Welcome AWP readers!

Here is some unpublished fiction just for you…

1. Electronic Submission
   A young woman trapped under tornado-wrought rubble must save American literature and herself.

2. The Time John Prine Met Giovanni Boccaccio
   Two dead but lively artists find themselves on a ferry in Lake Superior. Adventure awaits!

3. Longevity
   A short love story starring elders at the edge of the universe.

 ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION 

Dee dropped a paper-wrapped tandoori chicken roti on her desk and looked out her wide seventh-floor window. The sky, dark with clouds, cast a purple pall over the downtown streets — very quiet on a Sunday — and distant pastureland. She filled up a water glass from the five-gallon cooler, sat down with her laptop. Time to do some database cleanup over lunch, answer questions and complaints, watch submissions roll in and out like a big tide. 

This place here, she thought, unwrapping the sandwich and squinting to see a herd of cattle trudging along in the medium distance, this is where American creativity goes. Unlikely as it might seem: we are its central switchboard. 

Dee sat in Suite #700 of The Florence Building, a large art deco office complex in downtown Missoula, where she was one of two full-time employees of “E-Submit,” the central clearinghouse and ‘submissions manager’ for virtually all American literary magazines, fiction and poetry competitions, plus thousands of arts residencies and grant applications ranging from Delaware State Poet In Residence to the Walmart Working Parents Writers Fellowship.

As Dee chewed on the overly-salty chicken, offset by fresh lettuce, a yogurt sauce and a nicely tensile wrap, she tried to feel the flow passing through and around her. Hundreds of thousands of hours of imaginative labor, passion and meticulous word choice had been squeezed into stanzas and paragraphs and sent as signals into boxes housed inside this very office, the signals then passing into packets stored in great cloudbanks of servers in Colorado and in duplicate form in New Zealand and Tennessee. Virtually all of those signals in turn were quickly and automatically sent along — to Granta, to Harpers, to The Atlantic, and all the lesser constellations. This was the tide rolling in and out. She opened a small icon in her laptop’s ‘dock.’ “The Submitometer” was a custom app an IT guy had installed in their work computers. Dee watched the green dots tumble up and by. Green dots meant successful passthroughs, and each was auto-anonymized. USER4609: “A Day In Paradise” to American Short Fiction. USER9920: “Black Braids Click Clack” to The Kenyon Review. Every day a hundred short stories went through the system and on to the Paris Review. A thousand poems to Poetry Magazine.

The wrap was fine. Best thing within walking distance of the office if you didn’t count the decadent bison burgers from Front Street Bistro, which was right there downstairs in the Florence and where you could go if you really wanted to drop $25 on a burger and a pint, which since the breakup with Lisa had been happening on a more-than-weekly basis. But today was different. Today she was starting over. Fuck Lisa and her ‘friend’ Shawnee. Dee was moving on to a new life. She’d finish work early, go on a big hike. Get in shape, see the world. Alaska, Nepal. Someday. Right now, she was on her lunch break, and having already banged through seven e-mails and a bunch of database hygiene, Dee figured she’d earned ten minutes of window shopping. She browsed shoes and camping gear, then local restaurants. The Florence Building was represented by a blue pin. Front Street Bistro had a 4.7 rating in Google Maps. Why restaurants should be rated on a map made no sense. On the other hand, she thought, frowning and chewing, that kind of thing had been going on at least a hundred years, if you counted Michelin Guides. And maybe long before. Maps were always pointing to where there are good things to eat. Cave paintings, she’d read somewhere, celebrated specific mammoth hunts, depicted plants with berries and how to get to them. Maybe art has always been about finding sustenance.

“E-Submit” charged fifty cents per submission to the magazines as a processing fee, and the magazines for the most part passed that cost along to applicants. Some prizes charged writers twenty dollars or more for the privilege of having their story or poems rejected. Dee earned thirty-three thousand dollars annually plus health insurance, her salary unchanged for five years running. She was thirty-two years old.

Skies out to the west were dark purple now. Rain coming, maybe a lot of it. The land could use it, she thought, though she wasn’t sure she knew what Montana land needed. She was from Champaign, Illinois, another flat and agricultural place, but there was corn and here are cows. Her parents, both dentists, had sent her to Northwestern (an extravagance, as the U of I gave free rides to locals). She studied English with a minor in Computer Science and got onto the elite fencing team. Several fellowships, an MFA in creative nonfiction and a few lost years in Lisbon later, she’d answered an ad and found herself here. She liked the quiet and the nearby mountains, the college town vibes, the dank pool halls and biker bars. She opened the Submitometer again. Stories and poems and novels and memoirs washed in, went out. An alert on her phone warned of severe weather. She clicked it off, looked out, frowned slightly. The already dark sky was darkening farther, spreading into what looked like a horizon-wide bruise. Whatever. She didn’t have anywhere else to go. She opened her e-mail and got lost in correspondence 

•

The building shook and swayed. Dee heard a siren go off. Outside, the streetlights on wires down the block were jumping like marionettes in the hands of a madman, jerking and flinching and —yes — sparking. Then the streetlights went out. Garbage gusted across the street, flew up and over cars.

Her phone started buzzing again from the other room where the charger was. Then the lights in the office went dead. The room suddenly looked like it had passed through a moody color filter — the weak daylight outside was a green-purple-gray, and everything inside was a shadow of that color. Wind howled. Rain was falling sideways, streaking the window horizontally. Car alarms started going off seven floors below.

She scooped up her laptop and headed toward the basement, which was — she was pretty sure — the building’s designated tornado shelter. She didn’t pass anyone else in the hall. It was Sunday and the seventh floor was deserted. In general she loved working on Sundays — Jeannine wasn’t there and then she got to take Monday off, usually a hiking day or horseback riding. She reached the stairwell and hesitated. She turned around and went back in to grab the half-sandwich she’d left in its crumpled wax paper sheath. Outside her window, the lower sky toward the horizon now looked to be lightening — good, a break in the storm, she thought. But in the mid-range it didn’t look good. Out west over the river, past 6th Street, making haze like a desert oasis, she saw a field of moving wind. Moving towards her. Was that a chunk of barbed wire funneling up into a—

Funneling, she thought. Move. Now.

She walked quickly back down the hall, slamming through the crash bar on the stairwell door. Down the stairs, one at a time but fast, like she was training for something, sandwich in one hand and laptop in — no phone. It was back there, on the charger. She put the sandwich and laptop down on a stair, sprinted back up, taking steps two at a time. Got the phone. It only had 8% — the charger in Jeannine’s office had a corroded tip and hadn’t connected properly.

As she stood at Jeannine’s desk, an electrical wire whipped a crack across the window’s glass. The floor seemed to be moving now. Dee sprinted back down the vibrating hall and for a third time to the stairs. She leapt down the eight flights four steps at a time.

As she reached the door to the basement, the biggest tornado in Missoula’s recorded history met the side of the Florence and began to dismantle it upwards and sideways, deconstructing the historical landmark into a funnel of insulation, brick and cornice, Keurig machines and air vents, ergonomic chairs and plumbing, personnel files and boxes of urinal cakes, hard drives and circuits containing thousands of hopeful words, up and up and up.

For Dee the crashing sound was like being under a waterfall she’d once visited in Iceland, where the water came from far enough up you couldn’t see the source, and crashed down into the mossy limegreen pool so loud that no one could hear each other say how beautiful it was, and no one tried. A wave of impact slammed the basement door shut behind her, knocking her to the cement floor, skinning her knees, her laptop tumbling out of her hands. It made a cracking sound. Emergency lights flickered and went out. Darkness. The rubble of The Florence covered her up.

•

Dee was coughing and coughing in the black. On all fours on the concrete floor, she hacked away. She couldn’t stop. Then it slowed to something like a chain-smoker’s intermittent fit, and she found she could breathe between coughs. Something was changing around her — the dust settling, she supposed. She coughed for a few more minutes, slowly letting go of the certainty she’d asphyxiate and die. No. Not yet.

“Hello?”

Her voice bounced. This room was big. A boiler room, maybe? It had a lot of air, she thought. Enough for a couple hours to breathe — at least! — she calculated hopefully. That wasn’t the right word — calculated. She had no measurements. It was more like she hoped.

Who are you when you are under pressure? Her fencing coach had always asked her. When you face your opponent, in competition, it reveals who you are to yourself. Who are you, this round?

Who I am, she thought, is a person who liked to believe she had a couple of hours worth of air in a pitch-black boiler room under a collapsed seven-story building.

Her phone still had 8% battery, and one bar. She called 911.

“911, what is your emergency?” said a quick female voice.

“Hi, I’m in the Florence building.” Her own voice sounded gray now, no longer echoing. She shuddered, feeling cold.

“Okay, oh wow, my God,” the operator said. Failing, Dee thought, to grasp 911 operator 101, where you try not to freak out the person experiencing an emergency. The phone’s glow faintly illuminated the room around her. As Dee’s eyes adjusted she saw hulking shapes in the distance, and some metal shelving close to her head.

“Where are you, exactly?”

“The basement.”

“Good. That’s very good. Stay there.”

The shelving had a coating of dust like powdered sugar.

“Yeah. I don’t think I have a choice.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. I’m uh, I’ve been breathing some dust.” She coughed, as if to illustrate.

“What’s your name, sweetie?”

“I’m Dee. D-E-E.”

“Last name? And a phone number for someone you want us to call?”

“Um, Ritter. My dad is at 217-554-9910. He’s in Illinois.”

