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“He’s dead,” he told his son, and the kid sat without comment in his makeshift diagonal, half in the chair, half on the floor, semi-mesmerized.

She loved Kierkegaard in his antiqueness, in the glaring drama of the translation she owned, an old anthology of brittle pages with ruled underlinings in red ink, passed down by someone in her mother’s family. This is what she read and re-read into deep night in her dorm room, a drifting mass of papers, clothing, books and tennis gear that she liked to think of as the objective correlative of an overflowing mind. What is an objective correlative? What is cognitive dissonance? She used to know the answers to everything then, it seemed to her now, and she used to love Kierkegaard right down to the spelling of his name. The hard Scandian k’s and lovely doubled a. Her mother sent books all the time, great dense demanding fiction, airtight and relentless, but it defeated her eager need for self-recognition, something closer to mind and heart. She read her Kierkegaard with a feverish expectancy, straight into the Protestant badlands of sickness unto death. Her roommate wrote punk lyrics for an imaginary band called Piss in My Mouth and Lianne envied her creative desperation. Kierkegaard gave her a danger, a sense of spiritual brink. The whole of existence frightens me, he wrote. She saw herself in this sentence. He made her feel that her thrust into the world was not the slender melodrama she sometimes thought it was.

She watched the faces of the cardplayers, then caught her husband’s eye, onscreen, in reflection, watching her, and she smiled. There was the amber drink in his hand. There was the car alarm sounding somewhere along the street, a reassuring feature of familiar things, safe night settling in. She reached over and snatched the kid from his roost. Before he went off to bed, Keith asked him if he wanted a set of poker chips and a deck of cards.

The answer was maybe, which meant yes.

Finally she had to do it and then she did, knocking on the door, hard, and waiting for Elena to open even as voices trembled within, women in soft chorus, singing in Arabic.

Elena had a dog named Marko. Lianne remembered this the instant she hit the door. Marko, she thought, with a k, whatever that might signify.

She hit the door again, this time with the flat of her hand, and then the woman stood there, in tailored jeans and a sequined T-shirt.

“The music. All the time, day and night. And loud.”

Elena stared into her, radiating a lifetime of alertness to insult.

“Don’t you know this? We hear it on the stairs, we hear it in our apartments. All the time, day and fucking night.”

“What is it? Music, that’s all. I like it. It’s beautiful. It gives me peace. I like it, I play it.”

“Why now? This particular time?”

“Now, later, what’s the difference? It’s music.”

“But why now and why so loud?”

“Nobody ever complained. This is the first time I’m hearing loud. It’s not so loud.”

“It’s loud.”

“It’s music. You want to take it personally, what can I tell you?”

Marko came to the door, a hundred and thirty pounds, black, with deep fur and webbed feet.

“Of course it’s personal. Anybody would take it personally. Under these circumstances. There are circumstances. You acknowledge this, don’t you?”

“There are no circumstances. It’s music,” she said. “It gives me peace.”

“But why now?”

“The music has nothing to do with now or then or any other time. And nobody ever said loud.”

“It’s fucking loud.”

“You must be ultrasensitive, which I would never think from hearing the language you use.”

“The whole city is ultrasensitive right now. Where have you been hiding?”

Every time she saw the dog out in the street, half a block away, with Elena carrying a plastic baggie to harvest his shit, she thought Marko with a k.

“It’s music. I like it, I play it. You think it’s so loud, walk faster on your way out the door.”

Lianne put her hand in the woman’s face.

“It gives you peace,