He was trembling now with annoyance. Why did she seem so abstracted? He did not know how he could begin. Was she annoyed too about something? If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he must see some ardour in her eyes first. He longed to be master of her strange mood.

I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a— wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head—tunnel) actually lived.

I was twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that. My fingertips were all yellow from smoking. My girlfriend was with child.

It cost fifty cents, ninety cents, a dollar to ride the train. I really don’t remember.

[...] After the film I talked to a man about vasectomies. A man with a mustache. I didn’t like him.

“You have to be sure,” he said.

“I’m never getting anybody pregnant again. I know that much.”

“Would you like to make an appointment?”

“Would you like to give me the money?”

“It won’t take long to save the money.”

“It would take me forever to save the money,” I corrected him.

There was nothing stopping me from going back to where Michelle and I were staying, but these days had reduced us to the Rebel Motel. The maids spat out their chew in the shower stalls. There was a smell of insecticide. I wasn’t going back there to sit in the room and wait.

Michelle and I had our drama. It got very dreary sometimes, but it felt like I had to have her. As long as there was one other person at these motels who knew my real name.

Out back they had all these Dumpsters stuffed with God knows what. We can’t imagine the shape of our fate, that’s for sure.

I turned away because my throat was closing up. Suddenly I had an erection. I knew men got that way about men, but I didn’t know I did.

His chest was like Christ’s. That’s probably who he was.

I could have followed anybody off that train. It would have been the same.

[...] In another country, under another code, it would have been my duty to return to Rufus’s with a gun. But in the suburbs, at the end of my sixteenth summer, this was not an option. Instead, I resorted to a form of civilized murder. By the time I reached my house everyone in Rufus’s yard was dead. Rufus, Natasha, my stoner friends. I would never see them again. By the time I got home I had already crafted a new identity. I would switch schools, change my wardrobe, move to another city. Later I would avenge myself with beautiful women, learn martial arts, and cultivate exotic experiences. I saw my future clearly. I had it all planned out. And yet, standing in our backyard, drawn by a strange impulse, I crouched and peered through the window into my basement. I had never seen it from this perspective. I saw what Natasha must have seen every time she came to the house. In the full light of summer, I looked into darkness. It was the end of my subterranean life.

When Corinne had called a week or so earlier about Thanksgiving, Otto, addled by alarm, said, “We’re having people ourselves, I’m afraid.” Corinne’s silence was like a mirror, flashing his tiny, harmless lie back to him in huge magnification, all covered with sticky hairs and microbes.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Please try,” Corinne said. The phrase had the unassailable authority of a road sign appearing suddenly around the bend: falling rock.

And yet there was something to what Corinne had said; they had been one another’s environs as children. The distance between them had been Some Other, Better Otto as great, in any important way, as it was now, but there had been no other beings close by, no other beings through whom they could probe or illumine the mystifying chasms and absences and yearnings within themselves. They had been born into the arid clutter of one another’s behavior, good and bad, their measles, skinned knees, report cards . . .

A barren landscape dotted with clutter. Perhaps the life of the last dinosaurs, as they ranged, puzzled and sorrowful, across the comet-singed planet, was similar to childhood. It hadn’t been a pleasant time, surely, and yet one did have an impulse to acknowledge one ’s anteced-ents, now and again. Hello, that was us, it still is, good-bye.

The older one even had a wife, whom Corinne treated with a stricken, fluttery deference as if she were a suitcase full of weapons-grade plutonium. The younger one was restlessly on his own. When, early in the evening the three stood and announced to Corinne with thuggish placidity that they were about to leave (“I’m afraid we ’ve got to shove off now, Ma”), Otto jumped to his feet. As he allowed his hand to be crushed, he felt the relief of a mayor watching an occupying power depart his city.

At a few minutes before nine, William appeared, whistling.

Whistling! “Good practice session?” Otto said. His voice came out cracked, as if it had been hurled against the high prison walls of himself.