MY NEW LIFE HAD THE benefit of simplicity. If I wasn’t over at the condominium complex staking out C’s apartment, I was in the house across the street sleeping. Or I was at Wally’s buying supplies for the next day. By supplies I just mean oranges, the oranges I tore through one after another until my lips and cheeks and fingertips were numb with stinging.

Night after night, I was zeroing in on the daily moment at which Wally’s ceased resembling itself, the few short minutes where the shelves shifted into their new, perplexing positions. For the last week I had been overshooting and undershooting, discovering new slices of time that were just like any other: the same lights fluorescing a soured white, same tinny music seeping from the speakers, pop songs with all the words gouged out. The food chandelier hung heavy in the front of the store and swung slowly, deliberately, as though someone had come by and pushed it once, a very long time ago. As many times as I had come to Wally’s, I had never seen someone swap out the food in the food chandelier, and yet it was different every time I saw it. New things had appeared in it when I left the store, things that hadn’t been there when I came in. But this was a minor mystery compared with that of C’s location, which had yielded no answers: nothing but waiting, and more waiting, and time.

The new plan was to find a way into C’s apartment and wait for him to come in, to interrogate his objects, to do the things we used to do together as though there were still somebody to do them with. Generally: to be no longer on the outside wishing a way in, but at the end point already, wishing for others to trap themselves in with me. I came to Wally’s in order to find the thing I’d need, whatever it was, to wreck the lock and pry open his door.

I saw a Wally’s employee wearing the Wally’s Hospitality Hat, the oversize foam mask made in the shape of a young boy’s grinning, freckled face. A Hospitality Hat was like an ordinary hat in that it fit over the top of the head but also featured an extensive frontal flap with contoured nose, eye, and cheeks that was designed to be pulled down and over the openings of the face. Hospitality Hats were implemented so that customers would always be able to count on seeing a familiar face when they went in to shop at a Wally’s, no matter how far from their home branch they might be. The system wasn’t perfect: some Wallys were fat, others thin, some had jarring voices, some had breasts. But by removing a few of the variables from customer-employee interaction, they freed both parties to treat each other with the pretense of recognition, with amnesiac familiarity. GOT A PROBLEM ASK A WALLY read the sign overhead.

I had many problems. I looked down the aisle, toward the Wally that was standing at the other end, taking down notes on a clipboard. The fake face he was wearing hung down over his clipboard, freckled and permanently grinning. I wanted to ask him for help, but the Wally’s corporate policy stated that employees were not allowed to offer help to customers, only a generalized form of aid. A sign near the store entrance read:

WEAKNESS THRIVES ON HELP

Insofar as all Wally’s products might be deemed an aid to the human condition, a Wally might find it prudent to suggest to the customer additional items whose purchase might offer benefits, so long as said employee resists abridging the customer’s individualized buying journey. Delivering said customer to their primary product goal shall be deemed an act of harm on the part of said employee, and a detriment to desire evolution.

Feed a man a fish and he’ll imagine himself content, allow him to purchase a wide range of non-fish items and he will feed for days.

An ideal buying journey took at least an hour to complete. This Wally wouldn’t be able to shorten my path, but he might be able to hint at what sorts of products might be near the product that I wanted to buy. Though it was possible that he wouldn’t know himself, he could at least give me more to look for.

“Hi,” I said to the side of the oversize foam face.

It swiveled toward me. The crest of each upended cheek was the size of one of my shoulder blades. Shadows sank into its fleshlike form. Each dimple could have swallowed up one of my thumbs.

“Welcome to Wally’s,” it replied.

“I was hoping you could provide me with product aid,” I said.

“Tell me about your product circumstances,” he said back.

“I’m looking for a large thing about the size of a crowbar, and also of about the same weight, shape, and material,” I said, making a levering motion with my hands. Sometimes it was best to be vague. By being vague, you could occasionally give a Wally room to help you.

“I can recommend Salad Smotherin’s,” he said, “a new line of salad dressings from Rexall, the nation’s leading manufacturer of paper products. Or a frozen dinner from Stewwart’s.”

I made a dissatisfied customer face.

“Aisle fifteen and aisle four,” the Wally continued. “Both are delicious,” he said, turning back to his clipboard.

“I need something heavy,” I said, “and strong enough to break a lock.”

