I’m a few blocks from home when it starts to rain, dripping on my head from the gap where windshield didn’t quite meet roof, and it’s late when I finally step into the elevator. I remember the book and take it out of my backpack, opening to the introduction. I read, “We sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to the dead, the long long dead…” Not very good bedtime reading. I flip to another page and read, “The New English dictionary also gives us an obsolete meaning of ‘leye’ to be ‘flame or fire’,” when my wrists weaken and the book falls. I stoop to pick up the book and something square and glossy flutters from between the pages and lands on the floor. I stoop again and when I turn it over I see it’s a square photo of Elba, or at least someone who looks like Elba, the image creased and matted with grime. I squint my eyes. The photo may have been taken with a Hasselblad but it isn’t one of mine and from what I can see of the photo’s background I don’t recognize the place. The elevator doors open on my floor but I jam the button for ground floor, a little too hard because my finger bends queerly at the first knuckle. I walk two blocks in the rain and take a right on Elm. The puppy is crouched beneath an overhang, a swarm of flies relentlessly poking at his tough skin—his tail is too much of a stub to do him good—but the bum’s mass of blankets is sans bum. The book seems to sear into my hands, like some despicable thing releasing heat as it rots, and I throw it—it practically leaps—into the pile of blankets and walk away.

I decide that the bum and I are beginning to get on too-familiar terms and so I resolve to only visit the ATM between closely-scheduled errands. But when I rush up to it the following week with my paycheck, there is no bum, only his soiled cushion. I realize he’s left a note on it, ostensibly addressed to no one—See you at the end of the track. The first drops of rain have stained the dirty napkin on which the words are written. A wave of pity bordering on compassion irks me. I kick the cushion a little to the side, under the overhang, where it at least won’t get rained on. I pull a hard apple from my pocket and put it on the cushion, but it looks so small and pathetic, a crumpled fruit of mirror-stage misrecognition. I leave immediately, before I can snatch it away.