Two reflex smells I cherish: First, the rankness of old neighborhood bars where the wet cardboard mingles with griddle grease and the sourness of old beer comes in waves. Today, I held one of those waves and found that years can’t erode things that are born eroded. Spatial perspectives appeared in the perpetual late afternoon: The bar was Dixie’s Tavern and it was December 12, the twentieth anniversary of my brother’s death. I bought him a shot of Jameson (our father’s brand, not his—he died before he was old enough to take a legal drink) and after feeding some quarters into an old school Rockola, I downed a shot myself and chased it with a small flat Bud from the tap. It was cold in Lake Britten, but not cold enough to snow. No matter—I was snug and warm inside my cocoon, churning with tunes that touched various soft spots in a pantheon of memories. I don’t have to tell you what the songs were—you already know. When Seger screamed the next verse in ‘Fire Lake’, it was from inside, between the ribs, within the viscera, waiting beneath the rage. My brother let his scream be heard a single time before dying, and he died on purpose. The incarnation of people is temporary, and I have outgrown who I was at thirteen, the year Rory died. Fundamentals are unchanging, but here, inside toasty, reeking Dixie’s, just outside Lake Britten, I was a visitor, not a fundamental.

The second smell I treasure is the one hovering around the hardwood pews of Divine Grace Church. In early days, when I was still too young to have my first glimpse over the edge of the abyss, I used to sit in sacred silence and sniff the faint residue of frankincense; then, as today, it made me think of brass and ginger. It came to represent finality; it hinted at truth. After my brother died, my mother did not again attend mass—the shame of what her son had done was so overwhelming that even words like ‘organic brain damage’ were meaningless. The lens she’d aimed toward heaven was fogged by the great breath that formed the moment Rory stopped breathing at the age of seventeen. My father, who had been a holiday Catholic (Easter and Christmas) morphed from an apathetic agnostic into an angry atheist. Not me; I was never entirely sold on the celestial angle but I loved the earthly manifestation, and when weather permitted, I rode my Schwinn to Divine Grace and otherwise trudged through snowdrifts. I was after connotation, and I sat in the rear and tried to find it. But Father Kilcoyne had no applicable words of comfort for a boy whose brother was in Hell. When I took the Host, my fists were clenched in the pose of prayer and when I looked heavenward, I now saw a more sinister abyss: God. To engineer Hell—to first create the environment and then to maintain those mechanics for eternity—makes God worse than the most diabolical commandant of Auschwitz.

Since then I have tinkered with God’s role just as they have tinkered with Divine Grace—moved the shiny pews from a north-south orientation to east-west and rebuilt the altar. Somehow, the smell remains the same. Once in a while, I’ll get a whiff of the perfume my mother used to wear, and it drives me to my knees. Your own dead mother’s scent returned alive may not strike you as a religious experience, but to me, it does.


Rory and I were homeschooled. Ask my parents why and they’d have a ready answer: They were unimpressed with the school system’s strained resources and one-size-fits-all approach. Mom wanted lifelong explorers, children to whom curiosity was as natural as breathing and who were not beholden to grades or degrees or harsh measures of progress. Dad thought that the curriculum of the public school system was ideological cancer. This is what they claimed, at least, but over the years I have learned that conclusions are based on identifiable beliefs, but that those beliefs are usually rooted in something far more ominous than rational analysis. I suspect we were homeschooled because of Rory, who actually attended Lake Britten Elementary until the third or fourth grade, the age when bullying begins to come into its own. Rory had a peculiar look and an odd gait. His speech was stunted and if anybody would be a target for teasing, it was him. I’m sure I would have sailed through public school, but I wouldn’t change a thing about my education: I did my work from bed, on the couch or in the forest that butted against our property, learning what I needed to learn organically. My mom fed us math and reading and taught us to play Chopin on the piano. My father provided the income via his HVAC company and, with pathological punctuality, took charge of our man training. From him we learned marksmanship, the bushcraft of hunting, how quarry moves through the forest—basic survival skills if things ever went south on a global scale. He even taught us to shoot the Taurus 9mm that my mother did not know he had until Rory put it inside his mouth.