“This week,” he replied in a smooth and well-rehearsed tone, “we are also promoting the new Peapple by Nutrisco Foods. Passionate about fresh produce? Or are you a food explorer, looking to sink your teeth into a piece of the unknown? Peapple is a revolutionary new fruit combining the crisp texture of the apple with the velvety mouthfeel of the peach. Flavorwise, it’s the pineapple’s second cousin. Funwise, it’s second to none. Brought to you by the manufacturers of Nutrisco Sea Nuggets.”

“I need a crowbar,” I said, “or something exactly like a crowbar.”

He looked at me.

“Miss,” he said, “I think you’d better continue along your buying journey.”

It felt like a personal slight. Wasn’t there a human being inside that Wallyhead, someone who knew the pain of losing the one they loved or, more precisely, being unable to find them again? A human person who knew the desire to hack through something hard and unyielding to get to the one you loved, hack through the one you loved, even, to get at whatever they kept inside? He must have a lover of his own, some man or woman or animal whose absence hurt like a presence, some person that he poured himself into like a mold to remind himself of what he was.

I wanted to tell this Wally what I was feeling. I wanted to tell him about an idea for a commercial that I’d been having, over and over, during the afternoons when I waited for hours, sweating, staring, seated in front of C’s apartment. In this commercial I’m wandering around inside a wet and glistening space that I come to recognize is a body, though I don’t know where I am in it. I’m still missing C and I know he’s not around here to be found. I know that, but for some reason I can’t stop looking for him. And I’m trying to claw my way out physically, pulling at nodules and hanging bits with my hands, but nothing will move for me until I find some tubes that I can wrap my miniatured hand around, they must be for blood. They’re a meaty color, liver bruised blue, their texture springy like mattress foam. I’m tugging on one as though it were a handle on a locked door and suddenly it separates, crumbling like dampened cake in my grip. The ground heaves beneath me. Then I hear a growl of pain all around in what I suddenly recognize is C’s voice. There’s no way to tell him I’m in here and no way of getting out that won’t hurt him, tear him open and apart.

I wanted to tell this Wally what I always see at the end of the commercial, a slogan materializing over my head, hovering there weightlessly, the letters illegible from below, the phrase too large to see. I wanted to tell him about this feeling, this feeling that everything is already ruined and I’m selling something I can’t even comprehend. But when I looked up, searching for him, he had already disappeared.

In the next aisle over there was window cleaner, peanut oil, fruit snacks shaped like carnivores. The blue-raspberry color of the window cleaner sat against the peanut oil, bright as new brass. They didn’t belong together, they had been stranded there, separated from their kind. Yet these items shared purpose. It was overwhelming: all the colors and shades of colors in between, asking you to fall in love with them, hold them in your hands, and take them home.

At the end of the aisle, a Wally was down on his knees, filing cans into the shelf. He had a young body, skinny, tall, wider at the shoulders than at the hips. It could have been C in there, and suddenly I felt like it really was: C hiding in plain sight, C watching over me in the grocery store aisles, C in disguise learning things about me in secret the way I always had wished to learn things about him. I wanted to walk up to that Wally, separated for the moment from all of its kind, and say to it all the things that I had been wanting to say to C: Show me what you are when you’re not around me. Let me see how you look when I’m not looking at you. Tell me everything I’m not supposed to know, and don’t leave out any of the things you don’t know yourself. I wanted to extract one secret from him, it didn’t matter which. I would put my hands all over that fake face and squeeze it to feel the bones underneath, bear down on the micromesh that veiled the real, living eyeball beneath and press until it blackened. On the next day, I would search this town for someone wearing on his naked face the bruised eye that I had designed for him. From a swarm of identical heads, this inner head would become distinct to me, singular, a head with a personal connection.

I moved toward the man, arms out to my sides, but he retracted, his body positioned for escape. He didn’t know if I was about to hug him or hurt him, and to be honest I didn’t know either. I heard his breath, heavy already, rasping through the mesh mouth of the Wallyhead. He stood up and hefted his box of product up in his arms, tilted sharply to one side as the product slid over; it must have been something heavy, like cans. Then he shuffled backward away from me toward the back of the aisle, turning at last and ducking one or more aisles over before I even had a chance to ask my question. Why had he left so quickly? Maybe he remembered me.

WHAT DO YOU CALL THE things in the supermarket that are refrigerated, that you look down into like an open casket, and are full of light? I was standing near one of them, feeling the cold rise up from within its bright, clean white. Inside there were chicken breasts and wings and assorted soda tucked into crevices of the body pile, half buried beneath shrink-wrapped Styrofoam trays. I picked up a soda and a package of raw chicken in each hand and moved them to the other end of the cooled box. I did it over and over again, like a punishment. I was making a path to the bottom of the cooling unit, where there might be something like a crowbar. I was following my product instincts. They told me to dig right here.

