Cheat

Gregory Fraser

Hang-ups in the dead of night, and after training ourselves
to unplug before bed, crank calls between six and ten
in the morning, sometimes at supper. We hoped to avoid

confrontation, the hassle of running a trace, and prepared
to test our mettle, sure we could endure until one lunacy
ran its course. Then, after the towers crumpled, nothing.

My wife had failed a finance major, spoiling his plan
to graduate that May. Appeals (apologetic, cajoling)
were followed by threats of a suit against our school.

I didn’t know I could still run, an old man,
coated in dust, coughed to a TV crew,
awed by his breathless luck, and still I see

my twenty freshmen—on that campus hill in Queens—
pleased with their release from “Tintern Abbey,”
then stunned by the twin smokes climbing.

My wife the Miltonist refused to budge, pointing out
the all-too-obvious in the senior’s hopeless essay.
It was weeks, October maybe, before we noticed

the calls had stopped, and didn’t he talk of losing
an internship downtown? In our agnostic way—
half-conscious, tinged with the self-parodic—we prayed

that this whining cheat with his sense of entitlement
hadn’t burned or been crushed by rumble. He did have
a charming smile, and was his infraction really all that bad?

We watched the clock, kept ears pricked over oatmeal
and coffee, pastas and wines, until he nearly became
the son we never had, whose memory required our tending.

Who’s to say our number, all along, wasn’t picked at random
by some lonesome freak who simply quit one day.
Still, neither of us dared to mention what I’d shrieked

one August night (rabid, moon in my eye): Die,
motherfucker, assuming his to be the hostile
absence on the opposite end of the line.