HOLE

FOR MONTHS HE WAS JUST a number to her: she counted his dirties, he dropped them in the bucket, she recorded the number on the clipboard, and he moved down the line. Another pelican mired in oil, worn to the stump and nodding to his own ruin. A goner like the rest of them.

Then, after switching to the needle station—instead of counting, she handed out clean rigs—she noticed that he was the only exchanger carrying library books. Biographies, mostly, and crime fiction. She dubbed him Mr. Disgusting on account of his looks and dirty clothes. His hair was a long angry scribble in need of hot oil treatment, his face an overworked drawing with too many wrinkles, but he was tall and broad shouldered and could carry her around the block or up a flight of stairs if he ever needed or wanted to, a quality she’d found lacking in her previous boyfriends, and she was pretty much in love with his eyes, which were dark, frank in their expression, and seemed to say, You Are Here.

It was supposed to rain that night, the night of their first conversation. Half of the exchangers stood under a tarp; half were exposed to the stiff gray sky. The exposed ones looked sodden and miserable, even though it wasn’t raining yet. Mr. Disgusting stood toward the end of the line. Unlike the others, he looked perfectly at ease, a book shielding his face. She squinted at the title: Straight Life, the Story of Art Pepper—whoever that was. She was already anticipating the somatic effect his presence had on her: when he was within five feet she’d suddenly lose her peripheral vision along with all the saliva in her mouth, and her heart would beat as if being hunted. Seeing him was the highlight of her two-hour commitment and tonight she’d made adjustments to her wardrobe, ditching her high-tops and hooded sweatshirt for ballet flats and a vintage leopard-print cape. She was even wearing blush and a padded bra.

The line shuffled forward and soon he stood before her, smiling faintly. He was wearing the leather jacket she liked—once white, now scuffed and weatherworn, with a cryptic tire mark running directly up the back. There was a dead leaf in his hair she didn’t have the nerve to pluck out. She decided to stick to the script.

“How many?” she asked.

She expected the usual four clipped syllables: “Twenty-two, please.” Instead he replied, “I was fleeced last week.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Flimflammed,” he said.

It was her turn to say something, but she was too startled by his voice, which was distinct enough to be its own creature. It had a spine and sharp little teeth.

“Actually, the cops took them,” he said. “I just like saying flimflam.”

She smiled. “Where?”

“Couple blocks from here.”

The needle exchange was nothing more than supplies set up on roll-away carts, situated at the end of a little-known alley wedged between an abandoned convent and a Laotian bakery in what was called The Acre, a largely Cambodian neighborhood in Lowell. They’d been here five months but now it was October and soon they’d have to move indoors, somewhere under the radar.

“Must have been a rookie,” she said.

Their tacit understanding with the cops was that they could operate the exchange in peace, so long as the exchangers didn’t do anything stupid, such as sell needles for money or dope, or shoot up on the sidewalk, but occasionally the wrong cop wandered by and busted some hapless exchanger for possession and paraphernalia.

She shook out a paper bag and dropped in a starter kit. Technically, it was a one-for-one exchange, but if someone showed up empty-handed she gave them a bag of ten points and a small bottle of bleach.

“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate it. But I don’t need the bleach.”

No bleach meant he didn’t clean his needles, which meant he probably didn’t share them. She took this to mean he was single and unattached. She handed him the bag with what she hoped was an easygoing smile. In fact she felt queasy. It was always over too soon, and now she’d have to wait another week. He mumbled thank you and she watched him walk down the alley. He never looked back at her.

*  *  *

HE BECAME A FURTIVE PRESENCE in her life. She fantasized about him every other day, usually while vacuuming. She made her living as a cleaning lady and daydreaming was a vital part of her happiness on the job. Knowing nothing but his taste in drugs and library books, the daydreams were loose and freewheeling. She gave him a Spanish accent, a pilot’s license, a way with words. She dressed him in various costumes—UPS uniform, lab coat, motorcycle leathers—and invented interesting monologues for him.

They had their second conversation three weeks later. The site had moved into the dingy waiting room of a free clinic two blocks south. She was working the supply table, handing out cotton balls, bleach, alcohol swabs, condoms, and donuts donated from the Lao bakery around the corner, perhaps in gratitude for moving out of their alleyway. The fluorescent lighting made her feel like she was in high school again, back when the medication had made her skin green and her nickname was Witchy. He asked for cotton and alcohol swabs. In an effort to prolong their encounter, she offered a handful of condoms—black, their most popular color—even though she suspected he didn’t need or want any, as he wasn’t a sex worker and his libido was likely a distant memory. He let out a sad laugh.

“What’s funny?” she asked, playing dumb.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, and shook his head. “It’s just that I have little use for condoms except as water balloons, which I also have little use for.”

He looked at the floor, seemingly searching for words. She grasped for something to fill the growing silence, but she was too captivated by his voice.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve made you uncomfortable with my creepy honesty.” He shook his head again.

“Not at all,” she said. “I’m actually a fan of creepy honesty.”

He made tentative eye contact. His eyes made her feel all gooey and exceptional, but the tension in his jaw told her he hadn’t fixed that day, and she wondered how far from the site he lived. Was he able to wait until he got home, or was he like some of the other exchangers, who spiked themselves in public?

“Would you care for a bear claw?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Take two,” she said, breaking the one-per-person rule.

He gave her a wide smile and she took a quick inventory of his teeth: all there, reasonably white, and sturdy enough to tear linoleum. A minor miracle.

“You’re very kind,” he said in an oddly deliberate way, as though speaking in code. She watched him turn abruptly, cross the street, and disappear around a corner.

*  *  *

HE VANISHED FOR MOST OF the winter. She figured he was either in rehab, prison, or the ground. In his absence she grew listless and bored and almost quit, but what the hell else was she going to do on Tuesday nights? She lived alone, sans television. Her only friend was attending college in another state. She had more in common with the exchangers than anyone she knew. They were both invisible to the rest of society—they by their status as junkies, she by her status as maid—and they’d both eat pretty much anything covered in frosting. Spending time with her fellow volunteers was just as edifying. No do-gooders, no show-offs, no save-the-children types. They chain-smoked and ate nachos and hot dogs from 7-Eleven—she admired that.

Mr. Disgusting reappeared one afternoon in early spring, looking like an out-of-work character actor. He wore a seven-day beard, old sunglasses with amber lenses, a long-sleeved, forest-green button-up, some extra weight around his middle. He shuffled up and asked to speak to her alone. Excusing herself, she walked to the corner, stopping before a boarded-up tanning salon called Darque Tan II. She was going to say “It’s good to see you,” then opted for something more neutral. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Rehab.”

“I was hoping that’s where you were.”

“So you thought about me, then,” he said, removing his glasses.

“Are you okay?”

He put his sunglasses back on. “I’m not very good at this.”

“Good at what?”

He did some aggressive throat clearing. “I came here to give you something.” He handed her a shard of broken mirror the size of her palm. It was thick and sail shaped and worn smooth around the edges. She looked at it briefly and mumbled thank you.

“Turn it over,” he said impatiently.

He’d scrawled his name and phone number on the back in bright-pink crayon.

“I thought I’d put my number on a mirror so you can check yourself out while we’re talking on the phone.” He smiled.

She could tell he’d practiced the delivery of that line and she meant to reassure him, but was thrown off by the advice written on the wall behind him: “If God gives you lemons, find a new God.”

“That is, if you feel like talking,” he said.

She nodded slowly. In fact, she suddenly wasn’t sure about any of it—him, herself, herself with him. In her fantasies they never bothered with phone numbers. He just showed up, wordlessly threw her over his shoulder, and then he carried her down a different alley, where they did some violent making out against a brick wall.

“Do you even know my name?” she asked.

He blushed. “I’m convinced it starts with K,” he said.

“M,” she said. “It starts with M.”

“Mommy?”

She laughed. “Mona.”

“Hm,” he said. “Can I call you Mommy instead?”

“Maybe.” Turning away, she nodded toward the mouth of the alley, where one of her fellow volunteers was talking on a cell phone and openly staring at them. “Look, Big Brother’s watching.”

“You care what they think,” he said. “That’s why you won’t look at me?”

“I’m looking at you,” she said, then looked at the ground.

“Well, call me if you feel like it.”

She watched him walk away and thought back to the weekend of volunteer training mandated by the organization that ran the needle exchange. She and the other volunteers had role-played various hypothetical situations, such as what to do in the event that an exchanger inadvertently, or perhaps purposely, stuck you with a dirty needle. They never went over what to do if the exchanger handed you a broken mirror and asked you to call him sometime.

*  *  *

MOST DAYS SHE WORKED ALONE, in the fancy part of town, where many of the houses still had servants’ quarters left over from the last century. Her contact with the homeowners was limited, but when they discovered that English wasn’t her second language, they treated her warily, as if she were mentally ill, learning disabled, or an ex-con. They assumed she was sullied somehow. Disgraced. The fact that she was white, managed to graduate from a decent parochial high school, and yet chose to clean houses seemed beyond their comprehension.

Right now she was cleaning the Stones’ place with Sheila, her employer and legal guardian. The Stones lived in a sprawling Tudor mansion with a fireplace in every room, including the kitchen, which they were cleaning now. Sheila stood at the sink, rinsing dishes, and Mona was on her knees with her head in the oven, removing grease loosened with half a bottle of Easy-Off. Consequently, her skin was tingling and imaginary bionic noises accompanied the movement of her arms. Usually she enjoyed a good oven cleaner buzz, but just then she wanted to pull a Sylvia Plath. Sheila must have intuited as much, because she suddenly shut off the kitchen faucet and asked Mona if she was still taking her meds.

“Nope,” she said. “Been drug free for three weeks now.”

“How’s Dr. Tattleman?”

“I quit her, too.”

To Mona’s surprise, Sheila seemed unconcerned. Nonchalant, even. “Well, how’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Not as, uh, neutral as I’d like, but okay.”

“You don’t need to be any more neutral, honey,” she said, and sniffed.

Mona waited for the inevitable barrage of AA slogans. Sheila could string two hundred together in one sentence.

“I’m going to miss you,” Sheila said instead. “I miss you already.”

In four days Sheila was fucking off to Florida. For good. She’d sold her house and the business and had just closed on a condo in God’s waiting room, as she called it, where she planned to join a book club and take up golf.

“I wish you’d try group therapy,” Sheila said.

“I’m tired of talking.”

“Individual counseling promotes self-pity. There’s less wallowing in group, and you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. You can share your pain and then just . . . turn it over, listen to someone else’s problems.”

“Turn it over?”

“To God,” she said. “You know, let go and let God?”

Let go and let God? Let go and let God. Let go, let God! Let go! Let God! Let go!

Lately phrases got stuck in her head and tumbled around for days. They made a terrible racket, like loose change in a dryer. Last week it was “Get bent, you stupid bitch,” which she’d heard someone shout from the open window of a pickup truck.

“You’re not even here,” Sheila said. “Where are you right now?”

“I’m here, I’m here.” It was only noon and already she was bone-tired. Sheila, on the other hand, was just getting warmed up—she made cleaning look like swing dancing. Right now she was loading a dozen cereal bowls into the dishwasher. Cereal was all Mr. Stone seemed to eat, and he left milky bowls in every room.

