Brief Encounters with the Enemy

APPETITE

Things were not going as I had hoped. My sole purpose for interrupting my manager at this late hour on this Monday night was to inquire, respectfully, about an increase in my wage. But the conversation had somehow reversed itself, and now here I was standing awkwardly in the doorway of the restaurant office having to defend my very competency at my job. All through my shift I had entertained and distracted myself by imagining the scene in exacting detail: the gentle (or perhaps the assertive) knock on the office door, the disarming smile, the small talk about the weather, and then the casual introduction to the larger issue at hand, the larger issue that I had come to talk about with all reasonableness; the larger issue being eight to ten. That was how I had planned to say it: “I’m looking to move from eight to ten an hour.” Simply put. Or perhaps, I’d thought, I would say, “I’m looking to move to …” Or “I’m looking to move up to, up from, up toward …” Somewhere I had heard that it’s best to put your goals into clear terms, straightforward terms, and that once those goals had been thus stated, all would follow accordingly. In the rare instance that things did not follow accordingly, the onus was, of course, on you and your own ineptitude. I think I had heard it discussed on television. Or I had read it somewhere. Or my father had told me. The counsel had seemed wise at the time, and I’d been determined to remember it if ever an occasion presented itself.

So I stood in the doorway as my manager reclined in his chair with his fingers to his chin, staring up at the dark skylight, where rain was pattering. It had rained every day for a week. They said it was going to rain every day for another week. Fall was always like this in our city. But this fall was worse than others, they said. Soon it would be winter. “Business is bad, Ike,” the manager had told me briskly, effortlessly, as if he had been rehearsing the scene all night long also and was waiting for me to ask so that he could answer and rid himself of the refrain in his head. Not knowing how to respond, I said nothing, one foot crossed uncomfortably in front of the other in what had been, initially, an attempt at bold informality but, as time passed, quickly began to feel like an effeminate posture that would help only in the case against my confidence and assertiveness. And then my manager broke the awful silence by reminding me that two meals were returned by customers that evening. Why had two separate meals been returned, he wanted to know. The clock on his desk read one A.M. I wondered whether, if I had chosen to speak to him earlier that night, he would have been in a different mood, a more conciliatory mood, and would not have dismissed my request so swiftly. Next to the clock were lists of the various ingredients that needed to be ordered; check marks in small boxes indicated the amounts. We dealt in volume: crates, jugs, sacks. The manager’s pen was uncapped. His shirt was white except for a trail of red dots, presumably tomato sauce, running along one sleeve from elbow to shoulder. Or perhaps the dots were blood.

“A grilled cheese sandwich was returned tonight, Ike,” my manager said. He stated it as if genuinely interested, philosophically speaking. “A grilled cheese sandwich and a plate of linguine. Why were they returned, Ike?”

I did not know why, and my face tightened with false concern. I realized that if I did not say something convincing, and say it fast, I would implicate myself by admitting not only that I had made defective, inedible food but that I had so little awareness of my job that I could not even recall why or when such an error had occurred. “I’ll have to look into that” was all I said, as if I had my own underlings to consult. The clock now read 1:03. The manager’s face was round and kind, with puffy cheeks, and in the office light it looked for some reason even kinder than usual. I should change the subject, I thought. And I should uncross my feet so that I don’t look like a supplicant. I should talk about the rain and ask him when he thinks it will stop. It will make him think that I respect his authority. And then I will come back in a week and ask again for a raise — or in two weeks, maybe, not more than three, at some point in the near future, when everything has been forgotten and no meals have been returned and the rain has stopped and I have come up with a good response for when he tells me that business is bad.

But before I could say anything, my manager swiveled around in his chair, faced his desk, placed his hands lightly on top of the piles of paper there, as if they were a Ouija board and he was reading a signal from the beyond. Then he shuffled the papers around. Very rapidly, he shuffled the papers. “Seven-twenty-three the grilled cheese sandwich was returned,” my manger read. “And eleven-fifty-two the plate of pasta came back.”

Those times seemed so long ago. My manager looked up at me with his kind face, almost angelic. A baby face with puffy cheeks.

Answer him! But all I could think was that I was in the restaurant at 7:23. I was in the restaurant at 11:52. And here I am at 1:07, still in the restaurant. Tomorrow, I thought, I will be here. And the day after that. And the day after that is my day off. But then I will be back.