When I saw there was nothing underneath the chicken and soda except more soda and then a smooth white epoxy, hard as tooth, I started moving my pile from this end of the unit to the opposite end. I had patience within me. A hand on a pack of chicken breasts reminded me of C, the squish of him, the way he differentiated himself from this cooling unit or that shelf. There was a Wally standing near me, watching, but I kept on redistributing the chicken, fixing my gaze on the cold meat, suspecting that what I was doing wasn’t allowed but hoping to do it for as long as possible. Finally, he spoke.

Through his Wallyhole he said: “Excuse me. Hello. At Wally’s we pride ourselves on creating a flexible shopping environment, insofar as products have no fixed place. Which we believe inspires creativity. At Wally’s, Consumers are Creators. We say that.”

He paused. He must have been waiting for me to stop moving products around, which I would not do until I was more certain of what was at the bottom of this bin.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “there are boundaries that we do not allow the customer to flex, in this case the placement of products in both an area-specific and storewide sense.”

I compromised by moving the products more slowly from their old place to their new.

He began again.

“We can all agree,” he said, “that a man’s home is his castle. At Wally’s, we wish for your supermarket to be your castle as well. And, like a king in his castle, we wish you to do nothing, or as little as possible. We would rather you feel at home.”

“I don’t feel at home,” I said, finally putting down the chicken flesh and sodas and staring the Wally straight in his face.

“In my home,” I said, “nobody tries to divert me. If I wanted a crowbar, someone would tell me where to find it. Or maybe I would already know,” I added.

I was bluffing. I didn’t have a home where people treated me in this way, a home full of the things I needed. I hardly had something resembling a home at all.

The Wally just stared at me. It made it worse that he was staring at me with his real eyes, rather than the eyes of the Wallyhead, which were fake, shiny plastic with no actual holes for light to pass through. In the center of the forehead was a circular aperture smaller than a dime, through which a Wally’s employee could glimpse a portion of the customer he or she was aiding. But to get a full view of a person through a Hospitality Hat, you had to tilt the foam face up toward the ceiling while looking down hard, angling your head within so that your line of sight passed straight through the mesh netting of the mouth. I couldn’t see anything through the meshwork, but from the sharp twist of his head I knew he was examining me.

I was turning back to the refrigerator bin when he spoke again.

“Tell me about your product circumstances,” he said.

With my mind I was digging through what I knew about myself, trying to find a chunk of language that would tell me what I wanted and needed and was asking for.

“I just want something that makes me feel like myself again,” I said.

“Not myself as I feel right now,” I added. Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during an operation.

“I had someone once,” I began, watching through his foam face for signs of recognition, sympathy. “We were fantastic together. He really understood what I was all about, what I was like inside. This was because, inside him, he was the same as me. Maybe not on the surface-most inner layers, but deep down, the deepest, tiniest part.” I scanned his mesh mouth for a reaction, but there was none. “Then something horrible happened to him, and I’m still trying to figure out what it was.”

The Wallyhead listened, pointed intently toward me.

“He lost himself,” I explained with a touch of defensiveness.

I added: “I’m trying to find him.”

“And what do you want from us?” he said, his voice a little gentler, a little wider somehow.

“I just want to get into my boyfriend’s house and see if he’s there, or not there. I don’t need anything to happen once I’ve found out, you understand, I just need to know whether we’re together or not, and if not, if it’s because of me or because something dark and mysterious has befallen him,” I said.

“If it’s dark and mysterious, that’s okay too,” I added.

I said: “Something came into me, or my life. I need it out of me, as soon as possible.”

I looked up at the Wallymouth. A single eye gleamed, not unkindly, through the dark netting. The head wobbled around slowly in what I chose to interpret as a gesture of sympathy.

“I can show you to a crowbar,” he said.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to do that,” I said. But I wanted it: I wanted it enough that I didn’t care if this Wally got punished for it.

“We aren’t,” he said slowly. “But I can show you to something better.”

“Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

He just stood there for a second. The large foam head looked as though it were looking at me, which I knew meant that he was looking someplace else. Then he started walking.

