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best reasoning you can contrive is why not?’ C.T.’s voice, receding
     with outrage. Only the gallant stabs of his antenna are now visible, just inside my
     sight’s right frame. I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I
     will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond
     to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be inversion of standard travel, the ambulance
     and ER: I’ll make the journey first, then depart. I think very briefly of the late
     Cosgrove Watt. I think of the hypophalangial Grief-Therapist. I think of the Moms,
     alphabetizing cans of soup in the cabinet over the microwave. Of Himself’s umbrella
     hung by its handle from the edge of the mail table just inside the Headmaster’s House’s
     foyer. The bad ankle hasn’t ached once this whole year. I think of John N. R. Wayne,
     who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately
     and I dig up my father’s head. There’s very little doubt that Wayne would have won.
     And Venus Williams owns a ranch outside Green Valley; she may well attend the 18’s
     Boys’ and Girls’ finals. I will be out in plenty of time for tomorrow’s semi; I trust
     Uncle Charles. Tonight’s winner is almost sure to be Dymphna, sixteen but with a birthday
     two weeks under the 15 April deadline; and Dymphna will still be tired tomorrow at
     0830, while I, sedated, will have slept like a graven image. I have never before faced
     Dymphna in tournament play, nor played with the sonic balls the blind require, but
     I watched him barely dispatch Petropolis Kahn in the Round of 16, and I know he is
     mine.
    It will start in the E.R., at the intake desk if C.T.’s late in following the ambulance,
     or in the green-tiled room after the room with the invasive-digital machines; or,
     given this special M.D.-supplied ambulance, maybe on the ride itself: some blue-jawed
     M.D. scrubbed to an antiseptic glow with his name sewn in cursive on his white coat’s
     breast pocket and a quality desk-set pen, wanting gurneyside Q&A, etiology and diagnosis
     by Socratic method, ordered and point-by-point. There are, by the
O.E.D. VI
’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for
unresponsive,
of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic. I will play either Stice or Polep in
     Sunday’s final. Maybe in front of Venus Williams. It will be someone blue-collar and
     unlicensed, though, inevitably—a nurse’s aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security
     guy, a tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as
jou
—who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he
     sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what’s
your
story?

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
    Where was the woman who said she’d come. She said she would come. Erdedy thought she’d
     have come by now. He sat and thought. He was in the living room. When he started waiting
     one window was full of yellow light and cast a shadow of light across the floor and
     he was still sitting waiting as that shadow began to fade and was intersected by a
     brightening shadow from a different wall’s window. There was an insect on one of the
     steel shelves that held his audio equipment. The insect kept going in and out of one
     of the holes on the girders that the shelves fit into. The insect was dark and had
     a shiny case. He kept looking over at it. Once or twice he started to get up to go
     over closer to look at it, but he was afraid that if he came closer and saw it closer
     he would kill it, and he was afraid to kill it. He did not use the phone to call the
     woman who’d promised to come because if he tied up the line and if it happened to
     be the time when maybe she was trying to call him he was afraid she would hear the
     busy signal and think him disinterested and get angry and maybe take what she’d promised
     him somewhere else.
    She had promised to get him a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana, 200 grams of