Tamara Sheehan

Monk

I

Let's say the sun has come over the line of the city and the light is burning a hole in your eyes and shearing the buildings in two, and the reflection in the sharp glass plugging the windows by University Station is making it impossible to raise them.

If you turn blind and grope toward the first long shadows after the dense noise and cool darkness of the Station, you will find yourself at Monk, and there are worse places to wait for the sun to wrench its burning bulk into the sky and bake the the brown haze into a shell above the city.

The bar is a favorite of expatriates, particularly those in a self-imposed exile. Not many people come to this country who do not have ties to it, so poets and writers who have spent their advances flock here because it's cheap and it's exotic. After arriving the smart ones fly south and end up at Monk, coming in droves as though it was some facsimile of Paris, which it isn't, and Monk is not cheap or exotic.

The owner is a fat woman with thick black-rimmed glasses and a strong grasp of nearly every language under the sun. If you are white or black she speaks to you in English. It doesn't mater that you're a Parisian, or a sailor from Valdivostock, or that you've lived in this country for fourteen years. You are what Elaine says you are.

Elaine is made up almost entirely of pillows. Two on her face make up her cheeks and her chin is another. She has big round body that she wields like a wrecking ball and a curly smile that hides the steely calculation in her eyes.

I said Elaine's bar is a favorite of expatriates and since I am not an ordinary, pouchy, pale traveler, I am hinting at a brief adventure and the clinging tragedy of exile that comes in after each patron like a cloud of writer-stench. In an era of books on betterment and living closer to nature and adventures in capitalism, writers are some of the poorest bastards or richest sons of bitches I've ever met.

What's funny about this is that I too was once an idealist. When I landed the first thing I did was go South because I knew where I was heading, to the romantic spot nestled in the heart of the second largest city in the country, to Monk. Anyone who's written anything knows it. I stopped in a little town on the way and met a guy my age teaching English here for a living. We talked and I missed the train I meant to catch so he bought me a drink and things went from there to where one might suspect.

I came to Monk, pie-eyed after a night of pontificating and great glasses of wine. I had gotten on the train still half-pissed, with cheeks burning off the leftover heat of our encounter, and fell into that heavy sleep that's uncomfortably close to how I imagine death.

When we lurched to a stop I hauled myself out of my seat and found my way through the crowded streets from the train to the subway. I slept a bit, I think, but the thump and hum of the subway and the burst of static and sound that announced Somyon Station, LeDuc Station, then University Station woke me and each time I was sicker than before. Dear god, I thought, invoking that post-hangover deity that writers, even atheistic writers, carry around like a union card. I lurched to the doors. Get me off this fucking thing.

That was how I came to Elaine's, to Monk. I was pie-eyed and sick to my stomach with my tongue swollen a size too big for my mouth. When I staggered down the stairs into the cavernous bar I was clutching a stack of books to my chest and had a wine cork in my pocket.

Like I said before, in the morning when the sun comes up you could blind yourself just walking down the street with your head up, so when I got off the shuddering subway I went to the nearest dark thing, the alley, which is still narrow and high and dark, with the door on the left hand side about half way down. The door was like one of those office doors left over from the fifties from private eye movies: It had a wooden bottom painted gray with a window of frosted glass with the name Monk in big blue letters laminated onto it.

I pulled it open and went down the dark stairwell and found myself in a bar not unlike some high school theater set. The place was decked out in blue and black painted press-board that paneled over the concrete walls, everything is made of concrete there, and utterly windowless. About fifteen tables and one long long bar snaked around three walls. I found a spot unoccupied and sat down with my head in my hands and the fat woman with the pillowy face came over to take my order.

Why did I stay, you probably want to know? Even now if you see me you know I'm a foreigner. Not that there are no white people living here, on the contrary, but I wear a backpack, which is a throwback of my Canadian schooldays. Even though I've stayed here so long that I speak the language and stopped writing I still wear it and you can pick me out in a crowd. I carry my Canadianess around with me in a way I can't in Canada and here, living in a nation that's at war with itself, its not a bad idea to profess foreignness if only to sometimes be left alone.

Like everyone but Richard, I came here out of desperation. I was writing a book about an arsonist, twenty-five years old and following the advice of a friend to dress like Gertrude Stein as though some residual greatness might rub off on me. It didn't work, but everyone I met thought I was English, which was all right. When I came into Monk and sat down Richard smelled a writer and came over to me.

If I was dressed like Stein, Richard was Hemingway if Hemingway had been a tall and very good looking black man. He wore a button-up shirt splotched and discolored with god only knows what and a pair of brown corduroys, so faded and worn they were smooth and shiny at the seat. He'd come here a long time ago, a trip which he described by using the burning end of his cigarette to represent a jet engine and the opaque smoke that clouded him for the sky. "Whatar you working on?" He asked, looking at my face, pouchy eyes and lingering spots of heat that swelled my cheeks.

"A novel. I'm a novelist." I wasn't a novelist, but my particular mental illness and chronic lying, I thought, might turn into a career. I'd published with some moderate success back home, translated my own work under my dead grandmothers name (she was on my mothers side) and published it again neighboring countries. I had no great success but I was officially a poet, thought I didn't want to be.

"Name's Richard." He said, and ginned, chewing on the filter of his cigarette.

"OK."

"Everybody here teaches English." He leaned back in his chair and it shrieked. "It's the only way to get by, unless you can get a job writing with one of the English newspapers, but there's a strike now." He shrugged.

"What do you do?"

"I write." He grinned, a big row of yellowing teeth behind red lips. "This place is like alcoholics anonymous for us." I nodded and rubbed a hand over my lips which were dry and filmed with something. "I came to Elaine's on opening night." He said. "It was just my dad and me and Elaine and the Greek that does the cooking. Then there was Gerome, he's Slavic. Came down on a ship one day, and then everyone else just sort of started to arrive." I wanted to ask how long he'd been in this country but Elaine came back with a glass of cold water with ice and I started to drink it, the chill that trickled down my chest and hit my stomach pushed away the wave of nausea I'd been fighting.

"Elaine, this is Jo." I never did figure out why he chose to call me that. "Jo's trying to write a novel." Elaine looked down at me. She wasn't very tall, but she was looking down at me.

"You going to be a regular customer?" Her voice was harsh and heavy with a New York accent so obvious I wondered if it was affected. "I don't like transients, Jo. This place is my family, so either you come and you stay or you don't come at all." I nodded. I wanted to say "yes, ma'am," but I thought I might get in trouble. I knew right away that I didn't want to give Elaine a reason to put me in a cab and send me back to the airport. I knew she was the kind of woman who would do just that if I tempted her. I didn't really trust myself to speak so I nodded.

"You hungry?"

"A little." I said. I really wanted a coffee, but I was sensible to the state of my body so I didn't ask for one.

"You're hung over." She smiled suddenly, lighting up as though I'd given her some kind of compliment, or said the password. "Let me get you something to settle your stomach."

