© 2010 Adam Moorad of Brooklyn, NY

This is a work fiction. Any and all similarity to

real persons or events is entirely coincidental.
Perhaps you are a bit full of yourself?

The buffalo sketch on the following page is the

work of Christy Call. This novella was edited
with LibreOffice and designed with Scribus and
Gimp. The following typefaces appear: Optima,
Capsa, and Stencil Export.

notapunkrockpress.com/am
 chapters page
One 4
Two 13
Three 23
Four 27
Five 50
Six 54
Seven 66
Eight 73
Nine 77
Ten 79
Eleven 88
Twelve 92
Thirteen 94
Fourteen 98
Fifteen 101
Sixteen 106
Seventeen 109
Eighteen 113
Nineteen 123
Twenty 132
Twenty-One 140
Twenty-Two 155
Twenty-Three 157
et cetera
About Adam 166
Credits 167
Purchasing Information 168

3
 One
“It must be the southern air,” Amy says when
Lamb tells her everything is dead.
She stands on the balcony holding a cereal
bowl of water. The bowl looks heavy. She holds
it with her hands. Looks uncomfortable. Since
Amy’s grandmother died, she has spent more
time watering plants. Lamb looks at the plants.
Stares. Amy’s grandmother was a gardener,
apparently. She had a large garden with every
imaginable species: tulips, daffodils, roses.
Colors and fragrances. Amy’s plants are brown
and moldy. Dried-out. Lifeless. She is not a
gardener. She will never be the woman her
grandmother once was. She knows this and has
said so. She waters the plants anyways. Humidity
forms sweat across her hair line.
“What?” Amy says without looking up.
“Nothing,” Lamb says. He rolls up the
sleeves of his Jay Reatard t-shirt. Reclines in his
lounge chair. Perspiration saturates the cotton
beneath his nipples. He yawns. Amy’s radio is on
his lap. He plays with it. Tries to make it work.
Looks at Amy. Rubs his eyes. Looks down at the
alley. Chews his cuticle. There are lines and lines
of balconies belonging to people he doesn’t
know. Neighbors, he thinks. He admires their
plants, wind chimes, and Webber grills. Lamb
wishes he had a Webber grill. He feels
inadequate not owning one. He sets the radio
down. He will buy a Webber grill. He will grill
things. He will invite neighbors over and they
will grill things together.
A door opens and closes behind him.
Donny is in the kitchen.
“Donny,” Lamb says. Opting for a minimal
greeting, he turns in his chair and looks inside.
Donny sees Lamb and says, “Did you get a
haircut?”
“Rita,” Lamb says and nods, “The
Dominican.” He runs his fingers across his scalp
several times. He points at Amy holding a cereal
bowl full of water. Water drizzles off the bottom
of the bowl and splashes on the floor. It pools
around a smashed cigarette butt. The butt begins
to float. Lamb watches it. The butt is a cigarette
boat. The boat runs drugs from Dominica to the
Florida Keys. Heroin. Cocaine. Marijuana. The
Coast Guard will never catch this boat. Rita the
Hairdresser’s relatives own and operate this boat.
Donny walks up to Amy and takes her cereal
bowl away.

5
 Oikos
“What?” Amy says. She wipes her hands
against her chest, moving them up and down the
sides of her breasts. She contorts her face. Blinks.
Makes an exhausted expression. Blinks again.
“Like this,” Donny says. He angles the bowl
over a pot of dead something. He spills. Water
splashes onto the floor and his feet. The balcony
is cramped with the three of them and they all
get wet. The cigarette boat capsizes. Rita’s
relatives drown. Others will replace them.
“Like that, huh?” Amy says. She laughs. She
looks at Lamb. Lamb does not move.
“Did anyone check the mail today?” Donny
says. “I’m waiting for something to come.”
“What something?” Lamb says.
“Something,” Donny says.
“Who from?” Amy says.
“That something would be my, like,
allowance,” Donny says. “And the who would
be from, um, my Uncle Sam. I guess.”
Donny doesn’t say anything for a while then
says, “I don’t know.”
 Amy laughs. “Are you on welfare?”
