ERICH WAS RIGHT. A pamphlet was waiting for me on the floor as soon as I walked into my apartment. There was also a rancid smell. I looked around and saw that the refrigerator had been left open and the interior yellow light had burned out. The fruit had spoiled, and fruit flies drifted like dust motes around the open door.
I threw the squishy brown fruit out and shooed away the fruit flies and opened the window to air out the apartment. I was half-starved; I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. Fortunately, there was still a packet of vacuum-sealed synthetic meat in the drawer that seemed immune to spoilage.
I sat at the kitchen counter, peeled the plastic off the meat, and fed myself one slice at a time. I felt better once I’d consumed the last morsel. I felt like myself.
The pamphlet was a typical tri-fold affair with images printed on each of the six sides. The stock was flimsy. Three of the pamphlet’s faces depicted Rorschach blots that reminded me of my parents, a train depot, and a ceremonial urn in the Second Empire style that I somehow knew was filled with ashes. Two more showed identical images of a felt suit dangling off a wall. I recognized the felt as similar to the rolls of carpet that lined the walls of the photograph I kept in my nightstand. I retrieved the photograph and compared the material: it seemed to be the same, in fact. The final image in the pamphlet appeared to be a blown-up detail of craquelure on an oil-coated canvas, resembling a network of firing neurons or an aerial photograph of dried riverbeds.
Something else occurred to me. I got the photograph that Miriana had taken of the refracted light and held it next to the photograph I’d found in the credenza. Both photographs had been printed on the same self-developing stock—indeed, measured the same dimensions, too. I wondered if the one from the credenza was also Miriana’s work. If so—why had it wound up in my living room furniture?
I spent a half-hour studying the pamphlet. I had decided that I would not return to Factory 7A if I could help it, and that was driving my motivation to fulfill the favor asked of me by Erich. The faster I completed my mission, the faster I could get a transfer to a more fitting position—and the faster I did all that, the less likely it was that I’d get in trouble for abandoning my post. For the life of me, though, I could not find anything “inflammatory” about the pamphlet. This was not at all like the texts Erich and I had studied in Hallen’s class. If anything, it was most like the stuff I studied in my art history lectures. Better yet, the stuff students copied cheaply at the paper store and handed out at parties to perform their eccentricities.
The truth was, I quite liked the pamphlet. It was much nicer than any of the student work I had seen at Barnova. Where was the polemic? I saw no message. Those student pamphlets always had text. Quotes from Marx or Yudekhezko or Namboodiripad or Yohanofski. No text here. No clues as to authorship. Functionless art. Did that make it “trifling,” as Miriana had called it? Still, I liked it.
A fingernail of sun appeared outside my window. I sat on one of the cushier bits of modular furniture and examined the light through the open window. It had the pale, yellowish color of a zested lemon rind. The grass was parched, stiff, brown. The hill was patchy. I swiveled on the cushion and took in my apartment, my home for the last few—weeks? months? It was hard to say. I added buy a calendar to the To-Do List I kept in my mind. Also on the list: eat more greens. I needed to buy a duster, too. There was dust everywhere, a skin of it on every surface. I added duster to my list. I stood to swipe my hand along the top of the cupboard—it came back gray—and as I did, I caught a whiff of myself. I hadn’t showered for two days.
I took a shower, and when I got out, night had fallen, which seemed strange. Hadn’t it just been lunchtime? I dressed, then exited my apartment into the Crescent’s curving hallway. I needed to find my uncle. That should have been my priority the whole day. I’d gotten distracted, pulled away from what was really important. Not this business with the pamphlets, or my work assignment. I looked down the hall to the right: nothing. I looked to the left: nothing. I chose left and immediately paused before my next-door neighbor’s entryway. I’d go door-to-door. I counted backwards from three and then I knocked.
The woman who appeared in the crack had soft, delicate features that were charmingly smushed onto her face. She had narrow, anxious eyes and a downturned nose, and her skin was covered in freckles that spread across her nose like pebbles on a white shore.
“You’re not holding anything,” she said.
I looked down at my hands.
“Come in anyway.” She grabbed my elbow and tugged me inside. Then she bolted the door. She came around and stood in front of me, scanning. She wore a black turtleneck despite the heat, and green corduroy pants. Her thick and curly dark hair was mostly caught in her sweater, giving her a compressed look. She had the poise of a spokesperson. Work boots on her feet. She might have been from my part of the world.
