Rich Strike

1999

Fuck it, is the general feeling here, because we are minimum-wage employees in a doomed independent bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, because what we do is useless, stocking and straightening and standing idly at the register, answering phones, ferrying customers to the Health & Fitness section, Gardening, Travel, guiding them back to the books they will pull from shelves and flip through and then leave in little piles next to the puffy armchairs positioned throughout the store; fuck it because we are a group of eight, maybe ten, depending how many are scheduled, and every last one of us has a college degree and most of us a master’s, because our degrees have amounted to nothing, because when we stand and stock and straighten and mop and clean toilets we are doing so with one hand while clutching with the other our certificates of higher learning and, coiled within them, the bills we receive each month indicating the outstanding balance of our student loans; fuck it because no less than four of us have MFAs to our name, which means we have been trained to produce the very things for sale all around us, but instead of feeling at home here, encouraged by the company of books and bookish people, we are unmoored, queasy with the notion that if we ever do produce a book, by some miracle, nothing will come of it; the stories we thought might change the world, stories about people we used to know back home in those failed industrial wastelands from whence we came, those down-market cities where all the world’s redheaded stepchildren came to live, lost souls and lonely hearts, alcoholics and drug addicts, losers, deadbeats, drifters, felons—these stories will be lost on a shelf amongst thousands of others, thin-spined and slapped shut; no one will buy them or read them or even notice them. They won’t amount to shit.

Fuck it because four-twenty-five an hour, because we take home six-hundred dollars a month and our apartments cost three-fifty, because we eat the rest, and drink it, and there’s never anything left. They don’t pay me enough, is the phrase we toss back and forth, whenever a customer wants special attention, holds us hostage with her idle chatter (it is always women in the store, the middle-aged wives of doctors and lawyers with time and money to burn, sometimes wearing their Derby hats, those pastel flying saucers landed at a slant; or it is the elderly, frail and trembling and bent over their canes, hard of hearing, women who shout at us: Where is John Grisham? Take me to the murder section!). Whenever one of these women asks us to place a local phone call to her nephew to ask him the name of the book he was talking about last Sunday lunch, or wants us to escort her to her car, holding an umbrella over her head while soaking ourselves through, all of this without even buying a book!, all of this because the customer is always right, the customer is royalty, in fact one leaves the house these days only to be a customer, to feel that sense of power even for a moment, whenever this happens we say: They don’t pay me enough. Which is to say: Fuck it.

 

This world comes down to one thing and that thing, the bookstore manager tells us, is money. One must get used to it, he says. One must sit in it, stew in it, shvitz in it. The manager’s name is Roy and he started out like us, a kid just out of college looking for work, something to get through the summer until a better job came along but it never did, and here he is still, still. We wonder exactly how long he has been here, try to calculate his age based on his looks, which are hard to gauge—he is one of those skinny, Hank Williams-style cowboys in stiff blue-jeans and western shirts, slicked back hair, a long face with a crooked nose, soulful brown eyes—and by the various stories he tells: finding out President Kennedy was shot over a loudspeaker in a grade-school classroom, being sent to Vietnam in ’68 and coming home wounded in ’69, then working for a few years in the refinery outside Ashland, Kentucky, that giant hellscape off Highway 64 with its dozens of smokestacks rising into the air, fuming. Roy’s job back then was to shovel raw coke into a furnace and when he came home in the evenings he was so covered in dust, so completely black, he had to strip off his clothes and leave them in a pile on the porch before walking into his mother’s house. His mother cleaned every day on her hands and knees, a bucket of hot water and ammonia, a stiff scrub brush against the kitchen linoleum, but it was little use, because just when the floor was dry Roy came home from the plant and fouled the air, left his tracks and prints everywhere. It was a Catch 22, Roy said, a vicious cycle, one he thought he  would never escape, until one Sunday, lying in bed while his mother was at church, it occurred to him, like a ray of sunlight breaking through parted clouds, that he could go to school on the GI Bill and get himself the hell out of Dodge, as he put it, in his slight country accent. And so he did. He went off to Lexington and read for four years. And then, wanting nothing more than to keep doing that, or something as near to it as he could manage, he landed here.

We try to imagine being here so long. It occurs to us that while we were crying in our cribs, sitting in our high chairs banging our spoons against the trays, when we were climbing jungle gyms and learning how to ride bicycles, chanting multiplication tables in math class, learning to tie knots in Cub Scouts and singing songs in Brownies, while we read our comic books under the covers by the light of our bulky yellow flashlights, while we were developing our first crushes, learning how to rebuild the engines of the beaters we’d bought, then how to drive them, while we were working our first jobs at Dairy Queen, while we were planning our own escapes to colleges as far from home as we could get, during all that time Roy was standing right here, day in and day out, all that time. It blows our minds.

Yes, he tells us, during our morning meetings, those sacred ten minutes before the doors open, when we are all seated cross-legged on the floor in a circle in the music section, our hands folded in our laps, like school children, yes the customers are pains in our asses. Yes, it is we who have in fact risen early and gone out into the world while it was still dark and come here to prepare, and yes, by the time they waltz in at nine o’clock it will be with the swagger of those who think they own the place, it will be with the profound ignorance of people who reach for something without ever once considering how it came to be at their disposal, people who wake to the smell of hot coffee without wondering who made it, who exactly planted the seeds that were cultivated into the plants that produced the beans that were picked, then shipped and roasted and packaged and shipped again, yes, this is all true. But it is the way of the world. These people spend their money here and because they spend their money, we all have a place to work. We must do our best to place into their hands, as smoothly as possible, without in any way interrupting the easy flow between desire and satisfaction they have come to understand as the rhythm of life, whatever it is they want. If you can figure out some other way we all get to stand around in a room full of books and make a living, Roy says, please let me know. He coughs, clears his throat. The life Roy has built for himself here is a far cry from Ashland, and yet he has a chronic cough lingering from those days. Whenever he tries to stifle it, holding a fist up to his mouth, or sometimes worse, spitting something into a handkerchief, we look at him and wonder what is going on inside his lungs, wonder how long before his past catches up to him.

The point is, he tells us one morning, when we are all still new to the job, just give them what they want and get them the hell out of here. Then you can all go home and do whatever you want. Paint your paintings. Pluck your guitars. Write sonnets to the shimmering objects of your hopeless affections. Myself, he says, placing a palm on his chest, I like to read and listen to records. And after six o’clock, I do. Can’t no one stop me. That’s the kind of freedom you get, working here. That’s the deal.

In the mornings we listen earnestly to Roy because we want to learn how to live, what to do with our lives, how to best occupy ourselves; but after work, at the bars we frequent, our spirits flag, in no small part because it’s the end of the century and the world might be ending. It’s hard to know how much to care about anything, how much to invest, whether to buy or sell. We seem to have two choices, the first of which is to panic—to wring our hands and stock our cupboards and pull what money we have from the bank and stuff it under our mattresses, all for fear of what is being called Y2K, the great looming catastrophe of our time. The details are fuzzy for most of us but we understand it has something to do with computers, which we have come to rely on so completely that without quite realizing it we have stretched out prone beneath the shadow of their swords. Experts have appeared on television talking about the dating protocol embedded in our operating systems, explaining that whoever built the first computer, that idiot-savant, only designated two digits to indicate the calendar year, so as we creep forward to the year 2000, the computers creep forward to the moment they will convert from 99 to 00, whereupon the computers will think—this is the language being used—that we have reverted to the year 1900, and when this change registers in the computer brain—again, this is the language of the experts—the computer brain will have the equivalent of a human stroke, the computer brain will freak out, and when the computer brain freaks out there is no telling what will happen; when midnight comes on December 31^st no one knows, all of our records and data might be lost, our bank accounts might be wiped clean, our power might go out, the whole grid might collapse, people on ventilators and dialysis and all the tiny babies in incubators, their fists clenched tight, all of these people might be fucked, not to mention anyone on a plane—we’re told that planes might fall out of the fucking sky—and as for nuclear weapons, it’s possible they could launch themselves.