Lamb is listening. He wishes he was on
welfare. He wishes he had a real Uncle Sam
somewhere sending him a monthly allowance. If
this Uncle Sam passed away, he would leave
Lamb a large inheritance. Lamb could live
comfortably for the rest of his days on earth. He
smiles.
“It’s called unemployment,” Donny says.
Almost proudly. He stops. He looks around,
appearing vaguely disappointed in himself.
“Didn’t you have a job interview today?”
Lamb says. “Or something.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Donny says. He
massages his shoulder blade. Makes a strange
face. Sighs. His expression conveys the fact that
life is not fair.
“I wish I was unemployed,” Amy says.
“No, you don’t,” Donny says.
“Yeah, you don’t,” Lamb says. “You
wouldn’t have any money to feed me with.”
Amy glares at Lamb. Giggles through a
mask of irritation. She is under the impression
7
 Adam Moorad
that no matter what tone Lamb takes with her, he
is only joking. Lamb knows this and is annoyed.
He is always annoyed. He thinks, I am never not
annoyed with everything.
“That’s right,” Amy says. “You would starve
to death without me.” She carries out the word
starve. She smiles. “Starve” feels good on her
tongue.
“Enough,” Donny says. “Please reserve
these public displays of affection for a time when
I’m not present.”
“You’re a hillbilly,” Lamb says to Amy. He
makes a serious face. Looks at Donny. Donny
laughs. Amy looks at Donny then looks at Lamb
looking at Donny. She thinks Lamb enjoys
Donny’s company more than hers. She is
jealous. Lamb winks at Amy. Playfully. He
wishes he hadn’t felt the urge to wink. He is
annoyed himself.
“I never get a break from either of you,”
Amy says. “Boys suck. And stink.”
“Are you drunk?” Donny says. Lamb laughs.
“No. I haven’t drunk a single drop since the
funeral,” she says. “I mean, drank.” A reverential
expression spreads across her face. She is
reverent. She wants to be her grandmother. She
will try to become her grandmother. She will
attempt to carry her grandmother’s torch through
life’s dark cavern. Lamb believes in her eventual
failure as much as she believes in the torch.
“What’s for dinner?” Lamb says. Amy
doesn’t respond. She walks into the kitchen.
Donny follows her inside. She begins rinsing the
cereal bowl.
“What happened to your grandmother?”
Donny says.
“I don’t know,” Amy says. “Old age.”
“Everyone gets old,” Donny says.
“You’re already old,” Lamb says from the
balcony. He pauses. Feels obligated to say
something else.
He says, “Just kidding.”
Lamb wishes he didn’t say some of the
things he feels compelled to say. He doesn’t
understand his compulsions. He runs his fingers
through his hair several times. Bits of hair stick to
his fingers. He wonders if he is losing his hair.
His grandfather was bald. Lamb wonders if he is
genetically predisposed to baldness. He wonders
9
 Chapter One
how Amy is genetically predisposed. Everyone
gets old echoes inside him like a tolling bell.
Lamb feels young and old at the same time. He
closes his eyes.
Amy towels off the cereal bowl and places it
in the cabinet above the stove. She looks
beneath the sink. Checks the level of the waist
bin. Sits down at the kitchen table and picks
through the mail beside a goldfish bowl.
“I think you should be the one in charge of
the dishes and the trash,” Amy says to Donny.
“While you have all this free time.” She giggles.
Lamb is annoyed. Amy looks at the fish
bowl. A goldfish stares at her. She says
something to the fish that Lamb cannot hear. She
looks away. She pages though a department store
catalogue. She sees a family in matching flannel
shirts waving from a pontoon boat.
“Shut up,” Donny says. He walks to the
front door of the apartment. Looks through the
peephole. Opens the peephole. Closes it then
opens it again. He leaves it open.
“I wish I would get fired,” Amy says. “I hate
my job.”
“Me too,” Lamb says from the balcony. Less
annoyed. Still annoyed. He looks around. Smells
the air. Wants a grill. Needs a grill.
“I bet you think because I’m unemployed I
don’t do a goddamn thing all day,” Donny says.
His voice is loud and echoes against the walls of
the apartment. Louder than intended. He feels
embarrassed.
“Sheesh,” Amy says. “Guess I hit a raw
nerve!”
“Don’t listen to her,” Lamb says. “She’s
drunk.”
“Shut your mouth or you’ll starve,” Amy
says to Lamb. Starve. She wonders what to cook
for dinner. Wonders what her grandmother
would cook. Her grandmother could whip
together a five-course meal in twenty minutes.
From scratch. For a house-full of people. Lamb
looks at Amy from his chair. He smirks then
smiles.
“You’re an alcoholic Martha Stewart,”
Donny says to Amy.
“Thank you,” Amy says. She opens the
refrigerator. Looks inside.
“What’s for dinner?” Lamb says. He fans his
11
face as he enters the kitchen.
“Ask Martha,” Donny says.
“Martha who?” Lamb says.
“Martha,” Donny says.
“Martha who?” Lamb says.
“Never mind,” Donny says.
“What are you talking about?” Lamb says.
He feels temporarily deprived of information but
after a moment he no longer cares.
Donny looks at Amy and Amy looks at
Lamb.
“He said never mind,” she says. She shuts
the refrigerator.
“I’m starving to death,” Lamb says.
“Good,” Amy says.
“My body is eating my body,” Lamb says.
“We’ll order something,” she says. She
looks around. There is a long silence. She says,
“Dominos or Pizza Hut?”
 Two
The delivery boy takes an hour and no one is
hungry anymore. Amy excavates wet pepperonis
from the cold, congealed cheese. She stares at
her fish bowl. Donny and Lamb smoke on the
balcony. They take turns throwing the old butts
through the holes in the railing and into the
alley. The neighbor downstairs begins coughing.
Lamb and Donny can hear him from where they
sit. They hear him cough and spit.
Lamb looks at Donny. “The neighbor has
emphysema.”
“Sounds like it,” Donny says. The neighbor
coughs again then stops. Donny thinks. He
doesn’t know what to say. He says, “The days
are getting longer.”
Lamb looks at the sky. He feels more tired
than annoyed. There are several orange clouds.
They look like dolphins. What atmospheric
variance formed the clouds? It must be the
southern air. One time in Florida, there were
palm trees, sand, a dolphin in the ocean he
thought was a shark. Do the clouds above him
look more like dolphins or sharks? He looks
upward. The clouds have already shifted shapes.
Now they look like stingrays.
 Oikos
Lamb’s phone rings. He takes it out of his
pocket and looks at it. He doesn’t recognize the
number and wonders what to do. Answers after
four rings. Donny goes inside. Looks at the pizza.
Says something to Amy.
“Hello?” Lamb says. He wipes ash from his
fingers onto his shorts.
Silence. Then, “It’s good to hear your
voice.”
Lamb thinks a moment. Looks at the hair on
his legs. Breathes in. Exhales. He says, “Hello,
Dad.”
“I was beginning to think you’ve been
avoiding my calls. I’ve been trying to get a hold
of you for a while. I wanted to see how you’re
doing.”
His voice is low. More alien than human.
Lamb thinks, Inhuman .
“Everything’s, um, good.” Lamb looks at the
sky. The dolphins have returned, but are smaller
and pink. “What about you?” he says.
Lamb’s father doesn’t hear. Doesn’t listen.
He says, “So how have you been? We haven’t
talked in a while.”
 “I know,” Lamb says. “I know.” He doesn’t
know. He doesn’t know why he says I know. He
wants to know why he says he knows something
when he doesn’t know anything. He chews the
inside of his lip. Spits. His saliva hits the railing,
dangles for three seconds, and falls into the alley.
“You’re your average prodigal son—”
“Okay, Dad,” Lamb says. “Okay.” There is a
short silence. Lamb tries to picture his father. He
sees palm trees. Sand. He cannot see his father.
“So what can I do for you?”
“I think it was Luke. Or was it Mathew? It’s
been a while since I’ve read the Bible.” He
pauses for a moment. Clears his throat. “I’m
certain. I’m certain it was Luke.”
Lamb can hear his father swallow. Lamb
swallows. He holds the phone between his chin
and his shoulder. Amy walks onto the balcony
and looks at him.
“Who are you talking to?” she whispers. She
is holding a pepperoni in her hand. She takes a
bite. Lamb shoos her, mouths indecipherably,
glares at her with his face twisted in mock agony.
She rolls her eyes as if to tell him he’s
overreacting and walks away.