“The man has serious Mommy issues,” Mona said.

“Who?” Sheila said.

“Daddy Stone. The cereal bowls are like lactating boobs. He cradles them in his hand, shovels the cereal into his mouth, the milk dribbles down his chin, and it’s like he’s . . . nursing. He’s probably all pacified and drowsy afterward, which is why he can’t be bothered to bring the bowls to the kitchen.”

“Stop,” Sheila said. “He seems nice.”

“Did you see the bidet they installed in the master bath? They can’t even wipe their own asses.”

Sheila frowned. “I agree it was an interesting choice.”

Mona rolled her eyes. No matter how much Mona goaded her, Sheila refused to talk shit about their clients. “I’m sweating my balls off,” Mona said. “Will you scratch my back?”

Sheila dried her hands and leaned over to scratch Mona’s back.

“Higher,” she ordered.

“Maybe it’s time you got a dog.”

Mona laughed. “Why?”

“When you’re forced to do things that take you out of yourself—like picking up dog poop—that’s when you find yourself.”

“You hate your dog,” Mona reminded her. “He shits in your shoes, remember?”

“Go to the pound,” Sheila said. “Adopt another terrier.”

She’d grown up with two Jack Russells. This was back in Torrance, California. She’d named them Spoon and Fork. Spoon ran in circles, Fork in figure eights. They’d been loving and affectionate killing machines, and she’d loved them more than anyone, including her parents, but they’d been indomitable and were eventually sent to a farm in Idaho, or so she was told, and then her parents got wild, too, and divorced each other and shacked up with new people, and a year later, when she was twelve, she was sent to live with Sheila, her father’s first cousin. Sheila was single, childless, and sober with a capital S, and she agreed to take Mona in without ever having met her. It was supposed to be just for a summer. She’d heard of Massachusetts, but for all she knew, New England was attached to England, or, if not attached, then possibly connected by a system of underground tunnels. Lowell and London, she imagined, were affiliated, and she envisioned herself walking along cobblestone streets in the fog, wearing a trench coat with the collar turned up, and living in a turret covered in ivy, images she’d culled from various movies and postcards.

“Service to others,” Sheila said now, snatching the dirty sponge from Mona’s hands and rinsing it in the sink. “It’ll take your focus off your own problems.” She squeezed water from the sponge and handed it back.

“Service to others,” Mona repeated.

“It leads to greatness, sweetie.”

“But I’m already a servant.”

“Doesn’t count,” she said. “You make money.”

“And I already volunteer, remember?”

“Yeah, but why’d you have to pick that? I mean, running abscesses? Barf.”

Mona shrugged and got to her feet. “What’s for lunch?”

“Leftover Chinese.”

Sheila nuked their lunch in the microwave. Crab rangoons, green beans, pork lo mein. They sat on stools in the butler’s pantry and looked out the arched window. The Stones’ garden was customarily pristine, but someone had maniacally hacked at all of their hydrangea bushes.

“Disgruntled gardener,” Mona said, pointing. “Or maybe Mrs. Stone lost her mind.”

Sheila nodded vaguely. “You know,” she said. “The summers are hotter than Haiti in Florida, so maybe I’ll spend part of August up here with you.”

“Hades,” Mona said.

“What?”

“Hades. Hotter than Hades.”

“Hai-ti,” Sheila said. “There’s no s on the end.”

“Hades is the underworld, Sheila. From Greek mythology? It’s another term for hell. Haiti, on the other hand, is a country.”

“You’re upset.”

“I’m fine,” she said, and shrugged. “My correcting you is a sign of respect.”

“You respect me?” Sheila asked, surprised. “As a person?”

“No, as a pigeon.”

“Remember that first day, when I picked you up from the airport and you asked me if I masturbated?”

Mona rolled her eyes and bit into a crab rangoon.

“You were only twelve. That’s when I knew you were special,” Sheila said. “What’s that word? Begins with a p.”

“Precocious.”

Sheila snapped her fingers. “Right.”

“These crab rangoons are precocious,” Mona said, chewing. “You should eat one.”

Sheila cleared her throat. “You know, when I decided to sell the business and retire, my first thought was that I needed you to come with me. I even looked into colleges for you down there. But you’re almost twenty-four now. I shouldn’t be trying to caretake you. My sponsor says it’s instinctive, deeply ingrained behavior, a result of my overattachment to you, and that I’m in danger of preventing you from taking the falls necessary for your personal growth.”

“More falls?” She coughed. “That’s what I need?”

“What you need is for me to let you make your own decisions and mistakes. Our relationship is very co- and always has been.”

“Co-” was Sheila’s shorthand for “codependent.”

“Yeah, well, your lunch is getting co-,” Mona said.

“I’m not very hungry, for some reason.”

“Why didn’t you just give the business to me?”

“Because then you’d stay in Lowell forever,” Sheila said. “Which would depress the fuck out of me. And I can’t just give it to you—I need the money, silly.”

The buyer was some chick named Judy, who owned another cleaning business in Andover.

“So presumably I start working for this Judy person next week?”

“You won’t even notice. Your schedule will be the same, and she’ll cut you a check every two weeks.”

“Fuck,” Mona said. “So I have to start paying taxes.”

“That’s the only difference.”

“Well, it’s a pretty big difference.”

“I think it’s a good thing,” Sheila said. “Maybe now you’ll realize you need to do something else for a living.”

Mona felt a twinge near the bottom of her spine. The pain shot down to her toes, which, as usual, were partially numb. If she made any sudden movements, her back would go out completely. This would include coughing or sneezing. Even whistling would be dangerous. But crying—crying would be worst of all.

“Who’s going to be my emergency contact? Who will I not celebrate the holidays with?”

“You’ll meet someone,” Sheila assured her. “Trust me. He’s going to sweep you off your feet and you’ll forget all about me. Just promise me you’ll stay in school.”

*  *  *

SHE WAITED THREE DAYS BEFORE dialing his number. It rang five times and then his machine picked up. “Leave a message or not, I don’t give a—” The beep came sooner than expected.

“Uhh, I’m calling you.” Before hanging up, she added lamely, “It’s Saturday.” Realizing she forgot to leave her name and number, she waited a minute and tried again.

This time he answered on the first ring. “I was worried you wouldn’t call back,” he said, winded. “I forgot to change my voicemail recording.”

“It’s a little intimidating,” she admitted. “I got flustered and forgot to say my name. How’d you know it was me?”

“You have this weird nonaccent,” he said.

“I’m from Los Angeles,” she explained. “Originally, I mean.”

“You must be homesick.”

“Nah,” she said. “Lowell’s gotten under my skin. I don’t think I could live without all this brick and repression.”

He asked why here, of all places.

“Oh, I was shipped here,” she said. “When I was twelve. I’ve been here ever since.”

“Must have been quite a shock, landing in this dump. You’re probably still recovering.”

“It took some getting used to,” she admitted. “There’s stuff here I’d never been exposed to in L.A.”

“Such as?”

“Snow, wool, guilt.”

He laughed. “You’re probably saving your pennies to get out of here.”

“I’m not a saver,” she said. “And I have zero ambition.”

There was a silence.

“What do you say we get together tomorrow?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Where?”

“My place,” he said. “I want to get that out of the way—my living situation, I mean. Besides, it’ll be good for you to see how the other half lives.” He waited a beat. “You’ll probably run away, screaming.”

“Do you live in a commune or something?”

“No,” he said.

“Projects?”

“No.”

“Because I’ve seen projects before.”

“It’s worse than that,” he said.

“You live in a Dumpster,” she said. “Which is fine. I’ve been in Dumpsters before.”

He snorted. “Just remember to bring your ID,” he said. “They won’t let you into the building without it.”

“So it’s like a nightclub, then,” she said.

*  *  *

HE LIVED DOWNTOWN, IN A residential hotel called the Hawthorne, a six-story brick building sandwiched between a dry-cleaning plant and a Cambodian restaurant. When she arrived, three Cambodian gang members were loitering in front of the restaurant. It was broad daylight and she felt overdressed in her black kimono shirt and slacks. She also felt whiter and richer than she was. The sixty bucks in her pocket felt like six hundred.

The lobby had the charm of a check-cashing kiosk. A security guard stood at the door and a pasty fat man sat in a booth behind thick, wavy bulletproof glass. Mona slipped her ID through the slot.

“Who you here to see?”

She gave him Mr. Disgusting’s name.

“Really?” he asked, looking her up and down.

“Yeah, really,” she answered.

Mr. Disgusting came down a few minutes later, wearing gray postal-worker pants and a green T-shirt that said “Lowell Sucks.”

“You look nice,” she said.

“I scraped my face for you.” He took her hand and brought it to his bare cheek and then clumsily kissed the tip of her thumb. She blushed, glanced at the fat man behind the desk, who studied them with open disgust. “You get your ID back when you leave the building,” he said into his microphone.

They shared the elevator with a couple of crackheads she recognized from the neighborhood. Mr. Disgusting kept beaming at her as if he’d just won the lottery. For the first time in years, she felt beautiful, like a real prize. They got off on the third floor.

“It’s quiet right now, but this place is a total nuthouse,” he said.

“Doesn’t seem so bad,” she lied.

“Wait until dark,” he said, pulling out his keys.

His room smelled like coffee, cough drops, and Old Spice. All she saw was dirt at first, one of the main hazards of her occupation. She spotted grime on the windowsill and blinds, dust on the television screen, a streaked mirror over a yellowed porcelain sink. The fake Oriental rug needed vacuuming, along with the green corduroy easy chair he directed her to sit in.

Once seated, she switched off her dirt radar and took in the rest of the room. She’d expected something bare and cell-like, but the room was large, warm, and carefully decorated. He had good taste in lamps. Real paintings rather than prints hung on the walls; an Indian textile covered the double bed. He owned a cappuccino machine, an antique typewriter, a sturdy wooden desk, and a couple of bookcases filled with mostly existential and Russian novels, some textbooks, and what looked like an extensive collection of foreign dictionaries.

“Are you a linguist or something?” she asked.

“No, I just like dictionaries.” He sat directly across from her, on the edge of the bed, and crossed his legs. “I find them comforting, I guess. Most of these I found on the street.”

“You mean in the trash?”

He shrugged. “I’m a slut for garbage.”

“Your vocabulary must be pretty impressive,” she said. “Do you have a favorite word?”

He thought about it for a second. “I’ve always liked the word ‘cleave’ because it has two opposite meanings: to split or divide and to adhere or cling. Those two tendencies have been operating in me simultaneously for as long as I can remember. In fact, I can feel a battle raging right now.” He clutched his stomach theatrically.

She smiled. It was rare for her to find someone attractive physically and also to like what came out of their mouth.

“What’s your least favorite word?” he asked.

“ ‘Mucous,’ ” she said.

He nodded and scratched his chin.

“I wasn’t born like this,” he said suddenly. “Moving into this hellhole did quite a number on me—you know, spiritually or whatever. I haven’t felt like myself in a long time.”

