I went looking for pudenda deep in the dictionary as if in some secret storage room down dark labyrinthine corridors at the Vatican, and I discovered shame in the parenthetical italicized etymology. The external genital organs of human beings, especially women, the dictionary reported, citing roots in pudendum, singular form of the plural noun, from the neuter plural of pudendus, gerundive of pudere, to be ashamed. Shame clusters in the thesaurus with disgrace, dishonor, humiliate, embarrass; modest gathers with humble, self-effacing, demure, reserved, shy. Vagina is likewise Latin, meaning sheath like the scabbard into which we plunge our swords. The secret language of mortification, like the quibbling self-consciousness of the boy who tells himself the priest who fondles him is his friend, because they laugh together, or the boy who reminds himself he only watched while his friends raped his retarded sister.

You supposed to be my girlfriend, the teenager bullied the pay phone with the pomp and swagger of some little idol prowling the fight ring. I'd taken my daughters to the outdoor ice cream stand for a midsummer Saturday treat. The violence in the boy's tone made my elementary school girls look questions at me big as balloons. I herded them inside, safely away from the outdoor window. We could still hear him browbeating the receiver outside. You supposed to be my girlfriend. I rolled my eyes, as if to convey a moral lesson, hoping my girls would never make a covenant with such a jealous little god.

We grieved when our cat died, 93 or 94 in feline years, according to a chart on the vet's wall. In some respects a burden lifted: no longer having to witness his decline, no more twice-daily pills poked down forced-open jaws. Signs of his incontinence remain on the rug. But within weeks mice infested our home, at first just a whisper of feet in the walls, a spray of droppings in dark basement corners. Emboldened by Steve's absence, they moved on to the kitchen, like a group of New Year's Eve revelers. In no time they were brazen as whores lifting their skirts at midnight to passing cars: they nibbled crackers and chewed through boxes, tore open cellophane-wrapped packages of cookies. My daughter returned late from babysitting one Saturday night to find a mouse dancing across the kitchen counter. In the morning I discovered a loaf of bread shredded to confetti. I set traps in the pantry, smeared with chocolate, cheese and peanut butter. In the morning my wife found the corpse, spread out on the lazy Susan, its neck snapped in the sprung trap. Abby woke me to dispose of the body, in her mind a man's job. The stiff rodent seemed a child's toy; my children refused to look at the broken doll, horrified we'd killed it, the brutish reality Steve shielded us from all those years.

"Whosoever toucheth the dead, even the body of any man that is dead, and purifieth not himself -- he hath defiled the tabernacle of the Lord -- that soul shall be cut off from Israel; because the water of sprinkling was not dashed against him, he shall be unclean; his uncleanliness is yet upon him." (Numbers 19:13) I never knew my grandpa Milt; he died at 45, an alcoholic, haunted his whole life by a misfortune caused by self-absorbed adolescence. He was fourteen when he killed his three-year old brother in a farming accident, carelessly backing the truck over Nicholas while he played in the driveway; felt the bones crushing, heard the murmured shriek and the accusing silence that followed before his parents tumbled out the kitchen door In hysteria, his mother's shrill scream, his father's disbelieving grief; felt the awful weight of irreversible history, all the things you can't undo, all the things that will never, ever change. Milt and his wife Linda had a dozen kids in their 20-year marriage, the first named Nicholas in honor of the brother he killed, as if each new life might make up for the one he'd taken away, and of course they never did, his son Nicholas, another alcoholic, least of all. Grandpa died in his sleep the year before I was born, a victim of whiskey and a broken heart.

Call it superstition, but when I see the man mumbling to himself, lost in another world, I remember the pet hamster I stepped on as a child, still feels the tiny bones breaking beneath my feet, like crumbling pretzels, and I remember thinking this was punishment for the dirty book I'd hidden in my room. I tore the book into tiny pieces like shredded bread crumbs tossed into a stream, so many small scraps you could never piece them together again, but even then I burned the bits of paper, a funeral pyre in the fireplace. But I still felt just as guilty, the responsibility for the animal's death heavy as a stone in my chest. And now this man, shambling by, helpless as a rodent In the care of a small boy.

In the middle of the basement floor dirty white clothesline on cold concrete, discarded carcasses of waterbugs in dark corners. A sense of desperation flames out, an abused child locked in a closet, a dwarf planet burning to nothing unnoticed in the vastness of the universe. When the fuse burns low, where does annihilation begin? At what instant is nothingness achieved, and without a witness, can nothingness really be acknowledged? With a witness, an nothingness be accomplished?

Staring at the computer screen all day, my vision scrambled like a couple of stirred-up eggs -- three overlapping blurs in place of one person, an impressionistic swim of images, colors smeared on a canvas, photographs out of focus, dimming and mixing in fluorescent light. The eye doctor prescribed a new set of lenses designed for up-close inspection, reading and computer screens. The optician at Omnisight charmed me with her soothing manner, a wet nurse come to suckle me to sleep, assuring me my eyes would soon feel better. Like a voice on the radio you fall in love with. When, a week later, she fitted my glasses over my nose and ears, her neck, three feet away, blossomed into a topographical map, a sharp delineation of furrows, wrinkles, moles, lined dry skin. The soft-focus seductive aura tightened to a sharp clinical blister: I could see! Ah, damn it, I could see!

How many season finales on television end with a marriage, the loveable hangdog guy spilling his guts to the ultimately virtuous girl, how much he loves her, how much he always has. He can understand if she doesn't want to, but will she marry him? Friends. Frasier. Beverley Hills 90210. Weddings end everything they bring happiness becomes responsibility infatuation a sober acceptance of the burden of love. David on his knees to Donna -- more earnest now than he's ever been in his life. Chandler afraid he's blown it with Monica, leading her on for the sake of a surprise proposal when all she wanted was mature commitment, the sincerity of a vow and Niles, Frasier's brother, kept his devotion silent way past the time to tell Daphne -- but isn't there always one last moment when you can clarify everything, make it all all right?