15
 Adam Moorad
“Yeah, Dad,” Lamb says. “I think it was
Luke too. In the New Testament.”
“Yes. The New Testament, that’s right.”
There is silence for five seconds. Lamb
mentally sees sharks fighting dolphins off the
Florida Coast. Stingrays come aid the dolphins
like a cavalry or something. The sharks retreat.
The dolphins-stingray alliance is victorious and
celebrates by headbutting each other.
“Hello?” Lamb says. No response. He looks
at his phone. The call has been lost. He stands
there for several minutes. Thinks about calling
his father back. His father will call back if he
wants. He puts his phone into his pocket. Looks
at the sky. No dolphins. No stingrays. He can
still smell cigarette smoke floating in the air
around him. He walks through the apartment to
the kitchen sink, not wanting to touch anything
before washing the ash from his fingers. The sink
is full of dishes. Amy reaches across him for a
bottle of fish food.
“Who was that?” she wants to know.
“The Reverend,” Lamb says.
Lamb’s father was a pastor at a Baptist
church in the suburbs before Lamb was born. He
remembers thinking this was good when he was
younger. He recalls believing that he was
obligated to be happy that his father did good
things once upon a time before Lamb was
around to see or old enough to remember. All he
had was the vague impression he was never old
enough to know or think otherwise about his
father. Lamb only saw his father give a sermon
once. It was a cold Sunday in January during
high school. It was about Job. There was talk of
boils and death. Lamb walked out of the
sanctuary in the middle of a hymn. Walked to
the bathroom. Washed his hands. Scrubbed them
furiously. Looked at himself in the mirror for
thirty minutes and never returned to the
sanctuary.
“Who’s the Reverend?” Donny says.
“My Dad,” Lamb says. He turns off the sink
nozzle. Wipes his hands on his t-shirt. Walks
across the apartment and sits down in front of the
television beside Donny.
“Your father’s a goddamn reverend?” Donny
says. “Weird.”
“Was,” Lamb says. He clenches his teeth
tightly, flexing his jaw muscles beneath his
whiskered skin. He adjusts the fan humming on
the coffee table so it blows directly at him.
17
 Chapter Two
Donny is holding a pizza crust. His fingers
look slimy.
“We eat like shit,” Lamb says.
“I know,” Donny says. “I’m surprised we
don’t have scurvy yet.”
“Your teeth are going to fall out of your
mouth,” Lamb says.
“Yours too,” Donny says.
“I feel sick,” Lamb says.
“Do you need to go to the hospital?” Donny
says. “If there was any gas in my car, I could take
you.”
“An ambulance would be faster,” Lamb
says.
“An ambulance would be better,” Donny
says.
They stare at the television without
speaking. Lamb thinks about his father and
wonders what to do. He tries to remember the
last time he saw him. Tries to recall what his
father looked like. Arms folded. Legs crossed.
Lamb yawns and wipes sweat from his forehead.
The southern air. He yawns again. He can’t stop
yawning.
“My ovaries hurt,” Amy says. She presses
her hands against her hips. Lamb looks at her.
Donny keeps his eyes on the television screen.
Leonardo DiCaprio is running through the
woods. He stops and says something in a
pseudo-English accent.
“They always hurt you,” Lamb says.
Amy walks to the couch and jealously sits
between them.
“What day is it today?” she asks.
“Tuesday,” Donny and Lamb say in unison.
“It feels like a Thursday,” Amy says. Picks a
scab on her ankle. Bats her eyelashes at the
television.
Donny and Lamb do not respond. They
watch Leonardo DiCaprio. He is crawling across
a forest floor. There are palm trees. Sand. He is
in the tropics. He hides behind a tree and peers
behind him carefully. Beads of perspiration form
along his hair line. His eyes are wide. He
appears frightened.

19
 “I think I’m going to stop my birth control,”
Amy says.
“Please,” Donny says. “Too much
information.”
“Yeah,” Lamb says. “Too much
information.” He looks at her, smiles
embarrassedly.
Amy runs her fingers through Lamb’s hair
several times.
“That Hispanic woman sure knows how to
cut hair,” she says.
“Rita?” Lamb says. “She’s Dominican.”