But wait, say the experts: none of this is even the point. Because when the computer experts are done ranting they pass the mic to the religious experts, who are giddy, who drum their fingers and bounce on the balls of their feet in gleeful anticipation; all this chaos caused by computer failure will be, they say, just the beginning, just an overture to the end of days that will usher in the second coming of Christ, rejoice, all the people in the streets fighting each other for cans of food and sticks with which to build fires to heat their homes, rejoice, all the tribes of people roaming around commandeering resources for themselves with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, all the rape and murder and starvation and suffering, all the perished meek, rejoice, it is all part of His larger plan, and as each day that passes brings us closer to rapture we must waste no time, we must get right with the Lord and make ourselves ready for Him, lo we must busy ourselves, we must boil ourselves clean.

Then there is a plan B—if one is not inclined to worry or to believe in God—and that plan is, in the words of Prince, to party like it’s 1999.  Prince said this back in ’82 and suddenly he seems prescient, a prophet of catastrophe, a messiah in his metallic purple jacket, his hair cut into some kind of bird-like topiary. The song is all synthesizers and electric drums and it is everywhere, it has dissolved into the ether, you can’t take five steps without running into a wall of it. The lyrics paint a tapestry of chaos—The sky was so purple there were people running everywhere—and then, beholding the chaos, give it the middle finger: You know I didn’t even care. Which, when we think about it, and we think about it often, is not so much a party as a brand of dark nihilism. This appeals to the MFAs in our group, along with every other expression of casual disdain, of devil-may-care nonchalance in the face of crisis. When we pull a book off the shelves these days it is Camus or Nietzsche or Sartre, it is McCullers or Heller or Carver or Vonnegut. So it goes with us. The world might be ending and so what. A peculiar feeling has settled around us, that we are already past our prime, down on our luck, that all our dreams have kicked the bucket, and so, the feeling goes, fuck it.

And yet, and yet. There is Roy. Who keeps reminding us, in the music he plays at the store, in the books he recommends, that the story of humanity can be read, if you look in the right places, as a triumphant one, sometimes even miraculous. That year the four of us with MFAs, the aspiring writers on our way to becoming failed writers, make ourselves disciples of Roy. We form a book club of sorts, taking up whatever Roy happens to mention in passing—biographies of James Brown and Elvis and Abraham Lincoln, even an advance copy of a biography of a fucking horse, Seabiscuit, the small, knobby-kneed thoroughbred who, in the thick of the great depression, transformed himself, against great odds, into the winningest racehorse of his time. Buoyed by our interest, Roy starts bringing us books from his personal collection, giving one of us a copy of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, another a copy of Studs Terkel’s Working. To the lone poet in our group, the one who is, we all agree, the poet herself included, a heart so bleeding it borders on the ridiculous, Roy gives his copy of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, a first-edition folio with its last two lines underscored in pencil, those famous final lines where the narrator, grown now, having lost the dearest friend he has ever known or ever will know, the friend he flew kites with as a boy, writes: That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven. The poet shows everyone—Look, look what Roy underlined!—believing she has deciphered some secret about him, has discovered some evidence of loss and regret. He must have loved someone, she muses. He must not always have been alone. I wonder who.

The book we love the most is Randall Jarrell’s A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, which Roy first gave to the quiet one amongst us, the pudgy one with the thick glasses who almost never says anything. We make a little bible of this book, whose falling out of print we cannot believe or abide. We consider it a particular injury that the book’s inside cover is stamped in red ink with the word: REJECTED.  We have underlined so many passages in this book that the lines have become useless, in fact someone has written on the inside cover, probably the poet, of course the poet: Let us just consider every line herein to be special, and meaningful, and lit by stars. Still, one particular sentence we have singled out, have not only underlined but also highlighted and bracketed and surrounded with little hearts, a sentence which boils down capitalism to its bones, which isolates its way of thinking into a single question, which is: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? And we, feeling ourselves to be smart, absolutely knowing we are not rich and never will be, have clutched this book to our chests, as if a shield with which to defend ourselves.

 

That summer, one by one, then all together, we start coming to work early, to be near Roy, sensing he might help us through, show us the way, pluck us from the fuck it we are stuck in. We watch as he selects the playlist for the day, pulling nine hours’ worth of music from the store’s holdings and stacking the CD player: Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Lucinda Williams, Elvis, Etta James, Marvin Gaye, and his personal favorite, Al Green. We watch as he makes the coffee, turns on all the computers and registers, turns on the phones. We watch as he lifts the delivery door in the back room, for the magazines and newspapers that arrive each morning by truck. By far the best part of the morning is the delivery of The Daily Racing Form, which comes separately in a faded red Ford pickup, driven by an old man who is always smoking, even at seven in the morning, a cigar. Roy signs for the forms and then opens one up and sits on the open ledge of the loading dock and we all gather around him while he tells us what everything means. About horse racing we know absolutely nothing, so he has to explain it all, starting with the progeny of horses, how you can tell a horse’s sire from his name, usually. He explains which races will be held on which tracks, which horses will run and the odds against them. He explains who trains and who owns them. Increasingly, he tells us, the prices are astonishing, with the Saudis buying up everything worth buying. Any horse with any kind of lineage, even if he’s trained here, is probably owned by a Saudi. It’s a shame, he tells us, to own an animal like that and never see it, to buy a horse and race it without ever, he falters. Shrugs. Without ever placing your hand on his muzzle.  We sense a wistfulness in Roy, the mourning of a lost time before money ruined everything, when a knock-kneed nobody like Seabiscuit could win, when even someone like Roy might have owned a horse one day, if he played his cards right.

One, two, three, four, while it is still not quite light, five, six, seven cars come cutting across the back parking lot, one by one, bobbing over potholes, parking at odd angles. Men climb out of these cars, these rust-colored Mercury Broughams and pea-green Buick Skylarks, these burgundy Eldorados with white tops, leaving their doors open and their engines running, and they walk stiffly, bow-leggedly you might say, making their way towards Roy, who is sitting with his legs dangling, surrounded by us, our legs dangling too, on the dock of the bay, we like to say, though it is a delivery bay in a strip mall parking lot. Nearly all of these men, these early morning pilgrims, are dressed the same, in short-sleeve button down shirts, slacks belted across their thick waists, fedoras with feathers springing from their bands, each with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Bel-Airs, always. They have come for The Daily Racing Form even before the store opens, through some arrangement with Roy, who charges their credit cards on Monday mornings for the whole week. You can smell these men coming, in some cases because they have come straight from the bar, others because they tend not to shower, still others because they have slapped so much aftershave on their jowls. One man, Javier, is so short, such a flyweight, we almost can’t believe our eyes. He is always impeccably dressed in what appears to be a child’s suit, dark blue with a silver pinstripe, a pink satin pocket square folded neatly in the left breast pocket. Javier used to be a jockey, Roy tells us; he even rode in the Derby a handful of times, but never won. Javier always tips his hat to us, an old-fashioned white straw hat, and he becomes, of course, our favorite, the very embodiment of failed dreams borne gracefully, and we watch him coming and going in his busted-ass Cadillac with held breath, with something like awe.