I looked at Richard with my forehead in knots coming so far over my eyes that I must have seemed to be squinting. Richard didn't speak. He lit the end of a fresh cigarette with the brand of the old one and started to puff again.

Before I go on, I should explain something. Richard was self destructive like nothing I'd ever seen before. You think of rocks that stand against the ocean as self destructive, or people that cut themselves, they're self destructive, but Richard was a force of nature turned in on himself.

An immune system turned inside out he spent the bulk of his days punishing his body as much as possible. He acted as though enduring two, three packs of the cheap, tarry cigarettes they sell here, and drinking every night until he vomited was a way of battling something bad inside. I've met a lot of writers. Some of them affect neurosis thinking that writing is like planting crops, if you do everything like the pro's you'll get a good crop, or in this case, a book. Richard didn't affect his neuroses. He was really sick.

His hands shook and only a cigarette would steady them, his self esteem was terrible and when he got drunk (which was often) he became a brawling idiot. Usually it was Richard and Gerome. They fought constantly, like two tom cats in the same neighborhood, battling over turf, arguing about the fidelity of their respective partners. Usually Gerome walked away. Sometimes Richard chased after him and they would brawl in the dark closeness of the alley, no one to watch the tumbling, tangled bodies. After the flush of pleasure that came with combat, they'd come back into Monk, black eyes and bruises, and buy one another drinks. There was an uneasy pecking order. Richard was in charge but Gerome was greater. He was only giving his friend what he wanted.

Richard wanted desperately to be one of the great ones but his entire English vocabulary and a lot of his manners were gained from reading Tom Jones and Lord of the Flies, never a good combination for a man already teetering on the brink. Despite it all, I found liked Richard, even his rough spots.

When Elaine came back she brought me a bowl of warmed milk and a croissant and a pot of coffee in one of those little decanters made of stainless steel. Cream, which is nearly impossible to get here, was in a little pot she put down beside it. For Richard there was some tar like substance in the bottom an impossibly tiny cup that he quickly swallowed.

As I said before, I wasn't hungry but Elaine was standing over me like a queen looking down at her subjects so I dunked my croissant in the milk and started to eat the spongy mass. Elaine watched me take a few slow bites, nodded and turned back to the kitchen under the stairs. When she left, Richard took the cigarette out of his mouth and picked up the empty cup.

"Jo. Jo, Jo." He drew the syllable out and up into a whine. "Sounds like something you say when you start to complain." He grinned, I didn't. "You want to know about Elaine?" He had a look on his face that indicated even if I spoke to him he wouldn't hear me. So I said nothing and like I suspected, Richard told me.

As it turned out, Elaine was an immigrant too, but of a particular type. She's one of those people that goes somewhere one day and just decides never to go home. She was born in Manhattan and came with her husband during the war, she fell in love with the country and the language and the people. She says she loves the countryside. It's a lie. There's no reasons for her to live here if it's the countryside she wants. God knows it's nice out there but you just can't get out to enjoy it. The cities in this country are so damnably huge, you just can't escape.

It takes three subways and a train to get to the rural parts, which I think of as endangered. And then when you finally get outside of the all the steel and concrete you see fields of green and mud going as far as the locals can make them stretch, running hard against skyscrapers or into the ocean. Only a third of the land here is arable so the locals fight hard to cultivate what they can. Elaine loves it, she's like Richard and like a certain part of me, she loves the fields because they are dirty and wet and there's people working in them. She's just as Hobbesian as she sounds. More than that, Elaine is in love with words too, though she's never been a writer. She simply knows better than to try to make a living on language and she is the original owner of that cynical eye I've been cultivating.

But even if you go to the country, and you're looking at the mud plains and the green shoots coming up out of the water, you'll see the cities in the distance. The shell of baked smog that hovers over them, the glinted masses of steel and concrete jutting into the sky baked white by the heat of the sun. The countryside is small and you can't get away from the cities, no matter how hard you try.

Anyway, when Elaine's husband got the yellow fever they sent him home but the war was nearly over by that time. Elaine stayed. About a year after he went home, he died. Elaine didn't bother to go home for the funeral, there was no need, she told me later. The dead are dead.

So she set up shop one day near the University and quietly opened her doors and let the smell of the country inside. That was how Richard, walking with his father who had been teaching in a special school near Le Duc had found the place.

Richard's father knew Elaine from New York State University. They were old friends, old loves by the way they looked at each other. Elaine had been a fetching woman in her youth, with only the hint of the pillows she wore now coming through on the photograph of her graduation. Richard's father was tall with a serious part slightly off center. He wore a pair of slacks and a button up shirt. He looked like a clerk.

Richard often stayed at Monk when his father was teaching. He had never had a mother and grew attached to Elaine. She liked him too and soon Richard was a fixture at the bar, underfoot all the time, impressing Elaine with drawings rendered in crayon and then later, the poetry and prose that made him a bit of a local hero. The authorities thought it was cute having a six year old take their orders like a little man and then serving them their drinks. For some reason, nobody bothered about the legalities. When Richard's father was offered tenure at the University of Toronto, Richard had stayed behind because by then Elaine had become his family.

I began to wonder if all writers came from families that were like this. My father had left Mother and Mother had then left me. I awoke one morning some time after graduation to find a note and a very large check on the round oak table in the kitchen. Every month after that a check came for food and bills and usually some kind of postcard in between the checks. It was all very surreal and being the kind of person I am, you can imagine I didn't put up with that for very long. My father had come here before me, he was a paleontologist, god only knows what brought him to the country, but I suppose that when I bought the ticket I was following him.

"We've gotta stick together, you know." Richard said, pouring himself some of my coffee while I tipped the half-empty bowl up, lips and teeth caressing the warm bone china. The splash of cooling milk prevented my answering, or exclaiming, which was what I really wanted to do.

I learned quickly that Richard was something that bordered on psychic. He had the same sense of acute observation that Mother had possessed as well, some kind of of a superhuman ability to divine a companion's thoughts by raising a gaze that could, in Richard's case, only be described as rather plain and bloodshot.

When all your thoughts were chasing one another like frightened mice he'd take one long look at you and suck all the thought and emotion out of your head and serve it up to you in a single sentence. He was never the kind to miss the intertextuality, weather spoken or written, he always saw the implied, sometimes before he saw what was being on the surface discussed. So in the moments of quiet that followed, I often wondered how much Richard had suspected.

The owner of Monk, as I said before, is Elaine Dunn, whom the Gods made for mortals to love. A Pandora. She's a bowling ball shaped woman with a puffy face and hard eyes. She herself is rather like a god, the god of the bar and the kitchen and the god of Richard and more than a little of her has rubbed off on him. Elaine's always been Richard's mother but she's not the jealous type, so she looks after Gerome too.

It was raining the day Gerome came in. I was hunched over my diaries, scribbling madly about my arsonist; a woman named Marcie who chose to burn down her family home before embarking on a journey into the world. It was a preposterous piece of writing and when it was finally published I wrote a scathing review of it under a pen name, and gained more fame as a literary critic called Maurice Latrec than I ever did as a novelist under my own name. At the time, though, I really did think the book was good. I thought is was honest. I thought I was telling a story that no one else had told. I'm still not sure where I got that idea.