“Is it really that complicated, Ike, for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” the kind face asked.

Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me. Years prior, at my high school graduation, I had sat docilely in the audience and watched the valedictorian onstage in a lavender cap and gown read a tedious and patronizing speech that I knew for a fact had been patched together from a book of stock lectures. “There are some of us here this evening who will be heading off to college,” he declared, “others who are going into the military, and still others who are entering directly into the workforce.” As if all those choices were equal. His voice, amplified by the microphone, sounded exceptionally powerful and confident, and I imagined that if he were to remove that ridiculous lavender gown, we would discover that he was naked underneath, and that he had, as I well knew from the locker room, broad shoulders and a broad chest and was not at all embarrassed to be seen naked. While beneath my billowy gown was a small-large frame, short legs but long arms, soft flesh but hard knees and elbows, with no real delineation between torso and limbs or between limbs and extremities: the body of a hamster. I was irritated by the valedictorian’s speech and his three categories of life and his attempts at anecdotal humor that were supposed to seem spontaneous and ingratiate him with the parents but instead sounded contrived and wooden. The parents laughed and were won over. Sitting in the audience with five hundred other students, I had the unsettling awareness that I had already been consigned to a life of mediocrity by the very fact that I had not been the one chosen to stand on the podium. There was a single opportunity at having that happen in one’s life, and I had missed it. Nothing could make up for that now. I would forever be indistinguishable from all the others who had not been chosen. I was just one of five hundred. One of five hundred million. I am the addressee, I kept thinking as the valedictorian droned on. I will always be the addressee.

I turned nineteen working at the restaurant, making $4.50 an hour. I turned twenty at $4.75. And twenty-one at $5.75. “This is just a stopping-through place,” a busboy had told me on the day he quit. He was eighteen, blond hair, blue eyes, movie-star handsome with a dimple in his chin. He spoke with the expertise of someone who had done nothing to earn that expertise. I wanted to ask him for advice anyway. Instead I said, “You got that right, man,” as if I were also an expert on the subject of life’s trajectory. For my twenty-fifth birthday ($7.50), the waitresses got everyone to chip in to surprise me with a cake. “Happy birthday, Ike!” they sang at the end of the night. The twenty-five candles overwhelmed the cake. The flame was wide and significant; I saw the substance of my age. People joked about the restaurant catching fire. The waitresses had wanted to be nice, but I could see only pity. Who wants to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday at an employees’ table next to a mop closet while wearing a splattered apron and a checkered cook’s uniform? I ate the cake to show my gratitude. My manager came by and slapped me on the back. “Congratulations,” he said. He was the only person there who was older than I. The slap had a proprietary quality.

When I was about eighteen, a guy I knew from the neighborhood had seen me walking down the street and picked me up in his taxi. I was a block from home, but he wanted to drive me around and show off his new job. I sat in the backseat like a passenger, and I stared at the back of his head. “I’m celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday next week,” he told me. “Big party. Come on by.”

“Okay,” I said.

“A quarter of a century,” he said. He was being boastful, but the phrase was jarring. I can tell you this much, I wanted to say. When I’m a quarter of a century, I won’t be driving any taxi.

I had dreams of grandeur. I didn’t know how to get there, but I knew that it would work out.

He drove me around for a while and then he dropped me off right where we’d begun, a block from my house.

“See you at the party,” he told me. But I didn’t go.