“Okay. Anybody local?”

“Yeah. Jeannine. She works with me here. She’s my boss.”

“Can you give me that number too?”

“Yeah, I, uh, I need to look it up.”

She went into Recent Calls. There were three from her ex-girlfriend, two from her dad, three from her friend Dawn. Scrolling down, she found Jeannine, read the number.

“What do you see around you? Do you know what side of the building you’re on?”

“It’s really dark. I just have my phone light and my uh laptop which is, I think it’s dead, I dropped it. I uh. I think north, or maybe east. I’m next to a big water boiler I think? I’m scared. I’m really scared.”

A short empty pause.

“Thank you. That’s very helpful. Do you want to stay on the line, honey?”

“Yes but I don’t think I should. My phone has… shit. Six percent.”

“Stay where you are. I have your number. Emergency responders are on their way.”

The woman’s voice had warmed over the course of the exchange, like a slow-rising bread in an overnight pan. Dee didn’t want her to go.

“Thanks,” said Dee.

“Stay strong. I’m going to hang up now.” The operator waited, then hung up. Dee started to cry, then worried the sharp intakes of breath between sobs were using up more than their share of oxygen. The thought made her cry harder, which led to a coughing fit. Now her phone was buzzing. It said “IDAHO (UNKNOWN)”. She cleared her throat and hit the green button 

“Hello?”

“Hullo. You work at E-Submit, right?”

An older man, Western sounding, drawling and raspy like a smoker. He sounded like he was outside, or driving.

“Yes, but…”

“I have an issue with a submission.”

“There’s been an accident. A tornado actually, or a big storm that um, knocked down our building.”

“What did you say? A tornado?”

“Yes.”

“Recently? This is a contemporary occurrence?”

“Yes and I can’t… I can’t talk now.”

“I, okay, but, before you go, ma’am, can you send along my poems? Copper Canyon won’t accept late submissions, it’s emphatic on the website. I regret that I submitted only seventeen minutes before the deadline, and I am driving to an appointment now, but I just got a message that my application was sent back as a no-go. And ma’am, I did everything right. I paid my twenty bucks. It’s imperative” — he pronounced this last word with emphasis on the consonants — “that my submission get sent in in the next six and a half minutes. They are very strict.”

“How did you find me?”

“Uh…  I looked at the staff directory for “E-Submit,” and then my granddaughter did something like a, she said it was a, reverse phone search of your social media.” He said all this in a monotone. He sounded like her father talking about the price of crowns and root canals.

Dee slid down the wall. Her butt hit the concrete floor, sending little chalky dust motes into the air.

“Can you text me the document and I’ll send it where it’s going. Copper Canyon Press, you said?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll pull over and do that, I think I can figure it out on my phone.”

“Please do. Thanks. Good uh. Good luck with it.”

“Thank you kindly. It’s an anthology of nature poems, all set in the Big River Basin, I’ve been working on it some years now, and—”

Jeannine, her boss, was calling. She rejected it. Her phone’s battery was now at 5%.

“I have to go.”

As soon as she hit the red button a new call came in with a Montana area code. She picked up.

“Dee?” said another woman’s voice.

“Hi.”

“This is Missoula Fire and Rescue.”

“Hi.”

“We are coming for you, ma’am. Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” she lied. She saw a small shape scurry far off in the shadows. She flinched. Her phone buzzed. It was the poems from the guy, and a message: “Hang in there. Thanks. -Brad Kohler, Poetry & Pest Control.” Then a smiley face and thumbs up emoji. The PDF was titled “May The Creek Babble On.”

“I’m… fine.”

“We’re coming. Save your phone battery. Call this number if you need us. We’ll be entering the building through the northwest corner in the next, we’re hoping thirty to forty-five minutes. There’s a lot of debris. We just need you to hang on. Are there any other survivors with you?”

The woman’s voice seemed far away.

“I don’t think so.” Her own voice sounded quiet now too.

“Okay. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

The voice disappeared. Dee opened the PDF of poetry, forwarded it to info@coppercanyonpress.org with the subject line “please consider,” hit ‘send.’ Her phone was at 2%.

She turned the phone outward, used the white light from Brad’s poetry collection’s cover page to explore along the wall where she’d seen the rat. The wall was long and housed folding tables and more shelving. There seemed to be linens on some of the shelves. Her phone was at 1%. This was as far as she could get. She settled in against the wall, preparing to wait. She tried to think of prayers she knew but nothing came to mind.

Next to her ear was a trickle of wind. She turned and found a hole in the wall. She put her ear up to the hole. Inside was more wind sound, what people who put shells up to their ears call ‘the ocean.’ And beyond the wind sound, some faint clanking. It almost sounded like pots banging together. Dee listened harder. It was pots banging together. She shouted through the hole.

“Hello?” Then louder: “Hello?!”

A voice came back, very faint, like under a thousand blankets.

“I’m here. We’re here! We need help!” said the blanketed voice.

“They’re coming!” Dee screamed into the hole.

“We’re hurt. We need medical help.”

“They told me they’re coming!” was all she could say. And then, stupidly, “my phone’s going to die!”

“Okay,” the guy said. “I hope they get here soon!”

“Me too!” she shouted. And then, almost as an afterthought: “Who are you?”

“I’m Luis. I’m here with Raymond.”

A new voice joined, this one even weaker and more distant. “Hi!” Raymond, presumably.

“We work at the restaurant,” said Luis. “It was just us in the kitchen. Raymond’s hurt pretty bad. Something fell on him.”

“I’m sorry. I’m Dee. I work on the seventh floor, at E-Submit.”

A text came in. It was Brad. It was just eleven thumbs-up emojis, then another text saying “THANKS A MILLION.”

The phone blinked briefly and died.

“Do you think we have enough air?” she asked.

“What?”

“Do you think we have enough air?”

“Not really, it’s a pretty small room over here. Is it small over there?”

“It’s pretty big over here.”

“You got lucky.”

“Definitely.”

“So you said they’re coming?”

“Yeah in thirty to forty-five minutes.” 

“Oh.” 

A pause.

“Shit, man,” said Luis. “I hope they speed it up.”

“Me too.”

“For Raymond, especially.”

Conversation started to feel stupid. She felt dizzy.

“I think I need to sit down. They’re going to find us. I know it. Nice to meet both of you!”

“You too.”

As she sat down her hand landed on something squishy. She picked up a piece of chicken that had fallen out of her wrap. She brushed it off and put it on her tongue. Took a bite. The salt and char fired reassuring pleasure-centers in her brain, but the meat had dirt mixed in it now and it was hard to swallow.

She heard scuttling footsteps across the room and then a faint squeaking sound from where she’d seen the shadow before. The animal sounded unhealthy. It was doing a kind of wheeze-squeak. She sat very still. The scuttling and wheezy squeaking stopped. Then started again, closer. She shuddered and groped around her for something to fight with and found the rest of the chicken wrap, still in its paper. She closed up the food into a package and hugged it close to her body. The hacking sound was horrible. The rat was dying, she thought. It must have breathed something bad. I breathed it too, she thought.

She threw the rest of the dirty chicken chunk as hard as she could toward the last place she’d heard the squeaking, not sure whether she was trying to feed or hurt the rat. It gave off something like a death-rattle. Then there was no sound, except for a faint rumbling from above. It sounded like heavy machinery. She felt lightheaded and lay down on the cement floor. She was getting sleepy. A muffled voice seemed to be calling her name — her given name, Delilah, which nobody knew. Then it stopped. The distant rumbling went on and on, and she couldn’t tell if it was getting closer or further away.

•

Lisa and Dee used to tell people they met at a rodeo. It sounded better than Tinder. But they did go to a rodeo on their second date. The event was homegrown, queerpunk, utopian. Johnni Payphone was there doing bike tricks, and people from BlaqueInk were giving tattoos in an old school bus while under the big blue a bunch of beautiful queers roped kid goats, ate jackfruit tacos, flirted and drank cheap beer. Lisa looked great in her sexiest overalls and a jean shirt with a sky-wide cowboy smile. And so they kissed for the first time by the swimming hole, and later that night back at Dee’s place they thoroughly compared tattoos and birthmarks, and swapped contact lenses to see how that changed things. When Lisa came she arched her back, then melted into laughter and curled up in the comforter like a feral cat who’d never known a bed before.

Even on that date, though, Dee was always wondering about Lisa’s next move, like in a fencing match. Who’d take her clothes off first to jump in the swimming hole. Who was going to kiss who, exactly. How would that first kiss go, and would she approach from above or below? She was always trying to read the other person’s mind. Her coach would say, again and again — it’s not about her. It’s about you. But, protested Dee, there’s a girl with a sword in front of me! Of course it’s about her! What will she do next? That’s a very reasonable question!

They almost moved in together but then the thing happened with Shawnee. Lisa talked about her all the time, how Shawnee worked at a real ranch, not the dumbass kid corral where she, Lisa, gave pony rides all day. How Shawnee competed in the real rodeos, how Lisa drove all the way to Billings to see her rope. Dee should come next time, she said, but Dee knew better.

They broke up in Glacier, Dee’s head pounding with a migraine as it rained all weekend. For some couples shitty weather and being forced inside would bring them closer together. But when the sun finally came out on Sunday as they were packing up their tents, they looked up at the glistening pines, and a condor wheeling past, then down at the gorgeous shimmering valley, and without a word got back in the car and drove to Missoula. There was no kiss goodbye, no mention of the security deposit Lisa’d put down on the apartment.

