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way she clung to my arm as we finally left the bar and entered the cool, damp night. More than once here in New York I’d seen her work the persiflage, smiling wide-eyed for the boys, and then use me as her foil. She was more talk than action, but I was neither.
    We took a taxi back to my jeep, and I drove Shade to her apartment. Before climbing out, she leaned closer to me and smiled. “You’re a good kid, Sliver-Twit,” she said, spinning a dipsomaniacal derivation of the name that was no longer my own.
    “Thanks,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say and the way she looked at me sometimes, the way she was looking at me now, made any words at all seem redundant. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. The next thing I knew the passenger door slammed shut. I watched her climb the steps of her brownstone and disappear behind two sets of glass doors.

I ended the first week of the strike at the dentist’s office. Camille the dental assistant propped open my mouth and slipped the slurpy, suckling tube beneath my tongue. Water laced with mouthwash showered into the plastic cup. The hairs on my arms stood in collective shiver as Camille hummed to “Top of the World” by the Carpenters.
    “She’ll be in in a minute,” Camille said, trying her best at comfort before Dr. Janis started her drilling. I sat back and wondered why I’d kept this appointment, how my first trip outside since the strike began had me choking the metal beads of the spit-bib.
    The last few days had been a fog of frozen pizza and six packs of diet root beer, monotonous words springing from my television set. Only when armed with the channel clicker was I safe from the mocking jeers of my laptop and microcassette, the ridicule of my barren reporter’s notebooks. The tools of my trade had given me structure, now all I had was television. And I gave over willingly, letting in the call-in shows and sci-fi sitcoms, the Spanish Harlem hit parade, microorganism hour, Le Soufflé. Shows blended into each other; like a pure-bred zombie, I formulated interactive character plots, tracked stray Cheerios from channel to channel. I forgot to feed Freddy until she dug her nails into my arm and drew blood. We started smelling like the litter box.
    Then there was the onslaught of phone calls from Aunt Lorraine beginning on the morning after the double suicide, waking me at seven when I’d been out so late the night before. “So that’s your Doctor Kaminsky?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “He’s not my doctor,” I assured her. Though I was tired, the way she said your kept me alert. It was the tone she used when Mom was badgering her, and I would have to interfere, because like it or not, Mom was mine. Just as she was Aunt Lorraine’s sister-in-law. But I had no such claim on the suicide doctor. I couldn’t even speak of him and Aunt Lorraine in the same breath, let alone imagine bringing them together for a cup of coffee.
    Besides, how bad could her cancer be if she was calling me a few times a day. There was such verve in her voice. “I just want to talk to him,” she said.
    “You have plenty of people to talk to.”
    “Who, your mother? Rowdy? You tell me, who? Everyone’s so tip-toe, hush-hush, and get out. Nobody says anything.”
    “What do you want from them?”
    “I don’t know, I just need to talk to somebody…somebody who understands. I’m dying, you know.”
    “No you’re not.”
    “Say it if it makes you feel better, but you have no idea.” I don’t know if saying it made me feel any better, but it did help to dull the impact of her words. At least until the next phone call. The problem was we had such easy access to the phone; each of us confined to bed with everything around us grinding to a halt. By the time Camille called reminding me of my appointment with warnings about not filling cavities at this stage—the adult mouth being a bottomless pit of foreign matter, its lacunae home to more toxic