They watch a television commercial for an
extra value meal. A commercial for
pharmaceutical medication. A commercial for
cellular telephone service. He takes his cell
phone from his pocket and looks at it even
though he knows no one has called him. He
opens it and closes it. He opens it again. Almost
drops it on the floor. He sets it down on the
coffee table beside the fan. His hand shakes as
he wipes his forehead. He sits watching
television. Waiting. Wanting to scream. He looks
at Amy. She is chewing her fingernails. Lamb
adjusts the fan again. Leans backward. He feels
nothing. He moves the fan again. Nothing. After
a while, Leonardo DiCaprio reappears on the
screen. Now, he is on the phone telling someone
that something is seriously wrong. Nothing is as
it seems. Bad things are about to happen to many
different people.
Lamb leaves Donny and Amy on the couch
and walks into the bathroom. He shuts the door
and looks at himself in the mirror. He runs the
water in the shower and stares at his reflection.
He looks at his hairline. He will be bald soon.
Steam fills the bathroom. It begins to condense
on the mirror, slowly erasing his reflection.
When the steam disperses, he will be his
grandfather. His life will be close to over.
Everyone gets old. Lamb takes off all his clothes.
He looks down at his body and waits for his skin
to soften and sag. Nothing. He waits for his
pubic hair to turn gray and fall out. Nothing. But
it will happen , he thinks. Nothing can be done to
prevent this.
He steps into the shower. Adjusts the faucet
and closes his eyes. Leonardo DiCaprio is
eluding Dominican drug runners on a tropical
forest floor. Palm trees. Sand. He is somewhere
secluded. He is a young man. He has hair. He
will never grow old. Rita should cut Leonardo
DiCaprio’s hair because she knows how.

21
 Oikos
He opens his eyes and watches the water
brush against his skin then fall into the basin of
the bath. He leans against the shower wall. He
rests his forehead against his forearm. He does
not move for a very long time.
 Three
All the lights in the apartment are off. The
television is on. Its soft light emanates throughout
the room. Lamb walks through the kitchen. Hair
wet. Cold. Dripping. He digs through the sink for
a clean cup. Amy walks out of the bedroom and
sits at the kitchen table. Lamb tightens the towel
around his waist. Shivers. He can barely make
out the contours of her face.
“I wish we had a dishwasher,” Lamb says.
“You didn’t wash any of these, did you?”
“No,” she says.
“None of them?” Lamb says. He holds a cup
up to his eyes.
“Just rinse it out,” she says.
“Okay,” Lamb says. He runs the cup under
the faucet. Amy watches. He fills it. Drinks.
Finishes. Looks at Amy. Asks her if she’s ready to
go to bed. Amy yawns. She walks to the
bedroom without saying anything.
Lamb thinks about cleaning some of the
dishes in the sink. He should. He should be more
productive. Minor chores will teach him to work
 Adam Moorad
hard. This will enhance his life. Make him a
stronger, harder working person. He stands in the
kitchen for sixty seconds wondering what to do.
He sets the cup gently on top of the other dishes
and turns off the television. He walks into the
bedroom. Amy’s naked body is resting on a pool
of white sheets. Lamb closes the door quietly.
Stands at the foot of the bed staring at Amy, lying
awkwardly on her side. Her eyes are closed.
“I’m tired,” Lamb says as he circles the bed.
He hangs his towel on a hook beside the
bookshelf. Turns on the air conditioner. Lets the
cool air drift across his skin for several seconds
before crawling into the sheets.
He puts pillows on both sides of his body.
Hides between them. There are people talking
on the sidewalk outside. There are cars and
buses passing. Lamb pictures these people. They
are living exciting lives, driving cars and bus-
riding to places where exciting things happen.
Lamb wonders about these places. He thinks he
would go to them if he was aware of their
locations. Amy curls herself beneath the sheets.
A dog barks. People talk. Laugh. Their voices are
muted by the groan of the air conditioner.
“Are you happy?” Amy says, softly. Her
voice sounds hoarse against the empty, late-night
whirring hum of the neighborhood.
 “Miserable,” Lamb says, sarcastically to
silence. He makes himself snicker through his
nostrils. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t want
to know why. He reaches out. Touches Amy
beneath the sheets. She jumps a little when she
feels his hands on her skin. Moist against his
fingertips. He looks for her face. His vision is
blank.
