The week after our encounter, I walked past the psychic’s office at least twice a day. She looked sullenly ahead, chewing gum, flicking idly between cards, casually discarding fortunes on her foldable table. It was as if there had been no contact, no five-star review. She never once acknowledged me.

*

When we went out, I enjoyed the flickers of concern that passed over his rotating friends’ faces. Should we know this one? I adjusted my skirt and watched incuriously, flatly, as my features blurred into the women before me. ‘I’m new,’ I said, like I was standing in front of a classroom. Those nights we monetised my normalcy until it became hard currency.

‘She’s so regular,’ I heard him repeat, ‘that’s what I like about her.’ So I said nothing about the week I spent on a ward unable to recognise my own face, a week when I felt it was possible I would never speak to another regular human being again. In every restaurant, they sat us right up front and if the comedian demanded snow, snow fell from the ceiling.

*

Over time, the stuff my boyfriend did became sort of predictable – staying out late, or not coming home, or coming home reeking of downtown places. If I’d ever once spoken on the phone to my mother, I know she would have referred to this as ‘evidence’. She would have used the phrase ‘cheap women’. Like anybody, she had phrases she used frequently. I wanted to ask him, ‘Are you going to downtown places?’ but I didn’t exactly know where the downtown places were. They could have been downtown or they could have been uptown. They might have been in the middle. Then again, anywhere is seedy if you want it to be.

He also moved the track into our bedroom and forced me to sleep on the couch. He said it comforted him to hear the laughter at night. It improved his routine.

‘What routine?’ I asked.

‘Sorry,’ he said, piling up blankets and pillows.

I saw a doctor for my sleep problems. It was necessary. She shone a light under my tongue and performed other technicalities. A week later, I was informed I had several STDs, some of the minor ones, but also some of the major ones. I inquired whether I got them all at once, or at different times. The doctor said she couldn’t tell, her education only went so far. She awarded me prescriptions and a lollipop.

When I asked my boyfriend about it, he just ignored me, made me shower twice a day, repeated the weak jokes he told his mother at her lowest. If I mentioned the track, how the laughter scared me at night, he whispered, ‘We will not survive without that machine,’ and closed his eyes tightly.