Anyway, the first thing you notice when you get off the airplane here is the smell, which isn't nice. It hits you first when you're getting through customs and you look around at your fellow passengers, especially the ones that are staggering drunk or on Valium, and wonder if its them and smirk a bit when you catch the eyes of other passengers who give you that knowing look with the slightly raised eyebrow, as if to say: "well, at least some of don't behave like fraternity boys".

Then you get into the terminal and get your bags and here the air is as cold and dry and sterile as any airport in the world. And then you go outside.

That's where the smell and the heat hit you all at once. I know a girl who came through the doors of the airport and then went back inside and sat on her bag, laughing in the foyer because the world out there was so rank she thought she was hallucinating.

Then you go outside, because eventually you must or face the prospect of getting back on an airplane full of twice breathed air and the smell of stale vomit and cleaning agents, which is something that no one wants to do. So you do what all those British tourists in toupees and khakis do. You put a handkerchief over your face and try to get to your hotel which is probably as air-conditioned and sterile as the airport you just left.

The sewers here are over five hundred years old, you understand, and they simply weren't meant for this many people and then what happened during the long war. There are over ten million people in this city and more than twenty years of fighting. Sometimes heavy, sometimes nothing more than a short flurry of shells, one or two bodies puffing up in the heat, took place in the same streets baking under the same indifferent sun.

Since the war the manholes have stayed closed. The network of tunnels under the city were once strongholds of the resistance, now they creak alarmingly when a heavy truck rolls over them. Sometimes they get clogged, the unthinkable catching on the unknown and holding back the tide of garbage and rot. No one goes down to clear them. A good flood will flush all that away. What's in the sewers is the refuse of humanity, no one wants to see it.

When it gets hot, the smell comes up. I've heard travelers call it unbearable. It's not unbearable. After a while you don't really notice it. You walk with a kerchief pressed against your face but it doesn't help because nothing does, so you forget it, stop dwelling on it, or it would make you crazy. When it rains the smell and the dust get pounded back to the earth and the peppery clean of hot wet concrete rises shimmering and then you can breathe without tasting what the city has thrown out.

Gerome came down the stairs shaking the rain out the creases of a coat. A cloud of that wet, clean, concrete smell came in with him.

Lots of people come and go in Monk. Many are writers and artists because Elaine quickly got a reputation for sheltering us, for extending tabs and for staying open late for us and all our nasty inbred kind. I seldom bothered to see who had come in, most of them looked about the same. Pale, dressed darkly, sullen looking, some with smudges of sleeplessness under their swollen eyes.

I would have kept writing but the smell he brought with him caught my attention. When I looked up I saw Gerome for the first time. He was stamping the water out of his clothes, a sheen of rain and sweat clung to his blunt face.

I had never met Gerome before but Richard was his closest friend and had described him to me many times. Of course, being a writer, Richard's descriptions were never very flattering. When the blunt-faced man looked around for a place to sit I thought of Richard's description and felt my lip twist up in a half smile. Gerome's heavy black brows sloped toward me, shading his eyes.

"Gerome, hey." Richard said at my side and the black eyes traveled to Richard.

"Yours?" Gerome asked Richard.

"Nah. Hey Jo, this is Gerome. Gerome, meet Jo. A Canadian and a novelist." It was the tone that made me grind my teeth together, as though one could not be both things at once. I looked over at Richard. Slight lines that were around the corners of his eyes were deepening. Competition made him uneasy.

"Hello." Gerome said. He said down heavily on one of the metal stools. I was surprised that a man built on such a small frame, with skin stretched so tightly over the bones of his hands could make so much noise.

"Nice to meet you." I answered.

"Don't say 'nice'. It's insipid."

"Thanks." I answered sharply. I couldn't think of anything more to say in response. Gerome obviously did not expect more. He leaned over in his chair, raised his hand and waved toward the stairs.

Elaine appeared out of the kitchen where the Greek cook was yelling at one of the boys that bring the groceries on those little motorbikes with cylinders of extra gas or propane or whatnot tied onto them. Noodle-boys be called them, not because of what they carried but because they were all in the clutch of the gangliness of pre-pubescence, with noodle thin appendages, all slouched as if slightly overcooked.

The cook's voice blasted over the prattle on the television and the cars on the street above. He punctuated his points by smashing his meaty hands against the countertops. Rumor had it that during the second world war the Greek had served in the resistance. He'd been captured, a few times. A lot of his teeth were missing, his eyes were sharp and hard. He was said to be paranoid, slept with a knife under his pillow. But the boy looked bored, Elaine seemed not to have noticed the cooks voice swelling to a magnificent crescendo behind her.

She wiped her hands on her shirt and kissed Gerome's damp forehead leaving a smear of pink lipstick behind. They talked briefly, I suppose they were speaking Slovakian, I have no idea because I never bothered to learn, and she left again. Gerome wiped his forehead.

"How's the lip?"

"OK." Richard grinned belligerently. "Want to go again?"

"Not now." Gerome answered, unruffled. He turned to me. "Elaine never talks English to me." He said, nodding at her bouncing bottom as it disappeared after her body into the kitchen where the row was still on going. "What is it you are working on?"

I took a drink of my coffee as he spoke so I could delay answering him until I had formulated what I wanted to say. I never liked answering someone's questions without first wondering what they really want to know, I've always been that way. I guess that's why the teacher in my grade four class thought I was too slow to learn cursive writing, because I never answered her questions right away. But let's be honest, how exiting is grade four? I remember more from my recesses than the actual classes. I remember the mottled brown and orange and green of the carpet and the maroon trim of the gray school and the water that collected in the far end of the field and not what the Amazonian Mrs. Lyons tried so hard to teach us.

"I'm working on a book about an arsonist." I said as Elaine returned with a short drink clinking with ice. It was important, I thought, that Elaine knew I really was writing. I feared she would make up her mind that I was an impostor and throw me out of Monk and I would have no where to go. "It's set in Canada." I added, for her benefit. Elaine gave me a smile that made me wonder if I'd unknowingly said a bad word so I clamped my mouth shut. Whatever trespass I had committed had embarrassed Richard and Gerome as well.

We were all quiet and the sound of the Greek cook muttering loudly and banging frying pans down on the cooker took up the space our conversation had vacated. When a particularly nasty word drifted over to us I tried but couldn't stifle a giggle. I had learned a little Greek during my tertiary education and it's a universal fact that the first words you learn in a language will be common greetings and foul swears. This particular phrase was one I knew and admired for the creativity of the person who first came up with it. Elaine looked over at the cook shouted for him to keep the noise down and mind his language.

Then Elaine sat down with us and helped herself to the decanter of coffee, which was fine because coffee was complimentary for writers, and anyway, who was going to say no to Elaine?