If you don’t move, you don’t get hurt. If you wait to see where she’s going, you can dodge the attack. This was the instinct that she always had in swordplay, and she knew it was to her disadvantage. Dee was a good fencer — fast, athletic, an all-around with different blades, but she tended, said her coach, to focus on the opponent instead of trusting herself. Instead of seeing what both of you are doing as one thing. A dance. Dee studied videos of boxing matches to understand it better — you could see the boxers’ big gloves weave around one another. It looked great when they did it. It looked like art.

Dee felt a sudden surge of warmth in her body — a cousin of sex, an athletic vitality that shook through her. Then it was gone and the floor was cold again.

I’m a dumbass, she thought, fetal in the pitch-black boiler room. I should have texted my parents, before my phone died. Instead of that Idaho poet. I should have let them know I’m okay. Though even now she believed strongly she’d see her parents again. Or if she didn’t, she knew that they knew that she loved them. But she should have texted them. And now she had to write ‘I love you mom and dad’ in the dust on a shelf or on a scrap of paper, if she could find a pen—

She closed her eyes. She was almost asleep.

The sound of scuttling rodent feet. She didn’t seem to have the energy to move. It was like the scuttling had reverb on it, like it was amplified. Her head was foggy. You’re not coming over here, she thought. You’re dead. You’re a dead rat.

Then the scuttling was very close to her face. And a big furry shape was there, she could see it in the dark like a spaceship blocking out stars.

She didn’t try to brush it away. She didn’t scream.

Hey Dee, the rat said. It had a familiar voice.

What?

It’s me, Lisa. Your girlfriend.

Ex-girlfriend. You don’t sound like Lisa.

The room was glowing now, a kind of dim green. She noticed her laptop was lying propped open on the floor and was emitting a fitful, flickering white-green light. She couldn’t see any walls. The light was reflecting dust particles in the air. The room was a big faint cloud of pale green and she was floating in it.

The rat spoke again. It sounded like Lisa this time.

Did you get it?

Get what?

The title is a pun. Babble on is like Babylon the ancient city. Tower of Babel. May The Creek Babble On. River of Babylon. Babylon.

Oh. I get it now.

You say you do but I don’t think you do. The voice was lower now, Lisa’s voice draped in dirty velvet. It was her dad saying a scary story by a campfire.

The library was destroyed by God. Because it had too many books in it.

That doesn’t sound…right. Is that how it goes in the Bible?

Absolutely. Babylon, the tower, is a library. Because God hates books and buildings, everything falls down eventually. Everything turns into dirt.

Not chemicals. They go up. Like CFCs, burn a hole in the ozone.

Hey, ya got me there. Open up your laptop.

It’s already open, over there. It’s making the light.

Don’t be stupid. I need you to go in, open up the inside.

She reached over and touched the brushed metal case of the computer. Her fingertips glowed green, like she was dipping her hands in bioluminescent algae.

Oh. Wow.

Get into it.

She pried open the keyboard housing and felt a warmth emanating from the thing’s guts, down below.

Take out the memory.

She reached in, under the keyboard, fingers knowing. She extracted a little black rectangle with copper edges and a glass center that glowed green, the source of the light. It looked like a microchip or a piece of a motherboard.

That’s it. Touch the nubs.

She found on the flip side two metal protrusions. When she touched them, with her finger on both nubs, it worked like a taser, sending a mild jolt through her. She played with the shock.

Put it on your tongue.

She stuck out her tongue and placed the nodes. A sizzling feeling without pain. Also: a sweet taste, electrical with burnt vegetal undertones. An image came to her mind: green dots and numbers scrolling up and out. Then a pulsing shuddering feeling passed through her in waves, tongue to toes.

It was the submissions system. The Submitometer. She sat up, spine erect, cross-legged on the concrete, nodes to tongue. She closed her eyes.

Give in to it.

I’m giving in.

She rode the feed, a tide of yearning. All the submissions that had passed through this system over years, translated haptically. A crazy flow of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and novels, sent by people begging to be loved — words as a form of rage for love.

She basically tasted their souls: amateur authors and fanfic completists, jaded MFA graduates gone to drink, hopeful housewives with historical epics and academics’ erotic novels set inside their field of study. She took in a hundred million words, ten thousand metaphors, some extended and some mixed, hundreds of breakups and meet cutes and so many sex scenes — her God, the sex scenes flowed — ones where actual bodices were ripped, or brassieres cut with scissors, blouses lifted and bras unclasped exposing nipples, rosy nipples or even roseate. And then, too, a wave of grief. A hundred thousand willow trees seen by poets from below or from across ponds, a river of meditation on aging and death, ailing mothers always with parchment skin, always compared to paper.

•

She woke up to a crashing sound and a steady gust of air. It tasted like burnt plastic but also fresh, like trees or rivers. She stumbled to her feet, screaming “Here! I’m in here!” but it wasn’t the rescuers. It was just things continuing to collapse, shifting and opening up passages. Like when they say ‘the house is settling,’ except with several thousand tons of brick and stone and steel. It was still pitch black. There was no green — where had that idea even come from? If the dark was any color it was chimney-red, and that was likely just the inside of her skull. She’d read how that happened in sensory deprivation chambers — you can hear your own heartbeat, see your own optic nerve.

“Hey girl next door!”

Luis sounded closer now.

“I’ve been working the hole open with a knife. To let in more air. Can you help?”

Her mind collected itself. She could hear sirens now and machinery up above.

“Yes. Of course!” She found the hole and gouged at the opening with her fingers and a debit card she had in her pocket.

“Are you guys okay?” she shouted into the hole. There was a pause in the scraping on the other side.

“I’m okay. Raymond died.”

“Oh. Oh my god. I’m sorry. Is there anything… can I do anything?”

Luis didn’t respond, he was crying now, and gouging to enlarge the hole. Dee grabbed a piece of detachable metal shelving and worked harder at the hole.

After an hour or so they could touch hands. They grabbed onto one another. They didn’t speak. His hand was rough and warm, well proportioned, a platonically perfect hand, she thought. Then Luis rested for a while. Dee said maybe they should try to open the hole wide enough for Luis to crawl through so he could come into the bigger space, but he was tired, had cut his hand some. Air was flowing well enough now, he said.

Plus, even though Luis didn’t want to be stuck with Ray’s body he did want to honor his friend and be there for him somehow. Every once in a while Luis started panicking and breathing shallowly. He said ‘Hey’ and that meant he wanted to hold Dee’s hand.

“Remember the Chilean miners?” Dee asked while they held hands.

“No. Who?”

“A bunch of trapped guys in a mine.”

“In Chile?”

“Yeah, this was a long time ago. I was a kid. It was an inspiring story because they all survived.”

“How did they get out?”

“They had to walk a long way, I think. I don’t remember. I wish I did.”

“Seems like a different kind of situation.”

“Luis. We’re going to make it.”

“I want that. I want to see my kids.”

He was crying again. It was okay. She was crying too. They cried for a long time.

Then she remembered the sandwich.

“Hey, are you hungry?”

“You have food?”

“I have half a sandwich.”

“No. It should be for you.”

“Don’t make this a chivalry thing. You should eat.”

A pause, then: “Yeah. I would have some.”

She groped around until she found the rest of the chicken wrap. She pushed it through the hole with a coat hanger she found near the linens. She heard quiet unwrapping, then silence.

“Oh my god. Thank you.”

“Hey, Luis.”

“Yeah?”

“I want to say grace.”

“Oh, cool. That’d be cool.”

She closed her eyes and tried to think about God, who she had such a hard time picturing, and her parents, who were easy to picture, though in her mind’s eye they were simultaneously gray-haired and very young — like in that wedding picture in the bathroom — and other people she loved, though not Lisa, who was a rat, and gratitude and, for some reason, a horse named Pancakes that she rode when she was nine.

“You gonna say something?”

“Oh yeah. Um… Thank you to the people, who brought the food to this table, both present and not.”

Dee’s best friend Abby, age eleven, had taught this blessing to Dee’s family after coming back from a hippie Jewish camp in Oregon. Her parents adopted the mantra enthusiastically, recited it throughout her childhood.

“Peace. You may eat.”

“Thanks Dee. Where is this from? The food.”

“Mamoun’s, on 8th and Russell.”

“Oh yeah, I know those guys. I was gonna check this place out.” Chewing, then: “This is good. This is fucking awesome. You sure you had enough?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

She felt dizzy again. She sat in the corner near where Lisa-Rat had been. She thought of what she’d say when they pulled her out, how she would face the cameras, brush back her hair, speak of faith and food and love. If they pulled her out. Then she started to think of ways to say goodbye, in case they didn’t. She hoped Luis and Raymond’s family would have no more grief than they could bear. Her parents too. Whichever way things went, she hoped Brad’s poems would be accepted by Copper Canyon, that he would be loved in just the way he wanted.

From far above came a sound that could only be machines moving earth and debris. The low tones were rhythmic, almost like music. It was clear they were working through the night.

THE TIME JOHN PRINE MET GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

The Philosopher Zeno, being demanded by what means a man might attain to happiness, made answer:

By resorting to the dead, and having familiar conversation with them.

1.

The ferry from Bayfield to La Pointe only has one john, the thing smells awful, but by medieval Italian standards it’s a bucket of roses, so when Giovanni Boccaccio woke from seven centuries of death’s slumber mid-piss, aiming straight into a cracked pink urinal cake, he felt a glory-like hope.