“I mean it,” she says, from somewhere. “Tell
me if you’re not.” Hoarse. Someone says
something from the street outside. Laughter.
Silence.
“I know,” Lamb says. “I would.”
The city hums, then chokes. Lamb stares at
the ceiling. Eyes rolling over the hollow drywall.
“Mmmm,” Amy says. Lamb pictures Amy’s
face smiling jealously. Neither of them speak for
several minutes. Lamb listens for signs of Amy’s
breathing. An engine. Tires. The air conditioner.
Nothing human.
“I’m going to pass out now,” he says softly,
rolling away from Amy.
“Okay,” she says, whispering. Weak.
“Goodnight,” Lamb says.
25
 Chapter Three
She lies awkwardly on her side. Lamb is still
awake when she falls asleep, watching the
streetlights paint vague shadows across the
ceiling.
 Four
Ready to explode, roadside bombs line the
highway. The radio says so to Lamb. He touches
the volume and thinks about roadside bombs.
Feels distantly alarmed and has the urge to
explode. He wishes he had a more volcanic
personality. He is driving home from work. There
is traffic. Lines on the highway. He observes the
world in a blur. A cow. A steeple. Every other
mile. Another cow. Another steeple. In the sky,
an airplane. The radio says something about
airplanes. Airplanes have crashed. Will crash.
Are crashing. Lamb looks back at the road. An
exit ramp. A flag. Telephone wire. Another cow.
He wishes buffalo still dominated North
America. He thinks this would be good for North
America. For the environment, for everything. He
closes his eyes. Keeps his foot on the gas pedal,
hands on the wheel. Pistons grind under the
hood. He wonders what the road looks like in
front of him. Will he crash? Will he explode? Are
there bombs along the road ahead? He feels
paranoid and alone and attempts to envision
someone he can recognize. He pictures his older
brother, Michael. Michael is riding on the back
of a buffalo. The buffalo looks cool and serene.
Michael looks happy riding the buffalo. Lamb
wants coolness and serenity. Like a buffalo.
Opens his eyes: the highway, lines on the
highway, an American flag, telephone wire,
another cow, and no buffalo.
Lamb wonders why he works. He thinks
about the word “career” and says it out loud
twice. Feels a strange sense of happiness and
sadness. Happy to not be at work. Sad to be
coming from work. The voice on the radio says
something indecipherable. Sunlight pours
through the windshield and touches his skin. He
looks at his arms. They are too white. Lamb feels
malnourished and unattractive from a life spent
indoors. Working. He doesn’t have enough time
to be outdoors. This is counter-evolutionary.
He’s failing to evolve because of his job
requirements. He considers buying a
membership to a tanning salon. Imagines the
smell of lotion and pictures himself in a Speedo
on a tanning bed. He doesn’t understand why.
He looks at his arms. Sees freckles. Hairs. A
fading birthmark. Feels confused. Imagines
purple ultraviolet bulbs baking his skin. Baking
the organs beneath his skin. He thinks about the
damage caused by ultraviolet radiation. About
developing skin cancer on his arms. He wonders
if his arms would have to be amputated.
Wonders if society would shun him if he were to
ever find himself armless. Lamb pulls onto an
exit ramp. He looks around. The sky, an
airplane, another cow, another steeple. Another.
 Lamb remembers riding to church on his
father’s wedding day. His older brother drove.
Lamb tries to remember how much older. He
can’t. He remembers his father telling him that it
was a special day for their family. Lamb said he
was glad for his father. Michael was silent. His
father said something about their mother looking
down from heaven. The memory metastasizes in
Lamb’s brain.
“How do you know?” Lamb asked his
father.
“I know,” his father said. “She would want
me to be happy.”
Lamb had asked his father the question
weeks before, in their garage. His father said,
“Do you ever think about how you will feel
when you’re my age?” Lamb felt a strange
sensation. He cleared his throat. Pretended to
cough. He never felt comfortable alone with his
father. He shrugged his shoulders. Said he did.
Lamb’s father turned around. Moved a paint can
from one shelf to another. Stared at the shelf.
Closed his eyes.
“Well. People feel tired sometimes,” he
said. Lamb’s father turned around. Looked at
Lamb. Lamb did not move. His father yawned,
looked at the Webber grill in the corner of the
29
 Oikos
garage. Yawned again. Looked at a chainsaw
hanging beside a dormant refrigerator. Smiled
half-heartedly. His father thought everything
made sense.
