Take Me Home — The Hopkins Review (2024)

Little Oblivia, that’s what my mother called me. Always such a sucker for catastrophe.

Plagues, tornados, falling pianos, even one reoccurring fantasy about a bird sh*tting into my eye, causing me to careen my Schwinn into a passing semi and Splat! Dunzo! Daydreams like that bird sh*t, out of my control, falling from on high. I’d be passing notes in math class and suddenly wonder what it felt like to be shot through the thigh, or I’d be swapping spit with some Mike or Matt at the bus stop and blurt out that if we were in space, no suit, our bodily fluids would boil inside our skin.

My mother used to blame it on our neighbor, Mr. Hegge, but my father liked to say that when I was a toddler I’d stand at the lip of the basem*nt stairs, howl like a wolf, and wail when my echo bounced back to me. Fear? Joy? Chicken? Egg? All the king’s horses, all the king’s men. Either way, just before my panic slapped, I’d squirm with excitement.

I was fourteen with fresh cherry-red hair and my father was freestyling a lecture on the merits of natural beauty on the drive home from my mother’s apartment. It was early winter, our neighborhood’s corners hammered round with new snow, window lights glowing piss yellow and few try-hard Christmas lights twinkling in the cold. He was saying something about my sad need for attention when we pulled up to his house and stopped short of the driveway.

He said, “Livie, I didn’t know you paid the electric bill.”

“You literally just picked me up.”

“Something’s going on.”

He told me to stay, killed the headlights, and eased the car into the driveway. I watched him skulk toward the front door, stopping to grab the snow shovel from the porch before slipping inside. I tuned my ears for gunshots and stared hard at the big bay window, waiting to see an arc of blood spray the glass. A silhouette appeared. My heartbeat, tiny bongos. The silhouette paused. The delicious thrill, the bitter guilt chaser. The lights flickered.

“Olivia!” dad called, sticking his head out the front door. “Get in here.”

Old Mr. Hegge had broken the small pane of glass below the doorknob and cut himself reaching for the lock. Blood was smeared on the light switch, a dozen drops lead to the dining room, where Hegge slumped at the head of the table, so hidden inside his parka that it looked like he’d been raptured, leaving just his clothes and prosthetic leg, lying on the floor below the chair. My dad pulled back his hood. His skin was newspaper gray. We moved him to the couch and dad screamed MR. HEGGE in his face in a timbre I hadn’t heard since the divorce. I asked if volume was really the issue here.

“Call somebody.”

The first two times I tried to dial 911 I instinctively dialed 778, my thumbs already twitching to share the juice with friends, but the third time I got it right. I ordered an ambulance and called my mother while my dad kneeled by the couch, his hand on Mr. Hegge’s wrist, saying, “I’m monitoring his pulse. Livie, tell your mother I am monitoring the victim’s pulse.”

She said, “Christ, don’t let your father touch him.”

Ten minutes later she was in the living room, side-eyeing the rearranging dad had done. She’d changed since I’d left and was hovering over Mr. Hegge dressed for the bar. Smelling sweet, hair piled high with mousse, she wore jeans with heart-shaped pockets and a cream-colored suede jacket that wouldn’t do sh*t for the cold. She leaned over Hegge and spoke to him softly, one hand on his forehead, the other feeling his neck. Her long fingers massaged open Hegge’s mouth so she could peer inside. His eyes came alive then, darting like a bat trapped in the kitchen.

Rendered useless, my father had entered the speculative realm. “It must’ve been a stroke,” he said. “He had a stroke and got confused, wandered into his old house.”

“Please shut up, Darryl,” my mother said. “Please. Just this one time.”

“A stroke or dementia. That’s what I bet.”

“Maybe you would like if it you just tried.”

“Livie, I’ll bet you fifty bucks it’s one of the two.”

“Or he was trying to steal your Playboys,” I said, and watched him wriggle.

When Mr. Hegge started to wheeze, my mother sat him up and cooed him into a state of calm. I’d never gotten to see her like this before. This tender. Had she been like this with me when I was small? What happened? I felt the urge to keel over and spasm on top of him so that her hands could investigate me instead. I bit my bottom lip until I tasted blood. There was a man dying on the sofa, I reminded myself. Then, as if he could read my thoughts, Hegge looked right at me, or possibly through me, and said, with a tiny puff of air, “Motherf*cker.”

