Audio: T. Coraghessan Boyle reads.

They told him he had to wear a mask in public. Which was ridiculous. It made him feel like he had a target painted on his back—or his face, actually, right in the middle of his face. But if he wanted to walk out the door of the clinic he was going to walk out with that mask on—either that or go to jail. Outside, it was raining, which made everything that much harder, because what were you going to do with a wet mask? How could you even breathe? Here, inside the office, with the doctor and his caseworker from Health Services, there was no sound of the rain, or if there was he couldn’t hear it—all he could hear was the rasp and wheeze of his own compromised breathing as he sucked air through the fibres of the mask.

The doctor was saying something to him now, and Marciano watched him frame the words with his hands before they both looked to the caseworker, a short slim woman with a big bust and liquid eyes, whom he would have liked to fuck if he weren’t so sick. She was named Rosa Hinojosa, and he kept saying her name in his head, because of the way it rhymed, which somehow made him feel better.

“You understand what the doctor is telling you?” she asked in her clipped north-of-the-border Spanish, which he could have listened to all day under other circumstances. But these were the circumstances, and until he got better he would have to play their game, Dr. Rosen’s game and Rosa Hinojosa’s, too.

He nodded.

“No more lapses, you understand that? You will report here at eight each morning, when the clinic opens, for your intravenous medication, and”—she held up two plastic pill containers—“you will take your oral medication, without fail, every night at dinner. And you must wear your mask at all times.”

“Even when I’m alone?”

She looked to the doctor, said something to him in English, nodded, then turned back to Marciano, her breasts straining at the fabric of her blouse, a pink blouse that made her look even younger than she was, which, he guessed, was maybe twenty-four or five. “You have your own room in this house”—she glanced down at the clipboard in her lap—“at 519 West Haley Street? Is that right?”


“There are other roomers there?”


“All right. When you’re alone in your room, you can remove the mask, but only then, and never if you’re in the common area. You’re highly contagious, and if you were to cough without the mask on, the bacteria could get into the air and infect your roommates, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

No, he agreed, he wouldn’t, but now the doctor was saying something more, his tone harsh and hectoring, and though Marciano didn’t register what he was saying, or not exactly, he got the gist of it: this was his warning, his final warning, and now there could be no appeal. He watched the doctor’s eyes, which looked at him as if he were less than human, something to step on in the street and crush, angry eyes, hateful, and what had he done to deserve this? He’d got sick, that was all—and couldn’t anybody get sick?

Rosa Hinojosa (her lips were fascinating—plump and adhesive—and he wanted desperately in that moment to get well, if for no other reason than to maybe be able to kiss them) told him what she’d already told him, that because he’d stopped taking his medication a year ago, his case of tuberculosis had mutated into the multi-drug-resistant form, and his life was at risk, because after this there were no more drugs. That was it. They didn’t exist. But there was more, and worse: if he did not comply fully—no lapses—Dr. Rosen would get a court order and incarcerate him to be sure he got the full round of treatment. And why? Not out of charity, entertain no illusions about that, but to protect society, and at a cost—did he even have any idea of the cost?—of as much as two hundred thousand dollars for him alone. She paused. Compressed her lips. Looked to the doctor. Then, as if she were tracking the drift of the very microbes hanging invisibly in the air, she brought her eyes back to him. “You agree?” she demanded.

He wanted to say yes, of course he did—he wanted to be cured—but he honestly didn’t know if he could go through with it, and wasn’t that the problem last time? He’d taken the medicine, which was no easy thing, because it made him sick to his stomach and made him itch, as if there were something under his skin clawing its way out. They’d told him he’d have to stay on the regimen anywhere from six to thirty months, but within three months he’d felt fine, his cough nearly gone and his arms and chest filling out again, so he’d started selling the pills, because he didn’t need them anymore, and then he’d stopped coming to the clinic altogether, until the disease returned to shake him like a rat in a cage and he spat up blood and came back here to their contempt and their antiseptic smells and their masks and their dictates and their ultimatums. He wanted to say yes, and he tried to, but at that moment the cough came up on him, the long dredging cough that was like the sea drawing back over the stones at low tide, and the inside of the mask was suddenly crimson and he couldn’t seem to stop coughing.

