Folly

A body, lying in the alley across the street. I saw it, early in the morning, from the window of my third-floor apartment. The narrow space had been secured with yellow tape. Two men lifted it onto a gurney, then into the rear compartment of a van. I watched while kneeling on my sofa. The doors slammed shut, the van drove away, and the sky above, briefly alive with sunrise, glowed pink and orange.

*

The sofa was the first thing Oscar and I bought when we moved into our house. I took it with me when I left. I’d been laid off from my job as a high school English teacher, and an open, empty stretch of time loomed ahead.

“Okay, so it’s the Second World War, Los Alamos, 1943 or ‘44.” A few weeks after I’d moved out, Oscar started calling with ideas for a novel. “One of the physicists is a Soviet spy, giving detailed information about the bomb. I’m only just starting to flesh it all out.” Oscar was a science teacher at the school where I’d worked. Every summer break he renewed his ambition to write a book. “What do you think? The research could be complicated.”

Another idea he described as “a kind of Catcher in the Rye–esque coming-of-age story.”

“Lots of phonies?”

“Sure. I guess.” He sighed. “You don’t like it.”

Whenever I asked if he wanted to get together to discuss it in person, he always said no. “That’s not a good idea, Alice.”

*

His name was Benjamin Arm, and he’d died in the alley from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was fifty-two. The township I lived in, just north of Chicago, published a weekly paper, and news of Benjamin Arm’s death appeared there the following week. A resident in the building across from mine had taken out her garbage in the early morning and found him. The notice had included the address of the deceased, which wasn’t far from where I lived.

That afternoon I walked the seven blocks to a brick apartment building with a large courtyard. Multi-colored plastic streamers hung across the front entrance, advertising studio and one-bedroom vacancies. At that time I had thought—incorrectly, it turned out—that I was pregnant, and I think it was for this reason that I focused on the man’s name as I stood in front of his building, the rainbow streamers rising and falling with the wind. I scanned row after row of small, rectangular windows and saw nothing.

Benjamin Arm. Fifty-two years ago his parents had given him this name.

*

I walked north, first down the residential sidewalks and then on a path running alongside Lake Michigan. I planned to stop at the bookstore and then the drugstore, for a pregnancy test. At the bookstore I bought a novel, Folly, recommended via index card by “team member Noreen S.” Edie Trout, the book’s author, was not a writer I’d heard of. She looked elegant and wise in her jacket photo—black blouse, dark hair pulled off her face. I carried the book and the pregnancy test back to my apartment.

*

An unbearable heat wave descended for an extended stretch that summer. It made me feel sleepy and drugged. My friend Miriam came over one night with a pot of gazpacho, and we sat at my dining table, two fans pointed at our heads. I told Miriam about Benjamin Arm.

“You saw his dead body?”

“It was covered.”

“Did you hear the gunshot?”

“I heard nothing.”

Miriam slunk forward, elbows on the table. “While you slept.”

Miriam’s sister, Hannah, had been diagnosed with what her therapist called “hyper empathic disorder.” Hannah was frequently rendered incapacitated by the moods and tragedies of others. The disorder didn’t drive her to be helpful, rather it disabled her to the extent that she couldn’t enjoy and live her own life. They had given her a drug, Miriam said, meant to work as a filter of sorts, but it had only made her shake uncontrollably. Miriam seemed to have inherited it to a lesser degree. Endlessly compelled to put herself in the shoes of others, she was not, like Hannah, bedridden and pathologically overwhelmed.

“I think I’ll miss Oscar,” Miriam said. She looked out the dining room window toward the alley across the street. Her curly hair blew wildly above her head from the force of the fans. We wiped our foreheads with paper towels and ate our cold soup.

 

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To read this story in its entirety, please purchase a copy of Issue #22, which will be released in December 2025, or become a subscriber to the magazine.