Early in the afternoon of the ninth day, as I was looking through the bookcase, I noticed one volume that seemed like it may have been read recently. In the evening, broiled chicken and a can of Campbell’s soup. At snacktime, I treated myself to hazelnut ice cream topped with Cointreau. For lunch, it was cheesecake from the freezer and strong milk tea. The next morning I cooked rice and made a pilaf of canned salmon and seaweed and mushrooms. That evening, I had bread and salad and ham and eggs, with canned peaches for dessert. And more rice and spaghetti than I cared to think about. There was plenty of flour and yeast in the kitchen, enough for bread the whole winter long, if it turned out I had to stay. For a fledgling effort, it didn’t taste too bad either. The smell of bread filled the house, making it warm all over. On the cover was written: “If you can read, then you can bake bread.” It was no exaggeration. The Rat’s Bread Baking proved to be a thoughtfully written cookbook. Winter-dark wordless green pasture stretched between us. That wouldn’t be so bad, just being Count Such-and-such. And what would you have been doing? Maybe you’d only have been Count Such-and-such straight through. Maybe not your Dostoyevsky, but a known second-rate novelist. Brilliant, don’t you think? Me, if I’d been born in the nineteenth century, I’m sure I could have written better novels. In our later years, the two of us would be implicated in the Something-or-other Rebellion and exiled to Siberia, where we’d die. We’d go hunting together, fight, be rivals in love, have our metaphysical complaints, drink beer watching the sunset from the shores of the Black Sea. I’d have been Prince So-and-so and you Count Such-and-such. Probably we’d have been better off born in nineteenth-century Russia. But in the end, that’s not the question, is it? In any case, I’ve decided I’m not giving you my address. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I’ve got going, I have to wonder. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs.

It’s like I was raising chickens inside me. My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well. Understand very well what I can’t say very well.

A wild sheeps chase