When finally he looked up, both the doctor and Rosa Hinojosa were wearing masks of their own, and Rosa Hinojosa was pushing a box of disposable surgical masks across the desk to him. He couldn’t see her lips now, only her eyes, and her eyes—as rich and brown as two chocolates in the dark wrappers of her lashes—didn’t have an ounce of sympathy left in them.

Before he got sick the second time, he’d been working as part of a crew that did landscaping and gardening for the big estates strung out along the beach and carved out of the hills, a good job, steady, and with a patrón who didn’t try to cheat you. One of his tasks was to trap and dispose of the animals that infested these places—rats, gophers, possums, raccoons, and whatever else tore up the lawns or raided the orchards. His patrón wouldn’t allow the use of poison of any kind—the owners didn’t like it, and it worked its way up the food chain and killed everything out there, which Marciano didn’t think was such a bad proposition, but it wasn’t his job to think. His job was to do as he was told. The gophers weren’t a problem—they died underground, transfixed on the spikes of the Macabee traps he set in the dark cool dirt of their runs—but the possums and the raccoons and even the rats had to be captured alive in Havahart traps of varying sizes, depending on the species. Which raised the question of what to do with them once you’d caught them.

The first time he did actually catch something—a raccoon—it was on a big thirty-acre estate with its own avocado grove and a fishpond stocked with Japanese koi that cost a thousand dollars each. It was early, misty yet, and when he went to check the cage he’d baited with a dab of peanut butter and half a sardine it was a shock to find the robber itself, with its black mask and tense fingers grasping the mesh as if it were a monkey and not a mapache at all. In the next moment, he was running down the slope to where the patrón was assembling a sprinkler system for a new flower bed, crying out, “I got one, I got one!”

The patrón, big-bellied but tough, a man who must have been as old as Marciano’s father yet could work alongside his men on the hottest day without even breathing hard, glanced up from what he was doing. “One what?”

“A raccoon.”

“O.K., good. Is it a female?”

A female? What was he talking about? It was a raccoon. What did he expect him to do? Flip it over and inspect its equipment?

“Because if it’s a female there’ll be more. Get rid of it and reset the trap.”

Breathless, excited, the microbes working in him, though he didn’t yet know it, Marciano just stood there, puzzled. “Get rid of it how?”

A steady look. A sigh. “O.K., listen, because I’m only going to tell you once. Take one of those plastic trash cans lined up there behind the garage and fill it with water, right to the top, you understand? Then just drop the cage in, and it’ll be over in three minutes.”

“You mean drown it, just like that?”

“What are you going to do, take it home and train it to walk on a leash?” The patrón was grinning now, pleased with his own joke, but there was work to do, and already he was turning back to it. “And do me a favor,” he added, glancing over his shoulder. “Bury it out in the weeds, where Mrs. Lewis won’t have to see it.”

Why he was thinking of that he couldn’t say, except that he missed the job—and the money—and as he walked to the bus in the rain, the box of face masks tucked under one arm, he wanted to be back there again, under the sun, working, just that, working. They’d scared him at the clinic, they always scared him, and he was feeling light-headed on top of it. The blood was bad, he knew that—he could see it in their eyes. But he was twenty-three years old, and thirty months was like a lifetime sentence, and even then there were no guarantees—Rosa Hinojosa had made that clear. He was sick from the intravenous. His arm was sore. His throat ached. Even his feet didn’t seem to want to coöperate, zigging and zagging, so that he was walking like a drunk.

The sidewalk before him was strewn with the worms that were coming up out of the earth because if they stayed down there they’d drown, whereas up here, in the rain, they’d have a chance at life before somebody stepped on them or the birds got to them. He liked worms, nature’s recyclers, and he was playing a little game with himself, trying to avoid them and hold in the next cough at the same time, watching his feet and the pattern the worms made on the pavement, and when he looked up he was right in front of the bar—Herlihy’s—he’d seen from the bus stop but had never been inside of. It was just past ten in the morning and he wasn’t working today—his new job, strictly gardening, was with an old white-haired campesino, Rudy, who booked the clients and then sat in his beater truck and read spy novels while Marciano did all the work—so he really had nothing to do but sit in front of the television in his room all day. That had something to do with it. That and the fact that Rudy had just paid him the day before.

