Brooke found out she was pregnant the same week Benno was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

At thirty-nine, Benno was too young. Too young to be a father again. Too young for the diagnosis. Too young for everything.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, holding Brooke’s hand from the hospital bed where they were keeping him for an overnight after his second endoscopy. It was ridiculous. He felt fine. He could go home.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” He chewed his tongue around his mouth, suddenly sand dry. “I guess I mean what do you want me to do?”

Brooke squeezed Benno’s hand with both of hers. “Just get better.”

She used to look like Kay. A younger Kay. But she’d aged into all the differences, and now she didn’t look like anyone. She was a stranger. Benno wanted to go home.

“So what do you think?” he asked. “Got any names?”

Brooke smiled and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. There was a poppyseed in her teeth. “I like Horace if it’s a boy. It’s kind of vintage.”

“I had a cat named Horus, the Egyptian spelling. Growing up.”

“Really?”

“He had one eye.”

Brooke frowned. “I thought Recipient was your only cat.”

“No…” Benno started, then trailed off. Recipient was Benno’s only cat. There had never been a one-eyed cat named Horus. Where the Hell had he come up with that? There was only Recipient, the big son of a bitch, for as far back as Benno could remember… Horus? It must be residual effects from the sedative.

“Do you need a nurse?”

“Hm?” Benno looked up from his palm. “No. Just ready to leave.”

Brooke patted Benno’s arm. “Soon enough.”

A monotone voice spoke from the intercom in the hallway outside the room, but Benno could not make out what it said.

#

His older brother had a nice house. Advertising money. Benno had been there once before, right after Nick was born, for an obligatory uncle-nephew introduction. But other than that he’d only seen Oscar once in the last sixteen years, at their father’s funeral.

They shook hands on the front steps of the large three story home nestled on a quiet cul-de-sac just over the Connecticut border. The handshake lasted longer than Benno anticipated.

“You look good,” Benno said.

“I feel alright. Back to running.”

A crow shrieked from a bough in the woods behind the house.

“This is surprising.” Benno pointed to the mezuzah on the doorframe.

Oscar shrugged. “Just trying things out. Come in.”

Benno’s gums flooded with bile as he stepped into the house. It was a symptom either of the cancer or of the chemo. Other symptoms included fatigue—staggering fatigue—and relentless constipation, and the further thinning of his already thinning hair, and a worsening suspicion that it wasn’t worth it, that he was arguing with an earless, mouthless, mindless executioner on a strict schedule.

“How are you feeling?” Oscar asked as he let the heavy door fall softly shut.

Benno shrugged. “Like I have cancer in my stomach.”

“You don’t look great.”

“You should see the footage from my endoscopies.”

Oscar folded his lips into something approximating a smile. “Let’s sit. You want something to drink?”

“Whiskey, if you have it.”

Oscar’s brow bent sharply. “Do your doctors know you’re drinking while undergoing chemotherapy?”

“You gonna snitch on me?”

Oscar shrugged with a bewildered flair, then gestured to the long sofa in the sitting room, where a row of windows overlooked the wet woods and a painting over the fireplace—which appeared never to have been used—depicted a sprawling emerald city.

“Is Kevin here?” Benno asked, breathing through a stomach cramp as he sat.

“Oh.” Oscar turned from the drink cabinet. “He, uh… God it’s been so long since you and I’ve talked. We got divorced. Like six years ago.”

“Shit.” Benno drummed his knuckles on the sofa’s velvety cushions. “Me and Kay, too.”

“You don’t say.” Oscar dropped a few ice cubes into a glass and poured in a scant serving of whiskey. “How’s Nick?”

“He’s… I think he’s a good kid. Also, my girlfriend’s pregnant.”

“Jesus. I mean, congratulations.” Oscar handed Benno his whiskey and sat across from him. “How far along?”

“A few months. A girl.”

“So you really gotta fight here, dude.”

Benno sipped.

Oscar smoothed at the salt and pepper hair above his ear.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Benno said after awhile.

“What doesn’t?”

“That I’m gonna die.”

Oscar knitted his brow. “You’re not necessarily gonna die…”

“But I’m dying. I could die. I probably die. I die eventually. And it doesn’t make sense.”

Something off in the house clicked.

“You can beat this,” Oscar said. “But in general, everyone dies, Benno. Somehow, sooner or later. Everyone dies.”

Benno tapped an uncut fingernail on his whiskey glass. “I know that’s what’s supposed to happen. I know it happens to everyone else. But I think, deep down, I thought I’d be the one to avoid it. I mean, how could I die? The world doesn’t exist without me. I know you think it does, but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing if I’m not here to see it. So if I die, the world’s just gonna end. It doesn’t make sense…”

Oscar peered at his little brother. “Solipsism is a young man’s sport,” he said. “You’re what now? Thirty-nine?”

