"Could you please just come up to the second floor, please?"

"You're always making fun of the theater, making fun of my friends. You don't take any of it seriously."

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the theater. I have trouble losing myself in the action of a play. The actors always seem hysterical to me, scurrying around the bright box of the stage, screaming and crying and clawing at each other. Watching a play, I always feel like part of some team of psychiatrists that's been called in to observe a group of out-of-control mental patients.

"I come to the plays, don't I?" I said. "I hang out with you and your cla.s.smates."

"Name three of my friends from playwriting school. In fact, just name three of my friends."

"This is ridiculous. Of course I can-"

"Name two."

"Bonnie and Pat."

"Pat's my sister."

"The girl you went out with the other night. The flat-chested one. Her name starts with a D. Debbie?"

She proceeded to name all my friends from work, some I might have forgotten myself. Everyone in my department.

"What's the t.i.tle of the play I'm working on right now?" she said.

It was on the tip of my tongue. It had "dirt" or "mud" in the t.i.tle. Something mud.

She leaned her head against the iron banister and closed her eyes. A ribbon of hair fell across her cheek. The sight reminded me of how she looked in the mornings, just before waking up. Her expression so serious, brow furrowed in concentration as she swam up from that last dream.

"That singer tonight," she said, her eyes still closed. "d.i.c.k Doyle. All week I've been telling you about him, about how much I loved his songs. I must have spent twenty minutes just two days ago going on about how deeply his music spoke to me."

I tried to recall these conversations, but all I could hear of them were vague echoes. A few words here and there. Trance. Stage. Dream.

"I brought you tonight because I'd hoped that you might hear in those songs what I hear in them. I thought d.i.c.k's performance might affect you. But you didn't pay any attention."

"Do you have his CD? Give his record to me now. I'll listen to it. I promise."

She picked up her suitcase and continued down the steps. "I spoke to Belle, the woman who introduces d.i.c.k onstage. They're headed back to Florida in a couple of days. I want to go with them."

"Are you out of your mind?" I said, coming to the railing. "What are you, f.u.c.king brainwashed? We're getting married in six months. You're acting like a teenage groupie. You're twenty-five years old."

"If you need me I'll be at Pat's. I left my ring on the night table. I'm sorry, Max." Then she disappeared from view.

"Pearl...If you walk out that door, that's it. I'm locking you out! Pearl!"

The door shut.

I stood on the landing in my boxers, staring down into the vortex of our staircase. I was sure Pearl would come back.

"She's just going through something," I told my friends.

Two weeks later I was driving south on 95, toward Kwimper County, Florida.

Part Two: The Swampy Bottom IT WAS EARLY MORNING BY THE TIME I REACHED MY MOTEL. I'D been up all night guarding the dumpster-awake for over twenty-four hours-but I wasn't tired in the least. In fact, climbing the steps to my room, I felt completely alert, almost hyper. The encounter with the old man had upset me more than I'd expected-all that talk of d.i.c.k Doyle. Still, I tried to get some rest. I took a sleeping pill. I shut the blinds against the morning and got into bed. After a full hour of lying there trying to sleep, I finally gave up and tossed off the sheets.

I still had a while before my girlfriend, Joan, showed up. Her family ran a bus service for old people called the Silver Coach. They had five vehicles in their fleet, which they drove around town along various routes, each route servicing a different set of a.s.sisted-living communities. The buses ran to all the places old people would want to go: the mall, the movies, the hospital, the library, the cemetery. On days I was off work, like today, Joan would come by the motel and pick me up and I'd ride with her while she drove her route.

I did what I could to pa.s.s the time. I watched a show on cable about black holes. I cleaned up the room, even though I knew the maid would come around that afternoon. I took a long shower, during which I tried and failed to jerk off. I shaved carefully. Then I got dressed and went out onto the balcony to have a smoke.

It was nearly nine by now and the roads were full of decent people heading off to work. I thought about checking in with Roddy, but I couldn't bring myself to call. When I first came to Florida, he'd been very supportive. He was always telling me to hang in there, to do what I had to do. He said he understood. But the last time I'd spoken with him, he'd sounded different.