He didn’t go directly in, but walked by the place as if he were on an errand elsewhere, then stripped off the mask and stuffed it in his pocket, doubled back, and pushed open the door. Inside were all the usual things, neon signs for Budweiser and Coors, a jukebox that might once have worked, honey-colored bottles lined up behind the bar, and the head of a deer—or, no, an elk—jammed into one wall as if this were Alaska and somebody had just shot it. There were three customers, all white, strung together on three adjoining barstools, and the bartender, also white, and fat, with big buttery arms in a short-sleeved shirt. They all turned to look at him as he came in, and that made him nervous, so he chose a stool at the far end of the bar, rehearsing in his head the phrase he was going to give the bartender—“Please, a beer”— which made use of his favorite word in English, and the word wasn’t “please.”

The bartender heaved himself up off his own stool and came down the bar to him, put two thick white hands on the counter, and asked him something, which must have been “What do you want?,” and Marciano uttered his phrase. There was a moment of ambiguity, the man poised there still, instead of bending to the cooler, and then there was a further question, which he didn’t grasp until the man began rattling off the names of the beers he stocked, pointing as he did so to a line of bottles on the top row, ten or twelve different brands. “Corona,” Marciano said, unfolding a five-dollar bill on the bar, and all at once he was coughing and he put his hand up to cover his mouth, but he couldn’t seem to stop until he had the bottle to his lips, draining it in three swallows, as if he were a nomad who’d just come in off the desert.

One of the men at the end of the bar said something then, and the other two looked at Marciano and broke out laughing, and whether it was good-natured or not, a little joke at his expense, it made him feel tight in his chest and the cough came up again, so severe this time he thought he was going to pass out. But here was the bartender, saying something more, and what it was he couldn’t imagine, because it wasn’t illegal to cough, was it? But, no, that wasn’t it. The bartender was pointing at the empty bottle, and so Marciano repeated his phrase, “Please, a beer,” and the heavy man bent to the cooler, extracted a fresh Corona, snapped off the cap, and set it before him.

He sipped the second beer and watched the rain spatter the dirty windows and run off in streaks. At some point, he saw his bus pull up at the stop across the street, a vivid panel of color that made him think of what was waiting for him at home—nothing, zero, exactly zero—and he watched it pull away again as he tried to fight down the scratch in his throat. He was scared. He was angry. And he sat there, staring out into the gloom, drinking one beer after another, and when he coughed, really coughed, they all looked at him and at the wet cardboard box of face masks, then looked away again. Nobody said another word to him, which was all right with him—he just focussed on the television behind the bar, some news channel, and tried to interpret the words the people were saying there while the backdrop shifted from warplanes and explosions to some sort of pageant with models on a runway, looking raccoon-eyed and haughty and not half as good as Rosa Hinojosa. The bloody mask remained in his pocket, and the box of masks, the new ones, stayed right where it was, on the stool beside him.

All that week, he went into the clinic at eight, as instructed, and all that week he felt nauseated and skipped breakfast and went to work with Rudy anyway, and the only good thing there was that Rudy didn’t like to start early—and he didn’t ask questions, either. Still, Marciano was lagging and he knew it, and knew that it was only a matter of time before Rudy said something. Which he did, that Friday, T.G.I.F., end of the week, the first week with this new cocktail of antibiotics running through his veins, one week down and how many more to go? He did a quick calculation in his head: fifty-two weeks in a year, double that and then add twenty-six more. It was like climbing a mountain backward—no matter how many steps you took you never got to see the peak.

They were on their third or fourth house of the day, everything gray and wet with the fog off the ocean and the sun nowhere in sight. His chest felt sore. He was hungry, but the idea of food—of a taco or a burger or anything—made his stomach turn. “Jesus,” Rudy said, startling him out of a daydream, “you’re like one of the walking dead. I mean, at that last place I couldn’t tell whether you were pushing the mower or the mower was pushing you.” The best Marciano could do was give him a tired grin. “What?” Rudy said, staring now. “Late night last night?”

