Page 2 of Nine Lives

Thursday, September 15, 10:05 a.m.

It was the most interesting piece of mail that Arthur Kruse, having just returned from physical therapy, received that morning.

He opened the envelope, not expecting anything of note, and was surprised to find a short list of names, including his. He didn’t recognize any of the other people on the list.

There were three hours in the day before Arthur was due for his shift as an oncology nurse at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. He’d just begun reading A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester. Since reading A Distant Mirror over the summer, he’d found he didn’t want to leave the Middle Ages. Something about those past lives, the constant suffering, the search for God, acted as the only balm to Arthur’s state of mind since the car accident, nearly a year ago, that took the life of his husband, Richard, their cocker spaniel, Misty, and most of the function of Arthur’s left leg. He couldn’t quite believe it had been a whole year. Joan, his minister—and Arthur’s closest friend—told him it would be at least two years until he began to feel some semblance of normality, of happiness, of a return to his life, but Arthur wondered. The past endless year felt like it was just going to be repeated ad infinitum. Nothing helped. That wasn’t entirely true. Medieval history helped. He gingerly slid into his reading chair and picked up where he’d left off in Manchester’s book, not nearly as good as Tuchman’s. He read two pages, then drifted off, waking an hour before he had to be at the hospital.

His leg was always at its worst after midday napping, and he found himself limping to the kitchen to put on hot water for a cup of tea. While waiting for the water to boil, he looked out the window over his sink and caught a glimpse of the fox—the one he’d named Reynard—skirting the edge of his property. It was moving fast, and just before it ducked into the trees, it turned its head and Arthur thought he saw something—a small rodent maybe—in its jaws. It inexplicably made Arthur happy for the moment. The last time he’d seen Reynard he’d been worried about how skinny and ragged he looked.

The day was overcast, and the willow tree down by the brook had just begun to exhibit a yellowish cast. He drank the tea at his computer and thought of the list he’d gotten in the mail. What had it meant? Some strange automatic mailing, a computer screwing up somewhere in the middle of the country and sending out some random names. It was a possibility. Ever since Richard’s passing he’d taken to giving small amounts of money to multiple charities, ensuring that his name was on about a hundred different mailing lists, probably specified as an “easy touch.” That was okay. There were worse things to be, and getting mail was actually something he looked forward to. He’d been one of those children who sent away for catalogues just to receive them, until his father found out and put a stop to it.

He finished his tea, returned an email to Joan to let her know he was available to do the flowers for church that Sunday, and prepared to go to work.

3

Thursday, September 15, 11:00 a.m.

Ethan Dart heard the mail flop through the slot in his apartment door. He spotted the mysterious-looking envelope right away, and opened it instantly, hoping that it was a response from an agent. He’d recently gone through a period of unprecedented productivity and sent his demo tapes out to about a dozen agents who represented songwriters. It was a stab in the dark, he knew, but he figured it couldn’t hurt. Inside the envelope (the postmark was from New York City, and that was promising) was just a single sheet of paper with a list of names, nine in all, including his. He wondered if it had been sent to him by mistake, possibly because he’d made some sort of short list for representation.

He took the list, plus his mug of coffee, back to his bedroom and fired up his laptop. Ethan punched in the first name from the list—Matthew Beaumont—along with “songwriter” to narrow the results. Nothing came up, at least nothing that indicated Matthew Beaumont was another songwriter seeking representation. He tried a few more names, but lost interest. It clearly wasn’t a list of other songwriters or artists. It sparked an idea for a song, though, the chorus something like, “I want to be the last one on your list.” He grabbed a pencil, flipped over the sheet of paper, and began jotting down lyrics for a country song. List was both a great rhyming word—so many options—and a crappy one since the options were all clichés. Missed. Kissed. Insist. Still, he wrote three verses, and even began to hear the melody in his head. He got another cup of coffee and his guitar, and, after smoking the day’s first bowl of weed, began to work it out.

He didn’t think again about the list of names until much later that night, when he was sitting at the bar at Casino el Camino on 6th Street in Austin, trying to come up with something clever to say to Hannah Scharfenberg, who’d been sitting with him for the past hour.

“I got a list in the mail today. Eight names I didn’t know, plus mine.”

“What do you mean?”

Ethan took a foamy sip from his just-cracked bottle of Lone Star. “Just like I said. I got an envelope addressed to me. Inside was a sheet of paper with nine typed names on it, in alphabetical order. And mine was one of them.”

“They were typed?”

“No, not typed, but not handwritten. They were printed. From a computer.”

“Strange.”

“I guess so. Good thing was I got a song out of it. ‘Last on Your List.’ Wrote the whole thing in about an hour. Kind of an Eric Church thing.”

Hannah, a pharmacist and a rabid Longhorns fan, did not have a whole lot of interest in Ethan’s songwriting hopes and dreams, and he watched her eyes glaze over at the mention of his song. He bought her, and himself, a shot of George Dickel, then talked her into letting him walk her home. Ashley, her housemate, was away visiting her parents in Dallas, so Hannah invited him in. They smoked some pot, then watched half of The Royal Tenenbaums before having sex on the futon couch.

“We have to stop doing this,” Hannah said, coming back from the bathroom, wearing one of her old softball jerseys and nothing else.

“Why?”

“Because you’re seeing Ashley. And I live with her.”

“We’re not exclusive, at least that’s what she tells me.”

“No, but I live with her, and if she finds out it’s going to make life around here very awkward.”

“I think I like you more than I like her.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“Trust me, things that matter to you don’t matter to anybody else. You haven’t learned that yet.”

He convinced Hannah to let him stay over. This was after he’d made them both a cheese omelet they ate at the Formica breakfast table in the kitchen. In Hannah’s bed—a mattress on the floor, actually—they’d fooled around a little till Hannah told him the Ambien was kicking in and she had to sleep. She curled away from him, and Ethan, his hand still pressed up against her hip, thought about his day, wondering if Hannah was on to something when she told him how the things that mattered to him didn’t matter to anybody else. It would explain a lot about his life.

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