him back—fighting toward the torched Opel SUV on the low-slung bridge. Green I-beams angled over the muddy Euphrates. He stuck his hand through the shattered driver-side window, like reaching into a preheated oven. Two colleagues. One on the board of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade union for private military contractors. The other a former SEAL and personal trainer to movie stars, had his own line of workout videos. Both men, dead. Strapped into the front seats, charred and smoldering, smelling like pigs forgotten on a spit. Their throats slit after they’d been burned to bubbling black. Ray forced to leave behind their bodies. An atrocity, a violation of the Ranger Creed. To be dragged through the streets. Strung up from the riveted spans. But before Ray abandoned the remains of his teammates, with AK rounds ripping all around him, he drew his curved trench knife and gouged open one of the smoldering cardboard crates. There, he found package after melting, shrink-wrapped package. Stamped-steel forks, spoons, knives. The mission: make a delivery for subcontracted food caterers from Baghdad to a recently established forward operating base west of Fallujah. They were ferrying flatware—Ray resists the memory, refusing his murderous fury. He strives to stay present. Pain helps.

He drizzles canteen water on the cinders in his burning hand. Fizzle and smoke. With his thumb, he crushes wet coals into a warm mash he smears over his face. He’s vanishing. He must be careful—anonymity permits everything.

This ritual erasure once evoked pride. Bound by brotherhood, backed by the resolve of a nation under siege. These days, his thirtieth birthday lying in ambush, his long hair thinning, his beard ever thicker, he’s a sad, aging white dude. More clown than commando. A bought-and-sold soldier. Gone from fighting a right war—ready to notch kills as payback for the obliterated 3,000—to waging a wrong one. After which, Ray let himself be poached by one and another private security company, figuring if he was going to fight for wrong reasons, he should be sorely compensated. In terms of pay grade, entering the private sector was like getting promoted to one-star general. He put the money to good use. After his in-laws, the Jalals, were killed in the Al-Rashid district of Baghdad, he started sending 10k here, 5k there, to his mother in Jersey without so much as a note. He could tell how she was doing by how long it took her to cash his checks—the longer the better. When he was recommended for the Standard surveillance job, he’d been pulling down a thousand dollars a day for a three-months-on-one-month-off schedule. From that there to this here, earning half his rate but over a full 365, selling his skills in the States to who-knew-who, and toward what end he has no idea. But he would damn sure find out.

* * *

Smith woke with a neck crick as the sun rose. Little notion who she was. Tired with travel. The stinky, humid cab of her truck parked at a gas station. Hearing the shoosh of semis outside and the morning sounds of her empty stomach, a nearly audible ache to pee.

She slapped her face and hupped to, at attention behind the wheel, her sense of self partly restored by the sting. With it, a sense of purpose: she wanted to go for a swim in the ocean, get clean. She’d grown up splashing between the Gulf of Mexico and Florida’s Space Coast, and she’d been landlocked or sandbound since she enlisted. She had a couple hundred bucks. Enough for four more tanks of gas at ten-miles-per.

She spent the last of her cash at a BP in Pennsylvania she thought to boycott because of the Deepwater Horizon mess but she had no choice. As she approached the East Coast, her jaw aching from all the gas-station jerky she’d been gnawing, she couldn’t steer clear of interstates—all roads and signs leading the way to New York City. Might not be so bad to have some hustling bustle after the isolation and military monotony of Leonard Wood.

Her truck got her over the Tappan Zee before it sputtered, died, and coasted to a stop on the shoulder. Relieved, she ditched the three-year-old Dodge Ram for whoever found it first. Her 10k signing bonus for re-upping all went toward the down payment on that pickup instead of paying down some of her debt. From the ashtray she fished out her rings, planning to pawn them. She removed any trash that might identify her. Unscrewed both license plates. Popped the truck’s VIN plate off the dash. This would only buy a little time. VINs were stamped on every major car part. Law enforcement would eventually process, trace the truck, and alert AWOL Apprehension.

She slipped out of her jeans, pulled on her last clean tank top, flashing traffic, and climbed into her dirty camos. She’d draw more attention in uniform, but she’d be safer. Earn a little sympathy, maybe a handout. She clipped the leather holster of the small, weighty pepperbox pistol at the small of her back, shouldered her field pack, and humped it through the outer boroughs. Took her a couple days to thumb and bum her way into Manhattan—she wasn’t getting on no death trap of an underground train—and got dropped off in the West Village at nightfall during a July heat wave.

The Christopher Street celebrities deadbolted themselves into air-conditioned townhouses. Out came the trannies done up like vampires, reedy black boys in bras.

Heading farther downtown to get sight of the ocean, she found her way to the southwestern-most pier, between the New York Council of the Navy League and the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry. The water’s edge lapped against the pylons. A dim Statue of Liberty in the distance. Hand up like she had a question.

