He rejected medicine of any kind—believed in the body and its mechanisms. He competed regularly in lengthy events of strenuous activity, and could lift me off the ground with one hand in his pocket.

Nonetheless, when I awoke, he’d bound himself in the bedsheets and he was breathing in a heavy, smacking way.

I prepared the coffee and on a small plate arranged carefully washed fruits. Soon he set his cup down, sloshing the coffee over the rim in his excitement, and hurried to the bathroom.

He picked up the cup from its puddle when he came out and shook his head sadly—though by then the coffee had gone cold, and he would not drink cold coffee.

I might have envied his predicament, since whatever I swallowed made its swift and irritable trip from one end to the other, resulting in daily harassment. In a similar manner, I rush from one situation to the next, often arriving too quickly.

Yet, I could sit in a restaurant and request of the waiter some water and plain vegetables, please, and be understood. A little heap of the vegetables on a plate would arrive a few minutes later—lightly steamed, steaming still—accompanied by a small cup of oil or melted butter for dipping or drizzling, though most often I ate them unadorned between sips of water.

I went on to collect pamphlets and paused to read plaques of note. In one plaza people had been bound and set alight—alive—by their fellow citizens. In another, shoppers had been trampled by a large herd of animals.

Later, at the entrance to a park, I stood before a pair of pillars topped with a pair of heads—a man’s and a woman’s whose noses had been chipped to snubs—and on the woman’s crown of cold braids was a pigeon, releasing from its undercarriage a loose white drib that slid down the woman’s cheek like a teardrop.

Back at the apartment, I found him slumped in a chair—pasty and waxen—and not wishing to talk.

Could I walk without toppling? Would I make it in time to relieve myself?

How funny—how funny—the baring of ass—how good to sit.

There then came an angry banging on the door. But it was the hot hiss I was listening to—the miraculous stream—unaided, unbeckoned—of what had so recently been lolling around in my mouth.

When at last I opened the door, he was standing right there, as if roused from a spell. A clump—oily and black—was on the floor.

I made it, he said—casting a proud look down upon it and upon me—and for dinner I’ll have some soft yellow cheese.

BAIT-AND-SWITCH

We rented it by loophole. It had a wood-paneled rumpus room, a pink claw-foot tub, a tire swing in the yard, beige Berber wall-to-wall. The kitchen was papered in a repeating print of beribboned geese. It was like the house of some scrubbed friend whose parents fussed a sleepover—presenting bowls of name-brand snacks and a bland stack of video rentals.

We hauled in our resinous heaps and spread them haphazardly throughout the rooms. We smoked in the tub—ashed into the sink—puked the shower. We stored our liquor in the large linen closet that smelled sweetly of the clean bedding of a clean family at first—and then of the sour, sticky rings our bottles left.