All of these men, Roy tells us, have been coming here every weekday for years, decades even, and after they pick up their forms they go directly to White Castle and spread them on the counters, where they can study the odds and plan their bets as they sip their coffee. Then they head over to the track or OTB where, once or twice a year, they place a bet that keeps them afloat until the next win—never enough to quit, mind you, always just enough to get by. In witnessing this shady underworld we never knew existed, we feel we are learning something important about life—that it can diminish you to a set of addictions and their attendant rituals, that it can snare you so deep in one of its ruts you’ll never get out. The every-dayness of it is what we can’t quite get over. Even though we have to set our alarms to do it, even though we’re not on the clock until nine, we keep coming back, wanting to bear witness, asking Roy every question we can think of, about racing, yes, though what we are really asking is, how do you do it, how do you do it so long, this life, how do you do it?

We each decide, privately and then all together, to become Roy. At the store and in our off hours, we vow to manage ourselves better. We will shore up, make ourselves impervious to boredom and insult and vice and need, and in this way, off the radar, out from under the thumb of capitalism and its grinding engine of want, want, want, we will cultivate our souls. In the evenings after work we will read all the philosophers. Listen to all the symphonies, all the soul and blues artists who practically opened their veins when they sang. We will set our televisions and video game consoles out on the curbs in front of our apartments, so they can ruin the lives of other people and not ours, not one day longer. We will exercise, keep ourselves trim, stop eating out of cans and bags, we will try not to drink so much. We will each develop a quirky habit, such as playing chess by mail with prisoners, or learning the banjo, or growing our own medicinal herbs. Most of all, we will write the poems and stories and novels we believe the world needs. All of this we will practice with the discipline Roy demonstrates in all that he does, world without end, amen.

 

One day in November, the end of the century bearing down on us, just a handful of weeks left, Roy does something he has never done before, he claims, in all his years at the store: he invites his coworkers—us!—to spend our day off with him. We have all wondered what Roy does on Sundays when the store is closed, where exactly he spends his time, whether he has friends and what they are like. We know he lives somewhere near Churchill Downs, in a shotgun house in a shaggy-ass neighborhood even we wouldn’t live in. But beyond that, we know nothing.

He tells us to meet him for lunch at a Waffle House near the track and we all show up early. Even so, he is already there, sitting in a booth in the front window, and as we approach him—it is one of those gray, drizzly fall days—we see him backlit, glowing, his head bent over his newspaper, and we each feel, we will confess to each other later, a pain in our hearts, we have each turned into a little Marcel Proust, feeling the agony of loss even before it comes knocking.

Inside, we order our coffees and look over the racing form. This is what we are doing today, Roy tells us. It’s the last week of the racing season and we are going to the track. We sit in the dead center of the clatter and chatter of the Waffle House, holding our heads in our hands, hoping to concoct a series of bets Roy will approve of, trying to thread the needle, to strike a balance between acquiescing to the odds and occasionally taking the strategic risk. That’s smart, Roy tells us, when we tell him our wagers. And we think we’ve won his approval.

Except the poet, the goddamned poet just goes by the name she likes—someone has named a horse Schopenhauer’s Poodle—and even though the odds are against him, way, way against him, the poet can’t help herself, she proposes to bet the entire ten dollars in her pocket on him, for the win.

That’s never gonna happen, Roy says. Sounding disappointed. But then he does something surprising—he smiles. Just a little. Just one corner of his mouth turns up. But if you’re going to survive in this business, he says, you have to believe in miracles. We are all suddenly jealous of the poet. Of all poets. How do they do it? Just fucking around all the time. Just fucking around all the time, and somehow they end up on the podium.

 

All of us are awed by the track, its twin spires and manicured shrubbery, its sense—simultaneously, somehow—of frenzied excitement and hushed reverence. From the moment we set foot on the grounds we begin to notice that everyone here seems to know Roy. Other men, in the same blue jeans and western shirts as Roy, though some with cowboy boots and hats as well, greet him enthusiastically, shaking his hand, slapping his back. These men eye us warily, but Roy never introduces us. We feel like children brought to work on a snow day.

Roy leads us to the backside, where the horses are stabled, in green-roofed barns, and everyone there knows Roy, too. He stops and talks to someone, a stable hand or trainer—it is impossible for us to distinguish between the high rollers and stable hands here, as they are all dressed alike—who leads us into one of the barns. When the man asks if we’re with Roy, Roy simply tells him, “These are some kids from the store.” But otherwise we are unseen, unheard.

One of us—the skinny, bearded one with the gray eyes, the one whose arms are covered in tattoos, dozens of them, of birds and deer and foxes and owls and other woodland creatures, the one who writes lyrical, mournful stories about his dead Vietnam veteran father, the one we call soulful—drifts off, approaches a horse, puts his hand on the horse’s muzzle. It is a gray horse with white dappling and a black mane. The horse and the soulful one stare at each other for a long moment. It occurs to the rest of us that the soulful one should work here instead of at the store, that his proper place in the world is in a stable, he is so at home here. One day years from now he will publish a story and there will be a gray horse in it, with white spots, and the main character, a suicidal teenager, will have snuck into his grandfather’s barn to place his hand on the bridge of its nose, just like this, before he hangs himself from the rafters. When the poet reads the story she will recognize the horse, remember this moment. It will be the only story any of us ever publishes.

When the man Roy is talking to sees the soulful one touching the gray horse he shouts, “Hey! You can’t touch the horses.” And Roy, embarrassed we can tell, gets us the hell out of there. We walk with our heads down back to the track, trailing behind Roy, like kids in trouble.

On the way back to the track Roy tells us, over his shoulder, that gray horses almost never win. The soulful one nods. But, Roy says, they’re the most beautiful.

Then it is time to place our bets. We stand outside the betting booths with clammy hands. Roy goes first, places about ten bets. Then it is our turn. We approach the window with our crumpled bills and are handed tickets in return. We stuff them in our pockets.

Don’t lose those now, Roy says.

Then we sit and watch the first race. The stands are practically empty, so we are up close. The first time the horses race past us we all stand as if for an anthem. The poet even clasps her hands over her heart. The sound of their hooves on the dirt is how we come to understand the thrill of it, how powerful these animals are, how dangerous it is to race them, crazy really. The poet starts narrating, something she does when she is moved. What is happening right now in front of us seems impossible, she says. How is it that of all animals, humans are the ones who rose up and commandeered everything, bent the rest of the animal kingdom to their will? It doesn’t seem possible, that a hundred-pound jockey can control an animal ten times his size and strength. Am I wrong, she asks us, wanting approval—she is always looking for someone to agree with her.

