hexafu

WE SAT IN THE KITCHEN on a dreary Saturday, sewing leather bags for crystals. It was Rena’s latest moneymaking idea. Niki played demo tapes of the different bands Werner booked, but they all sounded the same, skinny white kid rage, out-of-control guitars. She was looking for a new band.

“This sewing’s for shit. What does she think we are, some fucking elves?”

Stoned, I traced a rising smoke pattern into a scrap of leather with an X-acto blade. I was good at this, better than my mother used to be. I could do a crow, a cat. I could do a cat in three cuts. I did a baby with a curl on its forehead and tossed it to Yvonne.

The door banged open behind us, letting in a rush of cold air. Rena came “Georgi sell whole thing, trade for lamp,” she grinned proudly. “Nice, huh?” Then her gaze landed on me, etching designs into the leather. “What, you crazy?” She grabbed the doe-skin away from me, thumped the back of my head with the heel of her hand. “Pothead stupid girl. You think is cheap?” Then she noticed the design and frowned, her lower lip pouted out. She held the scrap up to the light. “Not bad.” She tossed it back to me. “I think it sell. Do all bags. We make money on this.”

I nodded. I blew whatever I made on art supplies and food and going in with Niki on dope. College had already vanished, disappearing like a boat into fog. At Claire’s, I’d begun to think of my life as a series of Kandinsky pencil sketches, meaningless by themselves, but arranged together they would begin to form an elegant composition.

Sergei came in carrying a bag, his cheeks flushed pink in his handsome, wide, un-Californian face.

“Oh, these girls not starve Sergei,” he said. He opened the oven, peered in at the bubbling dish I was making for Yvonne, a broccoli-and-cheese casserole, to build her up for the baby. She ‘d been stunned to watch me put the ingredients together, she hadn’t realized you could cook without a box with instructions. Sergei bathed his face in the smell and the heat of the oven.

I cut a tiger into a leather scrap, reminding myself that Sergei was just Rena with a better facade. Handsome as a Cossack, a milky Slavic blond with sleepy blue eyes that caught every movement. By profession, a thief.

Around here, he was a constant sexual fact. He left the bathroom door open while he shaved in the nude, did a hundred push-ups every morning, his milky white skin veined with blue. If he saw you were watching he’d add a clap to show off. Those wide shoulders, the neat waist. When Sergei was in the room, I never knew what to do with my hands, with my mouth.

I looked over at Yvonne across the table, bent over piles of little bags and leather scraps, sewing, patient as a girl in a fairy tale. Any other girl would be sewing the ruffles on her prom gown, or knitting baby shoes. Now I felt bad about making fun of her earlier. “Sure, I’ll go to baby class with you,” I said. “If you think I’ll be any use.”

She smiled down at her sewing, ducking her head. She didn’t like to show her bad teeth. “It’s no sweat. I do all the work. All you gotta do is hold the towel.”

Niki broke off another chunk of hash, put it on the pin. She lit it and watched the smoke fill the glass like a genie in a lamp.

“None for me?” Sergei asked, pointing at the shot glass.

“Fuck you, Sergei,” Niki said. “When did you ever buy us any?” But she put a little out for him anyway, and I tried to ignore the way he looked right at me as he stooped to put his lips where mine had been. But I felt my face burn right up to the hairline.

We all ate, except Rena, who smoked and drank vodka. As soon as she left the room for a moment, Sergei leaned over, broad white hands folded before him. “So, when we make love, devushka?”

“You sleazebag,” Niki said, pointing her fork at him. “I ought to tell Rena.”

“Anyway, Astrid’s got a boyfriend,” Yvonne said. “An artist. He lives in New York.”

I’d told her all about Paul Trout. I’d finally picked up his letters from Yellow Brick Road in Hollywood, on the same street where I pulled the knife on the girl who thought I was Wendy. Niki took me there after school, on the way to meeting some guys who needed a singer. I felt bad I hadn’t written to him before, I’d thought of it many times, but I was afraid.

Chances were he never looked back. On the drive into Hollywood, I looked nervously at the envelope, marked Hold for Paul Trout. The hope implied.

It was a mistake already. I thought of a song Rena played that I hated like death, “Love the One You’re With.” It was the tune life kept forcing on me, and yet there I was, hope fluttering like a bird in my hand.

