Josef takes the magazine from him with a nod, as if he knew what it was. DER WEG—Monthly Magazine for Cultural Preservation and Development. He pages through it. “Only those who surrender are lost,” quoting a certain Colonel Rudel, who, he reads, was a highly decorated Stuka pilot and is now head of the Argentinian branch of the Siemens corporation. One article works out how it couldn’t have been six million. “We have to throw off the straitjacket,” he reads. “We know that our newspapers are lying.” He flips to the end. The magazine is published in Argentina and in Germany. “Chess Problem: Which side can mate in two moves? Solution given by Messrs. . . .” He sets the magazine down on the table and leaves the store, uttering something more like a noise than a word.

Another week passes. His rounds shrink, limited to the places where he can get credit. The girl irons his suit every day. A Madonna on a household altar stares at the ceiling, eyes rolled up toward the ceiling (as if she’d had her fill of Josef). The two Argentinians will be moving soon. They pantomime working in the fields, make the international sign for money. You can come along, repay your debt. He doesn’t want to. Then again, if they move, he won’t even have a floor to sleep on anymore.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Once his favorite line from Thoreau, but that was then. That time is over. The older he gets, the less interested he is in other people’s insights.

The last night he lets the Argentinians take him to a wedding and gets drunk. Corn on the cob and meat on a charcoal grill—a delicious smell wafts through his shantytown neighborhood. He feels like he’s only had to sit out one dance and is ready to jump back in, just a few goddamn years behind bars and now onward and upward—but he doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know anymore what he should do with his life. He’s lost the beat, and here at the shantytown wedding he has to confront this insight, here where all he understands is Salud, rum, whiskey, gin.

An image pops into his head, and he closes his eyes in shame. Him in the New York Times. Shoulders slumping forward, his hands in handcuffs. The remarkably brazen grin. He never understood this grin.

Ettinger had told him that same day. After the car accident he hadn’t heard from him again, but then, half a year later, Ettinger called him. “Tonight.”

He neatly folded Lauren’s sweater, smelled it, unfolded it, then smelled it again.