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He started drinking at 6 in the morning, was sober by 2 in the afternoon, but for the life of him he couldn’t say who that was showering in the bathroom, whose or what gray cat had just started up the hall, why the room’s width had grown in size, and what was that shape in the smoke curls above the ash tray, a mouse tail, a hook of hair, a suggestion of surf, or a letter of some language he was as yet unaware but would soon learn?

Bart, for example, who was never associated with great tragedy but with awkward steadfastness, Bart, who would never be associated with a memorable wedding, watched his father quickly taken by cancer. His father had stayed active for as long as possible and made sure that every morning and every night Barry, a lab mix he’d found late in life, was fed. And then Bart’s father died.

The day after his father died, which was the day of the funeral, Bart walked into his father’s house and saw Barry standing on his haunches in the doorway of the kitchen with a peculiar seriousness on his yellow face and in his large black eyes. Barry’s tail swished back and forth behind him. He watched Bart with unnerving and concentrated expectation. But what was Barry expecting?

The sun shone brightly in the room. The light through the kitchen windows had a certain white slowness, a cold angularity that slanted onto Barry’s tail as it swept back and forth across the linoleum, raising a gold dust of hair and motes into the air.

Bart stood watching this amazing confluence of light and movement and time. Bart for all his steadfastness suddenly understood what the light and Barry were telling him. It wasn’t a revelation. It wasn’t a stroke of religious validity or, as they say in literary circles, an epiphany. It was nine o-clock in the morning and someone needed to feed Barry and Barry was probably very hungry. No one had fed Barry the night before, at least Bart hadn’t remembered doing so in yesterday’s confusion.

And so, from then on, for Bart, Death became an image. Death became a dog sitting at the door to a bright room. The light is white. It breaks through the windows at an angle. In this light and in this room a dog wags its tail, waiting to be fed.

Sometimes when Bart came home from work, Barry would be waiting at the door, wagging his tail, and Bart would think of his father and smile.

The first sign that something had gone wrong was found at the fence surrounding the property.

The second came at the barn where they found the remnants of collision.

The third thing that told them that things had gone wrong was found at the back door, yet another, which was third but third divided, at one of the windows they’d left open for the breeze, which meant there were more than one, perhaps two, three.

The fourth sign was the empty refrigerator. Then from upstairs, they they heard the kids scream.

It was big, the kids said. There were two of them. They looked like hairy men or big giant ferrets with long arms. When they heard you coming, they broke through the screens and were gone. They had red eyes but not the kind of red eyes in the movies or stories, real red eyes, like glow from a flashlight through your fingernails.

The chain links were repaired, the big breaks in the barn siding, the back door and the all the shredded window screens. In the barn, a young man swept up the bones and the skin that had been left behind.

But do you think they were going after the children? Mother asked. Do you think they’ll come back for them?

The trail was easy to follow in the morning. They went on foot. They ate lunch in an uneasy camp and, curiously, they had little hunger. They followed the prints to the outer edges of things. And at dusk they found them in a clearing with the second half of the cow they dragged here from the barn. They remembered the details of the sun going down. They remembered at the western horizon individual and distant trees on the far away hills, leaves, cactus needles, a pile of stones silhouetted against the orange and purple burn of the dropping sun.

They’d put the second half of the cow on a platform of cracking shale; they’d already begun to rip into it as if every moment until sun rise was about blood and skin.

They tossed their packs, their guns, and their maps. The lids of their eyes felt like thin wet paper. Then they joined in, surprised at how how high they could leap and how strong their fingers were.

He read in the morning and at night. It was everything else in between that was difficult or strange. After the dawn and as dusk was beginning or just at the edges of these times or deeper into the day, such ambiguity, so much strangeness.

Marleena sipped her wine. It was dark out, a wall of black at the dining room windows, the city lights slowly going out or coming on or coming on and going out. He brought the food to the table and opened the lid and found the contents not quite cooked enough or over cooked, burned to the center or raw in the center and burned at the edges. He sat back and said, “I swear I followed the directions.”

