There are sounds outside conspiring to muddle me. My name as it is called repeatedly by both Dodge and Jenny sounds for all the world like the name of someone who has been lost for hours in a cold, dark sea, a raging sea: the name of a man who is suffering from hypothermia and can hardly clutch at the lifeline that has been thrown, his fingers slipping, the sizzling spray of the rotor blades blinding him. It’s the way you’d call someone who has been dead for hours, I think, but then I must be deceiving myself, because they have—I am sure—thrown their full support behind me in this project, vowed to support me to the end, and I’ve laid it out before them in the clearest terms. I’m here, I call back, still counting, not willing to take my eyes from the pill bugs and millipedes, the dry husks of their forms, shelled and sucked empty of life. I’m here, I’m here.

HUNGER

As soon as she heard it again from Jimmy’s lips in the social service office, waiting in line, lines, lines, and more lines—like man if we don’t qualify for some real monies, we got to like hit one of the houses up on the ridge—she knew exactly which one, a raised ranch with about five sets of sliding doors just dying to be jimmied. The old retired codger was always out on his lawn with his putter, practicing shots while she and Jimmy scraped around in the brush spying on him; tall crabgrass, little alcoves in the weedy meadow where they set up campfires with other rejects. Year in, year out since high school they’d partied there; now new houses were encroaching, plots marked out in yellow ribbons, foundations setting in wooden forms (they’d done their best to mess around with those but found the wood glued to the hardened concrete); there were skeletal superstructures worth torching if the escape route out—a single little dirt utility road—weren’t so chancy. Sliding glass doors, cheap dead bolts, the house was awaiting Jimmy’s lock-picking swiftness. (He’d been a locksmith apprentice and was as fast at picking as an average Joe was at inserting a key and turning the tumblers; he knew the kinks in the major lock brands: Yale, Jiffy, and Quicktight, the particular one dominating market share, found on just about every door on every home. He knew that most doors could be kicked in with a single, Zen-directed blast of the boot heel.)