1.
SHE WAS BORN in St. Julian’s Hospital. Her mother remembers (incorrectly) that it was storming that night, because her water broke while she was at the bowling alley, and the cavernous rumbling of falling pins got stuck in her head, something thunderous and dooming to focus on through the pain. But it wasn’t she who rammed through that mother’s body with an eager bald head. It’s amazing the accidents that can happen if you turn your back for just one second.
HE WAS BORN in St. Julian’s Hospital, on the same night, maybe as much as a half hour later. Things were inexact in the hospital that night. His mother was not in so much pain, considering. She always suspected that something went wrong. When the Doctor slapped him, he cried like a girl, which wasn’t his fault.
THE OB-GYN NURSE WAS DISTRACTED. This was because the Doctor was sexually harassing her, but there was no name for it then, no policy. He would sneak up behind her and caress the bend in her knee through he opaque white stockings. Then he would laugh with supreme good nature, so that she would have felt like a nitpicky stick-in-the-mud to say anything about it. The back of my knee, okay, she thought, but what if he fondles my ass? As she was typing the paperwork for the two new babies—birth certificates, ID bracelets—the Doctor crept up behind her and fondled her ass. The sensation of being pillaged shot up her spine, something left over from her horn-helmeted great-to-the-6th-power grandmother the Viking, and it resulted in a birth the same as if he had surprised her with a more specific thrust, which they did have a name for back then, though the punishment for it had softened since her ancestors’ marauding time. The Doctor laughed like a claymation Burl Ives and she keep her eyes on her papers the whole time. She spelled the baby girl’s name wrong and put down her sex as “M.” You’d think somebody would have looked into it, but authorities were different in those days. Nobody questioned authorities. Authorities were home free.
2.
SHE LIVED DOWN THE STREET from him. Nobody remarked upon how she failed to resemble her parents, because her parents were hardworking and careworn and complacent in their baldness and jowls. In school she was admired, but not very well liked. She went through the usual phase of longing for her parents to sit her down and tell her some dark secret about her past: that she was adopted, or had been born illegitimate, or was actually a robot. She never really felt out of place in their home, so eventually she resigned herself to living there. She created an imaginary little sister named Dawn to whom she told her secrets and blamed for all punishable offenses.
She was bright, but she worried about how she sounded when she spoke up in class. She heard a recording of herself early on, part of somebody’s science fair projects, and she could hardly stand the nasal sound of it—she sounded like a rock instead of a stone—so she decided that talking about academic subjects was ugly. Still, there were tests every year, and the authorities found out she was intelligent and shepherded her accordingly. Her father, a mid-level administrator at the city Parks and Rec Department, took her test scores as proof of his own wasted potential, and began to drink heavily. He was a tidy drunk and no one seemed to mind.
She took physics with a roomful of boys, and on the day it was announced that the town would be holding a Junior Miss pageant, these boys showed a rare solidarity, and urged her to enter. After a brief moment of confusion, she decided that they were complimenting her, and because her beetle-browed mother had trained her to accept compliments graciously, she smiled, making eye contact with as many of them as possible, these heirs-apparent hunched on lab stools, faces stained with erratic pimples, clutching tuning forks, their eyes darting around in double-fast drumstick time.
He was in that class, and although they had been neightbors their entire lives, and were mandatorily invited to each other’s backyard birthday parties, she didn’t linger on him or gave him any sort of special recognition. He had strange hair and the wrong cut of glasses and he didn’t play any sports. There was a yellowed snapshot loose in the back of her family’s album, of her and him as toddlers, running through the silvered saliva of yard sprinkler. His mother had dressed him in a pink hat, and he was chubby, which made him seem to have mocking little breasts. The photo gave her the creeps. She blamed his mother for the sickly way he turned out—it seemed like his mother made no effort to buy him miniature cars or force him into the Boy Scouts. She hated his mother, a bossy-toothed, whippet-thin lady with stainless steel hair and a ballerina’s sense of style. At Memorial Day picnics, she and his mother glared at each other over sun-curdled potato salad and neither of them knew why.