Eventually the EMTs arrived, their ambulance lights casting so far across the snow that everyone in the neighborhood came out to gawk. They stood shivering on their porches, watching the EMTs load Hegge into the back of the ambulance. “Why do you think he was trespassing?” my father asked one of them on the way out of the door.

Mom said, “The way you think about things, Darryl,” and rode along in the ambulance.

Inside, my dad made me sweep the broken glass. “Did you see the way that EMT was looking at mom?” I asked him. “Those big Awooga eyes.”

Mr. Hegge was the neighbor, not our landlord, which was a distinction he struggled with because our house had once been, and would forever be, at least in his mind, his house. He and his wife built it in the 1950s, when he came home from Korea minus his left leg. It wasn’t much—a cottagey three bedroom with pocket doors that stuck—but the bay window in the living room gave us a good view down the hill to the Sheetz and the Dollar General on Main Street. You could nib like crazy from that window, and nibbing was the only thing Mr. Hegge liked as much as doomsaying. When I was a toddler, he’d sold my parents the house and moved into a little prefab next door. As an incentive he offered to handle the lawn care for us for as long as he could. My mother was thrilled (every mechanical thing that my father touched self-immolated) but my father thought it was just an excuse for Hegge to spy on us. It was. Mom was never the type to care; she’d walk around tit*-out with the curtains open if it meant she never had to pull dad from another flaming heap of lawn mower.

Hegge was saggy but strong, with a big mole that seemed to orbit his face like a moon. His favorite pastime was killing snakes with a garden hoe that he called the decapitator. Once, while I watched him execute a worm-sized garter snake he’d pinned under his Velcro Reeboks, he said that during the French Revolution, physicians learned that a person could see for twenty seconds after they’d been guillotined.

He chopped. Then, he counted.

He mowed the lawn in cross-hatched patterns, like a baseball field, and he tended the roses with a monkish resolve. He picked blueberries from six immaculate bushes out back and left them in a basket on the porch for my mom, refusing any baked goods she might reciprocate on account of his blood sugar. He sprayed so much weedkiller around the flowerbed that two of the stray cats started walking crooked after rolling in the grass. He started calling them Cap and Size. Another time, when I was eating a Popsicle, he asked me if I knew the pain that comes with eating a cold thing too fast.

“Yeah,” I said. “Brain Freeze.”

“Brain freeze,” he’d said. “That’s exactly what it feels like to freeze to death, but in your whole body at once.”

Meanwhile, my dad at the window, grumbling:

. . . The neighbors probably thinking we’re working the old bastard to death!

. . . Seventy years old and never learned just to f*ck off!

. . . Someday he’s probably gonna leave us a bill!

“Livie,” he said to me once. “You know that guy isn’t your grandfather, right?”

I broke out laughing. My grandfather! He was just some guy that lived in our yard, a more interesting alternative to Cap and Size. Hegge was a part of the place, a fixture of the landscape, and by the time he stopped coming around I was thirteen and barely noticed. It was like a tree or a mailbox was gone. Something was different, but what? Eventually, when the grass started to tickle my ankles and the hedges took on abstract shapes, I asked my mother what was up with the lawn. She said, “Your father thinks charity leads to resentment.”

My father had given Hegge the boot, and, free from the weight of his charity, dad began toddling around the yard like he’d finally rid himself of his allergies to machinery and grass. He planted sad begonias, mulched grass clippings, trimmed our apple tree into the shape of an arthritic fist. Now my mother and I were the ones at the window, sucking Diet Pepsi through waxy, turtle-killing straws, and waiting for Dad to get Boo Radley’d out of that tree. (I’d just read Mockingbird and was proud of the fact.) Will you take me home? We squealed laughing, stomped our bare feet. Will you take me home?

“Why’d Hegge stop mowing our lawn?”

Dad was sitting across the table from me, scanning some insurance paperwork for home invasion clauses. “Liability,” he said. “And nosiness. Skillful nosiness. I swear that man was a spy in a former life.”

“He was looking for his wife,” I said. “He had some episode and wandered over here, looking for his wife.”

“He was wearing his coat.”

“His coat?”

“Coat, hat, boots. He even had gloves. Gloves, Livie! You know, last year some burglar in New York City fell through a roof and sued the property owner. Bankrupted him. You hear about this sort of thing all the time.”

“You really think Mr. Hegge is going to sue you?”