"I have one question for you, Max. One," said Roddy. "Why is my phone telling me you're still in Florida?"

"I'm just tying things up," I said.

"You've been gone two months already. You know you're not getting paid this month."

"I understand. You've already been very generous, Rod."

"You're right. I have." He laughed, and then gave a deep sigh. "Please. Just tell me, Max. Is this really about Pearl, or are you having some sort of...I don't know...breakdown?"

I was lying in bed, watching a caterpillar descend from the air-conditioning vent above my bed. It was bright green, with hundreds of little legs, lowering itself on a silk thread. "I'm okay," I said. "Really."

"Because the longer you stay, the worse it looks. The worse you look, is what I mean."

"I'll be back before you know it," I said.

"Now," he said. "Come back now."

Before I knew it, three more weeks had pa.s.sed. For some reason, though, I felt that there was still time. That doors were still open. After all, I had no intention of staying in Florida. Florida? Florida was the rank, swampy bottom of the country. The place people went to end things. Sticking out over the Gulf like a plank. I'd spent two years in business school and three summers interning ten hours a day just to get where I was-or where I'd been, before I left. If I'd been looking to relocate to Florida, I'd have taken a real job; I'd have gone hunting downtown, in the business district. But I wasn't looking. I wasn't starting over. I was with Roddy. The only reason I was working at all was to stave off some of the bills piling up back in the city. Things had been lean before I left, with all the new costs generated by the apartment. I needed some kind of income, even if only to live on while I was in Florida. I'd thought about waiting tables. I'd applied to drive a cab. I wanted something that paid cash. Something with no ties, that I could ditch at a moment's notice.

I'd been about to p.a.w.n Pearl's engagement ring when I'd noticed the HELP WANTED sign on Orlando's door. The job paid seventeen dollars an hour. More than I expected. p.a.w.nshops got robbed a lot, Orlando explained, and, I admit, the danger factor held a certain appeal for me. I was in Florida because my fiancee had left me for a brain-damaged country singer: there were plenty of moments in each day that I wished someone would blow my f.u.c.king brains out.

More than that, though, the job at Orlando's was attractive because the work would be so different from what I was used to. No pressure, no stress. I liked the idea of working somewhere I'd never even visit in my real life. This was all just a detour. Plus the shop was less than a mile from my motel.

I sat on the railing of the balcony, watching the traffic pa.s.s. After a while the cars became blank panels of color sliding by below. A square of red. A square of gold. A rectangle of apple green. Finally, around ten, the Silver Coach rolled into the motel parking lot. I went down to meet it.

Joan pulled the lever that opened the door. "So, how'd the dumpster treat you last night?" she said as I climbed in.

"Like a star...Good morning!" I said to the few old people already on the bus.

Joan watched me. "Are you okay? You look a little tense."

"I'm fine. Just tired," I said, and kissed her.

"Yum." She swung the door closed and pulled out of the lot.

Joan was twenty-one, ten years younger than me, a smart, beautiful girl. I'd met her at the supermarket near my motel. She was waiting on line ahead of me and her cart was filled with hundreds of mini juices-all for the coach, I eventually learned.

I'd taken a liking to her right away. She was responsible and driven for her age, a go-getter, always helping out her family. And yet there was still a touch of girlish rebellion to her-a wild streak-which I found thrilling. Some nights, after we'd dropped all the riders at their homes, Joan would park in a field near the bus lot and we'd make love in the shuttle. The springs were especially loud, creaking and groaning in a way that made even the gentlest s.e.x feel wild. Whenever I saw Joan's naked body, golden but for three small kites of untanned flesh over her softest parts, I'd begin to ache like I'd never ached for Pearl.

I always took a moment to appreciate this fact. I'd almost say it out loud: Pearl never compared to this. And then I'd give Joan a big kiss on her a.s.s.

I watched her as she piloted the Coach out into traffic. She was wearing a tank top that exposed her shoulders and the top of her pale, freckled chest.

She caught me looking and winked. "Be good," she said. She wore her black hair in sharp bangs that came right down to her eyes, darkening them. I'd decided that she was the kind of girl I should have been with from the start.