He’d lived there seven years. Before that, he owned a house in Lower Belvidere, near that guns and ammo joint. He’d had it all: a garage, a couple of cats, houseplants. She asked what happened.

“I was living in New York, trying to make it as an artist,” he said. “I had a couple shows, sold a few paintings, was on my way up. During the day I worked as a roofer in Queens.” He stopped, ran his fingers through his hair. “One night I was on my way home from a bar and I was shit-faced, literally stumbling down the sidewalk, and out of nowhere, two entire stories of scaffolding collapsed on top of me, pinning me to the concrete. A delivery guy found me three hours later. Broke my clavicle, left arm, four ribs, both my legs. Bruised my spleen. My fucking teeth were toast.

“After I got out of the hospital, I couldn’t exactly lump shingles as a roofer, so I crawled back to Lowell. Then I got this big settlement and was able to buy a run-down house, but one thing led to the other.” He pointed to his arm. “I pissed it away, made some bad decisions. I’ve been living in a state of slow panic ever since.”

“Sounds like you’re lucky to be alive.”

He shrugged. “Am I?”

She felt her scalp tingle. For as long as she could remember, she’d had a death wish, which she pictured as a rope permanently tied around her ankle. The rope was often slack and inanimate, trailing along behind her or sitting in a loose pile at her feet, but occasionally it came alive with its own single-minded purpose, coiling itself tightly around her torso or neck, or tethering her to something dangerous, like a bridge or a moving vehicle.

Mr. Disgusting plucked a German pocket dictionary off the shelf and leafed through it. He was certainly a far cry from the last guy she dated, some edgeless dude from the next town over whose bookshelves had been lined with CliffsNotes and whose heaviest cross to bear had been teenage acne.

“Do you know any German words, Mona?” he asked, startling her. It was only the second time he’d said her name.

“Only one,” she said. “But I don’t know how to pronounce it.”

“What’s it mean?”

“World-weariness.”

“Ah, Weltschmerz,” he said, smiling. “You have that word written all over you.”

“Thanks.”

He was beaming at her again. Where had he come from? He was too open and unguarded to be a native New Englander. She asked him where he was born.

“Germany,” he said.

According to his adoption papers, his birth mother was a French teenage prostitute living in Berlin. An elderly American couple adopted him as a toddler and brought him to their dairy farm in New Hampshire.

“They would’ve been better off adopting a donkey,” he said. “My mother was a drunk and my father danced on my head every other day.”

He ran away with the circus when he was seventeen. Got a job shoveling animal shit and worked his way up to drug procurer. It wasn’t your ordinary circus, though. It had all the usual circusy stuff, but everyone was gay: the owner, all the performers and clowns, the entire crew. Even the elephants were gay.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Straight as an arrow,” he said. After a short silence he asked, “Why, are you?”

She made a so-so motion with her hand.

“Wishy-washy,” he said. “You really are from L.A.”

She laughed.

“Well, I’m glad we got our sexual orientation cleared up,” he said. “Listen, there’s something else I need to get out of the way. Our future together depends on your reaction to this.” He smiled nervously.

“Fire away.”

She was 90 percent certain he was about to tell her he was positive.

But he didn’t say anything, just continued smiling at her, his upper lip twitching with the effort. She smiled back.

“What is this—a smiling contest?” she asked.

“Sort of,” he said.

“You win,” she said.

“Take a good look,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m looking. I don’t see anything.”

He walked over to the sink and filled a glass with water, and then he removed his teeth and dropped them into the glass.

“I’ve read Plato, Euripides, and Socrates, but nothing could have prepared me for the Teeth Police,” he said.

He held up the glass. The teeth had settled into an uneven and disquieting smile. She felt a sudden rawness in her throat, as if she’d been screaming all night.

“They’re grotesque—don’t think I’m not aware of that. I call the top set the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Notice the massive dome and flying buttresses.”

She smiled. The lump in her throat had shrunk, allowing her to swallow.

“What I really need to do is have the roof cut out of the damn thing. There’s this weird suction thing going on whenever I wear it.”

“It cleaves to the roof of your mouth,” she managed, and held her hand up for a high five.

“Precisely,” he said, slapping her hand. “Very uncomfortable.”

He set the glass on the sink and sat on the bed again, gazing distractedly out the window. She realized he was giving her a chance to study his face. He looked better without the teeth—more relaxed, more like himself somehow.

“Well,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve never seen false teeth before.”

“Yeah, but have you been in love with someone who has them?”

She felt her eyes widen involuntarily. “Who says we’re in love?”

“I do,” he said.

For the first time since setting foot in the building, she felt a twinge of fear. She imagined him throwing her onto the bed, gagging her with one of his socks.

“I’m kidding,” he said.

“How old are you?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Forty-four,” he said.

“I might be too young for you,” she said. “I’m only twenty-three.”

“That isn’t too young for me,” he said seriously.

“Of course it isn’t,” she said, and laughed. “What I’m trying to say is that you might be too old for me.”

He frowned. “I had a feeling the dentures would be a deal breaker.”

“It’s not that,” she said quickly. Or was it? She imagined him sucking on her nipples like a newborn, and then waited for a wave of repulsion to wash over her. Instead, she felt oddly pacified and comforted by the image, as if she were the one being breast-fed. “I’m thirsty,” she said.

He made Mexican hot chocolate with a shot of espresso. They sat side by side on his bed, sipping in silence. She noticed a notebook lying on the bed and resisted the urge to pick it up. He saw her looking at it. “That’s the notebook I write snatches of poetry and ridiculous ideas in,” he said.

“Good to know.”

“Do you have anything embarrassing you want to show me? A bad tattoo, perhaps?”

“My parents gave me away to a practical stranger, so my fear of abandonment feels sort of like a tattoo,” she said. “On my brain.”

He smiled. “You visit them?”

“Dad, never. Mom, rarely.”

Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was ‘phobophobia,’ a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.

“My parents are addicts,” she said, and yawned. “But I shouldn’t talk—I’ve been on my share of drugs. Psychiatric.”

“Antipsychotics?”

She laughed. “Antidepressants.”

“No shame in that,” he said. “I’m on 400 grams of Mellaril. My doctor said I could develop something called rabbit syndrome, which is involuntary movements of the mouth.” He twitched his mouth like a rabbit, and she laughed.

“What’re you taking it for?” she asked.

“Opiate withdrawal,” he said. “But they usually give it to schizophrenics.”

She nodded, unsure of what to say. He grinned at her and suddenly lifted his T-shirt with both hands. On his chest, a large, intricate, black-and-gray tattoo of an old-fashioned wooden ship with five windblown sails. The Mayflower, maybe, minus the crew. Above the ship, under his collarbone, a banner read “Homeward Bound” in Gothic script.

“Wow,” she said.

“One of the many useless things I purchased with my insurance money,” he said.

“Well, this is kind of embarrassing,” she said, “but I have some pretty big muscles. My biceps and calves are totally jacked. When I wear a dress—which is never—I look and feel like a drag queen.”

“Let’s see,” he said.

She hesitated and then pushed up her sleeve and made a muscle.

“What are these?”

He was pointing to the scars on her upper arm. They were so old she didn’t even see them anymore, but she looked at them now. There were four in that spot, about two inches long each. The cutting had started her sophomore year, immediately following her first dose of rejection by a boy she’d met at a Circle Jerks show.

“Teenage angst,” she said.

“Ah.”

“Maybe that’s more embarrassing than the muscles.”

He made a sympathetic noise and traced one with his finger. Usually she flinched whenever someone touched her arm, but she liked the feel of his hand. She felt something shift inside her—a gentle leveling, as if she’d been slightly out of plumb her whole life without knowing it.

He squeezed her bicep. “Are you a gym rat, love?”

“God, no.” She laughed. “I vacuum. I’m a cleaning lady.”

He blinked at her. “What—like a janitor?”

“Residential.”

“So you clean . . . houses.”

“Two or three a day,” she said. “In Belvidere, mostly.”

“You clean for a bunch of rich turds,” he said, finally wrapping his head around it.

“Basically,” she said. “Why the surprise?”

“I just think you’re a little above that kind of thing. Seems like a waste.”

She shrugged. “I’ve always felt a weird affinity for monotony and repetition.”

In fact, vacuuming was among her favorite activities. On applications she listed it as one of her hobbies. Even as a child she preferred vacuuming over things like volleyball and doll play. Her classmates had been forced to learn the cello and violin, but her instrument, and strictly by choice, had been a Hoover Aero-Dyne Model 51.

As a teenager she developed a preference for vintage Eurekas. Now she owned four: models 2087, 1458, an Electrolux canister vacuum, and a bright-red, mint-condition Hot Shot 1423, which she christened Gertrude. She’d found Gertrude in a thrift store. Love at first sight.

“Anyway, I’d much rather push Gertrude around someone’s house than sit in a generic office all day. I’ve always felt very relaxed in other people’s homes, and I like the intimacy involved, even though it’s not shared—these people don’t know the first thing about me. But yes, the rich turds, as you call them, can be a bitch to work for—it’s true. I think many of them struggle with the, uh, intimacy.”

“Why—are you sleeping with them?”

“Of course not.” She laughed. “I never see them. Many of them I’ve never met in person. But I know as much as a lover might—more, maybe—and they seem to resent me for that.”

“Ah,” he said. “You’re a snoop.”

“I’m thorough,” she said. “And . . . observant. You learn a lot about a person by cleaning their house. What they eat, what they read on the toilet, what pills they swallow at night. What they hold on to, what they hide, what they throw away. I know about the booze, the porn, the stupid dildo under the bed. I know how empty their lives are.”

“How do you know they resent you? Do they leave turds in the toilet?”

“They leave notes,” she said. “To keep me in my place. Funny you mention toilets—yesterday a client left me a note that said, ‘Can you make sure to scrub under the toilet rim? I noticed some buildup.’ And I was like, Oh wait a minute, are you suggesting I clean toilets for a living? Because I’d totally forgotten—thanks.”

He scowled. “I’m glad I don’t have to work for assholes.”

“Why don’t you?” she asked.

He smiled and told her he made his living as a thief.

Awesome, she thought. Well, he lived in a hotel so he was definitely small-time. She pictured him running through the streets, snatching purses.

“You don’t take advantage of old ladies, do you?” she thought to ask.

“I do, in a way,” he said matter-of-factly. “I mean, sometimes I do.”

“Well, are you going to elaborate, or do I have to guess?”

“I work for a flower distributor,” he said. “I supply him with pilfered flowers.”

“You’re a flower thief?” Now it was her turn to be baffled.

“That’s right. It’s seasonal work.”

Well, it explained the dirt under his fingernails and the scratches on his hands and arms.

“It’s hard work,” he said. “There’s a lot of driving and sneaking around. And I have to work the graveyard shift, obviously.”

“What kind of flowers do you steal?”

“Hydrangeas, mostly. Blue hydrangeas.”

“You just wander into people’s yards?”

He nodded. “Just me and my clippers! I can wipe out a whole neighborhood in under an hour,” he said, clearly pleased with himself.

She thought of the hacked bushes she’d seen in the Stones’ yard last week. “I think I’m familiar with your work, actually,” she said. “So what do you steal in the winter?”