Marleena sniffed the food and squeezed her lips, narrowed her eyes. She said, “You should’ve let me cook.”

He struggled through dense days, days thick with mystery. Abner strolled through the office with a stack of papers in his arms. He said, “Someone told me to bring these here. Where do I put them?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He never knew where Abner was supposed to deposit the papers and it was most often the case that when Abner appeared, he had papers, papers he didn’t know what to do with and they never knew who to call about it and ask. There was a table in the office with stacks and stacks of papers.

He told Marleena about it. She cut into her chicken breast and smiled at her plate and made motions of disapproval with her head. She said, “It’s Abner who never asks. You don’t know because you think he should know. But he doesn’t know. But someone obviously gives him the papers but he never asks them what he’s supposed to do with them once he gets them up to your floor.”

“He says he asks and they never tell him. They just tell him to take the papers up to my floor,” he said.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Marleena said. “Let’s go out to eat. I know a place downtown where they make good chicken.”

At the restaurant he told her about his drive to work, how at a particular intersection he always saw a red car waiting for the light, a small red car with a small man at the wheel and this small man had a small head so that it looked like a child was driving.

He ordered the chicken. Marleena had a salad with cherry tomatoes and crumbled cheese that smelled of long traditions of dinners and expert cooks. When the waiter brought Marleena the salad he regretted ordering the chicken and not ordering the salad. But the wine was good.

“You always see the red car?” she asked.

“Yes, always,” he said. “Every morning when I come to the light there’s the little red car with the little driver at the wheel. I stop at the light and the little car crosses in front of me. That’s what’s mysterious about it. I might be five minutes late or five minutes early. I’m always caught at the light and when I’m caught at the light, I see the red car. Everyday except weekends. That’s the way my days are. Everyday I see pretty much the same things and I have no idea what they mean. And then I go home, follow the directions, and the chicken is either raw or dried up. I don’t know what to think about it.”

Marleena told him her salad was “very very good.” The chicken they brought him was “very very nice.”

The next day was a work day so he dressed, put a coffee into the holder in the car, and drove into the city. At the same intersection at the same light and on the road running perpendicular to his own, he stopped and, as it happened every day, he saw the red car. It was that kind of intersection where right and left turning cars had a light all to themselves so the cars going into the city waited and the cars going south waited also.

This day, however, he decided to try something new. He turned off the ignition, got out and watched for an opening and ran to the passenger side of the little red car, opened the door and got in. Quickly, he saw that it wasn’t a small man who looked like a child at the wheel. Rather, it was a small woman, a small old woman with wire rimmed glasses, small teeth, and earrings that looked like rain falling.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “But I see you here everyday. Everyday at this same intersection I see you and I just wanted to come and say hi or stop you and ask who you are and where you’re going.”

The small old woman said, in a long-pitched voice that sounded like a boy’s, a boy who might sing for a church choir, “Me too. I also see you everyday, in your little blue car. I’ve always thought it was a little odd.”

The light changed for her. She put the car into gear and gave the car some gas, passing through the intersection. He looked passed the old woman’s head and saw that two men had gotten out of their cars and were watching him and the old woman drive away.

The old woman said, “Yes, everyday I see you in your little blue car, a big young man or young woman in a little blue car, maybe going to work, of course going to work.”

“And what about you?” he said. “Where do you go everyday? Where are you going when I see you every morning at that intersection?”

“Like you,” she said, “to work. Everyday when I see you I’m going to work. But not this day. Yesterday was my last day at work and now I’m driving out of the city for good and I’m not coming back.” She smiled at the road ahead. She had hands that reminded him of the hands of mice. Printed on her dress were small red flowers.

“Me too,” he said. “Yesterday was my last day at work, too. Just like you, today’s my last day in the city. I can’t make sense of these things anyway.”