 I did my shot at the hour of Rory’s death, 12:35 p.m., and left his at the corner of my table while I went to fetch another. Dixie’s was set up with a horseshoe bar in the center, a row of small battered black tables on my side and a couple of pool tables on the other. The friendly bartender was voluptuous all the way down, like Venus of Willendorf: She’d been chatting through menthol smoke to two homely, heavy women at the bar and seemed grateful for the distraction. She was incurious, though; she didn’t ask why I’d bought a phantom shot and now wanted another one, and I did not offer up reasons. She called me darlin’, and behind her, the liquor shelves were hung on ancient bathroom tiles—old-people liquor like Jameson and Vat 69 peppered with young-people fad shit like Rebel Yell. I glanced around as she poured. My fellow day-drinkers included a set of unconfederated retirees at the curve of the horseshoe monitoring the wide screen for Lotto winners, a frog of a man hunched over a ‘Win Visa Cards Here’ monitor in a t-shirt showing a silhouette of a stripper on a pole and reading ‘Support Local Talent’. A drunk dude in paint-spattered work clothes would occasionally belt out the chorus of a song I’d played, especially Springsteen, especially ‘Tougher Than the Rest’ which in his way, he probably was. From time to time, he hit on the homely girls, draping his arm around their puffy shoulders and buying them cans of Truly; they seemed delighted. Two guys in union jackets were playing pool, one with bleached Joe Walsh hair, the other shaved bald. At the other table, randomly racking balls and talking into a cell phone, was a reasonably well-dressed man in cowboy boots. If I had to guess, he was an attorney, and if I had to guess further, he handled mostly disability cases. As a group, they were all pretty much standard issue for a place like Dixie’s, including—in a worn motorcycle leather and a Cabela’s camo cap—myself.


Except for one of us. At end of the horseshoe, opposite where I stood to get my drink, was a graceful-looking woman, late-twenties, short hair in russet tones, wearing an autumn sweater. I tend to catch details, and after I got my second drink, I know she was watching me as I put another round of quarters into the Rockola. As soon as I was back at my table, she went and put in quarters of her own. Since I assumed she was waiting for someone, I also assumed that she’d grown impatient with my set list.


I might have pursued it, but probably not. I was nothing special, on that day in particular, and trawling for orgasms in a dirty bar may be a low-point in human impulses—not quite like eating from a dumpster, but close. And completely unnecessary: On any given commute to work on a busy highway, how many strangers do you pass with whom, under the right set of circumstances, you could fall in love? Spend years with? At least a few every day—that’s my bet.

Anyway, today was reserved for Rory and our earthly time together. As I’ve said, these early years were idyllic in their peculiar way, and I carry them like a bouquet, each bloom prettier than the last. Am I polishing them up, gilding them, recalling them as better than they were? No doubt—and you no doubt do the same with your pieces, your places. They’re refuge from the truth storm, and that’s a gift from our brains for which we should be grateful. Flowers fade but they can’t really wither because memories are replaced with memories of memories. I did the second shot and my thoughts returned to the forests around our house in Lake Britten, a ribbon of green behind a pearly backdrop of clouds. I think of Rory and me putting 30.06 holes in some spent oil filters we’d found in the garage: Around us, the trees kicked out oxygen while we made carbon dioxide, symbiosis amid the serenity and solitude. Miles from people but hardly alone; we had our place out here, as much as the trees did, and without explicit intent, we were cooperating. I did not feel isolation; I felt complete and timeless immersion. When the wind skewed hard across the lake, it was cold breath speaking in new voices with impossibly potent nuances. It had been whispering for years: I learned from my father that the key to hunting is to recognize tiny anomalies in the scrim, a flash in the forest thicket that doesn’t fit—an antler amid the foliage or a patch of fur.


Yet my father, who at the age of seventeen had bagged the biggest buck ever shot in Roscommon County, missed the critical anomaly in my brother’s landscape, and if I saw it—and am more culpable for having done so—I misdiagnosed it. I remember Rory alongside me, sitting with his head cocked as if he was trying to hear someone out of range, unable to translate it the way I could. He was an excellent shot, but he never became a good hunter. And I did. That’s because I learned to think like a deer, and he could not. I cannot say if he thought like a predator—all his thoughts were left in a blue-red splatter inside a closet. But I don’t think so. As near as I can figure it out, he thought in systems and his mind worked like a machine. Not like a microchip inside a mainframe, but like a dirty, greasy engine block. He appreciated being outdoors, but he did not love nature the way I do. In the end, every land was foreign to him, and even in the wild, by the meadows and brooks and shadowy ravines, I felt the hysterics of helplessness like a fog around him; I saw him as warlike without the ability to wage war—like a character from an old Hitchcock film, shallow on the surface and hiding so much. I never felt alone in the forest, even when I was alone, and I suppose that’s all Rory felt—here, there and finally, everywhere.


