“If you’re late, you’re fired. If you’re early, you’re fired. If you breathe the wrong way—”

“I get it. Thanks, boss. I won’t let you down.”

I try to shake his hand but Po-Mo doesn’t move to accept it. Instead he says, “You know, Starks, a little birdie told me you were going to break cover to your girl. If that were true, it would make the administrative process of terminating your employment a lot easier. You know that, right?”

I wouldn’t say I feel good. My stomach hurts too much for that, I am still the record-holder for permeability at Janus, and although other people probably can’t detect anything, my olfactory informs me that I still literally smell like shit. My own shit, no less. But as I exit Po-Mo’s office I realize, with joy, that I have escaped headquarters without suffering any of Schermer’s pranks. I am still employed. Soon—within an hour, I hope—Charlie will be coming over. Tomorrow I’m going to test for the floater position on the Nakamura job. I have a shot at the clean getaway. I’m still alive.

It’s a good place to start.

Reminder

There was a time in my life, not so long ago, when I would have been amazed to be pulled rapidly to the ground, backwards, in a deep, gravity-compliant, limbo-like arc by a pair of pliers gripping my earlobe. A year ago, perhaps, an innocent age blissfully unacquainted with the grief caused by the death of a beloved pet, or the debilitating effects of a massive overdose of elephant laxative, or the specter of unemployment and insurmountable personal debt. But not now. Now I only note, with an academic detachment, the many varieties of pain involved in the transaction, the most salient of which is the scalding sensation produced by the textured teeth of the pliers clamping down on the tender fatty tissue of the earlobe, but there is also an awareness that instead of simply detaching from my skull, as I dearly wish it would, my ear is following the pliers with great alacrity toward the hard concrete of the sidewalk outside my apartment in Clinton Hill.²⁷

By a small margin I am coherent enough to discern an additional pain, a complex emotional one composed mainly of humiliation and amazement caused by the fact that I have once again failed to hear someone behind me.

As my skull accelerates toward the asphalt, I think: what use are these ears?

When I encounter the ground, and incur my second concussion of the day, I smile politely at my assailant and say, as cheerily as possible, “Hi, Deke. I was just coming to see you.” This does not have the pacifying effect for which I had hoped. Apparently this is an utterance that Deke hears routinely, and its familiarity has bred a contempt that is expressed instantaneously by the torque-heavy twisting of the pliers.

Electrified by pain, and incapable of saying much more, I scream, in such a rapid-fire repetition that it sounds like a kind of deranged war cry, “Moneymoneymoneymoneymoney!”