Each word is a small miracle of air and shape. Each word urges itself upon the mouth. Each word is sacred.

Stop, he said.

Jesus Christ, Jimmy said, coming around. Over his arm was a green sport coat and a plaid pair of golf pants.

It’s fuckin’ Helen Keller.

Take what you want and be on your way, the buzz said.

The disappointment Jimmy felt over this sudden development was acute; that his original intention of stuffing a sock in the old man’s mouth—in lieu of duct-taping it the way they did in most of the flicks—had been thwarted. The plan had called for a sock and now here was an old fuck who had to put an electric razor to his throat to buzz the words out like a robot.

Sitting on the carpet with the buzzer in his hand, the man had a flashback: a few weeks after the house was finished and the poured patio had hardened (because as a mason he refused the standard-issue wooden deck of treated wood and even worked alongside the men as they poured the patio, to make sure the concrete was kept properly wet and set correctly) and his belongings were unpacked and put in place, he went outside and sat in his lawn chair. When he was alone he often tried to speak without the machine, just mouthing the air. Inside his head he could hear those words. But this afternoon he felt the urge to hear something, so he put the machine to his throat and buzzed a few bars of the “Moonlight Sonata,” just a hum, and then sang a little bit of Sinatra, and in doing so he remembered the way it had felt to smoke all of those cigarettes while working, doing some underpinning of a house, digging out beneath the footing, laying frames, guiding the chute into place and making the hand sign to the driver to begin the pour—all that cool clumped grayness slushing down the chute while he sprayed it with the hose, slushing it into place, waiting to be smoothed. All that hard work, and then, as a reward, a moment of silence as the smoke slips across his throat. Now it was replaced with the buzz. Not the same thing, he thought, but somehow similar.

Take what you want and don’t hurt me, the buzz said. Hearing this standard-issue plea filled Jimmy with an intense wariness. In the space behind his skull, the voices began a Greek chorus. No buzz in those fucking voices. Singing a kind of lullaby, he later said to himself, or maybe it was to one of the doctors in the clinic a few years later when he was back in, trying to get his life in order and cleaned up but not admitting, of course, to what he had done that night. It wasn’t a demon chorus. Not of his own making. Not of his own doing.

We should take off. This isn’t right. We’re off the mark here, she was saying.