The small woman nodded at the wind shield. She said, “Good. That means I won’t need to turn around.”

“No,” he said, “no need to turn around.”

“I think Ned’s gone a little crazy,” said Evergreen Holmes, smiling at Jimmy Williams.

“I haven’t seen him in years,” Jimmy said, visiting the porch on this hot evening. From the porch they could see the lights of the stadium.

“Just a little crazy,” Holmes said, drinking lemonade.

“Does he still sweat a lot?” Jimmy asked.

“Like a cold beer in Atlanta,” Holmes said. “Always has music in his ears and, yes, the novel in his hands. He always has the novel with him and he’s always reading it, even at the game right now.”

“The novel?” Jimmy let the dog’s tail thread through his palm. He had a lemonade in the other hand, which he shook so that he could listen to the ice.

From the stadium they heard cheering. Holmes and Jimmy heard the muffled throatiness of the loudspeaker.

Jimmy said, “But the novel’s not going to go on forever, unless it’s some sort of magic novel that goes on forever and is so good Ned takes it with him wherever he goes, work, the game, whatever. He sits even at the game reading his novel and sweating and listening to his music, whatever.”

Evergreen Holmes looked at Jimmy Williams and smiled again. He sipped the lemonade. He took a bottle out of the cooler, opened it, and poured some of its contents into his lemonade. Jimmy held out his glass and Holmes poured some into his, knowing Jimmy would be here a while.

Holmes said, “Well, that’s what Ned says. He does say it’s a magic novel. He says it goes on forever. He’s been reading it for years. He takes it to the game then puts the game on the radio so that he can experience two games at once, and then he opens the novel and reads the new novel that appears there after he’s finished the one before.”

“That’s crazy,” Jimmy said.

“”That’s what I’m saying,” Holmes said. “Ned’s a little crazy.”

“He doesn’t sound a little crazy. He sounds a lot crazy, whole or all crazy.”

“Well, that’s the funny thing about it,” Evergreen Holmes said. “He’s showed it to me and its true. We compared it and its true. True enough the first novel started just like this: ‘He sat in the stadium, the score 2 to 1 in the 9th. And that’s when it started to rain.’ and when he finished that novel the first line changed, read like this: ‘Edgar’s days at the plate were over.’”

“That’s impossible,” Jimmy said.

“Saw it with my own eyes,” Holmes confirmed.

“It’s impossible,” Jimmy said.

“You can see him now,” Holmes said, “somewhere above play, listening to the game on the radio, watching or not really watching the game on the field, and, yes, reading the novel, a damned novel Ned can’t hardly leave alone, even at the game.”

“Crazy,” Jimmy said, looking distressed at he nearby stadium.

“Damn right,” Evergreen Holmes said. “And you know what’s even crazier?”

“What could be crazier than that?” Jimmy asked.

Holmes said, “Everyone I tell that story to believes it.”

They’d been called to Italy on a tour and the offer of a job. Currency, selling currency. “We have to spread ourselves,” he said. “We can always come home if it doesn’t work out.”

“And living in Italy,” she said, “not much longer than a year, perhaps, could open all kinds of doors later for us. And it’ll be good for the kids.”

At the Firm’s front desk, a woman wondered who he was, gave him a smile full of empty recollection. She spoke into a phone. A company official shrugged his shoulders. “You’ve come from the states?” he said. “All this way? There must have been a mistake, a grave mistake.”

He showed the man all the documents, the names, the correspondence, everything impressive. He told the man his kids were all prepared. They’d found a school. The executive had it all on his desk and shook his head. The man said he knew none of the names. The executive was sorry but that it must have been a mistake, an incredible ruse.

He still had his job back home, and she was a woman of means, but the kids were waiting across the ocean. They rode in silence back to the hotel. Through his head went lists: who to call, who to blame, lists of all the questions he hadn’t asked. He ran through the phone calls, the transfers; they’d studied the language at the dinner table together. The months past of genuine preparations, now all an elaborate nothing, no more than the noise that passed the windows in little gusts.