Richard turned in his chair, pointing his knees at the person he addressed. He began to talk with her. They bantered and I watched the exchange of conversation, marveling at how alike they were. Not so much in looks, Richard's face had none of that bullfrog quality that characterized the erosion of years in Elaine, but they both had hard eyes that bordered on black in color and slightly oversized teeth and small, discreet chins. Their profiles were almost identical. If Elaine's nose had been a fraction flatter, they would have been duplicates of one another in shadows.

I was observing this when I realized Gerome was observing me. I looked over at him, meeting his eyes with as unruffled a look as I could produce. In those days, Elaine never sat with any of us, except Richard because he was Her Boy. I wondered why he wasn't taking the opportunity to speak to her, impress her, the way Richard did.

He grinned, showing a big row of white teeth leaning in sympathy together, and a wet pink tongue pushed up against them. I didn't like him. I don't know a lot of people who introduce themselves to another person by way of insulting them, but that, I would later discover, was just the way Gerome was.

Anyway he grinned at me and I began to feel stupid. My icy manner melted. I had to grin back, I don't know why. Eventually I put away my journal because I've never written very well and when other people read what I'm writing, unedited, over my shoulder, I just freeze up with fear and it's useless to continue. I tried to come up with something to say to Gerome. I didn't want to be obvious about my dislike.

"You play poker?" Gerome asked while Richard and Elaine talked. I shook my head.

"I've never tried."

"You want to learn?" I shrugged and he began to deal out cards to the four of us. I didn't enjoy learning, and I had little to bet, like the rest of us. The game eventually dissolved anyway, into a discussion on the ethics of consigning people to homes for the mentally disturbed. It lasted into the late hours of the night. Elaine's was open twenty-four hours, but no one came in as the day wasted away. People slowly began to leave, some groups stayed behind but we all sat in a subdued silence for the majority of the time.

When my eyes were protesting violently the continued scrutiny of the endless cards I knew I had to get some sleep. I looked up from the table at the door and the little frosted window that was at the top of the stairs I saw the world had gotten dark on us, the street lamp at the mouth of the alley had burnt out and the window looked like it had been painted black.

Night wasn't a problem, in fact, I often work better when the world closes up like a clam shell and mine is the only light in the building still glowing like a street lamp. I'd taken a flat not far away the first day I'd come and the dark has never really bothered me. Though Elaine offered me the apartment above Monk I thought if I took it I might never leave the alley again. As it was I hardly left it, except to go to the flat for a few hours desperate unconsciousness and to go to Namdemum for books and things.

My flat was more of a giant foot locker than a home or place of refuge. There is little I love in it, the building itself is wholly unpleasant, but most of them are, complete with peeling linoleum, rust splotched gas lines running to and from the stove, drippy taps that ooze water the color of tea, and lumpy floors. In my flat I have a stack of things I've bought, some books, clothes, a stone pot, a typewriter I thought I should have but have never, to this day, used, and the furniture that was there when I took the room from the landlord. If anyone took the time to break into the place they'd be horribly disappointed.

So it was dark and I thought I should probably go to bed so I started to gather up my things and Gerome looked up at me.

"Leaving?" He asked.

"Yeah. Nice meeting you." I meant what I said and it was not lost on Richard who winced a little.

"I'll walk you home." Gerome put his feet on the concrete floor and pushed himself off the stool that he had not left since coming in hours before. He said goodbye to the others and followed me up the short stairway to the alley above.

When you have been too long in a building and you go outside, even if you go outside in the heart of one of the worlds biggest cities, the air wakes you up. That initial cold blast reeked of the low tide and pulled the veil of sleep off my eyes. I started to walk and Gerome walked beside me and neither of us spoke much at first.

Given the nature of what happened a few days after this conversation took place, I think I should mention that writers, all writers, talk about seminal ideas. Sometimes these are ideas that, if shared with the wrong audience, could lead to the gallows. When Gerome asked me to describe how I would kill someone if I chose to, I was, like you probably are, rather surprised. After all, I hardly knew the man. But Gerome, as I said before, was an abrupt sort of fellow, and a writer so the idea wasn't as strange as it might appear.

"I don't know." I said, shrugging. "I guess I'd shoot them." He laughed.

"I mean, so you wouldn't get caught." I don't know what made him think I would have the expertise to answer the question, but I gave it a bit of thought anyway.

"Does it matter that you don't get caught?"

"It's central to the plot." He answered.

"Then I guess I'd do it psychologically."

"How?" He asked. I remembered what Richard had said, Gerome was Slavic and hadn't been here long and though his English was perfectly accented, it was not his first language and certain gaps were bound to remain. I tapped the side of my head to illustrate my point.

"I drive someone to it." I explained. His eyes opened wide and his blunted features creased as he considered what I'd said. As we were rounding the corner of the street (none of the streets have names here) he spoke.

"Then it's not murder."

"Then what is?"

"You must kill someone. Actually kill someone for it to be murder."

"Assuming that the person in question isn't someone who already had problems, I think that counts." We walked through half a dozen pools of orange street light and over the squat stone bridge. "And you wouldn't get caught." I added, "I don't think you'd even go to Hell."

We were quiet as we passed among a knot of tourists snapping photos of the city reflected in the putrid waters under the bridge and were silent all the way to my flat, which was only a block or so away from the bridge.

"Would you do it?" He asked suddenly when we were standing at the glass door of the apartment complex, the gaggingly sweet smell of the stuff they use to clean the carpets rising up off the floor. I frowned.

"I guess I'd have to have a good reason."

"I do," Gerome said.

"Then I'd do it," I answered, and went up to bed.

To this day I do not know if Gerome really expected me to invite him in. I did not want to invite him in, it was obvious, but this didn't seem to put him off. He must have skulked at the door to the complex for hours because I wrote little, perhaps one hundred words, but it took me time to do. I carved them painfully slowly, always looking out my window to where his shadow hulked. Eventually he seemed to go away, his shadow at any rate, had disappeared. I stopped writing, my eyes were to dry and tired that I could hardly see anyway, and turned off the naked light that hung in the center of the room.

I stripped. Cold rank air came in from the window, cooled me, wicked the smoke smell from Richard's cigarettes away from my skin, I closed it eventually. The city at night is a surprisingly noisy place. Despite the closed window the sounds of people and things outside filled up the room. I tried to fall asleep with the voices of dozens of strangers rising and falling like a chorus around me.

As happens when I lie alone at night, naked, with one hand squeezed between my thighs, I began to think. I think about work, ideas, characters, home, I chase them around in my head. Inevitably it's a vigil that keeps me awake until sun up. I once cultivated the habit, nurtured and rewarded myself with whatever interesting trivia I had read that day, and structured it with a Catholic sense of orthodoxy into liturgical hours.

My reverence for this system is not, derived from any link to the Catholic church. The Pope would pale to consider that a group of people so wholly lost as us would be interested in religion. People like us would turn it to our own ends, we are not to be trusted. But I loved the structure it gave my nights, I have always been mad over the control of time. My way, I guess, of coping with death. In exact opposition to Richard's exhibition of pandemonium.