Rudy was helping him lift the mower down from the back of the truck, so he couldn’t avoid his eyes. He just nodded.

“Youth,” Rudy said, shaking his head as they set the mower down in the driveway of a little mustard-colored house with a patch of lawn in front and back and a towering hedge all the way around that had to be clipped every other week, and this was that week, which meant hauling out the ladder, too. “I used to be like that, burn the candle at both ends, drink till they closed the bars and get up for work three hours later.” Rudy sighed. “But no more. Now I’m in bed before the ten-o’clock news—and Norma’s already snoring.”

Marciano had heard all this before, twenty times already, and he didn’t say anything, just leaned into the mower to push it up the driveway, but the mower didn’t seem to want to budge, and he felt weak all of a sudden, weak and sick, and here came the cough, right on cue. He really hacked this time, hacked till he doubled over and tears came to his eyes. When he straightened up, Rudy was watching him, and his smile was gone.

“That doesn’t sound too good,” he said. “You ever go to the clinic like I told you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Or, no, not really—”

“What do you mean, not really? You sound like your lungs are shot.”

He paused to catch his breath, because he couldn’t really cough and talk at the same time, could he? He lifted one hand and let it drop. “It’s just a cold,” he said, then turned and pushed the mower up the drive.

They were waiting for him when he got home, a cop in uniform and Rosa Hinojosa, who looked so fierce and grim she might have been wearing somebody else’s face. He’d run into her at the clinic the day before, and she’d asked him if he was sticking to the regimen, and he told her he was, and she flashed a smile so luminous it made him feel unmoored. “Good,” she said. “Good. Do it for me, O.K.?” But now here she was. He saw her before he saw the cop, the crisp line her skirt cut just above her knees, her pretty legs, the heels she wore to work, and for the briefest flash of a second he wondered what she was doing there, and then he saw the cop and he knew. Rudy had just dropped him off, was already pulling away from the curb, and Marciano wanted desperately to climb back into the pickup and go wherever Rudy would take him, but everything was in slow motion now, like in the outer-space movies where the astronauts are just floating there on their tethers and the ship slides away from them in a long smear of light and shadow.

He pulled a mask from his pocket—a dirty one, to show it had been used—looped it over his ears, and snapped it in place, as if that would make him look better in Rosa Hinojosa’s eyes, but her face showed only disappointment and something else, too: anger. He’d let her down. He’d had his warning, his final warning, and he’d been caught out, but how had she known? Had somebody informed on him? Some enemy he didn’t even know he had?

The cop, he could see at a glance, wasn’t a real cop, more some sort of Health Services mule, and he was old and slow and his head was like a big calabaza propped up on his shoulders, and Rosa Hinojosa, for all her youth, was no runner, not in those shoes. So he ran. Not like in the track meets at school when he was a boy, because his lungs were like wet clay, but still he put one foot in front of the other, hustling down the alley between his house and the one next door, to where the fence out back opened onto the dry streambed and the path through the weeds he sometimes used as a shortcut to the corner store. He got as far as the fence before he gave out, and, he had to admit, both Rosa Hinojosa and the calabaza head were quicker than he would have thought. He was just lying there, pathetic, humiliated in front of this woman he wanted to prove himself to, and he watched them pause to snap on their own masks before the cop bent to him and encircled his wrists with the handcuffs.

The next thing he saw was the hospital, a big clean white stucco box of a building that had secondary boxes attached to it, a succession of them lined up like children’s blocks all the way out into the parking lot in back. He’d been here once before, to the emergency room, when he’d nearly severed the little finger of his left hand with the blade of the hedge trimmer, and they’d spoken Spanish to him, sewed and bandaged the wound and sent him on his way. That wasn’t how it was this time. This time he was wearing a mask, and so was Rosa Hinojosa and so was the mule, who kept guiding him down the corridors with a stiff forefinger till they went through a door and briefly out into the sunlight before entering an outbuilding that looked like one of the temporary classrooms you saw when you went by the high school. What was funny about it, or not so funny, was the way people made room for them in the corridors, shrinking into the walls as they passed by in their masks.

