It was cold, so Heather and Rafik thought he was crazy. He didn’t know how to explain to them that without that open window he would hear them, their loving, and because they had each other, he needed other sounds, and he needed sleep more than he sometimes could manage to have it. He told Rafik that he was so used to being cold on the ship that he was not comfortable being warm. Rafik knew this was not the way it was, but he left it alone. Now that it was only the three of them, a new careful began. Heather was particularly quiet. He knew something had gone on while he was in the hospital that they had not shared with him. When they picked him up, Heather had said to him in the car, “We’ve moved. Everyone else is gone.” He knew there was a reason she told him this, but in the months that followed, he still did not know why, and he had let it rest.

The new place was a part of a house, but it was also partly underground. It had two bedrooms, and there was already furniture in it but it smelled, so frighteningly that they threw it out and, when no one came to take it, there outside on the sidewalk, they pulled it to the chain-link fence at the end of the street. But it bothered them there, a pile of things that when they came home they could see and, as if it were right near them, remember the smell. It could never be melted away or rained into the ground, so one night they set it on fire.

The fence went on for blocks in both directions and contained an empty parking lot. It belonged to the airport, Rafik said, but no one ever parked there, because the terminals were so far away. The furniture burned slowly, and they had to keep lighting it again and again. Finally, Heather said she would go to the gas station, and she drove off in her BMW, coming back with a red watering can of gasoline. And then it burned. Aziz worried that someone would surely come running. But the neighborhood stayed dark and closed.