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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 What aBurger, 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 unusually good marijuana, for $1250 U.S. He had
     tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before. Before this woman knew him. She did not know he had tried to
     stop. He always lasted a week, or two weeks, or maybe two days, and then he’d think and decide to have some in his home one
     more last time. One last final time he’d search out someone new, someone he hadn’t already told that he had to stop smoking
     dope and please under no circumstances should they procure him any dope. It