A crow laughed outside, muted by the heavy glass of the long windows.

“You know, it’s kind of serendipitous,” Oscar said finally.

“What is?”

“That you called me. That you’re here.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been going through some old shit dad left me.”

Benno thought about the revolver in the safe, and imagined pressing its muzzle to his temple, pulling the trigger… “What kind of shit?”

“Photos, mostly. Old family photos. Some letters, too.”

“Anything good?”

Oscar nodded, noncommittal. “I’ll show you. If you’re interested.”

Benno shrugged. He wondered about his dead father’s thought process in leaving Oscar a collection of family photographs and Benno a gun. With the former, one could recollect, recall, reclaim. With the latter, one could… what? Harold Haim was not the kind of man to sort things arbitrarily; his whole life was dedicated to imbuing meaning into every nook and cranny of every object and gesture. Everything meant something. What did Benno’s father mean here?

Oscar left the room and then returned with a cardboard box, which he set on the coffee table. From it he withdrew a tattered green folder. “I just pulled it out of the attic a couple days ago. Right before you called. I don’t know why.”

Benno took the folder and opened it on his lap. The first photo was of him, Oscar and their father, seated at a dining table he vaguely recognized during what appeared to be a Passover seder. Benno might’ve been fifteen, Oscar eighteen. Perched on the counter in the background, Recipient stared out through the sliver of a dark doorway, the triangle on his collar reflecting a sooty dark. The photo stirred nothing in Benno. They’d participated in Passover maybe three times in his life—each time for the sake of assuaging an incessant relative—the one pictured here likely being the last. He set it aside and massaged his abdomen.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

The next was of his father, mid-thirties, mustachioed, his hair oily and wild, his eyes exhausted and bewildered, a cigarette in his mouth and books piled behind him, holding a newborn nestled in a blanket in the crook of his arm.

“Is that you or me?” Benno asked.

“Me,” Oscar said. “That was the old house. In Putnam.”

“I was never there.”

“No.”

Benno set the picture aside. The next was older, the coloring muted and grainy—late seventies. A little girl, no older than eight, standing on the grass of a front lawn. She wore a blue dress imprinted with gold stars, her black bangs cut low over her eyes. On one hand, tucked furtively at her side, the middle finger was extended. She sneered.

“Is this…”

“Yeah.”

Benno tilted the photo away from the glare from the long windows.

“When I saw that picture, I kind of understood,” Oscar said. “I mean, not to diminish anything, but look at her face. That’s not a girl who’s growing into a compromising woman. When we were born, she had to postpone her studies, put everything on pause. And at some point, after enough years of sacrificing half of her attention to us, I guess she decided she’d sacrificed enough.”

Benno nodded slowly, a strange envy dueling with his relentless nausea.

“The whole thing was pretty fucked up,” Oscar went on, looking off at a vague angle. “I was so mad at her for so long I never really thought about it until much later. Fifteen years younger than dad—his student for god’s sake—pregnant at twenty. It really was a different time. Still it wasn’t that different. The odds were probably better that I wasn’t born than was. And you especially. But something made her go ahead with it, and here we are.” He shrugged. “So I don’t know. I don’t really blame her, after all. Look at the next one.”

Benno took another second with the little girl in the photo, whose simple sneer convinced him of a whole life—a consciousness as full as his—that Benno had never been given the opportunity to know. He wasn’t sure he agreed with his brother. What was the point of bringing them into the world, raising them into half-formed people—just old enough to know they’d been abandoned—and then leaving? Benno’s stomach roiled, but with a different kind of pain than the pain of his illness. His breath was bitter in his own nostrils.

He set the photo aside, and for a moment stared at the next photo, his eyes seeing but his mind failing to process. Then his throat tightened, and his feet went cold.

“She was about twenty three there. Twenty three or twenty four.” Oscar pointed vaguely toward the photo in Benno’s lap. “That’s me in the high chair. She must’ve been pregnant with you. Barely pregnant.”

Benno stared at the woman’s eyes. “I’ve seen her…” he said.

Oscar scoffed. “No shit.”

“No, I mean… I saw her…” Benno squinted at the photo so that his eyelashes obscured it in trellised shadow. “I saw her… Last year, the year before… In a bar upstate…”

Oscar’s lips folded into a line and he sat back slowly.

“She talked to me.” The photo fluttered in Benno’s hands. “She asked if I remembered her… She looked… She looked just like she does here…”

“Dude.” Oscar’s voice was soft, as if speaking to a distraught child. “You’re confused.”

