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If Jack Virtanen hadn’t been my neighbor, I wouldn’t have even noticed he existed. Maybe not even then if my wife Carol hadn’t gotten to be friends with Jack’s wife Mary. He wasn’t tall or short or fat or thin. Not dark or light. His hair wasn’t blonde or brown or gray. His eyes were mild and probably either brown or green. He was practically invisible.

Carol and I were next door at Jack’s, and it happened to be the second anniversary of our son’s death, though we worked hard at not talking about it. Jack was sitting across the deck from me, at the picnic table, under the umbrella. “Open your goddamn hand,” I said to him.

“I can’t, it will get away.” He said it as if he wished he could, but he just couldn’t. He had his right hand in a fist, held close to his chest. I glared at him, trying to decide whether or not I was going to try to get up and make him do it. My face was hot from too much late June sun, too many gin and tonics and because he was pissing me off. Jack was cool. He’d only had iced tea, and he pretended he was perfectly reasonable. He was not being reasonable.

I glowered at him a while longer, then bellowed, “Carol! Carol!”

Two women came through the screen door from the house. One was tall, thin and dark. The other was short, round and blonde. The tall one was my wife. “What’s the matter, Karl?”

“We’re leaving.” I labored out of my chair, swaying a little as I got to my feet.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “What now?”

I pointed at Jack. “Him. That’s what’s now. I refuse to be around that lunatic, psychopath son of a bitch for another minute.”

Jack blinked his mild eyes and smiled at her, his hands on his lap and out of sight.

“Are you sure about which one of you is the lunatic?” she asked.

I gritted my teeth. “Sure, go ahead and take his side. But ask him what he’s got in his hand. Ask him to show it to you. Go ahead. Ask him.”

She turned back to Jack with a raised eyebrow. “Well?”

Jack kept smiling and put his hands on the table; left hand open, palm up, right hand closed. “I can’t show it to you because if I did, it would get away. And I don’t know what it is, not for sure.”

She waited for more, but Jack seemed content to leave it at that.

“Is it a fly?” asked Mary.

He shook his head.

“A spider?” asked Carol.

He shook his head.

“A moth?”

“A butterfly? An ant? A dragonfly?”

“No, no, no,” I said, fuming. “He thinks he’s got a pixie, or a fairy or some goddamn thing.” I looked at Jack. “Don’t you? Admit it. You think you’ve got a goddamn fairy in your hand.”

They looked at Jack, waiting.

“I didn’t say that,” he said mildly. “I didn’t say what I thought it was.” He put his fist up to his ear. “But I don’t think it’s an insect.”

“You can hear it?” asked Mary.

He smiled and shrugged.

Mary went to stand next to him and put his hand to her ear.

“Well?” asked Carol

“I… I’m not sure. I think I hear something, but I’m not sure.”

Carol came over and listened, too, then she set his hand back down on the table, carefully, as if Jack couldn’t have just lowered his hand by himself. She didn’t say anything.

I watched it all, looking from one to another of them, rubbing my palms on my thighs anxiously. “This is crazy!” The words burst from me. “You’re all nuts. There’s probably nothing in there at all.”

Jack held his fist out to me, offering me a listen. I stared at it. I licked my lips. “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not going to let myself be hypnotized into thinking there’s some magical creature in there like you suggestible idiots. I’m leaving.” I went to the steps to leading from the deck to the backyard and looked back at my wife. “Are you coming or not?”

Carol looked at Jack’s hand again, then shook herself. “All right, you big baby. I’m coming.” She smiled at Mary. “Sorry, Mare. My lord and master calls.”

We turned around before we pushed through the shrubbery to our own yard. Mary waved to us. So did Jack. With his left hand.

I took another peek through the curtains in the window in the living room.

Carol looked up from the TV. “Karl, would you sit down and relax, please? You can’t even see the Virtanens’ from there. What are you looking for, anyway?”

