The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age

Synopsis

I should have told. Julie’s right: I would have saved dozens of others. Jeff, Julie, Sam, the academy kids, the Huck Finn boys, everyone else was ignorant or greedy or scared or confused or overwhelmed by bullies, but I was strong enough—I could’ve pushed him away. I did push him away. I saved myself and let everyone else suffer. Me and the god of creation—we’re the villains of this story.

Brian and Jeff were best friends, growing up together in New York City in the late 1960s. Then something happened that drove a wedge between them, ending both their friendship and their childhood, something that neither ever spoke about . . . at least until their shared secret resurfaced some forty years later, forcing them to reunite and, along with Jeff’s cousin Julie, to face the consequences of their years of silence.

In The Wisdom of Perversity, Rafael Yglesias, the critically acclaimed, bestselling novelist and screenwriter and the author of A Happy Marriage, winner of the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and Fearless, the basis for the cult film by the same name, has crafted a novel that tells the stories of three childhood friends who join together as adults to acknowledge the ways in which their lives were altered by the actions of a predator, a predator who now, many years later, has been exposed by more recent victims yet is on the verge of escaping punishment--thanks to his wealth and influence.

Damaged in different ways by the events of the past but all sharing the same feelings of guilt and anger for allowing this man to go unpunished, leaving him free to abuse others, Julie, Jeff, and Brian band together to force a public outcry that will assure that he will finally face justice. With a tone that cleverly mixes humor with stark reality, The Wisdom of Perversity is a groundbreaking novel that by giving a voice to the youthful victims of sexual abuse will inspire both praise and debate.

“Many contemporary works of fiction are bold,but few are this courageous . . . Rafael Yglesias has written a frightening, evocative, and intensely compassionate novel that manages somehow to do the impossible,shedding light on one of the darkest corners of this human theater.” —Helen Schulman, author of This Beautiful Life

“The sly courage, the deft intelligence, and the fierceness of vision that we, his fans, have come to expect from a Raphael Yglesias novel all blaze brightly forth—and cast very dark shadows—in The Wisdom of Perversity.” —Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

No Thanks

November 2007

BY NIGHTFALL ON Thanksgiving, Brian Moran was alone.

He had disposed of family obligations. At the Gotham Bar and Grill restaurant, he had treated his father to a midafternoon feast of squab and foie gras terrine, heirloom turkey with duck confit, sour-cherry stuffing, and potato puree cranberry compote. Dad had made fun of him for ordering butternut squash soup, no cream, as a starter and Greenmarket vegetables for his main course. When he passed on dessert, the old man pretended not to understand why spiced pumpkin cheesecake didn’t qualify as vegan.

While walking home, he had called his late mother’s sister in Santa Monica and promised Aunt Helen that he would see her when next he was summoned to LA, explaining for the one-millionth time that although he worked in the movie business he was hardly ever on the Left Coast.

Once safely alone in his apartment, following the advice of his shrink, he supplemented his daily dose of libido suppressor with a soupçon of Xanax, half a milligram, to help him endure this night of national gratitude. Once the sun set on a family holiday, like a vampire Brian yearned to satisfy his appetite.

Logistically it was hard to be bad on Thanksgiving. Depraved young women had their own dull families to attend to. Having the urge at all was discouraging. Still, he had reason to congratulate himself. He had been a good boy for almost a year. Six months since he had even felt tempted. The pills had worked. Until tonight. Would they work again tomorrow? Would they avail throughout the holiday season? Something about Christmas decorations inspired delinquency.

What he craved was excitement. Instead he turned on the sedative of his fellow Americans—television.

First CNN. Unfortunately there were no genuine tragedies to take his mind off his own slow-moving pathos. No ex–football star cutting his wife’s throat. No twin towers pancaking. No ostracized teenager assassinating his entire class.

Then MSNBC. The experts were very excited the election was only a year away. But they conceded there was little suspense about the primaries: it would be politically correct Hillary versus someone boring like Romney. Couldn’t even hope for Edwards against McCain—Eros versus Thanatos. He despaired of the republic. Despite the disastrous Bush years, the Democrats would find a way to lose in ’08.