Four months after the tragedy, my father bought a Sun Dog franchise in Phoenix and we moved to Arizona, where nobody knew us, and where, in a sense, we didn’t know ourselves—at least, we never mentioned Rory again. For me, lesser horrors shored up the big one; for starters, the realization that my parents actively hated each other. There was no blaming each other, although there could have been, but neither was there any real attempt to rebuild a semblance of family; we’d left town without a Marshall Plan. Have you ever seen a three-legged dog that has managed to overcome the loss and lopes along so well you barely notice? We were not that dog. Our remaining legs never again worked in concert. Mom made a half-hearted attempt to continue my homeschooling, but by then, I had memorized the mechanics of self-education and took myself over. It had been an iterative cycle anyway, and I had seen what worked and what didn’t. As I viewed it, I was an army without a commanding officer, marching forward, surviving battles, famines and long stretches of boredom, but never stopping, not even to rest for a couple hours beneath a sun that had the odd ability to cast shadows without light.


Dad taught me to replace compressors in suburban air conditions and to install commercial heating systems and I picked up a used Stratocaster from Mo Money Pawn on Indian School Road and spent what would have been my high school years working days and playing in garage bands at night, finding moderate levels of local success. Even so, Rory’s final act—conspicuously unmentioned at our dinner table—was an omnipresent albatross around everyone’s neck, and in my mother, it evolved into metastatic breast cancer. After monumental tragedies, I’m told, this kind of occurrence is fairly common—one thing becomes another thing. Once she’d been betrayed by her faith—bedrock and unshakable since childhood—her body followed. Something similar happened to me, and I carry this burden not like the dog that has lost a leg, but like a dog that has grown an extra one, or at least, has seen the original limb mutated into something hideous. My father dealt with it as his brand of father might, and after my mother died and our unholy Trinity was dissolved, he moved to a cabin in the Chiricahua Mountains with our Irish Setter, where he lives today.


And I came back to Lake Britten.


I came back because for good or ill, I was invested in the stones and pavement of my youth: This is the pylon my childhood pal John Duffy hit with his Grand Cherokee on his drunken graduation night; this is the Shell station behind which, amid vines and sumac and rusty barrels, a neighborhood girl solemnly allowed me to hold teacup breasts; this is the room where my brother placed the barrel of a Taurus PT92 between his teeth and blew his head away. I came back because the high desert air was sterile; I had grown into myself amid wet green leaves and severe blue lakes and that’s the palette I needed. I came back because my essential smells were here. For some reason this is inexplicable in humans, but not in animals: We all know that scent is how a dog finds his way home from fifty miles away. It’s why a dog chews up your slippers; they smell so much like you they are indistinguishable from you; to a dog, they are a better you—a you without a stern tone or rules against chewing up slippers. Back in town, I found trade work and the year I turned twenty-three, I married the daughter of one of the men who hired me.


When I was a child and couldn’t sleep, I used to lie awake in the darkness and obsess over night sounds. Sometimes I’d hear a car grinding gears down some far-off country road, and I remember wondering where somebody needed to go so late at night and in such a stupid hurry. A year or so after I got married, still unable to sleep, I began to leave the house in these wee hours and head aimlessly into the sticks, my thoughts in free fall, driving too fast, becoming the man I used to hear. Back home, my bride also lay in the darkness, crying—not because she wanted me to come home but because she didn’t; she knew her heart would sink when she finally heard rubber crunch on the gravel. We stuck it out for five years, then blew out our last gasps and gave up. It had nothing to do with a lack of love or trust—it was about the emptiness that neither could fill and the restlessness that neither could extinguish and in the end, the pretense of trying no longer made sense.