I peeked once more and shook my head. “I don’t know.” I looked at the window again but didn’t move the curtains. “What do you think he’s up to?”

“Why does he have to be up to anything?”

“C’mon. He thinks he’s got some sort of magical creature in his hand. He had you and Mary thinking it, too. Why would he do that?” I fought the urge to look out the window.

“Who cares? What difference does it make? He’s probably just…” Her voice trailed off as she thought about it. She knew as well as I did that Jack wasn’t the type to play practical jokes. She shook her head. “Besides, he never said it was anything magical, did he?”

I hesitated, and she raised her eyebrows at me. “Okay, he didn’t come right out and say it, but he… he… acted like it.” I stuck out my chin, daring her to argue with me.

“All right. Again, who cares?”

I didn’t want to tell her. I wasn’t even sure I knew.

“It’s just not right, that’s all,” I said. I took another look out the window. “Hey, Mrs. Mrmphrimiphski is going over there.” I held the curtain open so Carol could come over and see the squat old lady in the black dress and babushka marching in the road. No one on the block was sure of her name, but we had all decided she was some sort of Eastern European.

We looked at each other and went outside.

There was a group of people following a few yards behind her, people from all over the neighborhood.

I caught up to Ted Rimsky. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Beats me. Somebody said Jack Virtanen captured an alien or something.”

I looked at Carol who raised an eyebrow.

“Who said?” I asked Ted.

Ted considered the question. “I dunno.” He shrugged. “Somebody.”

We caught up to the rest of the crowd in the street in front of the Virtanens. I pushed my way to the end of their front yard. Mrs. Brphramachescu was knocking on the front door.

Mary answered. She smiled at the old woman, then noticed the rest of us and took a step back. “Jack,” she called back into the house. “Can you come here, please?”

Jack came to the door and smiled inanely. His right hand was still in a fist, which he carried close to his chest.

Mrs. Oospenskaya grabbed his hand. She smelled it. She held it up and peered at it. She rapped on the knuckles three times, then spit on the ground. She dropped the fist, stared at Jack and crossed herself, then turned to the rest of us and shouted, “Boze moi, potemkin alexander nevsky kalisnikov.” Or something. No one had any idea what she said, but everyone knew she’d put her official Old World seal of approval on Jack and whatever the hell it was that he had in his hand. Everyone oohed, some people bowed their heads, a couple of morons knelt.

I stepped up to the porch. “Are you all crazy?” I yelled. “This is bullshit. There is nothing in his hand. Or if there is something, it’s nothing magical or mystical. It’s a bug or a dandelion seed or a bottle cap.”

Letitia Deere, barefoot, wearing a peasant blouse and a peasant skirt, with a scarf around her head, joined us and said, “Mrs. Krboborovic has confirmed that you hold a great gift,” she said to Jack.

I peered at her. “You speak her language?” I asked.

Letitia shook her head impatiently. “There is more to communication than mere words. Do we need words to know what the birds are saying? Do we need words to speak with the whales?”

Before I could respond, she grabbed Jack’s hand and held it to her breast, her eyes closed in ecstasy. “Yes, yes, I can feel the power.” She looked into Jack’s eyes for what seemed a very long time. “May you be guided by the wisdom of the Goddess, and may She protect you from those who will seek to misuse your gift.”

“What gift?” I shouted. “What do you think he has in there?” I gestured at Jack. “Why don’t you tell us, Jack? Why don’t you just come right out and tell us exactly what it is you have in your hand?”

He smiled and blinked, then he and Mary stepped back into the house and he closed the door gently in our faces.

A few people wandered off toward their homes, but others milled around as if they were afraid they’d miss something if they left. Letitia sat in a circle with five or six men and women, holding hands and singing.

“Idiots,” I growled, and stalked off for home myself, with Carol a step or two behind me.

“What is your problem, Karl?” she asked as she caught up to me. “Since when do you care so much about what other people want to believe?”