He stood urinating in a low-ceilinged, mold-infused room built of crazily smooth white clay. The piss dribbled, then ceased. He felt relief. How long had it been? He tapped the last drip and turned to see his cassocked, bewildered self, jowled and gouty, in a huge rectangular mirror. The mirror’s corner held a graffito, a flourished signature, something a monk might have done in the margin of a Bible. It said “WEED.” Weed? He felt motion under him, and a low lurch. That was it. The off-center feeling. He was onboard a ship.

He willed his legs into a stumble toward a woven-metal door, beyond which, on a deck, he found himself facing a long white railing, trued and forged somehow without joints.

Leaning against it, a few meters away, he beheld a vision. A hermit-like man clad in black sprawled against the rail, his pear-shaped body backlit by a big sky. He looked like a gardener at rest, eyes creased from sun, big hand dangling a flagon like a seedling. A breeze ruffled the rooster-tuft that sprang from his head’s dead center. He took a swig as he turned toward Giovanni—surprised, but not too surprised to see a big man in medieval gabardine coming out of the head, adjusting his pants.

“Hey,” the man said. His voice crackled like a brush fire.

“Ciao,” said Giovanni, who was a younger man corporeally, grey and paunchy but not yet baked into his old-man body like the gardener fellow.

Giovanni felt even younger than his sixty-one—out of place completely in his corpulent body, like he was still twenty-five with all of Florence’s women, leaning out of windows, calling out to him. Before fame, meeting Petrarch, obesity, the plague, heartbreak. When his calves and triceps were strong from daily swims in the Arno. Standing by the pear- shaped man, Giovanni knew intuitively he had some seniority here—he’d been gone a long time. Centuries. He had a lot of questions but the first came out, in flat unaccented English: “Where are we?”

“Lake Superior.”

A silence. Wind on the water.

“Are we adrift? I see no sails.”

“It’s a ferry. Runs with a motor. You’re Giovanni Boccaccio, right?

“Yes. How do you know me?”

“The fellow who sold me a ticket for the ferry gave me a slip of paper, advertising the Bayfield County Rodeo next Tuesday. And it had your name on the other side. I’m John Prine.”

The man in black swallowed a little bit. The hollows of his neck strained and his heavy- lidded eyes winced almost imperceptibly. But Giovanni saw the flinch light a lightning spark, and then a beautiful smile spread, like a child’s, like the nine year old Beatrice’s must have been for the nine year old Dante.

“I think you’re my uh companion into... ya know.” John gestured across the railing over a broad field of choppy blue, his hand folded a little, cramped arthritically, strumming the air like he was looking for the strings of a lute.

“Into death?” said the Italian and the words sounded like a badly cast bell—not how he meant to ask it. But there it was. And at this somber moment Giovanni’s broad purple woolen hat, stiff though it was, was taken by wind. In an instant it was in the soup. They watched it bob in the water.

“Yeah. Guess that’s the idea.”

A long silence. Giovanni clutched the crucifix around his neck, a habit he’d had since his dad died in 1348.

“Where is this vessel bound, friend?”

“The Apostle Islands. A wild place. Good fishing.”

The men looked out at the land and water that was part of Wisconsin, had been for nearly two centuries.

“Why me? Why have I been called back from death’s slumber?”

“I’m not 100% on that. The girl at the car rental place tried to explain it to me, but I had just woken up myself. I was still getting my bearings. Looked about like you look now. Bewildered. Last thing I remember I was in the hospital, saying my goodbyes, and then all of a sudden I’m standing in front of this girl who works at the Avis rent-a-car, nametag says Clio. She’s photocopying my driver’s license, telling me about the whole journey ahead. Sweet kid, Clio—goes to school with my granddaughter, they’re both on the volleyball team. Says I have to cross a body of water to reach my final roosting place. And. Along the way I’m supposed to meet another poet. A guide.”

“A poet. That must be me. Your guide.”

“Yeah. Or... she might have said ‘a guy.’ It was either ‘a guide’ or ‘a guy.’ ‘Along the way you will meet a guy.’ Or ‘along the way you will meet a guide.’ I’m not totally sure.”

“A guy, or a guide.”

“One or the other.”

“Please think carefully on this. These are very different things, are they not?”

“Yeah... I wish I had asked her to say it again. The whole thing. Kinda went in one ear and out the other. Something about a hellmouth, a lonely path versus a path of love, tests, power of dreams. Kicking myself the whole drive up here that I didn’t ask her to write it down. Also, why didn’t I get an upgrade? Hyundai Sonata is fine, but... coulda gone with a muscle car. Something with a moon roof.”

Giovanni savored the word Sonata— its vowels felt like home. He closed his eyes, feeling dizzy. What was a moon roof? His mind reeled. He opened his eyes. The pear-shaped man was still talking.

“Drove north ‘til I hit water. Fellow sold me a ticket for this ferry, gave me a slip with your name.”

The islands were looming now, big outcroppings of hematite and sandstone, ancient formations.

“Then I saw you coming out of the john. Here we are.”

The sun was breaking through in fits. The slate-blue deck of the ferry crackled like a fresco in certain need of restoration.

“How long do we have? To travel across this water?”

“Long as it takes, I guess.”

The men explored the boat. There was no one else on board. The throttle was locked in a forward position, at a very low speed. There was a small suitcase in one room with John’s clothes, and another with a leather satchel containing 14th-century undergarments, some filthy with lice.

“Jesus. Toss that stuff overboard. Take some of my skivvies.”

Giovanni agreed— he was not sentimental about worldly possessions, though he thought with a pang about his library, his papers, a commentary on Virgil he’d left undone, and an open window near his desk where the rain could get in.

John worked out that at the current speed, if heading due east (as it roughly seemed they were) they’d reach the first island by dark. But the wind seemed to be going against them. It wasn’t clear if they were making any progress at all.

2.

“This is a sea, John, not a lake.”

“It’s a lake. Trust me.”

“Look East. It’s endless.”

“It’s a Great lake.”

Giovanni squinted and shivered in his robes. “Feels like the edge of the earth.”

“I don’t know exactly how much time we have together, Gianni, but I’m not getting into flat earth stuff with you.”

“Flat earth? As opposed to what kind of earth? Hilly?”

John spat into the water. “You’d think they’d give me a guitar. I’m a singer.”

“I heard you this morning. Your high range is thin but your basso is strong.”

“I’m seventy three, cut me a break.”

“You’d think they would provide me with a library of important texts, both ancient and new.”

“You’d think a lot of things, buddy. You really would.”

“And why would one poet be called back to accompany another into death? Is it a cure for the loneliness of the journey? Or am I truly to be your guide? If so, I feel singularly ill equipped. My mind is empty as a hole.”

“You and me both, brother. Let’s just get to those damn Apostle islands. Taking forever.”

Something strange was happening with distances. Looking behind, the shoreline of Wisconsin appeared to be fading into morning mist, but the land stubbornly lingered. And in front, the rocky Apostles seemed to get nearer as they watched them, but an hour later the islands were roughly as far away.

They went into the captain’s cabin. The room was silent except for the purring motor far below. They sat in plastic chairs on thin torn-up cushions. The sun settled into a mid-sky hangout, burning and burning at a low-medium heat. Somewhere, a loon called, a high panicked cry. John lit up his cigarillo and puffed.

“How did you go out?” The musician drew a jerking line across his neck, a mortal sign easily legible across centuries.

“I was beset by a continuous and burning itching, beyond relief, no matter how vigorously I scratched, day and night. I was then afflicted by a heaviness, a sluggishness of the bowels, a perpetual agony of the veins, a swelling of the spleen, a burning bile, a suffocating cough and hoarseness, heaviness of head, indeed more maladies than I know how to enumerate. All my body languished and all its humours were at war. I looked on the sky without happiness— my body was weary, my steps uncertain, my hand trembled; I was deathly pale, cared nothing for food. Letters were odious to me, my books, once so delightful to me, could not please me, the forces of the soul were relaxed, my memory almost gone, my energy seemed drugged, and all my thoughts turned to the grave and to death.”

“And then you died?”

“A couple of years later.”

“Ah.”

“You?”

“Plague got me.”

“Was it painful?”

“Hell yeah. Couldn’t breathe worth a damn. Hated that feeling. Like drowning. Claustrophobic.”

The cabin, by now, was filled with smoke and a sickly sweet taste like a pie on fire.

“Many in my day threw themselves into wells or off buildings into the Arno rather than face such a death.”

A loud thump. The men looked up through the curls of foul vapor at a small gray-brown smudge on the front window. They walked around and found a nuthatch on the front deck where it had fallen after flying into the glass. They stared at the bird, which was stunned but not dead.

The thing might survive, thought Giovanni. Its eyes were closing and opening slowly and it shuddered as it breathed. They waited. John finished his cigarillo.

“Screw it. I’m going downstairs. See if there’s a flare we could light off or something. Tell whoever is looking for us that we’re stuck.”

“I think they know.”

“Well I gotta do something. You’re not doing jack squat.”

“I’m sorry,” said Giovanni, with real feeling. He looked squarely at the singer, then cast his eyes down at the possibly dying bird, feeling equally vulnerable, embarrassed. “I am meant to be your guide into death. But I confess to you. I have received no training for this task. I am an old man, a doubtful Christian, a minor academic and a regretful writer of bawdy stories.”

“Well, buddy, I’m a novelty songwriter and a lapsed pescatarian.”

“A what?”

“I’m a country guitar picker and a Nashville scribbler, and I’m not bad when I’m doing my best, which is occasionally at most.”

