Audio: David Rabe reads.

A week ago Thursday, my uncle Jim called. When I picked up the phone and said, “Hello,” he said, “Hello.” The voice was familiar and yet I didn’t recognize it. “Who is this?” I said.

“Jim,” he told me. “Uncle Jim.”

“What?” I was very surprised, because I thought Uncle Jim was dead. “Who is this?” I wanted to know. I really wanted to know.

“I just told you. Jim. I’m here with Hank. Is your mom home?”

“No,” I said. I thought Uncle Jim had been dead for years.

“Where is she?”

Now, the Hank he’d just referred to was probably his older brother, and my mom was their sister, Margie, and the thing of it was, the bewildering thing of it was that I thought they were all dead. “Is this some kind of joke?” I asked.

“We’re not laughing,” he said.

“Look,” I said, “I was in the middle of something here.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

“Well, cooking. Dinner.”

“What? Is it dinnertime?”

“Yes.”

“What are you cooking?”

“Stir-fry. You know, vegetables in a wok.”

“You never did have time for us, did you?”

That was a new voice, a different voice. “Hank?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

He was right. I did.

“Anyway, Glenn.” Now Jim was talking again, and he said my name as if it were a window into countless flaws inside me. As if it revealed my essential weakness, grossness, as if it were the name of a fool.

I imagined the two of them somewhere handing the phone back and forth. “O.K., Glenn. We were just hoping to get ahold of Margie. If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“Look,” I said. “Look. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but—”

“I just told you, Glenn. We’re looking for Margie. That’s what we’re doing.”

“Stop saying that. Just stop it.”

“Stop saying what? Where’s Margie?”

“No. My name. Stop saying my name that way.”

“What way?”

“The way you’re saying it.”

“I guess you don’t like it, huh?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Don’t like the sound of it.”

“I just said I don’t.”

“Or is it us you don’t like?”

“We’re your blood, you know. Bloodline. Blood relative.”

“So why wouldn’t you want us to find Margie?”

“What?”

“She’s our sister.”

“She’s dead! You’re all dead!”

“So?”

They seemed to know something that I didn’t, some inherent mistake in my assumptions about what I’d just said. “Where are you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Where are you?”

“Why?”

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“I’d just like to know,” I said. “I’d just like to know, O.K.?”

“He wants to know where we are,” one said to the other. I think it was Jim to Hank, though it could have been the other way around. Whoever was speaking, his report of my question made them both laugh. They found it very entertaining.

I looked out the window, half expecting to see them prowling about in the October air. A mist, on the verge of freezing into snow, waved under stressful crosscurrents. I could see rows of lights defining buildings. It was a certain kind of heavy black night, blotting out the stars that I knew were up there, twinkling like the last of something.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the strangeness of their call, as I hung up and walked down the long corridor to the kitchen, because I did. I just didn’t know what to do about it, or even what to think about it, and I was hungry for the vegetables I’d left on the stove in their pool of oil. Halfway down the hall, I became afraid that I’d neglected to turn off the burner under the wok when I’d gone to the bathroom only to be interrupted by the ringing phone and my uncles. But the fire was off, the kitchen safe.

That night, they were on television. I was up late, restless, alone, because my wife and daughter were in California, celebrating my mother-in-law’s birthday. I sat with a bottle of Scotch and a glass, into which I poured and from which I sipped as I channel-hopped. I don’t know what I was searching for. I never do. And there they were. I hopped right past them, and then sprang back. They were sitting at a kitchen table. They had coffee cups and were leaning toward each other. Hunched over and talking, they appeared earnest and thoughtful. Their voices were very low and hard for me to follow. I held my breath, trying to hear. But I couldn’t understand a word. Or, rather, a word here and there was all I could understand. The sense eluded me. The subject matter appeared to be, if their postures were to be trusted, of the utmost importance. I had my suspicions about what it was and moved closer to the set. But tilting and arranging my torso so that I pressed my ear against the speaker brought no improvement.

The obvious thing to try was turning up the volume. Something about this choice worried me, as if it might signal my presence when they were clearly being secretive. I lightly tapped the little arrow on the remote. But what my action prompted was a hum that further muffled my uncles’ conversation. It was as if wherever they were the signal was weak and couldn’t quite reach me. The quality of the image was sort of like in the early days of television, when signals searched out antennae on rooftops.

Hank and Jim were in my grandparents’ kitchen, I realized. The layout was one I knew. I’d been there many times, sitting in those exact chairs while something went on, or I waited for something. Maybe my grandmother was cooking, or maybe she and my mom were talking while they cooked. There were times when I sat at that kitchen table while the adults, Jim and Hank and my mom and their sister, Amber, and my dad, Matty, and Jim and Hank’s wives, Kate and Gayle, and Amber’s second husband, Harold, or her first husband, Arnie, played cards at the dining-room table, which was only a few feet away and visible through an open doorway. The rooms were small, the ceilings low. Everything was small there, the houses squeezed together on little square blocks bounded by narrow streets, as if there weren’t miles of open land, farmland, and woods all around. They would play poker sometimes, betting nickels and dimes and quarters, shoving their coins into the kitty, which was the name they gave to the spot at the center of the table where the money collected. They talked to their cards, asking for good ones; they groaned at bad luck or barked happily when the cards they needed came to them and they felt blessed, as if something somewhere cared about them, and for a second they’d been given proof.