Gregory was startled from a doze by Dennis’s premature return. His bike had skidded in the snow and dumped him in a puddle, soaking his delivery backpack. The weed was safe in airtight cases, but some of his trademark red velveteen bags had to be swapped. Dennis was flustered and rushing; he needed to finish his deliveries in time to report to the vegan kitchen where he worked at night. On weekends, he had a third job, sorting books that had been donated to the public library. In the year since they’d finished their MFAs, Dennis had grown scrawny and frantic, gnawed at by student debt. He had time to write poetry only in the wee hours after the restaurant closed. Gregory sometimes heard him pacing their common area in darkness, occasionally activating his phone flashlight to scribble a line.
“I’ll deliver to Athena,” Gregory said.
Dennis appeared in the doorway looking astonished; Gregory hadn’t left the apartment in over two months. “Seriously?” Dennis said. “You’ll be saving my ass.”
Gregory wanted to save his friend’s ass, but what had prompted his ambitious offer was a sudden, tidal urge to see their former teacher. It wasn’t sexual. He was too drained even to fantasize, and had heard an unsettling rumor （which he’d not repeated to Dennis） that Athena had once been male. His craving to see her had more to do with the fact that those two years of graduate school, of writing workshops and literature classes, had been the happiest of his life. He’d hauled boxes for a moving company, read two books a week, and begun the novel that Athena and some others, too, had liked. Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.
“You’ll give her a shock,” Dennis said. “She asked about you and I filled her in. Hope that’s okay.”
“Athena asked?”
“Babe, everyone asks,” Dennis said, which of course was true. It had gotten around who Gregory’s father was, although he never mentioned the connection. “She wanted to know if you were writing.”
“What did you say?”
“Said I didn’t know. Are you?” He sounded dubious.
Gregory had stopped writing on the day he learned of his father’s diagnosis. What began as an interruption had hardened, in the eight months since, into renunciation. He doubted he would ever resume. Still, he pretended sometimes that he was the omniscient narrator of the scenes he witnessed through the windows across the street: a novel about the secret lives of adjacent New Yorkers. He’d titled it Contiguous.
“I’m writing in my head,” he said.
Dennis laughed. “Don’t try that on Athena.”
Gregory extracted himself from his waterbed and wavered beside it, acclimatizing himself to verticality. In the bathroom he steadied himself on the sink to brush his teeth and splash cold water in his face. He’d showered that morning with the help of a “shower chair” Dennis had bought at a medical supply shop and assembled （having told Gregory, “You stink, babe”）。 In the mirror, Gregory appeared more or less normal, he thought: a tall, formerly athletic （now slightly gaunt）， ethnically ambiguous male in dire need of a haircut. Gregory had the Affinity Charm, according to his father, which was a fancy way of saying he’d been taken for Greek, Latino, Italian, Native American, Jewish, Asian, and Middle Eastern, as well as Black and white, depending on some alchemy of perceiver and context. But it wasn’t alchemy, his father always insisted—it could be predicted with algorithms created by Miranda Kline, an anthropologist he invoked with annoying frequency in what had turned out to be the final years of his life. Even Richard got sick of hearing about her （Gregory could tell, although Richard wouldn’t say it）。 It was as if Kline were a departed relative their father wanted them to honor. One fact about her did interest Gregory, unrelated to her theories: Kline had successfully eluded ten years ago, in the mid-2020s, back when eluding was new. She had never been found.