He led me out of the aisle and into the aisle adjacent. There were jellied fruits suspended in plastic containers, glowing orange, yellow, pink, as the light pushed through them. I thought he might look back to make sure I was still there, but he didn’t. I understood that it might not be a simple thing to look around in a Hospitality Hat, to change the orientation of one’s head so radically. The foam plastic would chafe against cheek and neck. It would press warm and humid to the scrub of his pinkening face, eventually it might rub the skin away, showing the deeper pinks, the bluish-lilac tint belonging to the subdermal layers of skin. If he moved too much, his face might erode entirely. I trailed behind, several docile steps behind, watching his body clench and loosen with the motion of walking.

“When does the food chandelier get changed?” I asked him.

His body twisted toward me slightly, but the bulk of it kept walking as before.

“Do you know when you’re going to get more Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

“Are these really the questions you long to have answered?” he replied.

I looked around us at all the veal.

The veal section had changed. In the weeks since it first appeared on TV, Michael’s face had propelled veal to new heights of desirability: Men identified with his confusion, with the somber melancholy of his paunchy stomach and cheeks. Women wanted to feed him. He reminded the elderly of past versions of themselves, still ravening for living matter. And children finally had something they could understand when they thought of veal, that meat whose name wasn’t a kind of animal or a substance that came nuggeted, pattied, or shoved onto a stick. Veal had a face now, where before it had nothing. And while Michael’s face had once been an artless and unexceptional slab according to the personal accounts of grocery store employees and other witnesses to his robberies, image-capturing technology had transformed it into an object of fascination, something to stare at, a face that yielded up more over time.

The veal section had tripled in size, and Michael was everywhere: on stickers and cardboard signs that hung from the ceiling, mugging zanily all over the promotional Veal Wheel. He was a grinning caricature pictured next to the logo for the Regional Council for the Protection of Veal and Veal Imagery. Below his face, the text read: THE MAN WHO STOLE VEAL . . . AND GAVE IT TO THE WORLD. Veal’s new slogan was short and underexplained. Each package was stamped with a single repeated phrase:

THE LIGHT MEAT.

Ending up with the Michaels gave me that old feeling of having someone around, someone familiar and friendly who I wanted to talk to. I looked into each pair of his eyes and tried to feel for the one that was most familiar to me, most like the Michael from the poster I had swiped or, even better, the sad, slabby man from C’s television who I had watched cry through the rounded convexity of the glass screen. It depressed me to think of him living by the will of the Veal Society, kept in some room and taken out only when they wanted to extract more images from him. For his sake I hoped that he was okay, that these images were recent. I stared at the most Michael-like face of the bunch until I noticed suddenly that the Wally was stopped next to me, watching the same advertisement with an intensity that matched my own.

“Do you follow Michael?” he asked me, wiggling his large foam head on its axis a little.

“I’ve watched him,” I said. “I have a poster of him at home.”

“Customers love Michael,” said the Wally, nodding. “His face brings new ones each week, and more the week after. They come with their own shopping bags. Some bags have his photo on them. They come and they shove bundle after bundle of veal into their bag. They come to see his face and they buy because they hope to take away a piece of it. We don’t mind. We could stop it. Often when they leave with the veal, they take other items with them. This grows our veal proportion. We need the veal, but we can allow some to leave the store in the hands of customers.”

“But isn’t that what a store is for?” I asked. “To be emptied out by customers?

“And then restocked, of course,” I added. It was important to me that he could tell I was a good thinker.

“A store is about something greater than selling,” he said. “If you looked only at the surface of the word, you could say its primary purpose is storage. That surface is its core.”

“Why do you need the veal?” I asked.

He indicated with his arm the expanded veal section, as if that were an answer in itself. An unbroken aisle of meat, every gap filled, every crevice stuffed with packages of flesh shining wetly like rosy chunks of quartz. Coolers of veal shivered invisibly, releasing a sheen of cold mist into the air. A tremble of vulvar pink, the color of an innocent child’s gums. Freezers full of frosted flesh cast a low blue light.

“Wally’s is collecting veal,” I said, trying to extract words from his gesture.

“We are collecting veal,” said the Wally. He leaned on the word we as he stared down at me through his open mouth.

“That doesn’t make sense to me,” I said.

“It’s one of the only things that make sense,” he said soberly. “What qualities unite and divide all the products in this store? Either they are good for you, or they work ceaselessly to destroy you from within. The categories of fruit and vegetable and grain are meaningless in the face of this single superior distinction. It does not matter whether a tomato is a vegetable with seeds or a fouled-up fruit, it matters whether that tomato will hasten your ruin. This is what they should print on the nutritional labels, the ingredients list. This is the only category that is truly important to know, and knowing it is power.”