The nighttime temp had risen from ninety-odd degrees at midday—humid, heavy—and Smith stank from high heaven to hell’s cellar. Couldn’t tell the smelly soup of her self from the odor wafting off the water.

She tucked her holstered pepperbox into a pocket of her field pack and draped her digicams overtop, a pixilated camouflage heap in a shadowy corner. If someone stole all her stuff, so be it. Hopping the banister, she dangled, then plunged into the black Atlantic.

Frigid, dreadful, and dark, the ocean was a withdrawal dream. She scrubbed and rinsed as best she could, gargled and spat while she treaded salty water. The current was strong and suggestive, coaxing her—away from the rearing, beaming center of Western civilization—into deep water. The draw of it more frightening than any sea creatures below the surface. She floated a moment, let the current carry her. If she did nothing, if she relaxed too long, she’d be shuttled out to sea past Lady Liberty, who, come to find, didn’t have her hand up to ask a question—she was waving. Bye-bye, Bellum.

* * *

When the maintenance and retrofits of the liftboat were finished, twelve days late, Evangelína stayed a week in one of the Lacie’s two cramped VIP staterooms, like a stowaway in a teak closet, during the slow, sickening motor out to the Veslefrikk Z platform.

At platform, the Lacie had trouble with the preload. The ROV driver was a twitchy techie from British Columbia—pimply and pálida como el hueso. Entirely incompetent, he took a week to find firm seabed before they could jack up.

During the delay, she ran weighted laps around the heliport. Eight and a half circuits about equaled a mile. After each mile, she changed direction or she became queasy. As the delay reached its seventh day, the roughnecks turned overly deferential, which made her increasingly suspicious. She memorized each of the international crew’s names, first and last, but she addressed them by their jobs: Driller, Derrickman, Shakerhand, Mudman. Helped keep them in line—in the face of her gender, despite her height—if not under control. A few she gave nicknames. They found them endearing even though insult was her intent. The slippery South African toolpusher she called Atún, Tuna. The floorman and motorman, rotund Algerian twins, hairy and happy-go-lucky, were Alegrías. When they asked what it meant, she told them joyous, and kept to herself that it was slang for testicles.

The American roustabouts were worse than the grabby Tampico locals, whistling and winking, behind her back whispering, Shorty this, Shorty that, but they dealt an entertaining poker game. The youngest and tallest among them claimed to be a bayou shark, and he did have a wide, white smile that seemed sharpened.

Evangelína refused to trust a word he said. Her dismissive disbelief made her mull—for a minute—taking the lanky boy to bed. She’d be done with the tens of thousands of dollars in bills for doctors and sperm donors. Her mestizo child would have a sound chance of growing taller than five feet. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. “Bayou roustabout,” she said, reconsidering her strong hole cards—pair of jacks—before the flop came down and checking her bet to give the false impression of weakness, “you think maybe just this once you could not deal me a hand like a chicken foot?”

He shuffled his chips like a professional, said, “I might could,” and yet he had the tells of a mark—closing up his hand a minute before he mucked it, fingering his stack well before he raised—and she only lost money one night, the last.

* * *

On her way uptown in the Day-Glo night, Smith felt cold and ashamed. Her hair dripping the length of her spine. She’d lost control. Then it hit her. She wasn’t under control; control was hers to lose.

She marched up Broadway through Times Square at midnight, every bit as gaudy and egregious as the Vegas Strip, only it sprawled up instead of along.

All in one place at one time, there were more people of every persuasion moving hurriedly about in the middle of the night than she’d ever seen in her life. She tired of juking the motley lot. Made herself a cardboard sign. Worked in a misspelling. The dumber they thought you were, the more they gave—Lady war vet could use assistence, peace!

Soon she had enough to buy herself a five-dollar hot dog tonged from gray water by a man who smelled stronger than she did and occupied a cart that, on its side, read, If you love you’re Freedom thank a veteran. When she held out her fist filled with pocket change, he shook his head. “On house. Nice one with Bin Laden.” He gave her a hamming thumbs-up. “Next, you get King Abdullah. Mindmaster nina leven. Send all drones. The better the more. Waterboard him one time for Ahmadis.”

She said, “Well alright, Amadeus,” and, “Hotdamn,” returning his Lynndie England thumbs-up.

He smiled and said, “Hot dog.”

She deposited the coins into her pack along with her sign. Bit the nasty-looking, delicious dog, ate it plain and fast and nearly choked it up when she saw the box of a building in front of her, neon Stars and Stripes on its side, was a recruitment office.