HE LIVED DOWN THE STREET from her. He didn’t look like his parents, but then, they didn’t look anything like each other. In school he excelled but was often overlooked. His mother was overbearing, stridently feeding him vegetables. His father didn’t pay much attention to him. His father liked ’em young, young enough to fear legal repercussions, and this kept Dad preoccupied. His father was cunning and charming and frequently slobbered-over at bridge parties, but the only thing that really turned him on was the presumptuous knob of a sixteen-year-old’s ankle. He never had to compete with his son for teenage action because his son pretended to be indifferent to girls. Although she lived down the street and had maddening ankles—which she exposed all summer in rubber flip-flop thongs, the little tart—his father never gave her so much as an inopportune glance. She was sure-footed and resplendent in lipstick. He could imagine her screaming bloody murder. Instead, his father targeted a roly-poly girl with a hatchet job of a haircut who was flattered by the attention and already knew the singlemindedness of the male backhand.
His father never did get caught. The son never suspected his shining dad’s sexual deviance. Instead of exchanging insults with jittery girls, the son pulled the legs off the grasshoppers and burned the twitching torsos with a magnifying glass. He realized the insects were suffering, and secretly longed for one of them to stand up to him, punch him in the eye, and make him stop. His father never drank because with his habits, he could not afford to get sloppy and loose-lipped. His mother would gulp sun tea and eye her son, unconvinced.
THE DOCTOR KILLED HIMSELF violently—there was a gun involved and golf cart—in a public place but late at night when there was no one around. It was not because of his many medical mistakes (some of which irreversibly altered the course of innocent lives) such as a raspberry eye infection that went untreated and the undiagnosed walking pneumonia and the eating disorder that was allowed to slide until a promising young scholar died at age fourteen, buried with her flute case and stuffed pandas. He never saw the dead girl’s skeletal face chomping at him, exacting revenge. Nor did he kill himself over the sexual harassment. As the limits were defined and made punishable, he stayed one step ahead. He learned to target pudgy, bewildered women who were going through divorces, and ones who couldn’t afford who couldn’t afford to lose their jobs but made stupid mistakes like stealing from the petty cash to buy granola bars from the vending machine. He killed himself because the drugs were too easy to get and even all the people who should have been after him, it was gnomes that he saw marching half-legged over every hill; he could hear their stunted grunts on the line when he made phone calls; they spit blue pulp into his coffee. He would never have turned to drugs if they’d only kept the old nurses’ uniforms intact. The new baggy scrubs drove him to despondency. His one indulgence, as he saw it, was the plum ripple at the back of a woman’s knee, straining against white nylons.
3.
WHEN IT CAME TIME for the prom, she got a phone call from him on the white plastic phone in her bedroom. HIs invitation was no more or less inept than the rest of them, but it was out of the question. She was angry at him for not realizing this. She didn’t laugh about it with her friends. She never told anyone. If her mother had found out, she would have insisted that her daughter go to the dance with him. Her mother was strangely protective of the boys who darted around her daughter, as if she were afraid the girl harbored sinister intentions.
As for the father, he didn’t steel-grip their teenage basketball hands and toss them gruff intimidations. He winked at them from his reclining chair and secretly wished them luck. If he had not been drunk, he would have sat in the same chair feeling nervous and invaded, clearing his throat.
Meanwhile, she was kissed by man many always-boys in their Catholic school neckties. She drank wine coolers and relied faithfully upon their Virgin Mary complexes. She only missed her curfew a couple times, which is amazing when you think about it.
WHEN SHE REFUSED to go to the prom with him, he swore off girls forever, even though he didn’t know it until years later and always thought it was the checkered waitress who sent him over the edge. When she left her house in aquamarine satin and a sickly dyed corsage, bumbling and bobbing at the elbow of a bristling athlete, his mother spied through the slit in the blinds with his bird-watching binoculars. Her dress was backless and her pointy witch-hat shoulder blades, cocksure as shark fins, both wounded his mother and filled her with ravenous pride.
His father was staring into an auto club magazine, his scalp sweating, calculating how to slip out and meet up with his homely jailbait girlfriend, who didn’t get invited to prom. His mother picked a fight over an unpruned shrub, and his father ended up raising his voice, almost yelling: “Why do you need so many clothes? You’re working me to death.”
The son was upstairs with baseball playing on the radio, jerking off to a relatively tame nudie mag because he was not actually disinterested in girls. He didn’t have a favorite picture. They all looked the same to him.