“Why not ask me in December?” He winked.

“How’s the pay?”

“The guy I work for is a friend of mine. He pays me under the table for the hydrangeas, but he also keeps me on the payroll so I get benefits. It’s like a real job. Anyway, don’t look so upset. It’s not like I’m stealing money. They grow back.”

Against her better judgment, which had left the room hours ago and was probably on its way to the airport, she hung around. They continued talking and swapping war stories, sitting side by side on the bed. By the time the streetlights came on, he took the liberty of leaning in for their first kiss. It was just as she’d imagined it all those months—dry, sweet, a little on the solemn side.

*  *  *

IT WAS LIKE DATING A recent immigrant from a developing nation, or someone who’d just gotten out of jail. They went out for dinner and a movie, usually a weekly occurrence for her, but Disgusting’s first time in over a decade. The last movie he’d seen in the theater was The Deer Hunter. At the supermarket she steered him away from the no-frills section and introduced him to real maple syrup, fresh fruit, vegetables not in a can, and brand-name cigarettes. He showed his thanks by silently climbing the fire escape at dawn, after his flower deliveries, and decorating her apartment with stolen hydrangeas while she slept. Easily the most romantic thing anyone had done for her, ever.

Besides the flowers, his first significant gift was a series of drawings he found in the basement of a condemned house. There were seven in total, about five by seven inches each, loosely strung together in the upper-left corner with magenta acrylic yarn. They were crudely drawn in black and red crayon, seemingly by a child. She liked them instantly but was much more fascinated with the captions scrawled across the top of each one. The captions read:

There was a house

A little girl

Two dogs

One Fat Fuck

It was a nice skirt

Fat Fuck was found with no hands

Fat Fuck is dead

He thought the best place to display them was the bathroom. “It’ll give us something to contemplate on the can,” he said. “We can come up with Fat Fuck theories.”

They decided to hang them side by side above the towel rack, and she stood in the doorway, watching him tap nails into the wall. She’d never been in a relationship with someone who owned a hammer. He was wearing a pair of checkered boxers and his Jack Kerouac T-shirt, which had a picture of Kerouac’s mug on the front, along with the caption “Spontaneous Crap.” He’d made the shirt himself and usually wore it during the annual Kerouac Festival, when Kerouac’s annoying friends and fans descended upon Hole to pontificate about the Beat Generation. He called himself president of the I-Hate-Jack-Kerouac Fan Club.

His teeth, she noticed, were resting on top of the toilet tank. As usual, the sight of them produced a buzzing in her brain, like several voices talking over one another. She wanted to put them back in his mouth, or in a jar, the medicine cabinet, a drawer. They needed some kind of enclosure.

“Ever been with a fat guy?” he asked.

She told him yeah, she’d gone to the prom with a fatty named Marty, a funny and friendless guy she knew from art class. He’d been a couple years older than her and, at age seventeen, had already been to rehab twice. Since his license was suspended, his mother had driven them to the prom in her Oldsmobile, and they’d sat in the backseat as if it were a limo.

“Did you wear a dress?” he asked.

“I did,” she said. “It was black and made of Spanish lace. I found it in a thrift store. It came with a veil, but Sheila wouldn’t let me wear that. In fact, she insisted I wear this really gay red flower in my hair.”

“I bet you looked like a hot tamale,” he said.

“I’ve always wanted to be more Spanish,” she admitted.

“How Spanish are you?”

“A quarter.”

“How was it, being with a fat guy?” he asked. “Were you on top?”

She rolled her eyes. “Never happened.”

“Did you get loaded?”

“We split half a gallon of chocolate milk on the way there. Then he had a panic attack, so I fed him some of my Klonopin.”

He scratched his beard. “We should start a band called Klonopin.”

She brushed by him and retrieved an old canning jar from under the bathroom sink. She filled it with water and then dropped the dentures into the jar and placed it on the counter, next to her toothbrush. When she looked at him she was startled to see tears in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“It’s just a jar.”

He shook his head. “You’re the first woman to touch my teeth without wincing.”

“I clean toilets for a living,” she reminded him. “It’s hard to make me queasy.”

“Makes me want to marry you.”

She laughed. He’d been saying that a lot lately.

*  *  *

IF ONLY THEIR SEX LIFE were less difficult. He referred to his organ as either “a vestigial, functionless appendage” or “the saddest member of the family.” As for hers, he paid it a lot of attention and talked about it as if it were his new favorite painting—how young and fresh; what extraordinary color and composition. “You have the most beautiful pussy I’ve ever seen in person,” he marveled. “And I’ve seen dozens. You can’t imagine the shapes they come in.” Since he’d taken care to qualify the compliment with “in person”—obviously, he’d seen more beautiful pussies in print or on film—she thought it must be true, and it popped into her mind randomly and without warning, while cleaning out someone’s refrigerator or vacuuming under a bed.

He made love to her primarily with his hands and mouth—like a woman would, he said—and also with his voice. She wasn’t read to as a child, which he considered an outrage, and so, after sex—or sometimes before—he read to her from Kipling’s The Jungle Book (his choice), which suited his voice perfectly, because if wolves could talk they would sound just like him, and then short stories by Hemingway, whom he called Uncle Hem, and Flannery O’Connor and Chekhov and some other people she’d never heard of.

On Sundays they climbed the fire escapes of the abandoned mills downtown—their version of hiking—and rolled around on the rooftops. If the weather was nice they smoked cigarettes and took black-and-white photographs of each other with her old Nikon. After one such expedition near the end of August, they were walking back to her apartment when Disgusting veered toward a large pile of garbage someone had left on the street.

“Mind if I sift through this stuff?” he asked.

She waited on a nearby stoop. She heard someone exit the building behind her and blindly scooted over to let the person pass.

“Mona,” a voice said.

It was Janine Stromboni, an old acquaintance from high school, one of the few girls Mona had liked, even though they’d had zero in common. Janine looked much the same: huge hair, liquid eyeliner, fake nails, tight jeans.

“Wow,” Mona said. “You live here?”

“Just moved in,” Janine said, and sat down. “You still smoke?”

Mona fished two out of her bag and lit them both before passing one to Janine. They chatted for a few minutes and then Mr. Disgusting waltzed up carrying a green vinyl ottoman.

“A footrest for my footsore princess,” he said, and gallantly placed it at her feet.

She introduced Disgusting to Janine. To Mona’s relief, he looked good that day, like your average aging hipster. He had a tan, recently dyed black hair, and was sporting a Mexican cowboy mustache. His denim cutoffs were a little on the dirty side, but his shirt was clean, and Janine would never know the shoes he was wearing had been retrieved from a Dumpster.

Janine, however, looked plainly disgusted by Disgusting, and for a split second she saw him through Janine’s eyes: an old dude with dirty hair and no teeth, what Janine would refer to as a “total creature.”

Janine bolted right after the ciggie. The encounter permanently altered Mona’s perception of Disgusting, and from that day forward, depending on the light and her angle of perspective, he alternated between the two versions—aging hipster, total creature, aging hipster, total creature—like one of those postcards that morphs as you turn it in hand.

Her feelings for him, however, didn’t change. If anything, she grew more attached. Like cancer, he had a way of trivializing the other aspects of her life. Things that had previously seemed important were now pointless and absurd, her college career in particular. So, when the time came to register for the fall semester, she blew it off. Her major, studio art with a concentration in photography, seemed like a joke now, especially in busted and depressing-as-hell Hole. If she was going to study art, she reasoned, didn’t it make more sense to go to a real art school in a city that inspired her?

“Fuck art school altogether,” Disgusting said. They were in bed, wearing only their underwear and listening to his collection of psychedelic records, which he’d brought over to her apartment on their fourth date and to which they’d been dancing ever since. Dancing, Disgusting maintained, was the key to salvation.

“I can see going to college for math or science,” he said. “But art? Waste of time. All you really need is persistence and good taste, which you already have. The other junk you can pick up from books.” He smiled and slipped his hand into the front of her underpants. She was wearing one of her days-of-the-week underwear, the green nylon ones with yellow lace trim, the word “Wednesday” stitched across the front in black cursive. It was Friday.

“You smell different today.” He removed his hand and thoughtfully sniffed his fingers. “You smell like . . . hope.”

“What do I usually smell like—despair?”

“Like a river,” he said. “A little-known river in Latvia.”

She pulled at the waistband of his boxers, but he stopped her. “Let’s leave my genitals out of this.”

“Why?”

“Too sad and disappointing.”

“But I like your sad and disappointing genitals,” she assured him. “Besides, they wouldn’t be so sad if you weren’t so mean to them.”

He kissed her hand and placed it on his chest and she traced the words “Homeward Bound” with her finger. “Move in with me,” she heard herself say.

He was silent for a minute. “I’m pretty high maintenance right now.”

“I can handle it.”

He cleared his throat. “Let’s embrace our lone-wolf status. Few people have what we have, which is true and total freedom. No parents, siblings, spouses. No offspring. Nothing to tie us down. We can roam the earth and never feel guilty for leaving anyone behind, for not living up to someone else’s expectations.”

“Sounds lonely,” she said.

“Don’t think of loneliness as absence. If you pay attention, it has a presence you can feel in your body, like hunger. Let it keep you company.”

“That’s not the kind of company I want.”

He kissed her mouth. “We’re lucky we found each other,” he said. “Two orphans.”

*  *  *

SHE VISITED HIM IN HIS room at the Hawthorne twice a week. Once, after a reading session, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, located down the hall, and while he was gone she heard someone tap on his door with what sounded like acrylic fingernails.

“It’s me,” a female voice sang out.

Mona opened the door to a shapely woman with a pretty face and a crazy look in her eye. She looked American Indian—brown skin, tall nose, long black hair parted down the middle—and was wearing a red button-down blouse with open-toed stilettos half a size too small. She’d apparently forgotten to put pants on, but had had the presence of mind to wear underwear. Mona wondered whether she was a prostitute, insane, or both.

“Is he here?” the woman asked.

“He’s in the bathroom,” Mona said.

“Are you a cop?”

“No.” Mona snorted. “Why, do I look like a cop?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, I’m not,” Mona said.

“Just slumming then, I guess,” the woman said, but not unpleasantly.

She shrugged. You may have bigger tits than I do, she thought, but otherwise we’re not so different. We both have jobs that require us to work on our knees.

“Well, tell him I came by,” the woman said as she walked away.

When Mr. Disgusting came back he launched into a story about his near suicide in Oaxaca, where he’d planned to shoot himself in the head with a gun he’d purchased in Mexico City, but had been too distracted by the scorpion on his pillow—

“Do you have a date tonight?” she interrupted.

“What?”

“Some chick came by looking for you.”

“What’d she look like?”

“A pantless Pocahontas.”

“Roxy,” Disgusting said. “She’s a sweetheart. You’d really like her.”

“Is she your girlfriend or something?”

“God, no,” he said. “I look after her and a couple of her friends.”

There was a silence while she turned this over in her mind. “Are you telling me you’re a pimp?” she asked. “Because that would be worse than having no teeth. Much worse.”

“I prefer ‘Gangster of Love,’ ” he said, somewhat smugly.

“Terrific.”