“So if you don’t have the toner,” she said, “then where is it?”
“I’m your neighbor. Zelnik.” I stuck out my hand. It withered in the air untouched.
“I was expecting toner.” She became maudlin and sat down on a bit of cushiony modular furniture identical to the one I had just been sitting on in my apartment, not fifty feet away.
Indeed, her apartment was exactly like mine, only more lived-in. She’d obviously been in the Crescent much longer than I had. There was art on the walls—the walls were covered with the stuff: lithographs, paintings, photographs, collages, magazine clippings. Old woodcuttings of geishas on bridges overlooking ponds. Portraits of regal-looking individuals before abstract purplish backdrops. A sculpture of a Roman statesman with its eyes gouged out standing on a pedestal. Empty fruit baskets hung from the ceiling above her sink. Her refrigerator lacked a handle. Her sink lacked a faucet. Her apartment was completely dilapidated. Her furniture was full of gashes and scuffs, was missing wheels, had lopsided legs. The state of things revealed the cheapness of the material.
I realized she was sniffling. I went to the kitchenette and found a glass clouded with water stains. A hole in the faucetless sink vomited water. I filled the glass and brought it to her. She took several gulps, then looked up at me through her dark rings of hair, sagging twisted on the cushion like a tender gargoyle. One of her ankles was folded behind the other, and one of her trouser cuffs tucked into a wool sock. It was clear to me that she had poor circulation. She turned her face up at me.
“You want something to drink drink?”
“Sure,” I said, then realized why her voice had sounded familiar. Now that she had relaxed, and the disappointment of my lack of toner had worn off, her voice became what it usually was at rest: quiet, limpid, without cracks or static or phlegm. Her accent reminded me of home. I had eavesdropped on her through the wall, listened to her rendezvous with a man. She walked into her bedroom and drew the curtain for a moment, then emerged a moment later with two tumblers full of clear liquid. As the curtain fell back in place behind her, I glimpsed something boxy and metal with a big, attached lever.
She handed me a glass and I sniffed it. It was vodka—sort of.
I asked if she’d gotten it from the brass.
“The what? I made it myself.”
It was awful.
“Who sent you—Zelnik? I don’t know him,” she said.
“No, I’m Zelnik,” I said. I put my hand out again for a formal introduction. She looked at it and laughed.
“My neighbor, so you said,” she said. “And you don’t have my toner.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Mm-hm.” She had gray-blue eyes that sharpened at me. “Prove that you’re my neighbor.”
She unlocked her door and looked into the hallway before letting me out behind her. We walked ten paces to the right. I unlocked my door and pushed it open for her to enter.
“You first,” she said. I entered. She followed. We stood in my living area, a cleaner and barer version of hers. “It doesn’t look like you live here,” she said.
She was right. There was very little in my apartment that suggested human habitation. It occurred to me to show her my valise, so I did. There were still some clothes in it. And then, for some reason, I wanted to show her the photograph I’d found in the credenza. She brought it up to her face.
“Don’t show anyone else this picture,” she said, handing it back to me. “Put it back where you found it. It doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“Put it back in the credenza.”
“For God’s sake, what’s your name?” I nearly shouted. She took a step back, inching toward my door. She was frightened and dark, like something shaking in the bushes.
“We’ll talk in my apartment.”
We reversed our tracks. An onlooker would find our movements intimately plotted, a silly dance routine. She poured us another round of her moonshine, and we sat on her ruined furniture. After drinking, she relaxed again at last, melting back into the wall. She pulled her hair out of her collar and tied it in a sloppy bun on top of her head. I could see her whole face now. It was a very Jewish face. Her lips curved downwards, and her eyebrows were thick and angry. The color of the skin beneath her eyes was dark blue. She clearly belonged to a generation of people who’d spent their lives boarding trains to frightening places.
“Margarette Khvalsky,” she said. She held my gaze for a moment and smiled. “What is your first name, Zelnik?”
“I won’t say.”
“Wise,” said Margarette. “When you came to my door, you didn’t see anyone out there?”
“I never see anyone.”
“Why did you knock on my door?”
I took the pamphlet out of my pocket and unfolded it. “I’m looking for the person who makes these,” I said. She took it from me and looked at it, then handed it back.
