“I bet you were an athlete,” Bridget tells him. He says he was, just stopped playing when he got to college. Could have played.

“Were you that good?” she asks him.

“Fastest white kid in the city,” Mike hears himself say, then feels very stupid, very young.

“How old are you, Mr. Mike?”

“Nineteen.”

“Oh, I knew it.” Bridget brings her hand up to her mouth, teasing him. “You’re just a baby!”

Mike wants to tell her he likes the world probably as much as she does. Paul, staring up into the night sky with his fat, pale arms stretched out along the edge of the tub, tells him he has a rip in his trousers. So they noticed, thinks Mike. Of course they noticed.

Burton calls from the kitchen for Mike to come and help with drinks. Mike steps out of the tub with the certainty of Bridget’s eyes upon him. If only she had to get out of the tub before me, he thinks.

Mike likes making drinks with Burton in the kitchen. They look at the newspapers on the bar as Burton breaks ice with a small steel mallet. Mike reads about world leaders embroiled in war and torture. The Republican candidate for president of his own country is a deeply religious man and is quoted as literally saying that God is on his side. This is not cool with Burton, who, tapping the paper with an angry finger and shaking his head, breaks off to go piss.

Mike picks up the mallet to test it and it feels good in his hand. He lights another cigarette and reads the bookshelf behind the bar. Some books he doesn’t recognize about Southeast Asia and drug smuggling, and high fashion, and a couple he knows from his first-year philosophy course, St. Augustine, Kierkegaard.

Suddenly, Bridget’s voice, sticky and harsh, comes from the terrace. She is swearing and calling for help. Mike looks and sees her straining in the tub, sees her body and her freckled breasts roll up over the top and her red hair falling in her eyes, and then she braces her knees and drives her hips forward, calling for help, pulling, afraid.

“Burton,” she is yelling, “come on, you idiot.”

Mike runs and sees that she is trying to pull Paul from the bottom, where he is sitting cross-legged, like a submerged Buddha. His hair floats like a pale lily pad just beneath the surface. Harrison and Burton both rush up behind Mike and together they haul the enormous Paul from the tub. He splutters and hacks, eyes closed as they get him onto a chair on the terrace. Mike noticed earlier that the chair’s back is made of wrought iron angels. Paul is still coughing as he opens his eyes.