Wichita (9781609458904) by Thad Ziolkowsky Page B

woman!”
    Bishop walks the moped along the pathway beaten into the weeds, through the gate, which is missing the door, and out to the street, where Bishop bounces it over the curb, kick starts it and turns to give a thumbs-up. He rides wobblingly at first then steadies up, a wisp of bluish smoke from the exhaust hanging in the air like a § symbol.
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    L ewis walks around to the back of the house. The weeds are bowed in a rising wind. He sets the laptop down on the stoop and tugs on one of the tall tobacco-like plants. The roots release their hold on the soil with abrupt, satisfying ease. He pulls up another, cleaves his way out to the middle of yard and stands wondering whether he should start in clearing the rest.
    He’d better ask Abby first. She may be letting the yard return to some pristine prairie-like state, out of an anti-lawn/pro-water-saving sentiment. If that’s consistent with driving an Escalade. He can hear her quoting Whitman: “Do you I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”
    His dutiful-son impulse brings to mind Virgil and Uncle Bruno divvying up lawn work and minor house repairs during the annual summer visits to Cambridge, their competitive, theatrical sighs of exertion and sweat-flickings, the pallor of their chunky calf muscles flaring in the bright sunlight.
    The grandchildren were exempt from these labors but expected to be pursuing high-minded hobbies. Lewis’s project last summer was learning how to identify trees. Pretty banal. Sleek androgynous Izzy—like her brother, she inherited Bruno’s dark hair but their mother’s narrow, collie-like features—spent her time engrossed in an online whodunit game that involved literary maps of Beijing and Vienna. That was more like it. Meanwhile Eckhart offhandedly memorized Hungarian irregular verbs using a software program he’d helped design (occasionally sneaking off to porn sites when he thought no one was watching).
    â€œGrandma” and “Grandpa,” the twins call Gerty and Cyrus. Because he barely saw them between the time of the divorce, when he was eight, and when he moved to New York to finish high school, Lewis has never been comfortable following suit, which the twins quickly noted and made a game of exposing: “Lewis, would you tell Grandpa dinner is ready?” Lewis padded down the hall and tapped on the door to Cyrus’s study, the lair of the Genius. “Dinner’s ready!” he called in a modulated voice.
    â€œVery good, Lewis,” Cyrus said from within.
    â€œLewis, that’s not right!” Izzy whispered. There was a twin, demon-like at each ear. Eckhart said, “You should say,”—calling it out over Lewis’s shoulder—“‘
Grandpa
, dinner’s ready!’”
    There was a stir in the office and Cyrus said irritably, “I
heard
you, Lewis!”
    He sought to be like them in the beginning, even thought–why not?–to surpass them. But there came a moment early on when he saw it was futile. It was in a café near the Goethe-Institut Berlin, where he’d been sent
at considerable expense
as part of a European tour-cum-language-acquisition catch-up in the summer before his freshman year at Columbia. He was reviewing the German second subjunctive with an American girl named Alissa. They had drunken, tension-relieving sex a few times, once in a park standing against a tree. She was a freshman at Haverford but hoping to transfer to Princeton or Dartmouth, hence the hasty, apple-polishing addition of German. She had a manner Lewis was familiar with by then, that of an average-looking but neither rich nor brilliant girl who reacted to her elite private school by adopting an expression of anticipatory affront. With Alissa periodically scanning the horizon for foes, they reviewed. For Lewis, this was a bit of a joke: the second subjunctive—along with the first—was a faint strand