The shop was tiny, more crowded even than Rena’s. Comic books everywhere. Niki and I leafed through the stacks. Some of the comics were jokey, like Zippy the Pinhead and old Mr. Natural. They sold everything from the standard DCs to locally drawn, Xeroxed, staple-spined ‘zines. While Niki read a gangster girl tale, I went to the counter, told myself there’d be nothing for me.

A skinny guy in a burgundy bowling shirt doodled on the counter, pale arms covered with tattoos. I cleared my throat until he looked up. His eyes were pot-hazed. “I’m a friend of Paul Trout’s. Did he leave anything for me?”

He smiled a little shyly, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “He went to New York, didn’t you hear?” He rummaged under the counter and came up with two letters, the envelopes so heavily illustrated you could barely see the Yellow Brick Road address. The outside was marked Hold for Astrid Magnussen.

“No return address?”

“He moves a lot. Don’t be surprised.”

I left one for Paul, illustrating my life on Ripple Street. Trashpicking, our living room. I didn’t know what else to do with it. He was gone.

In the corner booth at the rock ‘n’ roll Denny’s on Sunset, I sat with Niki as she negotiated with the boys from the band, two bleached blonds and a hyperactive brunet — the drummer, I knew without asking. I was afraid to open the letters. Instead, I sketched some of the other customers.

Goth girls in black tights and black ratted hair, conspiring over Diet Pepsis and double orders of onion rings.

I finally worked up the nerve to open the first letter, slitting the beautiful envelope with the Denny’s dinner knife. Inside was a series of ink drawings done in Paul’s unmistakable comic book style, bold blacks and whites: Paul, walking lonely comic book streets. Paul, sitting at a Nighthawks café. He sees a blond girl on the street with short chopped-up hair and follows her, only to have her turn out to be somebody else. Would he ever see her again? the last caption read, as he drew at his desk, the wall covered with pictures of me.

The second envelope held a comic strip story of a prison break, three boys blasting their way out through steel doors with rocket launchers. They steal a car, the signs say Leaving L.A. They tear across the desert in the night. Next there’s a street sign in broken mosaic, it says St. Marks Place.

Angular hipsters in black pass a doorway, 143. The Statue of Liberty in the background wears shades, it’s reading a comic book.

I folded the drawings, slipped them back into the envelope decorated with lightning bolts, stars, and a girl on a white horse in a comic book sky.

Hold for Astrid Magnussen. If only I’d known that he would.

Hold for Astrid Magnussen. If only I’d known that he would.

And now it was too late. I looked at Sergei across the table in Rena’s kitchen. He could care less about my boyfriend in New York. He didn’t even care about his girlfriend in the next room. He was just like one of Rena’s white cats — eat, sleep, and fornicate. Since the night I’d seen them together on the couch, he was always watching me with his hint of a grin, as if there were some secret we shared. “So how is your boyfriend?” he asked.

“Big? Is he big?”

Niki laughed. “He’s huge, Sergei. Haven’t you heard of him? Moby Dick.”

Olivia had told me all about men like Sergei. Hard men with blue veins in their sculpted white arms, heavy-lidded blue eyes and narrow waists. You could make a deal with a man like that. A man who knew what he wanted. I kept my eyes on my broccoli and cheese.

“You get tired of waiting,” he said. “You come see me.”

“What if you’re no good?” I said, making the other girls laugh.

“Only worry you fall in love Sergei,” he said, his voice like a hand between my legs.

MY LATEST CASEWORKER, Mrs. Luanne Davis, was a middle-aged black woman in a white blouse tied in a bow at the neck and relaxed hair in a pageboy. I spotted her right off when I arrived at the McDonald’s on Sunset after school. I ordered a burger and fries and a Coke, and for once, the screaming of children in the ball pit didn’t bother me. I’d gone to Playland the night before with Niki, where she sang with one of Werner’s bands, Freeze. I carried her microphone stand, which made me a roadie, so I didn’t need an ID. Niki was the only one who could sing. She had a purring, ironical voice, she sang the way Anne Sexton read poetry. But everyone else screamed, and nobody could play, and I was still half-deaf from it.

