Daniel is convinced the apocalypse is imminent. He likes to speak about this with his hands folded in his lap and his eyelids lowered and his voice dialed down. Later he’s going to die of cancer, and he will tell us he’s sick in the same manner. I ask him what this apocalypse will look like, since the images I have in my head of apocalypses tend to involve lakes of fire and mountains of corpses and somehow I doubt this is what he means. Daniel is very smart and does not answer the question outright but instead goes on at some length about dwindling resources and moral decay. His wife Monica—who is famous in Europe for a number of inscrutable books I’ve tried to read—scoffs and ashes her cigarette into the fire pit. “Solipsístico,” she says. Daniel does not react except to blink at the normal rate. Lizzie—who’s a girl I’m dating at the time—asks what “solipsístico” means. Monica explains it means literally having or representing the self as the center. Specifically she means that the beneficiaries of great civilizations have always regarded themselves as teetering on the cusp of imminent apocalypse, because it is easier for them to imagine everything coming to an abrupt halt than it is to imagine a world in which their cultural dominance gradually wanes and the world rambles on into endless iterations. She says she only ever hears white men go on about the apocalypse. Lizzie tries to give Monica a high-five, but Monica pretends not to notice. Later that night Lizzie and I will have sex in the usual way, where I slap her around and cum on her face. But I shouldn’t have even mentioned this last part, because it has nothing to do with what any of this is about.

I take acid for the first time since college with Daniel and Monica. We go into the woods behind their house and walk in circles. It is sweltering, and they both remove their clothes. They are nearly twenty years older than me, though their bodies give little indication. It starts to rain at the same instant I feel the acid take affect. It occurs to me I have no way of knowing that I do not manifest reality by conceiving of it. Daniel hears something and prowls off into the trees. I wipe rain and sweat from my face with a sleeve. Monica speaks to me in a language I don’t know. She has a son about my age who lives in Europe with his father. Her nipples suck up the rainwater, which turns her skin transparent. I can see into her belly, where folds of tissue betray the distinct outline of an adult son. Reeds of lightning sew the sky to the canopy. Daniel returns caked in mud, his long hair globbed across his face, and seizes Monica by the waist. They wrestle to the ground and start to fuck right there. My instinct is to jerk off but I’m afraid of getting rainwater sucked into my penis, and of becoming transparent. Standing there doing nothing makes me sad, so I find a dry patch of ground beneath a tree and try to count every distinct object I can see; I keep exhausting the count at forty-one objects, no matter where I start or how desperately I search for more. Daniel and Monica find me soon after. Daniel asks me what’s wrong. The question startles me. Monica picks wet leaves from her black hair and scolds Daniel for scaring her rapazinho. I ask them to count how many objects they see. Their eyes dart around the woods. “Forty-one,” says Daniel. “Forty-one,” says Monica, “including the three of us.” I conclude there are, ultimately, only forty-one objects in the entire universe. Later, this conclusion will not withstand scrutiny.

I go through a phase following the trip where I feel an overwhelming conviction that everything is attached. Everything is a cause, everything is an effect, and it all moves together as a single event. It is poignant, it is everywhere, and I feel compelled to celebrate it. I decide to write a philosophical treatise investigating this conviction, but it reads like proclamation, and I’m afraid people will think I’m becoming religious. In an effort to ground the treatise in reason, I assign numerical values to the nouns and mathematical operations to the verbs, but I just end up with some big, random number, though not quite big enough that it seems to matter. Then the man next door murders his family. He uses a gun, but I imagine him using an axe. It’s all over the news up here. A reporter interviews me on the sidewalk while I’m walking Harlan. She asks how it feels to live next door to a grisly crime scene. I tell her it feels similar to not living next door to one. They don’t air the interview, which sucks because the first thing I did after talking to the reporter was call a bunch of friends and tell them I was going to be on the news. Now I’m afraid they think I lied. I call up a buddy and confess to him that I’ve been unemployed since June, that I’m ashamed about it, and that money is tough right now. He thanks me for my forthrightness. The echo in his voice causes me to suspect I’m on speaker. I abandon the treatise and by the end of the month am no longer convinced anything is connected at all. 