How is it possible, says the soulful one, staring at the track, that you’re philosophizing about something that’s happening right in front of you? How are you not just watching the fucking race?

When the race ends Roy explains to the poet how we did it. First, we befriended the horses, he says, and then we broke them; then, to further our comfort and control, we invented the saddle, and then the snaffle.

What’s a snaffle? the poet asks.

The bit, Roy explains. That whole massive animal is controlled through its mouth.

Snaffle, she says, wincing. She seems angry, on the verge of turning on the whole endeavor. That makes me feel bad, she says. It doesn’t really seem fair.

Ain’t nothing fair in this life, Roy says, looking off in the direction of, we imagine, Ashland.

After the first race, Roy leaves us for a while. We just look and he’s gone. Probably visiting with friends, we decide. In his absence we drink so much it is astonishing. We all run out of money and end up piling onto the one credit card between the four of us that has any room on it. This card belongs to the one who looks like Oscar Wilde, with a fat, long face, his hair parted down the center and tucked behind his ears. He always seems to have more money than the rest of us. He lives in a much nicer apartment, and wears a suede trench coat and carries a leather messenger bag, and it doesn’t make sense how he can afford all of this, plus a car—he has the only car amongst us, a BMW that belonged to his cousin, who died of a heroin overdose, he says—but nor does it make sense that he would work forty hours a week at a minimum-wage job if he had money, so we just don’t think about it. But still. As one hour leans into the next, and the next, and we order our fifth round of bourbons, the poet says, This is gonna take you, like, six years to pay off! She clutches her head and makes an anguished face.

Oscar Wilde just smiles, tucks his hair behind his ears. It’s okay, he says.

But it’s not! she cries. It really, really is not!

The next time he leaves for drinks, the poet turns to the soulful one, who anyone can see she is in love with, and says, Don’t you feel bad? I feel bad.

And he says, Don’t, you shouldn’t.

And, she says, But.

And he says: Haven’t you figured it out yet?

And she says, Figured out what?

And he says, Don’t you recognize his last name?

And she says, What? She isn’t local, knows nothing about this city and who runs it.

He’s got a trust fund, says the soulful one. Let’s just say there’s a sizeable amount.

A look passes between the poet and the fourth one, the quiet, pudgy one who always seems to be taking notes—in fact sometimes when they’re all together he literally takes a little notebook out of his pocket and writes something down. He’s afraid nobody likes him because he isn’t bringing a whole lot to the table, you might say—all he seems to do is scavenge. But here he feels a solidarity with the poet. They both feel wounded, played for fools.

The poet can’t quite believe it. Her mouth is hanging open. Twenty, thirty seconds go by. Then she turns to the soulful one, incredulous, and says, What the fuck are you talking about?

My God, says the soulful one, you’re a baby.

When Oscar Wilde comes back with drinks, the poet is demure. It is as if she feels embarrassed for having misread what was going on. Thank you, she says to Oscar Wilde. She sits up straight, holds her drink a bit aloft, correcting herself, adjusting to her new understanding of who she is spending time with. She has never been around money, the quiet one notes. She doesn’t know how to act around it. It makes her nervous.

Roy returns just in time to see Schopenhauer’s Poodle. The horse is black, he tells the poet, with a green mask, and he’ll be coming out of the last post, the absolute worst position. They are all standing even before the race starts. When finally the gates open and the horses come flying out, Schopenhaur’s Poodle is at the back of the pack, and the poet holds her breath, thinking he will do it, he will charge at the end—he is just waiting for the others to tire. But there are three beautiful chestnut horses in the lead, neck and neck, who are so furiously powerful she can feel their hoofbeats in her chest when they race past, and her belief flags, the quiet one can tell by a flicker in her eyes. By the time Schopenhauer’s Poodle crosses the finish line he is behind the next-closest horse by eight lengths. That’s kind of a disaster for him, Roy says. The poet pretends to shake it off. Of course he wasn’t going to win, she says. The form said so.

As they are leaving Roy stumbles on the stairs. He catches himself on the railing—it is just a wobble, really—but they all exchange looks. He must be as drunk as they are. But no one dares offer him a ride. What they do instead is pile into Oscar Wilde’s car, his dead cousin’s car supposedly says the poet, loudly, and follow Roy at a distance, like the Secret Service. When Roy turns off the main drive onto his street, we drive past it, give him a minute or two, and then circle back. We drive down his street until we spot his car, a 70-something Mercury Cougar in robin’s egg blue, in the driveway of a white shotgun with a sagging porch and a front lawn the size of a ping pong table. All the lights are out but there is a fat, glowing Santa on the porch standing sentry, his arm raised in greeting. None of us says a word.

 

After that the store is uncommonly busy with holiday shoppers, who are stocking up on cookbooks and hardcover murder mysteries and CDs. All through these weeks we hope Roy will make some mention of our outing at the track, will gesture towards bringing us with him again, but it’s like it never happened, in fact he is more aloof than before. He’s just busy, we tell ourselves, just getting through the holidays. And anyway, the track is closed.

The music section, where Oscar Wilde works, keeping the stock organized and answering questions from desperate shoppers, is by far the busiest during the holiday rush. It is mostly older ladies in the store, and these older ladies have come in for Andrea Bocelli and Sarah McLaughlin CDs, though they can never remember the names of the singers or songs they want to buy, and so they stand there singing to Oscar Wilde, Let this be our prayer, something something something, or Blahbedy blah blah angels, sometimes spreading their arms to indicate grandeur, and if you think that’s bad it gets worse, he tells us—the rest of the shoppers are buying up all the Britney Spears and Blink-182 and Limp-Bizkit records. We take this as a bad sign. If the world doesn’t end, it should.

 

But it doesn’t. It most certainly does not. We all spend New Year’s Eve together, at Oscar Wilde’s two-bedroom apartment off Bardstown Road, in the expensive part of town—How did I not realize?, the poet keeps wondering—watching the 55-inch television he was given by a cousin who bought an even bigger television and didn’t want the 55-inch one anymore. Supposedly. We sit on the couch wearing children’s party hats, drunk as skunks on Maker’s Mark, high on Oscar Wilde’s premium weed, stuffed with Chinese takeout, watching Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. We regard the giant crowd in Times Square, everyone wearing puffy coats, except a cluster of Wall Street-looking assholes wearing tuxedos. Everyone is screaming and holding long balloons, the kind you’d make balloon animals out of though there are no animals—just a whole lot of giant dicks, Oscar Wilde keeps saying—with mylar streamers attached on the ends, waving them around like mad. Seriously those all look like spewing dicks! What the soulful one fixates on, instead of the balloons, is that one of the storefronts lining Times Square has replaced the name on its marquis with the words GOING OUT OF BUSINESS FOREVER, and the camera keeps panning past it, and the soulful one keeps saying, This is an omen, this is a sign, the world is ending.

And the quiet one keeps saying, It is literally a sign.

And the poet keeps saying, You just have to believe, everything is going to be fine, you just have to believe. Over and over, she says it.

Until the soulful one says, Do you have any idea, do you know what you sound like? All I hear when you’re talking is the voice of someone who’s never been punched in the face.

And the poet says, crestfallen, I guess that’s true, technically. Technically I’ve never been punched in the face.

And the soulful one adds, I mean both literally and figuratively.