Joan's was the longest of the five Silver Coach routes. It consisted of seventeen stops-six at actual communities, eleven at commercial and service sites-and it took a full hour to complete. Some of the old people had nurses who waited with them for the Coach to pull up. Others were still managing by themselves, which always impressed me. We'd drive up and find them waiting on the curb all alone, like packages for us to collect.

I'd ridden with Joan often enough that I knew some of them by now; I knew their stories. Most of the people on her route were still healthy, their minds sharp, their bodies working well. But, of course, there were a few who'd begun to deteriorate. Some were struggling with senility, others were just physically failing, their bodies slowly evicting them. One, a woman named Hattie, for example, had recently taken a bad fall and hit her head on the sink. Since the accident, she'd begun to forget words. It got worse every day.

"So, how are things with that thing of yours?" she said when we picked her up that morning. She sat right behind me with her nurse. Her gray hair was still short from her st.i.tches. I could see the scar on the side of her head, pursed like a baby's frown just over her ear.

"You know, that thing," she said, looking at me, then at Joan, her eyes quizzical and terrified.

"My cold?" said Joan.

"That's right, your thing," said Hattie, though she seemed even more confused by this.

"It's almost all gone, Hattie. Thanks for asking."

"Oh, well, that's good," said Hattie. "Did you hear that, Charmagne?" she said to her nurse. "Her thing. That thing."

I tried to ignore Hattie's conversation with Charmagne as we continued along our route-first to the park, then the mall, then another mall-but the pathology of her injury was too fascinating: the way the rot was systematically moving through her vocabulary, infecting words, leaving them shapeless lumps. Her mother was a thing. The bus stop was a thing. The world was a thing. I was a thing.

I tried to picture Hattie's brain, to imagine what the deterioration process looked like, but all I could manage was a kind of gray coral reef couched inside her skull. I remembered what a diving instructor had once told me about coral. I was snorkeling with my family in the Bahamas and he'd warned me to make sure to watch out for coral reefs while swimming. Just touching a reef, he explained, even brushing it with your finger, could start a chain reaction that might bring down the whole organism.

Now, as we neared the second mall, I wondered if maybe this wasn't so different from how it was with the brain. Of course, a brain could heal from some kinds of trauma, it could rebuild connections, but once touched in certain ways, by certain hands, it was damaged goods.

"Thing thing on the phone," said Hattie. "Thing."

"Yes," said Charmagne, staring out the window at the pa.s.sing palm trees.

I closed my eyes and tried to relax. Still, I couldn't help asking myself how different the beating Hattie's brain had taken was from the type d.i.c.k Doyle's had endured. Hattie certainly couldn't turn her shortcomings on and off. You could push Hattie onstage and shine a spotlight on her, but believe me, it wouldn't start her square dancing. Stop, I thought. Cut it out. But I could already feel the anger rising over how absurd d.i.c.k's story seemed. After all, what kind of phantasmagoric injury could be turned on and off with the flick of a stage light?

"What a phony that d.i.c.k is," I heard the old man from the dumpster say. "How do people fall for bulls.h.i.t like that?" And I simply didn't know. I could not understand what sort of black magic d.i.c.k Doyle used to make himself so appealing. He didn't have brain damage. He wasn't an inspiration. There was no triumph of the human spirit going on at a d.i.c.k Doyle show. With his mustache and his fancy f.u.c.king cowboy boots.

An image of d.i.c.k flashed through my mind. I saw him at home, getting ready for his show that night. He had the mask down; he was completely alert and clear-eyed, singing into the bathroom mirror as he snapped up his cowboy shirt. He fastened his string tie and put on his hat, crooning away in that irritating voice of his. I could see dabs of shaving cream clinging to the bottom of his mustache.

He noticed my reflection in the mirror. "Oh, hey, Maxie," he said, which was what Pearl used to call me.

"Max? Hey," Joan said. "Are you all right?"

I opened my eyes and found that we were parked in front of the church. A couple of the old people were filing out, being helped down by attendants. I felt my face and discovered I was sweating.

"You were grinding your teeth really loud," Joan said. "What were you thinking about?"

"Nothing. I was thinking about how much fun it's going to be to get you out of here and up to New York. You're going to love it." I smiled at her.

