John is disappearing. He is so thin now that his neck looks more like an arm poking up through his collar. I can see the shape of his skull under his hair.

“You’re affecting business,” I say. “Customers are afraid it’s something the hot dogs do to you.”

“What do you know?” John says.

“Your nose is bigger,” I say. “Fuck,” I say, “it’s huge.” John tries to poke me with his tongs.

“Get away,” he says, his bony arm coming out from under his shirt cuff like a stick instead. He plays solitaire across the bin tops after lunch’s rush, the cards humped from the steam of the cooking hot dogs below. John plays and points to the park. “It’s like a heart,” he says.

“The park, a heart?” I say.

“The people are the blood, they go in, they go out. Boom de boom de boom. Hear it?” he says. “Some blood stays in longer. Some blood goes out fast. It’s a bad heart,” he says.

*   *   *

New neighbors have moved in. A fat older woman and a younger skinny red-haired man. We try not to imagine them as lovers.

“It must be accord,” our mother says. We can always hear the fat woman. Our house shakes when she walks across her floor. We can always smell the red-haired man. In the elevator going up or going down, we hold our hands to our noses. Our mother tells us red-haired people smell, they just do and she doesn’t know why.

Their roaches become our roaches when they bomb. Even our cats are annoyed and flick angry tails when they try to sleep and the roaches climb their fur. We send their roaches back with our own bombs. This works for a week and then their roaches are bombed back to us, so many that there are albinos and ones with deformities, two heads and missing legs.

The fat woman welds. She works at night downtown somewhere on the docks. She wears her helmet with the plastic face shield home, saying more than once it has saved her life more than once. Gang boys with nunchucks have flown at her on late subway rides and they’ve thrown metal stars so hard they stuck into her plastic face shield and she had to pull them out with pliers. Our dog and cats attack her when she comes to our house. The cats hang from her clothes hissing and the dog nips at her rear. She comes through without knocking on our door. She comes and she sits down on our couch in her dirty coveralls and her mask and we stare at her shoes and wonder how she gets her feet into them and we wonder if the skinny red-haired man helps put her clothes on and is that what our mother means by their accord?

We show them the pipe where Jochen killed himself.

“Oh,” they say, and then they are quiet.

They build a room around the area where the pipe is and use it for storage. We hear Jochen at night, we tell them. The fat woman says then she is glad she is down at the docks working at night. The skinny red-haired man says he doesn’t hear, and that he sleeps with headphones on to keep out street noise.

Our mother has fainting spells now. “Oh, merde, it’s just menopause,” she says in the hallway, hitting the wall behind her so that when she falls she slides down the wall as if she were shot by a sniper across the way.

We try to pick her up. “Leave me here,” she says. We all sit on the floor beside her. “Look, more hair,” she says, and pulls it from her head and gives us each a handful.

“Thanks so much,” we say. She puts her arms around us.

“My babies,” she says, she brings us close to her. “Did I ever show you this?” she says. “It’s Chinese. It calls the wild animals.” She slaps a rhythm on the floor with her hands and her fists and shows us how it’s done.

“Will it call our father?” Jody asks. Our mother stops her slapping.

“If we do it right,” she says.