How about a movie? He tuned to HBO.

That was when his luck truly ran out.

They had scheduled a film directed by Jeff Mark, made a mere fifteen years ago but already a holiday classic: Home for Chanukah. He had to give the schmuck credit: Jeffrey had made a Jewish holiday as American as apple pie.

He shut off the boob tube and moved to his computer to check on e-mails. He was tempted to rely on the Internet for a secondhand version of what he pined for. Sadly, his therapist had declared porno also to be taboo, a gateway to misbehaving in the flesh.

He reread the opening chapters of his favorite novel, Great Expectations. Dickens was always a comfort, a man who understood childhood was the ideal soft metal for the permanent engravings of evil.

Drowsy from the pills, he went early to bed. Prone in the dark, the miserable facts were clear: My friendships are a sham, my only pleasure forbidden, my salvation to never, ever be myself. Brian Moran did not give thanks. He decided that tomorrow he would stop taking his medication.

Five Seconds of Grace

March 1966

BRIAN MORAN USED to be a shiny-cheeked boy of enthusiasms, imbued with inexhaustible energy to pursue them and a generous impulse to share their delights with his nearest and dearest. In turn, he was profoundly grateful to anyone who provided a new excitement.

In 1966, Brian was especially thankful for an invitation from his best friend, Jeffrey Mark. Jeff had asked Brian to accompany him on a visit to his cousin Richard Klein, who worked for NBC in Rockefeller Center. The forty-two-year-old Klein was a vice president of marketing, able to promise the two boys a private tour of the television and radio studios.

Klein met them in the lobby, introduced them to Joe the security guard, and rode with them up to the eigth floor. There a reception area was shielded by a glass wall whose transparency was interrupted by three huge letters—NBC—the N bright yellow, the B sky blue, the C bloodred. Behind it was a receptionist wearing a single earphone and talking into a tiny mike suspended in front of her lips—had this been the extent of the tour Brian would have returned home deeply impressed. Klein then led them down a staircase, through double metal doors emblazoned with a warning—NBC PERSONNEL ONLY—into a bare concrete hallway. Klein ignored Jeff’s repeated honks, “Where we going?” while they passed through a series of double doors below confounding signs—NO ACCESS; TALENT ONLY—finally crashing through a single door with an unilluminated red lightbulb suspended above the warning: DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHT IS ON. Klein held the forbidden door open for them to pass through. When they did, they discovered they were backstage in a television studio, facing a jumble of props. A swami’s headdress, used in one of Johnny Carson’s recurrent comedic pieces, immediately caught Brian’s eye. “It’s The Tonight Show,” he said, thrilled.

“Enjoy. I’ll be back soon,” said Klein, stepping back, letting go of the soundproofed door. It whooshed shut.

“This way, boys,” someone called. They turned, amazed to see the rainbow-colored curtain of The Tonight Show being parted for them by a teenager with tight blond curls. He was wearing the uniform of an NBC page: red blazer with gold buttons, starched white shirt, navy blue tie, and neatly pressed gray trousers.

“Hi, Brian,” said Sam the page as he passed through, lifting Brian’s eyes into a grin of brilliant teeth. He had met this smiling teenager only once before, six days ago last Sunday, at the same time he had been introduced to Richard Klein. Brian had climbed the two flights from his apartment to Jeff’s earlier that morning, his usual routine on a weekend. They were three hours into a marathon game of Monopoly when the NBC executive and the page poked their heads into Jeff’s bedroom to say hello. Jeff presented Richard as “my famous cousin, the vice president of NBC.”

“Famous,” Klein repeated and chuckled. “I’m a vice president, not the.” He went on to introduce Sam as “my Little Brother.”