The social worker passed a wad of letters across the sticky table to me.

Such potential for damage, I didn’t even want to pick them up. I hated the sight of them, my mother’s handwriting, the crabbed lines I could see through the blue airmail envelopes. She could get seven pages per stamp, and each thin sheet weighed more than the night. They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown. I had not written to her since Claire died

Sipping her black coffee with Sweet’n Low, Mrs. Luanne Davis spoke slowly, overenunciating in light of my temporary deafness. “You really should write her. She’s in segregation. It can’t be easy.”

“I didn’t put her there,” I said, still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea.

She frowned. She had lines between her eyebrows from frowning at girls like me, girls who didn’t believe anybody could love them, least of all their dangerous parents. “I can’t tell you how few children I have whose parents write. They’d be thrilled to death.”

“Yeah, I’m super lucky,” I said, but I dutifully put them in my pack.

I finished my food, watching the kids jump off the net onto one small boy who couldn’t find his feet in the ball pit. Over and over they jumped onto him, laughing while he screamed. His teenaged mother was too busy talking to her friend to help him. Finally, she yelled something at the other kids, but she didn’t get up or do anything to protect her son. When she turned back to her friend, our eyes met. It was Kiki Torrez. We made no sign that we knew each other, we just looked a little longer than a casual glance, and then she went on talking to her friend. And I thought, prisoners probably traded just that glance, when they met on the outside.

When I got home, Yvonne was in front of the TV on the figured green velvet couch, watching a talk show for teenagers. “This is the mother,” she told me, not taking her eyes from the screen. “She gave up the daughter when she was sixteen. They never saw each other before this second.” Big child’s tears dripped down her face.

I didn’t know how she could stand to watch this, it was as phony as an ad. But I knew Yvonne was imagining herself coming back into her baby’s life twenty years from now, slim, confident, dressed in a blue suit with high heels and perfect hair, her grown child embracing her, forgiving her everything. And what were the chances of that.

I sat down next to Yvonne and looked through my mother’s letters, opened one.

Dear Astrid,

Why don’t you write? You cannot possibly hold me responsible for Claire Richards’s suicide. That woman was born to overdose.

I told you the first time I saw her. Believe me, she’s better off now.

On the other hand, I am writing from Ad Seg, prison within a prison. This is what is left of my world, an 8×8 cell shared with Lunaria Irolo, a woman as mad as her name.

During the day, the crows caw, dissonant and querulous, a perfect imitation of the damned. Of course, nothing that sings would alight near this place. No, we are left quite alone with our unholy crows and the long-distance cries of the gulls.

The buzz and slam of the gates reverberate in this great hollow chamber, roll across poured cement floors to where we crouch behind a chain-link fence, behind the slitted doors, plotting murder, plotting revenge. I am behind the fence, they say. They handcuff us even to shower. Well they should.

I liked that idea, my mother behind the fence, handcuffed. She couldn’t hurt me from there.

In my extensive leisure time, I am practicing astral projection.

I ride updrafts around the Bonaventure’s neat cylinders, its glass elevators ricocheting between floors. Do you remember the time we ate at the top, went once around in the revolving bar? You wouldn’t get near the windows, you screamed that the space was pulling you out. We had to move to a booth in the center, remember? You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don’t know whether you’re going to jump.

And I see you, walking in alleys, sitting in vacant lots crowded with weeds, Queen Anne’s lace dotted with rain. You think you cannot bear losing that weakling, Claire. Remember, there’s only one virtue, Astrid. The Romans were right. One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

Mother.

But I didn’t believe her for a second. Long ago, she told me that to slash each other to ribbons in battle each day and be put back together each night was the Vikings’ idea of heaven. Eternal slaughter, that was the thing. You were never killed out-right. It was like the eagle feeding on your liver by day and having it grow back, only more fun.

I SAT UP in bed at one in the morning, cotton stuffed in my ears, as Rena and the comrades partied down in the living room. Just now, they were wailing along to an old Who record cranked so loud I could feel it right through the floor. This was why Rena liked it down here among contractors and bakeries and sheet metal shops. You could make all the noise you wanted. I was learning, everything on Ripple Street was rock ‘n’ roll. Niki sang with three different bands, and Rena’s personal soundtrack consisted of all the big seventies rock she’d first heard on black market tapes in Magnitogorsk. I tried to recall the melodies of Debussy, the gamelan, Miles Davis, but the Who bass line pounded it right out of my head.

