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neck.
    I slept until the afternoon of the next day, long after Nicole had left for work. Her basement apartment, later
our
apartment and now just
my
apartment, had hardwood floors, seven-foot ceilings, and small windows high in the walls. The bed was firm and the room was cool. She left me a key on the night table, the same key I still use. Her cell phone number was written on a slip of paper curled through the key ring. I folded the pillow over my face and breathed in oranges, all the while thinking that the world was good and anything was possible.



2008
    IT ’ S NIGHT WHEN I get back from the hospital, my back full of stitches, and everything is waiting for me in the basement apartment, just as I’d left it: the six wooden panels leaning against the ragged old couch, the large burlap sack and dozen or so tiny pouches of dirt sitting at the edge of the kitchen. Buddy the rat’s transparent cage is on the kitchen counter and his pink nose is poking out of a white plastic tube inside of it. Next to the cage is the miniature wooden box with its odd rubberized hole on one side. And on the kitchen tiles, where I threw them upon returning from John’s apartment, are the blue notebook and John’s note.
    I don’t know where to start. There’s no beer in the fridge, only a few jars and plastic containers of condiments. In the cupboard I find half a bottle of a scotch-whisky blend. I rinse out a small glass and check the freezer for ice cubes but both trays are empty. I close my eyes and listen to the uncorking of the bottle, the way it resonates like my chest when I have the wind knocked out of me. I pour two fingers, add some water, and pick the notebook off the black and white tiles.
    I sit on the couch, careful not to lean against my stitches, and look at the notebook. It is blue and hardbound and about one hundred pages thick, the cover adorned with a generic pre-printed white label that says
LAB NOTES.
I open it and find dense, nearly inscrutable algebra that fills every page to which I turn. I compare the handwriting to John’s note: from the long ascenders and descenders, from the teardrop bow of the small g, I am sure it is his. The scotch won’t mix well with the painkillers from the hospital but I take a mouthful anyway.
    I told the nurses and the doctors that I’d fallen from a ladder and got sliced by metal siding on the way down. I doubt they believed me but at least they didn’t phone the police.
    I continue to flip through the book and find that it’s all the same algebra, long strings of equations. I’m unsure whether the letters in the formulae are variables or constants but the equations don’t ever seem to get solved or even substantially shortened. In the margins are hurriedly written notes with more cryptic initialisms, like “LJx,” or just “B.” The inside of the front cover has a familiar number written in various motifs:
Key fob then
    4-2510- then
    2510#- then
    2510
    The notebook poses more questions than it answers. I am about to give up on it when I flip back to the very first page and notice a single line of text.
    The street where I grew up led to a dead end
, it says.
    I put the book down, John’s note slipped inside it, and finish the scotch. In the kitchen I pour myself another large glass and tap Buddy’s cage. He comes out of the plastic tube, rears up on hishind legs, and puts his nose up to the wire lid to sniff me. He is black from his shoulder blades to his nose as well as along his spine, and the rest of his fur is white. His front paws are tiny and pink and look like human hands with long thin nails.
    “Hey, man,” I say to him. He looks at me.
    I pry the lid off the cage, gently pick him up, and scratch his ears with my fingertip. He stands on my forearm without complaint and watches as I pick up my scotch. I swirl the drink along the lip of the glass, take a sip, and swish it in my mouth. I hold it in front of Buddy as an offering but he only sniffs it and turns