“God,” she said. “It’s amazing. I’ll bet the hotel’s been broken into, all our things gone. It may be that sort of joke.”

He looked at her and thought about laughing.

Back at the hotel, they found the lock apparatus indeed broken. The mattress had been tossed against the television. All their clothes torn to shreds, the laptops stomped to death. Across the walls where there had once been paintings someone had drawn round heads with crosses for eyes with her lip stick and with her nail polish.

“This isn’t happening,” she said.

He went to the window and saw a man with what looked like her bag speaking to a cab driver, other cabs waiting.

“Look,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. That guy has your bag.”

They took the stairs, flew the few floors down. She told him they should call the police. But he was rushing down with the last few months of mistakes in his head, all the promises he’d given his children. On the street, they saw the cab pull away. They ran to another cab and said in practiced Italian to follow.

The cab took them to a wooded area, maybe the edge of a park, the other cab already stopped up ahead, which he thought odd.

“I left my wallet back at the hotel room, in my bag. Shit,” he said. “And I don’t have my bag,” she said. The driver, who spoke English, said, “You need to pay.” He showed them a knife. The smile on the driver’s face told him that the driver knew something, something more dangerous than the fare.

With suddenness, he took her by the hand and they ran into the woods. That fast. He took her hand and started off. That fast.

“Don’t look back,” he said.

“How could you forget your wallet?” she wanted to know, running out of her shoes.

He heard the cab driver shout something. Here, the trees grew tall and the bushes thick and he could sense a river, docks, small boats. He heard the driver’s breathing. He remembered the thinness of the knife, the mattress against the wall, a round face with X eyes, and the feel of his wife’s hand wet and hot in his as they ran.

He heard more voices behind him, a crowd chasing after. He heard the word “thieves.” At a narrow pier a young man was tying a boat, the motor running. He pushed the young man into the water and he pulled his wife into the boat with him so that she fell to her knees, and they were off, turning into the current. On the dock, four men appeared. One took out a pistol and fired it, but fired high, and they appeared to be laughing as they pulled the young man out of the water, who was laughing too.

His wife’s hair reminded him of branch trimmings and snakes. She kept saying, “This is crazy. This is crazy. We have to find someone.”

“All we have to do is find someone,” he told her, as the little boat bucked, turned on a shallow log, and nosed into the other shore. He fell forward and hit his chin. She, falling forward too, pressed her fingers into his buttocks.

He yanked her into mud, water, and low grabby tangle and they bulled their way into the edge trees. “God,” he whispered. “God.”

“Stop it,” she said. “Stop it.”

They came out onto a trail that might have been made by carts or small cars. “We’ll call when we get back to the hotel,” he said. But he didn’t finish saying “hotel.” He breathed out “ho” then felt a great weight at the small of his back, which split him in two. Something hard and gritty snapped at his mouth. For a moment he saw nothing, tasted blood. Then he sat up with immense nausea, opened his eyes and saw fallen leaves, sand, and the trunks of thin trees.

First he said, My mouth hurts. He said, My back hurts. Next he said, “Sandra?” Next and louder he said, “Sandra?”

He stood. He hobbled up the dirt road and saw ahead, where the this path met an actual road, a yellow truck, no, two yellow trucks. He began a run, calling her name. A long arm reached out and waved from a window as if a party was over, as if a friend was just departing. The truck drove away and the other followed.

At the new road, he felt her absence. He said her name more than once, but he couldn’t, at the same time that he uttered her name, which was all he could say out loud, place the name. All he could say was the name and wonder what it meant. Her name and the long arm out of he yellow truck that had waved with a gentleness he couldn’t fathom. He seemed to feel it was saying goodbye, that it meant goodbye. He said her name and asked what it meant, and he also had a feeling that somewhere in those clusters of buildings in the distance was his house, a cup of coffee, work, and that the name he kept saying softly had something to do with it and then he looked down and saw that he wasn’t wearing shoes and he wondered why. Why was he wearing black socks in this place, this place he couldn’t recall?