The nuthatch was standing now and hopping a little bit. That’s promising, thought Giovanni.

“Going downstairs. See if there’s a flare.” John lingered for a moment, staring at the islands in the distant north, then walked inside, screen door banging behind him, leaving Giovanni to wonder: how could he be a guide if he had no idea where they were going? Or if there was indeed any motion at all?

With some effort he knelt down to the bird, hoping to launch it back into flight. When he picked it up it had gone gray. Entirely gray—it was not a living thing at all but a clay statue of a bird. Terrified, he cast the stone relic into the water where it sank instantly.

3.

That night there was a storm and the boat bucked and rolled. Both men slept badly on their hard cots, waking frequently to absolute blackness, and the roar of rain.

In the morning it was calm and cool with a faint drizzle, and they scoured the rest of the ship, exhausting each closet and cabinet. There was little of value—mainly cleaning supplies and feminine sanitary napkins, mops and tacked up maps showing lake routes and depth charts.

They spent the day apart, Giovanni praying in his room and John quietly singing his back catalog on the south-facing railing, changing lyrics on the fly.

As the sun started to go down they met in the passenger lounge, as if at a prearranged time.

“What year is it?” asked the Florentine.

“2020.”

“Jesucristo. Miracle of miracles.”

“It’s okay. Could be better. I’m telling you, these are plague times.”

“All times are plague times, if you live long enough.”

“Fair.”

A silence sailed in and by. The singer held out his flagon. “Found my flask filled up when I woke up this morning. Wild Turkey. Want some?”

The medieval poet took the forged vessel and drank deeply. It was, for him, a ruby Tuscan port. Oversweet but deep and strong.

As the night wore on, and they finished the flagon, they became sentimental, and talked about everything on Earth.

They talked about shellfish, terza rima, oral sex and Prince Saladin. They talked about Corsican politics, Cleopatra, Bing Crosby, late night television and tapestries.

They smoked John’s cigarillos, which seemed to have a mildly hallucinogenic effect, in the form of a faint pink tinge to the wind. They felt hopeful.

“What do you miss? From life?”

“Little stuff, stupid stuff. I miss getting texts from my grandkids.”

“I used to get texts from my grandchildren too,” murmured Giovanni, who was fully reclined on a pile of cushions on the floor. John didn’t seem to know what to make of this remark, but let it lie.

“Love of children is the greatest love in the world,” muttered the Italian. “Greater than love of woman, love of country, love of God—”

He stopped himself. He’d blasphemed. His brow furrowed. Something was changing in the devout writer, even as he drifted away. John looked down, eyes crinkling at their corners with a kind of condescending tenderness he normally reserved for hapless young music journalists trying to interview him for college radio stations.

“I don’t believe in ranking stuff. Leave the top ten lists to Letterman. One love ain’t no better than another. Same with people, same with circles of hell. They’re all the same. Love is love. Hell is hell. Stupid to argue about it.”

The fat man slept, drooling on a blue plastic seat cushion.

John wandered below deck, opened a previously unseen door. He found a hold for bicycles and luggage. There were no bicycles, but in a corner he discovered two small North Face tents and a propane stove, a couple of fleece jackets and a pair of sleeping bags. One was embroidered with a floral cursive “J,” the other with a “G.”

4.

On the seventh day they figured out if they dreamed about food it appeared in the ferry’s snack bar, under the counter, the next morning. Prine often dreamed about condiments. For a couple of days it was just ketchup. Bad ketchup, that’s been sitting behind the counter of the diner in a generic plastic tube, and in the dreams he would be trying to squeeze it on a hot dog at a ball game, but the ball game was being called for rain, and the ketchup wouldn’t come out. “Christ, again?” Giovanni would moan when they saw the crusty bottle in the morning. Giovanni could control his dreams better, sometimes filled up the bar with trays of roast pheasant, poached quinces in brandy, classy stuff. John would bitch anyway. “This quail hand-pie’s no good. Tastes like lard laced with nutmeg. One bite’s enough, brother.” It was okay, they weren’t hungry anyway, tended to take a nibble and then wander off on deck. There’d be something else there the next day, unless they didn’t dream the night before.

But the Italian conjured something up, more often than not. “Got to hand it to you, Gianni,” John said one evening at what they’d come to call dinnertime, “you’re a hell of a lucid dreamer. I mean detailed. These peeled grapes with honey.” “Thistle honey”, said Giovanni, pulling up a chair, regarding the glazed fruit. “Always have dreamed that way. Lucid, like you said. It’s where I got all those stories.”

“I made mine up in the shower,” said John, behind the bar. “Any good song comes to you in the shower, first, and if you forget it, it comes back while you’re parking your car. And if you forget it again, it comes knocking at your brain when you’re making love. That’s when you know it needs you. When it won’t let you refuse. Try telling that to the poor girl you’re intimate with, though, when you jump off her and start scribbling in a notebook, tuning up your lute. The lady wants your full attention. Can’t blame her for that. Better to listen up in the shower, when the song comes the first time.”

“Ah.” Giovanni sighed, and slumped onto the formica. Water pipes clad in crumbling asbestos splayed across the cinderblock walls like parts of a terribly incomplete church organ. An organ without a church, or choirmaster, or God to guide its design. He felt homesick. He plucked a glazed grape and looked at John, who’d fallen into a revery – musing, so he supposed, about the woman and the shower. Popping the grape in his mouth and tasting its perfect, nearly rotting, ripeness, Giovanni thought about sex for the first time in several centuries. La Fiammetta, his little flame, her wrists and ankles twitching in ecstasy on a sheepskin blanket.

Then he remembered the moment when the idea to write his masterpiece, The Decameron, had come to him.

His father dead, his stepmother dead, so many friends. And all the nameless. He’d seen the bodies in the street that August afternoon of 1348. He was walking out of Florence for good this time, passing the Church of Santa Sicilia. He trailed a hired hand, an old man named Narciso, who guided a donkey bearing all the young lawyer’s belongings, all he had been able to fit in the chest. Giovanni trudged behind, his mouth and nose covered by a scrap of tapestry, as was the fashion then, whether by superstition to avoid breathing in the plague or to allay the odors of the city in those days. Outside the Mercato Nuovo he looked down at the corpse of a young pageboy, his eyes black-brown holes, a crow tugging at its shoulder’s flesh. He suppressed a gag. He closed his eyes and walked blind for several steps on packed familiar earth. Goodbye, Firenze, goodbye youth. And then, as if at a choirmaster’s cue, he opened his eye, looked up and saw the Duchess Amalia. Surely she’d fled by now? But no. Here she was, some five meters up, leaning out of a stone-framed window, holding out her proud lineless face and spangled lobes and peaked brow, her severely bound hair, her great breathing body, corseted and lifted like a shapely alabaster fragment lately hewn from a quarry. She held herself emphatically, robustly out the window, hands gripping an iron lattice— her chin still, nostrils flaring as she breathed deeply the death-perfumed air. Her lip quivered. Her breasts heaved. Could it be? thought Giovanni. Yes. It could. Make no mistake—she was horny. The Duchess was mad with desire.

And it was then that he spied, across the corpse-strewn Via Carlotta, a retinue of patrolling soldiers, sullen, ash-haired, childlike men with fly-blown features, holding hands over mouths, eyes below the horizon, like sleepwalking sailors. But one, the broadest- shouldered, suddenly stopped, looked up and behind him as at a gnat or bee who’d flown near his ears. He'd realized there was sex in the air. Yes! Sex was streaming through the air like the Arabic fire-works told of in the Tale of One Thousand Nights And One Night, like the famed dancing lights of the far North. He looked around, the fly-blown boy did, his eyes like evening stars. And he saw her. And she saw him seeing her seeing him. I tell you, the air left the world to make room for all of this. In that moment sex had sucked out the stench of death, pulled it up and out of the street as surely as a tight woven sardine net could catch every fish up out of a given patch of sea. Lust. Life. Giovanni was the boy, was the Duchess, in that moment their eyes were his eyes.

And then the boy and his comrades were gone, round the corner toward the Porta Aurea. The death came rushing back in, and it made him want to retch, the awful end in evidence. Through a doorway, a stack of corpses on a dining-table. Above him, the Duchess was still there, but now he was passing directly below and could see only her chin, nostrils, lashes and swept-back hair, an abstraction like a relic. He walked on, and out of Florence, and never looked back. There was no doubt his book began at that time. The sex in the Duchess and the boy had pulled him back into himself.

5.

“Breakfast? I dreamed up Tabasco. With eggs this time.”

Boccaccio said nothing, looked overboard, down at the water. His melancholy had taken hold in those days, while his companion’s bitterness seemed for a time to have burned off, like coastal fog in summer.

“I will spend the day in prayer.”

“Oh, Gianni, don’t do that. Don’t. Come on. Let’s play bocce with towels. I tied ‘em up good and tight. Got five red and five green. White one too. Italian style. La vitta dolce, baby.”

“Fuck off,” said Giovanni.

“Where’d you learn that kind of language? Mouth on this guy,” muttered John. “Just trying to pass the time. Christ.”

Giovanni stared down. Suddenly he rocked back on his heels and half-lurched forward toward the railing, a suicidal feint obvious from half the ferry-length away. John came walking quickly.

“Hey. Hey hey. Don’t you leave me alone out here.”

“I feel heavy. Useless. Like a statue.” He gestured into Lake Superior. “Do you think the water is cold?”

