So here was a Rafik who knew that entrepreneur in French was contractor but something else in English. But what was that else? Aziz could not tell. He could see that raging Heather disappeared near her father. There was honey in her, soft he’d not seen before. Her father was lit up, shining with being pleased at Heather. The mother of Heather; she was hated. The expression on their faces was like Aziz’s mother talking about Ghaleb, the son-in-law with snobbery in him, the one they called Peahen. The riddle of Heather’s father preoccupied Aziz, but after trying to solve why a man of such seeming stature would speak ill of his wife in front of strangers, and allow his daughter to live in a dwelling so ragged, on a street so dismal, with a man so underhanded, he realized there was so much of his new existence that was unknown to him, outside his English, or kept from him deliberately, or not yet anything he had ever experienced, so that recognizing it would have been like remembering a man he had never met. He felt as if he saw only a percentage, and a small one, of what was. Mostly, he had no one to discuss most things with, so their weight and importance were all too often equal. Anything could matter. Anything could be anything.

He became a student of windshields and the couples beneath them, scenes he followed for signs of how to live. Once he took a credit card from a woman’s hand, and her diamond ring, big as a marble, fired with light. Her husband on a cell phone had a little computer on his lap. She never looked at this husband, nor he at her. Straight ahead she stared, her chin level. There was nothing to see where she stared. Suddenly, she took the cell phone away from her husband’s ear and slammed his computer shut. Aziz thought the husband would get angry, but instead he calmly reopened the computer and starting typing. Almost instantly, the automatic window on her side came down. She threw out the cell phone, just missing Aziz’s knee.

He saw that he was unseen. Days—no, weeks—went by without a person speaking to him, and longer still, without someone’s eyes meeting his own. His place in the order of things was not a place; maybe, as he came to think of it, it was an insert, a scooping out, into which he belonged, but if he were to die or to quit or not be there for some reason, another, not like him but adequate to his function, would be fitted in and, like the tab in his cereal box, would keep it neat and closed.