At first Sam lived on a sofa in the basement. Then somebody left and he moved upstairs. A bald philosophy major moved onto the sofa. There was a Puerto Rican physics major in the furnace room with his girlfriend, a linguist. An art major had the front bedroom. Moira Clancy lived in the little room off the main-floor kitchen. She was being analyzed and got her room and board for cooking for everyone. She played the violin and spoke with a phony German accent, the souvenir of an au pair position in Hamburg. She encouraged the cats.

They all gave Sam the rent and he mailed it to the landlady when he remembered. Sam lived in the attic. The door off the landing closed so the cats couldn’t get up there. The attic had a cubbyhole kitchen and a closet bathroom, then one long room under the eaves. The ceiling sloped to the floor. You could stand up only in the middle of the room. There was only one little gray window.

Wherever Sam lived, it was always the same: piles of papers strewn everywhere, notes and outlines and unfinished letters and unfinished essays and unfinished chemical equations, dusty with cigarette ash. Books and pipes. Cartoon strips tacked onto the walls. Everything faded and flimsy from being talked about too much and touched too little.

Sam was in the little kitchen. I leaned in the doorway, watching. His square hands were grimy. I could see the top of his head; his brown, curly hair was gray with dust. He took a bloody paper bundle from the refrigerator.

“What stinks, Sam?”

“That’s just memory. This refrigerator remembers everything that’s ever been put into it throughout its history.”

“Why’s the meat green?”

He speared the hunks and held them up proudly. “Aging. Aged steaks. I read about it somewhere. Of course the main thing about horsemeat is that it’s cheap.” He slapped the smelly meat into the sink and scraped at the mold with a knife. “But if it’s really true that you are what you eat, I’d rather be a horse than a cow. Also, it’s very good for your teeth and gums, and has a lot of flavor. Beef doesn’t taste like anything.”

The knife sawed through the dark meat. Sam’s hands moved slowly. He pretended to be precise in his movements, but I could tell he really didn’t know what he was doing. He threw cubes of meat into the frying pan, poured oil over them. The pan was already caked with other charred hunks of horsemeat. The skillet smoked as the heat reached it.

“Go open the window, Sally.”