Peter was so nervous that it caused his system to shut down completely. Somehow he managed to make it back to the apartment. Somehow he started to breathe again. He sat motionless on the floor for a week in the apartment that was missing a mother. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, wet himself. Nobody questioned why Peter wasn’t at school. Hey, he was a Pole, he was a loser, he was a freak, so nobody wondered where a loser kid was when he didn’t show up for class, where he wasn’t going to learn anything anyway. Peter had forgotten school, forgotten himself. He crawled around the apartment. The heat was shut off. Ditto the gas. The water still worked. His mother really had left money. With careful planning it would last for a month’s worth of food. Peter ate tinned ravioli, he froze, and he looked out the window. The internet was dead. Nothing to read. Nothing to divert his attention. Peter waited without knowing what for, without missing his old life he waited on a new one. Something would have to happen. Something always happened—for instance, the water was shut off. After a few more days, with the money nearly gone, an eviction notice arrived. Of course, after the previous invoices concerning the rent. An eviction meant the arrival of police. And police would suppose that, in Peter, the situation concerned a child, and then they’d seize upon measures presumed to be appropriate for children. So Peter packed the things he considered essential, a couple of books, an alarm clock, the phones, a sweater, and a pair of pajamas, and closed the door behind himself. Out on the street, as always, indecisive. Peter stood there at a loss, probably like anyone else who for the first time didn’t have a home would stand there at a loss. Complicating things was the fact that Peter was not yet an adult and had no friends, because he didn’t even understand what the term meant. He would probably hit upon an idea as he walked, so he set off walking. He wasn’t frightened, because he didn’t know what to be frightened of. Of the cold, or the night? Of death—that would be ridiculous. Peter knew everything about so-called death. It was a condition like before birth. A condition as if he were sitting inside himself but unable to get out. Except not sitting.

He didn’t feel fear, rather a great aversion to having to adjust to a new situation. One advantage was the fact that he didn’t ask himself questions. Like, what would become of his life now, where he would sleep, what he was supposed to eat. Peter just walked. At some point after some two hours of walking, during which he had circled the crappy little town five times, he sat down at the entrance of the parking garage downtown and waited.