“It’s not what you think,” he said. “Since I work nights, I let them use my bed, provided they change the sheets. I give them a clean, safe place to conduct business. I consider it an act of kindness.”

“What do they give in return?”

“Beer money, actually.” He raised his shoulders in a so-sue-me gesture.

“But you’re sober now,” she reminded him.

“I know,” he said. “Look, this isn’t Taxi Driver, okay? These girls aren’t twelve years old. I’m not the one turning them out. They’d be doing it anyway, only they’d be out God knows where, in the back of a van—”

“Dating a pimp isn’t what I envisioned for myself at this point,” she interrupted. “At any point,” she corrected herself.

“All I ask is that you try not to judge me.”

She sat there for a minute, trying.

“You can leave if you want,” he said. “I’m not holding you hostage here. We could end this right now, in fact. But I don’t think we’re done with each other yet, do you?”

“No,” she said morosely.

“Look, I’ll start packing tomorrow,” he said. “Okay? I’ll move in next week.”

*  *  *

TWO DAYS LATER, IN THE middle of a Thursday night, he called and said he was having trouble reading the writing on the wall. She knew what he meant, and replied that she, too, couldn’t always see what was right in front of her. She needed some distance from it, space—

“No, Mona, there’s actual writing on the wall, but I can’t read it,” he interrupted. She heard panic in his voice. “It’s only there when I turn the lights off and I hold a flashlight to it.”

“What’s it look like?” she asked.

“Like a swarm of bees, scribble-scrabbling.”

“Scribble-scrabbling?”

“Yeah, like, protecting the queen,” he said.

“Are you on mushrooms?”

“It’s ballpoint ink, strangely enough,” he continued, ignoring her. “Red ballpoint.”

“Well, is it cursive, or what?” she asked, at a loss.

“Yeah, only it’s swimming backward. It’s indescribable, really. Could you come over? Just for five minutes? I’m freaking out.”

She sneaked into the back of his building, ran up the stairs, and let herself in with the key he’d given her. He was passed out on his back with his mouth ajar, naked except for a hideous turquoise Speedo, clutching a flashlight against his chest like a rosary. She looked at the walls: nothing there, of course.

She figured he took one Mellaril too many, but in his nightstand drawer she found a dirty set of works surrounded by dirty cotton, and her head started spinning. His arms were bruise free, but his hands and feet were swollen and she saw the beginning of an abscess on his ankle. He must have been putting it in his legs or feet. Fuck!

His notebook was lying open on his pillow and she read the open page:

I have renewed my travel visa to my favorite island. Now I can come and go without being stopped by the border police and accused of trespassing. It is pathetic how much I’ve missed this island’s scenery, its exotic food, its flora and fauna. Tonight I am in my little plane, flying around the island’s perimeter. To amuse myself, I perform tricks: triple corkscrews and low, high-speed flybys—my version of a holding pattern. But I’m running out of gas. The engine keeps cutting in and out, making little gasping noises. I’ll probably crash any minute now.

She was offended that she didn’t see her name in his diary. She tried nudging him awake, but he was out cold. No point in hanging around. She didn’t want to leave, though, without him knowing she’d been there. Rather than write a note, she removed her left shoe and then her purple sock, and slipped the sock over his bare foot. He flinched but never opened his eyes.

Over a week passed. He didn’t call and wouldn’t answer his phone. She waited for her back to go out, which was usually how her despair chose to manifest itself, but instead she became suddenly and bizarrely noise sensitive. At the supermarket she was so overwhelmed by the noise she had to clamp her hands over her ears and hum to herself, sometimes abandoning her shopping cart. After an embarrassing incident at Rite Aid, wherein she asked a woman if there was any way the woman could quiet her baby, who wasn’t even crying, just cooing, she had the bright idea to purchase earplugs, and took to wearing them whenever she left her apartment.

At work she raided people’s refrigerators, often taking breaks in the middle of the day to eat and lounge around in their living rooms, reading magazines or watching television. When there was nothing to eat, she raided medicine cabinets. Xanax, Valium, Vicodin, Darvocet—only one or two of whatever was on the menu, enough to take the edge off and still be able to vacuum. She’d always had a snooping policy—No Letters, No Diaries—but when she was high and itchy she read people’s diaries and personal papers. She read them hungrily, even if they were boring. And they were almost always boring. Afterward, she felt nauseated and ashamed, as if she’d eaten an entire birthday cake and then masturbated on their bed.

It was while reading Brenda Hinton’s weight-loss diary—full of body measurements, scale readings, and daily calorie intakes—that she finally broke down. That is, she had a coughing attack, which triggered a gripping back spasm, the likes of which she’d never felt before. She fell to her knees and lowered herself the rest of the way to the floor, where she lay for twenty minutes or so, staring at a water stain on the ceiling while Brenda Hinton’s dog, a miniature schnauzer with an underbite, calmly licked her elbow. Eventually she reached for the phone and called Sheila in Florida.

“What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

“Back,” she said. “Muscle spasm.”

“Yoga, honey,” Sheila said.

“The downward dog isn’t going to help right now.” The schnauzer seemed to roll his eyes at her. She decided she didn’t like dogs with bangs.

“I never hear from you. What’s going on?”

She spilled the beans: she’d fallen for an addict, someone she met at the needle exchange. They were in a relationship. Yes, a romantic one. He’d been sober for six months. Now he wasn’t. “Blah, blah,” she said. “You’ve seen the movie a million times.”

To her relief, Sheila didn’t offer any banal Freudian interpretations.

“Maybe now you’ve finally hit bottom.” Sheila sighed. “I know you won’t go to Al-Anon, but it’s time to get on your knees and start talking to your H.P.”

“What’s that again?”

“Higher Power, babe.”

“Right,” she said. “Small problem: I don’t believe in God. As you know.”

“What happened to Bob?”

Bob had been her nickname for God when she was a child. She’d talked to Bob like an invisible friend. She’d mentioned this to Sheila in passing once, years ago, and Sheila never forgot it.

“Bob’s dead,” Mona said. “Prostate cancer.”

“He’s not dead, sweetie,” Sheila said sadly. “But forget about Bob. Your H.P. can be anyone. It can be John Belushi or Joan of Arc or Vincent van Gogh. In fact, Van Gogh might be perfect for you. He was tortured by his emotions, never received positive feedback, and died without selling a single painting. If his spirit is out there, it can relieve you of your suffering. So, start now. Get on your knees and ask Vincent for help.”

*  *  *

SHE TOOK THREE DAYS OFF work, two of which she spent resting her back. On the third day she hobbled to the Hawthorne and let herself into his room. He was in the same position as last time, lying diagonally on his bed and wearing only his underwear. His room was trashed: he’d stopped doing laundry, emptying ashtrays, taking out the garbage.

She waved her hand in front of his face, snapped her fingers. He opened his eyes momentarily and whispered, “I’m gonna put my boots on and make something happen.” Then he nodded out again. She envied the blankness on his face.

Her presence never fully registered with him and she sat in the corner for twenty minutes, feeling as invisible as a book louse. It was worse than the way she felt at work, passing in and out of rooms, a ghost carrying a cleaning bucket.

Again, she wanted to let him know she’d been there. She removed an earring and placed it on his nightstand, along with some items from the bottom of her purse—a broken pencil, a ticket stub to a Krzysztof Kieślowski film, several sticky pennies.

It became a kind of ritual. Over the next several weeks she visited his room and left behind little tokens of herself: his favorite pair of her underwear, a lock of her hair, a grocery receipt. When she was feeling bold, she tacked a picture of herself onto the wall near his bed. But now he was never there when she was. She figured he was out and about, making something happen somewhere. Still, leaving the items made her feel less adrift, less beside the point. In fact, she was amazed by how much a few minutes spent in his room—marking her territory, as it were—seemed to straighten her out.

One day he surprised her by being not only there, but awake and lucid. She hadn’t seen him in three weeks and was startled by the amount of weight he’d lost, particularly in his face—his eyes were what they called sunken—and by the fullness of his beard, which he tugged on now as he sat on the edge of his unmade bed.

“Are you here to deliver one of your voodoo objects?”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “I guess I’m worried you’ll forget me.”

He nodded thoughtfully, as if she’d just said something really interesting. She noticed the loaded syringe parked on his nightstand, waiting for takeoff. “Looks like I’m interrupting your routine,” she said.

“I can wait until you leave.”

“Pretend I’m not here,” she said, and felt her chin tremble. She’d missed his voice, his anecdotes, his eyes on her.

“I have to hop around on one leg to find a vein these days. It’s humiliating enough without an audience.” Apparently the feeling wasn’t mutual; he didn’t miss her eyes on him, or anything else about her. In fact, he barely looked at her. She sat down in the armchair.

“Why’d you relapse? Is it because we’re moving in together? If it freaks you out that much, we don’t have to do it.”

He shook his head. “It’ll sound stupid to you.”

“Try me,” she said.

He pursed his lips, shook his head again.

“What’s with the sudden reticence?” she asked. “I thought you were the show-and-tell type.”

He crossed his legs, lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the ceiling. If she were one of those willful, high-maintenance girls, she’d be throwing a tantrum right now—stomping her feet, interrogating him, demanding answers. But then, a high-maintenance girl never would have set foot in the building in the first place, wouldn’t even be seen in the neighborhood. “You know, you’re lucky I’m so easygoing,” she said, stupidly.

“It was free,” he said after a minute. “And it hadn’t been free in twenty years. It’s hard to say no when something is free, especially for someone like me.”

“That’s your excuse?”

“It’s really as simple as that,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you.”

“Is that all you have left?” she asked, nodding toward his nightstand.

“For now,” he said.

“If I buy some more, can we do it together?” she asked. “I have a wicked backache.”

He studied her face for several seconds, finally acknowledging her, but it was quickly followed by indifference and his gaze returned to the floor.

Since he’d apparently chosen drugs over her, even after everything she’d shared with him—her mattress, her secrets, her so-called beautiful whatsit—it seemed only fair that she know what she’d been up against. She pulled forty dollars from her wallet. “Is this enough?” she asked, placing the money on the bed.

“Cut it out,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“I’m serious,” she said.

He picked up the syringe and held it in front of her face. “This is this,” he said emphatically. “It isn’t something else. This is this.”

She blinked at him. “Is that a line from a movie?”

He crossed his arms. “Maybe.”

“You’re being slightly grandiose,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, well, you’re not taking this shit seriously enough,” he said.

*  *  *

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE sitting on his bed and he was inserting his only clean needle—the loaded one on his nightstand—into her arm. “That syringe looks really . . . full,” she said, too late.

“Believe me, it’s barely anything,” he assured her.

The next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor of a stuffy attic. The air smelled like pencil shavings. A fan, some high-powered industrial thing, was on full blast, making a loud whirring noise and blowing a thousand feathers around. It was like the Blizzard of ’78. Then the fan clicked off and she watched the feathers float down, in zigzaggy fashion. They landed on her face and neck and she expected them to be cold but they were as warm as tears, and that’s when she realized she was crying and that the feathers were inside her. So was the fan. The fan was her heart. A voice was telling her to breathe. She opened her mouth and felt feathers fly out. There was a rushing noise in her ears, a mounting pressure in her head, a gradual awareness that something was attached to her. A parasite. She was being licked, or sucked on, by a giant tongue, a wet muscle. The sucking sensation was painful and deeply familiar, but there was no comfort in the familiarity, only dread, panic. She felt herself moving, flailing, trying to get away from it.