I start at five o’clock and I stop at midnight. On weekends I stop at one o’clock. Sundays the restaurant is closed. Thursdays I have off. On busy nights, the dinner rush begins around seven and goes until eleven. There is relative calm in the kitchen at first, and then the sounds begin to take on a discernible urgency — voices, dishes, doors, not unlike light rain before heavy rain — and then there will be an explosion of orders. How is it possible? All these orders? All these orders at once? Oh my God! There are only three cooks and a salad guy, but there are fifty orders, and then there are a hundred orders. The white blur of the manager’s shirt mixes with the black blurs of the waitresses’. Each cook in a pristine apron, soon to become filthy, hunches over a little workstation, cutting, frying, wiping, responsible for his little world. Once in a while, one cook will come to the aid of another who has fallen far behind, as if in battle, and this is always viewed as an act of extreme kindness. Generally, though, it’s every man for himself, and we let one another die facedown in the mud. I move at a steady pace somewhere between frantic and perilous. Once I scalded my entire forearm with boiling water, but I wrapped the wound with cold towels and continued marching onward up the hill. Another time I lacerated the tip of my finger, and only after my shift was over did I go to the hospital for seven stitches. I have learned precision and efficiency over the years. There is no wasted motion in anything I do. I am a study of that thin line between human and machine. The order comes in, the eyes scan the order, one hand removes two slices of rye bread (for instance) and places the bread on the grill, the other hand is already reaching for the American cheese that is in the square tin on the shelf, while another order comes in and the eyes are scanning that order as the limbs and hands continue to move. Only when the rush begins to abate do I understand that I have been in something akin to a trance, moving constantly but without full consciousness. The sounds in the kitchen will get quieter, a gentle, nonessential clattering. A lullaby of clattering — it’s near midnight, after all. The waitresses stand around idly. The dishwasher smokes a cigarette, even though he’s not supposed to smoke in here. Afterward I walk the ten blocks to my apartment, and if I make it home in time, I watch the end of David Letterman.

A few days after I was turned down for a raise, an anorexic waitress started working at the restaurant. She was pretty but had no breasts or ass. I caught her a few times eating the scraps from customers’ plates. She chewed and swallowed slowly, methodically, as if it took all her concentration. The waitresses said that they heard her sometimes in the bathroom coughing violently, and if they entered after her, they noticed traces of blood in the toilet.

The first time I saw her, she was sitting at the employees’ table before the dinner shift, clipping flowers and placing them in vases. She looked up when I passed by, and I saw that her eyes were bright blue, contrasting with her hair, which was jet black. Her arms were thin and her shoulder blades protruded at a sharp angle. When our eyes met, she looked down quickly and then looked back up, and when she looked up, I looked away. A couple of days later, she was standing at the time clock trying to figure out how to punch out after her shift. I was just arriving at the restaurant, and my shoes were wet from the rain. “Here,” I said. “Like this. You do it like this.” I put her time card in and jiggled it, because sometimes it has to be jiggled, and the clock crunched out the time: 4:52 P.M. “What a piece of shit,” she said. “The manager should fix that.” Her voice was deep, considering how fragile she appeared. I saw that she had a red rash on her neck that she was trying to conceal with makeup. The rash seemed to be either creeping up toward her face or down onto her body, as if it might be the thing that had eaten away her breasts and her ass. Her elbow touched my elbow, but I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose. And then my manager came into the break room.

“Busy night ahead of us,” he said, and slapped me on the back.

“The time clock,” the waitress said to him. “It doesn’t work.”

“Oh?” the manager said. He looked embarrassed. “I’ll tell the fix-it guy.”

He was wrong: it was a slow night. Which can be worse, because then one must make oneself busy. Or at least appear busy. A self-imposed punishment for the lack of business, as if the employees were to blame.

I spent my time polishing all the stainless steel in the kitchen, using an old jar of cream that guaranteed immediate results. It lived up to its billing, and I got satisfaction from seeing things gleam. When an order came in, it was burdensome, and I had to drag myself to the grill to put together whatever it was that had been requested. Tonight, I was certain, was not the night to ask again for a raise. I commended myself on my foresight. Occasionally I would look through the little round porthole of the kitchen door and see the anorexic waitress carrying trays of coffee mugs from one end of the restaurant to the other. How was it possible for her to carry a tray of coffee mugs? How was it possible for her to stand on those skinny legs? But she showed no signs of exertion in anything she did, like one of those small birds that take off with great power, beating their wings angrily. I should ask her out, I thought. We could come back here to eat. Take a long time looking at the menu. Inconvenience other people for a change. At the end we could ask to see the manager, and if he were feeling generous, he could waive the bill.

That night I sat on my couch and watched David Letterman interview a starlet. She wore unusually long earrings, high heels, and a red dress that I kept hoping I’d be able to see up. “What’s your dream vacation?” Letterman asked her. “Oh, I just want to stay home in my pajamas,” the starlet said. And David Letterman looked at the camera in that way he has, and everyone in the audience laughed, and Paul Shaffer played something quick on the keyboard, and the rain was coming down outside my window, and I realized that, shockingly, it was the anorexic waitress being interviewed by David Letterman. David Letterman was looking at the camera, which is to say he was looking at me, and he was saying, “Is it really that complicated for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” The anorexic waitress was holding a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich as evidence of my incompetence. “Why was this returned?” David Letterman was asking. But before I could respond the valedictorian said that some of us here tonight would either go into the military or enter directly into the workforce.

