Now his eyes looked bleary, his chin dropped closer to his chest. I began gathering my things.

“Perhaps this would be a good place to stop,” I said. “Thanks for taking the time, Mr. Firea.”

“You’ll come back? I have more I want to say.”

“I will, yeah.”

“Good,” he said, “yes.”

I left him drowsing in the lawn chair, but not before taking the cigarette from his fingers and extinguishing it in an empty can.

I entered back into the blistering heat and struggled down the switchback to the road, cars zooming by and flashing in the sun. To my relief, the Highlander hadn’t been broken into, but on the driver’s side, across the door and window, someone had spray-painted the yellow outline of an enormous cock and balls.

6.

I took the Highlander to a car wash, but the penis paint had dried and they said I’d have to leave the car overnight for them to blast it off. I had no other way to navigate Mimico’s knotted overpasses, so I just had to drive the thing, facing forward with deadly intent as people leered from car windows to heckle me, as if I’d chosen the dick design as a custom decal.

By the following afternoon, when I arrived at Mayor Fish’s rally, I’d almost forgotten about the graffiti until the unamused looks of people standing around the parking lot reminded me. To a cop surveying the penis, all I had to say was “I parked it on the west side,” and he gave a comprehending nod.

Tents had been erected on the lawn outside the courthouse, an imposing neoclassical building flanked by palm trees with Ionic columns and a dome painted gold. I framed the building in the middle of my vision, and two overpasses, one on either side, ran toward a vanishing point somewhere behind it. From this distance, the sound of traffic was almost soothing, like a water feature.

In the square shade of the tents, food had been set out—a pyramid of hamburgers, a bucket of macaroni salad, and cantaloupe cubes all reaching the same temperature—and it looked like they’d bused in some people from the west side for a meal. The homeless had been given bright-red XL T-shirts that said REELECT MAYOR JOCK FISH, making them easy to supervise as they hurriedly ate off paper plates.

Waiting for the mayor to appear, I reflected on the Pavel Firea interview. He’d called that morning to arrange our follow-up.

“Sorry I dozed off,” he said, and I heard him pull from a cigarette. “You can come by tomorrow, same time.”

It was such a spare, solitary existence, alone on that slope in a medicated daze, no pictures on the walls, no postcards on the fridge. My goal for tomorrow’s interview was to dig deeper into his private life. He could turn out to be one of my story’s key threads.