When she opened her eyes she felt a presence next to her on the bed. An exhausted female presence. She gasped, turned over, and found Mr. Disgusting sitting on the edge of the bed, scribbling in his little notebook.

“Ah, you’re back,” he said. “You had me worried for a minute.”

She tasted blood in her mouth. “Did something . . . happen?”

He closed his notebook, placed his pencil behind his ear. His pupils were pinned. “I lost you for a few minutes.”

“I passed out?”

“I think you must be allergic to amphetamines.”

“What?”

“You have a cocaine allergy,” he said patiently, as if he were a doctor. “You’re probably allergic to Novocain, too. And caffeine, maybe. Does coffee make your heart race?”

“I thought we were doing . . . heroin.”

“I mix them together,” he said. “I mean, nothing major—just a little pinch. It was meant for me, not you, and I’d forgotten about it.”

“Where are my boots?” she asked.

“You looked like a half-dead fish lying on the pier, just before it gets clobbered.”

“So what,” she said. “Who gives a shit?”

“I do,” he said. “That’s why I took such careful notes. I knew you’d want to know exactly what happened.”

“So what if I died while you were taking notes? You’re obviously too wasted to take me to the hospital.”

“Since when do you care about dying? Besides, I knew you wouldn’t die die. I was keeping my finger on your pulse the whole time. Your heart stopped beating for about five seconds and then it normalized. Let me ask you something: did you see anything? A white light? A tunnel? Dead people?”

“I was inside a vagina,” she said. “A giant vagina, it felt like, but then I realized it was regular sized and I was just really small.”

He smiled and nodded, as if he’d been there with her. “Whose was it?”

“My mother’s, probably.” She shuddered and hugged herself. “Is it cold in here?”

“You have a really weird expression on your face,” he said.

“Do you realize how shitty it is to be born?”

He did some slow-motion blinking.

“It’s excruciating—physically, I mean. There must be some mechanism in the brain that doesn’t allow you to remember, because if you had to live consciously with that memory . . . well, you’d never stop screaming.”

“It’s called birth trauma,” he said, nodding. “But I doubt it compares to other kinds of trauma. You know, like slavery. Or torture.” He gave her a significant look, but she was too nauseated to respond. She got out of bed, hobbled down the hall to the bathroom, locked the door behind her. There it was, her stupid face in the mirror.

Where’s your lipstick, she heard Sheila’s voice say. You look like hell. Why don’t you get on your knees—right here, right now—and talk to your H.P.?

She was on her knees two minutes later, vomiting into the already-filthy toilet. Puking was easy, almost pleasurable—like sneezing. She flushed, examined the ring around the bowl, imagined herself dumping Comet into it, scrubbing with a brush, spraying the lid with Windex, wiping it clean with toilet paper, moving on to the rest of the toilet—the tank, the trunk, the floor around it—

Detach, she ordered herself. Observe. Observe the dirt.

Someday, hopefully, she’d be able to enter a bathroom, even on drugs, and not envision herself on her hands and knees, scrubbing the baseboards with a damp sponge—

And that’s when she noticed Mr. Disgusting’s handwriting right next to the light switch:

If we had beans,

we could make beans and rice,

if we had rice.

*  *  *

BACK IN HIS ROOM, HE was still in bed, propped up against the filthy wall with a belt around his arm. His body was slack, his eyes half open. She wondered if he’d had more dope all along, or if he’d gotten it from one of his neighbors while she was in the bathroom.

“Sometimes I wish I were made of clay,” he mumbled.

He was miles away now, in his little plane, she imagined, flying around his favorite island. She put her boots on and he opened his eyes and said, “No, no, no—stay.” He patted the space next to him on the bed. “I’ll read you a story. Chekhov. ‘The Lady with the Dog.’ ”

“I’m sick of stories.”

In fact she felt a little like Anna Sergeyevna right now, after she and Gurov have sex for the first time. Disgraced, fallen, disgusted with herself. Aware that her life is a joke. Anna gets all moody and dramatic, but Gurov doesn’t give a fuck, and just to make it clear how bored he is by her display, the watermelon is mentioned. There it is on the table. He slices off a piece and slowly eats it, and thirty minutes tick by in silence.

Mona laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“That’s who you remind me of,” she said. “Gurov and his watermelon. You don’t really care about me. I’m just your boring mistress.”

He rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you at least a little high?”

“I read your diary,” she said.

“Of course you did,” he said. “And?”

“I’m not your favorite island.”

“There are better places to be sober,” he said, as if continuing an old conversation. “In the next life I’ll have an Airstream next to the Rio Grande, a silver bullet with yellow curtains. I’ll wash my clothes in the river and hang them on a clothesline. I’ll have vegetables to tend, books to read, a hammock, a little dog named Chek—”

He nodded off, his mouth still twisted around the word. His voice, she noticed, had lost its teeth. She crept over him on the bed, carefully unbuttoned his pants, worried her hand into his boxers. What the fuck are you doing, she asked herself. He’s gone, you fool. It’s over.

*  *  *

FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS she mentally projected Mr. Disgusting’s face onto whatever surface she was cleaning, just for the pleasure of scrubbing it off. The procedure worked best on tiled bathroom walls. She lathered the tiles with Ajax, then, covering her mouth with the collar of her T-shirt to guard against bleach throat, she scrubbed out his left eye, obliterated his right with a furious scribbling motion, and then expanded her strokes to remove his mocking eyebrows and long black hair. She scrubbed vigorously, her hands sweating in the rubber gloves, her breath moistening her T-shirt. When his face was gone at last, she doused the tiles with water from the tap. Her mind often seemed to clear itself of debris, and in its place, she felt the pleasant but slightly irritating sensation of having a word on the tip of her tongue.

A month later her anger suddenly dissipated and was replaced again by longing. So he’d almost killed her and then told her she looked like a fish—big deal, people made mistakes. She was getting over it. Besides, he’d apologized profusely via voicemail, and on her doorstep he’d left a Japanese dictionary in which he’d circled the words for contrite, shame, repentant, confession, apology, remorse, touch, please, help, and telephone. That certainly counted for something.

It was spring now. No more shitty snow. People were pulling their heads out of their asses and checking each other out. Even her mailman, whose beard had been long enough to flap in the wind, was now clean-shaven and winking at her occasionally. Perhaps Mr. Disgusting had gone in for some spring cleaning himself? He’d been in rehab this time last year, and had given her that shard of glass as soon as he’d gotten out, and by the time summer rolled around they were rolling around on rooftops and feeding each other Goobers. Maybe this time she’d convince him to move to California with her and they could avoid another winter in Hole.

She dialed his number but his phone was disconnected. She stopped by the Hawthorne a few times, but he was never in his room. She checked his other haunts—the Owl Diner, the Lowell Public Library, and the Last Safe and Deposit, a bank turned dive bar—all without luck. Since he loved getting mail, she sent him a postcard of a Henry Darger drawing featuring little girls with penises. On the back she wrote, “How’s it goin? You’re prolly just hanging around, being rad. I miss you a super ton, dude. I’m like totally lost without you. I fully want to make out with you again.” He loved it when she wrote in her native tongue.

*  *  *

WEEKS PASSED AND HE DIDN’T call. She considered burning the Fat Fuck drawings, but fuck it, she liked them too much. She wound up burning herself, instead, with a curling iron belonging to one of her clients. Carrie Dailey, a divorcée in her forties, owner of a hair salon in Andover, lover of spider plants. The curling iron was professional grade, some newfangled thing with multiple temperature settings. She’d been staring at it for weeks without knowing why. Well, now you know why, she thought. Now you know.

It made a ticking noise as it heated up. Where to put it? The crack of her ass came to mind, followed by the backs of her thighs, the inside of her mouth, her scalp. Something along the hairline might be nice.

She spat on it. Four hundred forty degrees, the dial said, though she didn’t see how that was possible. Holding it loosely in her hand, she let it hover over her left forearm, felt the familiar giddiness in the pit of her stomach. Then she brought it in for a bumpy landing. It was so hot it felt like ice at first, and she could smell her arm hair burning. She removed it, watched her skin pucker, and then touched down again, closer to her wrist, and counted to three.

Very hot, indeed!

For the sake of symmetry, she switched hands and burned her right arm. Nothing serious, just a few baby burns. There was something missing, though, some satisfaction she used to feel. Maybe it was simply too blunt an instrument. With a razor she could dictate size and shape and depth—she had more control over the outcome. And, because it was more active, and there was actual penetration involved, she’d felt more . . . engaged. Present.

Still, she was satisfied enough to unplug the iron and went back to dusting the living room. She’d been dragging ass before, but now she felt light on her feet, relaxed, expansive. Even the spider plants didn’t bother her. “Though I prefer rubber plants,” she imagined telling Mr. Disgusting. “The simplicity of their leaves, their shameless way of showing themselves, how they can be pushed only so far before their leaves crack and bleed, how their blood looks like mother’s milk—”

That’s what was missing, she realized then. Blood.

On the way out she paused at the console table in the entryway, straightened all the magazines and mail, swept the loose change and keys into a drawer. She pocketed the cash Carrie had left for her and glanced at the personalized notepad lying there, the words “Mental Note” printed across the top. If Sheila were here she’d draw a smiley face on the pad, along with something like “Happy Solstice, Carrie! Hope you’re well!”

She wrote,

Dear Vincent,

You may have witnessed my little episode. I know you understand, what with that stunt you pulled with your ear. Please relieve me of my suffering.

Pathetic, she thought, and tore off the sheet. She crumpled it up, but she didn’t want to throw it away. She smoothed it out on the table, folded it into a small square, and then wandered around Carrie’s yard, looking for a rock to put it under.

*  *  *

TWO WEEKS LATER, ON HER twenty-fourth birthday, she received a large cardboard box in the mail. No return address, but she recognized Mr. Disgusting’s cramped handwriting and felt a flutter in her chest. At last, he’d come to his senses. And, he remembered her birthday. Not bad for an old man. No doubt he sent her something he’d found in the trash, but whatever—she’d take it.

She brought the box to bed and sat with her back against the brick wall. Inside the box were two smaller boxes, one much larger than the other, but each carefully wrapped in wrinkled maps of her native state. Nice touch. With a red Sharpie he’d drawn a heart around her birthplace, Santa Monica, and another around her hometown, Torrance. She wondered what had possessed him; he definitely wasn’t the heart-drawing type.

Inside the first box was everything she’d ever given him: love letters; purposely bad cowboy poetry; several drawings of her hands and feet; an eight-inch lock of hair she’d meant to donate to Locks of Love; a deck of hand-illustrated German playing cards; a small lamp made of Japanese silk thread; and a locket with a skeleton keyhole, the doors of which opened to reveal a photograph of her very beautiful left eye.