I stopped, as did she. I bit my lip. “I…” I didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to poke at wounds that would never heal. “I just don’t think it’s right to make people believe in magic, in things that can’t be real.” I didn’t mention Donnie, but I didn’t have to. She knew me, knew what I was feeling.

“Okay,” she said gently. She took my hand and gave it a squeeze and took me home.

I was still at the window when Carol got up the next morning.

“Karl, you’ve got to let it go. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

I shook her hand off my arm and turned around to face her. “What if it does? What if it has everything to do with me, with us?”

She backed up a step. “What are you talking about?”

“What if it’s Donnie? What if that son of a bitch has our son in his hand?”

She stared at me, her mouth open. Tears spilled from her eyes. “He’s dead, Karl,” she said in a whisper. “Donnie’s dead.”

I hated myself for saying it to her. I hated Jack even more for making me think it could be true. “Look,” I said. “Jack seems to have something in his hand. He wants everyone to think it’s an angel, or a fairy, or moondust or something. But maybe it’s Donnie, his soul or whatever you want to call it. Not his body, but the part of Donnie that really was Donnie.”

“Stop it, Karl.” I could see the pain in her face, the pleading in her eyes for me to shut up and go back to trying to pretend to forget watching the cancer that ate our son. But I couldn’t stop, not as long as Jack made me believe in the possibility.

“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but does what happened to Donnie make sense? I know it’s insane to think it could be true, but maybe the truth of what happened to our little boy made me insane, and anyway, who wants to be sane in a universe that kills children for no apparent reason?”

She ran away from me. She ran back upstairs, and I pictured her throwing herself on the bed, sobbing. I knew I should go to her so we could cry together. Again. And maybe the crying would be cathartic, and when we had exhausted our bodies and our tears, we would be numb enough to go on. Again. It had been two years. How much longer was it going to hurt this much?

But I had to know what Jack was up to. I didn’t want to know, but I’d learned the hard way that what I wanted didn’t really matter much.

There were still some people waiting around in front of Jack’s house. They came and went in small groups, as if keeping a haphazardly rotating vigil. An unrequited vigil. Jack wasn’t coming out.

At least he wasn’t coming out his front door.

It turned out that he snuck out the back door sometime during the day and went to the hospital, where he and his fist supposedly healed one, or five, or twenty-five people, depending on which newspaper or TV station you heard it from. The person, or people, who were healed were stunned. Their families were euphoric. Their doctors were baffled.

Carol and I stared at the TV. I caught Carol looking at me worriedly out of the corner of her eye, as if she were afraid anything—a word, a direct look—might make me explode. She was probably right. I could feel myself trembling, like a rocket on a launching pad about to take off.

My chest was so tight it was an effort to speak.

“This… isn’t… real.” I said. “It’s like a nightmare, or an alternate universe. This stuff doesn’t really happen.” I turned to Carol. “Does it?” I needed to be reassured, like a little kid being told that it was just a bad dream, that I could go back to sleep and everything would be fine in the morning.

She shook her head. Her lips said “no,” though no sound came out. She was having the same bad dream I was having.

Only we didn’t wake up. The street in front of our house became a sea of pilgrims and petitioners, threatening to drown us in their need to be saved, whether from disease, or injury, or just from reality. Jack stayed inside, but that didn’t stop some people from believing they had been cured by touching his house, or eating the grass from his lawn, or catching a glimpse of him through a window.

It went on for days. We were trapped in our house. Even if we had been able to get out, there was no way we could push our way through the crowd to go to work or to the store.

“I’m going to kill him,” I told Carol.

She looked at me and saw I meant it literally. I don’t think she was totally against the idea, but she didn’t want to go on record as actually endorsing it, so she said nothing.

“It can’t be good for people to believe in this sort of thing.” She wasn’t arguing with me, but I spoke as if she were. “It’s dangerous, really. When people believe in magic, when they act as if there’s something or someone that can save them, take care of them, they don’t take care of themselves. I mean, faith is one thing, faith is fine if you don’t take it seriously. It’s when people start thinking that the thing they have faith in is actually going to make everything okay that they get into trouble.”

