A gangly old man, knotted with muscles, his pajama shirt open, wielding a nine-iron in what seemed to be mute surprise. Usually what you expect in these cases was a loud huh, a shout, something meant to scare the intruder away. That was the scenario. Usually the victim would engage in some kind of dialogue right off, set the standards, get things in order before you tied him up to a chair and took him to the basement and then, later, after watching his eyes dart around madly and so on, blow him away with a shotgun wrapped in a towel. (As was mentioned, Jimmy had a pretty good overall sense of how these gigs worked.) Instead, the old geezer just stood silently without uttering a word and held the club sidelong over his head. A strong-looking old fart when put next to Jimmy’s drug-depleted form, but not so against the jittering insectlike quickness of Janet, jerking behind in the shadows. (She’d moved back into the hall after throwing the switch.) She flew forward, and in a swift Judo move, snapping her arms around his midsection while engaging his ankles with her feet, disarmed the old man and twisted him to the ground, and then engaged him in a wrestling match. The thick carpeting provided ample padding for this occasion; it induced the wrestling, she later thought, much later, when details were few and far between: the club glinting over his head, the thick, heavy sheen of its wooden shank, the brass-coated reading lamps on both sides of the bed, a night table littered with brown pill bottles, capped in light blue, a mother lode of prescription heart pills and sleeping aids. (They’d load those up into one of the old guy’s socks and take it along to the hatchery.) The wrestling match moved along elegantly in the Greco-Roman style, with headlocks and half nelsons and quick leg movements, and while they went at it, Jimmy, not wanting to ruin a good moment, began to pilfer the room, going first to the closet, looking under the shoes, work boots, slippers, high heels, sandals, flip-flops, and in the pockets of the coats hung there.

How the old guy got hold of the device during the wrestling match was still a mystery to her, and to Jimmy, who was finally released from the hospital on a cold fall day and met up with Janet in the park, the bandage limp from his forehead, blaming his injury for the loss of details. The old coot must’ve reached up onto the nightstand to get it during the wrestling. She didn’t see it. It was shaped a bit like a gun, but more like one of those German electric razors, and when he turned it on it sounded like a razor, and she was sure it was a razor until he held the buzzing instrument up to his throat and began to make words out of the vibration, one at a time, having to press it deep into the flesh to get the sound out of his throat. His dentures were out and his gums had a hard time working into the proper shape. For a year he had trained in the use of the device, and part of the training was learning a whole new scheme for shaping the mouth around the words. In doing so, he had learned the essence of what it is we do when we speak. How much is involved.