SHE AND HE BOTH READ about the Doctor’s spectacular suicide in the town newspaper. Neither of them lost their appetite. He noted where the Doctor had gone to school, and spat out a mouthful of mile to show that he was not impressed. She wondered who would get the Doctor’s money now.
4.
SHE WENT to the state university. This was right when people stopped writing letters and started sending e-mail, but her parents didn’t have a computer, so they fell out of touch. She had a profound longing for neckties, so she started hanging around fraternity houses, where she could glimpse a tie now and then. She discovered that not all boys have Virgin Mary complexes. She didn’t pray for restraint, but for the physical prowess to disengage herself when she was ready to stop. This whole period was obtuse and dissipated. She learned to pronounce a few German words. She majored in communications or something like that. Right before graduation, she lopped off her long hair so she could be hired as a news anchor, but she was never sure how to go about applying for those jobs, so she spent the next five years will her hair back. It grew in one shade darker and fuzzy as yak fur. If someone had told her that the story of her life was almost half over, she would have barricaded herself in a root cellar and written an epic poem, though this was never entered her conscious plans at any point, no matter how dismal things looked. It would have been purely a knee-jerk reaction. This poem would not have rhymed and would have been painfully off-rhythm. She would have paid to have it printed by a vanity press, along with a photo of herself back when she had good hair.
HE WENT TO MIT. When she heard about this, she didn’t yet have the good sense to be sorry she hadn’t gone to the prom with him. His mother celebrated by serving organic strawberry ice cream with no preservatives the night before he left for Cambridge. He packed only one suitcase. He brought his magnifying glass, but no recorded music in any format. His father drove him to the airport, dangerously distracted by all the billboards advertising cheap rates for hotel rooms out there. When they got to the airport, they didn’t embrace or shake hands. The father sighed and stared off at the scab-pink horizon and said, “Son, if you could harness the energy from all the heartbreak in this town, you could power a trip into space,” without raising his voice to account for the roar of the jets looming and receding.
At MIT he discovered that not all girls cared if you had strange hair, and that quite a few girls had strange hair themselves. You’d think he could have found someone. But he was already too masterful with his pretended disinterest, too well studied, so he flicked away the masochistic ones that fell for his aloofness and ran up astronomical credit card debt at various strip clubs, all of which had no-touching policies. He would lumber home drunk from Le Bare, do his astrophysics assignments, then burn holes in the paper with his magnifying glass. Several cats went missing from his neighborhood around this time, but he had nothing to do with that. Despite the traditional feline corollaries, he thought of women as puppies, eager to please and in need of his training, though he never used the word bitch, not even in the circular commentary running rampant and scissor-fisted inside his head. Once he saw a stripper who he thought he remembered from his trusty high-school-era-jerk-off mag, but it was just the lighting and the lilac smoke and when she made eye contact with him he felt like swatter her on the nose, for her own good.
WITH THE KIDS AWAY at school, their parents became entwined. Her father’s drunkenness progressed from tidy to delusional and energetic. He believed he was a star of black-and-white movies whose genius was being unfairly hobbled by the studio system of the 1940s. He was displeased with his wife. “I’m their top box office draw!” he would bellow, with a rakish disregard for enunciation. “Their cash cow! And they pair me up with that frump! Jack’s gonna get an earful from me, brother, and how!” Her mother would smile vacantly and continue quilting, which was her new hobby, though it was meticulously slow work and she never succeeded in finishing an entire quilt. His mother, who’d always had a grandiose streak and imagined herself to be too big for her present life, found her father’s spoiled-star raving to be intriguing, then exciting. His father hadn’t touched his mother since she twisted her ankle while weeding the garden three years ago; he had walked in on the unexpected sight of her swollen ankle propped on the sofa, packed in ice, staring up at him with the dumb offensive ugliness of an overlarge insect, some fat albino roach who had flourished off the household’s careless leavings. So his mother really couldn’t be blamed for seeking out affection elsewhere. At one point during the affair, she thought she might be pregnant, and for five days she was radiant and rewound, but it turned out to be a false alarm and her face fell back to its usual fretting.
5.