I love the smell of a church, but I dislike the reek of religion—of mine, anyway; Christianity forces a hierarchy among species that diminishes not only the majesty of animals, but prevents us from knowing who they are. When there is dominion, there is no need to understand your charges so long as you understand mastery. I spent my childhood trying to understand animals and the last twenty years trying to understand Rory; twenty years to the day, in fact, and now, I ordered another shot of Jameson and after I downed it, I realized I had to find a way to make peace with the inscrutability. Rory had been my only blood sibling, but he was dead and I was exsanguinated.


Outside, the sky collapsed in rain; the few faces around me, floating pools of yellow light, continued doing their thing and may not have noticed. A song came up on the juke box that was not one of my mine; it was a bouncy country tune with an odd calliope groove, a peculiar jumble of the familiar chord progression. A competent player can play along with any country song, of course; they are all essentially the same—innovation is not a feature of the genre. The lyrics were common enough; the jilted vocalist was scolding the parents of her two-timing lover. But it was a catchy piece, and when I glanced up, the woman in the autumn sweater was standing over my table holding a shot of Jameson and a flat beer. She put them front of me, and stood above Rory’s drink. “You obviously already bought me one,” she said.


“It’s for my brother.”


“My bad, unless he’s a no show—you’ve been here as long as I have.”


“He’s dead.”


“That sucks. Irish?”


“To the marrow.”


She nodded. “Tradition. Black folks have it too, only they pour the drink over the grave of the deceased.”


“I prefer bars to cemeteries.”


“Also very Irish. Sad songs and happy funerals.”


“Not this one.”


“Sorry if that’s insensitive," she pouted. "How long has it been since he passed away?”


“Twenty years to the day.”


She said, “He wasn’t by any chance the principal of an elementary school?”


“Not even close.”


“Did you grow up around here?”


“I did.”


“Then you know what else today is the twentieth anniversary of. The Lake Britten Elementary School shooting.”

“That was my brother,” I said.


Whatever she had hoped to accomplish by bringing over the drink was compromised, but as it happened, it was not a deal-breaker. She looked at me at a slant, with stealth. “What’s your name?”


“Ian Murphy.”


She shook her head. “I’ll be damned. Ian Murphy. Amazing. What are the odds? Well, I guess we know what the odds are, don’t we? 100%. I remember my parents told me there was a younger brother, neurotypical is what they called you, not on the spectrum. I was only nine, but even then the comment sounded absurd. Rory Murphy didn’t pull the trigger because he was autistic."


She remained standing, but downed my brother’s shot. “Well, thank you, Rory. You’ve owed me that since before I could appreciate it. You certainly left your trace.”


“Who are you?” I asked.


“Allison Valmont. I was a kid in one of the classrooms.”


“Ah, Christ. I’m sorry.”


“Why? Did you put him up to it?”


“No.”


“Then you have nothing to apologize for —you’re a victim too, on your own level. Maybe more than me.”


“I don’t see it like that.”


“Sure you do, but how awkward would it be to admit it? No worries. Why be coy, Ian? I’ll show you what I did with mine if you show me what you did with yours. But you know what I should do first?”


I didn't, and she said, “Buy what’s left of that fifth of Jameson like they do in those cowboy flicks. You know, like, ‘Leave the bottle.’ It’s probably totally illegal, but this doesn’t strike me as the kind of place that cares. You know how long it’s been since you could legally smoke in bars? A decade. And here we are, inhaling second-hand fat-chick chain-smoke.”


She started toward the bar, then turned. “Oh, you’re free to not be here when I get back. I forgot about that part. I’d totally get it. But you have context without answers, and if I told you I have the answer without needing any context, you’d probably stick around to hear me out.”


“Do you?”


“Absolutely. I drank your brother’s shot, and now I’m going to buy him one. I’m making a decent career out of him. Not him specifically, but people like him. People in general. The whole nine; why people are always doing things that defy reason.”


“Are you a psychologist?”


She laughed. “Not really; I’ve been to enough of them to see through the shell game. Actually, I’m an economist with the Heritage Foundation. I came back for the memorial they held in the gym this afternoon. I left midway through it—twenty years and they’re still clueless. Gun control? It’s like their fucking mantra. So before I caught my flight back to D.C., I thought I’d soak up a little Lake Britten sunshine and lick a few Dixie lollipops. It’s been a while, but some things never change, do they? Same people, different faces. Except for one. And who in the world should strike me as interesting enough to want to talk to? Ian fucking Murphy. It doesn’t make sense until it does—that’s MY fucking mantra. By the way, the songs you wrung out of that machine were spectacular. If you had picked a single one wrong, I would never have come over. And then, we’d never have known. What can I say? —poetic misery turns me on.”