Daniel calls and tells me that Monica is gone. I drive over and find him drunk, staggering barefoot around the backyard in a bathrobe and what appears to be a pair of Monica’s underwear. He collapses on the icy grass and wails. I try to help him walk inside but he stiffens his legs. I end up carrying him on my back, which winds me on account of all the cigarettes. We forgo glasses and pass a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He tells me what happened: three nights ago they fought over a student of his, a young woman with remarkable promise in the field whom Daniel has taken academic interest in and nothing more. For some reason that either Daniel omits or I simply don’t follow, Monica accused him of abusing his authority, called him a predator, fetched her passport from the safe and left the house with nothing but a purse and a coat. He sprawls on the sofa, one of his testicles protruding from the crotch of his lacey underwear. “She takes me to the light, that woman,” he says. “Would you like to see a photo of her asshole?” 

“You’ve shown me before.” 

“Of course, of course.” He chews the end of a clump of his hair. “I know!” He leaps up and caroms into the bedroom. When he returns he thrusts a blue slip of paper in my face. “Her social security card,” he says. “Did you know she has three citizenships? And those cheekbones…” He collapses onto the sofa, places the back of his hand against his forehead. “She could be anywhere on earth right now.” On the wall, twice the length of his body, an oil painting of a burning tree amid mantles of black. “We shouldn’t be alone tonight.” Daniel sits up. “Call one of your little things.”

I call Eleanor. She’s surprised to hear from me after all this time. When she arrives I sense that Daniel is disappointed. He opens another bottle of Johnnie Walker. Eleanor wants to speak with me privately. In the bedroom she admits she thinks about me all the time, but thought I didn’t care about her. I explain that life has been hectic, but that I think about her too. She smiles and cries. I finger her on the bed until Daniel comes in to check on us. We drink Johnnie Walker and smoke cigarettes dipped in cocaine. Eleanor wants to kiss me. We kiss while Daniel goes down on her. I hold her hand. Eventually I excuse myself to get a glass of water and listen for a while from the living room to their sounds. Daniel issues injunctions. I find Daniel’s pants strewn on a chair in the kitchen and fish four hundred dollars from his wallet, then drive home. Later that night I walk Harlan along the canal. A red light drifts down the water, surrounded by darkness. Eleanor calls me the next morning, and again that afternoon. 

“It’s the same with me!” is Max’s response when I tell him I sometimes worry I might be a sociopath. I just met him at the bar. He drinks desperately and accosts numerous patrons. When we’re thrown out we go to his apartment and try to fuck, though neither of us can get it up. He picks a fight with me and I have to break his nose. We sit and smoke spliffs and watch porn until the sun rises at which point I tell him he needs to leave. He gathers some things without speaking, his nose whistling, and is halfway out the door before he stops and literally slaps his forehead and says that this is his place and I’m the one who needs to leave. We laugh for a while. He asks if I’ll be his plus-one at a friend’s wedding this weekend. I say sure and we shake hands. When I get home I realize he has no way of getting in touch with me. I try to find him online but I don’t know his last name. Many years later, Amazon recommends a book to me by Max Halper. I recognize the author photo. He looks the same, but with a beard. He poses as if doing a sociopath’s impression of a person feeling something desperately. I order the book and read the first third. It’s about other people. I think about trying to contact him but am embarrassed that I’ve never done anything at all in my life. 

Daniel asks me to drive Monica home from the airport. Trying to get back on the highway I accidentally turn the wrong way down a one-way road and am forced to reverse, causing a snarl in traffic. “Idioto.” Monica laughs, lights a cigarette. 

At the house I walk her inside and stand around while she disappears into the bedroom. The house smells like Clorox and aerosol. Monica reappears wearing a bathrobe. When she sees me she ties it shut. “I thought you had left.” She sits on the sofa and crosses her legs, and the robe slips off her thigh. 

“I was about to.”

