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I stood up. My knees felt shaky. The bathroom smelled very clean and the tile sparkled and I considered making it into my new bedroom. There is nothing soft in the bathroom. Everything in the bathroom is hard. It’s shiny and new; it’s scrubbed down and whited out; it’s a palace of bleach and all you need is one fierce sponge and you can rub all the dirt away.

I washed my hands with a little duck soap and peered out the bathroom window. We live in a high-rise apartment building and often I wonder what would happen if there was a fire, no elevator allowed, and we had to evacuate. Who would carry him? Would I? Once I imagined taking him to the turning stairway and just dropping him down the middle chute, my mother at the bottom with her arms spread wide to catch his whistling body. Hey, I’d yell, catch Dad! Then I’d trip down the stairs like a little pony and find them both splayed out like car accident victims at the bottom and that’s where the fantasy ends and usually where my knocking-on-wood hand starts to act up.

• • •

Paul’s parents are alcoholics and drunk all the time so they don’t notice that he’s never home. Perhaps they conjure him up, visions of Paul, through their bleary whiskey eyes. But Paul is with me. I have locked Paul in my closet. Paul is my loverboy, sweet Paul is my olive.

I open the closet door a crack and pass him food. He slips the dirty plates from the last meal back to me and I stack them on the floor next to my T-shirts. Crouched outside the closet, I listen to him crunch and swallow.

How is it? I ask. What do you think of the salt-free meatball?

Paul says he loves sitting in the dark. He says my house is so quiet and it smells sober. The reason it’s so quiet is because my father feels awful and is resting in his bedroom. Tiptoe, tiptoe round the sick papa. The reason it smells sober is because it is so sober. I haven’t made a joke in this house in ten years at least. Ten years ago, I tried a Helen Keller joke on my parents and they sent me to my room for my terrible insensitivity to suffering.

I imagine in Paul’s house everyone is running around in their underwear, and the air is so thick with bourbon your skin tans from it. He says no; he says the truth is his house is quiet also. But it’s a more pointy silence, he says. A lighter one with sharper pricks. I nod and listen. He says too that in his house there are moisture rings making Olympian patterns on every possible wooden surface.

Once instead of food I pass my hand through the crack. He holds it for at least a half hour, brushing his fingers over my fingers and tracing the lines in my palm.

You have a long lifeline, he says.

Shut up, I tell him, I do not.

He doesn’t let go of my hand, even then. Any dessert?

I produce a cookie out of my front shirt pocket.

He pulls my hand in closer. My shoulder crashes against the closet frame.

Come inside, he says, come join me.

I can’t, I say, I need to stay out here.

Why? He is kissing my hand now. His lips are very soft and a little bit crumby.

I just do, I say, in case of an emergency. I think: because now I’ve learned my lesson and I’m terribly sensitive to suffering. Poor poor Helen K, blind-and-deaf-and-dumb. Because now I’m so sensitive I can hardly move.

Paul puts down his plate and brings his face up close to mine. He is looking right at me and I’m rustling inside. I don’t look away. I want to cut off my head.

It is hard to kiss. As soon as I turn my head to kiss deeper, the closet door gets in the way.

After a minute Paul shoves the door open and pulls me inside with him. He closes the door back and now it is pitch black. I can feel his breath near mine, I can feel the air thickening between us.

I start shaking all over.

It’s okay, he says, kissing my neck and my shoulder and my chin and more. He lets me out when I start to cry.

My father is in the hospital on his deathbed.

Darling, he says, you are my only child, my only heir.

To what? I ask. Is there a secret fortune?

No, he says, but you will carry on my genes.