One sound—the one a sentence makes, the one that belongs to me—rises and falls with the life of his paint.

In the day he takes nothing, doesn’t return until dusk, but the timbre of his voice fills the camp. He’s everywhere—on the mattress, in the food, under the sink, in the cracks between the planks. His cape gestures about me. “You see yourself in everyone’s face. They still live inside you. Your goddamn mama. Your goddamn Serena.” He takes out the strap. “It’s the genes, bitch,” he says. “It’s all in the genes. Let’s clean out those genes.”

“Fix me,” I shout; “fix me good!”

***

The motor launch snuggles into the dock with his buddies, who bring food, alcohol, drugs, a woman. He puts me in the closet.

“Why? Can’t I see other faces?”

“No. You’ve got to get away from eyes.”

In the closet, roaches and mice have eyes that glow in the dark. Voices from another planet tell him the city: the shouts, the jokes, the firefights, the wars, the creeping pestilence taking so many lives, the Marauders in which they all take pleasure. “Where’s the puta?” he calls out. “Where’s the puta? Don’t tell me, let me see! Give me the puta!” He doesn’t mean me. They bring in the woman. He unstacks canvases for her. “Wow,” she says. “You’re an ace. How do you do that stuff? Where does it come from?”

“It’s all where you focus your eyes.”

“Your eyes are as bad as the rest,” I mumble in the closet. He’s no better, no worse. It’s their eyes he wants to keep me from—the others, the old ones, stored in the dusty crates, stretched thin. Tokens of my life, maps of moments. Every creator breeds dissent, my voices tell me. Avatars approach our graves. Only drifters escape respite: He’s a drifter! Not an exile, not an artist! A drifter! From that log, that splinter! I listen, take it all in, turn cryptic advice into code, and when he opens the closet, I stay. There is more time than life, the voices say. He cajoles, subdued, apologetic, senses something has changed. He walks the room, sprawls on the bed.

“Let me be,” he mutters in his sleep and wakes a day late, smiling, brow drawn. “Be the child. I want the child.” He puts the bonnet in my hands. Don’t take it out your soul. I drop the bonnet. “Be the child; let me have the child!” He looks at the sink. “Don’t you want your fix?”

“No. Too much you, not enough me.” My hand brushes the table.

“Bury your voices. I’m the cosmos.” He slaps me. “You feel? You feel how things are?”

I walk to the shrouded canvas. “You don’t spend your days with paint.”

“Don’t you want your fix, sweetheart?” He’s playful, dogface low-down sly. “You shaky?” He turns to the stove, hands clenched, face like a piece of meat. “I’ll take it straight out your flesh.” He bends over. Now or never. I imagine my entire weight putting the steak knife where his heart should be, listen for the sound it makes when I crank it, like gristle trying to speak.

“The monster!” Fixed good, strap in hand, veins a-bulge, breathing hard, eyes a puzzle, he falls at my feet into his own blood and hacks across the floor, one hand caressing the vision before him. “Let me be. You let me be.”

His eyes disappear.

Figures in robes spattered with paint climb into boxes of wood.

“How many do you want?” they shout.

I wake to the moon, an addict longing for a fix. I think of my child, Serena. I say her name. Once. Twice. A thousand times. Time passes. Hours, days, weeks? It’s time to make my way back to where she might be. In the patterns and cycles of sleep, with wind and water an echo, all the voices, for the rest of my life, are like the sound of a sentence, emerging only to fade.

Election Day

“Did you vote?” the mysterious Ava said. She had a bright orange sticker stuck to the sweater over her left nipple. “I VOTED,” it said. She had come to the barbecue with our neighbor Bobbi, whether as a long-lost friend returned from the Boundary Waters—where Bobbi intimated some terrible things had occurred—or as a newfound lover, I had no idea.

Time would tell. It always does.

“Vote? There’s an election today?” I was having her on, of course. I knew there was an election. Everybody told me it was important, that it would change everything if the wrong creep got into office.

“You registered?” she said. I was dumbfounded. How could any responsible citizen decide not to vote or pretend not to understand what was at stake? Did she ever stop to think that my vote might neutralize hers?

Or was she having me on? There was a furious light in her blue eyes. She glowed as if on fire with rail-thin luminosity. She had survived a long recovery after the Boundary Waters, Bobbi had warned, and could be brittle. That much Bobbi had told us as prelude to our gathering. “I’m bringing her along with trepidation. Give her slack. It’s her first outing in a while.”

“Of course I’m registered,” I said. “What do you take me for?”

I voted. I could tell you who for. It’s still a free country, despite the mess, the violence, the new world order. The ballot is still secret. I’m secret too. You can’t know about me.

We stood on the porch that faced my next-door neighbor Park’s large bur oak, a majestic tree that could outlive not only election day but all of us who presently walk the Earth. Ava was very easy on my eyes, but her own ocean blue ones stared deep at everything around her, as if she thought she had X-ray vision. I nursed a gin and tonic and thought about politics. There was a lot to think about: things to curse, things to praise, people who should be shot, a few worth celebrating. I could have ranted and raved, and I knew that eventually I would, but I decided I would hold off as long as possible.

I thought I would wend my way inside later in the evening, after our guests were gone, and turn on the television to study the election results and curse if needed, shout with delight if things turned out good. My friend Denzel and his wife, Latesha, drove into the driveway on the other side of the house and my wife, Louise, greeted them with a happy shriek. I grimaced. I wanted to say something to her about that shriek, which had become more frequent of late, but she would be offended. Everything offended her if it wasn’t straight-out praise. So I kept quiet and kept the peace. Louise had lived a hard life before we found each other. If she enjoyed a shriek now and then, so be it. There was little enough joy left in our part of the world.