SHE’D NEVER HAD ANY INKLING of how hard it was to work. She took a series of entry-level jobs that were supposed to lead to greater things, but she lacked ambition for those things (an office instead of a cubicle, a cell phone account, being in charge of the people still working in cubicles) and all of the job led to sexual harassment. It was definitely reportable and punishable by thins point, but she was one of the stupid ones who really needed the job but did punishable things, like calling her friend Beverly, who was backpacking through Europe, every day on the company phone. The sexual harassment because so inevitable that she would stay lte after her coworkers and gone home, to make that tiresome first move more convenient for her bosses. She discovered that she didn’t just like neckties. It was a full-blown fetish. She worked at places where her bosses wore neckties, so she was able to explore the possibilities to extend. Still, she would stare at the jostled boxes of copy toner and dream of being rescued. She always thought she should have a father capable of swooping in and plucking her from all hurricanes. But her father was slouched in a canvas director’s chair, slinging back gin and tonics, whining that musicals were a hot ticket these days, they should stick him in a musical, he could really sing, if they’d just give him half a chance, dammit.
She still went to Maas and eventually a genuine always-boy surfaced there, Virgin Mary complex and necktie intact. They were married and her new husband took a job in Boston.
She and he never ran into each other, never passed each other unnoticed on the street, never got on the same subway train but different cars. Their lives had absolutely no commonalities.
She had two babies, both girls. One looked exactly like her and the other looked exactly like her husband. The hospital in Boston was very exacting. One of the doctors had been nailed with a sexual harassment suit earlier that year, and everyone kept their hands in their pockets and their eyes on their work.
HE GRADUATED WITH HONORS, although no one could remember having had him in their class. He skipped the graduation ceremony. His diploma came in the mail. He unrolled it on the baked June sidewalk and torched it with his magnifying glass. Then he placed the magnifying glass carefully on the ground and crushed it with his bare heel, which took several stompings and should have resulted in stitches, but medical attention would have placed him in the same hospital where her children would later be born, and what ifhe had struck up a relationship or dependency upon some doctor or nurse or medication there, and kept returning, and been at the hospital on one of the afternoons when she was giving birth to her children? No. The coincidence would be too uncomfortable, require too much circular follow-through. He plugged up his foot with a mound of sticky band-aids and bled through his strtchy black dress socks as he started his job as a software engineer.
At work he made no friends. He figure out how to insert pornographic Japanese anime into the government spreadsheets he was programming. There were a few complaints, but he got no thrill from this. Even though he did stupid, punishable things, no one sexually harassed him. If asked, he would have said that he had no fetishes, it was all the same to him. He had his first ever girlfriend, the checkered waitress a domineering woman twice his age with a blaring South Boston accent, the ends of all her words blunted, cut off like fat cigar tips. Her uniform was not checkered. He called her that because of her past, which she deliberately kept murky. She was a crystal meth addict who never slept, so she listened to oldies radio all night and quilted. She completed seven quilts while they were together, and left them all behind when she disappeared. She didn’t say she was going out of the paper or cigarettes. She just left, jangling her keys.
He didn’t feel like getting another girlfriend, but not because he missed her. He was too good for her. He went to the movies and he was certain that he looked like the stars, despite his strange hair.
His mother made a special trip to the public library to e-mail him his old classmate’s address and phone number in Boston. She did this because things were shaky between her and the girl’s father, and she was grasping at straws. He printed out this information. With his magnifying glass now smashed, he had to be satisfied with ripping it to shreds and chawing it into a big wet spitball.
THE IMAGINARY LITTLE SISTER, Dawn, still lived in the house with her parents, utterly forgotten. One time Dawn walked in on her father and his mother having fumbling, drunken sex, and she was traumatized. His mother immediately felt a tingle of cold air spider up his spine. She disengaged herself from the tangle and wept inconsolably into the half-finished quilt on the bed. She had the distinct feeling that she had been pillaged.
6.
SUDDENLY IT HITS HER: She is trapped in the wrong life. She blames this on having made a poor choice of spouse, as this is the popular diagnosis of the day. By now she lives in the suburbs of Boston, a place she clipped and doubled coupons to get to, but the squat mailboxes guarding each driveway infuriate her with their pastel indolence, and when her daughters show her the color-by-numbers activity they’ve completed, she feels like screaming at them that all they have to look forward to is sexual harassment, and any idiot can do color-by-numbers, all the choices are already made, so wake up girls and figure out how to grow a thick skin. She gives her daughters styrofoam cups of hot coffee (Don’t tell your dad) and watches as they choke it down black to please her, the volume of its bitterness turned up to blasting level on their naive children’s taste buds. She has to get out. At the public library, she finds a Spaniard who speaks English as though he were reciting a recipe for hypnosis. She craves something foreign, someone who will perform an oxytransplantation so that when she lies down with him, she will wake up in a new life that she can’t even pronounce.