"Don't think about that just yet, okay?" she said, and rubbed my thigh.

"Why?"

"Because I don't feel that we need to be thinking about that right now. Let's just enjoy it for a while, all right? Get to know each other. We have time."

"But we don't have time. I'm leaving soon. And I want you to come. Please come with me? Joan?"

Joan kissed me on the jaw. "You were clenching your teeth again," she said.

Orlando had recently seen d.i.c.k perform at the county fair. Penny for your thoughts, I said to him the next day.

"It's not my kind of music," he said. He'd just purchased a set of commemorative coins featuring the birds of the Southern marsh. He was cleaning them one by one with a cloth dipped in a mixture of vinegar and ammonia. The smell made my eyes water.

"But what did you think of d.i.c.k?" I said.

"I thought he was f.u.c.ked up, man," Orlando said, blowing on a coin. "Before he started they had to wipe the drool from his face."

"You know, I don't believe people with trauma to the brain really act like that," I said, watching Orlando rub the coin dry with a piece of velvet. "They can't just snap out of it. They're not so aware of everything."

"I don't like these thoughts, my friend," Orlando said, and tossed the coin to me. On it was a picture of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r nesting in a tree. I slipped the coin into its case, which read: "An aggressive species, the pileated woodp.e.c.k.e.r is known to take over nests already inhabited by other, larger birds that it scares off by means of its hysterical laugh-like call."

"You were doing so well, too, Miller," said Orlando. "The last few weeks you didn't even mention the singer or her, the woman."

"Pearl."

"Where is this coming from all of a sudden? From that old man?"

"Nowhere. I'm fine. All I'm saying is that if d.i.c.k is faking, people have a right to know. You paid what, ten dollars to see him play dumb?"

"Do you remember," Orlando said, holding out the next coin, "how embarra.s.sing it was for you the last time you acted on these thoughts, my friend? These same thoughts?"

I grabbed the coin from him. My first week in Florida had been very hard. The day I'd arrived I discovered that Pearl had moved in with d.i.c.k-that she was living with him in his family's farmhouse outside of town. On top of this, I learned from Pearl's sister, Pat, that she was likely seeing d.i.c.k, too-that she might actually be involved with him.

"She's got a new man in her life, is how she put it," said Pat. "Game over."

Even so, I made a big effort to win Pearl back during those first few days. I tried calling the farmhouse where d.i.c.k and Pearl were living. I even drove out to the property. No one would talk to me, though. Which was ridiculous. The least I deserved was some sort of apology. Because what Pearl had done wasn't fair. You don't just leave someone like that. No discussion, not even a warning shot. It wasn't right. But I was drinking a lot that week, too, so when the Doyle people called the police on me, I wasn't able to properly explain myself.

"Right," said Orlando, nodding. He stared me in the eye while he polished the next coin. "You remember. Your face in the gazette. Everyone making fun of you. Calling you a stalker. And so on."

He handed me the coin, which showed a picture of a golden warbler. "Let me tell you something, my friend," he said. "This man, d.i.c.k-he is not faking anything. You understand? He is a sick person. You are wrong in your thinking about this."

"You're ent.i.tled to your beliefs," I said.

"Well, I don't want violence near this store, understand? Not on my property. No way," he said. "If I get into trouble with the police because of you, Miller, then you will have something to worry about."

Orlando had lived in the States for only a couple of years and he retained a stark fear of run-ins with the police. He still had family in Argentina he hoped to bring over, a sister and her children. He'd told me about his situation one night a few weeks before when we'd gone drinking together and I'd confessed to having come to Florida to win back Pearl.

"My life," he'd said, tapping his wallet, "right here." Then he'd opened the wallet to let a chain of photos accordion out. He told me their names one by one: his sister, Lisette; her sons and daughters, William, Cee-Cee, Barbara, and Vaca. Each had his or her own photo and they were all posed in front of the same patchy dirt yard, so that when he dangled the pictures in one line, it gave the illusion that his relatives were dolls, figurines stacked one on top of the other, biggest to smallest, on a series of plain brown shelves.

"Orlando, I promise, I'm not going to do anything to d.i.c.k," I said. "I was just talking about him. I'm over it."