As a child I used to cut out the trivia section in The Times if there was something of special note in it and I'd feed my self the tidbits as rewards as the night progressed, saving the best bits to be devoured last. (As the night grew later and I grew tired I would inevitably rise, pad to the door, slip through and run down the carpeted hall to relieve myself. I would drink a glass of water I had carefully stashed behind towels in the cabinet under the sink and washed my hands and face with the rest. The drain woke no one but the stainless steel taps, fickle, would some- times squeak. They were not be trusted.)

Refreshed, I would return to bed. Then, when gray dawn lightened the world outside my window, I would devour up the ultimate piece of trivia, relishing it in an orgasm of thought heightened by the delight of knowing the sun outside my window was coming up. It may seems strange, but it was for me perfectly logical. As a child I slept in three places and none of them were home. Night, in those days, was a dangerous time.

This habit of mine was an opus, constructed carefully over the passage of years, built upon with rewards, heaped higher by failure and the consequences of succumbing to the numbness of sleep. But the habit is useless now, and only prevents me from working a normal job. The threat that was once the dark is gone: the sounds of people milling about, the sounds of the police cars with their funny sirens whirring through the night, the multiple promises that I would scream until my head felt it would burst from the pressure cannot shut my brain off. Once the process has begun, it is unstoppable.

So I lay awake at some time close to Matins and thought about Gerome. About dawn (you can't really tell with all the street lamps and neon signs and cars driving around the city) I raised the last piece of information to my waiting lips and tasted the knowledge on my tongue.

Someone I know once said there is a secret language of movement, a language of the body and fleshy existence. It is seen in the looks, the silences, the way someone who had been through it knows another by their mannerisms. It was like a Masons handshake, but more subtle. Most people were unaware they were doing it. Some people, like my friend who pointed this out to me, can read it right away.

Gerome had the marks and mannerisms and I knew he pegged me as quick as I picked it up from him. I wondered about his illicit lover and I shivered in delighted pleasure, for I loved the idea of his misery, and licked my lips. I had no sympathy to Gerome. The great prat had insulted me, offended me before knowing me and that was a vulgarity inexcusable. His hanging around my flat only heightened my dislike of him. Knowing what I did was a powerful thing. Choosing to withhold my sympathy made it greater.

When at last, exhausted as the tension left my limbs, I decided I did not want to ask Gerome to confirm what I already knew, the sun was rising, really rising. The sky had gotten white again and the light was filling up the square on the splotched linoleum floor of my flat.

The night vanished and left me with a skull aching in time with each the pulse of my blood. My eyes were hot and dry and rubbing them would not restore the moisture lost. The lack of sleep twisted my stomach into a fist.

I drank a glass of cold water that stabbed my belly but made the acid burning in my stomach go away and opened the window to let the stink of the city back in. With the brush of air on my face I fell asleep in the plump upholstered chair that sits by the window.

I should have known, I suppose, that Gerome would not have gone home, that he had slept in the doorway, like a man on display in a museum stuck in a box of secure glass, sleeping to pass the time. I should have known someone would have let him into the building. I could only imagine the sweet stuttering, thick accented Slavic-English he told his tale in. I forgot my keys, my girlfriend locked me out, I'm lost. Let me in please, it's cold out here. Down there he would be like a big eyed stray dog missing half a tail to the people leaving the building for work.

I had only just fallen asleep when the pounding on my door woke me up. The sun was rising the line of light coming down the buildings and peeling the night away from the city. I sat up, groaned, yawned, grabbed for a bathrobe, moved stiffly to my feet. The pounding came again, a rapid tattoo that snapped teeth to teeth angrily in my mouth. I opened the door and gave Gerome a withering look that came from somewhere deep in the back of my head.

"Sorry." Gerome said. He looked as bad as any man who'd spent the night in a doorway would. His face was crossed and dented where the arm he had been using as a pillow had stamped the tea-colored flesh. On the same side of his head, he had sprouted a wing of coarse dark hair. There were black smudges under his eyes. He did not look sorry, but then Gerome never did.

"What do you want, Gerome?"

"You didn't sleep either."

"I was working." He gave me a steady look.

"Breakfast?"

"No. I'm tired."

"Not at Monk. Somewhere else." I hesitated. The sudden flash had burned up all the fuel I had left to give my anger. I knew I did not want to go anywhere. I did not know how to get rid of him.

"Later maybe." I said. I sounded so weak and pathetic I could hardly believe the voice speaking was mine so I shut my traitorous mouth. For a while we said nothing, Gerome seemed to be waiting. I stood, shoulders slumped under the bathrobe, in silence and held onto the metal door. The paint was peeling from it, leaving trails of gray where the faded, sickly yellow came away. It had probably never been primed, just slapdash painted, gone through war and probably more than one love affair given the scarring on the wall by the bed. I shook my head, forced myself to blink. "I'm tired, Gerome."

"Me too." Gerome pushed into the room, passed me, like a man getting onto a bus goes by the other passengers. I closed the door very hard and went directly to the bed. Gerome's black eyes followed me as I stripped, deliberately throwing the bathrobe onto the lumpy, linoleum-covered concrete floor, then lay down and kicked the covers to the bottom of the bed.

He stood in shock for a moment. For the first time someone had been ruder, more abrupt, coarser than he. I wondered how he was going to top it.

"Can I sleep in your chair?"

"Go ahead."

He sat in it. The chair, which is probably the only thing I miss from that awful flat, gave a little creak when he dropped his body onto it. We were silent. The noises of the city became day time noises. Finally I slept. It was bliss, deep, dreamless, perfect sleep. That dead faint of drunks or the very ill. I don't know how long.

I'd never slept naked with a man I hardly know in the same room as me before that day. I haven't made a habit of it since that time, either. That was a single moment of my life that has, really, been unsurpassed in the magnitude of it's absurdity.

Something possessed me to do it, you could say, or it was an absence of something-say, sleep- that stripped me to the very bones and made me use the basest social function I knew to try to remove Gerome from my flat. I like to think I was sleep drunk and couldn't grasp the ridiculous nature of the whole situation, but that's a lie. I wanted to horrify him. I was a little let down when he was still in the chair, breathing in loud rhythm, peacefully slobbering on himself when I woke up.

I was irritated, but I was far more sensible. I thought about myself, thought about Gerome and figured the damage, whatever it might have been, was already done. I got dressed. Gerome woke up while I searched for my shoes. He wiped a bit of drool from the side of his mouth.

"Lunch, then?" he asked. I was surprised by the sound of his voice. Meek, quiet, I wondered if he was afraid he might make me take off my clothes again if he angered me. I wondered why he hadn't slipped out of my flat while I slept. His face gave nothing up to my scrutiny so I nodded.

"Fine. Some place not Monk." He nodded in turn, unfolded himself for the chair almost as stiffly as I had, and tried vainly to flatten the wings in his hair. We left the flat as the sun was baking the stench of the city out of the sewers below the white concrete, passed through the shadows under the office towers and went down, toward the cool sea.

II

There is a song I learned as a child that talks about going down to the bay. It assumes we all know what bay, and what we are to do there, rather like a dream you fall into that seems to be halfway over. As with most children's songs, there's little lead up, no preamble, we are just going to the bay.