“I’m really not miserable.”


“That’s the poetry. Did you like the song I played?”


“I never heard it before, but it was good. It was confident."


“Confident, yeah. That’s Norah Jones, Ravi Shankar’s daughter. She’s mostly jazz and art music, but sometimes she rips out a bompachank somebody-done-somebody-wrong honkytonk song. Who even knew that pedal-steel sitar was a thing?”


She was joking about the sitar but she was right about me—I was not going to leave. The Daoist middle way, the path of least resistance. When she came back with the bottle, I said, “Which one?”


“Which what?”


“Classroom.”


“Mrs. Fleet’s fourth grade.”


“When I say I’m sorry, I’m being honest.”


“Then I honestly forgive you. Better now? I’m sorry too. Mrs. Fleet had just gotten married the month before. At the start of the school year, she was Miss Russell and then suddenly, she wasn’t—that’s a handful for fourth graders. It was her second day back from her honeymoon; she showed us pictures of the wedding and the beaches of Kapalua Bay. I’d never seen sand so white.”


“I do remember that one of the teachers was a newlywed.”


“And Mrs. Godine, the other one? A substitute. She had a son our age. Mr. Jaffrey called in sick that day—the most fortuitous flu in the history of the metaverse, right? And Principal Dougherty? ‘Remember that spelling, kids, princi-P-A-L, because Principal Dougherty is your pal!’—that’s how they taught us to spell the word. But the dude faced down the enemy for us and died doing it—that’s some pal. Let me ask you something personal, Ian, okay? That day? How long do you think target practice would have gone on for?”


“Until every teacher was shot. That’s what I think. Rory brought extra clips. He hated teachers. We were homeschooled, and that much was drilled in to us. Students were blameless, dupes nudged along toward the drain, miniature sponges absorbing indoctrination juice. That’s according to our mom and dad. But teachers with their state-mandated propaganda? They were the bad guys”


“You know that doesn’t explain shit, right?”


I shrugged. “To me, it explains why he didn’t shoot any children.”


“You don’t think he left deeper holes in us than a bullet would have?”


I conceded; I could hardly do otherwise. Most of it still made no sense despite twenty years of compulsive reflecting. On that cold December afternoon, without saying a word, Rory dressed up in combat gear, broke into the gun cabinet, hooked two 30-round magazines to a clip vest and stole Dad’s Bushmaster and 9mm pistol, then took the path through the woods to the school—the same one he used to take when he was a student there—and while loudspeakers were announcing the week’s early release for Christmas break, he set off a string of firecrackers outside Principal Dougherty’s office. He’d been saving them since the Fourth of July, and it was a while before Dougherty came out to investigate. When he did, Rory dropped him cleanly; heart-lung. Then he began entering classrooms. First, Mrs. Fleet’s fourth grade, then, the classroom next to it. Mrs. Godine had not been taught the school’s protocol for when there is a gunman loose on the grounds. The other teachers had, and Rory would have had to shoot his way into their rooms, but by then, first responders were arriving and Rory entered the janitor’s broom closet and killed himself.


Even so, it defied reason: Why had he set off the firecrackers? He must have known that someone would call 911 before he fired the first round; ironically, too, since they’d probably think the crackle was gunshots. The Taurus, I get—it’s hard to shoot yourself with an AR-15 inside a janitor’s closet. But if you know the police are already on their way, why carry extra clips? And if you intended to shoot it out with them, death by cop, why hit the broom closet at the first sound of sirens?


“You’re right,” I said. “It’s the same nightmare today as it was then. I have no answers.”


 “Well, I have one. Try it on and see if it fits. It’s why I was hired at Heritage—my Master’s thesis at Georgetown; Behavior Economics.” She poured whiskey: “But first, we’ll do a shot to Principal Dougherty,” she said. “And to Mrs. Fleet and Miss Godine—a three-way so I don’t get too wasted—you’re in no mood for that chaos. And I’ll put back Rory’s drink. Cheers, Rory; in your roundabout way, you got Steve Forbes to notice me.”

Allison followed her toast with a shudder and a goofy grin, but then, her tone changed and her intensity became disconcerting. She stopped looking at me and focused on blemishes in the chipped laminate on the surface of the bar table.