She leaves matter-of-factly, in plain daylight. Her older daughter, the one that looks like her, watches her go with a stunned expression. She has named the younger daughter Dawn, and she convinces herself that the older one will turn out okay because she has something to tell secrets and blame for all punishable offenses. But Dawn once walked in on her parents having desperate, fumbling sex during the bad years, a necktie wound in an exotic knot tourniquetting her father’s thigh and flying like the streamers on a coat of arms, and little Dawn was traumatized and never speaks. She won’t make much a companion, neither confidante not acceptable scapegoat. The older daughter known that she has been screwed. She gets her first twinges of that pillaged feeling at a dangerously young age.
HE DOESN’T HAVE THE PATIENCE for a magnifying glass anymore. The men in the movies who look like him all finger cigarettes with debonair deliberation as they show the second-billing females who is boss. He doesn’t smoke, but he buys a solid silver Zippo, a sleek rectangle that feels like a rock in his pocket, makes him think of a slingshot. It’s terrible what he does to them. He’s never really fit in anywhere and when they beg for mercy he just can’t seem to put himself in their moccasins. His feet are large and enviable. He can’t be expected to relate. They are so easy to get. He just mimics all those movies, which were obviously based upon his future. They all want to be rescued.
At first, he lavishes time on them, choosing one, following her, observing, researching, perfecting the fantasy, ringing the doorbell then either loping away or making up some excuse, masquerading as an authority, but not yet, until the day he does. Then it is a split-second pounce. He has it down to a science, the Zippo tucked inside a sock.
Ding dong. He is not nice looking but he stands erect and territorial like this is his closeup and when they answer the door, they are of two minds about him and their faces struggle. They are polite but can’t bring themselves to welcome him. What a crushing disappointment. How infuriating. It might as well be the same house, because it’s the same expression: the stiffening, the suppressed revulsion. They wish he were someone else. He slings back the weighted cotton pouch and socks them square in the nose. The skull caves in and he counts out the blows until the head is reduced to a mound of bloody mush. The lips disappear. He feels relieved, no longer waiting for a smile.
He keeps the bodies intact. He indulges in a last dance—”Stairway to Heaven,” he knows every note before it hits the tympanic membrane, he practically invented this song—dragging her around the room, free from the torture of his eye contact. He no longer wishes that one of them would stand up to him and punch him in the eye. He’s been adrift in the world for a long time. He’s a different person now.
THE ENTIRE CITY IS OUTRAGED by his perversions. Police bulletins pop through the airwaves. Girls clutch each other by the elbows and scare themselves by peering into the eyes of any man in a hat. They nowilayme themselves to sleep, combating the roar of flight rushing through their rational at-home-with-the-deadbolt-locked stomachs. Her drastic fleeing to Catalonia goes unreported, conveniently eclipsed. Her husband is too despondent to make sure his daughters are safe from the maniac at large. The husband drinks himself into incoherence and one night he takes the color-by-numbers activity off the fridge, removing the magnets as gingerly as he once brushed back her sleeve to look at her watch when he still had his Virgin Mary complex and need an excuse to touch her. He burns holes in the color-by-numbers with the tip of his newly acquired cigarette, and he doesn’t know why. It isn’t out of anger. It’s because his home is askew and he can’t recognize any of the furniture and there’s no place for him to sit. He passes out without remembering to lock the door. Fortunately, her daughters are safe as babes. He’s never liked ’em young.
7.
THE SPANIARD is of course abusive, or else a freeloading lout, or maybe he insists upon watching her perform sexually humiliating acts with unbathed gypsies. She comes crawling back to her husband with a newfound appreciation for domesticity and suburban mailboxes and the concept of Home, as this is another popular diagnosis of the day, from the backlash camp. Only her husband has developed a taste for the drink, and now he can all her a whore and she really has no comeback after what went on with the gypsies. Despite the fact that her own father is a drunk, she never developed a craving for a usual codependency cycle, never covertly searched for man like her dad. Neither of her daughters will speak to her. The older one pours two cups of coffee every morning, hands one to the younger sister, and non one tells them that coffee will prevent them from sleeping at night or stunt their growth. She knows it was a mistake to come back. She finds the color-by-numbers activity with the holes burned into it, and this gives her a refreshing feeling of solidarity; in fact it keeps her from going insane.
