Which is why he follows her as soon as she leaves home. Why he hooked up with the group called the Others, who hunt doctors who perform abortions, which is to say commit murders. Or women who want abortions. Who are then—how shall we put it—pressured by the group. Their addresses are posted on a website. Easy.

And now he tosses away the ashtray and runs into the night. Perhaps he can still beat up a homeless person so as to explain the blood on his collar.

It smells of food

When

KAREN

Enters the factory. It’s after midnight, and the others are lying on their mattresses, tomato sauce smeared on their faces. Leftover noodles still in the kitchen. “Dr. Brown died with an erection,” she says. “From or with?” asks Don. “Eat something first,” says Peter. The children who are no longer children—what do you call people who are still growing, for fuck’s sake?—sit at the kitchen table with Karen and watch Karen shovel herself full of lukewarm noodles. She’s not hungry, but sitting here, with the others, like a real family, is a ritual they’ve established, sitting together and talking, as if they could be each other’s family. They sit at the table, because grown-ups always sit at a table and make serious faces. They make serious faces and discuss adult things. The price of water has risen in the city again. It’s shut off every day for a few hours. People no longer bathe, barely shower, and there’s powder to fight the odor created by an unwashed body. Showering. What a thing. The children sometimes wash themselves in the little stream outside, sometimes in the kitchen sink. Often, though, not at all.

Despite its loft-style loftiness, the factory hall still looks like something. That animals live in. The mattresses on the floor, the laundry they wash in a trough in the kitchen hangs from lines all over the place, pizza boxes in the corner. Cardboard on the windows so as not to reveal at night to any potentially passing drones that it’s occupied.

The children leave the kitchen in its state, a state that looks as though a set designer had set up a bombed-out kiddie kitchen, and they lie on their mattresses to enjoy the best moment of the day. When the lights are out and the TV is on, all of them doing something by their nightstand lamps, reading or thinking or just not sleeping. I don’t want to go to sleep yet. The moment when it’s like being in a cave, when we all breathe as one, should never end. The moment before they’re all alone as the heroes of their nightmares, before you wake up in the morning in a light that illuminates the aimlessness and loneliness of the group too brightly. And

DON