She looks at me for a while. “Do you want a drink?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“What do you and my husband drink?”

“Scotch, typically.”

“What else do you do?”

In the daylight, the long painting behind the sofa is muted. I shrug.

“You drink scotch and sit in silence?”

“Sometimes we do coke.”

“Do you have any?”

“Yes.”

She gestures to the table. I carve two lines. Monica does them both. I carve another three. She pours me a glass of Ginja, which I find excessively sweet. The sun sets. At some point we realize it’s dark. Monica flits around turning on lights, then sits beside me. “Ai, meu garoto.” She rummages in my pocket for the baggie and dumps the rest onto the table. “I feel alone with you,” she says through the curtains of her hair as she leans over the lines. “Like you are just my leg.” She giggles. “Minha perna favorita.” I place my palm against her back. Her free hand finds my knee, and traces shapes. Her other hand wavers. I feel something attach at the middle of my body. The front door rattles and we surge apart. Daniel pauses when he sees us. He throws his bag to the floor and dances across the room. “My two favorite people.” He spreads his arms, kisses Monica on the mouth and embraces me. “I’ve never been happier to be home,” he says. We finish the coke, and later I will watch them fuck, Monica with her back to me, Daniel beneath her winking at me each time he spreads her ass. I tell them I am too coked out to jerk off. I smoke cigarettes until the pack is empty. I grind my teeth so fiercely that for days my head will thrum. 

I do sixty days in county for possession and a separate, specious charge that is ultimately dropped and which I’d rather not disclose. It is easy time. I find the guy who makes pruno and essentially hand over my commissary. I read Stephen King and throw numerous games of chess. A kid named Friend tries to hang himself from his bunk but only breaks his jaw. A few days later I see him walking around and ask if he’s okay. “Why the fuck wouldn’t I be?” he says, and I realize I’ve confused him with someone else. I help a few guys study for the GED. I proofread letters to home; I abandon redressing the profusion of double negatives on account of time. A new guy comes in and the cellblock whispers: “Short eyes. Chomo.” He is small, bow-legged and finicky. It wouldn’t matter if he were huge and indiscriminant. He pleads for his mother. They fuck him up so bad his eyes roll back and his hands convulse. 

I call Daniel, but Monica answers his phone. “Daniel’s ill,” she says. “He has the flu, I think.” 

“How’s Harlan?”

“He’s a good boy.” She exhales, and I can smell the smoke through the phone. “All day he plays in the woods. At night he sleeps with me.”

The next week I call Monica directly. “Hello, meu amor.” She speaks as if not to wake someone nearby.

I ask about Harlan.

“I’ll be sad when you take him away.”

I turn my back to the cellblock. “I can take you, too.”

She tsks. 

A few weeks after I get out, Daniel leaves town for a conference. “I want to go away,” Monica says over the phone. I bring Harlan, and we drive upstate in my car. Monica smokes more than I do. We stop at a bookstore in a village at the foothills of the Chavanuck Mountains. I find a copy of one of her books and show her. She gasps and seizes my waist. “Put that away,” she whispers against my throat, as if we’re doing something wrong. We find an isolated inn outside the village. It abuts a feral tree line, beyond which mountains crash into further mountains. Monica requests privacy to write, so I take Harlan for a walk along the road. I come upon a rundown tavern. I stand in the doorway and ask if I can bring my dog inside; the bartender looks at me as if I’ve just asked if he knows where I can get a drink. He microwaves a hotdog for Harlan and serves me double-whiskeys in a plastic cup. “Are you in trouble?” he asks. I don’t know what he means. That night I tell Monica about the bartender’s question. “People are afraid for you, querido,” she says in the dark. She lies with her back to me and kneads my penis between her thighs until it lengthens into her. Then she stops moving, and we fall asleep like that. In the morning it is still lodged inside. “Meu garoto,” she soughs when I wrench it out. I take Harlan out to shit, and stand across the road counting mountain peaks. “Monica,” I practice, my eyes leaking sunlight. “Monica.” The more I look, the more I see, until the whole sky teems with gauzy rock.

