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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 Inter-Lace 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 and the clock. He looked at the windows but not at the foliage and blacktop driveway beyond the windows. He had
     already vacuumed his venetian blinds and curtains, everything was ready to be shut down. Once the woman who said she’d come
     had come, he would shut the whole system down. It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him
     that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself
     to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.