“Brother, it’s plenty cold. Last thing you’ll notice before you freeze to death is your nuts getting sucked back up into your body, rattlin’ around in there like a couple ice cubes in a whiskey glass.”

The wind was blowing hard, coming from what they reckoned to be north.

“I’m already dead. And everyone I know is dead.”

“Yeah. But on the other hand, hot eggs, inside.”

“I don’t have the heart to lead you. I am a failure.”

“No. You aren’t. Not yet.”

Here John grasped the Italian’s mottled hand, squeezed it tenderly, and this touch was the first of its kind, it seemed to both men. After a few seconds John moved his hand off and gripped the rail. They did seem to be statues then, standing on deck as dusk ironed the gray- blue horizon into a smudge, and night fell, and they found themselves again among the stars.

“Look at ‘em. All them stars.”

“Yes,” said Giovanni. “Those are the stars.”

“I mean, so many of them.”

“It looks to me like the usual number,” said Giovanni, who had never experienced light pollution. “Oh. But see.”

“What?”

“We’re moving.”

“How can you tell?”

“Our position relative to the Polar Star has changed. And do you hear the furnace, below?”

“Yeah. The motor’s revving up.”

“We’re turning, and gaining speed. We’re headed North tonight.”

“On the move. Knew this baby had some horsepower.”

Giovanni chuckled. “You remind me of my childhood friend, Tomas. He and I made ships of sticks, imagining ourselves sailing the seven seas, fighting pirates and giants and monsters. We always named our vessels. So what shall we name this? Our bark to the afterworld?”

“The Good Ship Lollipop,” muttered John, lost in the stars.

“The good what?”

John explained lollipops to Giovanni, who had seen marvelous spun-sugar confections in the palaces of Naples, in his youth, amid the company of the dissolute Niccolò Acciaiuoli and his amoral gang of sycophants, prostitutes and alcoholic jesters. After some discussion of this name, Giovanni came to feel it was fitting for their vessel, for the company of a friend amid thoughts of death is sweet as manna from heaven, and candy is a balm to children in all ages yet recorded.

6.

They woke up on the sand, having landed on an Apostle. The hulking ferry was tied haphazardly to a middle-aged aspen that grew close by the shore.

“Do you know this place?”

“Uhhh.” John Prine squinted into the green and blue. “Kinda. It was the seventies. Came up here fishing one time. But we also partook in some Schedule 1 narcotics, if you know what I mean.”

“Perhaps this is the destination promised by Clio of Avis. Your afterlife.”

John looked to the beach’s edge where the sand gave way to an old-growth grove. He sighed. “I got it from here. You sail on to Paradise.”

“We are meant to go together.”

A high wind ruffled the birch, aspen, poplar. The tamarack trees were yellow and ready to drop their needles. Giovanni brushed sand from his cassock, grabbed a stick of driftwood and poked the remains of a long-dead campfire.

“This is our journey, John.”

“Some journey. Playing boy scouts on an island with an old fat monk. No offense. Far as I can tell, this is the dumbest miracle God ever pulled.”

“You admit then that is it a miracle.”

“It’s definitely weird.”

“Look at us. Walking as in life.”

“Look at us? Look at you. You have old fish stains on your robe. You have gout. You look like a retarded penguin.”

“I’m your guide.”

“You’re a shitty guide.”

“I know. I’d like to improve.”

“Where do we go?”

“Inland. I have a feeling. Come on.”

They walked a couple of miles in, following a faint foot path, with Giovanni in the lead. The Italian kept crashing through small limbs, cursing the sandals he’d died in.

Pausing to catch his breath after ascending a small rocky hill at what looked to be the center of the island, Giovanni stared at a squirrel perched on a thin tree branch.

It was fat and grey, uglier than the red scoiattoli in Florence, as the Bayfield ferry was a monstrous cousin to the trim and handsomely red-enameled barks of Italy’s interior lakes. The squirrel looked at Giovanni unblinkingly, its splayed body poised for... something. John had called it a ‘tree rat’ and that seemed apt enough. What was a body for? What was a tail for? Ballast, balance, proportion. Beauty?

To think of the ancestors of this squirrel, what voyage they must have taken to this island, or did God pluck them and place them? He had heard of flying squirrels, so a stiff lucky wind was also a possibility. Seemed unlikely, but then again here he was, undead, walking around with a deranged balladeer who was kicking rocks and coming up with rhymes for the word ‘fucked’.

“Somebody shot me, probably should’ve ducked. Lute been plucked. Messed and mucked. Air conditioning duct.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to write a song, about this fools’ errand you’ve got me on.”

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“No shit.”

“I’m not a guide.”

“You can say that again.”

“I’m not a guide.”

“I mean, that’s obvious, fella.”

A silence. The squirrel was still looking at him. It had gone still. Giovanni touched it. It was ceramic, a clay squirrel. A moment ago it had been moving.

“This is a sign,” said Giovanni, in a hushed tone. “This is a portal,” he continued, trying to convince himself. “A sentry animal. We’re going the right way.”

They tramped for another hour, making slow progress through dense pines. “So,” said John, “what’re you gonna do after you get me where I’m going?

“I’m going up to Paradise.”

“Oh? That so?”

“Yes, and I will meet Dante there, along with my love Fiammetta, my father and mother.”

“How you gonna get up there?”

“Well, in The Divine Comedy, it takes the Poet four days to get to the top— Beatrice, the immortal woman, waits on high.”

“She really all that?”

“Yes, she truly is, if you believe the Poet, as we must. Dante must be trusted above all men. He showed the path. I owe him everything,” said Giovanni, “and soon I’ll meet him! I can’t wait to talk to him, though I’m worried it will be awkward. I’m a fan but I don’t know what he thinks of my work.”

“It’s like me and Dylan. What he writes is gold but I never had a good conversation with him. Know what I mean?”

“This is your Dante?”

“Pretty much. Showed the way for us poor songwriters, like you said. But you know, we’re all ripping each other off. I stole from Dylan, he stole from me and Leadbelly and Woodie Guthrie, and anybody else he could get his hands on. You stole from Dante who stole from God, who stole from the Devil.”

The Italian stopped, a little offended.

“What could God possibly steal from the Devil?”

“His dignity,” said John, walking ahead at full stride, and Giovanni fell in behind him.

After a couple more hours of walking, Giovanni and John had made their way to the other side of the island, and to a lakeside campsite. A nearby plaque read: “Ashuwaguindag Miniss. Hermit Island.”

Next to the plaque was a stone heron. In the shallow waters John found a marble frog. A fox up on a rock was made of pure taconite. In the center of the site was a hearth, with still- smoldering sticks.

“Who’s been here?”

They found a message written on the sand, in Latin.

“Forgive us.”

John watched a yellow leaf fall into a carpet of its sisters as Giovanni went behind a maple, relieving himself or pretending to. Their physical functions seemed to come and go—they could go days without eating or relieving themselves, but other times a great hunger or a yen for defecation came back in, the carnival of digestion resuming again with a riotous churn, as if it missed being there. Like their bodies were struggling to be, or to die.

A chill wind came off the lake. John shivered. “Jesus. Do I have to be cold when I’m dead?” he shouted to the dull blue sky, hazy with smoke from a distant forest fire.

Giovanni came trooping up.

“Found something. A quarry.”

“Let’s see it.”

It was a brownstone quarry. Set into it was a cave. A low howling sound came from the cave.

“Looks like hell.”

“It may be the hellmouth. And it is my role to lead you in.”

“Wait. Don’t.”

They stared into the blackness. John paced, tossed rocks into the abyss. Banged his forehead with his palm. Shouted to himself like a person about to take a polar plunge. Then turned to his companion.

“Listen, Gianni. This has been fun. You’ve been cool and all, getting me here. But I need to do this alone.”

“No—“

“I have to.”

And without another word John descended into the cave and before long was swallowed.

Hours passed. The afternoon light made big shadows out of the rocks around the quarry rim. The moon emerged, nearly full. It was almost the autumnal equinox, Giovanni reckoned. When they’d set out, it was still summer.

It was very quiet. A whippoorwill sang. Il succiacapre. He was thinking in Italian again. The pear-shaped boor was fading out of memory. Soon it would be his turn, he supposed. To ascend. Fino al cielo. Any minute now. He walked around the campsite, trying to feel lighter. A couple of times he did but then attributed it to the springiness of the soil. Should lose weight. John had told him about this Lentenish habit of 21st century man, ‘the diet.’ Sounded papal, suspicious. The wind died down even further. And in this emptiness he heard a clanking around in the low depths of the chasm.

No, he thought. No more of this.

And then John Prine came clambering back out of the hellmouth.

They stared at each other a moment. Giovanni’s hands trembled as he asked: “What did you see down there?”

“Well. It’s a long-ass tunnel. Gets small sometimes, you have to crouch. Warm, like you’re getting close to a volcano or something. Then there’s a bigger cave with a wooden door, all banged up, painted blue. Went through the door— I was backstage at Tootsie’s. Best honkytonk bar in Nashville. Played a set, kicked ass, walked offstage and I was onstage at the White Horse in Austin. Played a great set, Blaze Foley was there, went back to the green room and it was the green room for the Grand Ole Opry. I kid you not. Got some makeup on for the broadcast, wireless mike, did my hair, put on boots and went out and played a set, brought the house down. Big ovations. Crazy love. Bonnie was onstage with me, and Iris too. Best backing band you’ve ever seen, shit. I didn’t walk offstage, no, I crowd surfed to the bar, and they had a vodka ginger ale waiting for me big enough to jump in and swim laps. Met an old girlfriend at the bar, went back to her place, made love,

stopped in to the bathroom, it was my ex-wife’s, she was there in the jacuzzi, wearing nothing, you know what happens next, walked through another door and I was backstage at Rudy’s again. No joke. I had all the energy back, everything in me, I was ready to go again.”