“So, after the shooting, my folks pulled me from Lake Britten Elementary and put me in Our Lady of Notre Dame; they thought I was less likely to get shot at parochial school. But, come on. The chance of two shootings happening in the same school is statistically non-existent. They should have left me where I was; at least I could have grown up with kids who were going through the same trauma. They should have bussed me to fucking Columbine. But the ‘where’ made no difference—I still thought about it constantly and the Catholic kids teased me about it endlessly, and all around me, everybody in the world kept doing insane-world shit and other kids kept shooting up other schools, and nobody could come up with a single logical explanation for it let alone a rational means of stopping it. All they could do was hope their school wasn’t next. And year after year, somebody’s school was.”


Now she lifted her eyes from the table and met mine. “Why is that, Ian? I’ve been thinking about that since I was nine years old.”


“I don’t know why, Allison. I wish I did.”


 “Well, it wasn’t until I was a marketing major in college that something bizarre occurred to me… I’m streamlining a little, so bear with me. In marketing—or for that matter, in driving to work on Monday morning or to Dixie’s on Saturday afternoon—we bank on the idea that everyone around us is making lucid decisions that are grounded their self-interest. Traditional economics assumes that consumers not only act this way by rote, but make choices that will keep society as a whole in balance. The fact that this is obviously not the case never seems to occur to us. When we hear that a test group, given binary options, insists that a course of medical treatments that saves 80% of people is preferable to one that kills 20% of people, we snicker because we think that they are simply not thinking the question through. Still with me?”


“I’m listening,” I said.


 “So, another example: If I ask for your opinion on a hot-button topic—gun control, say—you’ll have an opinion that you can easily explain. You’ll produce your set of reasons, and what’s more, you’ll be convinced that the analysis by which you arrived at your conclusion is sound. When I tell you that an equal number of people have a different opinion, and for reasons they think are equally valid, you will conclude—just like they do about you—that there is a flaw in their reasoning. And guess what? You’d both be correct, but only about each other. Your reasons are no more rational than theirs are, and not only that, but they have zero to do with your opinion. That’s another shell game: Whether or not we own it, we begin with the opinion, then dress it up with justifications. Opinions are rooted in many things, but rationality isn’t one of them. There’s no need to be rational when it is easier to fill in blanks to support a pre-existing conclusion. To an economist dealing with weird fluctuations in the stock market, or with consumers who will buy a duty-free bottle of Jameson to save a few dollars but ignore that same discount with larger ticket items, it’s baffling. But in prospect theory—my thesis—there is an understanding that when people shop, they rarely apply logic. Much closer to the surface of the decision-making process is fallout from past events, which differ from person to person, and loss aversion, which is universal. The theory is that when you apply cognitive psych to marketing, you have better results. Still here?”


 “I am,” I said, and I was.


“Good, because here comes Rory Murphy, and how I now understand what happened that day. Up until then, I believed in a rational universe. If physics could be codified, things could be predicted. But that’s simply not true, is it? There is nothing logical about reality; no reason that energy should equal mass times speed. Except that it does. That’s the dice roll we’re stuck with—it’s not logical in the least. All my econ professors had convinced themselves that people behave in their own self-interest despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As a species, we are messiahs of irrationality. So on Tuesday morning, December 12, Y2K, when Mrs. Valmont kissed little Allie on the forehead and dropped her off in the circle in front of the school, it was under the assumption—the conviction, actually—that a troubled neighborhood kid would not shortly enter the school with an assault rifle and shoot Mrs. Fleet in the face. Like everyone else—like your own parents, I'm sure—they assumed that Rory would act in his own self-interest and keep society in balance. But that’s not what happened. And the reason it didn't happened is that rationality is mathematics; numbers are infinite and our minds are finite. If we really obeyed the axioms of logic, we’d be consistent in our beliefs. But we’re not; we contradict ourselves constantly. If we were rational creatures, we could predict what everyone would do, and we’d all agree on a subject like gun control. But we don’t. People act on irrational impulses all day every day, convincing themselves that they’re motivated by analysis and deliberation, when nothing could be further from the truth. You can’t predict what people will do next and you can’t stop them from doing it, because you are struggling to apply mathematics to the abstract, and you can’t. Why? Because it cannot be done. It’s beyond the scope of a finite mind trapped in a random and unpredictable reality. That’s your answer, Ian. When you get a chance to think about it, you’ll see I’m right.”


