While Jagjeet pleads with Kong I feel something curdle in my stomach. I can’t help thinking about her. She just pops in there. Like this: when Charlie was in my bed it had its own ecosystem. It had her heat, her fragrance, the dewy thickness of sleep. That animal warmth that was also a promise. It swore that I would never be alone again, but now the heat is gone and the scent is fading from the sheets. That’s how the promise breaks: the fragrance fades to nothing. I’ll never be able to sleep in that bed again. Not that I’m going to get the chance.

Prison sheets probably smell like bleach and fear and crippling male loneliness.

“What about this?” I say, and slap down the title to the Clean Getaway.

“What’s that?” Kong asks Jagjeet.

“It’s the title to a boat,” I say. “ A Najad 55. I’ll sign it over to you.”

“A fifty-five what?”

“Sailboat. An oceangoing sloop.”

“How much it worth?”

I want to tell him: only my whole life.

Instead I give it to him in dollars.

“Wait, how much?”

I tell him again. Now, for the first time, he looks at me.

“Say again?”

I do.

“This is a boat we’re talking about, here, right?”

Again I assure him of the value of the boat.

“If you’re fucking with me—”

“I’m telling you the truth. It’s all my savings. It’s all I have.”

Then I take a chance.

“No more Geek Squad,” I say. “You’ll never have to say the word ‘reboot’ again. No one will be able to make you do anything you don’t want to do. You’ll be untouchable. It can be your own clean getaway.” I let him think on that for a second.

Then I make a Hancock gesture. “If you help us, it’s yours,” I say. “All yours.”

There is a harrowing metaphorical symmetry to this offer—only by forsaking my own clean getaway can I secure Charlie’s—and I teeter in my chair with sadness. Kong’s breath is a nauseating broth of bad meat and well gin. The title sits flat on the table, alive, sentient, aware of its power of permanence and despair. An article of surrender. My body feels both weightless and immensely heavy.

“Well?” I ask, making another circular motion with the pen. “Do I sign it over?”

For the second time, Kong looks me in the eye. A cocktail waitress does a plaintive babushka waddle over to our table and asks if we have everything we need. No one says anything. In my nostrils is the stench of stale albumin, the fetalike odor of unwashed genitalia. I feel very alone.

Finally, Kong nods at the title and says, “M-A-V-R-O...”

Bathroom Talk

Bathroom Talk