She leaves again, but this time she sneaks out in the middle of the night with no lover loitering at the train station. She does leave a note, which is more of a rambling poem, but the older daughter burns it without reading it, gulping black coffee she’ll never develop a taste for.
Most of the time she is sure-footed, marching through the streets like a blazing torch, scalding the open air. It’s only when she goes to the movies that she gets lonely. When she sees a couple sitting together at the movies, any two, extinguishing sand rushes up her throat, and her oneness feels start and uninviting as a straight pin, thoroughly unnatural. She should stop going to the movies, but she is drawn to dark rooms with a reflective blue glow where she can remember the father who never came to rescue her and dream that right this minute he’s on his way, his ticket is being ripped, he’s grabbing the stub and rushing into this very theater, straining his super-eyes until he spots the empty seat next to her, gliding to her side with a plan for escape and a tub of popcorn. Sharing a tub of popcorn with someone is the one act that proves that, despite our best efforts, humans are still not solitary animals. It helps her to make up theories, even far-fetched ones, as she watches the humans reach for a hand, a shoulder, a fistful of popcorn, watches them reach and reach for things they have already accurately pictured inside their minds.
Her death occurs years later. It is beside the point.
HE IS APPREHENDED at a multiplex during a matinee, and he identifies not with Lee Harvey Oswald but with JFK. The police take him back to the station and he finally gets that punch in the eye, but this, too, is disappointingly mild and fails to put him in his place.
His father has made an obsessive study of the legal system and even has a generous defense fund saved up. His father should reserve this for his own day of doom (there is another homely teenager in the neighborhood whose ankles he is ravishing), but despite his many failings, he has always known that if ever his child were in real trouble, he would swoop in and rescue him. He wonders why his son never realized this. It is by far his best quality, and should have formed the basis for a special bond between them.
His mother is too unsurprised to comment. Her mother brings over a loaf of banana bread and a quilted dishtowel, which is finished, as it’s smaller. She deliberates on the doorstep for a moment, then leaves the bread on the porch without knocking. A dog eats it and all his mother finds is a mauled dishtowel stained in crumbs and slobber, and she feels pangs of outrage, as if she has somehow been cheated.
Her father sees the neighbor boy’s mug shot on the evening news and has a panic attack thinking of all the young bucks streaming into the Hollywood Greyhound station, lying in wait, slicking back their body hair choosing new alliterative names, scheming to take his place.
A reporter for the Boston Globe and one form the Los Angles Times each get ahold of his high school yearbook, and have their assistants systematically track down all of his classmates and call them for comments and anecdotes. No one can remember him clearly, but they’re willing to go on record saying that he was a creep who deserves to fry. When the reporters’ assistants try to call her, it is her ex-husband’s number. One of her daughters answers. She tells the man that the person he’s looking for is dead.
He is found guilty. He is allowed to wear a suit, provided by his well-heeled father, to hear the judge sentence him to death. He somehow smuggles the necktie back into his cell and hangs himself. Even in his final seconds, he is arrogant, telling himself he’s getting away with something. He has to have this attitude because it makes his chest feel big enough to house him.
THE OB-GYN NURSE GOES BLIND. She does not relate this to her mistake of the switched babies, a mistake she never realized she made. Nor does she see it as a punishment. It’s comforting to be an invalid, to be waited upon after all those years of catering to the birth-sick. When the Nurses’s daughter complains that her married boss makes inappropriate comments and calls her “doll” in front of clients, the Nurse flexes her thick legs and smiles wanly, assigned to the deceased Doctor’s fingers a searching sincerity that she knows they never had. But to be blind and pillaged would be too much. She would give up altogether.
At night she tunes the radio to the opera and now that there is no one to watch out for, she lets her dead pupils and the raw mollusk insides of her eyelids perform a complex mating ritual, always falling asleep when it’s still that first harmless glance, when it’s all trilling and swelling, the rumble of the tympani heralding something too far away to start hoping for yet, before names are assigned and exchanged, before any sort of consummation, before the terror of a beginning.