In the morning, after a night that seemed to go on forever, he went to his car with his bags and found a shape scratched on the hood in the form of a pawn, crude, icy cuts in the paint, maybe made with a key.

Still, he had his ticket to Luzern, Switzerland, where his father had disappeared, and an appointment with a private detective. On the chute feeding people into the aircraft, he received (and this was surprising as he hadn’t thought she’d mastered the phone) a call from his mother’s mobile. Her voice raved through the receiver, “If you’ve a mind for Luzern, change it. I woke up this morning, went to the car, just an impulse believe me, and found a scratch on my hood in the shape of a pawn.”

He turned and made his way to the boarding area, which had the feel of a sudden evacuation, as if all critical airport activity had gone elsewhere.

From a pay phone he called Lorena, who had just arrived from Mexico City, visiting her inlaws. “I was going to call you,” she said. “My father-in-law phoned–there are so many calls this morning. He said that on the wall of his house, the one that faces east, he found a massive pawn drawn onto the stucco with chalk.”

“I’ll come over,” he said. “Someone scratched a pawn into the hood of my car, and my mother . . . ”

“We should meet in the park on the bench across from the deli,” Lorena interrupted. “For some reason I don’t feel safe here.”

On the freeway back to town, he felt that something about his life had changed with the appearance of the pawns. When the past returns to the now, he told himself, the future changes, which is why he’d tried to avoid it until this morning, the day of his flight, which he now knew was a mistake. He began to question his mother’s phone call, as it was unlikely that she’d suddenly learned how to use her cell. So who had called? And how did she know he’d been about to board a plane? These question’s lead him back to Lorena and the deli, a deli across from a park bench where they often met for lunch. How was it possible, therefore, to conclude that such a place was safe?

In any event, he took the off ramp and made his way downtown and parked. He crossed under the arches of the park entrance and made his way to the bench across from the deli.

His father had been a chess master and with his father the days and the weeks and the years had been an extension of the language of the board.

“To your father,” his mother said, “chess is war and madness.”

The day before he’d flown to Luzern and subsequently disappeared had been the day the son had beaten the father for the first time. His father played a defensive, frustrating game that lulled the opponent into naive aggressiveness. His father’s favorite move was to castle whenever possible, and so, to beat his father, he’d studied. He began to dream chess boards in which the castling scenario had been arranged so that the board and its pieces took on a grand and systematic geometry that would stay with him like a glow when he closed his eyes. For years he dreamed it, and his father would smile as the game drew longer, sometimes deep into the night. He remembered that after he’d beaten him, his father had stood, congratulated him, shook his hand. The next day his father had shaved off his beard and then had taken his flight, as he typically did that time of year.

His mother told him, after his father had disappeared, “There are rumors but only rumors. A man named Pierce, who was the first man to beat your father, was found killed, strangled. The second, a man named Bengal, disappeared and was never found. Only three men ever beat your father.”

“And who was the third?” he asked, giving the numbers little thought.

“You,” his mother said.

Lorena was not sitting at the bench. He waited for thirty minutes, thinking she might be late, caught in traffic, diverted on a sudden errand. He went to the deli and bought a drink and came back to the bench. Still no Lorena. Then something drew his attention. The windows in the tall building above the deli used blinds to protect rooms from the sun. Some of the blinds had been drawn, others not drawn. He now realized that the front of the windows in the building had been arranged in the shape of a great chess board with an ingenuity that struck him with sudden terror, the terror of returns and rumors and plans that extended across the globe.

He called Lorena’s cell. There was no answer. He called his mother’s cell, then her home phone, but neither of these were answered. He studied the face of the building and its windows but for some reason his next move escaped him, for this was a new game, an extension of something old, with new pieces, and a new and dangerous geometry.