Free When Is a Man by Aaron Shepard Page A

tailor-made for sitting outside. Smells didn’t come and go on an ephemeral ocean breeze but hovered in the still air and accumulated in richness: deli meat, bagels and mustard, coffee and fresh bread. Mountain bikes leaned against the ornate metalwork railings, a line of men and women in cycling shorts queued up at the coffee counter, brown and grey mud drying on their calves and black apricot-shaped bums. They looked to be all ages, anywhere from twenty to fifty, all of them hard and lean with tanned and veiny arms. On the curb near Paul, two men in khaki uniforms spread maps and clipboards on the hoods of a truck marked with a Monashee Power logo, their travel mugs perched at angles on the gleaming metal.
    He checked his e-mail, sent a quick reply to his parents to say he was all right, the river was beautiful, so were the fish, sorry he’d be out of touch for the next while. Most of the incoming messages he could ignore, put off, or delete. Like the one from Dr. Elias Tamba.
    Hope your convalescence is going well. I took the liberty of checking for a specialist in your area and, of course, found no one and nothing. In fact, I would recommend avoiding any type of serious injury or disease during your stay, as apparently the local hospital, thanks to recent government cuts, has been reduced to something slightly better than an emergency outpost.
    I’m obliged to ask about your plans for the future (your silence is understandable, of course, but this needs to be addressed sooner rather than later). Requisite questions: Are you registered for the next semester? Have you modified your dissertation, or considered a new direction you may want to take?
    He gnawed softly on one knuckle. Tamba’s stiff attempts at camaraderie grated. All he could picture was Tamba’s smug smile and Christine. Did he need to reply to this right now? No. If the question was whether he’d drop out or not, Tamba probably knew the answer better than he did.
    Driving back, the back seat loaded with clean laundry and groceries, he watched the monolith of the dam rise up like a mirage and shimmer under sunlight. The smell of dried grasses, hay in a field, filtered through the open window, along with the truncated notes of crows and blackbirds. An osprey perched on a telephone pole and then launched itself over the water. Cars and trucks were parked along the reservoir, and families trudged up dirt paths from the water, arms loaded with rumpled towels and empty coolers, their bathing suits wet with the last swim of the year.
    At Hardy’s driveway, he slowed to peek at the cabin. On the deck, a single straight-backed wooden chair faced the river, and the cabin, for all its dull-wooded wear, looked like a tourist’s dream, the cozy summer cottage. Then something moved on the far corner of the deck, and there was Hardy. The old man leaned against the railing, staring down at the dark pool, at the eddy gathering whatever the current sent down.

8

    In the dream, the woman was mostly Anneke, the student he’d met at the Skinnskatteberg pub, but he also recognized Christine’s elfin figure. The smile, broad, sweet, and somewhat naive, was distinctly Naomi’s. He wanted to kiss that smile, drawn to the memory of its silly warmth, but the shifty mouth eluded him, there and not there on the blond, plump-cheeked face of the giggling Swede.
    Much of the dream was a true recollection: they’d stumbled outside to a dark spot behind the building, where the streetlight didn’t reach. Snowflakes like drunks keeling over. Whenever she laughed, Anneke would press her head against his chest, and she was always laughing. “Very high on the Ecstasy,” she told him. He’d taken a mix of pills she and her friends had given him and they’d made him drink too much aquavit. He leaned against the wall of the building, her forehead butted against his collarbone and her breath gathered in the folds of his coat. He kept