Fighting back a panic attack, she focused on her breathing exercises. Hastened east on Forty-Second, cut down around Bryant Park, then up Fifth. She strode north toward Central Park, and it took a couple of wandering, sleepless days before she got comfortable with her bivouac, or was too beat to care. Not hard for a soldier to camp out, she told herself, especially in summertime. More police than people in the park after dark. Its deepest uptown reaches seemed remote as Ocala Forest, except for the sirens wailing out of ambulances caught in 2 a.m. traffic and the admonishing burps belched from cop cars with wicked indigestion. Eventually, she found the perfect tree for her tree hammock, an out-of-the-way beech northwest of the North Woods, near the old stone fortress of the Blockhouse flying a threadbare flag.

To keep rats, raccoons, and possums from ransacking her roost, Smith peed duckwalking around the base of the tree. She climbed up and reclined beneath the canopy.

While she lay swaying, exhausted awake, she told herself she’d get her daddy to wire her some money his broke ass didn’t have because he owed her bigtime. Roughing her up and chasing her off the way he did. She’d run from him and into the arms of the Army, and here she was running from the Army. Shit, she’d rent a little studio, or a loft, whatever that was, like they did on TV. Maybe she’d even be on TV. That didn’t come to pass, she could hang herself from this here beech. Sure way to wind up on all the newsstands.

Trying to put herself to sleep, she came up with tabloid headlines that would run over the picture of her dangling body. One she liked best was No Jessica Lynch.

Staring through the dark spangled leaves of her tree, she returned to her recurring fantasy—she sneaks into Islam’s holiest place, Mecca, wearing a black Gulf-style abaya, covered head to ankle, barefoot. Mixed in among the throng, she undresses. Removes first the niqab from her face. Then the hijab from her head. Lastly, she pulls the abaya off her body. She wears nothing underneath. The mob gasps, parts, goes silent. Naked before the bearded men and covered women, here she usually starts cursing them and their prophet. This time she sees herself raising her open hands to her ears, palms forward, fingers slightly splayed, as if signaling the crowd to stop, asking them to hold their stillness.

When they do, she lowers her hands and folds them across her bare chest, right atop left, overlapping to the wrists. She’s doing what she’s seen Muslims do a million times. She unfolds her hands, bows at the waist, hands on knees slightly bent, spine perfectly parallel with the ground. Poured water would not fall from her back. She rises. Then settles to her knees, bowing again, knocking her forehead painfully against the ground, feeling as much of the ground with her nose as her brow. She holds this pose and waits for the first stone.

* * *

A lusty Ada danced the jitterbug with little Sammy Davis, Jr., in the Stardust Room of the Berle. The scene she brought to life was silent, motion picture in a time before talkies, more memory than dream—getting difficult to distinguish the difference.

Milton Xavier Wright’s next thought was the same as it’d been for thirty-five years: Ada was dead. Slung from the giant two-door coupe, Ada skipped across the tarmac. He could see himself there at the crash site, though he shouldn’t’ve been, couldn’t’ve been, she facedown in tall grass on the shoulder, burbling her last breaths into a blood puddle. He’d been afraid to move her, her neck kinked like a canvas fire hose; he’d been afraid not to move her, she drowning in her own fluids. But he hadn’t been there. Had he?

Milton roused—hungry, coming to in the deprivation chamber of the oubliette, an egg-shaped hollow below the armory cellar, discovered as part of the caverns when the basement was blasted and pick-axed. Excavated bluestone became the armory walls.

Modeled on the one under the Bastille, the oubliette once stored dynamite, then ice. The room remained a constant 50 degrees, needed no heat in winter or cooling in summer. An efficient space. In it, Milton was nearer the inner elements. Closer to the core. Here, the cavernous air, the weather underground, felt therapeutic, even if he worried about the noxiousness and flammability of the earthly emissions.

Ada forced her way through his newly occurring migraines, his occasional blackouts, or she was their cause. His reflections were becoming painfully vivid, continuous. Hallucinogenic. More like flashbacks, they overtook him. The vapors. Then they vanished—he felt like himself. But they were becoming more frequent. The visions swelled like balloons in his brain, caused him considerable confusion.

He’d spent decades gaining a measure of control over his intrusive thoughts. Here he was, in his dotage, losing control. Especially when those thoughts concerned Ada, who was domineering in life. Willful as all get-out. Why should she be any different in death?

Every morning Milton made this same transition. Primordial lungfish emerging from muddy water: sluggish, hesitant, the pull of ages drawing him back into the primitive ooze. He spent time between two elements, amphibious—the past present, the dead alive.

This carried him to his next daily realization. He was dying.

The thought shook him stark awake. He held his breath, pounded his sternum with his fist. Far before dawn; he hadn’t gotten more than four hours sleep in decades.

How strange. He must rediscover his looming mortality morning after morning.

Two years ago, he received a partial laryngectomy, endured the removal of twenty-six lymph nodes. Convalescing after the surgery, his neck stitched, glued haphazardly back together, he got his stage-IV diagnosis. Dealt the death card, ace of spades.

To discuss treatment, the oncologist brought in reinforcements.