The other box contained photographs of her box, photographs for which she’d reluctantly posed atop his bed at the Hawthorne last summer. He’d never showed them to her, but then she’d never asked to see them, either. She’d examined herself with a hand mirror before, but there was something about the pictures that unsettled and sickened her. It was like looking at graphic photographs of her own internal organs.

Happy birthday to me, she thought. Thanks for negating our entire relationship.

Perhaps she was more sentimental than she was willing to acknowledge. Never in a million years would she send someone a box like this.

Before the package, her plans that evening had been to order pho from the Viet Cafe and watch Liquid Sky on VHS. Instead, she opened a bottle of Cabernet, brought it to bed, and emptied the contents of the first box onto the comforter. She picked up a love letter. Her handwriting looked frumpy and reminded her of uncombed hair. She rummaged through the rest of the contents, and that’s when she found the note written on the back of a beaver shot:

My Little Wallaby,

I’m leaving the planet shortly. I apologize for the tragic ending. I always told you I wouldn’t make it past fifty. Please don’t take my departure personally. You know very well it has nothing to do with you. My pain is ancient and I’m tired of carrying it around. That’s all this is.

Enclosed are all the precious gifts you’ve given me. I only wish I could take them with me. I would have left them here, but I couldn’t stand the thought of these vultures picking through it. And I thought it would be nice for you to have both sides of our correspondence. How often does that happen? This way our biographers will have to do less running around.

Please don’t despair. I am toothless, dickless, and twice your age—be happy to be rid of me. You need someone younger and more optimistic, who can fuck you properly and perhaps get you pregnant someday.

Some unsolicited advice on my way out: get the hell out of here. You have no real ties here so it’s stupid for you to stay. The reason you’re so comfortable in other people’s homes, Mona, is because you don’t have one. Keep searching.

Go to the desert. I’ve always wanted to live in New Mexico, and I can easily picture you living in Taos, a small town I passed through when I was your age. Why not move there and start over? Rent an adobe casita. Paint some pictures. Join a healthy cult of some kind. Get a guru. Surround yourself with [illegible]. I really want you to be—

*  *  *

THE SENTENCE ENDED THERE. SHE flipped the photograph over, hoping he’d finished the thought, but there was only the graphic image of her vag in all its squishy, purple glory.

She didn’t believe he’d actually killed himself. He was too attached to his problems. She’d always maintained that if everyone were forced to throw their problems in the garbage, each person would show up at the dump the following day and sift through any amount of muck to find them again. He’d probably just moved out of the hotel, gotten his own place like they’d always talked about, only without her. Maybe he’d taken up with one of his whores. An addict like him. Someone who accepted him as he was, or whatever the hell. More likely he was still living at the Hawthorne, not having the wherewithal to secure real housing, and sending her this box was just his way of saying goodbye. Moving on.

Well, it would be easy enough to find out. All she had to do was walk down to the Hawthorne and look up at his window. If his blue curtains were still hanging, and his plastic goose lamp still visible, that would tell her something, wouldn’t it?

Plus, it was hydrangea season, so presumably he was “working” again. If she hurried she might catch him leaving. He usually killed a couple of hours at the Owl Diner before going to work at 1:00 A.M. She pictured him sitting at the counter in his uniform—forest-green ski cap, matching jumpsuit, oxblood boots with orange laces—drinking coffee and chatting up the waitress. Perhaps she’d sit next to him at the counter and order a lemon square. “You don’t take pictures of someone’s pussy and then send them back, you dumb fuck,” she imagined lecturing him. “And you don’t fake your own death to avoid seeing them again. I understand the impulse—who doesn’t want to start over from scratch? But we can start over together. I still love you. Didn’t you get my postcard?”

She fortified herself with two more glasses of Cabernet, retrieved her binoculars from a kitchen drawer, and then slipped into her skunk coat and zippered it to the throat. The coat was calf length and made of synthetic black fur with a jagged white stripe going up the front and down the back. It was one of the few items she had that belonged to her mother, who used to wear it around the house, probably to ward off sexual advances from Mona’s father, but now Mona wore it wherever she went. It worked—people generally steered clear.

The coat was too warm for the weather, but she didn’t care. She walked down Pawtucket Street, past her favorite pharmacy and the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, past all the funeral homes—O’Donnell, Archambault, Martin, Laurin & Son—before turning down Merrimack Street, crossing the bridge over the canal and cutting through Kerouac Park, where a group of dumbasses were hanging out, passing a bottle.

She could always smell the Hawthorne before she saw it—surrounded on three sides by a dry-cleaning plant, a sausage factory, and a Cambodian restaurant, it smelled like a combination of starch, chorizo, and fish sauce, which for some reason always made her crave donuts with maple frosting. She avoided the lobby, walked to the side of the building, and stood gazing up at his third-story window, where the goose’s belly was glowing, its orange beak pointing east, toward the river.

Aha, she thought. He lives.

There was something on his window ledge. A perishable item, probably. Since he didn’t have his own refrigerator and hated storing food in the community kitchen, he often kept things like milk and cheese on the ledge, when it was cold enough to keep from spoiling. This was only effective in winter, obviously, and it was now April, so chances were the item had been there for months, long forgotten. She stared at it with her binoculars and saw that it wasn’t dairy, but rather meat: a roasted chicken with a syringe stuck in it. She lowered the binoculars, mystified.

She felt eyes on her. After scanning the windows she saw someone staring down from the second floor. A tall, gaunt man. He waved at her. She waved back. Mr. Disgusting! He was probably renting his bed to Roxy, killing time in someone else’s room. She trained her binoculars on his face.

Unfortunately, it was only Ray, a deaf crackhead originally from Georgia and an acquaintance of Mr. Disgusting’s, who claimed he wandered out of a Carson McCullers novel. Ray accosted her in the lobby once; he’d been broke and base-crazy and handed her a picture of a dollar bill, which was his way of asking for money. When she indicated that she, too, was broke, he karate-chopped her on the shoulder and then ran out of the building, wailing. He later apologized by handing her a drawing of a frowning stick figure holding a gun to its head, with the word “sory” scrawled underneath. She’d framed the note and hung it in her bathroom, next to the toilet.

He was frowning at her now, in fact. She lowered her binoculars and he disappeared from the window. Could be he was coming out to greet her, and she wasn’t in the mood for a Ray encounter. She walked to the front of the building and turned south, toward the Owl. If Disgusting wasn’t there she’d order a slice of coconut cake to go and call it a night.

The Owl was on Appleton Street, where the hookers sometimes hung out, but the only people on the sidewalk were two Puerto Rican yo-yos.

“Yo,” one of them called out.

“Yo,” she replied.

“Yo,” the other one said. “What you need?”

“All set,” she said.

“You in business?” the other asked, looking her up and down.

She was surprised—she wasn’t exactly wearing business attire—and oddly flattered. “I’m closed on Fridays,” she said, and quickened her pace.

The neon sign read “OW DINER,” the l having shorted out over the winter. She smoothed her hair down and entered the lopsided dining car. The booths were empty and there were only two people at the long Formica counter, a drunk with a dented forehead at the far end, and a dark-haired woman wearing bright-blue patent leather stripper shoes at the closest corner. No Disgusting. She wasn’t used to seeing the place so deserted. On Monday mornings, which was when she usually ate there, every table was occupied by old folks from the nursing home down the street—the Scrod Squad, she called them, since all they seemed to order was baked scrod.

She took a seat at the middle of the counter, ordered cake from the bored, pear-shaped waitress, and then sat there, stroking the fur on her sleeve and staring at the scratches inscribed in the Formica. The only words she could make out were “4-eva and eva”; the rest was chicken scratch.

“I smell a skunk,” the woman at the end said.

Mona raised her head toward the kitchen, where a gray-haired man was scraping the grill with a cigarette in his mouth.

“Seriously,” the woman said louder. “Something really reeks.”

Mona reluctantly looked in her direction. The woman sat hunched over a plate of half-eaten pancakes, the contents of her purse scattered all over the counter. Her black hair was teased on one side and she still had baby fat on her arms and neck.

“Roxy,” Mona said.

“Maura,” Roxy said.

“Mona.”

“Right. Sorry.” She stood and walked toward Mona, teetering slightly in her platform sandals. She was wearing her signature look—long shirt, no pants. Her hair wasn’t teased on purpose, Mona saw now, but rather tangled around a wad of fluorescent green gum, and she appeared to have something in her eye. Both eyes, actually. As she came closer Mona realized she was wearing about eighteen layers of mascara on fake eyelashes, which made her lashes look like furry little critters.

“I’m surprised you remember me,” Mona said.

“He had pictures of you all over his wall. I used to stare at them while I was—” She waved her hand and then reached up to straighten one of the critter’s legs. Mona noted her use of the past tense and felt her throat close.

“Anyway, you probably heard. He’s gone. His body hasn’t been found yet, but he always said that’s the way he wanted it. He must have crawled into the woods somewhere.”

She was struck with a sudden awareness of her nipples. They felt chafed, as if she’d been nursing a bearded man for the past thirty minutes. Then she realized it was loneliness. Which made perfect sense: nothing made her lonelier than a mouth on her nipple.

Loneliness is a presence you can feel in your body, she heard his voice say. She crossed her arms, thrust her hands into her armpits. Her head felt heavy and she considered resting it on the counter.

“You look totally cracked out,” Roxy said. “Why you wearing a bathrobe?”

“I’m fat,” she said.

“I take it you didn’t know,” Roxy said. “Must be a shock. I wasn’t surprised, though. He was pretty miserable.” She tapped her foot.

“Take a load off,” Mona said. “You’re making me nervous.”

She sat down. Her thighs dimpled where they met the stool. Her feet dangled slightly, not quite reaching the floor, and the leather on her shoes was marbled.

“What’s with the binoculars?” Roxy asked, pointing to where they sat on the counter.

“Bird-watching,” Mona said.

Roxy frowned. “I’m gonna miss the crazy fucker. That crazy voice’a his. Those stories he liked to read. He opened my eyes to a lotta shit. Whole other worlds. He used to read to me from this big fat book on myths? Persephone, Narcissus, Eros.”

She winced inwardly. Just another of his whores—that’s all Mona had been. She’d fooled herself into thinking they’d had some special bond. She looked over her shoulder toward the exit. Get away, she told herself. Make some excuse. You don’t need to hear anything more about it. She swiveled away from the counter and stood up.

“Where you going?”

“I’m cursed,” Mona said. “You probably shouldn’t be talking to me.”

Roxy looked irritated. “Don’t be like that,” she said seriously.

Mona swallowed and sat down again.

“I was gonna say—about Persephone—you know, I think about her a lot, ’cause I been tricked by pimps like that, but I don’t have anyone making deals with the devil for me, you know? I don’t have a mother, or anyone in my corner. I gotta look out for myself, not let myself get tricked. I gotta stop eating these pomegranate seeds, you know?” She licked her lips. “I think that’s the message.”

Mona shook her head. “The message is that you’re supposed to spend time in hell every year,” she said. “It’s, like, necessary.”

Roxy snorted. “For what?”

“Growth,” she said. “Development. Happiness.”

“I don’t know about you,” Roxy said, “but I live in hell year-round. I’m not some tourist.”

“Neither am I,” Mona said.

