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gifts, are they given or received? Are they exchanged during the trip or because he’s young? If there is a time of gifts, when does it stop? Why?”
    Now, wet, dirty and hungry under an overpass, Andrew asks Richard, “So, what do you have to eat?”
    â€œPepperoni sticks,” comes the dreaded reply.
    Stomach growling, head adrift on multiple breezes, he contemplates asking Richard whether motorbikes still have tuned exhaust. One of his later undergraduate essays, those private dances, compared someone’s evolutionary, revisionist poetics to the harmonically tunedexhaust systems of older motorcycles. Grossly inefficient port-engines, such as those on motorcycles or snowmobiles, routinely lose as much as one-third of their fuel as uncombusted exhaust. Knowing that the belched gas exits the exhaust pipes in a series of waves, motorcycle engineers replaced cylindrical exhaust pipes with conical ones to create an internal vacuum. Waves of unignited gas would then leave the combustion ports like swimmers, and some kick-turned off an inverted centre-point to swim back up the pipe and return for one more chance at explosion. Instead of asking, though, he simply stares down at the still cough pipe, the cold gun barrel, the exposed bone.
    High, he also sees through the grey air and his damp panniers to one of Betty’s Turkish postcards.
    Dalyan, Turkey
    Christian/Islam. Greece/Turkey. Fresh water/salt. Arrived from Greece and am so glad to leave the sandy nipple tourism behind. Much more polite here. On the little van-buses whipping around a city, you board and the driver takes off, entirely confident that you’ll hand up your fare and others will hand back the change.
    Went to an island’s turtle beach today. Not the right time to see them, but the island’s their breeding ground. Darwin started with turtles on islands. You?
    Not in a shell,
    You fucking bet.

20
    If Betty arrived at all that Sunday, after their Friday kiss and weekend emails, she would be arriving with one knapsack, not a moving van, and he wanted her to have the (promised) option of her own bed. He’d give her his room, as it was the cleanest, the most recently painted and the only room that didn’t, he suddenly saw, look like part of a 1970s museum exhibit. Okay, yes, she’d get his room, but which bed? His own mattress was fine, but Stan’s was speckled with pee stains. Another motive to give her his room was seduction by immersion, as if her spending time in a room thick with layers of Andrewness would make her more likely to cross the hall and seek him out. And then what? If she crossed the hall to find him in Stan’s old room, the sheets of that bed would be more likely to get pulled off. He’d have to double-sheet Stan’s bed.
    Breaking down Stan’s bed for this long night’s shell and pee game of beds and rooms, he suddenly saw the dinginess of Stan’s room. Stains ran through the worn carpet in broad channels and bore down in concentrated circles. A thick vinyl blind sat slack-jawed in a dirty window. The paint appeared to be quilted with dull patches.
    His list for yet another trip to the hardware store kept growing.
Paint, 2 gal
. Turquoise? A wheaty green?
Flooring: laminate? laminating? Curtains. Curtain rod
. Normally he was aware of the cost of buying drinks for women, yet here he was dropping hundreds on reno supplies he’d be hard-pressed to find time to use. T minus thirty-two hours until her possible arrival.
    Through his roles as both ex-nurse and a student who grew up in a university town, he already knew that no drug creates energy. Drugs simply spend energy the body has tried to keep in savings. Caffeine unlocks banked sugars. Pot, for him, for now, retreats from his body with an insomnious flame. But to really keep the home fires burning, to borrow time, he needed to climb a toadstool. None of the renovation books he had taken out of the library, and none of