To me this rock was just more faceless sex in a man’s world, up against a concrete wall behind bathrooms. Give me a Satie tone poem like light on a Monet haystack, or Brazilian Astrud like a Matisse line. Let me lie down in a half-shuttered room in the south of France with Matisse and the soft flutter of heavy-feathered white doves, their mild calls. Only a little time, Henri, before Picasso will come with his big boots. We should take our afternoon.

I missed beauty. The Tujunga night with too many stars, Claire’s neck as she bent over me, checking my homework. My mother, swimming underwater in the pool in Hollywood, the melody of her words. All gone now. This was my life, the way it was. Loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

Across the room, Yvonne’s bed was empty, she had left with someone at about eleven to go to a party across the river. I sat up in bed, drawing by lamplight, chasing an indigo line of oil pastel on violet paper with a whispery silver. It was a boat, a dark canoe, on the shore of a moonless sea.

There was no one in the boat, no oars, no sail. It made me think of the sunless seas of Kublai Khan and also of my mother’s Vikings sending their dead out on boats.

I blew on my hands, rubbed them together. The furnace wasn’t working, Rena still hadn’t fixed it. We just wore sweaters all the time. “Cold?” she said. “In California? You joke.” They weren’t feeling it, out there braying to the records, drinking Hunter’s Brandy, some high-octane Russian specialty that tasted like vodka flavored with nails.

the records, drinking Hunter’s Brandy, some high-octane Russian specialty that tasted like vodka flavored with nails.

I looked around the cramped, crowded room, like the stockroom of a Goodwill store. I imagined what my mother would say if she could see who I was now, her burning little artist. Just another used item in Rena’s thrift shop. You like that lamp with the bubbled green base? Name a price. How about the oil painting of the fat-cheeked peasant woman with the orange kerchief? For you, ten dollars. A bouquet of beaded flowers? Talk to Rena, she’d let you have it for seven-fifty. We had a furry Oriental rug, and a solid oak table, only slightly tilted, along with five unmatched chairs, special today. We had an enormous tiki salad set, and a complete Encyclopædia Britannica from 1962. We had three matted white cats, cathair over everything, cat smell. All this, and an old-fashioned hi-fi in a fruitwood cabinet and a stack of records from the seventies higher than Bowie’s platform shoes.

And our clothes, Mother, how do you like our clothes? Polyester tops and lavender hiphuggers, yellow shirts with industrial zippers. Clothes floated around from closet to closet until we were bored, then we sold them and bought something else. You wouldn’t recognize the girl I’ve become.

My hair is growing out, I found a pair of Jackie O sunglasses and I wear them all the time.

My clothes are gone, the rich orphan clothes from Fred Segal and Barney’s New York. Rena made me sell them. I’m sure you’d approve. We were unloading in the parking lot of Natalia’s Nails one Saturday. I was arranging coffee mugs when I saw Rena pulling my clothes out of a black plastic garbage bag. My French blue tweed jacket, my Betsey Johnson halter dress, my Myra Loy pajamas. Hanging them on hangers on the rolling rack.

I snatched them off the rack, stood there shaking. She had gone through my drawers, my closet. “These are mine.”

Rena ignored me, shook out a rose-and-gray long skirt, pinned it to a hanger. “Why you need? Dressed best at Marshall High School? Maybe Tiny Thai, Trader Joe? Maybe Melrose Place call for you to be star?” She bent and took out an armful of my Fred Segal T-shirts, dumped them into my arms. “Here.” She put a roll of tape and a marker on top. “You name price, you keep money, ladno?” She kept pulling my things out of plastic garbage bags, hanging them up. Dove-gray high-waisted pants with Edwardian jacket, a charcoal velvet collar. White shirt with ruffled front.

My Jessica McClintock dress with the white cutwork collar.

“Not that,” I said. “Come on, have a heart.”

Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. “You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him 1918.” She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. “Is fact.”

I stood there, my arms full of the silky T-shirts. Egyptian cotton. She couldn’t make me sell my clothes. That witch.

