“Oh, yes,” I say. “I had a great time. You know, I’ve been watching this new TV show. It’s about a man who kills people, but only if they deserve it. Bad people, in other words.”

“What do you think appeals to you about this show?”

“It doesn’t appeal to me,” I say. “I think it’s nonsense. You can’t tell what people are like from what they do. You can do a bad thing even though you’re not a bad person. Bad people could do good things accidentally. You can’t really know, is my point.” I can see him drawing breath to ask me a question so I hurry on. “And there was this other TV show where a man killed lots of people, but then he hurt his head in an accident, and when he woke up he thought it was ten years earlier. He didn’t remember killing the people, or the new kinds of cellphone or his wife. He was a different person to the one who killed the women. So was it still his fault, even when it was out of his control?”

“Do you feel that your actions are sometimes out of your control?”

Careful, I think.

“And there’s this other show,” I say, “about a talking dog. That seems much more realistic to me, in a way, than being able to tell good people from bad. My cat can’t actually speak—I admit that. But I always know what she wants. It’s just as good as talking.”

“Your cat means a lot to you,” the bug man says.

“She’s my best friend,” I say, which might be the first true thing I’ve said to him in the six months that I’ve been coming here. A silence falls, not uncomfortable. He writes on his yellow legal pad but it must be about groceries or something, because, really, I’m not giving him anything.

“But I am worried about her.” He glances up. “I think she’s…” I hesitate. “I think my cat is, what would you say? Homosexual. Gay. I think my cat is attracted to female cats.”

“What makes you say that?”

“There’s this other cat she watches, out the window. She watches her all the time. She loves her, I can just tell. My mother would be very upset if she knew I had a homosexual cat. She had very strong feelings about it.” The scent of vinegar fills the air for a moment and I think I might throw up. I didn’t mean to say any of that.

“Do you think your cat—?”

“I can’t talk about that anymore,” I say.

“Well—”

“No,” I say. “No, no, no, no, NO.”

“All right,” he says. “How is your daughter?”