He finished his beer and ordered another and became sullen, pouring this third beer, telling her how every crisis on earth, from pollution to overpopulation to poverty and ill health, could be ascribed to humans. He sipped and said, “We’re the problem.”

“Something cheery, please,” Olive said. “I’ve had a long day in triage.” Seeing the waitress, she called out, “Please bring me a beer.” Then she said, “One cheeky bastard in the ward decided to flash his old job at me.”

“What did you do?”

“Laughed,” she said. “It would have been against hospital protocol to kick him in the goolies.”

“No!” Sharkey said. “Disturbing!”

Just then the waitress handed Olive a bottle of beer and walked away laughing at Sharkey’s horrified reaction.

Olive said, “Sometimes the sight of people laughing alarms me.”

“Ever notice, rich people don’t laugh a lot—it gives too much away,” Sharkey said. “And it’s sinister when they do. You know it’s a form of boasting.”

“The poor actually cackle and hoot. They have nothing to lose,” Olive said. “You want to laugh with them.”

“The word ‘juices.’” Sharkey had finished his third beer and was signaling for another. “Juices can seem dreadful.”

“Bodily fluids,” Olive said.

“‘Fluids’ is worse,” Sharkey said. He watched the waitress pour a bottle of beer into his glass and drank a third of it, staring at Olive, nodding as he swallowed.

“Are you saying you hate those words because deep down you’re aroused by them?”

“Deep down they disgust me,” he said with such sudden force that Olive drew back. “Litter. Graffiti. Stretch limos. Garbage in the ocean. Sewage spills.” He put his glass down. “I think of them and I can’t swallow.”

“Steady on, Joe.”

But he was gesturing and insistent, with a drunk’s deafness. “Surfing in the Philippines that season I got horribly sick, I couldn’t understand it. The waves were awesome. Heavy evil barrels, all ours,” he said. “I was stoked, yet I got sicker.”

“Right,” she said, and looked closer. He never opened a book, but he always had a story that got her attention. He wooed her with his stories, like a traveler returned from a long journey, wishing to be a hero, seeking a listener.

He swallowed the last of his beer and took a glass pipe from his shirt pocket, mashed a pinch of weed into the bowl with his thumb. As he squirted a flame from his lighter he took a deep hit, throwing his head back and gulping.

“Then a local guy told me why no one else was there. We were surfing on an outflow from a sewage culvert!”

“There goes my appetite.”