The mornings are still and all the nights feel like Friday night, by which I mean they feel like the Sabbath, which, despite my hedonism, remains my body’s central quartz. When I kept the Sabbath, I did not yet have breasts. There were VHS tapes of devout animated cucumbers and my mother’s drawings of Lucifer, which bothered me until I had the vocabulary to know I was aroused. I was excited to explain the tenets of SDA to the kids in my new public school. I conceded that one of our early leaders invented cornflakes to treat masturbation, but asserted meditation on the natural environment as a form of self-love. It took a year before I realized my classmates’ questions were a sport. I didn’t take it personally. I tried harder, came to school with arguments already formed. A boy from the companion high school, an atheist who was four years my senior, pointed out my contradictions, and I went home and prepared more notes. The Sabbath itself was pristine. Of course I indulged loopholes. Sometimes I slept it away so I could avoid the boredom, sometimes I spent the day curating twelve-hour mixtapes of Christian rock. But most of the time, though I wasn’t allowed to dance and knew that everyone was having fun without me, I liked the quiet, the languor of a single hour, of a day when you are deliberate, thankful for what was made deliberately, retina and turnips and densely coiled stars, things so complex I could barely render them in paint. Though some things are not complex. Some things are accidents, and this is how it was filed with the insurance company when my mother wrecked the car. She didn’t come out of her room for four days. When I went inside, it smelled bad and she said that God was dead. My father took me to Friendly’s. A waitress dropped a tray of sundaes while he was holding my hand, and he crushed my fingers at the noise. He referred to my mother’s periods of catatonia as moods. He did not dare suggest we lift her up in prayer. Though he regaled each moony deaconess with stories of the work he’d done abroad, he did not pretend with me. My father did not believe in anything, and I was the only one who knew. To everyone else, my father was a God-fearing man. A charismatic servant with a troubled wife and a way of making women feel heard. On Friday nights such women would file into our home, and his office door would shut.

* * *

I talked to the atheist on the phone, at first about homework but then about other things. When I went to his house, he played King Crimson and I told him my mother did not believe in God. I kissed him on the mouth and he didn’t kiss me back. I understood that I had engaged seriously with someone who only engaged theoretically, and I was so humiliated by this that we never spoke again.

* * *

Now I am different. I have learned not to be surprised by a man’s sudden withdrawal. It is a tradition that men like Mark and Eric and my father have helped uphold. So I endure Eric’s silence, even as our paths cross in the morning and in the middle of the night. I don’t attempt to break it, though the longer it persists, the more it mutates. For a day or so, it becomes hilarious, and then a little erotic, a seething, suffocating thing that makes me aware of how long it’s been since I’ve been touched. I could find a local man to tide me over, but it feels like too much work. I’ve already done the work with Eric. He knows when I got my first period and I know he is decent to waitstaff, and I’m not interested in sucking the cock of a stranger who has potentially made a waitress cry. There is only so much I can do to save face. I am living in their house and eating their food. I am running out of money and I don’t know how long they will let this go on.

* * *

I try to be scarce. I spend my days making small still lifes of items in their house and playing video games with Akila, who favors console-based fighting where women disembowel each other with their bare hands. During these sessions, she is instructional but pitiless, adamant that I earn my win. We customize our costumes and weaponry and then she rips out my spine. In a week, I have calluses on my thumbs. I take the booklet and read through the character bios, each story originating with a single unlockable character who appears in the booklet as a silhouette. While we are in pursuit of this silhouette, Akila tells me that she does not like September, and in Louisiana, it is a big month for hurricanes. She says her mother was swept away in a flood. There is a FEMA jacket hanging in her closet and she used to wear it all the time, but after going to therapy for a while, she wears it only once a year.

* * *

I walk around the cul-de-sac, take long calls with Sallie Mae. I defer my student loans, schedule an appointment with a gastroenterologist in Hackensack. In the waiting room, I scan through the requirements for public assistance, and when I see the doctor he puts his finger in my asshole and tells me that he thinks we should run more tests. When I tell him my insurance expires in four days, he prescribes an OTC osmotic laxative that I can stir into tea. He asks that I come back once I have insurance again, and the plea is so sincere that when I visit the pharmacy to pick up my prescription, I wander the vitamin aisle and cry.

* * *

I am relieved to find that there are no family dinners. It reminds me of home, how everyone eats in a different room. Akila downstairs in front of the TV. Rebecca in the kitchen, standing up. A few times I see Eric make his plate and disappear into the basement, which is the only place in the house that is locked. Rebecca joins me for coffee in the morning but doesn’t talk. Most of the time she is either sleeping or in the morgue. With Eric in the house she is dimmer, more exact, her circuit brief and preordained, this clockwork so particular it feels precarious, vulnerable to a single, badly chosen word. I want to talk about how things were before Eric came back. How it has been two weeks since I rinsed the dye from her hair, and there are still traces of it between the bathroom tiles.

* * *

When the house is empty I take more photos of her things. With the last thirty dollars in my account I buy a twelve-count tin of Prismacolors and thick vellum bristol board. At night I open my window and work from the pictures, from the procession of glass and alloy and silk, textures defined principally by their fickle relationship to light and so as difficult to render as digital joints, her perfume a cold, narrow palette, her jewelry warm and wide, her clothes a little bit of both, the expression of weft and grain not dissimilar to hair. In between these sketches, there is a house. Clapboard and brass and turf, and even in this I see them, but I cannot see myself. For the first time I can capture knuckles and plastic, but there is the issue of my face. I still can’t manage a self-portrait. When I try, there is a miscommunication, some synaptic failure between my brain and my hand. I try to find another way toward the self-portrait. I close my door and destroy my room and take a picture of the mess. I approach the drawing optimistically, but I am not there. The next time the house is clear, I take an opposite tack and clean. I take out the garbage and then I take a picture of the bags on the curb. I clean the bathroom and take a picture of the tongue of hair I pull from the drain, and at night I render these pictures, hoping to see myself. When I don’t, when I have completed a series on folded laundry and grout and still am not there, I keep cleaning. And then one morning while I am shining the faucets, Rebecca tells me she is planning a party and she would like me to help. It is a party for Akila that Akila does not want. Akila says this explicitly as we are making our way through a new game, a turn-based RPG where the protagonist is an army mail clerk with amnesia. His only memory is of a boy from a small mountain town. As we draw closer to the first conflict of the war, the base is flanked by a long, alpine shadow. The non-playable characters are not subtle about it. A colonel whose pockets we emptied earlier in the game points to the shadow and says, Was that there before? As we climb the mountain, Akila says that Rebecca is throwing her a birthday party. She says that she would rather spend it alone. The controller vibrates in her hand. The vibration indicates the genesis of a new memory, a woman who is trying to put out a fire.

* * *