After a few minutes of conversation that I could hear inside the house, Denzel came out juggling his own gin and tonic, a fresh one for me, and a glass of Chardonnay for the mysterious Ava. His hold on the drinks was precarious, as if he might drop one. He had a little too much weight around the middle, a recent development, though who am I to talk? He gave Ava her drink and introduced himself. Before she could hypnotize him or bore into him with those eyes, I stood, put my drink on a table next to the grill, and shook his hand with a tight, firm grip so that he would know my spirits were up. “Did you vote?” I asked.

“Hell, yeah,” he said, smirking, used to my antics. I could tell you who he voted for in my sleep. The world has gone to hell in a bushel basket. The weather won’t behave itself. The people up here in this part of the world are dying off or driving off. There’s unrest. Violence. Marauders out west who, like the weather, might show up with a shit show in mind. Some nights, we have armored vehicles parked on the periphery of the neighborhood, special Militias paid for by the homeowner’s association. Despite that, Denzel still doesn’t carry a gun, which is ungodly behavior. What if a Marauder came along and grabbed Latesha by the ass and threw her to the ground? What’s he going to do about it without a concealed carry? Somebody I don’t like puts their paws on Louise? Boom!

We didn’t talk politics, though. We talked sports. We talked food. We talked books. We both like mysteries, the kind they write in Scandinavia, where life is kind of good and all the people are treated mostly the same while mass murderers ply their trade, but only in fiction, until a woman with a dragon tattoo or a man with a deep scar across his face snaps them in two.

Ava ignored our chatter and stared, twiddling her long-stemmed glass, at the awesome oak. In profile she was a stunner—Ava, I mean, with the long neck of an Egyptian queen, an aristocratic Roman nose, and décolletage that could slay a man. Her skin was dark, glistening, and I wondered where she came from, where her parents might have been born. Dark skin, blue eyes. The colored tattoos on her upper arms were unreadable hieroglyphs, abstract patterns that reminded me of paint Jackson Pollock might drip on canvas. Her jeans were tight, her sleeveless blouse bright and Latin. There was something otherworldly about her, as if she had arrived in a time machine and might vanish without warning.

Louise was inside with Latesha and Bobbi, all of them making a Tater Tots hot dish and a strawberry-rhubarb pie to accompany the grass-fed beef and very wild salmon I planned to put on the grill. Maybe Bobbi would reveal some Ava scuttlebutt to Louise and Latesha, and Louise might clue me in later, if the women didn’t keep what they learned to themselves. It was clear to me that Ava would be the prime topic of conversation if she wasn’t with us. “What’s the story with Ava?” one of us would say, probably me, though it would be Louise who would tease out of Bobbi whatever she knew.

They were making pie, but I was the real cook that night: steak medium rare on the grill. It’s a steak that’s very lean. Lots of protein. Easy to overcook. A little charring never hurts a good steak, but these babies are delicate. I got them special at Mike’s Meats. Mike knows meat, and I know Mike. The salmon is for Bobbi, who’s pescatarian.

Ava told me she eats anything. “Not particular. Food is food.”

“Did I tell you I voted?” I said when the conversation died down. “Did my duty?” Denzel agreed that it might be good later to watch the results, but the weather was too grand on the deck to go inside, and nobody wanted to be the first to stare into a phone. The clouds were deep and fluffy. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were mountains. The usual haze from the city twenty miles down the interstate had been blown in our direction earlier in the day. City stink. But the wind stayed high, and the stink moved on.

I heard the kind of beep a truck makes when it backs up. “Fred’s Trees,” the logo read. There was a picture of a logger with a saw taking down a big one. Park, my neighbor, came out to greet the tree man. That would be Fred, I guessed, though it’s possible Fred’s Trees was not a one-man operation. It was possible that Fred didn’t work alone. In fact, there was another man in the truck with him.

The two of them talked for a few minutes. Fred was a very tall Black man who wore a bright orange uniform and angled his right hand with his white work glove to indicate to Park something about the tree. I got a funny feeling. If what I thought was about to happen came to pass, I realized that I would have a situation on my hands. I picked up the fresh gin and tonic and drank it. Fast.

“What do you think they’re doing over there?” I asked.

“Looks like a tree’s coming down,” Denzel said. “Is there more blight in the area?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

Ava had turned to listen, licking her lips and sipping her wine. “They kill trees, don’t they?” she said in a droll voice.

“Huh.” Denzel frowned. He didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t a tree hugger, that’s for sure, but nature was one of his issues, with the seas rising, the heat burning the land, the crazy storms dropping like napalm without warning. “I hope they’re not taking down that big oak just to improve the view.”

He read my mind. That was my thought exactly. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said. “There are other trees on his property. Or maybe they’re talking about a trim, some pruning.” I heard myself say the words, but I was getting a bad feeling, a vibe, and could feel anger build to a crescendo.

“He’s a man on his own land, right?” Ava said. She tucked a stray hair behind her ears, squeezed her lower lip with two fingers. One of her nails was bitten to the quick. “You men do what you like on your land, all of you; isn’t that the way it is?”

I ignored her. “You know what, Denzel? I think Park is going to take down that tree.”

By now we were both frowning and studying the situation as if we were watching a postapocalyptic movie. “Fred, if that’s Fred,” I said, “is there to erase a beautiful bur oak from Park’s backyard.”

“Dude, it’s his yard,” Ava said. “His tree. It’s a great tree, no doubt he should leave it unless it’s diseased. But that’s not for you to decide. None of your business.”