I stand in the boiler room, watching the red pulse of the space-heater coils. They make a really quiet sound, too quiet to be a buzz. Almost a sizzle. I hitch up my backpack, stuffed full again with all the used sandwich wrappers.

I guess I had always thought that a boiler would be huge: pipes and hoses, bellows and valves. Hélène’s boiler just sits there, sits there in the middle of that knot of pipes, thin copper pipes and thick black plastic pipes with heavy joints. Sits there, quiet, all red–rimmed from the space heaters. Up ahead the old blanket stretches across the tunnel. Behind it that heavy tunnel darkness waits. I guess I’ve gotten away from it long enough. There’s thin window–grey dark and space–heater red dark, and then there’s tunnel dark, and tunnel dark sure is dark. It’s cold. My heart beats real fast and I want to pee. I really want to pee. I should turn around, back into the basement, run up the stairs, pound on Hélène’s door. She’ll open the door and pick me up, carry me up the stairs to where she lives. Carry me up there and fix everything.

The damp, soggy dark blows out of the tunnel, soaks my clothes, makes me heavy, sticks me to the floor.

I take a step and trip on the space–heater cord. I pitch forward and drag the heater with me and the cord pulls out of the socket, and I hit the ground in the dark.

That’s when I just disappear altogether. I knew it would happen someday. I take a deep breath and let it out, and it just goes, that breath, and I feel my lungs and insides just puff away, like ice on a stovetop. Everything inside me just steams and blows away down in the dark boiler room, and there’s this cold feeling as the rest of me follows along in that long, cold breath, until everything blows away and I’m gone. And I guess what I mean is, I’m cold and I’m lonely and I’m scared.