“I wish you hadn’t called my phone,” Landsman says after a moment. “Better you should just have let me die.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Bina says. “Oh, and you’re welcome.”

“And what am I supposed to do now, besides be grateful for having my balls cut off?”

“That’s up to you, Detective. Maybe you could try thinking about the future for a change.”

“The future,” Landsman says. “You mean, what, like flying cars? Hotels on the moon?”

“I mean your future.”

“You want to go to the moon with me, Bina? I hear they still take Jews.”

“Goodbye, Meyer.”

She hangs up. Landsman cuts the connection on his end and stands there for a minute with Berko watching him from the bed. Landsman feels a last surge of anger and enthusiasm blow through him, like a clot of dust being cleared from a pipe. Then he’s empty.

He sits down on the bed. He gets in under the covers and turns his face back to the Balinese scene on the wall and closes his eyes.

“Uh, Meyer?” Berko says. But Landsman doesn’t answer. “You planning to stay in my bed a whole lot longer?”

Landsman sees no percentage in answering the question. After a minute Berko bounces himself off the mattress and onto his feet. Landsman can feel him studying the situation, appraising the depth of black water that separates the two partners, trying to make the right call.

“For what it’s worth,” Berko says finally, “Bina also came to see you in the ER.”

Landsman finds he has no memory of this visit at all. It’s gone, like the squeeze of a baby’s foot against his palm.

“You were doped up pretty good,” Berko says. “Talking many kinds of shit.”

“Did I embarrass myself with her?” Landsman manages to ask in a tiny voice.

“Yes,” Berko says, “I fear that you did.”

Then he withdraws from his own bedroom and leaves Landsman there to puzzle out the question, if he can muster the strength, of how much further he can sink.

Landsman can hear them talking about him in the hushed tones reserved for madmen, assholes, and unwanted guests. All through the rest of the afternoon, as they eat their dinner. Through the uproar of bath and ass-powdering and a bedtime story that requires Berko Shemets to honk like a goose. Landsman lies on his side with a burning seam at the back of his skull and drifts in and out of consciousness of the smell of rain at the window, the murmuring and clamor of the family in the other room. Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman’s soul. First he can’t lift his head off the mattress. Then he can’t seem to open his eyes. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Goldy careers into the room. His tread is heavy and lumbering, a baby monster’s. He doesn’t just climb into the bed, he roils the blankets the way a wire whisk roils a batter. Its like he’s fleeing something, panicked, but when Landsman speaks, asks him what’s wrong, the boy doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed, and his heart beats steadily and low. Whatever he was running from, he found shelter from it in his parents’ bed. The kid is sound asleep. He smells like a piece of cut apple that’s starting to turn. He digs his toes into the small of Landsman’s back with care and without mercy. He grinds his teeth. The sound of it is like dull shears on a sheet of tin.

After an hour of this kind of treatment, around four-thirty, the baby starts to scream, way out on his balcony. Landsman can hear Ester-Malke trying to comfort him. Ordinarily, she would bring him into her bed, but that’s not an option tonight, and it takes her a long time to settle the little grandfather down. By the time Ester-Malke wanders into the bedroom with the baby in her arms, he’s snuffling and quieter and almost asleep. Ester-Malke dumps Pinky between his brother and Landsman and walks out.

Reunited in their parents’ bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limit of the bed. They chop at Landsman, stab him with their toes, grunt and mutter. They masticate the fiber of their dreams. Around dawn, something very bad happens in the baby’s diaper. It’s the worst night that Landsman has ever spent on a mattress, and that is saying a good deal.

The coffeemaker begins its expectorations around seven. A few thousand molecules of coffee vapor tumble into the bedroom and worry the hairs inside Landsman’s beak. He hears the shuffle of slippers against the carpet in the hall. He fights long and hard against the impulse to acknowledge that Ester-Malke is standing there, in the doorway of her bedroom, ruing him and every fit of charity toward him that’s ever seized her. He doesn’t care. Why should he care? At last Landsman realizes that in his struggle not to care about any thing lie the paradoxical seeds of defeat: So, all right, he cares. He opens one eye. Ester-Malke leans against the doorjamb, hugging herself, surveying the scene of destruction in a place that once was her bed. Whatever the name of the emotion inspired in a mother by the sight of filial cuteness, it competes in her expression with horror and dismay at the spectacle of Landsman in his underpants.

“I need you out of my bed,” she whispers. “Soon and in a way that’s lasting.”

“All right,” says Landsman. Taking stock of his wounds, his aches, the prevailing direction of his moods, he sits up. For all the torment of the night, he feels oddly settled. More present, somehow, in his limbs and skin and senses. Somehow, maybe, a little more real. He has not shared a bed with another human being in over two years. He wonders if that is a practice he ought not to have foregone. He takes his clothes from the door and puts them on. Carrying his socks and belt, he follows Ester-Malke back down the hall.

“Though the couch has its points,” Ester-Malke continues. “For example, it features no babies or four-year-olds.”

“You have a serious toenail problem among your youth,” Landsman says. “Also something, I think it might be a sea otter, died and is rotting in the little one’s diaper.”

In the kitchen she pours them each a cup of coffee.

Then she goes to the door and retrieves the Tog from the mat that says GET LOST. Landsman sits on his stool at the counter and stares into the murk of the living room where the bulk of his partner rears up from the floor like an island. The couch is a wreck of blankets.

Landsman is about to tell Ester-Malke I don’t deserve friends like you when she comes back into the kitchen, reading the paper, and says, “No wonder you needed so much sleep.” She bumps into the doorway. Something good or terrible or unbelievable is described on the front page.

Landsman reaches for his reading glasses in the pocket of his jacket. They are cracked at the nosepiece, each lens severed from its mate. It’s truly a pair of glasses, two monocles on their stems. Ester-Malke gets the electrician’s tape, yellow as a hazard warning, from the drawer under the phone. She binds up the glasses and passes them back to Landsman. The gob of tape is as thick as a filbert. It draws the gaze even of the wearer, leaving him cross-eyed.

“I’ll bet that looks really good,” he says, taking up the newspaper.

Two big stories lead off the news in this morning’s Tog. One is an account of an apparent shoot-out, leaving two dead, in the deserted parking lot of a Big Macher outlet store. The principals were a lone homicide detective, Meyer Landsman, forty-two, and two suspects long sought by Sitka law enforcement in connection with a pair of apparently unrelated murders. The other story is headlined: