She saw something moribund in it: in the house, which had acquired a clammy gloom; in Sharkey, who seldom exerted himself—which was why the day at Leftovers had been a disaster. He sat and stewed, and when she returned to him after work every day he would tell her a story she already knew, that he’d told her before.

What was wrong? It was not just his stopped life but also his visible deterioration. Sameness is never sameness when it is so persistent in nature; sameness is decay. It was bad enough that in his world nothing was new, but the truth was that he was growing smaller, his aura dimming, and his world too was shrinking.

On the evening she returned and he began with a fixed smirk (he was holding a joint) to tell her again of the business with the package of pakalolo that Moe Kahiko had sent to him, she remembered that he’d first begun this story in the car moments before he’d hit and killed the cyclist.

“I done a bad ting,” he said in Moe’s dull, droopy voice.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “We can’t go on like this.”

But Sharkey kept talking.

She leaned at him and said, “Don’t. Please park it.”

He stopped talking yet kept his facial expression, Moe’s frown, exaggerated, foolish, obtuse. It had been a good enough story the first time. Now, like all the others, it was monotony, noise in her ears and eyes. She wanted to scream.

“What’s your deal?” he said.

“My deal,” she said, and thoughts fluttered in her head, winged things slapping into each other and against her skull, rousing other thoughts, sending them flying, waking them to fury—none would settle, none would roost, all of them squawked for attention or beat their wings behind her eyes. She pressed her head to quiet them.

“You’re fretting again,” he said, like a boast, a big confident put-down.

“Not fretting.”

“What then?”