“You know his wife died in her sleep? She was a cross-country skier! I saw her coasting around town the day before she croaked. And the way he used to follow your mother around like she had pockets full of bread. To be honest, I never completely trusted him around you when you were little.”

“What are you even talking about? Now you’re just making things up.”

He sighed. “Your hair looks like sh*t, Olivia. It’s hard to even have a conversation with you when it looks so ridiculous. It looks just like bloody stool.”

I spit a slick ice cube from my Sprite across the table. It slid past him like a shuffleboard puck onto the floor.

He said, “I am sorry, honey, but I thought you needed to know.”

In my room I propped open the window with a copy of the K–L encyclopedia and stuffed a towel under the door. I cranked my radio (MMMBop, I’ll Be Missing You, there it is, I’m a Bitch, I’m a Lover, I’m a Child, I’m a Mother . . .) and I set the box fan blowing out the window and stuffed a paper towel tube full of dryer sheets. I had six menthol cigarettes in my filigreed jewelry box and a few packs of wedding matches I’d found in the basem*nt. I’d been thinking that every fourth cigarette in a pack should be a menthol, or maybe cinnamon, for after meals. Or they could be unmarked, like white M&M’s. A little surprise when the paper flames. I let the menthol spin my stomach and when it was done I tossed the butt onto the roof and covered it with snow.

I tucked myself into the comforter and felt the cold pinch my nose. Before the Hegge thing, it had been a year since I’d seen my parents in the same room. At first, dad had insisted on coming into her apartment when he picked me up, always tugging on doorknobs or offering to change lightbulbs. Once, he came up with a pizza like the three of us could have a nice family meal.

My mother said, “I don’t eat meat, Darryl.”

“Since when!?”

“Since today.”

Bitch ended.

It was funny how my mother seemed to tell me everything, because it wasn’t always like that. When they split, dad had spent a month on the couch and they tried to hide it from me. They’d go to bed together and twenty minutes later I’d hear him lumbering down the steps carrying his bedding. In the morning, the portraits in the hallway would be crooked from where the pillows rubbed.

In No Doubt, Gwen and Tony broke up and he didn’t even quit the band. They had to (or maybe they got to?) feel the static of it every day. Tragic Kingdom was already in my three-CD changer, and I skipped a few tracks and hit play. In the video for “Don’t Speak,” Tony stands stock-still while Gwen practically sings straight into his mouth. I could barely handle the sweet in-between of it. Can’t look / can’t look away. My God, the power in that! The way men melted before my mother. No, think of Tony’s thin lips! Gwen’s white throat, her impossible belly, the way she liked to plunge her hips at the camera. f*ck You and f*ck Me—she said them both at once. She wore that jewel on her forehead like a third eye, so even when her eyes rolled back she could stare at Tony. Poor, dumb Tony. I pulled the blanket over my head and felt my own breath circle back into my neck and I tried to f*ck my pillow the way that Gwen would f*ck her pillow, or maybe the way she would f*ck me, all muscle and tongue, and just when I was making good progress, I remembered Hegge’s dead eyes on the couch, and went cold.

My mother must’ve canceled her date to stay with Mr. Hegge at the hospital. She called a couple hours later and said it was a heart attack but he was expected to recover, then hung up and coolly ignored my father’s many calls the next day. She got a ride from someone—it killed him not to know who—and picked up her car in the dead of night. I overheard the messages my dad left her, his determined march into Bullsh*t City.

. . . . . This wasn’t how I envisioned you coming home, he said.

. . . . . I’m sorry to have ruined your plans, he said.

. . . . . You looked so vibrant, he said.

. . . . . We should talk, he said.

When my mother called the next day, she told me that, yes, she’d been to see Mr. Hegge and, yes, he’d explained himself, and, no, she didn’t want to talk about it.

“That’s between Mr. Hegge and myself,” she said.

“Was it terminal burrowing?” dad asked, wrenching the phone from my grip. “Like Mittens and the garage.”

She must’ve repeated it.

He said, “Yes, terminal burrowing. I’m capable of reading up on things, you know.”

She hung up.

He said, “What’s the burnt smell?”

I spent that weekend regretting my hair—two washes and already a dull plum—while staring out the window at Mr. Hegge’s cold, dark prefab, the snow piling up along the walkway. Eventually I put on some boots and went to his place, where I shoveled the walkways clear and knocked the icicles from the porch eaves and scattered the rock salt, just like he’d sometimes done for us—wait, who was us?—early in the mornings. I thought this was a very mature thing to do.

