“Swallowed my chew gum,” Raymond said. “You know, it was a compliment, Raf choosin’ me for a friend. I brought him here from Baton Rouge that summer with all the falling stars? Can’t remember what we were doin’ then, but it musta been disgusting.” Raymond staggered and caught a door jamb with his free hand. He stood there, propped, wagging his head. “No worse than this recent. Prudence tell you she found me trying to roll up under the car last night to sleep? A drunk runs off and hides ’cause he knows he’s caught in it. Ashamed of being that depressed, like it’s got its own stench. He sees people doing the day-to-day, walking around. . . . ’S like everyone else moves by in some trance.”

A terrarium night with steam at rooftop level. The black sky was low. I could make out, from the porch, the St. Francis birdbath and could smell the sticky fruit droppings from the tree in the clinic’s yard.

In my notebook I wrote,

old red air

fine needles for a tattoo

whump and oom-pah

of the rained-on corner band.

Raymond’s white shirt was all the way unbuttoned. He went to urinate in the side yard.

“How’d you meet Raf?” he called back to me.

I hesitated before answering. “He was this guy Nick’s friend,” I said.

“Nick?”

“I lived with him before Raf.”

“Huh,” Raymond said, as he returned. “Nick a good friend of Raf’s?”

“Real good friend,” I said.

“So, how’d he act when you shifted over?”

“Relieved,” I said.

“That ain’t true,” Raymond said, smiling.

Now the night was gone. The headlights on a passing city bus blinked off. Sunrise took the sky through grays, reds, oranges, up to a cyan blue.

I walked Raymond inside. I fixed a breakfast of bread, and coffee, a bowl of carrot salad with coconut and carob shavings.

The linoleum in the kitchen was silty. The soles of our shoes scratched and whispered.

Raymond didn’t eat, didn’t sit. He stood with his back to the screen door.

Behind him, in the yard out there, were Raf’s plantings: a flower garden of begonia, periwinkle, and some yarn-ball blossoms called “Sparkle verbena.”

“Am I in your notebooks?” Raymond asked.

“You?” I said. “Oh, sure, you. You’re at the heart of it all.”

He pulled me to him, sighed into my hair. I felt him harden against my thigh. He said, “Raf’ll be back and this time he’ll find you.”

“Yeah. Probably that’s the idea.”

Raymond said, “My idea I’m havin’ right now is— though not new—right now it seems a real good, borderline-genius idea.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Not yet.”

Pru wore a sleeve of pink fabric, like a playsuit of Lilith’s; no underwear. Her short hair was twisted into thorns.