The song, I vaguely recalled, is certainly a catchy one. Like most of the jingles written for children, the tune tumbles mindlessly over and over again. When you are five or six you sing bursts of it in clusters of friends and they all join in, whatever came before the song is forgotten until the song is over. Then when you reach for it, some twenty years after you last sang it, the song has disappeared and the memories you have of singing in the playground, surrounded by a cluster of your friends have become mute.

Gerome was disinclined to talk. I occupied myself much of the way to the waterfront trying to remember the song. Eventually I gave up. I wondered if Gerome might know but I doubted Raffi had made his debut in Yugoslavia. I wondered briefly about Gerome's childhood and quickly pushed back the unasked question, already answered.

We moved quickly out from the city that I knew. The beaten concrete gave way in places to the spread of lawns and brick or cobble streets where white umbrella covered tables dotted sidewalks. Here tourists sat demurely dipping biscotti and getting burnt by the sun, complaining about the state of the roads, the heat, the wind, the hotel, the inflation, the smell of the place that even the vastness of the sea adjacent was helpless to alleviate.

The water appeared amid the jumbled mass of white umbrellas, a ribbon of gray blue glittering gaudily where it lay at the foot of the tourist area. I expected Gerome to stop here, some nice cafe in mind. Instead he pulled me across the street through the waves of heat coming up off the asphalt, between hot, noisily idling cars locked in perpetuity at a stubborn light swarmed by stubborn pedestrians.

We stepped onto the curb, rounded the corner. The market street burst into view and my eyes were overwhelmed by the sight of it. Half in shade, half in light, thousands of human bodies mingled and writhed and breathed and fought against the heat, the stench, the conflicting movements of the other humans.

We struggled through the frantic limbs, the tangled bodies pushing, open mouths calling out or yawning. The smell of cheep food frying loaded the air with grease. Piles of merchandise were heaped around makeshift booths and not content to flood the street with things, innumerable brightly colored things, things alongside people were out on balconies.

Linens were strung out of windows, bright colored, hanging limply. Their lower hems brushed our heads and were blackened by the greasy smoke. The cables they hung from crisscrossed the narrow street making use of windows half opened, rust eye-hooks like metal worms eating out the limbs of crumbling masonry. Between the wires and linens and signs were other things: baskets, bright plastic tubs, pots and pans all stacked in tottering piles leaning away from the sea as if a storm had piled them up.

Gerome took my hand, plunging into the writhing crowd and pulling me in after. I followed, I had to keep my head up to avoid knocking into things but the street was broken, uneven, I stumbled but could not have fallen against the press of bodies jammed so tightly around me. I hardly walked; the human current carried me. I stepped on carpets, a dog, chickens that ran shrieking. Children bumped and pressed against me, someone grabbed my arm and apologized, before I could reply he was swept away by the crowd. Thieves felt up their unwitting clients, whores called out from the half-opened windows, competing tunes blasted from a half dozen static filled stereos, grease on hot grills cracking, burst into flames. The world had been stuffed into the alley and I was drowning in it. Panic wedged in my throat and what came out was a hysterical giggle. I was laughing madly when we reached the far end of the street where the crowd was thinner. Gerome waited until I had calmed down.

We were skirting the water's edge, the noise of talking and crying children and vendors bawling and music gave, with grudging slowness. Away at last. At the far end of the market it was dark. People dispersed to other streets.

We rounded the corner, came out of the shade in a place where the next narrow street was flanked by carefully cropped trees planted in brick lined squares. They slowly rotated in the breeze, made top heavy by all the careful pruning, and brushed at black power lines. All these were the hallmarks of colonization in the early half of the century as much as the architecture of the street.

The narrow road itself was clogged with cars, parked for the most part, but some few motorists careened through the course of pedestrians and parked cars, roundabouts planted with red geraniums, and stop signs scarcely noticed.

Gerome took me half way down the long shady street to a cafe. Busy, with patrons that had spilled a trail of plastic tables and chairs from the shop out onto the sidewalk, there were few seats left. Busboys in black despite the heat hummed in and out of path of patrons and haphazard tables as urgently as bees.

Gerome saw me settled in a green plastic chair that had been warming in the sun and went inside the narrow brick building to get us lunch. I looked around at the other patrons and discovered immediately why Gerome had brought me. The place, not only above ground, had character.

Several sleepy looking prostitutes wearing clothes that were made for teenagers sat in chairs near by, smoking slender white cigarettes. Others were nodding as they nursed cups of coffee and bowls of breakfast, quietly talking shop.

Near them, a man wearing a bloody butcher's apron was discussing something in a rumbling basso. The young man listening to him was nodding, responding in turn, chewing something sticky from his fingertips. Beyond those two a pair of buss boys leaned against a green marble counter top that made up their station. In noisy camaraderie they talked and joked and grinned while they watched women in summer clothes walk by.

The air around the place was cool and still, the breeze from the ocean cut off by the tall Victorian buildings. Still, but busy, and that I think is the appeal of places like this for writers. Other people's urgency, like bursts of sun on broken glass catches the eye of anyone who moves close to it. It keeps us from becoming too lethargic, too self absorbed and gives us lives to spy into. Writers are cannibals. When they say there's nothing new under the sun, they aren't kidding. Writers just present it so it looks new. That is our job. To do this, we need something interesting, a seed, an idea. For that we require other peoples urgency because writers, as a rule, do not feel urgent unless the urgency is sexual. In that case we feel urgency most of the time.

Though the place has changed owners a few times now, it remains impossible to get away from the activity around the cafe. People still move urgently to and from the narrow building. Those in chairs, talking, lean forward in their seats, move fingers and hands to color their tales, feet stamping on the broken concrete to emphasize a point.

There were other reasons to like the cafe, some of which are gone now. The urgency in the air was tempered by the homey kitchen smells, the odor of things frying, coffee and alcohol that bled from the cafes lining the street, the noodle boys on the motorcycles carrying groceries and the babble of voices that nearly drowned out the sound of the vomit in the gutters being washed away with hoses. In the great march of progress, this new love of clean, bright things, hard plastic, opaque lids, mechanical shit, a lot of this is gone. I still come here for my solace, but it's not like it was. Only Gerome and I and the prostitutes remember what it was like.

I settled, stretched out my legs under the table, watched a dog mooching from laps look over at me. He scanned me, with a look of deep doggy contemplation, and give me a miss. No food.

I should confess, now that I love to eavesdrop. I don't spy, I listen in. I like it. I have no plans to describe your rendezvous with your lover at a cafe when I later meet your wife. People are paranoid. All I want is to listen, my reasons are simple. Cafe conversation was enormously fulfilling, people were there to talk. Just people, not writers, and they had nothing to lose by interacting with one another.

I've always found that the best conversations are those overheard, partially because I myself am a horrible conversationalist. My favorites are the snatches which involve some single nugget of information terribly vital to making sense of the whole thing, which you have missed, and can only wonder what the punch line might have been. I entertained myself by listening while I waited for Gerome to come back with something to eat and slowly I began to feel better.

My attention was diverted from conversation by a strange sight half a block down the road which I was in a good position to observe. In the middle of the street was a white lorry, and drivers were careening around it, hairs, breaths away from the crush of metal and annihilation. The owner of the illegally parked lorry was standing on the sidewalk, yelling at a man with a dog. The driver was so angry that his words were merely garbled stuttering exclamations rather than coherent sentences. I couldn't figure out the reason for the rage but I marveled at his extraordinary physical representation of it.

He was red in the face, the sinews of his neck stretched like cord strained too long at its maximum, his eyes bulged and rolled. The big arms, half hidden under the company jacket he wore, were bulging as much as his face, the purpled veins stood out in the bed of flesh. To the presence of the lorry driver, the fellow with the dog was utterly oblivious.

He was reading a newspaper with the sun on his shoulders and his shadow falling onto the paper to keep the glare down. A pair of oversize sunglasses hid most of his expression, which was irritation to judge by the sloping eyebrows and thin pressed lips drawn in a line that severed the top of his head from his tremendous chin. Irritated, it seemed, not by the yelling man, but by what he read. He had somehow not noticed the screaming lorry driver. At his heels, his black dog snuffed lazily at the sidewalk as unconcerned as her master, unaware it seemed of the man yelling, boiling, about to burst.

At last the man with the newspaper looked up. He started, leaping backward almost a full step and his dog scrambled beside him. The lorry driver stopped shouting, he gesticulated, but even these outrageous movements faded after a time. The two men looked at one another.

Then the man with the dog smiled, his thin lips pulled back in a half concealed grin of boyish pleasure, his eyebrows ring slightly. He pointed to his ear with one finger and shook his head.

"I'm deaf." he mouthed, and an incoherent sound came out as he moved his lips to testify to this. The lorry driver swore, threw his arms hopelessly toward heaven and stomped back to the illegally parked truck.

"When I was younger," Gerome said, setting down two mugs of coffee made rich with cream, "I was preoccupied with not dealing with physical existence." I knew what was coming, or thought I did. I made a hasty joke.

"Not in those words I bet."

"No, in Slovakian." I hesitated, then seeing the faint curling of the corners of his mouth I began to laugh. "I'm sorry I insulted you, Jo. I wanted to apologize but I started on the wrong foot again today."

"Why apologize?" I asked as he sat. I took the coffee and drank. I tasted the evaporation of alcohol on my tongue. "What's in this?"

"Brandy."

"At eleven-thirty in the morning?"

"The French say that a brandy with breakfast thickens the blood." Gerome shrugged.

"Skin would be better. If it was skin I'd become an alcoholic." I sipped again. There was a lot of brandy in the drink, the alcoholic heat half concealed by the warm coffee, smell entirely masked. "It's a wonder there are any livers at all in France." I said. I drank again and Gerome did the same and neither of us spoke for a while. Each was sizing the other up, deciding what would come next. Around us the buzz of conversation kept the silence from becoming oppressive.

"I didn't know you. I thought you were just someone Richard had brought in." Gerome said, lowering the mug for a moment. I nursed my own, gave Gerome a look of dislike.

"You made a bad mistake, you know that?"

"Yes." I felt my eyebrows go up, the curling at the corners of his lips grew slightly. "That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it?"

"Yes." I was surprised at his perception, and inwardly furious that my emotions had showed so plainly on my face in Monk. I wondered what else Gerome had picked up, I wondered if Richard had known. Certainly Elaine would have guessed. At once I wondered if that was why Gerome had brought me here, rather than going back to Monk.

"You and Richard fight a lot?"

"He likes to fight." He shrugged.

"You?"

"That's my own business."

"He'd like to destroy himself, Gerome. I know you can see that."

"It's the work. Maybe the sales of his books would go up."

"They tend to do that after someone dies."

"They do."

Gerome set down the coffee he was holding, touched my hands which were wrapped around my own mug. At that moment he looked terribly earnest, his thick eyebrows were reaching slightly upward, the hint of smile gone. He caught my gaze and held it, his mouth opened slightly. A breath, a moments hesitation, and then he spoke.

"You can call me a prat if you like." I burst into helpless laughter and he grinned too, a full cat like grin that showed his teeth and tongue pressed against them, just like the one last night.

"Prat," I said.

"Agreed. Done with that now?"

"Done." I nodded.

"Good. We're done. Now let's stop talking about Richard."

I laughed again. "Is this why you brought me here?"

"Yes and no, Jo. Yes and no." He shrugged, the bulbous shoulders rolling under his shirt. "I get sick of Richard's cigarettes. And Elaine sometimes too. Richard is Her Boy."

"Now you're doing it."

"Touché." He scratched under his chin, then leaned back in his chair when a server appeared with a platter of fruit, sliced, arranged elegantly on the plate. I helped myself to a bit of cool fruit, sucked it while Gerome selected his own and crammed it into his mouth. "I want your help with something I'm working on." I swallowed what I was eating.

"Is this about the conversation we had last night?" I asked guardedly. Who knew if the people sitting around us were off-duty officers who certainly would not understand.

"Some." Gerome shrugged again. "I want to ask you what kind of qualities you think someone would need, you know, to do that." I blinked, looking helplessly at Gerome.

"Good god, Gerome, what makes you think I'd know?" He laughed.

"Nothing personal I promise."

"Well what then?"

"Your arsonist. You're writing about a criminal. I'm writing about a criminal." I ate a slice of apple that he offered me.

"What's Richard working on?"

"A poem in Greek hexameter."

"Richard reads Greek?" I asked in surprise.

"No," Gerome laughed. "He likes to out do everyone. Richard hardly finished school, he can't read Greek. The style is what's Greek, the words are all in English. He's a bloody misfit." I decided not to answer. "What about your criminal?"

"She's not a criminal."

"She's an arsonist."

"But she doesn't get caught." I grinned, tapped my forehead with my index finder. Gerome shook his head, his hair falling from behind his ears.
"You have a very strange notion of crime," he said, then added, "Your morals seem to be a little off too."

"Goes with the territory." I said.

"Well?"

"I don't know, Gerome. I guess I'd have to really hate someone."

"What if the person is just in the way?"

"You could just tell me the plot, you know," I said. The reaction was just what I had expected. No writer who had been among writers and knows what cannibals we all are will share such close knowledge.

"What if I told you he--"

"The main character?"

"Secondary."

"Ah."

"He was a close friend of the man who murders him."

"I would say that most murders are committed by people who know their victims well," I answered. I took another swallow of the coffee and brandy and felt the alcohol burn up in the air when I breathed. Gerome shifted in his seat, leaning so close that the sharp blue stubble wrapping his chin was apparent.

"The main character is in a bit of a rage. He wants something the other character is keeping him from getting," he ventured.

"So psychology is out?"

"Yes. I don't think my main character could manage it."

I frowned. "Maybe. Maybe not." I nodded, leaned forward also, aware that Gerome's eyes were not where they belonged. "What about something like alcohol? I mean, to help the psychology along."