“I’m thinking about it now,” I said.


“I never told anybody this, but my mother dropped me off at school late that day, nearly noon, not long before the shooting began. That was because I had an eye appointment in the morning. They put those drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils, and by the time I got to class, my vision was Magic Kingdom; everything was shimmering like I was inside a dream. When Rory shot Mrs. Fleet, I saw it through gauzy golden haze. I thought I was sleepwalking, like the whole thing was playing out in my imagination. That’s the true funk of reality, Ian. It still feels like that after twenty years.”


She blew out a lungful of air and pushed the whiskey bottle to the edge of the laminate, where Rory’s shot was. “Well, I sure don’t need any more of that, but since it’s your round, maybe you could convince darlin’ to sell us a six pack to go.”


“It’s late,” I said. “When is your flight?”


“Like, now,” she said, looking at her phone. “Like, right now.”


“So what will you do?"


“The thing that lots of people do when they miss planes, Ian. Leave some other time. I already checked out of my room at the Crowne Plaza, but if it’s of interest to you, I could check back in.”


“I live two blocks from here,” I said.


“If you’d like, I could follow you home.”


“That's fine. That’s good.”


“Will a girlfriend or pretty young wife be waiting at the stoop?”


“Nope.”

 

“It bodes well, then.”


“I do have a motorcycle in my living room,” I said.


“I wouldn’t have expected anything less.”


It was true: Every dream Rory and I ever talked about had a motorcycle attached to it. This one was a ‘77 Harley café racer I was restoring, adding a pillion-free saddle and siamesed exhaust. I had no garage and would not leave the project to the sort of weather that was currently slavering across the panes. The house was tiny, a few hundred square feet, but it had lakefront in the rear, and in the summer I fished for walleye and caught bass, and in the fall, vice-versa.


There was also a table in the front room that I’d made from cherry wood because it machines well, sands well and finishes well. It was one-foot deep, two-feet wide and three-feet high. There were two shelves; an upper one with a slight angle for books and a lower one for candles and incense. A silk brocade was draped over the top to keep ashes and wax off the surface. Three symbols hung above it; the San Qing, representing a primordial beginning, a numinous treasure and the celestial way, the Dao.


I told Allison about Phoenix, and she was puzzled that I’d chosen to come back to this infernal town in this particular state; it had only been a few years and surely everyone remembered who I was. Of course they did, and that was the point. Lake Britten was unfinished business. We’d run from it, but we couldn’t outrun it. As it turned out, most people didn’t even bring it up. To those that did, I’d say that Rory was my brother, and if he’d asked me to take a bullet for him, I would have done it, and if dealing with their grief and hatred was that bullet, so be it. I wasn’t ready for a mountain and a dog—not yet, anyway.

“Murphy is a common enough name,” I said. “When I printed my business cards, I made sure not to reference the shooting.”


Next to my end table was a Martin 15 made of the same gorgeous wood. As soon as she saw it, Allison asked me to play something. I toyed around for a bit, inverting progressions until I hit on the right pattern, and when she recognized it, she beamed and said, “Can you sing it too?”


“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t know the lyrics.”


“But I do,” she answered.


I went through the chords until she found her voice and comfort level, and together, I thought we sounded lovely. She was no Norah and I was no Ravi, but in that moment, with the unfathomable shock, the incandescence and the strangeness of our meeting, it was an exchange of grace. The exchange that followed was no more or less intimate than what had come before; I was emptied, then filled, then emptied again—and Allison too.


At some point between the first shot at Dixie’s and our last beer near dawn, the sadness and self-blame reached an arc and began a gentle slog away from it. Twenty years was enough and I felt a physical sensation as it dissipated. Allison said that she felt something similar and I will take her at her word. She had not been to church in years, but that morning, before her flight, she came with me to an early mass at Divine Grace, hung over and somehow blissful. Out front, the changeable-letter sign read, ‘Every Saint has a Past and Every Sinner has a Future.’


Inside, the pine pews smelled of spent incense and delicate perfume; the rain had stopped and calm light spilled through tall windows, washing the world in golden haze and making us feel as if our eyes were dilated.