When he’d had a chance to take in the barred windows and the heavy steel door that pulled shut behind them with a whoosh of compression, Rosa Hinojosa, cold as a fish, explained to him that he was being remanded to custody as a threat to public safety under the provisions of the statutory code of the State of California, and that he would be confined here temporarily before he could be moved to the Men’s Colony, in the next county, which was equipped with a special ward for prisoners with medical conditions. He felt sick, sicker than ever, and what made it worse was that there was no smell to that room, which might as well have been on the moon. He saw a sterile white counter and a man in thick-framed glasses and some sort of hospital scrubs stationed behind it. Rosa Hinojosa was doing all the talking. She had a sheaf of papers in one hand and she turned away from him to lay them on the counter. There was a U.S. flag in the corner. A drinking fountain. Black and white tiles on the floor. “I didn’t do anything,” Marciano protested.

Rosa Hinojosa, who was conferring with the man behind the counter, gave him a sharp glance. “You were warned.”

“What do you mean? I took my medicine. You saw me—”

“Don’t even give me that. We have you on the feed from the security camera at the 7-Eleven making a purchase without your mask on—and there was testimony from the bartender at Herlihy’s that you were in there without a mask, drinking, on the very first day you walked out of the clinic.”

“I’m an American citizen.”

She shrugged.

“Look it up.” This was true. He’d been born in San Diego, two years old when his parents were deported, so he’d never had a chance to learn English or go to school here or anything else, but he had his rights, he knew that—they couldn’t just lock him up. That was against the Constitution.

Rosa Hinojosa had turned back to the counter, riffling through the stack of forms, but now she swung angrily around to him, a crease of irritation between her eyes. She wasn’t pretty anymore, not even remotely, and all he felt for her was hate, because, no matter what she said, when it came down to it she was part of the system, and the system was against him. “I don’t care if you’re the President,” she snapped. “We bent over backward, and now you’ve left us no choice. Don’t you understand? The order’s been signed.”

“I want a lawyer.”

He saw that she had a little dollop of flesh under her chin—she was already going to fat—and he realized that she was nothing to him, and, worse, that he was nothing to her but one more charity case, and what he did next was born of the sadness of that realization. He wasn’t a violent person, just the opposite—he was shy and he went out of his way to avoid confrontation. But they were the ones confronting him—Rosa Hinojosa and the whole Health Services Department, the big stupid-looking mule who’d clamped the handcuffs on him and made the mistake of removing them after they stepped through the door, and the man behind the desk, too. Marciano took as deep a breath as he could manage and felt the mucus rattling in his throat, the bad stuff he kept dredging up all day and spitting into a handkerchief until the handkerchief was stiff with it. What he was about to do was wrong, he knew that, and he regretted it the instant he saw it before him, but he wasn’t going to any prison, no way. That just wasn’t in the cards.

So now he was running again, only this time they weren’t chasing him, or not yet, because, mask or no mask, they were all three of them frantically trying to wipe his living death off their faces—and good, good, see how they like it, see how they like being condemned and ostracized and locked up without a trial or a lawyer or anything—and he didn’t stop spitting till he had the door open and was back out in the sunlight, dodging around the cars in the lot and heading for the street and the cover of the trees there. His heart was pounding and his lungs felt as if they’d been turned inside out, but he kept going, slowing to a stiff-kneed walk now, down one street, then another, the windshields of the parked cars pooling in the light like puddles after a storm, birds chattering in the trees, the smell of the earth and the grass so intense it was intoxicating. He patted down his pockets: wallet, house key, the little vial of pills. And where was he going? What was he doing? He didn’t have any money—no more than maybe ten or fifteen dollars in his wallet—and there was nobody he could turn to, not really. There was Sergio, the only one of his housemates he was close to, and Sergio would loan him money, he was sure of it, but Sergio probably didn’t have much more than he did. The only thing for certain was that he couldn’t stay here anymore.

He hadn’t seen his mother in two years, hadn’t really given her a thought, but he thought of her now, saw her face as vividly as if she were that woman right there slipping into the front seat of her car. She’d nursed him through the measles, whooping cough, the flu, and whatever else had come along to disrupt his childhood, and why couldn’t she nurse him through this, too? She could, if he was careful and took his pills and wore the mask every single minute of every day, because he wouldn’t want to infect her—that would be the worst thing a son could do. No matter what the doctors said, his mother would save him, protect him, do anything for him. But how was he going to get to her? They’d be watching for him at the bus station and at the train depot and at the airport, too, even if he could scrape up enough for a ticket, which he couldn’t. . . . But what about Rudy? Maybe he could get Rudy to drive him as far as Tijuana—or, no, he’d tell Rudy he needed to borrow the truck to help one of his roommates move a refrigerator or a couch, and then he’d do the driving himself and get somebody to bring the truck back, pay somebody, make promises, whatever it took. That was a plan, wasn’t it? He had to have a plan. Without a plan he was lost.

He kept moving, breathing hard now, the sidewalk like a treadmill rolling under him, but he had to fight it, had to be quick because they’d have the cops after him in their patrol cars, an all-points bulletin like on TV, and they weren’t going to be gentle with him, either. Up ahead, at the end of the street, was a park he’d gone to once or twice with Sergio to drink beer and throw horseshoes, and there were bushes there, weren’t there, along the streambed. Pushing through the park gate—kids, mothers, swings, a couple of bums laid out on the grass as if they’d been installed there along with the green wooden benches—he tried to look casual, even as the sirens began to scream in the distance and he told himself it was only just ambulances bringing people to the emergency room. He went straight across the lawn, looking at nobody, and then he was in the bushes and out of sight and he dropped to the ground and just lay there until his heart stopped hammering and the burning in his lungs began to subside. It would be dark soon, and then he could make his way back to the house, borrow somebody’s phone, call Rudy, pack a few things, and be gone before anybody could do anything about it.

Paranoia was when you felt that everybody was after you even if they weren’t, but what would you call this? Common sense? They’d come to his house and handcuffed him and put him in that white room, and he hadn’t done anything. Now they’d charge him with escaping or resisting arrest or whatever they wanted to call it—and assault, too, assault with the deadly weapon that was his own spit. It didn’t matter. The result would be the same—thirty months in a sterile room with the fans sucking in and the warders wearing masks and gloves and pushing a tray of what passed for food through a slot in the door and coming in twice a day to stick the intravenous in him. He’d rather be dead. Rather be in Mexico. Rather take his chances with his mother and the clinic in Ensenada, where at least they spoke his language and wouldn’t look at him like he was a cockroach.

He was thirsty, crazy thirsty, but he forced himself to stay where he was till it was dark, then slipped back into the park to get a drink at the faucet in the rest room. Only problem was the door was locked. He stood there a long moment, rattling the doorknob, feeling disoriented. There was the steady hiss of cars from the freeway that was somewhere behind him in the intermediate distance. The trees were shrouds. The sky was black overhead and painted with stars, and it had never seemed so close. He could almost feel the weight of it, all the weight of the sky that went on and on to infinity, outer space, the planets, the stars, pressing down on him till he could barely breathe. Desperate, he knelt in the grass and felt around till he located a sprinkler head. At first it wouldn’t budge, but he kept at it till the seal gave and he was able to unscrew it and put his mouth to the warm gurgling flow there, and that made him feel better and pushed the vagueness into another corner of his mind. After a while, he got to his feet, eased himself down into the streambed, and began working his way back in the direction of the house.

It wasn’t easy. What would have taken him ten minutes out on the street took an hour at least, his feet unsteady in a slurry of mud and trash, stiff dead reeds knifing at him, dogs barking, the drift of people’s voices freezing him in place. He was sweating, and shivering, too, and his shirt was torn at the right elbow, where he’d snagged it on something in the strange half-light of the gully.

He didn’t really know how far he’d gone or where he was when he emerged, scrambling up a steep incline and into the yard of a house that was mercifully dark. There were lights on in the houses on both sides of it, though, and the black humped shape of an automobile parked in the driveway. He moved toward the car and then past it, and if he was startled by a voice calling out behind him, a single syllable he would have recognized in any language—Hey!—he didn’t hesitate or turn around or even look over his shoulder but just kept going, down the driveway and straight across the street to the sidewalk on the far side, where he was only another pedestrian out for a stroll on a cool night in a quiet city.

When he got to his own street, he made himself slow down and scan the cars parked on both sides of the road, looking for anything suspicious, the police or the Health Services, Rosa Hinojosa, though that was being paranoid—Rosa Hinojosa would be at home with her parents at this hour, or her husband, if she had one, absorbed in her own life, not his. He took his time, though he was feeling worse by the minute, shivering so hard he had to wrap his arms around himself, his shirt soaked and too thin against the night and the temperature, which must have dropped into the mid-fifties by now. And then, steeling himself, he slipped across the street and into the dark yard of the rooming house, where they’d come for him once and would come for him again.

He ducked in the back door, tentative, all the blood in his brain now, screaming at him, but there was nobody in the hall, and in the next moment he was in his room, the familiar scent of his things—unwashed laundry, soap, shampoo, the foil-wrapped burrito he’d set aside to microwave for dinner—rising to his nostrils in the ordinary way, as if nothing had happened. The cough was right there waiting to erupt, but he fought it down, afraid even to make the slightest sound, and though he was tempted to turn the light on, he knew better—if anyone was out there, this was what they’d be watching for. He found his jacket thrown over the back of the chair where he’d left it that morning and wrapped himself in it, then went to the window and opened the blinds, so that six thin stripes of illumination fell across the bed. That was when he remembered his pills—he had to take his pills no matter where he was or what happened, that was the truth of his life, whether he ever saw Rosa Hinojosa again or not.

He went to the sink for a glass of water, shook out two of the little white pills and swallowed them. Then—and he couldn’t help himself—he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, just for a minute.

The knock startled him out of a dreamless sleep, the knock at the front door that thundered through the house as if the wrecking ball had come to reduce it all to splinters. But who would knock? Everybody who lived here had a key, so there was no need for knocking, not unless you were immigration or the police. Or Health Services. For one fluttering instant, he pictured Rosa Hinojosa in police blues with a cap cocked over her eye, a nightstick in one hand and a can of Mace in the other, and then he was pulling his door softly shut and fastening the latch, as if that would save him—but what was he going to do, hide under the bed? He didn’t know much, but he knew they’d be at the back door, too, just like in the movies when they nailed the gangsters and the pimps and the drug lords and the whole audience stood up and cheered.

No time for his backpack, no time for clothes, his toothbrush, for the change he kept in a pickle jar in the top drawer, no time for anything but to jerk up the window in its creaking frame while the knocking at the front door rose to a relentless pounding and the voices started up, Sergio’s and somebody else’s and a dog barking, and then he was down in the grass and scrambling, hunched over, for the next yard and then the next one after that. It took everything he had. Twice, he tripped in the dark, going down hard on somebody’s patio, all the little sounds of the neighborhood amplified now, every TV turned up full blast, motorcycles blaring like gunfire out on the street, even the crickets shrieking at him, and that dog, the ratcheting bark of that dog back at the house, a police dog, the kind of dog that never gave up, that could sniff you out even if you sprouted wings and flew up into the sky.

Where was he? Some dark place. Some citizen’s back yard with its jade plants and flower bed and patch of lawn. A cold hand was inside him, yanking at his lungs, squeezing and bunching and pulling the meat there up into his throat, so that he couldn’t breathe. He went down on his hands and knees, and there was no plan now but to find the darkest corner of the yard, the place where nobody had bothered to cut the grass or trim the shrubs, where the earth was real and present and he could let the blood come up and forget about the pills and Rosa Hinojosa and his mother and Rudy and everybody else.

Time leaped ahead. He was stretched out in the dirt. What was on his shirt was hot and secret and wet. He closed his eyes. And when he opened them again all he could see was the glint of a metal trap, bubbles rising in the clear cold water, and the hands of the animal fighting to get out. ♦