"What if it's not murder?" Gerome countered. I shook my head.

"I don't understand. I thought you said it had to be murder."

"I mean, the secondary character just has to be out of the way of the main character. So he can get this thing." I blinked.

"For a limited time?"

"Yes."

"For christsakes, Gerome, you're the author, send him to Kerblakistan for two weeks."

"Where?"

"Anywhere. Look, just get rid of him. Make up a country. Lower Slobovia. Maybe he knows someone who's ill there."

"No, no, it has to be this way. He won't leave, it's not… in character. He can't leave. I need him here. I just need him away for a weekend. Murder was the only thing I could think of." Gerome was getting frustrated, I could see a tightness squeezing his eyes, hear the pinch of creeping anxiety in his voice. He was still gripping my hands with his, the skin stretched so tightly, webbing the bones together, my own began to sweat under the covering.

"An illness."

"No. It's too unlikely."

"What then?"

"He has to die, or almost die."

"Why?" I realized we were whispering, like conspirators. At once I wanted away. I pulled back from him, freeing my hands, felt the sweat cooling on them. I became aware again of the buzz of friendly conversation, that the sun was burning the skin on my leg. No wonder Gerome didn't want to go to Monk. Imagine Elaine walking in on a conversation like that. Writers or not, she would have thought twice about us.

"I just need to know how," Gerome said in a quiet voice. He looked hard at me, his blunt face was creased in a frown. I thought I understood the stress he was going through. He needed something, anything, and didn't trust himself. What he wanted was for me to come up with the same idea, thereby lending credence to his plan, but he refused to lead me to it. I pondered.

"Gerome, don't you think this is like cutting off a hand to get rid of a hangnail?"

He smiled faintly then. "I guess it is," he said. The tension ran out of his body and his pushed his chair away from the table, one arm indolent over the plastic, the other toying with the mug. "I hoped you would be able to help me."

"I'm thinking," I snapped. I ate another slice of apple, going brown in the sun and air. "What about the aid of a friend? That person could do the psychology, while the other could get what he wants." When Gerome did not disagree I knew I'd hit it. I pressed on, leaning forward again. "It means adding a new character, probably means changing your plot a little." Gerome's bottom lip jutted while he considered.

"Perhaps," he said. He nodded slowly. "Perhaps. But the set up has to be right." My eyes left his face. I looked around. Many of the patrons of the cafe were gone. Shadows had gone long and purple while we talked. The busboys had begun to look harried. A breeze was coming off the ocean. Behind Gerome I could see where the sun was going down between buildings.

Picture a woman in a tourist market, bent to the task of dyeing ivory. The crimson dye looks so thin and watery in the pail, streaming off the ivory, running all over the floor on which she works, staining her cuticles red. That was what the sky was like behind Gerome; bright, vivid.

That was it. In retrospect I can see it clearly. That moment.

III

I liked Richard, so when I heard from Elaine, already a puffy sort of women, who looked impossibly puffier, that Richard had swallowed two and a half dozen sleeping pills I went to his flat. It's one of the places to let above the bar. Gerome, Elaine told me, was already there.

Gerome, the heavy-faced Slav had wandered into Monk one day, lost, far from home, was one of Richard's only friends, his closest one. At the time he was working on a book, something about a murder, I can't really remember. After this, everything became a bit surreal. I don't think about it often.

Anyway, the story goes that after a night of heavy drinking, the type that usually dissolves into brawling but this time did not, Gerome had come round to Richard's flat to pick Richard up for lunch. When he arrived, Gerome had found that the door to the apartment had been left ajar. A note pasted to the wood was written in English inviting Gerome inside.

So Gerome had found Richard lying naked on the tangled bed with little pearls of the pills he hadn't swallowed all around him. He'd called for an ambulance and supervised the paramedics as they loaded Richard's naked body onto the stretcher and maneuvered him through the halls and down the stairs.

When I got there the paramedics, the police and of course Richard had already gone. The others were there, lingering, guiltily enjoying the excitement. The dent where Richard had lain in the bed was still there, still warm, Gerome told me later. And the note he had written in hexameter was on the footlocker by the bed, the police hadn't bothered with it. All in all, the scene in his apartment was nearly as good as Richard himself.

"Don't worry," Gerome said when he saw me. "He's going to spend the weekend in the hospital, and then he'll come home. They'll probably pump his stomach. It's a good thing I got here when I did." I blushed as though I had just seen Gerome in a wickedly obscene position.

"What's his note say?" I asked.

"It's printed in Greek."

"You said he doesn't speak Greek."

"I guess he does," Gerome answered, running a hand through his limp blond hair in a motion so adolescent I wanted to make fun of it.

"Just like him." I answered instead.

"Try to outdo us."

"Always."

"Why'd he do it?"

Gerome shrugged. "Who knows why he does anything?" He wasn't angry. I kept my mouth shut, Gerome rarely wants an answer to his questions, this I knew was no exception.

"You'll stay?" he asked when the crowd of regulars and neighbors and vulture-like onlookers were starting to disperse.

"Of course," I said.

I went to the window and looked out into the neighboring apartment complex where the last earthquake had cracked the concrete facing into a web of black and gray and a large yellow sign reading "danger-do not enter" in the local language was posted across the shabby looking door.

"He did not die from drink but work." I quoted. I asked again. "He'll be OK?"

Gerome shut the door leading into the hallway, then crossed the narrow space in the apartment and closed the bedroom door as well. He leaned against it.

"You know how he is." he said at last. He fumbled through the darkness of the apartment to find Richard's cigarettes.

"Maybe he should see a doctor." Gerome lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply like a man using an inhaler for asthma. I looked at him. His face, which had gone pale in the excitement, was illuminated by the burning end of the cigarette; the heavy Slav features looked almost demonic. I wanted to turn on a light but at six pm the power is shut off across the country and Richard had never bought his own generator.

"Most doctors," Gerome said at the same time exhaling a huge cloud of opaque smoke, "need help themselves." He nodded toward the bedroom as though Richard was still there and I shrugged. I didn't know any doctors.

Gerome lowered himself heavily on the capacious couch that dominated the far wall and I to the chair across from him. "You're staying here tonight?" I asked. There was no need, but anything was better than silence in a house where someone's tried hard to die.

"Drink?" he offered, getting up from the couch with as much noise and gracelessness as he'd gone down on it. I didn't answer and he brought me a brandy anyway.

Eventually when the sun was coming up and I was looking at it pie-eyed through the dirty window, Gerome came over and pulled me down to the floor with him and we made love. We remained entangled until the buzzer sounded in the hall and he leapt up to answer it. He pulled on his jeans and I found the corduroys I'd discarded earlier just before the boy with the newspaper managed the flights of stairs and knocked on the door. Gerome took the paper and carefully pulled out the sections he wanted, leaving me the scraps, which I took and read while the apartment began to bake and that smell of outside started to rise up around us. We spent the remainder of the day in Richard's flat. No one could have been happier.