“He goes out all night.”

“Kamal, listen,” Ghazi said. “Once I am at Brooks Street, about two years ago, and I come home, no one there, no one expected. And he is there. He has nail polish on his feet. On his toenails.”

“Fuck.”

“On my mother’s head.”

“Rafik. Gay? No.”

“Maybe that,” Ghazi said. “Maybe something else.”

“Rafik.”

“See, I tell you, you don’t know someone.”

“I told Dhakir the other day”—Kamal recounted—“ ‘Look, I will buy the satellite phone, but I want nothing to do with it.’ ”

“Did you?” Ghazi put down his pen.

“Did I what?”

“Buy the phone?” Ghazi asked.

“I told him I could not find any.”

“Good.”

The Depression, Ghazi called it. The Depression came to visit. The Depression cooked dinner. The Depression goes on vacation, then I call home. His plans were one hour long or two days, maximum. One day he was moving to Australia. Another day he was thinking about Seattle. He called Realtors and made appointments; he didn’t show. The only place he felt a little okay was the movies. He took in two, sometimes three a day. Al Pacino was his favorite actor. Even when Pacino was in a bad movie, Ghazi loved it. And since it was Pacino, he could watch it twice, three times, even five times. Sea of Love, that was the one that started it. It wasn’t that sex with her against the wall, though he’d tried to imitate it more than a few times. It was how Pacino looked lost but acted sure.

When he wasn’t watching Pacino, he was in the public library. He’d learned from the homeless you could stay there for hours, and as long as you had a book open and your eyes mostly open and didn’t smell like rat piss, they couldn’t make you leave. He went there after dinner. He wasn’t trying to avoid Heather, but that night with her was a factor. She seemed to understand it had been a one-time situation. He was the uneasy one.