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CHAPTER ONE
The good thing—the only good thing—about the worst finally happening is that it has happened.
That was something the first sergeant said on the morning before the final push for Cantigny, when the sun unexpectedly rose up silver instead of gold. It was a bad omen—before the day was over, the worst came, and many men I knew did not survive it. With the situation in Europe, I found myself thinking more and more about the war, and what I came up with twenty years later and sometime after three in the morning on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, was that the first sergeant had lied.
The worst had happened, and there was nothing good about it.
The police herded us into a blind alley at the head of Tenth Street, apartments on one side and a tailor's shop on the other. It was only blank walls that faced the alley, and with the rear blocked off by a chain-link fence and the alley's mouth guarded by a pair of policemen with bristling, overeager dogs, it would be a very fine killing field indeed.
Oh come now, said a jolly voice in my head. They certainly won't kill you. They'll take your name and your picture, and tomorrow or the next day, it'll all be out where you were and what you were doing. Perhaps they'll beat you a little, knock a club into your mouth to loosen your teeth like they did for poor old Pickett. No one's going to kill you, old sport, not on purpose, anyway.
That was a voice that I had been hearing more and more as well, and it was not welcome.
There was a blizzard coming on, a few stray flakes already falling from the sky. I wrapped my wool coat more firmly around my body against the chill, but the boy next to me was shaking in a cloth jacket that was too light by far. He shrank against the brick for all that it must have been frigid, and there was a glassy look to his eyes, like a horse that had run itself wild. He was younger and poorer than usually came to Prospect Park; not unhandsome, but lost. He caught me looking at him and tried for a brave smile, but I shook my head with irritation. My teeth felt too sharp in my mouth, as if I might like to bite.
The type that usually came to Prospect Park would have taken the hint. We were mostly professionals, men with jobs that kept our hands clean. I wasn't the only columnist who took the subway across the river—I wasn't even the only one from the Herald Tribune. We knew how to conduct ourselves, but this boy didn't.
"Rough night," he said tentatively.
"I suppose."
"Think we can slip them some cash to look away?"
"Do you have any cash?" I asked pointedly. I didn't. I had subway fare to get back, maybe enough to pick up a sandwich on the way. Cortland from the sports desk had gotten mugged a few months ago.
He shook his head, running his bare bony hands up and down his arms.
"My ma's going to kill me," he sighed, and I looked up at the broad flat way he said ma, his vowels longer than anything a native New Yorker would have time for.
"St. Paul?"
"Altoona," he said, as if it should mean something to me, but it did. Altoona down by Eau Claire, just under a hundred miles from St. Paul, and I scowled reflexively.
"Are you from St. Paul?" he asked, searching my face for a sign of anything familiar. I didn't answer, instead looking up at the glass salamandrina that hung suspended from the side of the apartment building. It was about the size of a goldfish bowl, hobnailed white on the top, but clear below. They were the faddish thing when I had first come to New York in 1922, and people hung them in rows and clusters for how cheap and pretty they were. They were mostly gone now, taken down in favor of the electric lights that lined the streets with a chemical avidity. Inside the glass, the faint suggestion of a whip-tailed lizard still stirred weakly, emitting a soft mauve glow that was the next thing to invisible.
Excerpted from Don't Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo. Copyright © 2025 by Nghi Vo. Excerpted by permission of Tordotcom. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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