The Bend of the World: A Novel

DEDICATION

For my brother

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1

It was a wet February in Pittsburgh, spring, early and without warning, and twice in one week UFOs had been spotted hovering over Mount Washington. Well, people said, that’s not exactly the strangest thing you’ll see on Mount Washington, which was just one of the ways that we said bullshit, but by the end of the following week there were so many eyewitnesses and cell phone pics and videos and even a sudden and suddenly popular blog called Alieyinz.com dedicated to these and other sightings around the city and the rural counties south and east that the mayor’s office called a press conference To Address the Speculation. The early part of that year had been rough for the mayor. A lingering and byzantine dispute with the head of the Economic Development Council blew up when the director of the EDC publicly resigned, citing a culture of intimidation, corruption, favor-trading, and recrimination in a widely published letter. Then the papers reported that the mayor himself was under investigation for appropriating a Homeland Security grant and using the expensive new surveillance equipment to spy on his not-yet-ex-wife and her attorney. So the mayor didn’t actually show up to the flying saucer press conference; his chief of staff Jonah Kantsky came instead, which was just as well, since everyone said that Kantsky was the Svengali behind the young mayor or, since it had been pointed out that such phrasing might be a little bit anti-Semitic, that he was the Richelieu behind the child king. When the woman from Channel 4 asked him why the mayor wasn’t at the presser, Kantsky said, Gail, the mayor is busy cooperating with investigators, which made the reporters laugh. Anyway, Kantsky said something to the effect of we’re cooperating with DOD and DHS and the National Weather Service and the Air Force reserve wing out at the airport and all relevant state and local and federal authorities including the Pittsburgh FBI office etc. etc. etc. and I can assure you that while clearly something was seen last week there is no probative or dispositive evidence or indication that it was anything other than a meteorological phenomenon, in fact I have been convincingly assured through these consultations that it was an example of a rare phenomenon called ball lightning, the result of warm or cold air masses or vectors or something.

Then a huge bald black guy in a dark suit and a yellow yarmulke who’d been standing quietly in the back lost his shit and started screaming, You want to live in a dreamworld forever? And he had to be hauled out by a pair of police officers barely as tall as his shoulders. That effectively ended the press conference, except that a live mic caught Kantsky muttering something about a fruitcake to an aide, and the next day the story was neither the UFOs nor the outburst by the man, who turned out to be Rebbe Mustafah Elijah, the high priest and sole proprietor of a local sect called the Universal Synagogue of the Antinomian Demiurge, a weird millennial cult based out of the back room of Elijah’s Africana store in East Liberty, but rather a subsequent press conference hastily arranged by City Councilwoman Mary Tremone, a presumptive mayoral challenger in next year’s contest, who cited Kantsky’s overheard comment as just one more indication of a heedless and uncaring administration displaying a shocking disregard for the feelings and emotional well-being of the city’s LGBTQ communities, especially its youth, who faced bullying every day, and who were The Future of Our City. And so by the first week in March the whole thing became a diversity imbroglio.

Once more down the memory hole, said my buddy Johnny Robertson, waving a fry at my face over the table in our booth at the diner.

This place is shit, I said. Why do we come here?

Did you ever meet the rabbi? Johnny asked me.

Who?

Mustafah Elijah. Did I ever introduce you? No? That guy is awesome. He ate the fry. The thing is, my friend said, the thing is that there’s a fourth river, you know, under the city. So if you take the aerial view of the city and you have the Allegheny and the Mon coming together at the Point to form the Ohio, if you take the Ohio and sort of extend that axis through the point and onward between the other two rivers, what you get, ta-dah, is basically the peace sign, which of course is just an inversion of a satanic symbol representing the Baphomet, which is in turn just a reproduction of an even more ancient sigil related to Ba’al worship and suchlike. So basically the Point represents a node or a nexus of intense magical convergence, an axis mundi, if you will, wherein vast telluric currents and pranic energies roil just beyond the liminal boundaries between the phenomenal and the numinous branes of existence, and obviously this whole UFO what-have-you is a manifestation of that, not some fucking ball lightning or whatever. Jesus, ball lightning? Fucking fifty years after Roswell and a century after Tunguska, and that’s the best they can come up with? I was born at night, but not last night.

Uh-huh, I said.

You gonna eat the rest of those eggs, brother? Johnny asked me. Oh, and can I owe you? I’m a little short today.