Yeah, I got that, the poet says, sounding a bit wounded. I mean, I do have some interpretive skill, I’m not completely. She falters, sighs. I guess you’re right, I don’t really belong here. She tries to pull off her party hat but it sags to the side, still affixed to her head by the elastic string. I guess I’m a little, I’m a little out of my elephant. She is too drunk again, the quiet one notes. She tries to keep up with the rest of the group but she is one of those pale, ninety-pound, Winona Ryder-style waifs, and she can’t handle it. She slumps onto the arm of Oscar Wide’s leather couch—again, his cousin’s—and closes her eyes. By the time the ball finally drops and everyone in Times Square starts screaming, all those Wall Street assholes high-fiving each other, waving their balloons in the air, at the dawn of the new millennium, the poet is asleep.

 

One morning in February the soulful one—he is the only one still arriving early for work—walks in from the bus stop and across the back parking lot in the first light of morning. Roy’s car isn’t there, he notes, which is a first. He sits on the back steps smoking a cigarette until Oscar Wilde arrives in his dead cousin’s BMW. Oscar Wilde understands the nature of the situation even before the soulful one walks to the passenger side and gets into the car. They drive straight to Roy’s. When they see his car in the driveway, its hunched profile, when they see Santa on the front porch still lit, his arm still raised, the sack slung over his shoulder still full of undistributed toys even though it is February, they know.

Roy’s doors are open, which doesn’t surprise the soulful one—he grew up around here and knows how people are, leaving their doors unlocked as almost a point of pride. What’s surprising is the spareness of Roy’s house. There is no furniture in the living room except an old corduroy beanbag and a record player on the floor, with a few milk crates full of records surrounding it. Elvis’ Christmas Album is on the turntable, the soulful one notes, its sleeve on the floor, Elvis’ face staring up, a young face with a slight smirk indicating he is enduring the misfortune of his fame as well as he can. Next they walk through the kitchen, white cabinets and a linoleum floor printed to look like brick, a card table and two chairs against the wall, then down a skinny hallway to the back bedroom. As they make their way down the hall, Oscar Wilde entertains the possibility that Roy is alive—that he is hung over, perhaps, and just struggling to get out of bed. But the soulful one knows. The soulful one has seen this before.

The door to Roy’s room is half ajar and suddenly the soulful one, who is in front of Oscar Wilde, signals him to stop, turns and presses his palm against Oscar Wilde’s chest. Just wait, he says. Oscar Wilde turns away and goes back toward the kitchen. He has never seen anything bad before, not really, and doesn’t have the stomach for it, it turns out.

What the soulful one has seen is Roy is in his bed—a mattress on the floor—slumped over on top of the covers, and that he has, with a revolver that is now on the floor, shot himself in the head. There is blood splattered everywhere.

Oscar Wilde, understanding now what is going on, starts gingerly opening the doors of Roy’s kitchen cabinets. In one cabinet is a box of Froot Loops and a box of Cheerios. In another cabinet, a bottle of Maker’s Mark, a bottle of Beefeater, a bottle of Heaven Hill straight corn whiskey, all of them nearly empty. In the cabinet between the stove and refrigerator, Oscar Wilde is surprised to find a series of old school photographs in frames, photos of a girl who looks like Roy, the same dark eyes, the same nose, her dark hair in braided pigtails.  As you progress from the top shelf to the bottom the girl grows older, all the way up to her senior photo, in which her long hair is released from its braids and is falling in gentle waves, in which she is wearing pearls and a black drape, like all the girls do in the south for their pictures, even the poor ones.

When he finally gathers the strength to check on the soulful one, Oscar Wilde sees that he is sitting on the bed holding Roy’s hand, his head bowed. He doesn’t move or make a sound for a long moment.

Like fifteen minutes, Oscar Wilde says, when he tells the rest of us the story, which he does many times, in bars after work, fifteen goddamned minutes the soulful one sat there holding Roy’s hand, and you could just tell he was reliving some kind of awful episode from his childhood. We are free to speak of the soulful one now because he has stopped coming out with us after work. He has more or less stopped talking to us. We are giving him space, thinking he will return to us.

Something awful has happened to us, the poet says one night at the bar, when we are all good and drunk. She clasps the quiet one’s hand, then Oscar Wilde’s, and pulls them to her, like a preacher welcoming sinners at the altar. We must stay together, she says. We must never break apart. We must promise to remember this, and stay friends our whole lives, and live our lives in such a way that Roy is honored, that Roy would approve of. She tries to calculate whether that means staying at the bookstore forever, like he did, or striking out, living large, trying to write our books. I can’t make the math work, she says. Either he liked the way he lived, which he seemed to, in which case we should all just stay at the store and live our lives simply and honestly. But then again, she muses, he shot himself. Which means maybe he had regrets, maybe he wished he’d lived more, in which case we should strike out. And who was that girl? Where is she? Did she die, too, and the pain of it, that’s what got to him in the end? I don’t know, she keeps saying, I don’t know what we should do. She lets go of their hands and props her elbows on the table, places her face in her hands. She mumbles and they can barely hear her: is it worth, like, getting married and having kids if you’re just going to lose it all and the pain of losing it will literally kill you? Oscar Wilde and the quiet one give each other wary looks. If she keeps drinking like this, the quiet one notes, and if she keeps trying to figure out the meaning of life, it will go badly. It is like watching a dog trying to read the newspaper.

Just then the waitress delivers a fresh round of shots. Makers, Roy’s favorite. They straighten up and raise their glasses. To Roy, they say. Down the hatch. To Roy.

 

The assistant manager, a shrill-voiced woman named Betsy, takes over when Roy dies, and almost immediately institutes a number of changes. The first being that she makes everyone wear aprons and nametags, the second being that she stops early delivery of The Daily Racing Form to the men we have grown so fond of. If they want the form so badly, she says, they’ll still want it at nine o’clock. But this isn’t true, as it happens. We never see them again.

The third change Betsy makes is to stack the CD player each morning with only two discs on repeat, the two artists that are selling the best, Sarah McLaughlin and Andrea Bocelli. We listen to their soaring, plaintive voices for eight hours a day. We conclude that this is what happens to people who get too used to reading books in college and don’t make any plans for their future livelihood. We are in a circle of, if not hell, hell-adjacent. Maybe we’re in a circle of irony.

One morning as the store is opening, when Betsy cues up Andrea Bocelli and his voice, once again, comes blasting from the speakers overhead, Oscar Wilde announces: I’m going to die of boredom.

I already did, says the poet. I’m not really even here. I’m just an apparition.

The right thing to do in this situation, says the quiet one, is kill Betsy.

Be that as it may, says the soulful one, the easiest thing to do is quit.

And so it goes.  Within three months we are all gone, flung, scattered to the wind. Fuck this place, we say. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.

 

2022

The soulful one makes a point to watch the Derby each year. The race itself lasts just two minutes, which is the right amount of time, he has decided, to spend thinking about his life before, as he refers to it, that life back in Louisville just before he left everything and moved here to Alaska. He doesn’t like thinking about those years, back when everything shimmered with meaning, when every choice he made seemed of the utmost importance. He remembers how he agonized, trying to parse out the morality of the simplest question, like whether or not to go out with friends after work—was he seizing the day, or wasting his time?  The world was ending, he thought, and he wanted to make the most of his life. He couldn’t afford a single wrong move, or so it seemed at the time.