But I couldn’t stop the thought that, really, what exactly was I saving them for? When would I ever need a two-hundred-dollar Jessica McClintock dress again? It was a roast-goose-with-chestnuts dress, Puccini at the Music Center, gold rims on china. I looked at Rena in her shiny red blouse, unbuttoned to the third button, high heels, and jeans. Niki, setting up kitchen appliances, magenta hair and black polyester. Yvonne, round as a watermelon in her purple baby doll dress with a swirl pattern from the sixties, sadly arranging the baby furniture, posing a worn teddy bear in the high chair.

Why couldn’t anybody ever hang on to anything? You never believed in sentiment, Mother, you saved only your own words, one picture of my grandmother and one of your 4-H cow. Only Claire could hold memory. It was the present that she couldn’t sort out.

“Someone gave it to me,” I finally said to Rena.

“So?” Rena looked up from her hangers. “You’re lucky, someone gave to you. Now you sell, get money out.”

I stood there, sullen, my arms still full of T-shirts.

“You want car?” Rena said. “Artist college? You think I don’t know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is…” She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was.

Finally, she threw her hands up. “Money. You want remember, so just remember.”

So I did it. I marked a price on my crimson velvet dream. I marked it high, hoping it wouldn’t sell. I marked them all high. But they sold. But by afternoon, the crimson dress was still unsold. People kept asking Rena if it was really one hundred dollars.

“What she say,” Rena replied in her deep voice, implying helplessness.

“It’s a Jessica McClintock,” I said defensively. “Never been worn.” My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.

I could still remember how I looked in it when I tried it on at the store in Beverly Hills. I looked innocent, like somebody’s daughter, somebody’s real daughter. A girl who was cared for. A girl in that dress wasn’t a girl who had a beer and a cigarette for lunch, who lay down for the father on carpet pads in an unfinished house. It wasn’t a dress that knew how to make a living if it had to, that had to worry about its teeth and whether its mother would come home. When I showed it to Claire, she made me turn for her like a ballerina on a music box, her hands clapped to her mouth, pride flowing from her like tears. She believed I was that girl. And for a moment, so did I.

All day, I helped them on with it, slid the satin lining over their sweaty shoulders, zipped it up as far as it would go without straining. At about three, a group of girls came around, and one of them kept looking at the red dress, holding it up to herself. “Can I try this on?”

I took the plastic off, slid the dress down her arms, over the pale downy. hair, pulled it along her body, zipped the back as she held up her dark ponytail. It looked just right on her. I held it for her as she went to the 7-Eleven to call her mother.

Fifteen minutes later, an attractive older woman showed up in a butter-yellow Mercedes, black linen slacks, suede moccasins with horse bit buckles. I helped the girl into the dress again, and the woman gave me the hundred, a single crisp bill.

They were going to a cousin’s wedding in New York. The dress would be perfect. I could tell from the mother’s expression that she knew exactly what it was worth.

All my things had sold. I sat on the fender of the van and counted my money. I’d made over four hundred dollars.

“See, not so bad,” Rena said, balancing a box of plates on her hip.

“How much you get?”

I mumbled it, ashamed, but also a little proud. It was the first money I’d ever earned.

“Good. Give me hundred.” She held out her hand.

“What for?”

She snapped her fingers, extended her hand again.

“No way.” I held the money behind my back.

Her black eyes sparkled with bad temper. “What, you think you sell all by yourself on streetcorner? You pay me, I pay Natalia, Natalia pays landlord, what you think? Everybody pay somebody.”

“You said I could keep it.”

“After pay me.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Niki said, looking up from where she was arranging cheap clothes on a blanket on the ground. “Go ahead and pay her. You have to.”

I shook my head no.

Rena shifted the box to the other hip, and when she spoke, her voice was harsh. “Listen to me, devushka. I pay, you pay. Just business. When was last time you had three hundred dollars in your hand? So how I hurt you?”

How could I tell her? What about my feelings, I wanted to say, except what was the point? With her it was all just money, and things that could be traded for money. She’d stolen something from me, and even got me to do the selling for her. I couldn’t help wondering what you would do, Mother. It didn’t apply. I couldn’t imagine you at the mercy of Rena Grushenka, in the parking lot of Natalia’s Nails, selling your clothes, crying over a dress. I didn’t know what else to do, so I held out the hundred, the red dress hundred, and she snatched it from my hand like a dog bite.