“I make them,” she said. She rose from the cushion and drew the curtain back from the bedroom area. The big metal thing I’d seen earlier revealed itself to be a small printing press, jammed in the crevice between the bed and the wall. There were grease and ink stains all over the metal. I couldn’t believe Erich’s mission had turned out so easy to accomplish. That was it. I had accomplished it. Mission accomplished. I could get a house, a better job. If I was that kind of person. Was I that kind of person?
My gaze fell on her bed, where a knotted sheet revealed a restless night. After she decided I’d looked enough, Margarette closed the curtain. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Were you sent by someone?”
“Yes.”
There didn’t seem to be any point in lying about it. I wasn’t afraid of Margarette. She could not hurt me.
I watched her light a cigarette, gather her lips into the corner of her mouth, and exhale her smoke in a tube like someone accustomed to a difficult life.
“So you will tell them about me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“No,” I said.
She held her cigarette by her face, her elbow resting on her knee, her back hunched. Her gaze was fixed on the floor by my feet.
“I am looking for my uncle,” I said. I described his features, which, as always when I did this, manifested an image of him in my mind that was just a collection of floating, unconnected body parts in a vat of plasmatic liquid. “Does it ring a bell?”
Without taking her eyes from the floor, Margarette said, “You’ll never see him again.”
“You know him?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
My heart began to pump faster. “So you know him,” I said. “Tell me where he is. Please. I won’t report you.”
She looked at me now, drew on her cigarette, then smirked. “You crack so easily.”
This accusation triggered some defensiveness in me. I could feel it bubble up from the recesses, scolding me for forgetting my mission. My mission. To win approval. To be approved. I heard Miriana’s voice; I heard Erich’s. Their voices ran lines like dissonant saxophones playing against each other, and yet the overall sound was pleasing in its disharmony.
“Are you all right?”
I opened my eyes. Margarette was crouched in front of me, holding a glass of water. She handed it to me, pushed it gently towards my mouth. I drank.
“I came to Duma with my sister Sarah. Where is Sarah? Where did she go?” Margarette asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know where your uncle is.”
“I’m not going to report you,” I said.
“Thank you.” Margarette returned to her seat. She exhaled, then took off her sweater; her shirt clung to the fuzzy fabric and rose; for a brief moment I saw the extreme contours of her ribcage. She wasn’t just skinny—she was emaciated.
She caught me staring.
“You need to stop eating the food in your refrigerator. It’s in your face. You go slack. Your cheeks drop. They are poisoning you. Stop eating their food.”
I wanted to laugh but caught myself. This sounded like the paranoid ravings of a woman with a totally circumscribed life, a woman with no ability to see beyond the reach of her own arms. Though delusions like this were understandable when your life was just one loss after another. She was groping blindly for explanation. I felt sad for her.
Margarette put her face into her hands. Her bun bobbed at me. To change the subject, I asked her where she was from.
Her response was muffled. She took her face out of her hands and repeated it. “I won’t tell you,” she said. Then she smiled for the first time.
“You don’t want me vacationing there.”
“There are no tourists where I’m from.”
“Me neither,” I said. She looked at me with, I thought, a face of recognition. We were speaking English, but her accent was very similar to mine. “I heard you through the wall one night,” I said. “You were with a man. I didn’t hear anything bad. I don’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to come clean. So we could be equal.”
“Equal? What does that even mean, equal?”
“On common ground.”
“We’re beneath the ground.” She reached over to the sill to collect a pad and a pen. She jotted something down, then ripped it from the pad.
“Have you been to the grain elevators?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Hm.” She held my gaze for a few moments. I couldn’t read the expression. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been wherever, why-ever. She handed me the paper she’d torn. “That’s his number,” she said. “For not telling them about me. For when you need a break from this life.”
“Whose?”
“The man you heard me with.” Margarette stood up, then pulled me to my feet. She pushed me to the door. “I hope you find your uncle,” she said. I bowed dumbly as her door closed in my face.
In the hallway, I wondered what I would tell Erich. It seemed inescapable to me that I would have to report to him, to tell him that I had—or hadn’t—found the pamphleteer. As would Miriana, I imagined. She seemed to have a stake in this, whatever it was exactly. Competition, maybe. A rivalry. Perhaps she disliked that Margarette was playing outside of the rules. But that didn’t ring true for the Miriana Grannoff I knew. Nevertheless, I would have to answer for my task if I wanted to see her again. And I did, desperately.
