There was one possible destination, yet before he reconciled himself to it he came upon the only other beacon in town: a coffeehouse. Instinct placed him in a chair in the empty establishment, yet with no occupation for his hands he felt conspicuous. A barista, carrying a coffeepot and trailing tail fins, strolled up to his table, although he was more fascinated by the ring on her finger than her mermaid costume.

The young Hispanic woman queried him while she poured. “Are you a hospital patient?”

He was too numb to dispel the notion he was also wearing a costume.

She ventured further, “You look lost.”

A piece of seaweed dropped to the table, and without forethought the patron picked it up and threaded it back into her fishnet cloak. He forlornly murmured at her waist, “It’s just that I don’t know how to get from here to here...”

A language barrier existed, though the silence during the car ride was strangely bearable. The man mumbled in the direction of the crumbling house when the young woman drove past the blocked-off street. “I used to live down there.”

He did not expect a reply.

Arriving at a tenant house, the two walked around to an efficiency apartment at the rear. A bowl of candy corn sat on a table inside the door, yet with no electricity for the porch bulb it was doubtful trick-or-treaters would partake of it. The barista lit a scented candle on entering, and her guest, standing in the doorway in his drafty gown, was somewhere between anesthetized and charmed by her matter-of-factness. Boxes crowded the small apartment, but he could not say if they were half-packed or half-unpacked; a numinous painting sitting in a dark corner was in a similar state of limbo. Michael did not know her name—did not even have strength in his throat to ask—, but being relieved of conversation suited them both. She was buoyant and familiar with him, and the ring on her finger notwithstanding she appeared to live alone. He watched the woman flitter about with her back turned until, in reaching under her armpit, she unzipped the sequin-scaled costume to her hip and disappeared into a bathroom. On her return she was in in a modest robe, although the candle threw his shadow over her like another disguise.

“I would make tea, but no power,” she informed him.

A bright keyhole winked behind her. He glanced at a closet where a nailed-shut door formed a back wall. Someone on the other side of the partition passed in front of a light. The resident walked up to a wardrobe chiefly comprised of costumes and placed her mermaid outfit on a hanger, blotting out the ill-favored star. A blanket, strung over a make-do curtain rod, was drawn across the door-less closet as added insurance.

“A monster lives here,” she reported gloomily. “A monster who peeps in on me.”

It was a few steps from there to her dusky bed, and with no furniture she was bound to sit on the corner of it. The dark-haired beauty was in no hurry to relinquish the anonymity of her smile. She turned, lifted her hand, and rubbed the wall closest to her where a black velvet painting of Jesus was tacked up.

“I sometime hear you walking around, squeaking on the floor.”

Her proclamation was not as odd as he would have supposed. The amnesiac assumed she referred to a second apartment that abutted hers.

“Do you have nightmares?” she inquired. “Is that why you walk?”

It was easier for him to half an unknown distance than to close it. “I have trouble sleeping.”

“I have Eszopiclone,” she said, picking up the saucer with the candle and handing it to him. “In the bathroom.”

The declaration bounced off the cardboard boxes, pointing him to the medicine cabinet in the next room. Dropping the saucer to the edge of the basin, vanilla from the smoldering wax mingled with other, somewhat incongruous smells around him. Fruity shampoo clung to the shower curtains, although baby powder air freshener, closer to the floor, was intended to mask a thin film of vomit floating in the commode. Candlelight washed over the lip of the saucer to squint at a ring beside the soap dish. It was a wedding band, and even before picking it up Michael knew it was plastic. The interloper could not say the resident removed the ring when changing out of her costume, or whether it was another ring on a stage of props. Regardless, while his fingers ran over flickering bottles and bristly brushes along a shelf of toiletries, he sensed something faintly incestuous—domestique—in the seduction: something that was both obstacle and obstacle-remover in this house of movable walls.

Michael glimpsed himself in the cabinet mirror, finally noticing the strange patterned sunburn over his temples and forehead. These markings undoubtedly chronicled what came before his awakening on the country road. Against this abyss, and against his apparent homelessness, only a faint sounding in his chest supplied a quality for which he would never be sure of the quantity. Where was the leaving-off place in his understanding? And why should he tremble in fear at the precipice where this understanding left off? Swallowing the sleeping tablet, he looked through the doorway to where the young woman, having shed her robe, was already in bed. The candle felt the way before him, pressing softly against her bare shoulder as a tentative barrier. The floor creaked in the vicinity of the draped closet door: an ear if not an eye was in the room with them.

“I can still hear the monster,” he whispered.

Only Jesus looked back from the wall. But, kneeling in prayer, his gaze was fixed silently on the ceiling.

Michael slipped down under the covers with the girl to face the drowsy candle on his right side. The groaning timbers of the old house talked among themselves around his sinking body, but were of a divided mind on the subject of their being company.