Suddenly I was wide awake on the couch. A police show was playing on the television. Buddy talk. I switched it off. Light was just beginning to break. I got up and paced around the living room and then I sat back down on the couch. The couch was soft; next to it was a chair and a lamp, all generously provided by the landlady. When I first came to look at the apartment, I was disconcerted to observe a refrigerator standing against the living room wall. “You can have that too,” the landlady said, as if having a refrigerator in the living room were a desirable thing. I made a show of considering it. We walked out onto the balcony, which was the apartment’s main selling point. It was a sunny day, and we stood together for a while, looking down five flights to the street. The previous tenant had spray-painted a pair of shoes on the balcony without bothering to put down newspaper as protection. Positioned between myself and the landlady was the permanent silhouette of two feet facing the railing. They had a ghostly quality, as if someone had leaped and left behind his imprint. I wanted to ask the landlady if she might be able to clean away those feet at some point, but I didn’t ask and I took the apartment anyway.

Now I opened the balcony door and stood outside. It was raining lightly. Perhaps today was the day it would stop altogether. No one was out on the street. In the distance was a line of dense trees that in the dim light seemed closer than they actually were. Beyond the trees were the mountains. The mountains and the trees made the city seem rural, or on the verge of becoming rural, as if civilization were working in reverse and nature were reclaiming the land for itself. The mayor had countered this by referring to the city as “The Emerging International City.” He hoped the moniker would catch on. So far it hadn’t. On local television, there were commercials every fifteen minutes, poorly made, with people on the street pretending to make unprompted remarks about why the city was already an international city or deserved to be one. But it was clear that none of them really knew what they were talking about. Furthermore, the phrase “emerging international city” was so cumbersome and took such great concentration to say that you could detect, after watching these commercials over and over, the way people paused ever so slightly before uttering it. The very fact that everyone managed to pronounce the phrase without stumbling once was evidence that the whole man-on-the-street conceit was fraudulent.

Below my balcony, two black boys were riding by on bicycles. They were drenched from the rain and they were laughing and they were full of bravado. One of the boys happened to glance up at me. “What are you looking at, white man?” he yelled out, speeding away as if I might be able to swoop down and get him. I was humiliated, not by the use of “white” but by the use of “man.” He sees me as a man, I thought. When I was eight years old, I had spent the afternoon playing with a group of my friends and a lone black boy who lived in the next neighborhood over. All afternoon we played, until another one of our friends showed up, making the lone black boy superfluous. “Time to go home, fella,” my friend had told him. But the boy had refused to go home, and an argument ensued. My father heard the argument and threw open the kitchen window.

“Go home, boy,” he said, assuming that the black boy was the cause of the trouble. “Go home before I come down there and slap the taste out of your mouth.”

When I woke in the morning, it was raining hard. My downstairs neighbor hadn’t taken in his newspaper yet, so I sat in the vestibule and read it.

Business is bad. That was the big news. Business is bad and the rain won’t stop. Business is going to get better, but first it’s going to get worse. The rain is going to get worse too. And then the rain will stop.

When my neighbor came down, he was wearing a gray bathrobe.

“Here’s your paper,” I said, as if I’d been standing in the vestibule with his newspaper in my hands for the purpose of handing it to him.

He looked aggrieved. “Thank you,” he said. Hollow words. He folded the paper and put it under his arm; his armpit was stained. He nodded at me. “Have a great day,” he said.

Later, I did my exercises. I do them every day. If I ever end up joining the military, I will be ready. But I have no intention of joining the military. A couple of years ago, on the basketball court, an older guy had come over after the game and talked to me about life. He was friendly and showed interest, and I thought he might be gay. He smiled at everything I said. “Is that right, son?” At the end of our conversation, he handed me his business card: Sergeant Robert Alton. “Stop by, son, and talk to me sometime.” I thought about stopping by, but what I really wanted was for him to come back to the basketball court and ask me again to stop by sometime.

