“Looks that way.”
“I wish I’d have known; I was just at A.J.’s.”
Prentiss stuffed the rest of the apple pie in his mouth and took a roll of paper towels to his roommate in the bathroom. “That’s a potent odor,” he said. “Makes my fruit pie taste bad.”
“Thank you.”
“Seriously, you got a problem there.”
“Mayday, mayday.”
“You owe me money.”
“I always owe you money.”
“You got to put it up front now or they’ll shut down the utilities.”
“We have flashlights.”
“The second due date is coming.”
“We can make fires in the garbage can.”
“Going to turn off the water and we won’t be able to flush your evil shit away.”
“I’ll build an outhouse.”
“Seventy-four dollars, Frost. Today. Seventy-four dollars.”
“But I have to pay Sadie when I see her tomorrow.”
“Who’s Sadie?”
“My therapist.”
“A man’s got to have priorities. Don’t make me look for a new roommate.”
Prentiss went to his room and got out one of his work sweaters, a downy V neck decorated with rows of off-center maple leaves. Pulled on the boots. Patted his two-inch Afro into an approximate square. Started walking across town to the clean, well-lit Humboldt County Library, where the books and movies kept piling up for his sorting pleasure. Pleasure. Yeah, right. About as much pleasure as having your balls licked by a cat. A frazzle-haired woman pushing a stroller with no baby in it breezed past him when he crossed the street to the courthouse. He was going to be late. But for seven bucks an hour, did he care? True, the county had given him the job as an alternative to living in a halfway house, and he had to be grateful for the little bit of freedom this allowed him, though it was a chafed freedom, a liberty restricted to fighting his impulse to sit down with a gallon of red wine and let the good times roll. Oh, but it was all sour grapes these days.
Prentiss had been living with Frost for two years and considered him his only close sober friend, though they didn’t do much together besides watch TV and go to the flea market for the distinctive clothes Frost favored. Prentiss didn’t pretend to understand Frost, who in high school had chastised him for not being black enough—the irony of Frost’s being white didn’t seem to matter—but who lately had let slip a few race-is-irrelevant comments regarding affirmative action. Sometimes Prentiss stood in Frost’s room, which had a map theme going on—every square inch of wall space was covered by maps of the world, of Uganda and Estonia and East Timor, of small towns and big towns and mountain ranges and highway grids and famous buildings (the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, the Carter House)—for an effect that was like staring at someone’s brain circuitry. His own, maybe. There were stacks of National Geographic on the floor and piles of loud, colorful clothing on the bed and in the room’s corners, as well as newspaper clippings about car accidents. Prentiss would wonder at this cartographic nerve center and then gratefully return to his own, normal room.
The next morning he got up early to go to the bathroom and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so he poured himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen and was examining the toy mouse that came in the cereal package, when a strange woman walked in and let out a half-second scream.
Prentiss threw down the mouse and tried to see straight. “You a friend of Frost’s?”
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“Carl’s. You a friend? My name’s Prentiss. I was just settling down to some breakfast cereal and found this little Ziegfried the Marvelous Mouse toy come in the package.” He looked from her to the table. Frost never had women stay the night. As far as he knew, Frost didn’t know any women. “It isn’t a regular thing me examining a plastic mouse this early.”
“My name’s Justine. I just met—I mean, yes, I’m a friend of Carl’s. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.” He looked at her and she stood there zipping her purse open and shut. “You want some toasted wheat biscuits?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Could you tell me where the bathroom is?”
“It’s back there in the hallway on your left. But at the moment we’re having a toilet paper shortage. I could offer you a paper towel.”
“That’s all right. I don’t live far from here. I can wait.”
“Suit yourself. But there’s nothing so urgent to me as the first pee of the day.”
“I don’t suppose you,” she said, staring nervously at the refrigerator and its magnetized poetry and clipped, careworn coupon. “I don’t—”
Prentiss looked at her in the weak morning light and she seemed about to say something before stopping, removing her hand from the purse, and walking out the door.
That afternoon, Silas Carlton was in the Bead Emporium, staring at rows and columns of bead drawers. He felt the paralysis of choice that struck him sometimes at the grocery store when he’d face seventy-two different breakfast cereals (he’d counted them during one of his twenty-minute stupefactions). There were too many alternatives. Ah, he’d think, give me a Soviet food line any day where I have to take whatever they’ve got. Unburden me of these decisions. By that logic he should have grabbed the nearest cereal and not bothered deliberating over the bran o’s and crispy muesli flakes and frosted chocolate nuggets, but he had preferences—he had tastes—and a bad selection would haunt him until he threw the cereal away and went back to the store, at which point the difficulty would begin again. Other people didn’t have this trouble and were quickly filling up plastic baggies with beads. No hesitation. A silver-haired saleswoman with thin gold-framed glasses sat on a stool holding a closed book of crossword puzzles and staring at him. Silas didn’t like people to pay attention to him while he shopped. Made him feel pressured, like he was being monitored and any deviation from standard browsing behavior—if he spent too long reading a label or talked to himself—would get him in trouble. As maybe it would.
He left the store without buying anything and felt a huge relief, like he’d resisted temptation, though all he’d done was fail to get a gift for his great-niece Lillith’s seventeenth birthday. He walked down and up the dip in Buhne Street—exacerbating but not making unbearable the pain in his knees—and turned left on Harrison and stopped in for a fountain-style soda at Lou’s Drugs.
Beto the Argentinian was at the counter with his long sideburns getting ever longer. He gently patted the stool next to him when Silas approached.
“Silas,” said Beto.
“Beto,” said Silas.
“It’s good for you to join us.”
Beto sat alone and no one was behind the fountain. The aisles of Lou’s were empty. The cashier was gone. The ceiling corners
