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by a fungus. He had tried all sorts of ointments but the fungus appeared to be indestructible.
    “Did I tell you about Zachary?” he said.
    In the background, through the telephone line, he could hear the deep, jocky voice of Jake the Medical Resident asking Jodee a question, and she hesitated—maybe gesturing or miming ormouthing, “IT’S BRAN! DON!” exaggeratedly so that Jake the Medical Resident could read her lips.
    “Zachary who?” she said. “Zachary Leven from high school?”
    “Yeah,” Brandon said. “Zachary Leven. He died, actually.”
    “Geez,” Jodee said. “You sure have lost a lot of people from your class. What was it? A car accident? I hope it wasn’t drugs.”
    “Um,” Brandon said. He thought about it. “You know—I’m not completely sure what it was. It definitely wasn’t a car wreck but …? Some kind of, like, illness? I hadn’t talked to him in a long time and I missed his funeral, so …”
    He found himself sitting there in a state of pause. It was totally unnerving, because surely he had heard how Zachary Leven had died. Or read it somewhere …? It reminded him of the day that his parents died, sitting there in the living room with the cop, a weight-lifter-looking guy named Mark Mitchell, who had a notepad he was writing in.
Had he noticed anything out of the ordinary about them recently?
Officer Mitchell asked.
Were they having marital problems? Had they made any statements concerning feelings of despair, had they verbally expressed any concepts of life not being worth living, that sort of thing? Were they having financial difficulties?
And Brandon had been unable to think of a single explanation. There was nothing unusual that he noticed, he said, and he sat there in the wingback chair, the cop on the sofa, the neat living room and the candy dish on the coffee table full of red and brown M&M’s that he had never seen anyone eat.
    He sat there remembering this, holding the phone against his face, and his eyes ran over the topography of the floor. It looked sort of like there was a kind of drain, a vortex around where the sofa bed was. A spiral of materials had begun to form an orbit: aspoon and empty yogurt container on the carpet, wasabi pea, Post-it note, throat lozenge, a sock in fetal position.
    “Well—
anyways
,” Jodee said at last, after the ellipses had trickled past for a while. She sighed in a gently emphatic way. “I don’t want to keep you,” she said. “I suppose I better let you get off the phone.”
    It had occurred to him that maybe something was going wrong with the world. Like global warming or an economic collapse or a coming plague. He could imagine that his parents had somehow intuited or found out about such an event, something so terrible that they couldn’t bear to live through it. But what? He couldn’t quite conceptualize such a catastrophe, though often he was aware of its presence, its
force
, something large and omnipotent hovering over not just himself and his house but also the neighborhood, the state, the country. Possibly the planet?
    He noticed, for example, that many of the stores were closing and remaining empty—the old Beatrice Academy of Beauty across from the high school had shut down, and through the cracked windows you could see the hair dryers all piled together in a jumble, like dead spacemen. Parking meters along the block had been beheaded and were now just bare pipes sticking up out of the sidewalk. There were also more vacant lots than there used to be when he was growing up. These were lots where there once were houses, houses that he used to pass by on his way to school as a kid, and it seemed that they just came and took the houses away when he hadn’t been paying attention. All that remained were patches of high grass and weeds, not even a foundation.
    He had mentioned this to Patty and Marci, the two headcashiers at work, but this didn’t seem to make an impression on them. “Brandon,” Patty said. “This