My mother visited Mr. Hegge a few times while he recovered in the nursing home, and my father did manage to collect his mail from the overstuffed mailbox, setting it on the kitchen table with a Post-it that said NEIGHBOR. Every Friday, riding to my dad’s, I’d expect to see Hegge’s lights on, the soot from his wood stove uglying up the winter wonderland. My heart hurt at the sight of fresh snow. What was that feeling? It was strange to miss something you hardly noticed before. That paradise/parking lot thing. I started to wonder if I had any right to feel anything at all. I’d never thought of Hegge as a person, as alive and real as me, until after I saw him half dead on the sofa.

Six weeks passed before he came home, driven by a man from Veterans Affairs. “How awkward,” my father said, peering between the blinds. “He must be very embarrassed.”

“Or maybe he was just trying to turn off the lights for you when his heart went Boom.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I bet he saw the work you did on the banister and lost the will to live.”

He lifted his hand like he meant to smack me and I put my fists up. We laughed.

The VA guy unloaded a few bags of groceries and as soon as he left Mr. Hegge crossed the driveway using a cane with three tennis balls at the end. He climbed the porch steps and wrapped on the door near the piece of shoebox that had replaced the broken pane.

“Darryl,” he said. “Give me five minutes of your time.”

He sat in the fugly plaid wingback chair he’d left us when he moved. Seeing his face, still mealy and sallow, was like a pipeline back to the night we’d found him. I’d struggled with it for weeks. The way he’d gasped and rattled, the way I tried to call my friends first. The ease with which my father found his niche in the gray space between cynicism and incompetence. Was that my inheritance? A deaf sort of indifference? Shrugged shoulders, that’s life! Maybe for the first time, I felt no joy in the drama. Only the iron weight of it. It’d been at least a month since I imagined myself struck by lightning. A few days before it had occurred to me that the winter birds would sing even if we weren’t around. I wondered if my father had ever considered it.

Mr. Hegee said, “It’s very hard for a man of my age to admit that he’s made a mistake.”

“No worries,” my father said. “Something in your brain just got mixed up.”

“Nothing was mixed up, Darryl. That’s why I’m here. I built this house, I lived in it, my wife died in it, and now I would like to die in it.”

“Excuse me?”

“You deaf? My parts are all worn out. It might not be tomorrow, but the chariot’s coming. I’m a planner, always have been. We could just swap houses for a while. Or we could just wait toward the end, then I can get wheeled over by the hospice people. Or I could just kill myself over here, that’s my preference. No mess of course. I’d be happy to compensate you for your time.”

“Mr. Hegge,” my dad said, a little quack in his voice. “I don’t think that is a good idea.”

“I’ll crawl over here and die on this porch if I have to. Just trying to be courteous.”

Then Mr. Hegge stood, slapped his hat down over his ears, tried to zip his coat, failed, hands shaking, eyes wet. He said “Ahh f*ck it,” and reached for my father’s hand instead. No hand went out to meet him. “You think on it, Darryl.”

On the way out, he winked at me like we shared the world’s oldest secret.

The weather warmed and the snow compressed like my old mattress. The whole town felt colorless, my hair included, and Mr. Hegge had stuck a seven-thousand-dollar check into our mailbox, which sat on the kitchen table for one long weekend as the greed, the goodness, and the ego all fought for space in my father’s head. I took one look at the check and knew it would all come together. Besides, my father had spent a long time sitting on the phone with my mom the night before, and it was clear to me that they were negotiating some armistice to help grant the old man’s dying wish.

But the next day I opened the lid to the trash can and saw the confetti of the check sprinkled over top some old French fries. An image came to me, quick as a blink. I was going to set my father’s f*cking hair on fire. I found him in the TV room, trimming his fingernails and stuffing the slivers into an empty beer bottle. “Come here,” I said. “Come out to the kitchen so I can set your f*cking hair on fire.”

“I can’t believe the way you talk to me. Does your mother let you talk to her like that?”

“You told him No?” I was rifling through the junk drawer looking for a lighter. A hairbrush, a compact, why were so many of my mother’s things still lingering in this house? I found a Bic, marveled at the spark, and all at once I was hovering over him, looking down at the black pores of his nose. I could tell he was agitated. Scared, almost. The usual smugness gone. He put the beer bottle up to his lips and almost drank his own fingernails.