I get a job as a bartender at a dive near my house. My first night of work I take a shot for every drink order and black out. Allegedly I reach over the bar and grope a woman’s thighs while she sits with her husband. The manager comps their drinks to persuade them not to call the cops. He takes me into the back and knocks out a few of my teeth. I try to quit drinking on my own and get DTs. I am only twenty-seven. Knotted in bed I am plagued by rapid, breathy gibberish, doors slamming shut at random intervals. I gawp into open wounds, flesh spread apart baring stalks of bone and wrinkled organs. I have no memories of my mother, even though she raised me. I am so fucking saddened by the dizzying eternity in every single moment. I call Daniel, who brings me whiskey and gets me into the bath. I guzzle the whiskey and feel abruptly normal. We mock my idiocy. I move the water around and tell him I am in love. He eyes me suspiciously. “With whom?” he asks. I shrug and piss in the tub. Daniel drives us across town to a rooftop bar and opens a tab. The last I remember he is leaving with a woman whose entire body is a single, vibrant tattoo. I awake in a twin bed. There is someone else, encased in the sheets. I gather my clothes and dress in the doorway; one of my legs is painfully asleep. I find a boy at a table in the next room, drawing. My hand kneads his shoulder. “Are you okay?” I say. The boy covers his nose. “Are you in trouble?” 

“You ain’t got nothing to say to him.” A voice staggers from the bedroom. I leave to wander through a neighborhood I barely know. When I light a cigarette I discover my fingertips smell like feces. I will end up at a clinic later that week where they give me antibiotics for whatever I picked up. I will get very lucky again. Sometimes I think I may have too much luck, that there’s not enough for other people. But none of this is about other people. None of this is about other people. 

Daniel cooks paella and pours Malbec and rattles off a well-rehearsed anecdote about one of his students. Monica leans on the island, smoking. She has not looked at me since I arrived. I feel her thoughts bore through the air. Each time she cranes to ash her cigarette, the fabric of her blouse distends, and her dark nipples skim the counter. Blood ossifies in the middle of me. I think through each impulse to its conclusion: grasping her waist and tearing her blouse open, sucking her breasts into my mouth one at a time, kneading her in my palms—and when Daniel tries to interfere, bludgeoning him with his pot of paella—kissing Monica’s throat, kissing Monica’s belly, her ass, her thighs, lifting her into my arms and carrying her into the bedroom, entering her, slowing, stilling, being still, sleeping inside her. After dinner Daniel goes into his study to make a call. Monica still won’t look at me. When she sets the last plate in the dishwasher I seize her wrist and sweep her around the corner into a dark hallway. “I need you,” I gasp.

Our teeth clash. Her hands flit around my hair, my face, along my arms. Her breath makes me salivate. Briefly, our tongues meet. Then she turns her head aside, shuts her eyes. “It will not happen again,” she says, breathless.

“It will happen,” I press her against the wall, slide my fingers inside the waistband of her pants.

“No, querido.” She pries my hands away, steps into the light. “It will not.”

Monica’s new book is dedicated to “Meu garoto.” I read the back: It is about a man whose obsessive preparation for the apocalypse bankrupts his family and devastates his marriage. After suspecting his wife of infidelity he relocates his children to the bunker on their property where he teaches them about the fiery cataclysm raging outside. The book wins a spate of awards. I call to congratulate her, but the way her phone rings means she’s in Europe, and she doesn’t answer. I write her a letter in which I accredit our time together upstate as having been so spectacular it may well have ruined the rest of my life. I describe the things I want to do to her, the things we didn’t have time for. I list the ways she satisfies me—physically, intellectually, emotionally—and start to list the ways I satisfy her but can only think of different angles at which to make her cum. I Google her and scroll desperately through the records of her accolades; I loathe that other people have permission to celebrate her. I drive to the college and sit in the back of the auditorium while Daniel finishes a lecture on ablative proairetics in early Blythe. After everyone leaves he comes and stands beside me. “What’s wrong?” he asks. 

“Nothing. I just wanted to hang out.”