The world hadn’t ended, of course. And yet the soulful one always thinks of this time as the end of life as he once knew it. He couldn’t believe, still couldn’t believe, that he had been made, or perhaps destined, to walk into a room where someone had shot himself. Not once but twice that had happened to him, his father and then Roy. It was too much. He’d gotten out of Louisville, just about as far as he could. He’d wandered for a while, working in kitchens and bars. Then settled outside of Anchorage teaching twelfth grade English to kids who were feeling the first stirrings of existential despair in their chests. Hamlet, Death of a Salesman, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby. He was mired in those questions again—what to do with one’s life, whether it had any meaning—though at a safe distance now. Moving had been like magic, had placed him past all of that.

What should I do? his students asked him. What should I do?

Go out with lanterns, he always told them. Find yourself. Look near and far. Look everywhere.

On TV, they are loading the horses into their paddocks. The commentators are naming the horses, one by one, as they are settled in. Rich Strike, the commentators say, only made it onto the list of contenders yesterday, when another horse scratched. Eighty to one, they say, about the worst odds possible. The soulful one remembers the poet betting on the longest shot that day, how naive she always was, how much it angered him to be around that kind of person, the kind of person who hadn’t lost anything yet, who could afford to bet on a longshot because she still had some reserves to burn through. That kind of person used to drive him crazy. But now, he realizes, he prefers it. He likes it when kids in his class still believe they can change the world, still believe that love is all that matters. When they come into his classroom already crushed, the light in their eyes already blown out, they usually don’t make it. They just finish up school and disappear into the wilderness.

Back then, the poet had enough light, he estimates now, to last her a good number of years, maybe a whole lifetime. He hopes she’s still like that. Writing poems about beauty, trees, flowers. He doesn’t know how she’s faring now, or any of the others. They had written to him for a while, trying his email again and again, even though he never wrote back. The poet had written him a heartfelt note when he’d published his first story—and last, as it turned out.  I remember how you stroked that gray horse, how it looked like communion. He’d tried to answer a few times, but he had never been able to do it. He’d had to let it all go. The writing, the friends, everything. It was the only way he could manage. It was for the best.

 

Oscar Wilde is out on his balcony, smoking a Newport, because they don’t make Bel-Airs anymore. He has been living here in Portland—Maine, not Oregon, he is quick to specify when catching up with friends—for three years now. When he decided to move to Maine, he had been looking for something he would never grow tired of, and it had seemed to him that Maine had a certain unspoiled, undiscovered quality that would buoy him, that would make him feel like the guardian of a privileged secret. But now people were moving to Maine in droves, people who didn’t seem to deserve or appreciate or understand it, who were too young to have earned it. His new neighbors, who share the top floor of the building with him, are so young it bothers him. They are too young, he thinks, to own property in a building like this, with floor-to-ceiling windows, long balconies, multi-million dollar units. He doesn’t know where they got their money but assumes it is the same place he got his. At least when he was their age, he tells himself, he was trying not to live like he had money. He had put in a few years of spartan living first. He had always liked that about himself.

Yes, after that stint at the bookstore he had capitulated. He had taken his father’s advice and gone to business school at Wharton. While he was there, he’d watched the financial industry collapse, literally and figuratively; the apocalypse they’d all been anticipating in Louisville had just been the wrong one. He had moved to New York during the recovery and worked at Sachs for a while, then moved to the private equity firm his uncle ran. On top of the money he already had, he had made even more, an obscene amount.

He had gotten married along the way, had a son, and spent ten years as a family man. His life with his wife was something like an agility course, jockeying to get into the right schools, onto the right soccer and baseball teams, the right tennis coaches and piano teachers, the right language tutors. Even the good parts of their life—the vacations, the home improvements and acquisitions of newer, better properties—were stressful. He had grown tired of it. Through all the concerts, games, performances, fundraising banquets, Oscar Wilde had emitted a simmering frequency of resentment. Fuck this, he was thinking, those last few years. Fuck all of this.

When their son was thirteen, his wife left him, and took their son and the bulk of his affections with her. She had moved back to Virginia, where her parents lived—he had always hated them—and he was free, finally, free of all that. But he didn’t know what to do with his freedom. He quit his job, spent a year drinking. Then another. And then he was done with that. He decided to move to California and be a guy who was all about experiences. He filled his calendar. He took surfing lessons, took hang gliding lessons. He flew to Nepal and climbed a mountain. He went on a safari in Kenya. For five thousand dollars, he rented a helicopter that flew him over a swampy region of Louisiana, and when the helicopter dipped low, he shot feral hogs with an AK-47. He went to a ranch in Reno and launched a rocket propelled grenade. He learned how to drive a race car. And then one day it seemed to him, with all the wildfires, with all the tent cities along the highway, that California was over, and he had started casting around for the next place. In January 2020, he had moved to Portland for its undisturbed beauty, the crispness of its air. He had loved it, especially in those first months of COVID, when it seemed the rest of the world was suffering and he wasn’t.

Then all the young people from Boston and New York had started moving up to Maine, and they were ruining it. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be here.

Oscar Wilde drops his cigarette butt of the balcony and watches it plunge. He had calculated the Derby would be starting just when he finished his cigarette, and goes back inside to find he is just in time.

He hears the announcer shout, And, they’re off! The race is running. He squats in front of the television and tries to position his phone in such a way that captures both him and the race. He wants to send a picture to the quiet one and the poet. They are only in touch two or three times a year now, probably because whenever Oscar Wilde thinks of them, a bad feeling settles on him—like he chose the wrong path. Maybe if he’d kept at it, reading and writing, trying to find out the best way to live, he could have done something better, he wouldn’t be alone now in an expensive condo, watching on TV a distant place that plucked the minor strings of his heart. Maybe if Roy hadn’t died. That’s what had really spooked him.

But now Oscar Wilde does what he always does, which is to push away the bad feeling. He makes a manic face, holds up the bottle of Maker’s he has brought out for the occasion, and takes a selfie. To Roy! he types, then hits send and goes back to the race. Which looks to him like all the other races he’s ever seen in his life. The top contenders are up front. They are going to win, and were always going to win.

 

The quiet one is at his desk. It is a Sunday afternoon, but still, here he is at work. There is something wrong with this, of course, but next week will be different. His workload will be clear by then. Or so he has told himself for an endless expanse of Sundays, almost twenty years of Sundays.

If he had known his life would be like this, he would have done something else besides go to law school. Anything else. But the debt he had sunk himself into in pursuit of his degree required he keep working for at least ten years; and then after that, to make up for all the time he’d lost, the life he hadn’t gotten to live, the marriage and children he hadn’t managed to squeeze in during his ten viable off-hours a week, he needed to keep working, to stockpile money. He needed to stockpile it so he could retire at fifty, maybe fifty-two, and then start living. That was his plan. At fifty-two he would leave the firm and finally write his novel. Occasionally he digs up his old notebooks from his twenties and thinks he can revive them, spin them into something important. Though he doesn’t quite know where to start.

