I gave a weak laugh, watched him tip the tiny glass bottle upside down and pull the plunger back.

‘How did it happen?’

‘It was so stupid,’ I said.

I told Pete the story: it had been a hot night in February. I walked into my stuffy, low-ceilinged apartment and opened the window. Immediately – before I could switch on the light, before I had even turned around, it flew in. At first I thought it was a moth. It had a moth’s lightness, and the frantic jagging of its body in circles around the ceiling suggested a moth’s weight, a moth’s panic. I went to wave it away. When I realised what it was I pulled my hands back like I’d received an electric shock.

‘Then what?’

He came towards me holding the uncapped syringe.

‘I got a lacrosse net. I tried to catch it. It got tangled in the net, and when I went to let it go, it bit me.’

‘You play lacrosse?’

‘Not anymore.’

He swabbed my upper arm and then, with no preamble, stuck the needle in. I didn’t wince. I braced my core and breathed through it. The rabies vaccine is a painful one. I felt the crawl of the liquid as it was pushed into my bloodstream.

I had a series of five injections over several weeks. After the last one, he said, ‘You know they make this stuff out of monkeys?’

‘Monkeys?’

‘Rhesus monkeys. And chickens.’

‘Wow.’

I was wondering which parts of the monkey and the chicken they used, but he must have taken my expression for pity.

‘Better them than you,’ he said.

I didn’t think about him again. The bat bite was healing; it looked pink and raw, curdled. Several weeks later I went to a bar with a friend. When I walked in I saw him sitting on a barstool. He was watching a football game on the TV and eating from a bowl of free mixed nuts. I remember the way he ate those nuts, mechanically chomping through them, handful after handful, in a way that suggested neither enjoyment nor hunger; only process.

It wasn’t until my friend had left and I’d paid my bill that I approached him.

‘Not foaming at the mouth?’ he said.

He was a little drunk.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘Do you know how alcohol works?’ he asked while I tried to get comfortable on the bar stool without letting my legs fall open.

‘It removes your inhibitions,’ I said, remembering something from a long-ago biology class.

He looked at me with a condescension so pure that it was more amusing than annoying, and I laughed.