I did fifty push-ups, straight and with no effort. Several minutes later I did fifty more. Those took effort. Then I did sit-ups. The room vibrated. When I was done, I examined my body in the mirror. Sharp corners met round corners. When I turned to the side, the sharpness gave way to roundness. The body of a hamster, I thought. And then I thought about the anorexic waitress standing next to me at the time clock. The body of a hamster meets the body of a bird. “Here,” the hamster said. “Like this. You do it like this.” And the bird’s wing touched the hamster’s paw, but it was not clear if this was intentional.

On Saturday night, I decided I would ask again for a raise. Especially considering that one of the other cooks had not shown up for his shift. I was covering for him, a near-impossibility, because that night the orders were unceasing. I loathed the waitresses who brought them to me, even the anorexic one. The manager said that he would come and help out, as if he had any idea what needed to be done, as if anyone could just drop in and do my job. But he didn’t help, and I saw this as even more reason to ask for a raise. “I’m looking to move up to …” “I’m looking to move up from …”

Near midnight, things finally slowed down. My apron was splattered, as if I had been shot with food the way people are sometimes shot with paint for fun. The dishwasher smoked a cigarette, and I hoped the manager would come in and catch him. Through the window of the kitchen door, I could see the anorexic waitress tallying up her tips for the night. The way she concentrated over the pile of money accentuated her cheekbones. I knew she’d be gone by the time I was done cleaning up my workstation. A last-second order came in, and I got it ready. And then I scrubbed the grill with a long wire brush. I was supposed to scrub it every night, but I never did, and no one noticed. Tonight, though, there would be no evidence that could be used against me. Hard bits of ash that had accumulated over the years fell from the grates like ants. My shoulder ached from the exertion. When I looked through the window, sure enough, the anorexic waitress was gone.

Just a few more odds and ends to finish up, I thought, but when I turned around, my manager was standing there with a plate in his hand. “What’s this?” he asked.

On the plate was a grilled cheese sandwich: the bread was almost black, but the cheese, as my manager showed me, had not melted.

“How do you burn the bread, Ike,” he asked, “but not melt the cheese?” His face was kind.

Outside, I stood under the restaurant awning. The rain was coming down in great sheets. The wind and the dark gave it the quality of a volcanic eruption. People were saying that this was it — the final rainfall — and that as early as tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon it was going to be sunny. They’d heard this said.

I started walking. My umbrella was no defense. After two blocks, the black fabric tore away beneath the onslaught, so that I was holding only the sagging frame of an umbrella. Why could no umbrella be invented to withstand a downpour? When I was sixteen years old, I had filled out an application at school for a summer job and then forgotten about it until I was called one June morning to meet with the supervisor of an umbrella factory. It was a small family-owned place on the outskirts of town, where some factories still existed. I had to take three buses to get there. The supervisor was a perspiring man in a tie and a shirt with one button missing from the center. He was looking for an office clerk. He asked what my skills were, but I didn’t know what they were, because I’d never had a job. I told him I was a hard worker, because I assumed that this would be true if I was given the opportunity, and he seemed to accept it at face value. Afterward, he showed me around the plant. It was old and made of wood, and there were probably mice. A group of ex-farmers, or people who looked like they might be ex-farmers, stood around a long table spray-painting assorted logos onto umbrellas. I was curious about their work, and the supervisor took me closer so I could see. The smell of paint was pleasant and reminded me of my kindergarten days. “It smells great,” I said to the supervisor, grinning. He looked askance at me, and within thirty seconds the smell had become so overwhelming, so noxious, that I feared I might vomit. “Let’s get away from these characters,” the supervisor said. He showed me the office where I would be working. It had a file cabinet and a swivel chair and a window that looked out onto the factory floor. I pictured myself sitting at the desk and wearing a tie, and the image invigorated me. Two days later, the supervisor called to offer me the job, and I told him it was too far away for me, but I thanked him anyway.

Three blocks from my apartment, I could see that I had left the lamp on in the living room. In the dark, it looked like a beacon of sorts. The hair on half of my head was matted from the rain. A car approached from the opposite direction, spraying water on both sides. It steered toward me, and for a moment I thought that it might be some punks looking to drive through a puddle and splash me. Then it slowed and stopped completely, and the window came down and the anorexic waitress leaned her head out. “Get in, silly,” she said.

There was another girl in the car, so I got in the backseat.

“I just live right there,” I said, pointing, but instead of turning the car around, she drove over the bridge, past the railroad tracks, up into the hills.