His alarm goes off. He has set an alarm, because he is that kind of person now, a person whose life passes in billable, six-minute intervals. If he is going to take a break to call the poet, so they can watch the Derby together, he is going to set an alarm for ten minutes in advance of the start time. The whole time he is bringing up his browser to find the live broadcast, chatting with the poet, watching the race, a clock will be ticking in his brain. At his rate of $750 an hour, this break will cost him more than a hundred dollars. The poet has no understanding of this. She has sometimes rambled on to him for over an hour about her kids. He had asked her once, when they were about to hang up, Do you realize you just cost me a thousand dollars bitching about this soccer tournament?

Oh my God, she’d said. That’s horrifying. I’m horrified.

Just giving you some perspective, he’d said.

I keep forgetting your time is, like, I mean it’s worth something, she said. I feel bad just saying hi to you, now that I think about it. We should never talk again. Goodbye.

Good riddance, he’d said. Because he couldn’t tell her what he really felt—that if not for her, there would be no one to call. No one he could tolerate. No one who still occasionally talked about the human soul.

He calls the poet. They have been talking almost every day since 2020 when, a few months into the pandemic, the poet’s husband had disappeared on her. The quiet one had been in quarantine, working from home, losing his mind, suddenly remembering the person he used to be, the person he had meant to become. They had leaned on each other through that time.

The phone rings and rings. He imagines her running through her house, breathless, hearing the phone but not being able to locate it, sticking her hand between the couch cushions or under a pile of laundry. She almost always misses his calls but returns them right away. I couldn’t find the phone! she always says, as if this is some sort of surprise. There is a frantic, disorderly quality to her life he finds fascinating and a bit repulsive. He sometimes wonders about what will become of her. Divorced with three kids, teaching at a community college, running free poetry workshops for seniors and sometimes even prisoners, living in a century-old bungalow, with very little saved in retirement. Her later years, he often thinks, are going to be hard.

 

The poet is in the back room of a bar. But is it a bar, she is wondering, considering they serve a full menu and have a game room full of pool tables and pinball machines and video game consoles, and they even have a kids’ menu that’s a placemat, with word searches and mazes on it, and packets of crayons they distribute to kids? Can it be said to be a bar bar? She is trying to come up with a list of ways this place—a dive within walking distance to her house, a dive she first started visiting during quarantine, because of the pinball machines, the video games, because for twenty bucks you could have someone else feed your kids and then your kids would maybe leave you alone for five goddamned seconds—isn’t really a bar. Even though it is. In the front room, in full view from where the poet is sitting, a row of drunks is slumped over their beers. All the televisions are tuned to sporting events and from the overhead speakers, Def Leppard. On balance, she concludes, the place is a bar. She has taken her two youngest kids, seven and nine, to a bar. Again.

But it’s okay, she tells herself. She doesn’t do it very often. And today is special. Today is Derby.

She is here because she wants to see the Derby, just two minutes is all she’s asking, but her television is broken. The state of her house is this: she is the type of person who has only one television, and whose only television is broken. Her sons had knocked it over while chasing each other around the house. I didn’t do it! said the older son. I didn’t do it! said the younger. This was weeks ago, and she still hasn’t replaced it. Do we really need one, she has asked the kids. Think of all the reading we can do now. But they have given her that look. The look everyone gave her, all the time.

She has timed all of this carefully. Her sons are happy for the moment, one of them driving a racecar through a burned-out urban hellscape, the other pounding the flickers of the pinball machine. She has fed a five-dollar bill into the coin machine and has a stack of quarters waiting for them. Their food has been ordered and is set to arrive in the next five minutes, just before the Derby starts. While they stuff their faces with french fries, she will be able to slip into the next room and watch the race. She is pleased with herself. You’re killing it, Jones, she says to herself. A little pep talk.

Her phone starts ringing and she digs through her bag, an NPR tote whose seams are coming loose at the top, overflowing with books and student projects, crumpled papers of all sorts, and she wonders, Do I have to be such a fucking cliché?

When she finally answers, the quiet one explains the race is about to start; he has placed his bets online. A trifecta for himself, he tells the poet, and a single bet just for her—a hundred on the longest shot, Rich Strike, 80 to 1, to win.

Oh, God, she tells him. A hundred bucks. You shouldn’t have done that. You might as well have lit that hundred on fire.

I know, he tells her. But it doesn’t matter. You’re forgetting I have money.

I guess.

You don’t know what it’s like, he muses. You get so miserable chasing money you just throw it away trying to entertain yourself.

Sounds nice, she says.

It isn’t, he says.

They still have a few minutes to kill. The quiet one tells her about the case he is reviewing documents for—these Wall Street assholes still email their girlfriends from their work accounts, he says, and she can practically hear him rolling his eyes. This one guy keeps writing, the quiet one says, in elaborate detail, about wanting his girlfriend to suck his dick. While the quiet one talks, the poet is idly poking herself in the belly, the soft rim of fat that has lately appeared out of nowhere. She is sort of fascinated by it, like a bird come to a feeder, something sudden and startling. Then she remembers she is in public and straightens her posture.

How’s the teenager, the quiet one asks her. This is what they have taken to calling the poet’s oldest child, whose defining feature is that within the past year she has shockingly, and completely, turned into an asshole. The poet blames her husband—ex-husband, she has to keep reminding herself—because during quarantine, he had taken one look at the situation—three kids in the house, four Zooms going at the same time—and he’d left, just straight-up left, saying his work was drying up—he sold ads for a local television station—and he was going to go work for his brother’s marketing firm on the west coast. But you hate your brother, she had protested. That was just before she realized he hated her more, hated their life together.

For a while the husband was FaceTiming them from the beach, saying, Hey, kids! Look where I am! And turning his phone to show them the ocean and the people walking along the shore. People in shorts. Shorts! Meanwhile the poet and her kids were trapped in the house trying to get through that first winter, like the Donner Party. A year later, when the kids returned to school, the husband had come back and tried to insert himself into the rhythm of their lives, but by that point the poet and her children had developed a hive mind, and what that hive mind was thinking was: Who the fuck is this guy?

So he’d left again, this time for good. And now the teenager was an asshole.

Since they have last spoken of the teenager, the teenager has done something so cruel, the poet tells the quiet one, it has sent her reeling.

The situation was that the teenager’s bed, where she took her phone calls, was next to a vent that spilled out directly over the poet’s bed, and the poet could always hear, clear as a bell, what the teenager was saying. She didn’t even want to hear what the teenager was saying, and walked away when she could, but this last time, she was almost asleep and didn’t want to get out of bed—sleep was hard to come by for the poet. But suddenly the teenager’s voice was right there, all around, excited and loud.

She’s only sending me to therapy, said the teenager, so she can get free therapy for herself. Like, she’s seriously asking me all the time, did your therapist say anything helpful? She’s just like, a little mouse under the table sniffing around for therapy crumbs. Like, get your own therapist, Bitch!

The poet had flushed with shame, hearing this, because it was true. She had been doing that. She needed therapy but it wasn’t free, and if she was going to pay for it, she would pay for the teenager, who sometimes mentioned suicide, as a dark joke usually, but then again, then again. The poet knew the jokes. She made them herself. All the time.

Then the teenager had said: That bitch won’t leave me alone, that stupid fucking cunt. I hope her stupid poems, her stupid fucking poems about trees and flowers and birds and shit, like, I hope they get famous and she wins the Pulitzer or something and she makes a bunch of money and then she dies. And then I’ll get all the money. And I will dance on her grave.