But as I sat in bed, listening to the noise and laughter and occasional crash from the living room, I knew that even you had to pay someone now, for your pot and your inks and the good kind of tampons, dental floss and vitamin C. But you would come up with a compelling reason, a theory, a philosophy. You’d make it noble, heroic. You’d write a poem about it, “The Red Dress.” I could never do that.

Out in the living room, someone put on an old Zeppelin album. I could hear them singing along in their thick accents, the churning of Jimmy Page’s guitar. It was four in the morning and I could smell melting candle wax, dripping in great pools on the tables and windowsills. I didn’t need Claire’s candle magic book to see burning house written there. It was why I slept in my clothes, kept my shoes by the bed, money in my wallet, most important things in a bag by the window.

You’d think they’d try to get some sleep — the next day we were going to the flea market at Fairfax High, to sell our sambo statuettes made of bottlecaps, trays painted with botanical nightmares, never-worn baby clothes, and all the moldy Reader’s Digests. But I could tell, they wouldn’t sleep until Monday.

The door opened, Rena’s friend Misha stumbled in, posed, playing air guitar along with Jimmy, his plump red lips like an enormous infant’s. He was practically drooling. “I come to see you, maya liubov. Krasivaya devushka.”

“Go away, Misha.”

He staggered over to my bed, sat down next to me. “Don’t be cruel,” he sang, like Elvis, and bent to drool on my neck.

“Leave me alone.” I tried to shove him off, but he was too big and loose, I couldn’t find anything solid to push against.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t do nothing.” He lay down on the bed next to me, spread out like a stain. The alcohol reek was a miasma, it reminded me that there were snakes that stunned their prey with their breath. “I am only so lonesome.”

I called for help, but no one could hear me over the music.

Misha was heavy, he rested his head on my shoulder, slobbering on my neck. His weepy blue eyes so close, one heavy arm around me.

I hit him, but it was no use, he was too drunk, my fist bounced off his flesh, he couldn’t feel anything. “Misha, get off me.”

“You’re so beautiful girl,” he said, trying to kiss me. He smelled of vodka and something greasy, someone must have brought a bucket of chicken.

My knife was just under my pillow. I didn’t want to stab Misha, I knew him. He had a dog named Chernobyl, he wanted to move to Chicago and be a blues guitarist, except he didn’t like cold weather. His fumbling hand found nothing but vintage polyester.

“Love me a little,” he begged in my ear. “Love me, devushka, for we all going to die.”

Finally, I got a knee up and when he shifted I hit him with my drawing board and slid out of bed.

In the living room, most of the people were gone. Natalia was dancing by herself in front of the stereo, a bottle of Bargain Circus Stoli clutched by the neck in one hand. Georgi was passed out in the black armchair, his head leaning against its fuzzy arm, a white cat curled in his lap. A cane chair was knocked over, a big ashtray lay facedown on the floor.

Rena and her boyfriend, Sergei, lay on the green velvet couch, and he was doing it to her with his fingers. Her shoes were still on, her skirt. His shirt was open, he had a medallion on a chain that hung down. I hated to barge in, but then again, Misha was her friend. She was responsible.

“Rena,” I said. “Misha’s trying to get in bed with me.”

Four drunken eyes gazed up at me, two black, two blue. It took them a moment to focus. Sergei whispered something to her in Russian and she laughed. “Misha won’t do nothing. Hit him on head with something,” Rena said.

Sergei was watching me as he kneaded her thigh, bit her neck. He looked like a white tiger devouring a kill.

When I went back into my room, Misha had passed out. He had a bloody cut on his head from where I hit him. He was snoring, holding my pillow like it was me. He wasn’t waking up anytime soon. I went to sleep in Yvonne’s empty bed. The stereo stopped at five, and I got a restless hour or two of sleep, dreaming of animals rummaging through the garbage. I was awakened by a man pissing in the bathroom across the hall without closing the door, a stream that seemed to last for about five minutes. He didn’t flush. Then the stereo came back on, the Who again. Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember, but I really couldn’t say.