Four New Messages Read Free

were discussed, various names proposed both at the college level and pro. Pressing questions asked and answered: What’s more degrading, working as a stripper or working as a maid? What’s the best position to have re: Iran—preemptive strikes or sanctions inevitably targeting women and children? What’s the best sexual position for virginity loss—for a man, for a woman, for a child? Is there a future for campaign finance reform after the veritable abortion of Citizens United v. FEC? If you could repeal any amendment to the Constitution, which (no one allowed anymore to pick the first ten, whichever amendment repealed Prohibition, or the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth)? If you were a fart, what type (how wet, what smell)? Ten Most Mortifying Moments? Most egregious party foul? If you could describe your entire life in only one word to only one dead grandparent, which grandparent and what word?
    Etc.
    Mono’s apartment had been advertised as a one bedroom but having remitted the deposit he admitted to himself, why not, it was a studio. What the realtor maintained made it a one bedroom was a small little nothing nook by the door so minuscule that whenever Mono wanted to open the door he had to move the television onto the bed. His TV slept better than he did. The door’s peephole had been blackened for a robbery. The window opposite gave onto parkinglot, he never kept it open, gas. On the floor, lotto stubs, scratchers he’d scratch with teeth. Underlabeled whiskey under the label. Flies at the bottom of a liter of cola. In the bathroom clothing hung from the showerhead smelling alternately feculent and moldy. The sink was mustached with shavings. He’d been using takeout napkins as toiletpaper for a month. The sounds he’d hear by morning were those of mice the size of his pinky sprayed newborn from the walls or, once, the whining die of the smokedetector’s batteries. The apartment had no light because the bulbs had burnt out and he never remembered to replace them. Anyway Mono was rarely home at night and the television was enough light and the computer was sufficient too.
    Mono was ISO work. He was perpetually interviewing and applying himself to applications because what’s life for a man in the middle?
    Interrupting binges where if you didn’t have what they wanted you yourself weren’t wanted.
    Only feared.
    Meeting people furtively but trying to be kind. Yet having that kindness misinterpreted.
    I don’t care what you think about the Yankees’ outfield, one kid said, I just want my fucking drugs.
    Yankee wants his fucking drugs? Mono unsure of what to say.
    The kid apologized.
    Accidental, his initial involvement. Mono had begun delivering when he began owing Methyl money—short one night on an eightball he was supposed to have split before a food court coworker bailed (that one week Mono worked at Quaker Mall).
    He knew he had to get out when this past New Year’s down the shore at a condo shuttered for the season a fierce former valedictorian who’d strolled with him along the snowy beach had said, Let’s continue this conversation some other time—a convo about renewable energy—like when I’m sober and you’re not my dealer.
    Mono had had sex with her lesbian friend that night: she was stretchmark mangled, solicitous. She’d feigned abandon, collapsed on the bed, but just when Mono wanted to fall asleep she went to the bathroom to brush teeth, which was tender. The next morning she picked his jeans up from the floor and turned the pantlegs rightside out while Mono repositioned the pair of athletic socks in his jacket’s breastpocket—an advertisement for his packing a gun. That was the only time he’d had sex this year.
    The résumé he’d been sending around he’d falsified: his experience including six months as executive assistant in a film production company he’d created, a year as a consultant to a pharmaceutical consulting firm for whose HR hotline he gave his own phone,