Then the teenager had laughed and laughed.

If you’re so smart, the poet has been thinking since, why aren’t you rich? Why aren’t you rich?

The thing is, the poet explains now to the quiet one, I didn’t even do anything! This kid has never had a curfew, has never been punished, has never had to have a job, has been handed anything she’s ever wanted. I mean, I still put notes in the kids’ lunches every day. Not just quick little scribbles that say I love you, but like, poems, poems in rhymed tercets delineating why I love them, all the special qualities they possess. Three poems a day I’m writing at like six in the morning while packing up lunches, and they’re even illustrated. I mean to be fair sometimes I can’t think of a poem and they just get a note that says I love you, but on those days, still, there’s a little watercolor of a dog with a balloon tied to its tail, and the balloon is a heart, and inside the heart, that’s where it says I love you. I mean, they’re elaborate.

I think maybe, the quiet one says. Pauses. I think maybe you should redirect that therapy money to yourself.

They both laugh. It’s true, she knows. She is off the rails.

Then follows a silence where neither of them says anything. Probably because her problem is so stupid, so pathetic, because of the staggering smallness of her life, the quiet one can’t think of what to say. Or maybe he’s taking notes, the poet thinks darkly, for his book. Maybe he will turn this whole stupid life of hers into a story.

After a few seconds he says, well, the race is about to start.

She heads to the bar and motions frantically to the bartender, asks for a Maker’s. He sets it in front of her and she points to the television. Would you mind, could I bother you to? She can never finish a sentence these days, but it doesn’t matter, he knows what she means. On screen is footage of the horses being settled in their posts. The last horse, Rich Strike, is a chestnut horse in a red and white mask. The owners of Rick Strike only found out he would race yesterday, says the commentator, when Ethereal Road was scratched. She feels an immediate affinity with Rich Strike, whose eyes, she can just barely see for the mask, look a bit crazed. He will lose, of course, the poet thinks. But it’s an honor just to be nominated.

Suddenly the gates open and the announcer cries: And they’re off!

The poet and the quiet one are silent for the first stretch, taking it all in. The race is unfolding exactly as the odds would suggest, exactly as the Racing Form would have predicted. Rich Strike is among the handful of horses at the back, out of the race, it seems, from the very beginning. The three favored horses are up front, trading off the lead.

Their phones buzz simultaneously and they each swivel them away from their ears to find Oscar Wilde beaming, giving them a thumbs up. To Roy, he has written. He looks puffy, thinks the poet. Overserved, overfed. Like Oscar Wilde just before he was sentenced to prison.

To Roy, says the quiet one.

To Roy, says the poet.

It hurts, saying Roy’s name. All these years she has held onto the idea of him, has measured herself by the standard he set. She remembers now a time, just days before Roy killed himself, when she was back in storage searching through deliveries for a book that was supposed to be out on the shelf but wasn’t, and she’d turned and seen Roy standing there, awkwardly, waiting for her to notice him.

You’re a good kid, he’d told her. I just wanted to tell you that.

And she’d flushed the way she always did when someone said something nice to her.

I believe in you, he’d said. Don’t give up being good, now. And then he’d hurried away, walking off quickly and silently, his head down, the way he always did.

She’d held onto that all these years. Believing she was good, believing she was fighting the good fight. But now she didn’t know anymore.

That bitch, she kept hearing the teenager say. That stupid fucking cunt.

No one is watching Rich Strike, no one except the poet, who feels a sort of kinship in his continued fervor, though the odds against him are insurmountable and he will never win. She keeps her eyes on him. The three favored horses are still in the lead, lengths ahead.

It wells up in her, what she has been trying to keep in but can barely, barely contain anymore—something about watching this horse lose is stirring up what she has been feeling for years. She can’t stand to watch him lose. Fuck this, she thinks. The seconds go by and it is as if she is conjugating a verb. She is losing. She has always lost. She will always lose. At the end of her life, she will have been a loser. She thinks of all the effort she has put into trying to be good. The lectures she always gave in class speaking to the nobility of the human soul, the enduring appeal of truth and beauty, and the bored faces of her students, their heads tilted toward their phones which, concealed in their laps, they think she can’t see, though the glow of the screens on their faces gives them away. She thinks of all the care she’s put into the children. She remembers carrying a cake that was shimmering with candles toward the teenager, who was five then, the way her child’s face was lit with wonder.

Bitch, bitch, bitch. Cunt, cunt, cunt.

Her thoughts spin by, like the bars of a slot machine tumbling, tumbling. She is waiting for them to settle, waiting to see where they land. More and more lately, her brain is in a frenzy, and she can’t figure out the simplest thing, can’t figure out how she feels about anything. Is she right or wrong? Is she good or bad? Does her life matter or does it not? Is it still worth going around talking about love and truth and beauty, or is it just embarrassing now? Will her kids remember how she raised them, how she loved them, or will they just forget? The odds shift by the second, like the board they’d watched at the Downs with Roy all those years ago, the numbers flickering, flickering, changing so fast you couldn’t keep up with them. What did any of it mean?

She looks away toward the game room. The boys are fine. The older one is still seated in the driver’s console navigating a racecourse, the cars all around him going up in muffled explosions. The youngest, the one so gentle she worries he will be crushed by the world, is still playing pinball. His strategy is to flick the flippers constantly and in this way he is staying alive, for now.

Why aren’t you rich? Why aren’t you rich?

She turns back to the television. At the top of the stretch, Rich Strike is still one of the last horses. The announcer is deep into the intricacies of the leading two horses, who keep trading by a nose, by a nose. She watches as Rich Strike maneuvers through a narrow opening, then makes his way to the inside rail, where he could, possibly, sneak past the frontrunners. But they are halfway down the stretch and it won’t matter, she calculates. There isn’t enough time. She remembers how Roy taught them, during Schopenhauer’s Poodle’s race, how toward the end of the stretch, you could tell which horse would win based on momentum and the lengths left to go. He had pointed to a horse who was five or six deep in the pack, but was charging. That horse is going to win, he’d said, and it hadn’t seemed possible, he was too far behind, but he did.

Hey, the quiet one says. Are you seeing this? Here comes your horse.

He’s too far back, she says.

And he mostly is. Except maybe not.

The seconds unfold. The drunks at the bar have lifted their heads and are watching now, too.

Your horse is going to win, says the quiet one.

Don’t, she says.

She remembers Roy saying, with that half smile, that you needed to believe in miracles if you were going to survive in this business, and she wonders now if she has it in her.  To believe or not to believe, she thinks, that is the question. She is a poet and it is the job of poets to believe, but it hurts too much. Even as the horse races alongside the frontrunner, as the jockey is pumping the reigns, and as the commentator is crying out, having just realized what is going on—Rich Strike is coming up on the inside!—she is fighting back what is rising in her chest, knowing if she looks up at the sky hoping to see those two mythical kites, those hearts hurrying toward heaven, knowing if she looks and finds the sky empty again, she won’t be able to shake off another loss. Fuck this, she is thinking, he is too far back, fuck this. It hurts too much to watch. At the last second, when the horse stretches his neck, the poet isn’t even looking, she has closed her eyes, not wanting to see, not wanting to believe anymore, because it is too dangerous, it is too dangerous to believe.