My fingers felt hard and full. The tips were red from cold. My breath was steaming out in puffs. It carried heat from my throat and the wet bag of my organs farther down.

“Was Stella right?” I asked.

“About what?”

“Last night. She said you hated talking about work.”

“It’s something I told her. And I meant it.”

“But?”

“Now that you’ll be working there…” he said. “It’s different. We can talk about it, if you want.”

He told me about the buildings. The bank owned twenty floors of one skyscraper, he said, and twenty-five floors of another one. It seemed a shame they didn’t have an entire building. I didn’t understand much about his world, and I was ready to accept that. My main priority was not being afraid to ask questions.

Abe launched into a list of the people I should watch out for. Turned out his division was full of crazies. I probably wouldn’t be working with them, he said, but just in case. There was Joe DiFranco with a drawer full of porn. “Most people are using websites these days,” Abe said. “But not him.” I didn’t like to hear Abe talk about that kind of thing, as if he used websites, too. He told me about Demetrius Sloth, whose name still got jokes.

He thought you could learn a lot about people when you saw them staying late.

“Like what could you learn about you?” I said. “I mean, if you weren’t you.”

He laughed. He said he ate chocolate bars to keep himself awake, was one thing. He could eat four or five in a row.

He asked if I remembered the time I caught him eating sugar in the dark. He was maybe ten years old.

Of course I did, I told him. I’d found him striking his spoon into the hard bag. He explained the sugar was full of mountains and valleys, its own planet, and he was eating the whole world. He whispered, “I’m shoveling.”

If he ate too much, I’d warned, the spiders would crawl into his mouth while he slept, because it was sweet. He’d smiled and taken another bite. I’d tasted some once he was gone, just to fall asleep with the same toothache.

“I kept my mouth wide open when I fell asleep that night,” he said. “I wanted to catch a mess of spiders and name them after us.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

There was a long silence.

“Abe?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you still get that thing at night? Where you can’t move?”

I remembered these most of all, the night terrors. They struck him suddenly, like stomach flu, and I’d wake to hear him calling my name, complaining that his limbs wouldn’t listen to his mind anymore. Like dead animals attached to all my endings.

“I get it after dreams now,” he said. “Only bad ones.”