After they left, Jeff had explained, “Sam’s a Jewish orphan. Cousin Richard is his Big Brother. You know, like in those dumb public-service ads. But that’s for Catholic boys. This is the same, only it’s for Jewish kids who don’t have fathers.” Brian had asked what had happened to Sam’s father. Jeff shrugged. Then he said, “For a Jew, Sam’s very blond.” Brian knew immediately Jeff had borrowed that observation from his mother, Harriet. Whenever Jeff quoted her, he did an unconscious imitation of her voice, his nasal whine deepening to produce the rasp of her sarcasm. Harriet’s singling out Sam’s blondness for comment meant there was something about it worth mocking or criticizing, since she talked about others solely to belittle or excoriate. At the time, Brian had enjoyed puzzling over what was wrong with Sam’s blondness. He liked mysteries because they promised solutions. The worst frustration of being a child—and sometimes it seemed to him childhood consisted entirely of frustration—was the profound mystery of grownup behavior.

But no mystery could distract from the awe he felt as he entered the studio stage and took the very steps that Johnny Carson walked five nights a week. Brian’s entrance, of course, came unheralded. He was not greeted by the bellowing welcome of Ed McMahon, announcer and commercial pitchman, or the brassy flourishes of Skitch Henderson conducting The Tonight Show band, or cheered by a revved-up audience of out-of-towners. Although no one was there to see him, Brian looked down shyly, partly overcome by the expanse of empty seats pitched at him and partly to make sure that it was really his Hush Puppies striding onto hallowed ground. While staring at the stage floor, he noticed four small pieces of yellow tape laid down at unrelated angles. He knew from his father they must be Johnny’s “marks” indicating where he should stand while delivering his opening monologue. Before he gave up acting full-time to take a teaching job at a specialty public high school for the performing arts, Brian’s father, Danny Moran, had a lucrative one year stint as a philandering husband on the soap opera General Hospital. As a result, he never tired of explaining to his curious son how things were done on television.

“Wow,” Jeff said as he arrived beside Brian. “Look.” He pointed to the right.

Brian followed his friend’s finger to a banal arrangement of furniture Brian thought of as a fabled kingdom. In true scale and color he saw what he had previously known only as pixels: Johnny’s desk, an upholstered club chair for Johnny’s guest, and a couch onto which the interviewees shifted after Johnny dismissed them.

“This is boss.” Jeff ambled over to the green-carpeted area of the set. He climbed up a step that raised it a level above the surrounding stage floor. He scaled this height casually, as if he belonged. But Jeff doesn’t belong, Brian thought. No eight-year-old boy has the right to mount Johnny’s set.

Nevertheless Jeff invaded the sacred place with his awkward walk, fearlessly rambling about Johnny’s desk, Johnny’s swivel chair, and four potted plants arranged in front of a backdrop of a painted-on Manhattan skyline.

“Hey!” Sam shouted, waving at Jeff to get off.

“This is so boss.” Jeff settled into the upholstered guest chair, nicknamed “the hot seat” by a giggling actress Brian and Jeff had seen on one of the thrilling nonschool nights they had been allowed to stay up well past Johnny’s monologue.

Panicked now, Sam let go of the rainbow curtain and skimmed on the polished sea in his loafers to Johnny’s island, stopping short of making landfall himself. “Jesus! Get up. Don’t sit there.”

“Why not?” Jeff complained in his most nasal, mewling infant tone.

“You’re not allowed. Get up!”

Jeff honked at Brian. “Hey, Bri. Come over here. Sit in Johnny’s chair. You be Johnny. I’ll be the guest.”

“No,” Sam shouted. He pirouetted at Brian, red blazer twirling like an ice skater’s skirt and ordered, “Stay there!”

Brian obeyed.

“Don’t be a jerk,” Jeff said to Sam. “No one’s here.”

Sam became a siren of panic: “Get up! Now! Right now!”

“Why?” Jeff complained. “You haven’t given me a reason.” It was Jeff’s particular gift, which would serve him well throughout his life, to be able to challenge the limits people wanted to impose, and seemed particularly eager to impose on him, without provoking rancor. He had called Sam a jerk, ignored his warning, disobeyed his order, and now demanded an explanation, which Brian thought ought to have earned him a blow on the head or at least forcible ejection from the hot seat, both of which broad-shouldered Sam could easily accomplish. Instead the page’s knees buckled, palms flush in prayer. He pleaded, “Please . . . before somebody sees. Please get up.”

“Don’t be such a scaredy-cat,” Jeff said, dismissing him with the back of his hand. “Cousin Richard said we were allowed.”

