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“Today we are going on a field trip,” Max announced.

She accepted the coffee he handed her. “Oh? Where to?”

“You tell me.” He took a seat on the edge of the worktable. “Today you are going to take me out of my dusty little world and we will do Fallon things. I have kept you in here like a caged animal until now.”

“It hasn’t been that bad.”

“So today you give me not just your energy, but your time. Your environment. And by the end of the day I promise I will know your pose for the final piece.”

She nodded, impressed by this sudden flexibility. “Well, okay. We’ll have to go somewhere we can walk to, I guess.”

“Wherever you like.”

“Or actually…can you ride a bike?”

He smiled. “I think I can remember. It’s been about twenty years, but there is that saying, after all.”

“Cool. Let’s finish our coffees and go rent some bikes.”

He nodded and Fallon tried to picture him on a bicycle. It wasn’t a likely fit but it touched her. Max Emery, more than anyone else she’d ever met, led an exceptionally self-designed existence. She felt flattered that he was willing to violate this lifestyle to conform to her wishes.

“Let me bathe. I’ve been cleaning the vents.” He nodded to the ladder propped near the opening of the ventilation duct. He pulled the particle filter mask off his head and sauntered to the tub, running the taps.

“Turn around now if you do not want to see me the way I see you.”

Fallon couldn’t calculate the exact meaning of the statement. She swiveled her chair around loudly and grabbed a magazine. After a few minutes the taps turned off and she heard sloshing.

“You’re safe now,” he said.

“So.” Fallon furrowed her brow. “Does the mailman, like, love delivering to this house? He must be used to seeing naked women traipsing around here every afternoon.” She turned and thought she could make out Max’s backlit face smiling from where he reclined in the water.

“My postman is a woman.”

“Well, does she make it a point of dropping the mail off at nine-forty-five every morning?” she asked, meaning the time Max normally bathed after his runs.

“The box is at the end of the road.” His warm tone told her he was charmed by her awkward attempt at flirtation.

“What about your…fans, or whatever? You’re pretty famous. Do people ever come here and peer into your many windows?”

“It has happened. But not for several years.” He dunked his head, scrubbing his hair.

When he resurfaced Fallon asked, “Has anyone ever stolen any of your statues? The broken ones in the backyard?”

“They have not. Not yet.”

“That’s surprising.”

“Well, my work, the popular pieces, are perfect. So they say. I am meant to be very, very good at rendering the human body, to create lifelike figures. Humans made of stone.”

“Yes, well, you are,” Fallon said.

“So the people who make a fetish of my work, they fixate on the perfectness of it. Every piece of mine that has been stolen—and there have been a few—were like that. The ones out back, they’re all rejects, as it were.”

“Geological tragedies?” Fallon asked, borrowing his earlier phrase.

“Exactement. They’re not worth as much to the collectors who think my work is synonymous with the flawless imitation of flesh. Perhaps when I am dead they will be more valuable. Perhaps, too, the pieces from my so-called ‘disfigurement period’, as some call these past eight years. But it does not matter to me. Like my patrons, I will be gone someday. My work, for as long as it is destined to, will travel around without me, ending up goodness knows where. As I have said, the process is what matters to me. Like breathing. Or perhaps like sex, rather, to some people,” he amended thoughtfully. “I would not die if I could not work, but I would be miserable. That’s what matters. Not the finished pieces.”

She nodded.

“I’m going to stand up now,” he warned.

Fallon nodded again but only turned partway, keeping him in her periphery. She indulged in the vague impression of his silhouetted body as he dried himself, those long muscles,