2

I was halfheartedly dating a girl named Lauren Sara at the time, or she halfheartedly dating me. Ours was the sort of object in motion that, unacted-upon by an external force, remains in motion. But isn’t that true of all objects, and all relationships? Johnny hated her. You’re a classic gay misogynist, I told him. He objected. I don’t hate all women, or even most women. Just every woman you’ve ever dated. Do I need to draw you the Venn diagram? The common denominator is not the vagina.

We’d met, Lauren Sara and me, the past summer in a popular bar on Penn Avenue on a day so hot and insistently humid that the sunlight turned green. It was the sort of day when thunder keeps grumbling in the distance but rain never quite seems to arrive. I’d played softball with some of the guys down at Baldy McGrady Field before a real team with real equipment and a real reservation chased us off, and I was cooling off with a beer, unsuccessfully, because even on Sunday afternoon the bar was hot and crowded. Can’t they turn on the fucking air? I said to no one in particular. My friend Derek said, Hipsters hate air-conditioning. Do they? I said, and he shrugged. It seems like they would.

From behind, Lauren Sara looked like another friend of mine, and she was talking to a girl I thought I might have known, and when I went over and tapped her on the shoulder and said, Hey, and realized, when she turned around, that she was someone else, I said, Oh, sorry; I thought you were someone else.

And she sipped her whiskey through the little stirrer straw and lifted her eyes and shrugged and said, I am. She paused. Someone else. Derek, who was on his way to take a piss, heard this, and I heard him mutter, Oh Jesus Christ. I later found out that he’d dated Lauren Sara. A good time, he said, was not had by all.

So what’s your name again? I asked, even though I hadn’t yet asked her for her name.

Lauren Sara, she said, but someone had just then turned up the music and I leaned closer and said, Laura?

Lauren Sara, she said again. I fucking hate when people call me Laura.

Lauren Sara, I said. That’s two names.

Two too many, she said.

What? I asked.

I don’t know, she said. What’s your name?

Peter, I said.

Can I call you Pete?

No.

She grinned, and she said, See?

We walked back to her studio. She was a graduate student at CMU, a sculptor or something, who made things or assemblages or whatever that looked like chairs to me. It had finally rained briefly and hard while we were in the bar, and the sycamores drooped over the cemetery wall. Her studio, which she shared with another artist, whom she called the Greek, was on the second floor above a closed auto body shop on Penn Avenue; you walked up a narrow concrete staircase and pushed aside a steel fire door that clanged like something in a medieval dungeon and walked into an expanse of concrete and cracked windows and piles of industrial junk.

Why do you call her the Greek? I asked.

Because, Lauren Sara answered, she’s Greek.

Like Greek Greek? I said.

Like Zeus. Like ruins. Like a spinach pie. Do you smoke weed?

I watched her while she dug around for a piece or papers. She was prettier than the women I usually dated, who tended to look more like Lauren Sara’s futurist constructs than like Lauren Sara: severe, planar, composed in straight lines and angles. Johnny said I only dated women who looked like little boys. You’re a classic ephebophile, he said. Please, I told him. You think everyone is gay. He sighed. Not gay. Gay is an artifact of the binary twentieth century mind. What’s gay? You’re gay, I told him. I, Johnny said, and you have to understand that he was a big, barrel-chested beast of a man who was just then wearing a pair of hiking boots, cargo shorts, and a Laibach T-shirt, am queer. You sure are, I said.

Anyway, Lauren Sara had a round face and a body that, if slight, could by no reasonable standard be called boyish. She had blue eyes, but the blue was never much more than a soft halo around big black pupils, forever dilated because she smoked too much weed. She wore sundresses over spandex shorts and she rode a bike everywhere. She was in a phase of feigned poverty; she never did introduce me to her parents, and she was always vague about their backgrounds, but I figured out that her dad was an attorney or something and her mom was the head or principal or director of some kind of vaguely Catholic private school in Philly, and once during the winter we were together, when she’d claimed to be unable to hang out for a few days due to some pressing school projects, I’d been driving through Shadyside and had spotted her outside of a restaurant, ducking abashedly, or so I imagined, into the back seat of a big Mercedes with a handsome, sixtyish couple already in the front seats.

Well, that all came later. We got a little stoned and drank a little more warm whiskey from a bottle she snatched from the Greek’s drafting table, and she made me look at some of her sculptures and asked what I thought about them. I said I liked them and they looked like chairs. Cool, she said. I’d soon discover that it was the most prevalent word in her vocabulary, closely trailed by yeah, both of them pronounced as lilting bisyllables, coo-ool, yeah-ah, and a doubled nod of the head like a pigeon when it walks. Yeah, she said, they’re more like about the idea of a chair.