As far as Brian knew, Klein had said nothing about what they were permitted to do. Sam, however, was desperate to believe: “Dick really said you could sit on the set?”

Jeff nodded confidently, a quiet assertion that convinced Brian his best friend must be lying: if he really had permission he would have shouted it.

Sam buttoned his blazer, straightened his tie. “Okay,” he conceded. “But if somebody comes in, you’d better get up. Dick’s not the president of NBC.”

“Come on, Bri!” Jeff called. “Get in Johnny’s chair and interview me.”

Brian nevertheless checked with Sam for permission. The page nodded in resignation. “I’ll watch the door. Just don’t touch anything.” He punched the curtain to make an opening and disappeared behind its quivering colors.

“Hurry up!” Jeff ordered. “You pretend to be Carson. I’ll pretend I’m Don Rickles. ‘Get over here, you hockey puck! What am I, chopped liver?’ ” Jeff paused in his imitation of the rude comic to gag with laughter and self-applause. Rickles’s insults were delightful to Jeff and Brian because they sounded obscene even when they weren’t. Was “puck” really “fuck”? “Hockey puck” really “stupid fuck”? They couldn’t be sure. Why would Carson tolerate, even in jest, being called a stupid fuck? Yet it required no imaginative leap to assume obscenities from the hideous Rickles. He was a gargoyle: nearly bald bullet head, squashed peasant nose, tiny vicious eyes of a foraging rodent. Certainly that was the thrill of Rickles as a guest. While spitting invectives, he swiveled his no-neck fleshy head from Johnny to Ed, occasionally including the audience as his target, who seemed to adore him anyway. Most tantalizing of all to the boys, Rickles perpetually flirted with the ultimate taboo—saying a swear word on television.

“Look at this,” Jeff said, back in character as Rickles, mocking Brian for standing indecisively beside Johnny’s chair. “Look at the goy trying to sit. What’s the matter? Scared the Jew left germs? What a hockey puck!” Jeff doubled over, choked with laughter of self-appreciation.

Accepting Jeff’s casting, Brian sat in Johnny’s chair, imitated the master’s long-suffering smile, and delivered a Carson put-down: “It’s always a joy, a real thrill, when they let you out for the week, Don. What are Sunnydale’s hours these days?”

Jeff stopped laughing. “That’s wrong,” he scolded. “That’s not what Johnny would say.”

Normally Brian would have been stung by this criticism, but he was overcome by the bliss of floating on Johnny’s chair. Although he had released his full weight on it, Brian hadn’t sunk at all. He was borne aloft, a king on a throne. And there was more treasure for Brian to discover while seated behind Johnny’s desk: he spied a shelf, built where normally there would be a drawer, shielded from the prying eyes of the camera and studio audience.

Meanwhile Jeff was correcting him. “Right? How do they know Sunnydale is a nuthouse unless you say it? You have to say ‘What are the funny farm’s hours these days?’ ”

Brian pointed at Johnny’s desk, widening his eyes, an urgent pantomime of alarm. Here was the proof eight-year-old boys shouldn’t be allowed on Johnny’s set: he had uncovered a whopping grown-up secret, the hiding place of a star.

“What?” Jeff said. He didn’t rise from the hot seat and come around to see for himself. “What are you pointing to?”

“Hurry up and look,” Brian whispered.

“What is it!” Jeff jumped up and stepped away from the desk, distancing himself from whatever grisly object Brian had found.

Brian insisted: “Just look.”

Jeff asked plaintively, “Is it a spider?” He had a squealing fear of spiders, odd for a New York City boy. Although cockroaches were plentiful, spiders were almost unknown.

“No!” Brian shouted. “Look!”

“Jesus, lower your voice,” Jeff complained. He lurched forward, then hesitated by the corner of Johnny’s desk. “You sure it’s not a spider?”

“It’s a secret shelf,” Brian resorted to a stage whisper. “Look.” Brian pushed his chair away to make room.

Jeff kneeled, peering into the hiding place. Brian leaned in. Together they inspected its shadows. They discovered two precious items: a coffee mug and a glass ashtray. Jeff reached into the darkness—“No,” Brian objected—and drew a royal blue cup into the light. “Put it back,” Brian pleaded.