“Everything he did for us while you sat on your fat ass, and you told him No?”

Sparks but no fire. I flicked it until my thumb blistered, and my eyes winced from the brightness. I threw the lighter in his face and told him to say something before I dug out some more wedding matches.

He stood up, adjusted his pants, and said, “Mr. Hegge was always obsessed with your mother. I mean obsessed. You saw the way he snooped around looking at her. Tell me you did.”

I didn’t want to say it, but it was true. He did dote on her. He left us—wait, her?—roses that he cut from the bushes. He turned his back when my father opened his mouth. But who didn’t? I remembered this strange time when I’d walked into Hegge’s yard to shoo the strays back to our place (he was always threatening, toothlessly, to shoot them on sight) and I found him sitting on his porch, dripping sweat from the tip of his nose. Something looked wrong with him. He was panting, and pale. When I told him I would go get my mother, he croaked, “Don’t you dare!”

My father was looking at me without a hint of told-you-so. He said, “That man is a pervert and an interloper and he tried to pry your mother away from me.” He had a stupid look on his face. Guileless, beaten. He said, “You two are just so mean to me now!”

I left him to wallow and called my mother, catching her on the way to work.

“I hear you, Livie,” she said. “But you have to understand it from your dad’s point of view. That’s his house. People can’t just choose the place they get to die.”

“He’ll listen to you. Make him listen to you!”

“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “There’s nothing I’m willing to do.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Why do you think you get to know everything all the f*cking time?” she asked.

“He told me Mr. Hegge was in love with you.”

I could hear the crackling static from my mother twisting the phone cord between her fingers. Like cracked knuckles, the sound of a brain at work. She said, “God you ought to see what it’s like at work. Men always think they’re in love with me.”

And I knew, then, that it was true.

That spring I turned fifteen, went to my first woods party, got drunk on one Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and after an hour of hounding, I agreed to make out with some girl from the trailer park while the guys stood around and hooted. Maybe I had expected something different, something silky. But our teeth clicked and her tongue felt like a deflated balloon and she laughed into my mouth. She literally curtsied for the boys, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The feeling I felt in that second—a red planet, claws and teeth. Decapitators! Shame! But later, when they asked us to do it again, I said Yes. That time, I shoved my hands into her the back pockets of her jeans and squeezed like I could wring something real out of her. Some dude yelled HOLY f*ckING sh*t!

The next morning my mother burst into my room at seven AM and told me that my punishment for coming home drunk was to go to Mr. Hegge’s with her. He’d had another stroke a few weeks before, and things weren’t looking good.

It’s funny—huh, not haha—how imagination works. You’re always the victim or the hero, never just the girl standing around. (Ex: I’d never imagined someone else mauled by a turkey vulture or falling into a fissure.) I had my fantasies on the car ride over but when I walked into Hegge’s prefab I knew there would be grand schemes between my mother and me. We wouldn’t be blackmailing my dad or sneaking Hegge into the spare bedroom in the dead of night. He was hooked to machines, guarded by a hospice nurse, and propped up on a heavy, metal-framed bed. What’s worse was the greasy maroon sweatpants. I had never seen him in anything except starched blue jeans held up with black suspenders. That’s how I knew it was close.

He lived for three weeks, and all I learned from sitting with him during that time was that there was no good place to die. There was lots of wheezing and a constant smell of piss. Sometimes he would reach down from the bed and feel the empty air for a dog he’d had twenty years before, but he never mentioned his wife. Not once. He died in the company of my mother and me and a male hospice worker that he liked to harass for not joining the army. His last words were, “I f*cking hate this.” This! This what? My mother told me that people say the craziest things at the end. Once, one of her patients sat upright from the hospital bed, whispered, “Who the hell is frying onions?” and laid back down, dead within minutes.

After the coroner left with the body, I stepped out to the porch with my mother. She was smoking and I asked her for one, thinking heroic thoughts about death and disclosure and honesty. Thinking that now we were more like sisters. But my mother snarled at me and said, “He’s not even cold and you’re trying to find an angle.” It was June, the first heat wave where everything undulates and thrums. We listened to the crickets, and my mother cried, and after a while, she said, “Someone left an address taped to the door years ago. Your father and I think it was Mr. Hegge.”

