He’d spent his formative years in various homes in the Bible Belt with grim aunts who could trace their American lineage to the original bill of sale. He kept chickens while his mother, the sibling his aunts didn’t talk about, was in Louisiana slowly going mad. These were terms of art my father gave to me as I was learning to swim, his old man’s vocabulary having none of the clinical tact of the DSM-5. There were asylums, there was madness, and in the place of Germans, there were Krauts. His mother did not have a chemical imbalance, she had something fickle, something female, and so she returned to him with a severed frontal lobe. He was afraid of her like I would one day be afraid of him, because children, like dogs, are attuned to the signs of an impending storm. He became a man who always had girlfriends but didn’t much like them, a strapping sailor with a dampened drawl and a center part, his unruly hair slicked back with pomade. Then the war, shit and mud and some fusion of the two, the shipwreck’s centrifuge and the axon unraveled to the center of the nerve, my father the civilian, alarming the neighborhood with his midnight walks, shining his medals and trying to fool doctors with a carefully crafted limp. While he collected disability, it was not enough, and he had done it, the thing that most animals do but which only a few animals grieve, he had been up close and found it fetid and strange, killing for his country—a country that, once he was back home, reminded him that patriots could be shell-shocked, could be spangled in Arlington grass, but absolutely could not be black. And after having walked around with a child’s blood underneath his fingernails, at home the banks, the churches, the women, were nothing. He saw that the people at home did not see black men like him among them, that they were unprepared. So he came to New York armed only with confidence, and after two dead wives, my mother appeared before him on Broadway and 143rd, pretty and young and high.

* * *

At the end of the exhibit, I realize Special Collections is in the basement. I take the elevator down and my hands are shaking. I take off the fentanyl patch and put it in my purse. In the basement, I look through a thick pane of glass and count a dozen archivists. All of them are women. They don’t wear uniforms but they move uniformly, the microfilm and glass plate negatives poised in the hand without contact of the palm, the flatbed scanners and DSLRs splashing their faces with light. Beyond them, Eric removes his mask, pulls on a cotton glove. He opens a book underneath a mounted light, and when he lifts the page it is almost translucent, like onion skin. He beckons over the archivist closest to him, motions to the binding. She removes her mask and smiles. He puts his hand on her shoulder and how great is that, that in this shabby library basement, he is warm and involved, apparently the kind of boss who is also your friend.

* * *

When I turn around there is a woman sitting at what a moment ago was a vacant desk. She is a natural black girl, bright and woowoo, a cluster of cloudy amethyst around her neck. She asks me if I need help. I tell her that I need to speak with Eric, but when I turn and look through the glass, he is gone. I tell her I brought him a sandwich, and she looks me up and down and tells me he is out.

* * *

I take the sandwich and stop at a Duane Reade. I buy a Snapple and small bottle of Dr. Schulze’s Intestinal Formula #2, which boasts thirty-five million active cultures, and I ask for cash back. I check my email and there is a message from Panera Bread that reads, While there are currently no open positions as this time, we encourage you to apply in the future, a message from the Department of Education, from Bank of America, from my landlord, who has bad news about the security deposit, from a Nigerian prince, and from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which would like to remind me that per my firing, I will be uninsured in eleven days. On the bus back, I watch the road. The rain is heavy and there is a man running along the shoulder with a gas can in his hand. I think of my mother, who was sympathetic to a lot of things, to brown spider plants, to cats with alopecia, and most especially to car trouble. There was no hitchhiker she did not indulge, no man with a smoking Saab she was unwilling to help. Whenever I was in the car, I pleaded with her to keep going. I felt anxious around these men, and I struggled with what to say. But during her time as a dealer, an addict, and then a fervent Seventh-day Adventist, she was mellowed by the cosmic and by her prolonged chemical abuse, brimming with the grade of charisma you see in septuagenarian rock stars whose tepid late-career albums remind everyone they’re still alive, charisma that exists at the end of a liver, that has to do with acceptance, which incidentally is a tenet of Narcotics Anonymous and the SDA faith, wherein death is inevitable and complete. Except as a pious child, I could not feel casual about death. I had read Ecclesiastes, and the idea of death as nothingness terrified me. We picked up a man and he had a Bible in his hands. My mom was thrilled by the synchrony, but a mile away from the exit, I looked in the back seat and he was touching himself.

* * *

I return to the house by noon and sit in the garden. I dig a hole and find a smooth gray stone. I wash it in the bathroom and hold it inside my mouth. In the end, I put it on the windowsill. I go to my room and masturbate angrily to that picture of Eric in Greece, and when it doesn’t make me feel any better I wander around the house. Rebecca is asleep with the door open, and for a while I stand there and watch her. I take pictures of different items around the house—the KitchenAid, a bowl of nuts that are primarily nigger toes, a drawer of old duck sauce packets and pens. I take a few of the ballpoints and a couple of pieces of paper from the printer that has, for the length of my stay, remained unplugged. I retreat to my room and try to render the photos as realistically as I can. At three, I hear Akila come home from school and run up to her room. By the time Eric comes home, I have the KitchenAid down, though the beater looks a little weird. The house is quiet. When Eric was away, the house was filled with sound, Akila’s and Rebecca’s routines textured and discordant, water and glass, sticky sounds of trash and sparring gear and doorjambs swollen with heat, the mailman and the democratic socialist at the door, all the toilets at the mercy of a houseful of women, the sensory meridian of tangled jewelry, of bobby pins and linoleum, of dubbed anime and the neighbor’s dog, otherwise a soft cosine of electricity and digital noise. With Eric home, there is none of that. I listen for any movement in the house, but none of it is distinct. There are no running faucets or noisy floorboards that precede feet. We all just materialize. Halfway through a long shower, through the curtain, I see Eric’s silhouette. I don’t hear him come in, but I hear him lock the door. He stands there silently as I wash my hair. When I get out of the shower, he is gone.

* * *