Came home and was so tired that she wanted to fall to the floor as soon as she entered the apartment. The apartment would fall in around her and bury her, and life would stop tormenting her with letters and phone calls, with bureaucrats, handymen, robots that parked her in telephone waiting lines. And never to need to look for a job again and fail to find one—cost cutting, you know how it goes—and never to need to come home and run into the idiots her older son always hung around with now. The dumbfucks who can only speak in half sentences. And see the empty bed of her youngest child and feel somehow happy that he was dead and hate herself for it. And what was up with Karen lately? She seems to have grown up and lost twenty kilos. Probably smoking hash. And hates her life. Great, that made two of them. On the table alongside ten bills covering all aspects of personhood was mail from the building management agency.

KAREN

Saw how her mother didn’t look at her. With a flurry of motion, her fingers, which looked oddly arthritic, fumbled around with the envelopes while Karen told her about everything. About the drugs, the men, the pimps, the other girls, some of whom had gotten pregnant. Two had killed themselves because they didn’t dare go home, but most of them were on drugs and still half alive. “I’m going to call the police, okay?”

“What did you say,” said her mother and looked vacantly at Karen. Karen reached a

POLICEWOMAN

HEALTH CONDITION: obese

HOBBIES: addicted to sugar, ordering clothes online and returning them

POLITICAL CLASSIFICATION: left liberal

SEXUAL BEHAVIOR: Tinder profile has for quite some time had no matches

“Yes, I’ve got it. Sounds like quite an adventure, from what you’re describing. But yes, thanks, we’ll follow up on these leads. It’s possible that we’ll need to speak to you again. Good night.”

The police officer acted as if she were writing down Karen’s address. Then she deleted the record of the telephone call. Nobody here at the station house wanted to be opened up to charges of racial profiling. There’d already been about twenty reports. Girls had been questioned, transcripts made. And then destroyed. Computers had killed ten jobs in the department in the last year. Archives, clerical, emergency call center, accounting, all of them displaced by machines. Who wanted to risk their job for a couple of girls, who in any case were pregnant at fifteen and would get social welfare benefits? The policewoman sucked on a sugar cube. And

KAREN

Hung up the phone

After a few minutes of silence—

Karen thought her mother was shocked or concerned or outraged—her mother looked up and asked: “Did you call?” She let the eviction notice.

Fall to the floor and