I thought through it. The yelling in the bathroom, the crooked picture frames. The day I came home from school and found the dishes shattered on the kitchen floor. I said, “The address to dad’s girlfriend’s.”

“No,” she said. She chuckled. “I was sleeping with a radiologist from Smethport.”

I said Oh, and my mind went there, all the way to some couch in Smethport, my mom straddling some man, her hair fanned out over some man’s shoulders, her tit* in some man’s mouth. But it didn’t bother me, not really, because I knew what it was to want. I knew the secrets that want can make. I thought I understood my mother then, because I was at the age where I believed we were just the sum of the things we want.

But I was wrong. That wasn’t the whole story. She said, “When your father and I decided to separate, Mr. Hegge tried to get me, us, to move in together. He said it would be strictly platonic. I guess it does seem really weird in retrospect. It was so sad, Livie. The man literally took off his baseball hat when he came to speak with me.”

She said, “I’ll never forget what he said. He said, We can help each other. Wouldn’t that be good?”

As we stood in the sun and she walked me through the other details of Hegge and the divorce, I felt the camera of my little life pan. There I was with my fresh blonde hair, looking upward at my beautiful mother, nodding. And then it panned again, and it was my father in the suspenders, holding a hat over his heart, saying, Wouldn’t that be good? Wouldn’t it? My dad with his little lectures. My dad with his smoldering khakis. My dad with his color-coded Rolodex. His terrible beer, his stupid pride and clumsy affection, his secret trips to the sofa each night. Pathos is the word I would later learn. Those SPCA ads with the dogs like ratty old footstools! A downward-looking love, disgust somewhere on the periphery.

Mr. Hegge left my mother the little money he had and instructed her to gift me, of all things, a rusty iron anvil from his woodshed. Stamped John Deere 1927, it weighs twenty-five pounds. If I had ever expressed interest in a tool, it was out of sarcasm or politeness. Hegge would have known that, and in the twenty years since I’ve had it, its primary function has been to bruise my shins. I used to tell the men I brought home that I was training to be a metalsmith. For a couple years I even kept a hammer on top of it, because nothing says you mean business like a ballpeen.

My wife Lorraine has wanted the anvil gone for years, but it sits uselessly on the bottom shelf of a bookcase. I’m looking at it right now, sitting on the couch, sharing an electric blanket with my dumb, pretty wife, who has disappeared into her phone. If she wasn’t so obsessed with crosswords, I’d worry she was having an affair. Occasionally she’ll break the silence and ask me the capitol of Mongolia, abbreviated, or a five-letter word for reckoning. There are times where I look at her and I cannot think of anything to resent.

This, to me, is love.

I’m waiting for my mother to call and tell me to hurry home. My dad is sick, the dying kind, and we’ve been unsure when I should make the trip. When you live across the country, it really is a guessing game. And dad? He keeps saying it’s up to me, as if to grant me a choice I already have. My mother claims loneliness has humbled him. When he got sick, she sold her little place one town over and went back to take care of him. At first, I was livid. I told her life only moves one way. But Lorraine keeps reminding me that if you respect someone, you’re supposed to respect their decisions. Now there’s something resentable!

Sometimes I look at the anvil and remember Hegge pounding out a bend in the decapitator. Other times I see TV tropes. Wile E. Coyote looks up just in time to see the anvil drive him into the Earth. He crawls from his terminal burrow, stars running laps around his flattened head. The roadrunner sprints past. How long have we been mistaking that paint job for a tunnel? I’ve accepted that Hegge gave me that anvil just because it’s so cumbersome. Like a joke without a punchline. Like the fact that soon my father will be dead.

I’m hoping for a quick deluge of feeling, followed by nothing.

But I doubt that will be up to me.

Today, rare sun in Seattle. We’re nine stories up and I’m watching a little electric car parallel park on the narrow street below us when my phone begins to chatter on the coffee table. Don’t answer it. Let it ring. Just look down at that tiny car, and wait. It couldn’t even hold a dozen clowns. Watch the people walking obliviously to work. Is there a five-letter word for the comfort one feels in gravity? The thrill of the crush—the whistling steel, detonated airbags, shrieking alarms. Flashing lights, buckled metal. A panicked pedestrian running away, a useless messenger bag held over his head. Later, maybe, he’s calming at home on his plushy couch, a glass of nice red curling between his fingers, saying, Honey, you wouldn’t believe it. Today I saw the craziest thing.