LITMIR.BIZ

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he says, feeling himself on the verge of a wrong answer.

      “I’ve made some real mistakes in the people I’ve picked as friends.”

      The questions keep coming, easier if he does not think too much about the reasons, all the times behind his answers. His only friends are those he’s met on the street, or in trials at the drug companies. They are only acquaintances, not friends to trust. The last person he trusted was Chrissie; the two of them hitchhiked all the way to Montana, made plans together. Red-headed, she was going to be his woman forever, he believed, and the two of them would live in a pale blue house, rising in the middle of the night to feed the baby, never tiring of each other. She always surprised him, and he trusted her beyond anything. Now he doesn’t even know where she is.

      “Sometimes my temper explodes,” Lisa says.

      “False,” Scott says, taking a moment to answer. “I got a real cool head.”

      “I’m quiet when I first meet strangers.”

      “True.”

      “Most people would rather win than lose.”

      “Obviously true,” he says.

      “There are people that can read minds.”

      “There’s some good guessers,” he says. “People who can see ahead, or they’ve been there before and they can guess. ‘Find out what happens before what happens happens’—that’s a motto I heard.”

      “Is that a ‘False’?”

      “Yes.”

      In the pause between questions, he listens to the scratch of Lisa’s pen, crossing the boxes of his answers. Squinting, he can see the colors of the billboards, through the window, too distant to read. They cast rectangular shadows onto the highway; what must be cars disappear into the shadows, then emerge out their other sides. Clouds cast their own shadows, over buildings, their white reflections sliding across windows as the office towers rise, tall across the river. Looking at them, he wonders where he’ll sleep tonight. This morning, like the morning before, he awoke in an office building that is under construction; he descended two floors, to where the water is hooked up, and as he passed down the hall he suddenly realized that there were men through the open doorways. The men sat at desks, writing with pens, talking on phones, in rooms that had been empty only yesterday. Tonight, he’ll have to find a new place.

      Since arriving in Philadelphia, he has slept in a vacant lot, behind an old couch with dirty stuffed animals perched in a line, staring out, some missing their plastic eyes; he has slept under an overpass, felt the vibrations of big trucks as they passed a foot above his head. He has spent nights on steam grates, next to men with icicles in their beards, all the frozen condensation—in the morning, he pulled down his pants and the grid showed on his skin, his bare ass scored like a piece of chicken.

      “I think that about does it,” Lisa Roberts says. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch, probably sometime next week. All this information—the phone and address—is correct?”

      “Right,” he says. “Only the phone’s not working. I can just drop by here, at the hospital.”

      “You’d be paid every two weeks.”

      “Whatever,” he says. “Maybe what you learn from me can help some people. The money’s no big deal.”

      “That’s what they all say.”

      Scott does not stand. He is ready to answer more questions—he wouldn’t mind answering them all day and night. It has been a long time since anyone paid him so much attention, took such an interest. He speaks as Lisa ruffles through the papers, putting them in order.

      “I watched you when I came in,” he says. “Sizing me up—my hair and my coat and everything. What else do you want to know?”

      “We’re done,” she says.

      “Anything at all.”

      “Next they’ll do the blood tests.”

      “One more question,” he says. “I know you have one. You’re curious about me.”

      “All right,” she says, snapping the metal jaw of the clipboard on the papers it holds. “Tell me this: do you always smile like that?”

      “Try to,” he says. “You probably want to know why.”

      “If it’s short.”

      “Explanation’s real simple—it goes back to horses, and that’s a thing where I’ve had some experience. It’s so easy to spook a horse. It’s because of the shape of their eyes; they can be looking back, watching you while you’re riding, at the same time as they look around at where they’re going.” Scott holds a finger up at each side of his head, pointing in front of, then behind him. “If you’re smiling, that makes them relax and behave, since they think you’re a happy and kind person.”

      “There’s no horses here,” Lisa Roberts says. Her clipboard is on the desk, the cap on her pen. She stands and opens the door.

       THREE

       SNAKE

      Behind the Art Museum, Scott finds a path that switches back and forth down the slope to the Schuylkill River. Overgrown grass, tangled with shreds of plastic and other trash, stretches out at the bottom, under a few trees and around a dry fountain; green-roofed buildings, their windows boarded up, stand to one side. The air smells of sulphur. He keeps moving, all the way to the railing. The river slides darkly by, forty feet below, a walkway right at its edge. A man sits on the walkway, only his legs visible, stretched out, his feet dangling over the water.

      “Hey!” Scott says, then repeats himself, more loudly. “Hey!”

      There’s a spiral staircase to his left, and he descends, his boots ringing on the metal steps. He hurries along the path.

      “And just what is your problem?” the man says.

      “What kind of a name is that for a river, anyway?” Scott says. He looks out over the water, its surface almost black, greasy, impossible to see through. “I can’t even pronounce it.”

      “That name’s from a whole other language. Means ‘hidden river.’” The man doesn’t look up to speak. His hair is black, in a short Afro, barely darker than his skin; his beard is pure white. He wears a pink dress shirt and brown slacks. His feet are bare—a pair of rubber sandals rest next to him—and a length of fishing line is tied around one big toe, stretching down into the dark water.

      “What’s so hidden about it?” Scott says. “It’s right there, in plain sight.”

      “It’s thick down there,” the man says. “No one knows what all’s in the water. Could send scuba divers under and they couldn’t tell you a thing.”

      “You fishing?”

      “Just counting the dead fish floating past—they die trying to breathe that water.”

      “Could get your toe pulled off,” Scott says. “Fishing like that.”

      “This here’s just the way Huck Finn did it.” The man lifts his foot, wiggles his toes, the nails thick and yellow. “You ever read that book?”

      “Of course I read it,” Scott says, though he hasn’t.

      “Name’s Ray. Sit down, if you like.”

      “I’m all right,” Scott says. He stands silently, watching Ray whittle at a stick. The knife has a six inch blade; the stick is taking the shape of a lizard or crocodile. Scott leans closer, wishing he had a knife.

      “Where you from?”

      “Here,” Scott says.

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