Benno shook his head, his eyes locked on the woman’s eyes. Eyes much older than the face in which they were set.

“This photo was taken in eighty-nine,” Oscar said. “She’d be, what, sixty-something now? Not to mention that, I mean, Benno… She’s living on the other side of the world, if she’s alive at all.”

“Do you know that?”

“What?”

“That she’s living on the other side of the world?”

Oscar exhaled through his teeth. “No. No one does. She told dad she was recruited to a research team, but back when we were looking for her we found out there was no team. There was a plane ticket to Egypt and that was it. She wanted to disappear, and she did. So no, I don’t know where she is. But I bet she’s not hanging out in a bar upstate. And even if she was, she wouldn’t look like that anymore.” He was silent for several seconds. “You just saw someone who looks like her. That makes sense, right?”

Benno stared at the eyes. He’d seen this woman. He’d recognized her, but couldn’t place it. He couldn’t place it because he hadn’t seen her since he was fifteen. Because she’d disappeared. Because she’d left…

“Are you okay?” Oscar reached halfway across the table and tented his fingers on its glass surface. “You should have some water.”

Benno’s stomach cramped, and he grimaced. “No.” He started to stand, swayed, and then righted himself. “I’m not confused. I saw her. She had tattoos on her face. Hieroglyphs and shit. She knew me. She asked if I knew her…” Benno tossed the folder toward the table. But he missed and it landed on the floor, the photos scattering on the carpet.

Oscar stood as Benno weaved around the furniture toward the foyer. “You’re leaving?”

Benno’s stomach cramped and his gums flooded with bile. He wasn’t confused. He’d seen her. There was no question. He’d seen her…

“Benno!”

The low sun cut over the tops of the trees and into Benno’s eyes as he lurched down the front steps. He wasn’t confused. It was an impossibility—a terrible impossibility—but it was undeniable. His shoes slipped on the bottom step and he landed strangely on his ankle. But he didn’t feel it, because the pain in his stomach and the panic in his mind overwhelmed any other sensation. He wasn’t confused. He didn’t feel the hollow click in his ankle as he threw open his car door and climbed inside. He didn’t hear his brother’s voice calling from the house, or the crows howling from the branches. He didn’t see anything but a pair of eyes, older than him. He didn’t know how it could be, but it was. He wasn’t confused.

#

Benno didn’t know if it was the same bartender. He remembered an old woman with glasses, but it could have been his memory and the gray wastes of time playing tricks on him.

This one was a man, maybe a couple years younger than Benno, with a freckly nose and a mousy disposition. He hunched over behind the bar, straining to attach a keg to the tap nozzle. When Benno approached he stood, wrinkled his nose at some discomfort in his back, and forced a warm nod.

“What can I get you?” he asked.

Benno glanced at the booth where he and Brooke had sat two years earlier, then over at the stool at the bar where the woman had sat, looking at him. “No, I’m not here to… Actually I’ll have a whiskey. Jack Daniels, double and neat. But I also have a question.”

The bartender set to work on Benno’s drink. “Yeah, what’s that?”

“Last time I was here there was a woman. She was sitting right there. Young, in her twenties.” Benno cursed himself for failing to take the photo from Oscar’s house. “She had tattoos on her face.”

“Face tats, huh?” The bartender set Benno’s drink on the bar top. “I only work weekends, so if it wasn’t…”

“It was a Tuesday. Before Thanksgiving. Two years ago.”

“Two years ago? She must’ve been pretty.” He stooped down and took up another attempt to attach the nozzle. “She’s not a regular, I can tell you that. I’d know a pretty girl with face tats if she came in even once in awhile. But a Tuesday two years ago, that woulda been my Ma working. Don’t think she’ll be much help, but you’re welcome to ask her.”

“Where could I find her?” Benno asked, then gritted his teeth to conceal a grimace as his stomach cramped and turned.

The man jerked his head toward the back of the bar. “She’s in the office. Through the door that’s not a bathroom.”

Benno threw his whiskey back, then fished his debit card from his pocket and set it on the bar. Bile tore up his esophagus. His sneakers stuck vaguely to the bar’s sticky linoleum floor as he headed into the back. There were three doors. Two were marked as restrooms. The third was metal, with a crash bar and an EXIT sign hung above it. Benno glanced back at the bartender—the top of his head just visible over the rim of the bar top as he struggled with the nozzle—then hit the crash bar and stepped into darkness.

