"Locking me in?" I said.

"Trust me," he said. "It's better this way. They don't do the most rigorous vetting of tenants around here. Most of the kids are cool. But this place can be a creep con, too."

"What if I have to take a leak?"

"There's a jug over there in the corner. Okay?"

"Okay. And thanks."

"Hey, we're on the same team, right?"

"What team is that?"

Horace walked off, joined a few others near the rehearsal platform. He hoisted himself up behind the drums, laid down some lazy paradiddles. A gaunt woman with a constellation of face studs and a coonskin cap fingered a fuzz-toned bass. A bald guy with a microphone duct-taped to his throat dropped for some push-ups. His grunts and a few hard burps roared through the PA. The bass player looked over at the blinking soundboard near the drums.

"Wait!" she called. "We should be recording this!"

They got loud and I got weary. I had worried they would keep me awake but they functioned like the noise machine Maura brought home a few years ago, the one that blasted the crush of waterfalls while we slept, or did until we produced our own noise machine, one with the opposite function, shoved the store-bought model in a closet with our racquetball gear and my home gravlax kit. I fell asleep as the throat-miked youngster gargled schnapps and Horace bashed away on his snare and the girl plucked a two-note bass line much like the two-note bass line I used to pluck back when I also believed it was more authentic if you could not play your instrument whatsoever.

That night I dreamed I was an indentured servant in colonial Philadelphia. Somehow, even in the dream, I sensed that I had once been a development officer in post-colonial New York City, but couldn't be certain. I wore a leather apron with pouches filled with tools, pliers and awls, heavy iron files. My workbench was heaped with broken video games. I had no idea how to fix them, but I knew my master would not let me sleep or eat until I had. Jaw clenched to stanch my sobs, I jabbed a bellows up against the exposed logic board of a console, pumped.

A summer storm whipped the elms outside the workshop window. I heard a knock on the door and a round-shouldered young man with bright gray eyes leaned into the room.

"Ben," I said.

"I came to see if you needed any help, Milo. I know these contraptions tend to bedevil you."

"I'm fine, Ben."

"Truly, Milo, I am here to offer any advice you require. I have been thinking much on the subject of induction. And I feel I owe you after the incident last week in the tavern. I never knew you possessed any Hebraic blood."

"I never knew you were an anti-Semite," I said.

"Well, we do not have that term yet, but I am chancing that you refer to the prophecy I allegedly deliver at the Constitutional Convention sixty years from now? About how the Jews are insidious Asiatics we must protect against? That was a forgery. Everybody knows that."

"But what about the stuff you said at the tavern last week?"

"I just apologized for that."

"Ben," I said, "get the fuck out of here."

"Please, Milo, forgive me. Not for my sake, but for yours. You must relieve yourself of the burdens of resentment. Such an amelioration of the soul will enliven you. I am loath to see you toil with such futility."

"Sorry it's so painful to watch."

"I just don't understand it, my good friend. I left school at ten but have applied myself assiduously to learning and life. I will refrain from reciting my present and future accomplishments. You can look them up on ye olde webnet."

"I hate that joke. Both of those jokes."

"To each his own," said Ben.

"You made a slave hold the kite."

"Pardon?"

"I read that somewhere. You made a slave hold the kite and then the lightning struck and he got hit."

"Kite? Lightning? I fear I am ignorant of this calumny. But, yet, you may have something there. As I mentioned, I have been cogitating upon certain electrical properties, as found in nature. Kite, you say?"

"Come off it, Ben. You fucking hustler."

"And what, pray tell, are you, Mister Burke?"

"You know what I am, Ben. I'm a piece of shit. A man with many privileges and zero skills. What used to be called an American."

"Not my kind of American. Fare thee well, Mister Burke. Good luck with that GameCube."

Young Ben Franklin slammed the door shut after him. My master's lucky horseshoe fell from its nail, clattered to the stone floor.

I woke with my cheek pressed into the cage wire. The bass player's porous face, scabbed and splotched at the sites of her various impalings, bobbed inches from mine. She knelt on the stone floor in the next cage over. Horace thrust away behind her. I'd once heard him refer to this position, on the phone with his mother, as "the style of the doggie." Of course, he might have been in her ass. I had no way of knowing from my vantage. It was a phenomenological quandary. Either way he pushed into her, and the girl's face drew up to my tiny patch of world. Our eyes locked. Her sour breath jetted through the wires. I stuck my pinky through the cage, uncertain of the nature of my ask. A suck? A nibble? She seemed to know, precisely, shook her head. I shrugged, rolled over, stood. The place had quieted down. Kids huddled in clots. Some swayed on their haunches around laptop screens. The boy with the throat mike snored on the drum riser, his aural emissions now less tropical waterfall and more the creak of a splitting ice cap, or some ur-continent's ancient riving.

Twenty-two

No messages from Maura arrived in the night. It seemed she had not crumpled with longing and regret, tried to reach through the dark to find me, beg forgiveness, or at least talk me home. Maybe the animator had cabbed out to comfort her, to animate her. Maybe at this very moment she brewed him coffee as he doodled at the kitchen table for Bernie's amusement. Did his cartoons feature an oafish, middle-aged disappointment who'd watched his young colleague fornicate in a chicken-wire cage and now just wished more than anything his wife could love him again, because that was the gruesome truth about betrayal, it was the cheater who had to be coddled, groveled to, convinced?

I hoped he drew me with some mercy, for Bernie's sake.

I checked my email on Horace's laptop. Two new messages sat in my inbox, the first from Don Charboneau, addressed to me, but with Purdy cc'd:

Hey there, bag boy-where is my bag? Daddy mad I called his lady friend? (Are you mad, Daddy? I just want a new mommy. And also I am so excited to meet my new sibling. Is it a boy or a girl?) Anyway, Mr. Burke, I guess this email is to you. I just wanted to see how it was hanging. Since my Daddy doesn't seem to want to respond to my emails I thought I'd get us all on the same screen this way. I'm thinking of starting some kind of mail order business called PurdyStuarthadasecretfamily.com, but I'm not sure what I could sell. I really just want to get drunk and watch television, but my finances are in a delicate state with this depression and shit. I'm not sure what to do. I was hoping for some fatherly advice, if not from my father, then from you. You ever read Hamlet? It's too long, and kind of in love with itself, but there are some good parts. I feel like Hamlet sometimes. But I know I'm in a very different situation. Because nobody poured poison in my father's ear. My father just fucked my mother long after he'd left her and married somebody else. Then he killed her, sort of. So it's kind of a separate story line. What should I do? Confused in Denmark, or Maybe Northern Queens

The second email, from Purdy, said,Lee Moss, ASAP, which I read as RIP, oddly, until my eyes focused.

"Want to ride into the office together?" said Horace. He walked into the cage, rubbed his hair dry with a dishtowel. "You're single now, and the morning rush is a great place to meet women. Or at least stare at them until they get pissed and change cars. What do you say? Or should we play hooky and get breakfast? No, wait, I can't, I've got a meeting with an ask."