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Michelle was the first person I engaged in that unmapped territory.

I took the stairs two at a time and locked the door behind me. My first thought was that she wouldn’t come. It was all a little game. But if so, it was one that had me—there was no other word for it—aroused. I began to imagine the age-old scenario of a woman in need and a cynical benefactor willing to trade on his good deed: her supple, supplicant body in bed next to mine, the voracious yearning of the flesh.

Clearly these were not the musings of a freelance social worker. I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and tried to think of it another way.

Suppose she did come. Suppose she rang the bell, and I buzzed her in, and when I opened the door she appeared to be alone. But suppose that before I locked the door a man who’d been hiding around the corner kicked it in my face. Suppose they subdued me, bound and gagged me, taunted me, laughed, and pissed on my head. Suppose they boiled a pot of water and slowly dribbled it onto my arms and neck, then stole what little I had worth stealing. Or suppose they piled all my books in the middle of the kitchen and lit them in a giant bonfire.

I fumbled for a cigarette. She does not know where you live. Let the telephone ring. Better yet, turn off the ringer and the answering machine and crawl into bed. Pretend you never met her.

I paced: kitchen, living room, bedroom; bedroom, living room, kitchen. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. I finally did what I told myself I must. I turned off the ringer and the machine. I stripped to my boxer shorts and got into bed. My heart thumped against my ribs like a pneumatic jackhammer. I stared unblinking at the ceiling and tried to steer my imagination away from a combustible mix of sexual fantasy and racial paranoia.

I thought of the night my mother called me and told me she was worried about my brother. He had broken up with his girlfriend. He sounded depressed. She was sure he’d be fine in time—maybe they’d even work it out, get back together—but that night, she told me, it might help if he heard my voice. She had told him I was moving to New York, and he said he hadn’t even known. We hadn’t talked in months; we were brothers in our early twenties, living on opposite ends of a vast country and we had better things to do.

I hung up the phone and thought, yeah, I’ll call him—but later in the week. I’d arrived in New York that very day and hadn’t seen L. in months. We were finally back together, and I was intent on cherishing her. My silly kid brother and his silly love life would wait. After I took a few days to get settled, I’d call and get the news.

As it turned out, he couldn’t wait, and I got the news from my father the next afternoon. Late the previous night, deep inside a fugue of self-pity, fueled by a bottle of scotch, my brother had put a hunting rifle to his temple and shot a hole through his brain.

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