Jeff dipped his nose into its cylinder and sniffed.

“Put it back,” Brian repeated.

“Here,” Jeff thrust it at him. “Smells funny.” Brian reluctantly accepted the mug. Jeff took out the ashtray. “He smokes?” he asked the empty seats. “I’ve never seen him smoke.” He bumped Brian’s shoulder. “You ever see him smoke?”

Holding Johnny’s mug had entranced Brian. He understood this was trespass, sitting in Johnny’s chair, fingers curled about Johnny’s cup, and yet he felt at home. Briefly the child Brian had an hors d’oeuvre of the paradox that would become the main course of his adult life: how could he feel at once so comfortable and so out of place?

“I’ve never seen him smoke,” Jeff declared. He returned to the hot seat, cradled the heavy glass ashtray between his legs, and stared pensively at a prism of colors dancing across its surface. “He can’t use this. We’d see the smoke.” He sat up, inspired. “What’s that smell of ?” Jeff nodded at Johnny’s mug.

Brian put the mug down. He gripped the desk’s edge, braced as if the odor might blast him, then bent over the cup’s empty well. He paused to glance at Jeff and wink mischievously (as Johnny would, to involve his audience) before taking an elaborate whiff. “Milk?” Brian joked.

“Cut it out! Is it booze?”

Brian didn’t think he had ever heard Jeff, or anyone in real life, say “booze.” It was the kind of word Jimmy Olsen might say on Superman, or a gangster on The Untouchables. Jeff was right, though—must be booze. Otherwise, why hide the cup? Brian cleared the air several times with his hands and gradually lowered his nostrils over the mug. Brian inhaled noisily, nodded in solemn deliberation, and delivered another punch line: “Yoo-hoo?”

“Cut it out,” Jeff said. “Smell it.” Jeff folded over until his head rested on his knees. “This is serious! We have to figure it out!”

Perhaps this was why they had become best friends: no matter how shallow, unreflective, and thoughtless Jeff could be about the great issues (for example, whether Roger Maris had broken Ruth’s single-season home-run record fair and square), Jeff had an insistent desire to unscrew the back panel of the adult world and inspect its works. They had that in common: an impatient, humorless need to know. Jeff was right to scold him. Brian knew he should take this question seriously. Brian dipped his nose below the mug’s lip, shutting his eyes to concentrate.

He smelled . . . soap.

“Brian,” Jeff called.

To maintain peak concentration, he kept his eyes shut. “It doesn’t smell of any booze. It smells like they washed it.”

“Brian,” Jeff said urgently.

“Brian!” came a different voice, an authoritative bass belonging to Richard Klein, NBC vice president. “Put Johnny’s mug down!”

Brian’s heart exploded. That was the sensation: a terrible thump in his chest, followed by a ghastly feeling that all of his blood was leaking into his Hush Puppies. He shoved himself clear of the desk. Johnny’s mug spun from the force of his release, its base emitting ominous notes.

Jeff jumped out of the hot seat and with flailing arms leapt off the carpeted island onto the black sea, a terrified passenger abandoning ship. In a flash, Jeff managed to appear to have had nothing to do with the violation of Johnny’s set, while Brian was caught red-handed in the sacred chair, Johnny’s royal blue mug spinning on the desk.

“Brian, get the fuck out of Johnny’s chair!” Richard Klein bellowed, red-faced.

Other than his important job title, Brian knew little about Klein. When Klein and Sam had popped into Jeff’s room last Sunday to say hello, he had impressed Brian, in dress and speech, as quite different from Jeff’s slovenly dad or Brian’s garrulous father. Klein wore a gray pin-striped suit enlivened by a maroon tie and he smelled of Old Spice, an aftershave familiar to Brian because his father doused himself with it on very special occasions, like when he took Mom out for her birthday. It usually tickled his nose. At one point Klein had leaned close to Brian to peer at the Monopoly board. One whiff of him had provoked Brian into a series of violent ah-choos. “You’re allergic to adults,” Klein had joked, patting Brian’s helmet of very straight black hair. Richard Klein had also impressed him with the self-confident way he smiled indulgently at the awed questions Brian had asked about his glamorous job. He had also made clever fun of Harriet’s hypochondria. Jeff’s mother spent most of her waking hours in bed with a heating pad that she shifted restlessly, always with a groan and a sigh, the location of her complaint moving from lumbar to forehead to kneecap, a general invalidism that prevented her from cleaning, shopping, or cooking. “Have to get back to your mother’s hospital bed,” he had kidded as he left. He seemed a master of self-control, nothing like the easily upset adults of Brian’s experience. So this new side of Klein, red-faced, spewing obscenities, made it clear to Brian that he was in big, big trouble.