“This is my friend,” the anorexic waitress said, looking at me in the rearview mirror, but the windshield wipers were clacking and I couldn’t catch the friend’s name.

She was in college, this friend. Or about to go to college. The anorexic waitress was going to the same college in the spring. I couldn’t hear what she planned to study. She spoke as if she were already weary of it. Her thin hands gripped the steering wheel. In her black waitress blouse, her arms looked the diameter of fingers. Could those even be called arms? But she drove with ferocity. Up into the hills we went, those dark hills that looked as if they were encroaching on the city. Shortly we were in the thick of them, and I was surprised to discover that, rather than being the heart of the rural world, they were the heart of the suburbs. Nice houses that looked identical were set catercorner to one another off the main road. Billboards directed us to more houses about to be built, and to a mall I’d been hearing about for a while. Another billboard showed an illustration of a spinning earth with an arrow pointing to a small dot that presumably was where we were. THE EMERGING INTERNATIONAL CITY, it read.

Soon we were dropping the friend off in front of her parents’ large house. The house was dark except for one light that illuminated the driveway. “Good night! Good night!” she called.

I took the front seat and I noticed how wet my pants were. I noticed how close I was to the anorexic waitress. Back toward the city we went. In the gloomy swirl of rain, I could see the giant office building with its antenna that, in the darkness, looked like a cross on a church steeple.

“Do you want to hear a riddle?” she asked out of the blue.

“Okay,” I said.

She smiled broadly. Her teeth looked discolored. “There’s a cabin in the woods with two dead people. They are both strapped to chairs.” She paused to glance my way. “The doors of the cabin are blocked and the windows are sealed. The people did not die from murder, exposure, dehydration, suicide, fire, asphyxiation, disease, or starvation. What did they die from?”

She concentrated as if she were also trying to think of the answer. I thought about the word “starvation.” I had no idea what the answer was, so I guessed AIDS.

No.

I guessed again.

No.

“Should we really be talking about dying while you’re driving in the rain?” I asked. She let out a ghoulish movie laugh and pantomimed turning the wheel hard, as if to swerve into oncoming traffic. This made me tense. The windshield wipers beat out their rhythm. “What killed them?” she said again. We went around a bend, and the office building disappeared momentarily and then reappeared, so that its giant antenna resembled a needle stuck in an arm.

“It’s an airplane, silly,” she said. “They’re seat-belted into the cabin of an airplane that’s crashed in the woods.”

I thought about this, piecing it back together from the opposite end. “That’s a good riddle,” I said at last.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of them.”

We were coming back over the railroad tracks that were about a mile from my apartment. A dishwasher from the restaurant once managed to elude the police who had come to arrest him in the middle of his shift, and not knowing where to go, he had run all the way to the tracks and hidden in the underbrush. They’d found him three hours later, covered in dirt, and taken him to jail. At his trial, he had pleaded no contest on the advice of his court-appointed lawyer so that he’d get only a three-year sentence. He had not known what the phrase meant, though, and so, standing in the courtroom in his baggy suit, he had said, “No contents,” and everyone in the courtroom had laughed.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked me abruptly. “What are you so quiet for?”

I told her about the dishwasher, and she said, “That’s a funny story.” And then she said, “That’s a strange story.” After that she said she had thought about studying law but decided against it. But might study it after all.

“You’re a funny boy,” she said. “You know that?” And it was my turn to smile, because it’d been a long time since anyone had called me a boy. When had I crossed that line from boy to man? Whenever it was, the line had been so faint, so subtle, that I had missed it entirely. Maybe if I had been paying closer attention, things might have turned out differently for me.

“ ‘Boy,’ ” I said. “That’s a weird thing to call me.”

So she said it again. “Boy … boy … boy.” Teasing now. But suddenly she was no longer saying just “boy” but “pretty boy.” Or perhaps I had misheard her. “Pretty boy.” I wanted to ask if I was hearing her correctly, because the rain was loud, and the car was loud, and she was driving with great vigor along the wet streets, all the power of her skeletal limbs surging into the car. I watched her mouth, waiting for it to speak again. A wide mouth with wide lips. Her lips were the fleshiest part of her body. The second I looked back toward the street, I heard her say it again.

“Pretty boy,” she said. “Pretty, pretty boy.”

“Really?” I asked her. “Really?”