Fearless by Rafael Yglesias Page A

she said.
    He was a mouth but no voice. He tried to ask why she wanted to discuss God but forgot the previous word as each new one was formed. Anyway, it wasn’t important. A sea poured up his body: hot, unwinding his muscles, and melting his bones.
    Where’s my cock? he wondered and opened his eyes. He didn’t have one. He had grown an abundant woman from his stomach. She swam out of him, her face relaxed.
    “You’re not angry anymore,” he said, the words sounding through his nose.
    “Oh God,” she answered.
    He laughed and told her: “There is no God.”
    The FBI man’s head was wide to begin with; and yet his ears stretched his face even more, comically projecting flesh farther from the center of his face, which was a small nose and tiny red lips. “Are you Max Klein?” he asked.
    Everything in Max’s mouth was stuck together; there didn’t seem to be any free space inside. “Hmmm,” he mumbled his yes. He realized he had no clothes on and hid his body behind the hotel door, clutching the edge of its frame. He had a headache too, he noticed, two lines of pain running from his cheeks and crossing his forehead, burning to the back of his skull.
    The wide-faced man opened a leather wallet. Inside there was a picture of that face with FBI in big letters beside it. “I’m Agent Parsons. This is my partner, Agent Smith.” Smith was black and skinny. The cool white collar of his shirt shimmered against his ebony neck. He seemed to be staring at a point above Max’s head. “You’re registered as a Mr. Max Klein of 505 West End Avenue? Is that correct?”
    Max felt shame. He knew he had been naughty, but he wasn’t sure what to select from his buffet of guilt: taking LSD, committing adultery, eating strawberries, the death of his partner, the abandonment of the children he had saved, peeing on private property…
    Meanwhile he mumbled, “Wait,” hurrying into his pants—he couldn’t find his underwear or his shirt. He let the G-men in, prepared to surrender. It wasn’t the sixties anymore: his behavior deserved punishment.
    “Do you have any identification?” Agent Parsons asked.
    Max gave Parsons his wallet and watched Smith wander around the room searching for something. “No bags?” Smith asked when he opened the closet and saw it was empty except for Max’s underpants and polo shirt.
    “It’s him,” Parsons said and showed his partner Max’s photo on his New York State driver’s license.
    I didn’t call my wife and son, Max remembered. That was the crime he had committed.
    “Were you on a flight to—?”
    “Yes,” Max interrupted. “I was there.”
    “You took a hike straight from the scene?” Smith asked. “Just upped and left?”
    “Yeah…” Max’s head throbbed and he held it in his hands. A vivid neon flash of his first and ultimately rejected drawing for the Zuckerman house on Long Island pulsed against his eyelids.
    “Your head hurting?” Smith asked and knelt in front of him, staring into his eyes. “Did you get checked by anybody?”
    “What time is it?” Max asked, wondering how many hours delinquent he was in telling his wife that she was not a widow.
    “One o’clock,” Smith said and then added: “ P.M. ”
    “One o’clock…?” Max was confused. The crash had happened at about twelve.
    Smith understood. “One o’clock, Wednesday afternoon.”
    He was a day delinquent. Max shut his eyes and the redesign of the Zuckerman patio flowed away from the boxy Cape, easing your eye toward a fantasized and improbable garden. In fact, everything Linda Zuckerman touched seemed to wither and die. He wished the things he drew were never built and never seen by his customers. What both his clients and his pencil imagined was always more satisfying than the compromise of their finished constructions.
    “Mr. Klein,” Agent Smith tapped him on the knee. “Can I ask you something?” Max opened his eyes. Smith’s right eye was bloodshot and he sounded as if he had a