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accustomed to the dirt and no longer saw it.
    It wasn’t always like that. He was brought up in a clean immaculate home. And would have felt uncomfortable if he weren’t living in a clean immaculate home. Once he had to have clean walls and nice furniture all dusted and everything spick and span. And himself always clean and immaculate.
    He remembered college, the bathroom down the hall from his room. He used to spend an hour at a time down there taking a bath, washing his blonde hair, shaving and, very carefully, brushing his teeth and using dental floss. Then he’d clean his nails. And he dusted his room often and had clean sheets sometimes twice a week.
    It seemed fantastic to recall that now. He’d had the same sheets on the bed for a month and a half. And had never thought about it until then. It simply had become a world where thoughts of how many sheets you had on your bed did not exist. And one could go down and down to that world and never once see the steps on which he descended.
    He began to think about his old home when his mother and his sister Grace and he lived together. He remembered how nice his mother kept it.
    What would she think of this?
    God, he could almost see her stricken and terrified face as she stood over his bed and looked down at him. He thought—it’s good she’s in her grave and can’t see into this room. See him in it, lying urine-soaked and helpless, an old man’s bullet in his back.
    And what would his father say, he thought. Never mind this Erick, he’d say, be a gentleman and all will follow. He felt his features tighten in uncontrolled anger. You stupid old drunken failure! cried his mind.
    And Grace—what would she say?
    He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure whether she’d be annoyed or sympathetic. There was no way of knowing.
    Grace would be home now. In her clean and pleasant Brooklyn home with the two girls. No, Susan would be at school because she was eight and had started school soon after he’d departed from their home.
    Lying there on the wet, uncomfortable bed, he thought of Susan’s chubby body, her limbs sturdy with health, her cheeks apple red, her energy boundless. He saw himself in the backyard with her, pushing her on the swing, her arcing up into the sunlight, her brown legs flopping, the skirt of her dress fluttering up over her ruffle-edged slip and her laughing and crying—
Higher
, Uncle Erick, push me higher!
    Laura May was probably playing in the backyard with the boy next door. They would be digging in the sand pile probably, erecting fallible castles of the young. He could almost feel the warmth of her arms in the sun and see the speckled gold of her pigtail-braided hair sticking out from beneath the little red sailor’s cap she wore.
    Life, its visions and enticements were full on him as he lay there helpless, unable to move his limbs. It tortured him to be cursed with such violent imaginings at such a time.
    And Grace, where was Grace?
    In the kitchen perhaps, maybe washing clothes in the creamy white machine, watching the shifting soapy waters soak through and press dirt from the material. He could almost smell the pungent, nose-wrinkling odor of the soap. Stocks of odor committed to memory were released and what he had not used before he utilized now and tortured himself with the using.
    Maybe she was baking a cake. Like a crazed torturer he stood over himself and pounded in memories of her strong, white hands beating up the flour and the eggs and the baking powder. He watched her pour it into the pan, slip it into the oven. He felt the hot blunt blast from the oven as she opened it. Suddenly remembered standing in Sally’s kitchen and smelling the lamb chops while she smiled at him. The hot, delicious tang seeped into his brain. Oh Sally, he said, if you only knew how…
    The drunk in the next room was hacking and gagging.
    The sound filled all space and drove away thought. For a split moment there was nothing else in the universe but the drunk