The Candy House

But no beam—no sun, even. A cloudy dusk in late spring in an Upstate New York suburb interlocked with many others, around a city like many other cities. At night, from the window of a plane, their lights look like seams of gold ore in black rock. And among the tens of thousands of suburbs surrounding some three thousand American cities, there might be, from April onward, seven or eight hundred boys standing at home plate at any particular time, each emulating the batting stance of whatever hero’s poster hangs above his bed, and a throng of parents, some ringing cowbells, some getting nasty—stories of bad parental behavior are part of a picture that turns generic the instant you cease to have a stake in it, as in: The boy at bat is your boy.

His name is Ames Hollander. Middle son, squashed between godliness above and eccentricity below. People forget his name. They forget he exists—that he can see and hear and remember like they can. His mother frets, knitting the brown V-neck sweater he’ll reject in winter when she presents it to him (No one wears knitted sweaters, Mom!): How can the love and dread she feels for her middle son be converted into something tangible, something that can help him?

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world. From a distance they look alike even to her, especially in uniform.

It’s 1991, and a lot of things that are about to happen haven’t happened yet. The screens that everyone will hold twenty years from now haven’t been invented, and their bulky, sluggish predecessors have yet to break the surface of ordinary life. No one in this crowd has ever seen a portable phone, which gives to this moment the quality of a pause. All these parents gathered in the fading light, and not a single face underlit by a bluish glow! They’re all here, in one place, their attention burning toward home plate…

“Do I?” His father always seemed surprised.

Now, from his waterbed, Gregory could hear his roommate bustling around their small common area preparing a spate of last-minute weed deliveries to ease people through snow quarantine. “Guess who’s on my list,” Dennis called. “Athena.”

“No way,” Gregory said.

“Third time. She’s way into the antique thing.”

Dennis sold vintage weed: Humboldt Homegrown, Eureka Gold, weed from back in the day when marijuana was leafy and harsh and full of seeds but delivered a high that was the weed equivalent of vinyl: “whorled” and “crosshatched,” “sonorous” and “plump” (Dennis’s MFA in poetry served him well in these marketing descriptions)—in other words, authentic in ways that the bloodless, odorless tinctures that passed for weed nowadays were not.

“How is our Athena?” Gregory projected, with effort, toward his open bedroom door. In the weeks since a mysterious fatigue had confined him to his bed, Gregory and Dennis had perfected the art of conversing between rooms.

“Unchanged,” Dennis said. “Topical. Fearsome.” He popped briefly into Gregory’s doorframe.

“Poison,” Gregory said.

“Aaaaaant.” Dennis made a buzzer noise. “Word-casing.”

“True,” Gregory reflected. “ ‘Poison’ is no longer toxic.”

“ ‘Toxic’ isn’t toxic,” Dennis said.

“ ‘Toxic’ is anodyne,” Gregory agreed. “ ‘Robust’ is limp. ‘Catalyze’

fails to react.”

“The ‘silos’ and ‘buckets’ are empty,” Dennis said.

“What about ‘empty’?” Gregory said. “Is ‘empty’ empty?”

“ ‘Empty’ is supposed to be empty,” Dennis said. “ ‘Empty’ fails by being full.”

“But does ‘empty’ convey enough emptiness?”

They could do this all day…

• A tendency to think aphoristically in the second person, as required for her mission’s Field Instructions (e.g., “Laundered socks will vanish despite your best efforts to track them”; “Reading books about babies sleeping may not result in your babies sleeping more”).
• A persistent wish to return to her mission, despite its agonies, as if to a mythical land from a dream or a book.
• A conviction that she—and I—would have been “better off” had she perished at the end of her mission rather than returning.

We have availed ourselves of every in-house resource in terms of therapy and body scans, but Lulu’s present distrust of our institution renders these assurances null. I understand that, after the expos last fall and resulting suspension of the Citizen Agent program, seeking outside consultation is doubly impossible now. Yet this leaves us in a bind.

Lulu’s wariness and anxiety prevent our employing child care of any sort. The staunchest reassurance about vetting and references for babysitters or daycare programs prompt her to quote from her own indoctrination: “Your lack of espionage training is what makes your record clean and neutral.” And of course she is right.

The secrecy of Lulu’s mission has distanced her from old friends, and she avoids the company of other new mothers. For these reasons, my return must be conditional. I am not concerned for the children’s physical safety or Lulu’s own; I would not return at all if such were the case. But if her suffering and discomfort do not abate, I will have to take an indefinite leave to assist her.

Sincerely,

Joseph Kisarian

Henry Pomeranz→Joseph Kisarian
What a shit show, Joe…