He told me that he’d been a good guitarist once. “Do you believe me?” he asked, and I could tell I was supposed to say yes. I didn’t actually care, but there was a mood around the table that expected me to say yes and so I said yes. We would be in London for a week, I was already feeling homesick, and Henrietta was sitting next to me, so I said that yes, I believed​ 105he’d been talented on the guitar. Mark smiled, and I smiled, and he smiled back at me, and I thought how much easier it was this way. For all I cared he could have been a virtuoso. He could have been Eric Clapton or someone. It didn’t matter. What mattered were the others, and I thought I needed to leave it open. I had to allow him inside, even though one time, out in the hallway by our classroom, Mark had said, “Mette isn’t chubby, she’s fat,” so that everyone could hear. Henrietta had been there that day too, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, but sometimes you have to eat shit, I thought, and said, “Yes, I believe you when you say you were a talented guitarist.” I said it so that everyone could hear, and then he got to the freezer chest.

He said that unfortunately, he’d been robbed of his great talent, because one day he’d been rummaging around in his grandmother’s freezer chest, whose hinge mechanism turned out to be broken, and just as he was standing there about to grab some cinnamon kringles, the freezer lid had slammed down on his fingers. The freezer chest had crushed them. “See for yourself,” he said, waving his stumpy fingers in my face. “See, I’ll never barre a chord again.” There was a silence, Henrietta smiled, and I said, “That’s really a shame,” and he said, “You think so?” “Yes,” I said, “I do think so,” and then he paused deliberately, before saying, “But it’s all just bullshit, you little fool.” He said it easily, and then our corner dipped as the ferry to England hit a wave, and Henrietta, with her special insight into evil, could barely keep her seat.