but when she’s not working. She works the late shift. All she does is eat, all day. And stare. That fatty.” Thomas slams his cup on the table. “I’m going for a walk.” Patricia looks at him, surprised, then returns to her newspaper with a shake of her head. He’s almost never angry. Now he’s boiling with rage. He takes the stairs down from the sixth floor, tramping hard on the steps, pounding his fist on the elevator at every level. Luckily he left his cellphone back in the kitchen, otherwise he would’ve called and given her an earful. The temperature outside is colder than yesterday, the wind’s blowing from the west. A plastic bag dances in the gusts. He should’ve worn a jacket. He fishes his cigarettes from his pocket and finally gets one lit after several attempts. Fucking wind. Maybe the door of his father’s apartment was busted a long time ago. Maybe it was just some junkies, like Maloney suggested, who’d stolen the silverware and a few pieces of furniture, or some drunken second-hand shop dealer, or some boys, or maybe all of the above in several rounds. Maybe it really was some kid throwing an apple core through the door on his way down the stairs. But it was in the living room. Thomas turns a corner and the wind lashes his face. The park on the other side of the street seems gloomy in this gray weather. An old woman with two small dogs is practically flying through the air. A band of youths hang around the benches at the park entrance. Farther down the street there’s an ambulance, and the EMTs are maneuvering a stretcher into the vehicle. His rage dissipates once he’s trudged around the block. Yet he still has no desire to go upstairs to Patricia. He decides to go grocery shopping. The supermarket is filled with families chugging around with large carts and piling them with items. There’s a line at every register. The families with children appear to be buying groceries for the entire week: milk, bread, frozen foods, cereal, huge packages of toilet paper. Thomas removes products from the shelves, but the entire time his ears ring with a high-pitched note of irritation. And when he puts his items onto the belt—goat cheese, red onions, crackers, sparkling water, and a whole bunch more—he suddenly stops. Every single one of these people will die. Every single person, no matter how old they are. The ones babbling cheerfully, clowning around, having a good time, arguing and talking, or lonely or hunted or sad or happy or relieved—even plain joyful—they will all die. Maybe soon. They’ll lie like wax figures in some morgue. Their insides and their flesh will swell and rot, bacteria will explode inside their bodies and make them stink like dead cows in 95-degree heat. He looks at a dark-skinned, middle-aged woman behind him, at the young blond man at the register, at a grandfather holding his small grandson’s hand. They’ll all be disgusting corpses. Maybe very soon. The grandfather actually looks like someone who might kick the bucket any day. The kid could run in front of a car. The woman could have a terminal illness without knowing it. Him too. Even him. Maybe he’s got cancer. He slides his card through the machine and grabs his bags. He has a headache, a hangover, and stiff legs. The glass door glides open and nudges him back onto the street with a puff of warm air. Son of a bitch. Their father lay with his eyes closed, his dark hair combed back; one of the guards had found him, dead as a doornail on the floor. Heart attack. A white sheet covered his body. When they removed it, he was wearing prison garb. “Yes, that’s him,” Jenny had said, though no one had asked them to identify the body. She took a step back and squeezed Thomas’s arm. He felt nothing but loathing. There he lay, a corpse, already pallid and stiff. He recognized with a cool indifference some of his own features: Yup, that’s how I look, too. It was as if their father resembled a boy or a young man, and yet didn’t. His features were smooth, wrinkle-free. The dome of his forehead, his jutted chin, his broad mouth, his thick lips. His face expressed nothing. It was clear that he was no longer a human being. Yet it was unmistakably him. The body, a form for the life that had been inside him, like a mold one lifts a cake out of. The cake had been eaten. Their father’s big hands were crossed over his abdomen; they’d probably struggled to set them just so, or maybe they’d hurried, as soon as he’d been declared dead by the prison doctor. With a sudden tenderness, Thomas imagined several female officers with keys and pistols in their belts standing over the deceased, washing his ears, cleaning his nails. Arranging him, getting him ready. But it was the nurses who’d fixed him up. Those hands unnerved him; they were the same ones that had filled so much of his childhood. The hands he and Jenny had kept a close watch on, the entire time, those fast, unpredictable hands. Their father wore the ring with the black square on his little finger. He’d inherited it from his big brother, who’d been in the foreign legion and died when he was twenty-six, and he’d always promised Thomas that it would be his some day. “When the time comes, you’ll get the ring, Thomas. Before my brother got it, it was my father’s. When I die, it’ll be yours. And your son will have it after you.”
“But you can’t die,” he’d said, anxious. He was seven years old.
Their father had laughed out loud. “Ha! I’m not planning on it!”
Thomas wanted nothing to do with the ring. They must’ve forgotten to remove it when they prepared his body. Jenny squeezed his arm. “He looks so different,” she whispered. She’d visited him at the prison, so she must’ve known. He hadn’t seen his father’s face in many years. Outside it was cold, but the western sky was soft pink, golden. The bushes shivered when they walked toward the road. Thomas had taken the package containing his father’s possessions from the cell; they’d just handed it to him, without asking whether he wanted it or not. He could have chucked the whole thing in the garbage can on the way home, but the package now lay at the bottom of the bedroom closet, on top of his shoes. He’d first realized he had it when he got home. Later he’d opened it and found the pathetic dirty magazines, the notebook with telephone numbers sloppily scratched in, and the watch with the worn leather strap—which the old man had owned for as long as Thomas could remember. Every time he raised his arm to smack him or Jenny, or just raised his arm threateningly, pretending he was going to hit them—which was almost worse than the punch itself—he’d seen the reflection of light on the face of the watch and tried to tell what time it was. As a way of shielding himself. Like whistling when you were being beaten. Or reciting a verse in your head when you were being yelled at by the teacher, in front of everyone. Later he sang pop songs to himself, but around his sixteenth birthday nothing worked anymore, and so he began to fight back. Though he was taller and bigger than his father by the last year he lived with him, his father was almost always superior, except the one incredible time when Thomas had managed to haul him down to the floor and sit on his chest staring directly into his eyes, hissing: You will never hit me again, you bastard. He was agitated by so many emotions that he nearly lost his breath. As well as a strong desire to cling to his father’s body, to feel his arms around him: tears, love. Their father had only smiled and shook his head, clucking his tongue. And Thomas stood and walked to his room. The next day he ran away from home.
Wind rips at the enormous white tarpaulins covering the façade of the adjacent building. He still has no desire to return to Patricia, but he can’t stay out here. A woman opens a window on the second floor. He meets her glance for a moment, then her face disappears behind a checkered cloth that she shakes out vigorously. Crumbs and fluff billow in the air like snow. He takes the elevator up and carries the grocery bags into the apartment. The bathroom door opens, and Patricia exits with a towel around her head. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Every time you walk through that door you say ‘I’m sorry’.”
“I know,” he says.
“Did you go to the store?”
“Just picked up a few things.” He turns and grabs the bags and walks down the hall. He gives her a quick peck on the cheek as he passes by; she smells like fresh laundry, but there’s also this hint of earthiness, of wet soil, which he always finds off-putting. He sets the bags on the kitchen table and checks his cellphone. Jenny has called several times. She’s sent three text messages: “please can’t you help me?” and “I’ll take it to the shop then” and a half-hour ago: “aunt k called.” He hears Patricia setting up the ironing board in the living room. With the phone in his hand he opens the bedroom door. It’s cool and dark in here. He sits on the bed. His clock ticks faintly. He doesn’t want to call. After a short time,
