Going Native by Stephen Wright

chair against the floor until the joints spread and cracked, sticks falling from his hands, while she bolted for the John, evading the slashing chair leg (now a club) by inches. The door banged, the lock snapped shut, he on the outer side, flailing away in an explosion of paint chips, the gouging magician, one-two-three, relishing his power over wood, she on the inner side, huddled trembling over the bowl like someone who has been or is about to be violently ill, fingers buried to the first knuckle in the ringing tunnels of her ears.
    When the pounding stopped, she tentatively lowered her hands and listened. First, to the clump clump of his thick graceless feet up and down the narrow hallway, then from the bedroom the click Click CLICK of the lighter, then a pervasive swarming silence that drew her from her tiled sanctuary to stand shyly at the bedroom door, a watcher with big spaniel eyes. Surrounded by pillows, Mister CD was lounging upon the mattress, his back propped against the wall, his expression slightly strained with the effort of holding in a breath blended with sweet additives. He nodded genially in her direction, the apple-cheeked country squire savoring his evening brier. When he finished, he placed the stem in a saucer on the floor and, casually interested, looked up at her. "Now, what'd you go and make me do you like that?" he asked. "I coulda had a bad heart attack."
    She mumbled out a reply.
    "What? Speak up. You look like one of Dracula's wives."
    She mumbled on.
    "I can't understand a fucking thing you're saying. What is it?" He held a cupped hand to his ear, pretended to listen. His arm made a quick dismissive gesture. "Fuck that." He labored to his feet with elderly caution, plodded past her without a glance or a touch, to resume his ongoing study of the moonlit still life framed in his front window. There was a preordained method for scrutinizing the scene, an obligatory review in unvarying sequence of certain trees, shrubs, poles, shadows, reading the pattern for the anomalies one surely, at this point, expected. Across the desolate street the familiar houses, perpetually dark, not even a forgotten table lamp to share the vigil of these abandoned hours, their duplicate faç ades presenting the same enigmatic expression, the solitary streetlight shedding its pinkish pallor over the ornaments of suburbia, throwing into further relief those cliffs and pools of deepest shade, teeming with potentialities, the moon a crescent of chrome among an intimidating array of icy studs where a single rivet had come undone, a communications satellite in decaying orbit, hurling itself into the oblivion of home. Then he noticed the hole in his view. His own Galaxie, it was missing. He peered through disbelieving eyes at the empty space in the driveway. He scanned the dark row of cars parked along the curb. He opened the door and rushed out onto the lawn, a frantic naked man utterly unable to comprehend -- his unmonitored pulse galloping headlong toward the finish line without him -- the rather unexceptional fact of his victimization by the forces of modern life. Someone had dared to steal his fucking car.
    In the bedroom Latisha lay sprawled halfway across the disheveled bedding, her legs lost in a welter of CD wreckage, the slovenly pose, she imagined, of the final police photograph. She had found the pipe and the bag and now shell after lofting shell was breaking in coarse splendor against the high vaulting of her skull, launched from a busy mortar battery at her center, where the warm stem nestled pleasingly between her thighs, a snug axis around which her proffered body, gently at first, then with quickening vigor, began to move, up and down, side to side, churning up new worlds, one after another.
     
     
     
    Three
    BLACKWORK
     
    The rain caught him in the dark by surprise, a cold finger at his cheek, tapping him awake to night and storm and the confusions of consciousness. He dared not move; he could recognize