“So you did it again?”

“Damn right I did it again. Wasn’t I down there a while?”

“You were.”

“Did that merry-go-round three times. Then I sat down at the dressing table at Tootsie’s. Looked around at all my guitars. Looked at myself in the mirror. I sat there a long time. I mean a long time. Pulled out a sharpie, wrote something stupid on the mirror. Looked at myself. Smacked myself on the face. Lady with a clipboard said ‘you’re on, Mister Prine.’ And I thought of my songs and all I did and my kids, and my grandkids, and all the love. And I went back to the blue door and into the cave and came back here. Almost turned back a couple times but I—but I—" He shook his head hard, swallowing a sob. “I thought. Man. I’ve done this before. I did all this. All this striving. All this effort. I’ve done it. I’ve been loved. I gave it and I got it. I’m—”

He broke off. And cried.

“I’m ready for something with not so much me in it, not so much effort, not so many chord changes. And I thought of you up here. I don’t think Jesus or anybody is coming for you, brother. So I thought I should come up, see how you’re doing.”

The Florentine took this in, as much of it as he could understand. The word jacuzzi rolled around in his mind, a beautiful word without meaning.

“Did you really do all that down there? Did you see all that and choose to come back?”

“I did.”

“Or did you make it up? Did you sit in a cold cavern and come back and tell me a story to make me feel grateful, and useful? As a gift?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, buddy.”

And they left it at that.

Giovanni turned, seeing a stone fox and stone acorns littering the ground. Around them, autumnal oak leaves were falling, some fluttering and some with a thud as they too became stone. The thuds became more rapid. Pine needles rained down, scraping Giovanni’s skin. He looked at the blood on the back of his hand.

“This is a test.”

“I’ve been tested, man. I went down in the hole.”

“Not yours. Mine. It’s not safe here. Move!”

The trees were fossilizing fast. The men ran, breaking personal bests in the 100-meter, the 200-meter, and on, trampling ferns that snapped like ice. From a ridge the ferry appeared below, a brushstroke of rusty white tied by a string. As they descended an adolescent elm came down as marble and pinned John’s ankle. He cried out in pain.

“You’re stuck. Let me help.”

The Florentine’s muscles, as flaccid now as they had been the day he slumped dead on his desk mid-mistranslation of Homer, strained as he lifted the trunk just enough for John to roll away. A dark bloom of blood darkened Prine’s trousers and the bed of needles where he lay.

“Don’t think I can walk.”

“I’ll carry you.”

“Nah. Leave me.” John looked up at the thinning air, the wisps of clouds. “Died once. I can do it again.”

“No. No!” His authority surprised him. “We’re not doing that anymore.”

And Giovanni Boccaccio, father of Italian prose, hoisted the folk singer onto his back like the broad shield of a Ghibelline mercenary, and together they fled from that place. As he crashed through brush, Giovanni kept John awake with small talk.

“What was the stupid thing?” Giovanni gasped for air like a landed carp. “You wrote on the mirror?”

“Oh... uh,” John struggled to recall, head lolling as they stumbled over downed limbs, through the hardening forest.

“Oh yeah. ‘There once was a fellow named Prine... who could get drunk on one cup of wine.’ Let’s see...” He slurred and slumped. “‘When he gives a toast, he’ll stand up and boast, I’m a cheap date. Suits me just fine.’”

7.

“This is the anguish of prose, man.”

“What’s the anguish of prose?”

“Compared to poetry. If you write a poem about a woman who died, you can sing about her and she lives forever. It’s immortal. She stays beautiful always. That’s the opposite of how prose works. If you write a paragraph about a dead woman she’s even more dead than she was when you started writing. Every word is another shovelful of dirt. That’s the anguish of prose.”

They were on front deck, John slumped in a cot, his leg patched up half-assedly with band- aids from a first aid kit they’d found in the kitchen. Their chairs faced open water. The dull blue lake flowed below. They were cruising north-ish, from the busted compass by the pilot’s seat. The motor was humming faster than usual for some reason. Night was approaching in the form of a huge cloud the color of charcoal.

“Thanks for helping me out, back there,” said John, taking a cigarillo out of his pocket (they were ever-replenishing, he’d recently learned, and all apple-scented). “You didn’t need to do that.”

Giovanni wanted to say something about the ascension he had expected after John’s disappearance, the Paradise he still craved as his reward for bearing the stubborn, smelly musician like a cross. Instead he cracked his knuckles (a habit since Naples in the 1330s), sighed and said: “You’re welcome. I’m retiring now. I will pray.”

“Me too, I guess. Pray we get where we’re going.”

The Italian shuffled off. That night he dreamed of his mother for the first time in centuries, a French woman he’d never known, a face shining in candlelight.

8.

Then they reached Ontario. A moose was there, snuffling in a stand of jackpine on the edge of a rocky shore. The gray stones were coated in rime.

“We have come to the end. This is hell, a freezing hell.”

“Naw, it’s just Canada. Zip up your fleece.”

They were taken into custody by immigration officials who had spotted the ferry a few miles out. Plague-conscious, the cops wore fitted black masks over their noses and mouths, and took the men’s temperature with a small glowing wand. The gesture reminded Giovanni of the smudge a priest used to daub on his forehead on Ash Wednesday. They both registered 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. “Right on the money,” said John and gave Giovanni a double thumbs up.

In the cinderblock detention center, Prine’s gift of gab had no effect, though he talked a blue streak about his platinum albums, his sold-out gigs in Toronto and Kingston, his drunken run-ins with Neil Young, even extolled the charm of Sault Ste Marie. The bored border cops let them walk after a couple of hours. Said a lady from Edmonton had bailed them out. Wired some money too.

They bought new clothes—Giovanni got up in flannel, camo pants and a floppy canvas hat (“you look like Jerry Garcia on a hunting expedition”), then ordered and ate a large Hawaiian pizza from a place called Fatty’s. They bought an old Ford pickup truck and drove up the road, where they bought an empty farmhouse on the roadside for a few hundred Canadian.

A few weeks later they set up an antique store. They never aged further. This, then, was the limbic threshold Dante had described: “Junk + Memories + Such” on route 17, near Amethyst Harbor, east of Thunder Bay. On a high shelf behind the register they kept a ceramic squirrel Giovanni had swiped from Hermit Island. One day its nose got chipped when John was bringing in a bedframe. They sold it for five dollars that afternoon to another junker from up the road.

During the colder half of the year, weather rolled in from the arctic north and pushed out over the lake, day after day. The two men talked only rarely, absorbed in their work restoring furniture and taxidermy, attending estate sales, selling the things of the dead to young couples in down vests, eyes aflame, men and women just beginning to collect what they need to get through the world.

LONGEVITY

Their life unfolded in flashes. One week awake, then fifty years of sleep. A few days conscious, a dozen years in cryo. A day, a century.

The flashes were for science. The ship woke Jaime and Lina when some phenomenon needed to be analyzed, catalogued. And, they came to think, witnessed. Take the flares from the giant white supernova last fall. If a tree falls in the forest. Lashes of light so white they blurred the surrounding black, licking the universe, scraping it out, singeing the edges of sight. “Fall” was arbitrary, of course. They had a calendar for each year of their personal, biological lives. The colorful wall calendars showed wide-angle Earth-photos of landscapes of the Northern hemispheres: snowy mountain ranges, summer fields of violet, Halloween leaves. They marked through the days dutifully with Xes in bright black permanent ink. Last “fall” was in fact a hundred and seventy-five years ago, but neither Jaime nor Lina looked much anymore at the real time chart, a tab in a screen somewhere in the workstation. Now, for them, time proceeded in star-days, star-years, which began at launch with SY1, when they were both in their mid 50s. It was now the spring of Star Year 20. So in corporeal, aging terms, Jaime and Lina had recently turned seventy-five and seventy-six, respectively. They’d been married nearly five decades. The first half of their marriage was earthly, rocky sometimes, up and down. The second half, all in flight, had taken them several thousand years and five million light years beyond anything anyone had ever witnessed.

The way he served the coffee, his veiny hand hesitating with the tray, she knew he had something to say. Go on, she thought. But she was patient. It would come out. She looked up and out at the galaxy they were passing, glanced at the camera panels, then back at Jaime as he shuffled down to the engine room. The coffee was too hot to drink at first, always was. She lifted the cup and blew on it as asteroids began to pelt the hull, sparking as they glanced off the glass.

The trip was a kind of retirement gift—one they’d made for each other. Dr. Kavathekar saw it coming. As Director of the Sentinel program she knew the couple’s minds, their passions, nearly as well as they did. Level with me. Is this mission truly, as you claim, for Earthly volunteers? Or is it for you? Be honest: are you the volunteers?

Of course they were. A one-way trip. No one else, they thought, could do it. They had piloted hundreds of flights together and apart, knew mechanical repair, medicine, had the stomach and the patience and the heart. Jaime thought he saw Lina flinch as she signed the paperwork, my last will and testament, leaving their library to the lab, their house to friends, their clothes to charity. Then she turned to her husband, smiling like a newborn sun, and he knew it was real. It’s happening.