One thing was now certain, though: I did not want to snitch on Margarette. She had gone through enough.
I returned to my apartment and gave it a thorough dusting. I began in the kitchenette, then took on the bedroom, and ended in the living area, where with a wetted cloth I attacked the window, scrubbing the film away from the glass. It came off like potato skin that had been scorched onto the surface of a skillet. In some places the skin was so heavy and stubborn I had to use a wooden spoon I found under the sink. I chiseled away, trying to be careful not to scratch the glass. But even when I managed to carve out a satisfying chunk of it, there was yet another layer of dead skin beneath. I pried a crumb of it off the glass and rolled it between my thumb and index finger. It gave, like rubber cement. I flicked it back at the glass and it stuck.
After working on that for a while, I picked up the piece of paper that Margarette had given me. I stared at it for a while before realizing what the problem was: I didn’t have a phone. I hadn’t seen a phone anywhere. I went back over to Margarette’s apartment and knocked on the door again. She was wearing a different outfit when she answered. A work uniform, a gray utility jumpsuit with a significant brown belt at the waist. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail and she wore black leather gloves.
“I don’t have a phone,” I said.
She looked at the paper for a moment, then said, “What time do you want him to come?”
“Any time after dark, I suppose. You have a phone?”
“I’ll let him know.”
“Can I use your phone to call my uncle?” I said.
“What’s his number?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and closed the door in my face.
I went back to my apartment, where daylight now shone in broadly, and sat around until it returned to darkness. As I waited for my guest to arrive, I took a shower and tidied; the place was a mess all over again. At least the gunk on my windows had cleared itself up. I wondered if it was a kind of bacteria activated by sunlight, or humidity. Tidying made me feel better, as did knowing that company was expected. I enjoyed playing the host from time to time. I wished I had some of Margarette’s moonshine. I was feeling unexpectedly nervous.
There was a knock on the door. It was Kamwendo.
“Resnick, is that you?” he said.
“It’s Zelnik.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Kamwendo.”
“Winger, actually.” He smiled charmingly. His teeth were straight and small but his mouth was large and fleshy and his lips full and purple.
I let him in. His shoulder grazed my chest and I smelled oranges. He took a few steps into the living area and stood, looking around. He put one of his hands in his pocket while the other swung by his side. He turned and looked at me. He was wearing form-hugging navy trousers and a navy dress shirt. Outside of that was a sharp red cardigan that made him seem like an athlete on his evening off. He looked virtuous.
“It’s truly uncanny,” he said. “You truly do look exactly like Resnick.” He may have misinterpreted the perplexity on my face, because he added, “That’s not a bad thing.”
“I thought you worked at the pier,” I said.
“I do both.”
“Yes, but why?”
He had a sharp Adam’s apple that bobbed when he laughed. “For the favors,” he said.
“I’ve heard about these favors,” I said. I poured him a glass of water and he drank it quickly. He had thick, cropped hair that grew in a half-halo around his head, and slightly reddish eyes. He was tired, I imagined. “What do your favors get you? And don’t say ‘this and that.’”
He smiled. That row of teeth. “You’re my last of the night,” he said.
Winger placed the glass on the credenza and turned to me. I took him by the hand into my bed nook and asked him to take off his shoes, which he did, sitting on the edge of the bed, carefully unlacing. I crawled onto the bed behind him and wrapped my legs around his. He had a strong but pudgy midsection that I felt through his sweater and shirt. He leaned his head back against my collarbone and our cheeks touched. He was freshly shaven; I was not. He rubbed his face gently against mine and we listened to the bristles of my beard tick back and forth along his skin. I smelled the oranges more strongly, and something else, too, something old and fragrant like mothballs or formaldehyde. He leaned forward and wiggled out of his cardigan and shirt so I could better grasp his chest. There was a cluster of dark wiry hairs that I threaded my fingers through. He felt cold in my hands so I hugged him tighter to me. Eventually, we got out of our clothes and got under the covers. I didn’t know how this was supposed to work—if I needed to be upfront with my selection of service, or what the selections even were; I didn’t want to ask for a menu. We kissed for a while before he turned me over, which was exactly what I had hoped for. Afterward I placed a pillow over my head and cried uncontrollably for several minutes. I was half-conscious of his presence next to me while I was crying, half-conscious of the gratitude and relief I was feeling that he wasn’t searching for his clothes while I sobbed. He didn’t try to console me.
