It didn’t comfort Sergej that he was one of a million Poles here on this unfriendly island. What kind of attitude was it, what kind of system was it, that imported workers only to have them sleep on mattresses and never be greeted on the street? Not so much as a thank-you. And going back home is not an option. And going to America is not an option, there’s no money for that. His money was too precious to spend on a prostitute. Money. It was the only thing Sergej could think about. The only thing that interested him. That it shouldn’t be the most important thing or that it was vulgar to think about was something only people with money said, people who’d never been hungry and who’d never seen life as a choice between just two options—to die in your own filth with your dick in your hand, eaten by a dog, a failure, or to make it. Anything interesting in life took money. The freedom not to have to work or to choose what job you would like to do. Maintaining space between you and other people, traveling to foreign countries, and a proper bed with privacy. For fuck’s sake—the moron on the mattress next to him again. Banging his head on the ground for the past half an hour. “Shut up, you idiot,” said Sergej. Then again, louder. A few others in the room shushed him, annoyed. Sergej decided to shut the little fucker up. Then he can just whimper and won’t have to keep smashing his head.

Then Sergej had grabbed

PETER

with one hand, covering his mouth, and with the other hand pulled Peter’s pajama pants down, opened his own pants, and stuck his penis into Peter’s backside. Peter didn’t know what exactly had happened, he had no idea about sexual things, but it was uncomfortable. It hurt, and elicited in Peter, someone who was always lonely and didn’t know how to make contact with others, a new sort of loneliness, one with an added dimension of coldness. He stopped breathing and waited until the man withdrew from him and disappeared into the dark. An old man next to Peter had watched the entire incident—if you wanted to call it that, because you didn’t want to try to figure out a better word that fully encapsulated all the brutality that went with penetrating a child’s body, ripping things in a child’s innards, caring not about the fact that it was a tiny human being that one was rubbing oneself against—the man had watched the incident and jerked off while doing so, then rolled over and gone to sleep. Peter sat swaying in a corner of the bathroom the next day and the day after that.

A few days later

Peter’s mother came home from her shift at the bar. Home, such as it was.