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and Free Box to lay down on. He kicked off his massacred tennis shoes, throwing his skeletal butt down onto the mattress with an audible grunt. It made her laugh, something that was hard to do on an empty stomach.
    He wrapped his legs around her, and she told him, “I could stay in bed all day. There is something about this house that makes me feel like that. Do you know what I mean?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “I don’t.”
    She ignored him, and continued talking.
    â€œThis building knows we’re here. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. I wonder how it feels about us.
Architecture is such a strange thing,” she sighed. “I think it’s the last great religion of our times. This place is getting under my skin, and the funny thing is, I don’t know why. I don’t know who lived here before us. I don’t know anything about them. But they’re here. They’re still here with us.”
    She fell quiet and stretched out beside him on the mattress, idly touching the hair on his chest. The abandoned building creaked; Barbie and Free Box listened to the sound. She turned to him.
    â€œCan you put your arm around me? Yeah, there.”
    Free Box laid back on the bed and gazed at the cracks in the ceiling. If he stared at them long enough, he’d hallucinate; he was that hungry. He couldn’t remember when he’d eaten last.
    â€œWe’re safe here,” Barbie murmured. “Nothing bad will happen to us. This building will take good care of us, I just know it.”

nine
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    a one legged homeless man stopped the squad car at the intersection of Eighteenth and Mission in front of Wang Fat’s Fish Market. I leaned out the window and gave the guy a dime and a nickel. I floored the gas pedal and we drove off in a cloud of smoke down Mission Street.
    Everything in the road possessed a low grade, low rent, super-8 film texture. I was on the same wave length. I sensed the devil moving around inside of myself. The devil was in my lungs every time I smoked a low-tar cigarette; the devil was in my mouth whenever I fielded an interview with a citizen in the street. The devil was just a part of myself, another voice I’d discovered in my head.
    Wielding the steering wheel like I was a Roman charioteer, I hung a left off Mission Street, rolling nice and easy without any problem up Nineteenth Street toward the next block on Lexington.
    Bellamy propped his elbows on the dashboard,
coughed once, then said, “See that driveway, Coddy? In there.”
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    We got out of the squad car simultaneously, twins born from the same mold. Everything he did, I did. Bellamy pointed his face toward the house, a two story, paint faded Victorian. A dog was barking somewhere on the first floor of the building. All the curtains in the place were drawn tightly shut, as were all the windows. He said, “Let’s go around back. There’s a path.”
    First, Bellamy at a quick pace, then myself, followed the cement walk that paralleled the driveway to the rear of the Victorian. A large palm tree loomed over the house and part of the backyard, casting a spider web’s shadow over us. Infinitesimal sized palm frond shavings dropped on our riot helmets; I could hear rats in the palm tree.
    At the end of the quiet path was a gate surrounded by seven-foot-tall bamboo rushes. The bamboo was bright green, tinged with silver, spilling onto the path. A woman speaking in Chinese, and a young girl’s suppressed giggle came from the other side. Bellamy swatted a bamboo rush away from his face and opened the gate. A quartet of galvanized steel garbage cans were brimming with corncobs, carrot pulp, cabbage leaves and spinach stalks. A short, stocky woman in a red jumper looked up from a stack of dishes in a wash basin and screamed.
    â€œI’m a police officer, ma’am,” Bellamy explained, startled.
    The woman started to yell