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now), the twenty-five-gallon plastic bin he used for his recyclables. All this Elwin amassed on the snow, along with the deer, beneath the black gridwork of the fire escape.
    Working steadily, he noosed the sisal rope around the doe’s neck, tied it, yanked the knot to test it, then (standing tiptoed atop the overturned plastic bin) looped the rope’s other end over one of the fire escape’s iron rails. He pulled the slack through. With a heavy grunt, he tugged hard on the rope, drawing the doe’s head off the ground so that it appeared an unfamiliar sound had just roused it from sleep. But that was as high as he could lift it. Hoisting the deer, he realized, was going to be more difficult than he’d planned; at 340 pounds (a weight deemed “morbidly obese” by his tactless primary care physician), Elwin wasn’t remotely so fit as he’d been in his grad school years, back when he could’ve raised a buck like a yo-yo. Dropping the rope, he considered tying it onto the Jeep and hoisting it up that way, but this would entail parking on the back lawn, in eight inches of snow and probably atop the brick planters. He wiggled his arms like an on-deck batter, picked up the rope again, braced his boots against the snow, and pulled mightily. The doe’s neck rose, then its limp forelegs, its torso, then finally its hind legs—slowly and smoothly, like a saint ascending—at which point Elwin, his overinsulated arm muscles seething, tied off the rope then collapsed onto the snow.
    He lay there for a while, on his back, the soft-faceted snowflakes that the wind was sweeping off the roof grazing his eyelashes and powdering his lips. The deer he’d just lynched was dully twirling in the sideward glow of the 150-watt floodlight tilted over Big Jerry’s back door. Light-years above him, partly screened by woolly black clouds, were two stars: Sirius and Rigel, guttering weakly. When Elwin was a boy, and begging for a telescope, his father had told him that the Indians took the stars with them when they were forced out of New Jersey, which explained the star-deprived blackness above Montclair as well as the overfreckled skies out west. Those few stars they’d left behind, like Sirius and Rigel, had been merely too big to carry; they were like abandoned monuments, a celestial Stonehenge lodged in the skies above Ho-Ho-Kus and Secaucus, the last physical vestiges of an erased civilization.
    As the cold began penetrating Elwin’s back, he wondered, idly, as he sometimes did, how he’d ended up here. Not the immediate here—face-up in the snow at 2 A.M. with a pendant carcass nearby—but the wider, more existential here: securely tenured and middlingly comfortable, yes, but piercingly alone, unloved and unheralded, a coroner of dead languages, dead marriages, and now (refocusing the mental lens) a dead and dangling deer. This was a question—How did I end up here?—that as a younger man he used to ask himself regularly, most often in a tickled and self-congratulatory mode:
How did I end up here
(limb-tangled in bed with this woman, so obviously out of his league; doing fieldwork in places he enjoyed hearing described as “far flung”—the Amazon, the Mongolian steppe, an Inuit village in Nunatsiavut; or accomplishing feats for which his Montclair upbringing had scarcely prepared him, like shooting a deer or tilling a half acre of meaty black soil in that Skippack Valley commune, or sewing up his own gashed arm, in a vocal haze of mosquitoes, after a machete mishap in a Bolivian Indian village)? The swivels of his life used to please him greatly. They were a rebuttal—not angry, but insistent—to the straight, level course of his father’s life: from the Army to college to grad school to a teaching post to marriage to fatherhood to retirement to nursing home, each progression as engraved and invariable as the Stations of the Cross. Elwin had been different; he’d zigged, he’d zagged, resisting the tamped-down paths, the