Even before I hit puberty I wondered if the fantasies I wove around girls to whom I was attracted like a moth to light were really "love" and I felt skeptical, no, no, only adults felt love, rooted in experience, something as hard-won as knowledge. It had nothing to do with careless boyhood fantasies of being a rock star, the beautiful woman he adored; that was only -- something else. I didn't yet know the word "desire" or "lust." But even then I knew love was ultimately elusive, like the photocopy of a thought, only a word to which you tried to give meaning, a sound like an animal's groan, a noise made by a gulping movement of the mouth and in the end something you only claimed as a piece of property the way nations assert possession of real estate, define boundaries, when in objective reality there is only space. And later hopeless crushes were "only" crushes, not the real thing and even sex was just to slake lust, no matter how sincerely you felt the word you uttered in passion like giving a sacred stamp to a fleeting appetite. Oh, if you've ever felt it, you know, my friend says confidently, eyes glittering, and I want to wipe the smug smile from her face. No, no, that's not it at all, not love at all.

"And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying: 'What seest thou?' And I said: 'I see a seething pot; and the face thereof is from the north.'" (Jeremiah 1:13) All I can do is dream of that woman in Minnesota I met last summer, Blankman mused, watching his wife at the stove, making supper. I can't say a word about her. To anybody. He fantasized two virgins, but he knew the time was long past for all that, the innocence of Adam and Eve exploring each other's flesh, slipped like a stone beneath the surface; even the ripples ceased to move. His musings took the form of complaint, a lamentation against time, age, circumstance: fate. So he sealed himself in a dream of a room with a chair and mattress, he and the girl from the north naked, their lust a seething pot, scene after scene after scene, the two coupled in every conceivable form and orgasm all around, like an atmosphere. Blankman's wife smiled. "What are you thinking of?" A complete lack of suspicion in her voice and on her face. "I was thinking of that Cajun song about the man so smitten with a woman, he says if he had only five days left to live, he'd give three to spend just two with her." Blankman's wife kissed him on the mouth. "You're so sweet," she whispered.

Maybe she had too much time on her hands, Elizabeth thought, now that she'd retired, getting mucked up in other people's affairs. She'd only meant to warn her negligent neighbor the dogs in the backyard needed care, and the alleyway was no place to wash her car when others needed a way out to the street. "You old bitch!" the girl shouted, spittle spraying Elizabeth's cheeks, a sour smell of beer on her breath. "Why the fuck can't you mind your own business and quit sticking your nose where it don't belong?" How Elizabeth longed to slap this smug young woman's face, hurt her any way it took to put her as much at Elizabeth's mercy as she was at hers.

After I wiped away my fingerprints, I knew they'd get my DNA anyway, a drop of semen, a smear of blood, saliva where I drooled on the carpet, fingernail clippings, hair and scalp flakes. Still, I'm a master of disguise, and I can change my voice to sound like almost anybody. You should hear my Harry Houdini impression. Who am I trying to fool? Machines that don't make mistakes invented and used by humans that do? The agent banging on my door? The men waiting outside in the car? It's a big country. I can hide almost anywhere. People get lost all the time. Nobody ever finds them again, and nobody's really looking. Most of us spend our entire lives Avoiding the knowledge of who we really are.

In school history was tied up in neat ribbons, beginning and end dates bound by a hyphen, making tidy little packages of events. Late at night sometimes I yearn to explain myself to old girlfriends, fingers hovering over telephone buttons. The effects of slavery linger like a fart in a still room, surely always will; World War One (1914 - 1919) spilled into World War Two (1939 - 1945). The Korean War (1950 - 1953) is history, right? What about the Gulf War? What about Iraq? Even an e-mail, I sometimes think, but I stop myself, overcome with the futility of clearing up misunderstandings Before I die.

The idiot neighbor boy knocks on our door, a Burger King crown askew on his head. He asks if my children can come out and play. I think of ritual sacrifice, the offering of an unblemished red heifer that's never known a yoke. She is slain before the priest, her throat cut; the priest sprinkles her blood before the altar. She is burnt in the priest's presence, skin, flesh, blood and dung. The priest flings cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet onto the heifer's pyre. The priest's assistants collect the ashes, put them in a secure place by the shrine. The tribe uses the heifer's ashes for purification from sin, purification from contact with the dead. Ashes mixed with water sprinkled on the unclean. I tell him they're busy now but maybe they'll come out later. His eyes glaze over with a puzzled look, and I don't know if he comprehends. Is the concept "busy" too huge to grasp? Does "later" seem too vague, confusing? But he turns away, adjusts his crown. I close the door behind him.

I stood at the Howard Street bus stop, waiting for the 27 to come along reading a paperback novel by Saul Bellow, full of streetwise characters and worldclass thinkers. A beautiful young woman approached, Asked if I would act as if we were together. A creep was bugging her, she said. If he saw her with me he'd go away Or pull a knife, start a fight, I thought, but went along with her just the same, chatting mindlessly about nothing, until the guy came by, a scruffy young guy in a torn sports jacket, goatee like a fallen maple leaf. But he went on, minding his own business, acting as if he didn't know her. Our bus came by, the girl got on with me. She thanked me for my help, sat in a seat by herself, staring out the window like a girl in a movie making her getaway, making sure the guy hadn't returned. I sat back in my seat, opened my book, basking in the warm knowledge I'd been taken for a decent man.