“I know the timing is wrong. He—”
“No,” she said. “The story. If this, this business with Louise, was in the ’70s, he’s . . . your age. Not so old. Not yet. Not old enough yet to have dementia like that, to be ravaged like that.”
“But he’s crazy.” He crumpled his napkin. “I guess you have a point, maybe literally speaking. But listen. Maybe the framing is different. The ’50s or something. Or, I know. Maybe—he might have had a stroke.”
“Now, why would he have a stroke?”
“An addiction,” he said. “Gone mad. I said that.”
“We ought to give up our table,” she said. “All of these people are waiting to sit.”
*
“So who was she, really? Louise?” she asked. “You based her on someone.”
“No one,” he said.
She turned away.
“Don’t do this,” he said.
“She had to be someone. Everyone you write about is someone you know. And why would you tell me a story like that?” The snow was a cliché, she thought, and she was no writer. He ought to know better and probably did. So what was his point?
They stood by the time board—every seat taken under the dome—as new delays clicked into view.
“For God’s sake, let it go,” he said.
The air hung between them. The damage was done.
She could see the future; she didn’t need to dream it: Sooner or later the train would come. The law of things. The two of them: grasping their bags, boarding the train, claiming their places. Each would read, or fake it. Back in New York, they would stop for a drink. They would laugh over nothing. Make up, brush it off. Neither of them would speak of the story ever again, though later he would publish it. Nevertheless, for the rest of the time they were lovers (which wouldn’t, of course, be very much longer), she’d cease to adore him; for him, she was a phase. And the woman—Louise—whoever she’d been, whatever she’d done, whatever her significance, for them, she was real and could not be un-invented.
He knew what he was doing.
“People you’ve known for a very short while will stay with you always,” he’d said to her once. “Regret. Impossibility. That’s something you don’t understand yet . . .”
3.
Soon, She’ll Be a Master
She turns off his laptop, there in the dark. His name is his password. First. Last. Crackable. Practical precautions—he isn’t very good at them (she tells herself that), for all of his planning, for all of his critically acclaimed self-awareness. She’d read the thing twice—“The Point of Departure.”
The action she’s taken cannot be reversed.
He murmurs in his sleep as she lies down beside him, nose to nape.
Soon he’ll awaken. Soon he will worry (delays, cancellations). Soon they will go to the station and quibble. This, that. Café La France. The ladies’ room. Unswallowable breakfast.
The future he can’t completely imagine, for all that he tries.
Listen, he’ll say.
Do you want to hear my idea? he’ll say, before he pays cash, before he finds fault, before the train comes, before he opens his case, before he answers a text, before he knows what he knows, before he clicks on a file, before she swallows a pill, before he pleads an excuse, before he changes a lock, before he apprehends that it is she, Louise, who has deleted the body.
WATERFIRE’S SMELL TONIGHT
BY PABLO RODRIGUEZ
WaterFire
The smoke was different tonight.
Maybe the onlookers attributed that to the humidity, or the wet wood. But not Jose Cadalzo. Jose had finally landed a volunteer job on the boat that went around the floating fire pits, feeding the pyres with crisp, specially chosen wood, giving him the best seat in the house for the now world famous Providence tradition. Who would have ever thought that setting up a bunch of floating fireplaces accompanied by piped-in music on a not-so-clean river would become the main attraction in the renaissance of a former industrial city?
The color and the acrid smell of the smoke reminded Jose of his youth in the Dominican Republic. When cows or horses died by the roadside, their owners would douse them with gasoline and set them on fire. That was it! Jose realized. The fires tonight smelled like burnt flesh. And why not? Human flesh and animal flesh are not that different, are they?