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particular afternoon, and he could
     just reimburse her when she brought it to him. This arrangement, very casual, made
     him anxious, so he’d been even more casual and said sure, fine, whatever. Thinking
     back, he was sure he’d said
whatever,
which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn’t care
     at all, not at all, so little that it wouldn’t matter if she forgot to get it or call,
     and once he’d made the decision to have marijuana in his home one more time it mattered
     a lot. It mattered a lot. He’d been too casual with the woman, he should have made
     her take $1250 from him up front, claiming politeness, claiming he didn’t want to
     inconvenience her financially over something so trivial and casual. Money created
     a sense of obligation, and he should have wanted the woman to feel obliged to do what
     she’d said, once what she’d said she’d do had set him off inside. Once he’d been set
     off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered.
     Once he had asked her to get it, he was committed to several courses of action. The
     insect on the shelf was back. It didn’t seem to do anything. It just came out of the
     hole in the girder onto the edge of the steel shelf and sat there. After a while it
     would disappear back into the hole in the girder, and he was pretty sure it didn’t
     do anything in there either. He felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf
     was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar. Once he’d decided to own
     marijuana one more last time, he was committed to several courses of action. He had
     to modem in to the agency and say that there was an emergency and that he was posting
     an e-note on a colleague’s TP asking her to cover his calls for the rest of the week
     because he’d be out of contact for several days due to this emergency. He had to put
     an audio message on his answering device saying that starting that afternoon he was
     going to be unreachable for several days. He had to clean his bedroom, because once
     he had dope he would not leave his bedroom except to go to the refrigerator and the
     bathroom, and even then the trips would be very quick. He had to throw out all his
     beer and liquor, because if he drank alcohol and smoked dope at the same time he would
     get dizzy and ill, and if he had alcohol in the house he could not be relied on not
     to drink it once he started smoking dope. He’d had to do some shopping. He’d had to
     lay in supplies. Now just one of the insect’s antennae was protruding from the hole
     in the girder. It protruded, but it did not move. He had had to buy soda, Oreos, bread,
     sandwich meat, mayonnaise, tomatoes, M&M’s, Almost Home cookies, ice cream, a Pepperidge
     Farm frozen chocolate cake, and four cans of canned chocolate frosting to be eaten
     with a large spoon. He’d had to log an order to rent film cartridges from the InterLace
     entertainment outlet. He’d had to buy antacids for the discomfort that eating all
     he would eat would cause him late at night. He’d had to buy a new bong, because each
     time he finished what simply had to be his last bulk-quantity of marijuana he decided
     that that was it, he was through, he didn’t even like it anymore, this was it, no
     more hiding, no more imposing on his colleagues and putting different messages on
     his answering device and moving his car away from his condominium and closing his
     windows and curtains and blinds and living in quick vectors between his bedroom’s
     InterLace teleputer’s films and his refrigerator and his toilet, and he would take
     the bong he’d used and throw it away wrapped in several plastic shopping bags. His
     refrigerator made its own ice in little cloudy crescent blocks and he loved it, when
     he had dope in his home he always drank a great deal of cold soda and ice water. His
     tongue almost swelled at just the thought. He looked at the phone