“You can’t show up like this.”

“I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”

He clears his throat as if to say more, then exits the auditorium. Later that night he calls me, but by then I am wasted at a buddy’s house trying to convince him and his fiancée to have sex in front of me, and when this fails I go to the bar where I met Max months ago and interrogate the bartender as to where I might find him. The bartender wipes the counter incredulously. I wander up and down a series of blocks on which I vaguely remember Max’s house being. Finally, after midnight, I go home to find that Harlan has pissed on the floor.

Monica, 

I cannot remember, I cannot imagine anything outside of you. I have become the family that interbreeds in your rooms, boarding windows, evolving lore of your stairwells. I disown the sky for the ceilings of you. Your walls will hear me say everything.  

I have a dream in the spring involving a girl I dated briefly in high school. In the dream, she and I are frantically searching for somewhere to be alone together, but a series of obstacles denies us the privilege. I wake up feeling something akin to homesickness and set about trying to track her down. It is not difficult; by that afternoon we have made plans to get together over the weekend. We meet for coffee, which turns into a walk around downtown and drinks at a restaurant on the canal. She is a kindergarten teacher and aspiring writer. She asks if I still draw. I admit I haven’t in years, that I studied literature in college and still consider a career in academia, though I can’t afford to go back to school right now. I tell her about the dream I had, and she puts her hand on my forearm and says that it’s uncanny, because she had a dream about me, too, not long ago, but didn’t have the courage to reach out. Eventually I have to go home to walk Harlan. She comes along, and we take him to the park and laugh at him as he gambols around. She slides her arm through mine, briefly. We end up back at my house and find ourselves sitting together on the sofa. “What should we do?” she asks, fingering her hair. 

I put my hand on her knee. “Why don’t we call it a day. For now.”

She looks at me for a while. “All right,” she says. 

That night she texts me that she wants to see me again. We set up a date for later in the week. 

I ask Daniel for a loan, so I can take her somewhere nice. “So this is the one.” He licks his teeth while counting twenties from a wad.

“Exactly.”

He winks. “Bring her by sometime.”

After dinner she comes to my house and we make out on the bed. Her breath is hot. She starts to unbuckle my pants. I imagine saying: “Wait,” and seizing her wrists. “I need to be upfront with you. I’m in love with someone else, and that’s not going to change right now. So if you want to get laid, I’m down. But that’s all it can be.”

I imagine her crossing her legs over the edge of the bed. “Who?”

“My mentor’s wife.”

I imagine her lifting her eyebrows, “I guess I’ll go,” gathering her things, Harlan following her, and then her pausing in the doorway. “Good luck with that.” I imagine her smiling faintly. “Sincerely.”

But I say nothing, and I pull her hair and lodge my fingers in her mouth and fuck her as hard as I can. I stay up drinking long after she’s gone to sleep, and when I eventually get in bed I put my penis between her thighs. When I wake up I am turned the other way, with my back to her.

“It’s late,” Daniel continues, his hands folded in his lap and his eyelids lowered and his voice dialed down. “There isn’t anything they can do, realistically.” The quiet flame of the fire pit draws the striations of his face into strange letters. Monica exhales walls of smoke; it is a chilly night, and her legs are drawn up. I want to warm her, but there is fire between us, and her husband. “I’ve opted out of chemo,” Daniel says. “I’d rather go with my dignity intact.” He glances at Monica, as if expecting her to argue. She ashes her cigarette into the dark. I feel suddenly as if I shouldn’t be here, or as if none of us should be here. Then Daniel stands. “If no one has anything to say, I’m going to lie down.” He shambles indoors, frail now, as if disclosing his cancer has accelerated the decline of his body. 

A log disintegrates in the fire pit, and the flame wanes. Monica is cast into near total darkness. “Are you all right?” I sit forward.

She exhales. Faces of smoke creep into the narrow shaft of light between us. “Why should I not be?”

I get up and move toward her. “Did you get my note?” I kneel beside her chair. She gazes off into the dark. “Monica.”