He continued: “We know what happens to the man who swallows arsenic, to the child or dog that keels over with a plastic bag shoved down the esophagus as far as it can go. The cause and effect are blatant. Most substances machinate more subtly. They suffocate the tinier parts of us, parts you can’t see. Strychnine has an effect life of minutes. Alcohol has an effect life of hours. What is the life of a half pound of potatoes inside you, how long will it work away at you, sabotaging you in ways too small to perceive? Minuscule objects are breaking in you at this moment. You can feel them, even if they can’t be seen or heard. The things that have gone wrong inside of you are whispering to each other beyond your hearing, too softly to stir the surface of your eardrum. They are whispering in the other room like your parents used to when you were just a child. A single moment of clarity could cure you. A single taste of some pure and holy food could return you to your originary nature, your ability to discern good from evil as simply as one looks up into the sky and sees that it is blue. But there is nothing pure and holy in this world.” I heard my breath loud in my own ears, so fast that it sounded to me as if I were running from something.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said in a hopeful way.

“No, of course there isn’t,” he said comfortingly, peering down through the black mesh mouth. “You’re like everyone else. A ghost trapped in a body, loving what kills it. Wouldn’t you rather love what is right for you instead? Wouldn’t you like to find out what that is?”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said. “You’re talking about C?”

The little transparent pipes in my mind were breaking one by one, spilling forth a caustic blue fluid.

“I’m talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about who’s running you. Is it you, yourself, or someone adjacent, so similar that even you can’t tell yourselves apart? Tell me, do you ever look in the mirror and mistake that face for your own? I see you and I perceive that the very edges of your body are a blur. You don’t know where you end. You are nibbled at by a vagueness. By saying this, I in no way am referring to anything like an aura. This is a sign of the disintegration of your organism under pressure. Tell me, is there someone in your life who’s been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who’s been taking up your time and not giving any of it back? Have you made certain they’re not stealing light from you? That the darkness from their body has not permeated your own by way of your common air, proximate water, shared furniture, et cetera?”

I knew he was talking about B.

“I did have a friend,” I said.

“And your friend trespassed upon you,” the Wally replied.

I nodded. His looming foam face seemed bigger now, closer.

He continued: “I sense another attachment, too. Someone who made you feel like a ghost within your own living body, someone who you are haunting. You see their separation from you as an act of harm, but you should examine the harm within you. Trace it. Source your sadness. Doesn’t it begin in this person, absent though they may be? Their oozings in you, their memory turning to rot. The ghost of this person haunts you, and you cannot flee in body.”

He reached forward his fleshy pink hand and placed two pink fingers against my temple. His skin was incredibly soft, like it had just been unwrapped, like I was the first thing it had ever touched.

He continued: “But you can flee your mind.”

I didn’t understand anything. Behind the Hospitality Hat, red became orange, orange turned pink. The colors bled sweetly, like a thing dying softly in the forest alone. By the time I understood it was the product shelves sliding on their tracks, shifting into their new positions, it didn’t even matter. It didn’t make a difference what different things were; just having them move across my visual field, casting their shadows on my retina, was enough for me to feel like I had known them deeply.

“Haven’t you been sensing this?” said the voice in front of me. “Don’t you want to be one with yourself? To have a double ownership. To know just once with surety that when you breathe, when you eat, that you are the only one inside you breathing and eating? That you are you, and no one else.”

In the gap newly created by the sliding shelves, where the plastic cups of jellied fruits trapped in firm syrup had once been, and behind the head of the Wally whose voice radiated from within me, pouring out from my skull as though I were the speaker rather than the listener, I saw the bodies of Wallys working away at something, heaving boxes of something dense that hit the ground with moist thuds.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You will,” it replied.

The bodies were loading the boxes into a truck. The bodies were shouldering them heavy, like cases full of flour or ground bone, cases of liquid-soaked rag. On the sides of the boxes I saw the KANDY KAKES logo and underneath it the words:

HAVEN’T YOU NOT HAD ENOUGH?