“Do you really work at the pier?” I asked him once I’d calmed down. The fact that he was still with me made me think he might spend the night. I very much wanted him to.
He faced me, our noses an inch apart on my lone pillow. He had a forest of short fine black hairs that clung to his bottom lip which I hadn’t noticed before. I ran my thumb across them.
“Yes, I really work at the pier. Why don’t you believe me?”
“Having a hard time believing we’re near the ocean.”
“You have no idea where you are.”
I looked at the ceiling, the mildew. There were drooping sacs of trapped water and little shadowy fissures.
“You know Margarette,” I said.
“You got my number from her,” he said. “She’s nice.”
“I’m supposed to tell someone about her pamphlets.”
“I don’t want to know,” said Winger. He moved his arm so I could be cradled. I wondered what all of this would cost me, one way or the other.
“You’re from England, aren’t you?” I asked.
He pulled back to look at me, mock surprise on his soft face.
“Naughty boy.” He taunted me with his finger. “Asking the naughty questions.”
“But you must be.”
His eyes hardened. “You shouldn’t ask. It’ll only compromise you to know.”
I looked away but there was nothing else to look at. The window was in the living room. “There are enormous distances between people here,” I said.
“It’s design. We’re a ‘global community,’ aren’t we?”
This made me think of my uncle. I began to describe him to Winger, but he cut me off.
“I don’t know him.”
“You might.”
“A Jew like you. I don’t know him.”
I felt my face and neck turn red. “Well, you look exactly like the horrible man who gave me my job.”
“Don’t be racist,” said Winger.
I smacked him in the abdomen, and he curled like a snail’s shell and then looked exhausted, his face drained of sheen, his eyes narrow. I imagined that in a previous life he ran a small, successful business, perhaps wine, or was the president of a union of bricklayers, a hereditary vocation, or a fine and inspiring schoolteacher. He kept curling until his knees were in his chest and he was on his side, lightly snoring.
Sometimes, at night, before I fell asleep, I would think about the paintings I would make if I were a painter. I had so many stills in my head. If I had been trained as a painter, I could extract them from my head and put them somewhere else. I could send them to my uncle to show him who I really was.
If I could paint, I would paint a door made of rich and grainy mahogany surrounded by acrid, smoking rubble—a painting that makes you think: how did the whole building burn but not the door? And what makes a door, anyway? Is it simply that which you can pass through, from one empty space to another, even if you can walk around it? Or must the door provide the only access to what it keeps on the other side? These are a few of the objectivist questions I would have this painting pose. Uncle, you would of course recognize this door as the one that my mother and father were trapped behind, in front of which stood a barricade of gendarmes. You held my hand as we watched from across the courtyard. It was the last time you did that. I never expected you to be a father to me when your brother died, but I did hope that you would be kind. I still don’t understand why you weren’t.
The image ended there. I tried to sleep. Naturally, I couldn’t. I worried that a sac of ceiling would puncture and drench us in putrid water. I worried about the microbial universe. I worried about walking through a cloud of invisible, odorless, poisonous gas. I worried about getting shot with a gun. I envisaged holding a pistol in my hand and following the weight of it through my fist holding it and downward into the ground and into Earth, passing through the dirt and crust until I was jammed inside the solidity of Earth like an ancient, compressed mineral.
I listened to Winger breathing beside me. His chest rose and fell, much, I assumed, like the water by the pier where he worked. I would visit him there soon. I’d never lived by the ocean. Occasionally, I had lived by lakes. Barnova was near a freshwater reservoir that supplied the city. Ancient pines towered above it like sentries. When we met in the basement of some utility building—for what? the student newspaper?—the water seeped in through the floor, up through the sodden pastel yellow carpet. The room was stuffy and humid, shadowy. Boxy columns supported the concrete waffle ceiling. The walls were solid gray concrete. One long row of fluorescent lighting flickered intermittently and buzzed. The sodden yellow carpet. Parallel lines running through my life. The stacks were comprised of long tan metal carts on wheels, full of obsolete works of reference, or damaged, outdated, or recalled materials. A broad community desk, surrounded by chairs. Old and broken instrumentation. An inky and moldy aroma. Something behind my ear: the nub of a blue editor’s pencil. A gray rat hacking away at a stack of papers, a cube of wet pulp. Hacking, gnawing it to bits.
