In your bathroom there is a sink, a white oval, the shape of a halved hollowed eggshell, a porcelain bowl that rests upon a porcelain pedestal. Hidden within this pedestal is the pipe that carries away your sink’s refuse, which is your refuse: your whiskers and sloughed-off skin cells, hairs that have broken from your head, blood that has leaked from gums or nose or fingers. It is a feature, this sink on its pedestal—so says your landlord—but, in fact, because of the pedestal’s narrow width, the pipe within it lacks what plumbers call a trap, that double curve of pipe shaped like an S too lazy to stand upright. The trap is meant to hold water in its valley and so block sewer gases from rising into your bathroom. But your sink lacks this trap: the water from your tap rushes straight back into the earth like rain falling on a windless day, and often, on hot days especially, a fetid smell rises into your house, a thinly but evenly spread stench that takes over your life like the sound of an argument in the house next door. Light a match, your landlord said when you complained, and left it at that. Now, years later, it has become your companion, this stink, something to talk to when you’re alone the way other people talk to a pet or to the walls. Oh, it’s you again, you say, and you wave a hand, a greeting and a clearing of the air—and, so, a farewell as well. Sometimes, when you awaken in the middle of the night for a pee and there is no smell in your bathroom, you put your face right into the shell of sink and sniff deeply, pulling into your lungs a past that is deeper than memory. Once, after doing this, you stand up and catch sight of yourself in the mirror. Your face spooks you for some reason, and you grab nervously at the book of matches left in a concavity of the sink meant for a bar of soap. You take a match, light it, you hold it to the mouth of the drain. It sputters there, a brief consolation, and then, as if tweaked by fingers, it goes out. Your sleep-glazed eyes stare at a rising ribbon of smoke that seems to offer both rebuke and absolution, and then a second breath, yours or the pipe’s, disperses even that illusion, and you are left with nothing but yourself.