At the Easter wedding, Lamb’s outfit
matched his brother’s. A black tuxedo. Yellow
bow-tie. Yellow cummerbund. They always
matched. Several years later, Lamb still had the
tuxedo. He kept it in his closet with the rest of
his dress clothes. When Lamb moved in with
Amy, he took the tuxedo to a secondhand store
for twenty-five dollars. Spent it somewhere.
The new wife, Cynthia, was frail with a
vague, waterlogged beauty. She taught Sunday
School. After Lamb went to college, his father
was alone. Cynthia would come over during the
holidays. Bake pies. Apple. Pumpkin. Key lime.
Every holiday. Another pie. One Christmas Eve,
Cynthia drank too much eggnog and fell out of
her chair at the dinner table. She laughed and
didn’t seem embarrassed. Lamb thought she
looked at home on a floor, laughing. Lamb knelt
down to help her up.
“Did your mother like to drink eggnog?”
Cynthia asked.
“I don’t know,” Lamb said. Michael looked
on, not speaking. He never said anything. Lamb’s
father folded his arms. Looked around. Looked
tired.
Lamb never knew his mother. She died
before he was born – technically – at thirty-one,
at the Baptist hospital downtown. Induced
childbirth. There was a car accident. Lamb
arrived ahead of schedule. His whole life is lived
ahead of schedule. He wishes he had memories
of his mother’s life. Sometimes he closes his eyes
and pictures what it was like in the womb, inside
her. Tangled in umbilical miasma. A zygote.
Blind. Eating what she ate. Feeling what she felt.
Sleeping. Dreaming.

31
 Adam Moorad
Lamb pulls into the parking lot of his apartment
building, turns off the ignition. The pistons stop.
For fifteen minutes he sits behind the wheel, not
wanting to move. He looks at his building.
Bricks. Balconies. Telephone wires. Home. He
wonders if Amy and Donny are inside. Lamb
thinks about the word “home.” He says it out
loud, looks at his arms, feels weak. Rubs his
hands together furiously. The friction in his
fingertips makes him nauseous. “Home,” he
repeats. He wishes he were happier. Wonders
what happy people do to feel happy. He thinks:
his mother looking down from heaven, Michael
riding a buffalo, ultraviolet radiation, burning, a
grazing cow, a steeple, pointing, a waving flag,
asking his father the questions, his father
disappearing, exhaustion, the roadside, the
bombs, a bow-tie and a speedo, a dreaming
zygote.
Inside the apartment, Donny is
unemployed, playing video games in his boxer
shorts. He has no career. Lamb envisions his
own career. Donny nods in his glasses. Lamb
nods back, moves through the apartment, steps
out on the balcony. Looks at Amy’s dying plants.
The dried leaves look tired. He feels tired. He
walks into his bedroom to change. Sees himself
in the mirror. He stares. Feels skinny. Tells
himself he will do a better job of feeding himself.
He will become stronger, happier, better
nourished, and more attractive.
“Your father called,” Donny says. “He
wants you to come over for dinner sometime.”
“That’s all he said?” Lamb says. He
imagines his father thinking about him. Calling
him. Wanting to see him. Asking Donny to take a
message for him. Lamb pictures his father as a
preacher a long time ago. His father was a
revered man in the community. Lamb pictures
his father sitting across a dinner table from him,
arms folded, condemnatory, and Lamb not
wanting to be alone with his father or with
anyone.
“I think,” Donny says. “He sounded sad. I
felt sorry for him.”
“Do you want to come with?” Lamb says.
“When I go?”
Donny looks at the television. His face. Red.
Sweaty. He throws the video game controller
against a couch cushion. He says, “Goddammit.”
He leans backward. Folds his hands behind his
head. Looks at the television. At the controller.
Shakes his head.
“I don’t know,” Donny says. “I don’t really
have the money for eating right now.”
33
 Chapter Four
“You don’t need any,” Lamb says. “My Dad
will feed us.”
Lamb looks at Donny. Sits. Looks at the
television. An alien dances across the screen. Its
arms and jaws dangle in a computerized wind.