Brian’s essential shyness, his reflexive reluctance to announce his desires, to demand his due, was trumped by a keen sense of what is just and what is unjust, in particular when someone attempted to apply justice to him. He got to his feet and declared the truth, “It was Jeff’s idea!” Unfortunately for his righteous cause, the energy of his rising out of Johnny’s magic chair caused it to recoil rapidly and whack hard into the base of a tall potted fern.

The large planter wobbled violently. They all watched as the wobbling worsened, tipping more and more precariously, until it seemed inevitable that a collapse onto the painted Manhattan skyline would result. Brian glanced at Klein and Sam. Both were paralyzed with horror. Brian saw the future with oracular clarity: a toppled fern destroying the set would transform embarrassment into disaster.

He leapt at the potted plant without regard to his body’s preservation. His chin smacked painfully into the brick-colored pot, but he remained fixed on his goal, flinging his arms around the moist planter. Its circumference was too great for him to encompass and too heavy for him to prevent from tipping over—except by pulling it onto himself. The ceramic planter fell against his neck and shoulder; wet soil spilled down the collar of his one and only white dress shirt, especially ironed by his mother for today’s grand occasion.

“Help,” he groaned, squeezed by the planter’s weight. He had forestalled the destruction of the set, but the fern was still in jeopardy and so was Brian. The pot continued to slide farther onto him, dirt spilling at a faster rate.

Sam righted the planter. Brian rolled onto his back and sighed. Only then did he feel the ooze of slimy soil settling into the canal of his spine, sliding toward an embarrassing crack in his bedrock.

“Get up!” Klein yanked him to his feet. “Jesus Christ, look what you did!”

Brian reached around with his left hand, halting the descent of the damp soil at the small of his back, aware his clean shirt must be ruined. “I know,” a miserable Brian conceded.

Klein pointed at the green carpet. “You stained Johnny’s rug.”

Now Brian saw his saturated shirt had left a brown smudge. Horrified, he dropped to his knees, trying to soak up the moist residue with the palms of his hands, mumbling, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”

“Cut that out. You’re making it worse.” Klein tugged him off the set onto the bare stage. He let go to fish out a silver money clip from his pocket, peel off a twenty-dollar bill—a wonderfully large sum to Brian—and handed it to Sam. “Go to building services. Ask for Fred. Give him this to clean it up. Pronto. Before Props sees it.” He leaned close to Sam. “Don’t say the boys were in here. Got it? Say you knocked it over. I’ll protect you. Understood?”

Sam nodded solemnly.

Klein said, “Move it,” to Jeff and retook Brian’s hand to pull him clear of the scene. Fast. The rainbow curtain and the shadows of backstage went by in a blur of shame. They burst through the metal door into the fluorescent hallway, decorated by warnings that now seemed to have been well thought out. A mortified Brian concurred wholeheartedly with the wisdom of the signs—AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY; NBC EMPLOYEES ONLY—and especially with that vaguest yet most profound distinction of all—TALENT ONLY. Brian agreed he should have been kept out.

Richard turned a corner into what looked to Brian like a submarine: a narrow, windowless gunmetal hall lined with doors, each fitted with a glass porthole. He hopped on tippy toe to peek into them as they rushed past the rooms. He was able to see only a blur of sleek electronic equipment.

“Hey, Dick,” a fat man in a T-shirt called from the open door of a room they whooshed by. “Who you got with you? New VPs of programming?” His laughter followed them around a corner.

Jeff stopped dead in his tracks.

