Hypothermia

flight through the world was inevitably brought to ground by a flailing plunge from the ethereal heights of the Responsorial Psalm. Then came, in succession, a rosy giant of a man, pink as a pig; the rabid Dominican woman who directed the choir for the Mass in Spanish; and three unflappable Filipino señoras , fearless because they knew no one had any idea what they were singing. Three risers had to be stacked up for them to reach the microphone. It was no use. The Pole continued tyrannizing the Mass with his lungs of steel. Surrounded by his swarming progeny during the slow, majestic procession toward the altar and host, he was the full, vigorous embodiment of Slavic tenacity, destroying tempos and pushing notes to the breaking point.
    Then he disappeared. It wasn’t until he said this to her that he really and with clarity saw that he was telling a story with no ending. How? she asked, sounding very intrigued. For a moment this gave him the hope that something real was flowing along those microwaves, same as when they were guided only by the inscrutable, magnetic wisdom of the flesh, with nothing else in between them.
    He disappeared, he said, that’s all, nothing else. And? Well, we ended up stuck with the Filipino ladies—they’re frightful. It can’t be. The truth, he answered, is that I really miss him, so much that I went looking for him at Our Lady Queen of Poland. It’s pretty close by. I went to all three morning Masses but there was no sign of him. He disappeared. Maybe he went on vacation, she said. Or he defected to Poland, he responded. Her laughter on the other end of the line made him feel that, in spite of everything, he might be able to save himself.

THERAPY: DUPLICITY

    I have the strange and terrible habit of confessing offenses I haven’t committed.
    One day, for example, in my hour of deepest sincerity, beweeping our own incarnation of mankind’s fall from grace, I told her that she had not been my only extramarital affair, that I’d had two other lovers. The number I decided on is of particular interest, because I’d never really had any.
    But it would be more interesting still to know why I bother doing this. The fact is that, while confessing to these affairs, I was convinced about the veracity of the events in question. But they made no sense: we’re both adults and we’ve been around the block enough times to be freely admitted to the ranks of the “experienced.” My bragging, therefore, was unnecessary. But that’s what I said to her and now I don’t know how to take it back, because my fictional jadedness isn’t consistent with my fears of our being found out.
    It’s something I’ve done ever since I was a kid: I pretend to have a secret life, all to myself. Well, now I’ve got it, all right, and nobody else can get in. I’m like the blind man in the Bible: although his sight was restored, he had to pretend that he couldn’t see anything because Jesus Christ himself ordered it.
    No, I don’t even know if what I’m saying here is the truth.

FATHER

    It was by no means a noteworthy event, but it came back to him whenever he allowed himself enough perspective to consider the more practical than admirable scale of values according to which he had always operated, and that had lately, for lack of opportunity, fallen into disuse. During a New Year’s Eve celebration he’d gone out to the garden to have a smoke. He was with his wife and little girls at his father-in-law’s house in Raleigh—a minor, tepid, nondescript city composed almost entirely of suburbs. A fine frozen rain was falling, which in the southern United States can begin at the end of November and not let up until March or April, without ever turning to snow. He had not yet removed his cigarette lighter from his jacket pocket when he spotted an opossum on the garden fence, just above eye level. It was very young, soaking wet, watching him with a hard, unsettling stare.
    As was generally the case, the opossum story came back to him during a peaceful interval: she’d accompanied her husband on a business trip to Hong Kong, a trip he had helped to organize, so his days at the office crawled lazily by, without his boss’s demands for action or his boss’s wife’s need for attention. During that time he checked his e-mail constantly because he knew that a message from her might arrive at any moment. He responded with long, intense letters that always made him feel less lonely while he wrote them, but