Our group reserved the basement because no one went down there. I entered this memory at a moment when Zofia Percik and Obren Vučić were in a heated argument about Hallen. Obren had convinced Professor Hallen to agree to an anonymous interview for our paper. Zofia had been in Hallen’s class with me. She knew him as a monster, and I agreed with her. I had learned that good people could periodically behave badly, but not that badly—that’s how you knew who was really bad. Obren thought Hallen’s scholarship was enough to prove his anti-partisan ethos, never mind his unorthodox pedagogy. Plenty of professors were eccentrics. Having a Barnova professor on record would be a coup for our paper, proving that the faculty weren’t all toadies and milquetoasts. Like Professor Grannoff, some faculty members were holding on. Hallen taught an anti-Fascist literature course, Obren argued, wasn’t that proof enough? Zofia said that just because you taught fascist literature didn’t mean you were automatically repudiating it. Hadn’t it been the deans who made it a prerequisite for graduating?
Subterfuge, said Zofia.
But did it really happen like that? Now I remembered a high window with a view of passing feet, their owners unaware of our presence in the nondescript basement. But we wouldn’t have met in a windowed room, where we could be seen by the public. Would we?
The argument resolved itself abruptly when Obren reported that Hallen was already en route. Obren had prepared for the interview. He took masks out of his rucksack and passed them out. There were six of us, or seven, or eight. We all wrote articles, screeds, essays, manifestos. Obren asked me to transcribe. The masks were woolen and itchy; he had cut the eye holes out himself, for our safety and for Hallen’s. This way everyone could be plausibly anonymous in the event that police pressed us for names at a later, inevitable date. Zofia looked at me with sullen eyes. She was very thin and her eyes were sapphire medallions set above cut cheekbones.
I wished I knew what I remembered. I thought that I remembered being in love. That we were in love. But maybe I just think that because of what happened next. I looked at Winger now, still snoring charmingly, a charming sleeper. A hard and soft body, accommodating, full of pleasure. The whiskers beneath his lip.
Obren had told Hallen to knock in a specific rhythm. We couldn’t lock the door—the locks had been removed from all the doors on campus and all the residences where we slept on pallets, without pillows, prohibited from leaving our rooms after six in the evening.
Then: knuckles rapping at the door. The wrong pattern. Obren checked his wristwatch.
We had a chair jammed beneath the doorknob. Obren turned to look at us. His shoulders were up by his jaw as if he were sinking into himself. The knuckles rapped again—and then the door shattered open. A hole appeared in the back of Obren’s skull and I tasted his mind in my mouth. The room filled with the stench of sulfur and little shouts of fire. Zofia was thrown against the wall and slid down it, leaving a painting of blood on the concrete.
Winger coughed in his sleep. I rubbed the broad plain of his back. He was radiating heat. It was dawn. I wasn’t sure I had slept at all.
“Did you have any dreams?” I asked.
He moaned. “No one wants to hear about that.”
“I do.”
“Don’t be sentimental.” He pushed my arm away, rose, and dressed. I listened to him fill a glass with water from the faucet and drink it down. He moved back and forth across the living space, looking for something.
“Have you been to the grain elevators?” I asked.
He stopped pacing and looked at me. “No. Why?”
“Something Margarette said.”
“Hm.”
“Can I arrange for you to come back tonight?”
His eyes grew mean. He resumed his search. Eventually he found what he was looking for, his bag, and extracted a velvet pouch. He wagged it at me. “Coffee,” he said, and tossed it onto the counter.
“You’ll have some?”
“I’ve got to go,” he said. His affect was restrained, businesslike. His hand was already around the doorknob.
“What about the favor I owe you?” I asked.
“I’ll be in touch.”
I got out of bed and wrapped the sheet around my waist. I was embarrassed. He glanced over his shoulder at my body and smirked rudely, then went out.
“Bye,” I said.
I stared for a moment at the closed door, then dressed and made myself a cup of Winger’s coffee with the tepid faucet water, then sat and stared out at the hill in the back. A patch of grass was illuminated. I looked at it intently until my vision began to blur and the yellow-green palette began to wiggle and squirm. I thought of the worms beneath the earth.