“What?” Her shoulders flex.

I hang my head, my hands folded on the armrest. “You’re all I think about.”

“You’re an idiot,” she says, and her words betray no accent. 

“I know,” I take her hand. “I know I’m…I’m not…but I’m soft. You can mold me into whatever shape you need me to be. I can fill whatever is empty in you.”

She flicks her cigarette into the fire pit. “Idioto.”

I reach toward her face, but she leans away. “You’re the only thing in my life,” I whisper. “I want to be that to you too.”

“You will never be anything to me. You are my husband’s toy.”

The fire snaps. “I’ve never made love the way we did.” I put my hand on her thigh.

Her face contorts as if at a foul odor. She brushes my hand away.

“Monica…” I lean toward her.

“Get off,” she says, but I sense regret laced in the words.

“You take me to the light.” I bring my mouth toward hers.

“Get away from me.” She recoils.

I drag my lips across her face. Her mouth is taut. “Monica,” I breathe.

“What is this…” Daniel stands in the doorway, his bathrobe tied shut around him. A mug dangles from his fingers; steaming water spatters onto the hard stone. “What the fuck is this?”

Monica gets up and stands away from both of us. Daniel throws the mug at me, but it cambers into the fire pit. He comes forward and I rise to meet him. “After everything.” His hands harden. He is small. I could kill him with a finger. I turn my face forward and allow his fists their effort. There is no pain. I want to cry for him. I will leave the house bleeding only in the usual places. I will not go home tonight.

In the fall, a new family moves into the house next door. I watch them through my window. There isn’t much to say about them; they are other people. The parents are roughly my age. I consider introducing myself, but fear I will present as threatening. I walk Harlan past their house. Occasionally I see movement through a window, the blur of a body, or a stroke of light. One night I hear shouting. They decorate the house for Halloween with cobwebs and bundles of white sheets. In December they string lights along the eaves and coil them around the trees on the sidewalk. On New Year’s I go through my phone and take a shot for everyone I’m not with. I wake up covered in piss. Harlan has toppled the trash and eaten part of the bag. I am four months behind on rent, though somehow no one has appeared to collect it. 

I’m given a nametag, and follow the red arrows to the ICU. I see only hospital personnel. A pair of nurses ask if I need cheering up. Daniel’s room is at the end of a quiet hallway. He is alone, unconscious, unshaved, his hair fanned about the pillow. There is hardly the indication of a body beneath the sheets. Solemn machines crowd him, their wires disappearing into the bed. I draw up a chair. I take his hand and roll my thumb along the stalks of soft bone there. “Say you’re sorry,” I mouth against his papery skin. “Say it.” Some years later, when Harlan dies in my arms, I will repeat this, into his coat, though then I will be crying.

Monica enters. She is dressed in layers of dark garments so that only the skin on her face is exposed. She stands on the far side of Daniel’s bed, looking down at him as if at a blank spot on the floor.

“There’s hardly anything left of him,” I say. 

“The body wants to separate from itself.” She sets her purse on the bed between Daniel’s legs. “Death simply grants it permission.”

“Monica,” I say.

She shakes her head. 

We watch Daniel. “Do they know how much longer?” I ask.

“I am not waiting,” she says. “I am going home.” 

“Let me drive you.”

“No,” she says. “My home.”

A nurse comes in and fiddles with the dials on a machine. A crackling voice speaks from the ceiling: “Forty-two,” it says, and the nurse hurries away. Monica removes a glove and dangles her fingers above Daniel’s hand. Her hair is lighter than I remember, and there are lines around her eyes. She mouths a word, and she frowns, and she puts the glove back on and lifts her purse and turns to go.

“Please say something to me.” I half-stand, my jaw tightening.

She does not turn around. 

I sit with Daniel for another hour, sipping from the flask in my coat. I get lost on my way out of the hospital and pass through the ER. A girl is rushed past on a gurney, her left leg shredded below the knee like a surge of fire. Something detaches itself from the middle of my body. By the time I get home I’ve worked it out so that I feel lucky to be anything at all.