“You mean hairs?” He wiped his hands on his soiled apron, an abstract canvas of chance and skill.

“Yes, that piece of meat there,” I pointed to one of his displayed amputations at random, “used to feel. It wore a coat to protect it from cold and hungry gazes. Like mine and yours. Because of it, we are both here today.”

“All I have is what you see,” he half-twitched, half-scowled, unsure whether I was making fun of him, or he of me.

“Fine. I’ll take that one. Many thanks.”

Drops of blood forsook the doomed flesh, how they sizzled upon contact with the oven’s scalding bottom. I watched through the brown window, flesh converting into food. Small explosions could be heard as the roast spat. Heat, I thought, brought life out of gases, and if extreme enough, heat returns food back to its original gases. Clouds of smoke filled my apartment.

Professor Ranji burst in with wild eyes, wet, combed back hair, gleaming teeth in the dark frame of his beard. He dropped a bottle of red wine in and a French bread across the sink, pushed me out of the way, and with his own down-stretched sweater sleeves went to remove the roast, and not without heaven-curdling swears, for I had not used a pan.

“Thought your place was on fire,” he apologized, fanning the air and rolling up his soiled cuffs until his sleeves looked exaggeratedly big and fat above his elbows.

The meat rested on the worktop. The top was scorched, the bottom, raw. With the help of a shoeshine rag, once part of a T-shirt and white, he changed the position of the grill to the middle, and threw the meat back in. After he rinsed his hands, he wiped them on his trousers, and opened several windows.

“Wow, fine place you’ve got here …” he noticed at last.

“Thanks. My mother has this friend whose husband has a real-estate agency, he let us have it for practically nothing … practically unfurnished as you can see … My mother took in his wife while they were getting a divorce.”

At the tone “mother,” Professor Ranji shrunk like a probed sea anemone.

“Where do they live?” he asked, as though they could be living in the next room.

“At home. In Wachovi. Ever heard of Wachovi?”

“The truth?”

“It’s near Gables Beach … a six hour drive from here.”

Professor Ranji’s beard made his grins animalistic, almost predatory growls. I was getting goose bumps, taking on the skin of an easy prey.

“I get the feeling man and wife get sick of each other after awhile, like pot roast every day no matter how much you change the sauce and the side dish, and at the same time, they can’t stay away from each other for good, people miss the food from the country they come from no matter how bad it is.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” he frowned, picked my biology notebook off the floor and used it to fan the other rooms. My hair was impregnated with the incense of parched meat. He pushed through the cardboard boxes and banana cases I intended to use as dinner, coffee, and night tables; without asking, he rolled up the garbage bags on which sand dollars and starfish were drying and left them in a corner; it’s true, they smelt rather strongly.