Out in the kitchen she began to cough again. Little poppers. Kaff kaff kaff! He heard the hiss of her medicinal inhaler and seconds later the coughing stopped entirely. Why didn’t she pick it up at the first tickle? Why? Because she was a fiend and coughed simply to torment him with guilt! And Jesus Christ, did his toe ever hurt! Matthew reached for the flashlight and sat on the edge of the bed examining his bloody nail. He needed to rip the thing off but lacked the courage to do so. Instead, he resumed the full layout position and began to practice hatha yoga breath control. He wasn’t doing it right, just operating on the basis of some half-remembered instructions from a meditation book one of his many counselors had laid on him.

His toenail throbbed. He flipped on the flashlight again, gritted his teeth, and pulled the snagged edge of it loose and then flopped back in the position. Such a small few micrometers of tissue and such a great pain. A perfect metaphor for life! Fuck it, going to sleep now would be impossible!

On television he saw a report about twelve hundred people drowning in Bangladesh. He reached for the remote and turned up the volume. There were scrawny women in saris sitting in trees, shots of people on rooftops, and pictures of skinny white cows floating in the muddy flood-waters. When the camera panned through a major city, Matthew took great satisfaction in seeing that the floodwaters had submerged two-story buildings. That twelve hundred drowned in a far-off land somehow comforted him. Better they than he. In fact, when God reached out like that, He got something off His chest—some level of celestial wrath that just as well might have been directed at Matthew. It was like an Aztec sacrifice or something. A good way to blow off steam.