Dr. K’s contribution was the engine, and the sleeping algorithm. It wasn’t something she could trust Jaime and Lina to do. She built the system to wake them only when the Sentinel found something requiring analysis beyond the ship’s capabilities, plus when ship repair is needed plus a once per century maintenance detail plus, and this was the couple’s request, when the Sentinel finds itself in places of extraordinary beauty. Lina had programmed the settings for beauty. A combination of color, movement, visual change. She fed the algorithm centuries-worth of video content – nebula clusters, various novas, shimmering black-hole-edges, epiphenomena of the universe growing and dying, exploding and collapsing.

They had long ago made peace with the fact they’d slept through the deaths of everyone they’d known. It was only hard through Star Year 3, when the world they’d left behind had ceased to contain any person who cared for them in any way.

That spring, they’d woken up one day to find the real years had advanced by seven decades. Seventy-three years and fifty-five days of sleep, to be exact. “Good morning!” Jaime’d said, sitting up in cryo, his long legs hanging over the pod door, pulling his socks on, and Lina saw that his eyes were swollen with tears. At that time, they knew, back on Earth, their great-grand-nieces and –nephews were reaching retirement age, losing their memories to senility. They took half a day to write down a list of every person they’d ever met, all the names they could remember.

They had no children of their own, a mandatory condition for selection to serve in any Superfast Sentinel, even a hopeful round-tripper. But theirs was the first humanned one- way, so they had a legacy of sorts. After Launch, Jaime and Lina’s names were enshrined, their visages beloved by students of science, their forms a permanent installation in Tampa, looping on video, clutching hands, we are going to go very far, very fast, together, assuming Tampa still existed. Whether or not they were still looping on Earth: everyone they knew was dead. After that point, and especially after Year 4, they were free.

It suited them, this life beyond. They had what they needed: their scientific instruments, the Cyclopedia, an immersion display, each other.

Jaime came up from the engine room, smiling. “All clear.” The coffee was just now reaching drinking temperature. Lina brought the cup to her sunburnt lips, took a sip.

•

The teardrop-shaped Sentinel was a glass tadpole eighty feet long. The tail was a transmitter, what they called a warp-radio, that sent back information at three times the speed of light, so no matter how far they traveled, what they gathered would get back long before they possibly could. Even if they turned around. But they weren’t turning around.

A round-trip was possible, technically. But they were now beyond its likely range, even if they both stayed healthy for the trip back. And besides—with every passing sleep the Earth they’d known was farther and farther transformed. Reading history, late into the nights, they shuddered to wonder what might have become. What advancement had unfolded, at what cost? Had Warming had the feared effects on ocean salinity? Had the Wars come back? COVID-35? The possibilities of seeing life evolved, of being welcomed home by humans who wouldn’t speak what they knew as language anymore, thrilled but exhausted them. They’d likely be in their nineties, if they survived, just based on maintenance-waking alone. And Earth would be twenty-thousand years older than when they left. At least.

Besides. They’d already seen thousands of things no one had ever seen. Flying forward, they could be sure of thousands more.

The Cyclo was always on these days, Jaime often hunched over it, reading about the past. He was hunched now, generally, she noticed. He was getting old. His hair white and wild— uncut for decades, he’d swept it up with one of her clips. From his ears, wiry hairs sprouted like an explosion coming up from a deep mine. Look in the mirror one of these days.

There was a personal mirror in each privacy room, mandatory in the design—the couple at first disputed this ornament, claiming they had no vanity and could use the cameras if needed—but Lina had come to appreciate the glass’ inert honesty, especially when it came to her own face’s new lines, hairs and sallow shadows, a certain recent hollowness suggesting wisdom and the skull below. Through the doorway she could see he’d taken his down. When did he do that? I didn’t notice. I used to notice everything.

Jaime spent hours of Cyclo time on traditional hiphop, 20th/21st centuries. He read Carrington, Leonora, complete works and Huygenz-Uba, modern transit dynamics. He has something on his mind, she thought. I know it.

That night they turned on a meditation program. The stars streaked. They breathed slowly. As they hurtled into vast blackness, Doctor K’s voice, reading Thích Nhất Hạnh, surrounded them.

•

The next morning it came out.

“Honey.”

“Yes?”

“I wondered if I could take some days on my own.”

“Why?”

“Just want to see what it would be like. Might be good for you too. Absence makes the heart, all that.”

“I’d miss you.”

“I’d miss you too.”

It was a real question, the ball in her court, but he’d already prepared the system. Of course he had. Jaime Valenzuela, always a step ahead. His hack had required a complex unyoking of the sleep systems, a violation of Dr. K’s explicit warning. You can’t be alone. You just can’t. Not with the complexities of the ship.

But as he expected, she liked the idea. They agreed to alternate: two days alone, two days together. And so, after their next Sleep, Lina woke on her own for the first time in fifty- thousand years. In the Observation room, she found her husband doing gentle aerobics in front of a vast line of black holes. It never failed to shock her, the warping of that blackness, a trick on the eyes, like her optic nerve was falling forward, falling in. He paused mid- lunge, and as he turned to her, she remembered him at twenty-eight, in his red shorts and running shoes, by big rocks somewhere in the West. Why an Ultramarathon? she’d wondered.

Why not?

“Good morning, love.”

One wake, Lina’s turn to start, she began to notice the part of space they’d entered was subtly blue. It wasn’t apparent staring out, up, or down. It wasn’t directional at all. It was just that, shiplights off, everything was now a little bit blue.

•

Years of starlife passed this way, an irregular rhythm now, intuitive. One or the other would take a week alone, or two. They left each other short love-notes, made tapestries of digital imagery on the interior of the tear-shaped hull. There were poems, fractal flowers. Once Jaime studied ocean navigation, made a sea-voyage for them, from a whale’s perspective, complete with orca songs and their translation. Love, went one part, echo me.

They turned eighty-four, eighty-five. They saw incomparable beauty. When awoken, individually, they recorded things to share. They sometimes did a string of three or four observations without waking the other. They stretched their lives beyond what could have been possible if both woke up each time. They were now, they knew, far enough away from Earth where even the warp-radio’s signal was at risk of being lost. Anybody who may still be Receiving would get degraded images. But for Jaime and Lina things were exceptionally vivid.

“I always thought my sight would go as I got old. But I see better than ever.”

“Tea?”

“I’m not drinking caffeine anymore. It gets my heart rate up. I want to stay steady,” Lina said, her hair a wild swept-back mane of white.

“I think I’m sick.”

She turned to see Jaime, dark bags under his eyes.

“Sick, how?”

“I don’t know. Something in my gut. Hurts when I eat, hurts all the time.”

Cancer, she thought, but didn’t say. It was more fear than prediction.

But that was it, or something like it.

They chose little intervention. They had opiates, but no surgery station.

The blue light continued, as it had for months now. Years? When she looked in the mirror it was there. It was in her skin now, or was that a trick of light? Love, echo me.

He slept through fifty of her Observations. She started drinking tea again, studying medicine. There was likely nothing to do for Jaime. Let him sleep. Awake. She woke each time to the hum of the ship, tried sleeping humanly, without cryo, for hours and days. Took ballet classes with a module. Sang karaoke. There was work to do of course, but the ship did so much of it, always had. Taking photographs and video, hi-res, medium-res. All the nebulae and forms of stars and planets in subtle variation. She was a passenger. She was in service to knowledge.

She looked at her husband tenderly. His skin papery, his mustache strong and black, his hair so thick. She felt a kind of lust. How often and how well we loved. Fucked, she thought, and the word made her smile, the foolishness of it all. Her ovaries had been barren, the doctor told her, no chance of children. Lucky, said Jaime. I don’t want to be careful, with you.

She wanted to have breakfast with him. She told the system to wake them both up next time.

She woke and turned but Jaime wasn’t there. He was there, but still in cryo. A small icon indicated a medical reason not to resuscitate. Override, she pressed, she said, she shouted. But the cryo system wouldn’t respond. The whole system was designed to be overrode, there was no way it wouldn’t let her in. Unless, she thought. Unless he’s gone.

The last time he had woken it was to see a great Cluster, one of thousands. It took a few days for the ship to capture. During that time he’d read a book in paper, one of a few precious specimens. Earth Elegy, a warming parable from 2075, a masterpiece, a love story. She’d always seen her husband in Clarissa, the protagonist, who’d overcome corporate anti-solar machinations to save the planet. Jaime’s work in his youth had been in solar. It’s you, my love, it’s you, she thought, seeing him read this book they’d shared. Or maybe she spoke it. He kissed her before climbing in, clutching his stomach, and now—

He lay inert in the chamber. She could force it open but the seal would be hard to restore. She didn’t trust her strength.

She panicked. Then remembered they knew this would happen. They’d talked about it a hundred times.

The blue light was obvious now, undeniable. It was a light, yellowish blue. It seemed to adhere to surfaces, though that didn’t quite make sense. I’m losing my mind. No. I’m not.

It was in all the rooms now. It was in Jaime’s chamber. It was in her skin and the whites of her eyes. It was in the glass of the hull, the fuel-trail. It was a cloud.

The ship passed near a stream of suns. Each one exploding, ferocious.

The light was shimmering in her. Jaime was dead. Lina was alone and so far past what had ever been seen. And she still had years ahead. Years and years to witness.

Wake up, my love.

Wake up.

The blue light nestled, kindled in her.

She looked inside. She closed her eyes. She gasped. For it was at this moment the Ones who lived in the yellow-blue light chose, for the first time, to speak.