I saw the EXIT sign glowing over the dark hole they carried the boxes into. I knew that there probably wasn’t anything good inside that hole. Wherever my neighbors had gone that afternoon, silent and sheeted, it hadn’t been in pursuit of happiness. Otherwise they might have looked happier. But what I found hopeful about that hole was: It was a hole. I could put myself into it. I could avoid detection, and in its dark inners I could pretend to forget myself. Whatever I had once had with B or with C was gone; if I wanted it back, I’d have to dig my way back into them. It would be difficult, and there was no guarantee that they’d be willing to hold still to let me do it. I felt the thinness of the fiber binding me to myself: like a loose thread hanging from a hem, I could tear it off. I’d leave them waiting around in the heat for me, the ones I half loved, wondering what they had done to scare me off. Something rattled in my hollow. When the Wallys in their masks handed me the sheet, I took it. I let them help me unfold it, stretch it out to its full length. I let them drape it over me, shift it back and forth until the eyeholes fell over my eyes and I could see them all, their identical Wallyheads bobbing around me at slightly different heights. I let them blank me out.

I took one step forward, then another, then another another another.

WE SAT LIMP AND SILENT inside the hold of a white cargo van that sped along the highway. The van was a common make, rectangular and white with two long, tinted windows so we could see out and nobody could see in. It was the most popular model of cargo van on the road these days: according to the ads, one was sold every five minutes. Dozens had been bought in the time that we’d been driving. A funny chemical smell hung in the air, polyurethane foam, the smell of Wallyflesh bodying out the masks that the cultists continued to wear even though we were no longer in a Wally’s, even though it was prohibited to wear the Wally’s uniform outside of the store, where it was considered an unauthorized use of a trademarked visage. It was still bright outside, but fading. Slices of the world, anonymized, shone from around the corners of drooping Wallyheads as we drove someplace that I couldn’t even imagine. I pictured a black, light-filled room. I thought of the house across the street, minus the house, minus the street.

For the first couple of minutes, the little slivers of outer world meant something. They were the stop sign on the way out of the Wally’s parking lot, the second stop sign after the bend in the road that plenty of cars ignored, the willow trees lurching over the fenced backyard of a woman recluse who only left the house wearing a pretty silk scarf draped over her head, the ends clutched together beneath her throat by a hand that could have been very old or fairly young. She went as far as the mailbox, never farther. B said she was probably a former movie star with an obliterated face. B was obsessed with obliterated faces, she thought they made for a great story. If B were here, she would whisper into my ear that each one of the Wallys had lost their faces in gruesome grocery store–related incidents. But that kind of thinking was why I was here in this van and she was wherever she was. B didn’t understand that the dangerous part of having a face was showing it off, not losing it. To see your face spread onto the faces around you, absorbed by others. The masks on these Wallys kept me safe the way the sheets over my neighbors had kept us all safe from seeing and then replicating their sadness, safe from taking them within. The masks were prophylactic, emotionally speaking. These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into the shapes they thought I should have.

After a minute or two in the van, we could have been anywhere. Tree-shaped trees blurred behind the shapes of the other people slumped in the van like captured things whose only experience had been to be captured again and again. Thinking of them in this way made me feel warmly collegial. Beneath their masks and uniforms, they could be people much like me, with anxieties about those closest to them and a weird misplaced hunger for something intangible that could be satisfied only by snack food. They might have someone they were running from, or someone they were running to, even though they didn’t have any idea where that person might have gone or why. Of course they wouldn’t be, beneath their foam shells, exactly the way I was. All of them were male, possessed of soft, foldy bellies that crested and troughed beneath their red Wally’s polo shirts. They looked ample, arms and torsos pressed together. I wanted to push myself in among them, sneak my bony elbows up into their surplus, and fall asleep there, warm and forgotten and surrounded by the lingering scent of cheese, cardboard, and laundry detergent.

It was hard to think of the right thing to say when I had never said anything to these men and they had never said anything to me. I didn’t know whether to express sadness about my past or positivity about my future with them. I looked around me in the back of the van: eight men in foam heads, six cases of Kandy Kakes, five or six tarps spread beneath us, balled-up newspaper, and two units of twine, brittle and straw colored. I looked at everything outside the windows. They could have been driving me in big loops around my own town and I wouldn’t have known. It all went flashing by, increasingly green but still just visual slush, reminding me blandly of other places I’d been without causing me to remember them in detail. I figured that I’d better start feeling like this van was my home.

“I don’t know about you guys,” I said out loud, trying to sound upbeat, “but I for one am completely excited to eat a Kandy Kake whenever we get to where we’re going.”

Nobody replied. The only sounds then, as before, were the tires turning against the road, rubbing themselves out on it, and the low drone of the engine. Outside the window, the trees passed by—not faster, not slower, but the same.