“I eat pancakes to get the taste of come out of my mouth.”

“Yeah, well, my mouth gets fucked, too—daily.”

Roxy looked at her sideways. “By what?”

“Bleach,” Mona said.

“You drink bleach?”

She laughed. “I clean houses. I inhale a lot of toxic fumes. It leaves a residue in my mouth and throat. I call it bleach throat.”

“You’re a maid? He never told me that.”

“He was embarrassed by it, I think,” Mona said. “Which is puzzling on a variety of levels.”

Roxy petted the critter on her right lid with the top of her forefinger. The gesture seemed to soothe her. Mona suddenly longed for a furry critter of her own. Tugging at the fur on her sleeve didn’t make her feel any better. She looked and felt like roadkill.

“Anyway, I saw him a week ago,” Roxy said. “I walked into his room and he was in bed with the television going. Old reruns of Soul Train—his favorite. He loved jerking off to that show.”

“I know,” Mona said, though this was the first she’d heard of it. Her eyes filled up. Don’t let it out just yet, she ordered herself. But the tears leaked out of her anyway, like sweat, and there was that feeling in her nipples again, the pain tugging from the inside, first one and then the other and then both at once.

Roxy reached over and adjusted the collar of Mona’s coat. “My mother used to wear a fur coat,” she said. “Real fur. She wore it while she worked. She’d just lay there on this dirty mattress, in the coat and nothing else, and the men would wait in line.”

“Jesus,” Mona said.

“Anyway, he wanted people to think he was all tough and stuff, but he was a total softie. He was like me—he felt things,” she said. “I can’t be in a room and not feel things.”

“Really?” Mona asked. “What are you feeling now?”

“Your sadness,” she said. Her face suddenly changed expressions—her mouth and chin drooped slightly and her eyes misted over. Then she swallowed hard and blinked several times, fighting back tears. It took Mona a second to realize Roxy was mirroring her expression.

“I feel things!” the drunk at the end shouted.

“Shut it, Carlos,” the waitress said.

“I have feelings,” he said in a loud whisper.

“I’ll give you a feeling if you don’t simmer down,” the waitress said.

“You think you’re better than me,” he said, to no one in particular. “But you’re no better.” He turned and looked at Mona. “You’re no better,” he repeated.

“Okay,” Mona said.

“Guess what, Carlos,” the waitress said. “It’s sleepy time.”

These were magic words, apparently, as he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a child, stood up, put on his coat, and walked to the door. “I’ve been to Egypt,” he murmured on his way out. “Where the fuck have you been?”

“He’s very charismatic,” Mona said, after he was gone.

“He’s Portagee,” the waitress explained, and set a plastic container containing the cake on the counter. “It’s mangled on one side, so it’s on the house.” She disappeared through a set of swinging doors. Mona caught a whiff of marijuana coming from the kitchen.

“Is that why you do drugs—because you feel things?” Mona asked.

“I’m not addicted to drugs. I’m addicted to this.” She gestured to her outfit.

“To not wearing pants?”

“Hooking,” Roxy said, unfazed. “It’s very addicting, believe it or not. I used to go to meetings for it.”

“Hookers Anonymous.”

“I kept relapsing. It’s really hard to work a regular job after you’ve done this awhile.” She reached up and stroked the critter on her left lid. Mona imagined the critters disengaging themselves from her eyelids and walking across Roxy’s face in opposite directions, disappearing into the damp jungle of her hair, where they’d eventually meet one another, embrace, and start mating.

“What’s your D.O.C.?” Roxy asked.

“Pardon?”

“Drug of choice.”

“Rubber cement,” Mona said. “And Liquid Paper.”

“For reals?”

“I was hooked on that stuff in elementary school. The glue was like coke, and the Liquid Paper was like crack.”

“You musta killed a lotta brain cells.”

“I never thought about it that way.”

“So what’s your D.O.C. now?” Roxy asked, swinging her legs slightly.

“I don’t have one.”

“There’s gotta be something,” she said. “And don’t say something retarded, like ice cream.”

Mona thought about it briefly and decided to be candid. “My smell,” she said. She wished she were in her apartment now, lying on the couch in front of the television with her hand down her pants, alternately touching herself and sniffing her fingers. “You know, down there.”

Roxy laughed. “You must really like yourself.”

“Yeah, you’d think so,” Mona said. “Actually, I’ve been something of a panty sniffer my whole life.” She routinely sniffed the underwear of her female clients; she didn’t go rummaging through the hamper, but if it was on the floor and she had to pick it up, she usually gave it a tentative sniff before throwing it in the laundry basket. “I’ve never told anyone that, by the way.”

“You shouldn’t,” Roxy said.

Mona shrugged. She expected to feel exposed, but didn’t.

Roxy leaned toward her and lowered her voice. “Do you, like, get off on it, or what?”

“Well, no. But it definitely alters my brain chemistry. It sort of stimulates and tranquilizes me at the same time.”

“Like a speedball?”

“Not as intense, obviously, and minus the, uh, life-threatening element.”

“I heard about your close call,” she said, and looked at the counter. “He felt bad about it.”

“Well, good, he should have. I was flopping around like a possessed person and he was all cavalier about it afterward.”

“He said you had a religious experience or something like that.”

“I was born again,” she said. “Literally.”

Roxy pointed to the cake. “You have a sweet tooth, like him.”

“It’s my birthday.”

“Aw,” Roxy said. “And here you are, all alone.” She reached over and touched Mona’s sleeve. Mona felt like punching her in the throat suddenly.

“I’m not alone,” Mona said.

They sat for a minute in silence, during which the words “I’m not alone” echoed in Mona’s head. She felt pain in her nipples again.

“Listen,” Mona said. “I’m thinking of leaving Lowell and moving to the desert.”

“To live?”

“No, to die,” she said. “Of course to live. Anyway, you can come with me, if you want. We can clean houses there. Start a business.”

“Thanks, but I wouldn’t last five minutes. I can barely wash my own hair.” She fingered the knot in her hair.

“Peanut butter might get that out,” Mona said.

“I’ll give you my underwear to sniff, if you’re jonesing,” Roxy said. “Might make you feel better.”

Mona laughed. “Enabler.”

“I’m serious.”

“It doesn’t work that way. It’s sort of a private thing—”

But Roxy slipped off the stool and strode toward the bathroom.

Mona swiveled toward Roxy’s backside, baffled. Did she really think Mona wanted her crusty underwear?

Time to go, she told herself. Sleepy time! She placed a few singles on the counter, grabbed the cake, and left before Roxy came back.

*  *  *

THE “DEAR VINCENT” LETTERS WERE becoming a habit. She wrote them in people’s kitchens. They were quick and dirty, whatever popped into her head, even if it was just a string of unrelated words. Often it was a question: Why do I feel the desire to perform minor surgery on myself? Should I go back on my meds? Why am I here? She sealed the notes in ziplock bags and left them in people’s yards. Under the porch, usually, or under a big rock. She liked the idea of someone finding them years from now, wondering who wrote them, how they got there. Although, she was beginning to feel a little like Emily Dickinson.

But now that was over, too. Judy, her new boss, hired a bunch of Colombians and made everyone work in teams. The main client, it turned out, was the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which required cleaning houses condemned for unsanitary conditions. Hence the shit heap in Pawtucketville last week. Its windows and light fixtures had been coated with what looked like honey but was actually nicotine, and so Mona and the Colombians—Judy of course wasn’t there—had been forced to clean in this weird brown darkness. Mona had opted for the kitchen, which she’d estimated would take a solid sixteen hours. The counters were littered with rotting garbage and unopened mail from the seventies, and for some reason there was dry dog food all over the floor, and not just a few cups but pounds and pounds of it, far too much to sweep or vacuum. The only thing to do was to shovel it into a trash can, which she began doing in earnest, and that’s when she noticed that it was alive and moving.

She dropped the shovel and called Judy. “Maggots” was all she could say.

“Pretend it’s white rice,” Judy said.

Thanks, Coach.

She’d continued shoveling in the dark, muttering to herself and listening to the Colombians laughing and singing in various parts of the house, and she must have shoveled herself into some kind of trance, because the old thoughts were coming back, telling her to fill her coat pockets with rocks and walk into the Merrimack River.

Later, when Mona was at home and in bed, Judy called and said, “I’m sorry, Mona, but I’m going to have to let you go.”

“Let me go?” Mona asked. “Where?”

“You’re burned out,” Judy said. “I need someone who can put their hustle pants on.”

“Hustle pants?”

“It’s not personal,” she said. “I have to think of my business right now.”

“You mean immigrant pants, right?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll still give you a good reference.”

Mona hung up and stared at Disgusting’s suicide note next to the alarm clock. She read the last paragraph as she did every night before turning off the lamp. “Go to the desert. I’ve always wanted to live in New Mexico, and I can easily picture you living in Taos, a small town I passed through when I was your age. Why not move there and start over? Rent an adobe casita. Paint some pictures. Join a healthy cult of some kind. Get a guru . . .”

*  *  *

A WEEK LATER SHE KNOCKED on her landlord’s door. He answered wearing a sweater vest and reading glasses and holding a bowl of what looked like soggy Apple Jacks.

“I’m moving out, Mr. Lim.”

“When?”

“Next week.”

“Your eyes is confuse,” he said.

She didn’t know what to say. “Yeah.” She nodded. “Hey, you want to buy my bed? It’s only a few months old and it was really expensive. I’ll give you a discount.”

“Your bed?”

“Yep.”

“Your bed.”

He had a habit of repeating whatever she said, placing the emphasis on different words.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred,” she said. “Cash only.”

He clucked his tongue.

“It’s a good deal.”

He wound up buying it for one of his nephews. He was also kind enough to help her drag most of her belongings out of the apartment. They arranged it all on the sidewalk: couch, armchair, kitchen table, nightstand, lamps. She decorated the tree in the courtyard with her winter clothes and shoes, which seemed to delight Mr. Lim, as he took pictures of the tree with a disposable camera. Aside from a holey blanket, some old canvases, and a frying pan, it was all gone three hours later.

The only items she had trouble parting with were her books, knickknacks, and Eurekas. The books and knickknacks would fit in the bed of her truck, no problem, but not the vacuums.

She abandoned three at the curb, but spent one last evening with Gertrude, her baby. She pushed her around the empty apartment and then parked her in the kitchen and stared at her while she drank too much wine. Unable to bear the thought of someone else’s hands on her, she considered drowning Gertrude in the Merrimack, but wound up carrying her down an alley instead. It was after midnight and the alley was empty and smelled of ripe garbage.

First she tried bludgeoning Gertrude with a brick, but the only damage she did was to her own ring finger, so she picked Gertrude up by the handle and smashed the vacuum against the pavement over and over like a guitar. It felt good to put her whole body into something and she worked up a nice rhythm.

Before long the bottom plate flew off, and then the belt and brush roll. She splintered the red plastic, put a few dings in the metal hood, and, after several minutes, heard a loud crack—the motor. By then she was panting and her legs and feet were tingling and she could feel her heart beating in her entire face. Who knew it could be so gratifying—so exhilarating—to destroy something you love, to ruin it for anyone else?