Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,45

and opaque adolescence. By the time Susan was in the morgue and her death dispatched as accidental manslaughter, Mark had disappeared with the girl. June had, with relief, seen her younger nephew off. Now he understood.

Now he understood a lot of things, all the signals that he’d missed. Such as Uncle Travis’s departure, for instance, which had coincided with the arrival of two teenage boys, or Mark’s abiding distance, which seemed less a rejection of his younger brother than a rejection of their relations at the core. They had known—they had all known—and not only had they not protected Albert from their knowledge, he had barely figured in their calculations. Even Susan, no blood relation, still carried more weight in his family than he.

It was dark. He left the house. He was in Spectacle Pond, staring at the water, in the far pond, where Susan and Ludi had looked at the sky. His stomach rose before him like a white moon.

No. There was the actual moon, a delicate, high-set orb, stars twinkling all around it like the crystal earrings Susan often picked off the black velvet trays of vendors in Provincetown. His own stomach was a slab of green cheese, buoyant, like the half-eaten Styrofoam below a float.

He was surprised to find that he was crying again, tears running down his face in hot straight paths. When Susan died, he had cried for years, it seemed—for the first months, vast bellowing gasps of bewilderment, and then a stretch of shamed whimpering that emerged while he was waiting in line at the grocery store or standing in an elevator.

These tears were different—less bewildered and more astonished, as if he had suddenly learned he was adopted, or born on a distant planet. As if this world was the distant planet. This was, he supposed, the moment when he was meant to give up, to leave his corpse, his white bloated body, washed up on the needled shore. Or maybe he could seek out Mark, and gun him down in the middle of a performance of Our Town. Then he would track down Ludi in whatever hovel she was in, remind her of the many dinners Susan had cooked on her behalf. For a moment, he saw himself dragging her into a cab, shouting orders as some Spanish boyfriend gesticulated in the distance. Albert had never been to Spain.

He was not going to do any of these things. The black sky over the pond was a lid, he suspended in its jar. Through a conflagration of circumstance and other people’s will, he was floating alone two miles from a dark small road smack in the center of a barely peopled peninsula, with nobody to know or care. He was not angry or murderous. He was lonely, merely lonely—or at least, he thought, lonelier than anyone like him had right or reason to be.

LA JETÉE

BY DAVID L. ULIN

Harwichport

He had been here before. Countless times before, not the physical space but the emotional space, the roiling space inside. That summer on the Cape, summer he’d turned thirteen, he’d had this … vision was the only word for it, as if it were a movie in his head. Ever since, it had dogged him, like a distant memory: black-and-white, herkyjerky, somewhere between a film and a collage of stills. Always, he was at the center, moving heedlessly along the jetty, around its great stone curve. He was running from something but he didn’t know what, only that it kept coming, relentless, unforgiving, like a simple twist of fate. The jetty made no sense, it was a dead end, a blind alley, but it was where the vision took him, while the big waves crashed against the rocks. He had been drawn here in reality also, drawn to the vastness, to the brackish sweep of steam-drilled boulders, to the tension between industry and nature, the breakwater holding the waves from the harbor and the waves pushing to take it back. They were inevitable, the waves, as inevitable as the vision, in which it was always high tide, and as he tore out past the breakers, the rough water pulled at his feet, until, just beyond the halfway point along the jetty, a big wave crashed across the rocks and swept him out to sea.

Out to sea … and didn’t that describe him, didn’t that get right to where he was? Thirty-eight years old, adrift in a life that didn’t fit him any longer, if indeed it ever