Unassigned Territory, Kem Nunn

Harlan stood for several minutes at [the room's] center, in the darkness. He was trying to figure it but found he hadn't enough to go on. An affair of the heart, perhaps. Harlan had given in to an affair of the heart once. He had been eighteen years old at the time. He had run away with a neighbor's wife and they had gone to Kansas City. His father and the woman's husband had come looking for them. It was an absurd story. At least it seemed absurd to Harlan. The woman's husband wound up pulling a gun on him in their apartment. He wasn't very good with it and Harlan had taken it away from him. Then his father, who had been looking in another room downstairs, had come up and Harlan had fought his father. He could have taken his father but he hadn't.

In the end -- not the night of the fight, but in the end -- Harlan had done what his father wanted -- he had gone home. What he had found at the time was that living with the woman was doing something to him. When he had left with her he understood he was breaking a rule. But he thought it was only one rule; he had thought that he could violate one principle and yet still live by the others, and what he found was that it didn't work that way. Later he believed he had learned the truth of Paul's words when he said that God's Word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference. It was the revelation which had pointed him down the road he still followed. It was about keeping honest and as near as Harlan could tell, obedience to the Word was the only thing that worked.

Harlan went to an open window. The night air was cool against his face. He could see a bit of the road and above that the ridge which led to the interstate. Above the ridge the sky was filled with stars. He tried for a moment to imagine what the girl the Wheeler boy had run off with might be like. Neil Davis had described her as a common whore. The curious thing about that was, it was more or less the way Harlan's father had once described the woman Harlan had run away with. There were times when it suited him to imagine he no longer remembered the woman's name, but he did. He continued to stand at the window, to examine the huge black shape the ridge had cut from the starlit sky. The woman's name was Virginia. At one point during the summer of his eighteenth birthday she had given him a record as a present -- the Paul Whiteman recording of "I'm Coming, Virginia." It was supposed to be a joke, something she had picked up in a secondhand store. The thing turned out to be something of a collector's item, however, as it contained a cornet solo by Bix Beiderbecke and there were times now, when Harlan thought of her, when he imagined he could still hear the pure tone of Bix's horn as it filled a cheap two-room flat complete with bamboo shades and colored lights, windows open upon hot summer nights.

The woman had died some ten years later, or so Harlan had been told, in a Memphis hospital of cirrhosis of the liver -- an ugly death and what he supposed was the point of the story, what one ought to remember about the pursuit of empty pleasures. That he remembered more, that the cheap trappings of a romantic sentimentality still clung to the episode like the scent of a dime store perfume, was a nagging source of irritation. That the trappings were capable, on occasion, of generating actual tears, was worse than irritating. But then he supposed there was a point in all of that too. It had something to do with the stuff choices were made of. Though not a subject he ordinarily talked about, it was, he thought, under the circumstances, something he might take up with a certain Obadiah Wheeler, should the opportunity present itself.