I pull up our email chain and find the mixtape. I sent it at 1:43 a.m., after the author wrote to tell me that squid have doughnut-shaped brains. I look at the track list and wonder where I went wrong. The esophagus passes through a central hole in the brain. If they overeat, they risk brain damage. I wonder if I was too earnest, if I relied too heavily on Mazzy Star. I stop applying for jobs and look for a reputable camgirl site, though I have some trouble linking my PayPal and the traffic is low. I sit in front of the camera in my bra for half an hour and only get one patron. Mostly he just reads the paper, but then he folds it up and sends a message through the chat that says kill yourself, nigger bitch. I log off and think about the clown nose. I look outside and Akila and Rebecca are in the garden wearing wide-brimmed hats. They are kneeling in front of a single tomato, and for a moment, they look completely alike, the plant the center of their silent communion. Then Akila takes off a glove and cradles the tomato in the palm of her hand. They turn to each other and laugh. I try to figure out what was funny, but I can’t, so I go to the master bathroom and look through the cabinets, and inside everything is generic and mostly expired except for the narcotics. I take two Percocet and save a fentanyl patch for later. The bottles all bear Rebecca’s name, though the triazolam is the only one with her middle name, which turns out to be Moon. Underneath the sink, there is an old-school douche bag that is warm to the touch. There is a modest purple vibrator with three speeds, cotton balls, hydrogen peroxide, hair dye, and black nail polish. I take the nail polish. I can’t imagine her painting her nails, but I can imagine her on the bathroom tile, prepping the douche with Vaseline. When I imagine it, she is indifferent, her vagina defying all etymology, not a pussy or a twat but an abstract violence, like a Rorschach or a xenomorph. For me, I’ve had little choice. The moment I left Clay’s house, my vagina was a cunt.

* * *

I go to the window and make sure they’re still out in the garden. I take a few pictures of them and delete the ones with too much sun. I do a sweep under the bed. There are board games and unopened bags of soft, red clay. There is a battered version of Sorry, a Boggle with a cracked dome, and a sleek chessboard with a compartment for pieces. Inside, there are two queens and a pouch of tulip seeds. It seems strange that these would be kept under the bed, strange that they would have board games at all. Everything is too ordinary, too sweet. I can’t imagine Rebecca suspending her disbelief long enough to move a piece, I can’t imagine Akila tolerating the cheer of her father, and yet there they are outside in the garden, laughing with each other. My mother was not a woman who laughed. She didn’t laugh because (1) she could see that everyone who heard it was unpleasantly surprised and (2) after we moved upstate, nothing was funny. She told stories about the home economics courses they offered in rehab, about how they gave her a succulent shaped like a hand and taught her a different way to pack a suitcase. These stories were not humorless. She smiled when she talked about the holding cell in Harlem, about the plainclothes police officers who sat outside her apartment in unmarked cars. She told me that cowboys could be women, could be black. She watched multicamera sitcoms exclusively, left the TV on low during the night so that my dreams became elastic and improvisational, primed to make sense of the canned laughter always in the air. She was disappointed to find I had inherited her ugly, glottal laugh, and encouraged me to hold it behind my hand.

We went to church and clapped softly to an instrumental of “He Lives.” We wore plain, shapeless clothes and washed each other’s feet. At a more relaxed, secular church a mile down the road, the pastor gave the sermon from his drum kit. In our church, my mother tried to befriend scared vegetarian women who smelled the city and turned their heads. The sun went down and the TV turned on. We went to Waldenbooks and my mother bought my weekly sketchbook. She stood in Self-Help with her hand in her hair. At home, she put on “Dancing Queen” over the TV. Underneath ABBA, Suzanne Somers emerged from the shower as John Ritter placated the landlord with his floppy wrists. My mother danced and waxed poetic about 1977, the year she was seventeen. She lay on the floor and said, It’s all boring when I’m not high, the ceiling fan turning in her eyes.

* * *

When I put the chessboard back, I notice another game a little farther back, underneath a pair of dirty gingham shorts. When I bring it out, I see immediately that it is Monopoly, which was my father’s favorite game. It was his favorite game because he always won, and he always won because he always played against me. He believed in the purity of competition. He did not believe that a child deserved to win simply for being a child. He scooped up my properties and smiled, showed the gold fillings in his teeth. Once, I tucked a few blue dollars into my dollhouse in the middle of the night. Now I look for my father’s favorite piece, the boot. But the game and the pieces are missing, and in their place is a Glock 19. This was one of Clay’s favorites. He owned three, and in his apartment, one was always nearby. When he held it, he held it casually. When I take the gun into my hands now, it does not feel casual. The gun itself is ugly. It is heavy and inelegant, but in my hand, I see how it is lethal, ingenious technology. Rebecca texts me from outside and says that she and Akila are going out for back-to-school supplies, and it occurs to me that it is September. I stand at the window, and I watch them drive away. I consider the gun and notice I have an incoming call.

“Eric,” I say, embarrassed by the apparent relief in my voice.

“She lives,” he says, and I sense his irritation. It should make me happy, but his anger is different when it is not theoretical, and I panic.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“You did?”

“Of course not. But I worried. I worry about you in that neighborhood.”

“You worry about me?” I say, because I like the idea of someone out there wondering if I’ve died, though in the moment his whiteness is unbearable. Also I know he is just trying to make me feel bad about not responding, but even this performative concern feels good. “It’s just Bushwick.”

“Have you looked at the crime map? They update it regularly. A good amount of forced sodomy in your area. Rebecca got mugged coming out of the supermarket eight years ago. Two miles away from our house. Guy took her ring and I had to get her a new one.”

“How’s the conference going?”

“It’s good. All these NARA nerds. I feel at home. But I miss you.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, putting him on speakerphone so I can hold the gun.

“No, I do. I mean that. I’ve had a lot of time to think up here. You know when you go to a hotel and get one of those rough towels, and the toilet is sealed and certified with a sticker? That’s Toronto. Clean. Everyone has great skin.”

“What have you been thinking about?” I ask, because I’ve never been to a hotel.

“A lot of things. I was working with some glass plate negatives. T. E. Lawrence. The negatives were so degraded I went back to the hotel and found flakes of the film inside my glove. I put them under a light and mostly it was a wash, but in one or two I could still see the desert, the color-reversed sand. And I just felt like, fuck, this exact thing is happening to me, you know, cellularly.” He laughs, and I can tell he is embarrassed. For a moment, I think I love him. I hold the gun with two hands.

“I totally get that.”

“I could leave my wife,” he says.

“What?”

“I could leave her. Easily.”