Besides, I’ve only ever seen one film that could be classified as noir. A Hitchcock, I think. All I remember of it is a woman being attacked in a room by a flock of birds and reading that the actress who played her actually had been attacked at the behest of the maniac director who wanted her terror to be real. He’d switched out the planned mechanical birds for the scene for real birds at the last moment.

The actress was powerless to stop it.

Everywhere you look there is a story of a man terrorizing a woman for reasons of his own. This is perhaps my only connection to those fragile kittens in the movies.

The terror, my companion.

“Come here,” Brazuca says, from across the room. We’re back in Vancouver. He’s bare chested, having long thrown out the shirt with the tear. Seems to have given up on wearing shirts altogether when we’re alone.

In bed we push past the secrets, obfuscations, evasions, and outright lies. We are honest, for once.

I’ve always hated the term making love. It has never felt right to me, to suit those words to this action. But I’m reluctant to call whatever this is fucking. Sex too banal. Intercourse too clinical. I hear kids these days call it smashing, but that seems wrong on too many levels to comprehend. It’s none of those things and all of them, except for the last. It’s an exploration to see what fits. I can’t figure it out yet, this thing between us, but I know I won’t ask him about it. It’s too new. Too much can go wrong. It changed the moment I pressed my mouth to the inch of skin exposed by the rip in his shirt.

Everything tilted.

“You ready to talk about what happened in Detroit?” he asks.

“I was looking for the truth about my father’s death. But the whole thing went sideways,” I say.

It tilted there, too. Maybe it never straightened. I’m living a sideways kind of life, but it seems okay right now, here in this bed with the curtains drawn, cocooning us in. The only view is of a telescope in the living room. It’s strangely comforting, the idea that just past this room if we were to fit an eye to the small circle of glass, we would see the world out there. But we’d have to get up first, cross the threshold, and look through the glass.

Insurmountable obstacles.

This sideways life of mine doesn’t feel right, but it’s okay because Brazuca seems to be living sideways with me. He is also askew.