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he’s ten minutes later than the five minutes late he thinks of as permissible. Fifteen minutes is late enough that he’s inarguably late but still close enough to on time that maybe nobody noticed. Giorgos’s idea of management is to stay in the upstairs office for most of the day, on the computer, possibly looking at whatever kind of porn tiny, angry Greek men indulge in, so he’s not always up-to-date on the precise status of any given employee.
    The only person in the kitchen is Anil, who looks up fromhis station at Billy, looks at the clock, and looks back at Billy, all without pausing in his sandwich assembly. Guy is kind of a machine.
    “Late again,” Anil says. “You run into a bunch of bananas that you couldn’t resist?”
    “Very funny,” Billy says. “Does Giorgos know?”
    “I think you’re safe,” Anil says. “But, come on, man, this job sucks enough even when we’re working
together
; could you please make a little more effort to not get shitcanned? In the name of some motherfucking
solidarity
?”
    “Yeah,” Billy says, getting his latex food-prep gloves on. “But it wasn’t my fault.”
    “Right, it’s never your fault,” Anil says. “That’s some bullshit, though.”
    “True,” Billy says, taking his spot at his station and reviewing the three sandwich orders in the queue. “But I gotta tell you, it’s been a weird-ass day today.”
    “Ah, yes, Billy and the ten thousand weirdnesses,” Anil says. “Spare me no detail.”
    Billy contemplates the prospect. Tell him. Find a way. Anil already knows that shit sometimes goes down in Billy’s life. It was Anil who showed up at Billy’s apartment when Billy failed out of school, made him open his blinds, change his clothes, shave his face, pour the last of the Krakowianka down the drain. And when Billy confessed, in that dark time, to having been too drunk and disordered to have gotten it together to go back home for his own mother’s funeral, it was Anil who volunteered to drive Billy to Ohio—eight hours—so that Billy could look his father, Keith, in the face, and apologize. Anil had slept on a couch that no one had ever found comfortable and then driven Billy back thenext day. Ate the cost of the gas and the tolls and the cigarettes without complaint. Billy remembers that trip, the two of them out of their minds on rest stop coffee, listening to Anil’s Minutemen cassette over and over and over again, the only cassette Anil’s crappy stereo hadn’t long ago devoured. After the tenth time they listened through it Billy had memorized the album’s entire collection of gnomic pronouncements; by the time they rolled back into Brooklyn he was bellowing them out the window. Each line seemed like a slogan for the new and better life that he believed Anil had bought for him. Surely you could talk to someone like that about the Devil?
    Except you can’t, not really.
    “Forget it,” Billy says, finally, not without a little sadness. “You would just—you would think I was a real nutjob.”
    “Instead of just a fuck-up?” Anil says.
    “I’m not a fuck-up.”
    “Whatever you gotta tell yourself, man.”
    Fuck-up or not, Billy fulfills his duties well as the day wends along: he reduces heads of lettuce to ribbons with some deft knife-work, he folds sliced turkey artfully atop ciabatta bread, he musters a passable level of cheer when Giorgos passes through. All the while, though, he’s thinking of how he could tell Anil about what happened this morning. Telling Anil would be a good trial run for telling Denver, and if he can tell Denver, he feels like his life will fall back into some kind of recognizable order.
    “Hey,” says Anil, at one point when they have a breather. “After work I’m meeting the Ghoul down at that vegetarian place he likes. Gonna talk some shop for a little while. You want to join us?”
    The Ghoul: his real name is Charles but to them he’s always been the Ghoul. What else can you call someone with