Carol still didn’t say anything.

“All right,” I said. “I’m not going to kill him.” I didn’t really want to kill him. Or at least I wasn’t prepared to accept the consequences of killing him. But I had to do something. “What I am going to do is go over there and open his damn hand and show everybody that this whole healing magic thing is just a lot of bullshit. This circus has gone on long enough and somebody is going to get hurt.” I didn’t need to add that the someone might be me.

I had to fight my way against the swell of supplicants squashed up against our house. We ebbed and flowed like flotsam at the beach, seeming to move with the waves but never getting any closer to shore. I tried to elbow my way though, but a hundred others were at least as aggressive as I was.

Finally I noticed what should have been obvious: everyone was concentrating on the front of Jack’s house, as if it were a two-dimensional portal to whatever they imagined Heaven to be. Very few people were laying siege to the back door.

I turned and headed around between our houses, pushing aside the few who, probably by accident, found themselves stranded there, wondering how they could rejoin the rest of the herd in the front. It was relatively easy to get up on the deck and pound on the back door.

“Jack! Jack!” I yelled. “It’s me, Karl. Open up.” My plan, such as it was, was to get inside, drag Jack to the front, and crack his fist open in front of the world to show him for the charlatan he was.

He peeked out and smiled at me, as if he were actually glad to see me, and opened the door. He yanked me in, then closed and locked the door behind me.

“Look…” I started.

“Karl,” he said. “Good to see you. I was hoping you’d stop by.” As if it was just another day in Suburbia, and we could sit outside and have a lemonade and chat a while.

“Uh, yeah…” He made me lose my train of thought. “Look,” I started again. “This can’t go on. Can’t you see that you’ve thrown the lives of all those people out there into chaos? This can’t be what you meant to do. So, what I think is that you should go out there and just open up your hand and, if there is something in there, they can see you let it go, so they can get on with their lives, and we can get on with ours.” I was pretty proud of myself for the appeal to his better nature. No threats, no insults. Diplomacy.

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.” He peered at me, mildly.

“I don’t think that’s really what you want me to do, either.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it is.” How could eyes like that hypnotize anybody? There was no strength in them, no power. Yet, somehow, I wasn’t as sure as I had been. I shook myself. “Okay, I didn’t want to do this, but you know and I know there’s not a goddamn thing in your hand. You are going to go out to that crowd and show that to them, or I’m going to drag you through the house and out the door and make you open it, if I have to cut your fucking hand off to do it.”

He just smiled at me. “You don’t need to do that, Karl. I’ll be glad to open my hand. Here.” Before I could react, he grabbed my right hand and put his right hand up against it, then closed my hand into a fist.

I looked at him stupidly, not sure exactly what had happened.

“I think you’re better suited for this than me, anyway,” he said.

I looked from him to my hand, then back to him and back to my hand. “What… You…” I licked my lips. “There’s nothing in there!” I shouted. “Nothing!”

He just smiled.

“What’s to stop me from opening my hand, then?” I asked. “What’s going to happen to your precious fairy then?”

He smiled.

“I’ll do it, if only to wipe that silly smile off your face. I’ll do it right now.” I headed for the front door. He didn’t try to stop me, so, of course, I stopped. I swallowed. I stared at him. I gave up and went home.

Jack showed his empty hand to everyone and, within an hour, our street was deserted. Jack didn’t tell anyone about me.

Carol and I don’t know what to do. We spend a lot of time just staring at my hand. I still don’t know what’s in there.

No, that’s not true, I do know. There’s nothing in my hand. Nothing!

And yet, thanks to Jack, I could very well spend the rest of my life with my hand in a fist. Even though it’s empty. Because it is empty. I know it’s empty.

But the thing is…

It tickles.

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