The drunk man’s slowing speech made him a little cuter. I listened to his cute, awkward talk as I ate more flounder or rockfish or whichever it was. I’d become very drunk very quickly and for some reason was thinking about Umma. She hadn’t been allowed to eat anything raw since her cancer diagnosis six months ago, not even the hwe that she liked so much. Digging through the saury flesh that had come in the spicy stew, I had the uncharacteristically filial thought that I should bring her here when her treatment was over.

—Umma was always good at taking the bones out of fish for me . . .

Hearing this, he deftly ripped out the bones of his own saury and dropped the chunk of fish into my rice bowl.

—Oh no, I didn’t mean it that way, please don’t, I can’t take your fish.

—I’m happy to.

—Me too. Saury is tasty.

—I’m not happy about the saury. I like the universe that is you.

Was this how the lovers of Pompeii felt when the magma covered them? I was deluged by something very hot, and the world seemed to stop turning. Spinoza had distinguished forty-eight different kinds of emotion. Which one was I feeling right then? Desire, joy, awe, or confusion? And what did the man on the other side of the table feel for me? A mix of disdain and curiosity, or something similar to what I felt for him? In an attempt to calm my pounding heart, I tried to recall the many keywords from the Philosophy of Emotions course but failed. In the blue light of the aquarium, he seemed paler than before. It was too late by the time it occurred to me that he looked lonelier than anyone I had ever known. His face grew larger and larger as it approached, and I was kissing him.

I tasted something on his lips that I had never tasted before. The fishy, chewy taste of rockfish. Maybe the taste of the universe.

That night, we both went back to his place.

◊

I lay down with him in the dark room and held him close.

I touched his hair, flattened from the cap he’d worn all day, felt his stiff neck and the tattooed skin that was cooler than the rest of his body. He put his arm around my shoulders. We lay still for a moment, holding onto each other without the least bit of distance between us. The shape of my chest, the length of my arms, my whole body seemed to exist in order to fit perfectly with his, and his warm head against my chest made me feel I was hugging something as vast and precious as a universe. Concentrating on the heat of his skin and the sound of his breathing whispering in my ear made me completely lose sense of who I was.

I became something not me, not anything, just another part of the world that was him.