On Saturday morning Thomas wakes early, his heart thumping, stressed, uneasy. It’s 6:00 A.M., still dark outside. Patricia sleeps with a hand on her belly, and the bed smells like old man. He rolls over, tries to get his pulse under control. Can’t. He goes to the bathroom, drinks water. Then back to bed. Falling asleep seems impossible, yet he must’ve slept, because it’s suddenly light outside, and he’s dreamt, and now it’s 9:30. Patricia’s up, and his telephone beeps with a text message. Drunk with sleep, he reads, “you need to help me, the toaster doesn’t work, j.” For God’s sake, she’s got to stop this now. Instantly, he’s pissed. Feeling the tension in his neck, he kicks off the duvet. “stop it,” he writes. “aren’t you sweet, thanks a lot,” Jenny replies. He curses under his breath and steps into the shower. He pulls on pants and a sweater, clean socks, running shoes. In the kitchen Patricia sits swaddled in her duvet, reading the newspaper. She drinks coffee. She’s bought bread and butter at the bakery. There’s also juice. “Good morning, honey,” she says, sliding over so that he can sit on the bench. She’s done the dishes. A half-empty bottle of beer rests on the kitchen table, and she’s put the food containers in a garbage bag and swept the floor. But she didn’t use the dustpan: dust and crumbs are heaped in a little pile in the corner, near the sink. Thomas pours coffee and butters his bread. Jenny texts, “knew I could count on you.” He falls for it every time. She feigns helplessness and insinuates that he doesn’t care about her, and so he comes leaping to her aid after all, motivated by a guilt he has no reason to feel. But not this time, hell no. “fine,” he responds, skidding his cellphone across the table. “What’s going on?” Patricia asks, looking at him. “Nothing. It’s just Jenny. She’s obsessed with the stupid toaster.”
“Toaster?”
“I can’t explain it. And it’s boring! Ridiculous. She’s trying to manipulate me, as usual. I guarantee she’s bored. Alice is off with her new boyfriend all the time, she says, and Jenny just sits staring at the wall.” He hears how hotheaded he sounds, how loudly he’s talking. Already he regrets it, but he can’t help himself now.
“She’s working, though, isn’t she?”
“Yes, but when she’s not working. She works the late shift. All she does is eat, all day. And stare. That fatty.” Thomas slams his cup on the table. “I’m going for a walk.” Patricia looks at him, surprised, then returns to her newspaper with a shake of her head. He’s almost never angry. Now he’s boiling with rage. He takes the stairs down from the sixth floor, tramping hard on the steps, pounding his fist on the elevator at every level. Luckily he left his cellphone back in the kitchen, otherwise he would’ve called and given her an earful. The temperature outside is colder than yesterday, the wind’s blowing from the west. A plastic bag dances in the gusts. He should’ve worn a jacket. He fishes his cigarettes from his pocket and finally gets one lit after several attempts. Fucking wind. Maybe the door of his father’s apartment was busted a long time ago. Maybe it was just some junkies, like Maloney suggested, who’d stolen the silverware and a few pieces of furniture, or some drunken second-hand shop dealer, or some boys, or maybe all of the above in several rounds. Maybe it really was some kid throwing an apple core through the door on his way down the stairs. But it was in the living room. Thomas turns a corner and the wind lashes his face. The park on the other side of the street seems gloomy in this gray weather. An old woman with two small dogs is practically flying through the air. A band of youths hang around the benches at the park entrance. Farther down the street there’s an ambulance, and the EMTs are maneuvering a stretcher into the vehicle. His rage dissipates once he’s trudged around the block. Yet he still has no desire to go upstairs to Patricia. He decides to go grocery shopping. The supermarket is filled with families chugging around with large carts and piling them with items. There’s a line at every register. The families with children appear to be buying groceries for the entire week: milk, bread, frozen foods, cereal, huge packages of toilet paper. Thomas removes products from the shelves, but the entire time his ears ring with a high-pitched note of irritation. And when he puts his items onto the belt—goat cheese, red onions, crackers, sparkling water, and a whole bunch more—he suddenly stops. Every single one of these people will die. Every single person, no matter how old they are. The ones babbling cheerfully, clowning around, having a good time, arguing and talking, or lonely or hunted or sad or happy or relieved—even plain joyful—they will all die. Maybe soon. They’ll lie like wax figures in some morgue. Their insides and their flesh will swell and rot, bacteria will explode inside their bodies and make them stink like dead cows in 95-degree heat. He looks at a dark-skinned, middle-aged woman behind him, at the young blond man at the register, at a grandfather holding his small grandson’s hand. They’ll all be disgusting corpses. Maybe very soon. The grandfather actually looks like someone who might kick the bucket any day. The kid could run in front of a car. The woman could have a terminal illness without knowing it. Him too. Even him. Maybe he’s got cancer. He slides his card through the machine and grabs his bags. He has a headache, a hangover, and stiff legs. The glass door glides open and nudges him back onto the street with a puff of warm air. Son of a bitch. Their father lay with his eyes closed, his dark hair combed back; one of the guards had found him, dead as a doornail on the floor. Heart attack. A white sheet covered his body. When they removed it, he was wearing prison garb. “Yes, that’s him,” Jenny had said, though no one had asked them to identify the body. She took a step back and squeezed Thomas’s arm. He felt nothing but loathing. There he lay, a corpse, already pallid and stiff. He recognized with a cool indifference some of his own features: Yup, that’s how I look, too. It was as if their father resembled a boy or a young man, and yet didn’t. His features were smooth, wrinkle-free. The dome of his forehead, his jutted chin, his broad mouth, his thick lips. His face expressed nothing. It was clear that he was no longer a human being. Yet it was unmistakably him. The body, a form for the life that had been inside him, like a mold one lifts a cake out of. The cake had been eaten. Their father’s big hands were crossed over his abdomen; they’d probably struggled to set them just so, or maybe they’d hurried, as soon as he’d been declared dead by the prison doctor. With a sudden tenderness, Thomas imagined several female officers with keys and pistols in their belts standing over the deceased, washing his ears, cleaning his nails. Arranging him, getting him ready. But it was the nurses who’d fixed him up. Those hands unnerved him; they were the same ones that had filled so much of his childhood. The hands he and Jenny had kept a close watch on, the entire time, those fast, unpredictable hands. Their father wore the ring with the black square on his little finger. He’d inherited it from his big brother, who’d been in the foreign legion and died when he was twenty-six, and he’d always promised Thomas that it would be his some day. “When the time comes, you’ll get the ring, Thomas. Before my brother got it, it was my father’s. When I die, it’ll be yours. And your son will have it after you.”
“But you can’t die,” he’d said, anxious. He was seven years old.
Their father had laughed