The only light was from the blue glow of a laptop monitor open on the desk. Before it, a woman sat, an old woman with enormous glasses that magnified her two huge, dilated pupils into cavernous discs. Benno recognized her instantly as the bartender who had been working the last time he was here. She looked up as the door swung shut with a clang, her eyes searching for a moment before finding him.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

Benno pointed a thumb back over his shoulder. “The guy out there—your son, I guess—thought maybe you could help me.”

The woman blinked—a slow, exaggerated movement in the thick lenses—and then sat back. The chair beneath her scraped on the floor, producing a sound like a chain dragging on concrete. “Help you with what?”

“I’m looking for someone.” Benno took a step into the room, which he began to notice smelled powerfully and distinctly of body odor. “A woman. She was here when I was here. It was a long time ago, two years ago. Thanksgiving. You were working. You gave me a cigarette.”

The old woman’s glasses reflected the laptop’s light, and her gaping eyes swallowed it up. “Don’t remember you,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Benno said. “Maybe you remember the woman I’m looking for. She had face tattoos. Egyptian symbols, hieroglyphs. She was drinking a beer at the bar, near the window.” He combed his memory. “She had a gold tooth.”

The old woman peeled her glasses off her face. Benno was shocked at how much smaller her eyes appeared without them, so small they seemed almost deformed, inset in a bloated face. “She a friend of yours?”

Benno nodded, his jaw tightening with disappointment, then shook his head. “I think… I think she’s my mother.”

The old woman huffed. “Then I can’t help ya. Girl I’m thinking of must’ve been half your age. Got the Egyptian tattoos and everything, but couldn’t be your mother—unless you look real bad for a ten year old.”

“That’s her,” Benno said, his heart kicking up in his chest. “That’s her. And I misspoke. I didn’t mean mother. I meant my daughter.”

The woman’s small eyes narrowed into points. “Maybe,” she said. She placed a knurled hand on the laptop’s screen and dragged in halfway closed, muting the already muted light. “I remember her though. No way we’re thinking about different people. Came in here everyday for about a week, like you said about two years ago. Right around Thanksgiving. Sat and drank beer from opening until closing.”

“Do you know her name?” Benno found himself leaning forward at an angle, as if drawn by some anticipatory force. His heart clipped against his ribs.

The old woman shook her head, her jowls waggling. “Didn’t talk much. I remember thinking she might be in some kind of trouble.”

“Why’s that?”

“She seemed a bit nervous. Would turn and look at the door every time someone came in. And she was always alone. I mean, sometimes some of the regulars would get enough courage in them to try and strike up a conversation, but she would shut it down with silence.”

Benno’s palms sweated. “What else can you tell me about her?”

“Not a whole lot. She stopped coming in as soon as she started.”

Benno’s eyes searched the office’s dark corners. “There must be something…” he said as if to himself. “If she was here every day, there must’ve been something…”

The old woman closed the laptop further, plunging herself and the room into near total darkness. “You know, you’re lucky,” she said.

Benno felt a terrible draft of deja vu hum through him. Instinctively he back-stepped, his hand feeling blindly for the door’s handle.

“Lucky, lucky…” The woman’s voice was raspy and low. “Because there is something.”

“What?” Benno asked, too quietly.

“She had one of those little red books. She kept her money in it.”

“Books?”

“Those AA books. That tell you where you can find meetings. Must not’ve been taking it too seriously since she was in here drinking beer all day, but she had one.”

Benno’s hand found the handle, his thumb toying along the aluminum.

“There are a few around here I know of. But if I had to bet, I’d say she was going to the Serenity Group up at Graylock. It meets at four in the afternoon.” The old woman reset her glasses, which glinted in the meager light. “That was the only time she would leave the bar. Four to five. Everyday.”

There was a dimple in the aluminum door handle just beneath Benno’s middle finger.

“It’s funny,” the woman said. “From here you look like you’re asleep. But my eyes aren’t good. And of course you aren’t… Of course…”

The dimple had nearly perfectly matching dimensions to the pad of Benno’s finger.

“Go ask up there,” the woman said. “Maybe you’ll get even luckier.”

Benno strained on the handle, and the door gave to a rush of orange light. “Thank you,” he said, backing out of the room.

“Then again,” the woman said, her huge eyes, now swallowing the orange light, seeming to bore into Benno, her voice crooked with some kind of humor Benno couldn’t grasp. “Maybe you are asleep.”

Benno hurried back through the bar, the floor clawing at the soles of his feet.

“Hey!” the bartender called as Benno spilled out onto the street. “Your card!”

But Benno didn’t hear him. He heard only his own blood echoing through the channels of his body, and a raspy voice lilting with mockery.

Lucky… Lucky…