Klein poked him in the back. “Keep moving.”

“What’s that?” Jeff barked.

Brian looked at what his best friend had spotted. Behind a plate-glass wall there was a nearly empty white room: no chairs or desk, only a single machine rising from the floor, like Manhattan bedrock erupting through the building.

“That’s Grace,” Richard said. He put the flat of his right palm on Jeff’s skull and urged him forward. “Keep moving.”

Jeff allowed his head to flop forward, but the rest of his body did not move. His head snapped back. “What’s Grace?”

“Keep moving and I’ll tell you.” Klein pushed Jeff’s skull again.

Jeff planted his feet. “What’s it do?”

Brian moved beside Jeff to study this marvel. Tiny yellow, red, and white lights flashed throughout the breadth of the mechanism; switches flipped up and down, recording tape snaked through heads—a miniature world of ceaseless activity.

“Grace is on all the time. She checks every word spoken live over the air. Now move it.” With a stiffened index finger he poked Jeff hard in the back.

Jeff stumbled forward two steps, then dug in his heels. “Checks for what?”

“I’ll tell you later.” Klein poked him again, even harder. “Move it.”

Jeff did a one eighty, asking as he turned, “Checks what?” He braked by splaying his feet, wedging them against the wall as he faced Klein.

“To catch curse words,” Klein snapped. “All words go through Grace. There’s a five-second delay between what someone says in the studios and its going out over the air. Grace can recognize in five seconds whether someone has said a bad word. If they have, she covers it with a noise. We call it a ‘bleep.’ ”

“Wow,” Brian whispered, gazing at the marvel with loving admiration.

“What curse words?” Jeff persisted.

Richard snapped, “Don’t be a wisenheimer, Jeff. Keep moving.”

“Which ones? All the bad words?”

“Okay, you want to hear me say bad words. Fine. Move your ass, and when I get to my office I’ll tell you all the naughty words that Grace knows.”

Jeff grinned, turned on his heels smartly, and they were on the move again. Brian was sorry to leave Grace and sorrier still, thinking of the moist soil welled in the small of his back, that he couldn’t bleep his own mistakes.

Klein led them down a flight of metal stairs, feet clattering, onto a featureless landing beneath painted red letters: 8TH FLOOR. There they passed into yet another universe, this a hushed world of gray carpet and tall oak doors, all shut. Richard steered for one that was discreetly labeled MEN in raised black letters. He pushed it open, propelled Brian ahead of him into a bathroom designed for one, and called back to Jeff, “Wait right here. Don’t move. Got that?” Klein followed Brian into the men’s room and shut the door. Jeff heard it lock.

Standing alone in the hallway it made Jeff very nervous how long Brian and Richard were inside the men’s room. He hopped from one foot to the other to calm himself, a lucky choice since a secretary who passed didn’t ask why he was waiting outside the bathroom. “Someone in there?” she announced her assumption as she walked by. He put his thumb into his mouth to comfort himself.

And for Brian, his time in the men’s room with Richard Klein lasted far longer than the quarter hour that actually elapsed. No matter how many years passed, those minutes remained ineluctable to Brian’s heart and mind. No matter how often he tried, with this drug or that therapy, with whatever philosophy of understanding, spiritual or vulgar, for Brian their time together lasted forever.

At first, standing in the cramped space between sink and toilet, comforted by the familiar cloud of Old Spice emanating from the adult male, the world he knew remained. He was a boy, a messy, embarrassed boy, and Klein was a powerful, protective grown-up. The task of cleaning himself was all that mattered, and Klein’s help was welcome.

Klein gathered the back of Brian’s shirt around the lump of muddy soil to prevent it from spilling. He told Brian to take it off. Eager to rectify all his mistakes, Brian hurried, fumbling with the buttons, then sliding his arms free.

Klein dumped the soil into the toilet. He turned on the cold water, ran it over the muddy stain, finally lifting the shirt up to the mirror’s lights for examination. He sighed. “You need a new shirt.”

Brian thought of his mother’s profound distress at anything that had been spoiled, especially something expensive. Klein caressed the boy’s worried cheek. “I’ll buy you a new one.” He turned B