Its mouth and claws are laced with the blood of
something. Everything moves in slow motion.
“I’m intimidated by church people,” Donny
says. “They make me nervous.” He snatches the
video game controller from the cushion. Restarts
the game. Lamb watches. Laughs.
“You’re always nervous,” Lamb says.
“Besides, he isn’t a preacher anymore.”
“You’re always nervous,” Donny says. His
eyes are glued to the television. With a sword he
engages an alien from another dimension on a
yellow brick road. Tries to save a princess from a
burning battleship in a far-off galaxy. From a car
accident. From ultraviolet radiation. From
cancer. From armlessness.
Lamb looks around the apartment. He
doesn’t know what to do. He cannot get
comfortable. He looks at Donny, then at the
television. Donny walks up a road, bombs
exploding in far away places. Lamb watches the
explosions from the safety of the sofa. They
combust on another side of the world. There are
yellow flames. The sun is out. The sky is blue.
Things are on fire. Lamb imagines he’s on fire.
Drowning in flames, death imminent. Amy’s
plants are already dead. His mother is patiently
looking down from heaven. Lamb is an excited
tiny zygote.
Something is about to happen.
Donny says, “Maybe next time.”
“Suit yourself,” Lamb says.
“I need to get a job,” Donny says.
“Where’s Amy?” Lamb says.
“I don’t know,” Donny says.
“What are we supposed to do for dinner?”
Lamb says. “Tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Donny says. “I don’t have
any money.”
“You don’t need money,” Lamb says.
“I don’t know,” Donny says. “Are you going
to call your Dad?”

35
 “Maybe,” Lamb says.
“What’s the difference between a preacher
and a pastor?” Donny wonders.
“I don’t know,” Lamb says. He leans
backward, crosses his legs, tries to maneuver his
spine in a posture-supporting position. Looks at
his fingernails. Smells the apartment. The paint
and drywall and stagnancy of bottled air. Air
particles bouncing against one another
throughout the room. Against the floor. The
ceiling. The television. Wanting to be released.
Static crackles across the screen. The particles
brush against Lamb’s skin.
“Let’s go to that Mexican place,” he says.
He closes his eyes. His body is in his apartment,
feeling torn and calm. Split like a piece of
firewood. It is the seventeenth century. Lamb,
bearded, chops firewood. Buffalo roam the
continent freely. He lives in a frontier log cabin
with ten children. His wife has scarlet fever. He
is chopping wood in the snow. His children
watch him, his beard, the wood, the axe. He
chops and chops until his hands blister and
burst. The cold burns his skin. The axe handle is
a bone, an extension of Lamb’s own body. His
body stays one place, his mind another.
“Mexican food sucks,” Donny says.
 “Then we should get sushi,” Lamb says.
Amy opens the door and walks into the
apartment. She drops her keys on the kitchen
table. Her face is tired.
“Welcome home,” Donny says. “Sushi
sucks more.”
Amy looks around. Confused. “What?”
“Your boyfriend wants to take me on a
date,” Donny says. “Are you jealous?” He looks
at the television screen. Frowns. Says, “Not
again, goddammit.”
Amy looks at Lamb, annoyed. “I wouldn’t
be if he ever took me anyplace.”
Lamb shrugs. He tries to kiss her in passing
but she resists.
“Well you shouldn’t be,” Lamb says and
pinches her arm. When he touches Amy’s body
he thinks about his own and looks at his
abdomen. His skeleton is rapidly decomposing.
He is in a cold casket in some far away field. He
shivers. He sees his flesh dehydrating and
disintegrating. Worms crawl around the casket
walls. They look at him and are revolted by his
presence. Slowly, they edge away. They are sick
37
 Oikos
and nauseous. Lamb is sick and nauseous.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Amy says. “I
have a roommate I share a bed with who I feed
and clean up after.” Lamb and Donny laugh.
Lamb looks at Amy. She is smiling but her eyes
flutter. Conveying neglect, looking ordinarily
tired. She sets her purse on the couch and stands
between Donny and the television screen.
“What the hell?” Donny says. “Move it. I’m
about to die.”
“Let’s go to a bar,” Amy says. She doesn’t
move. “I had a hell of a day.”
“Big surprise,” Donny says. He presses
pause on the paddle. Sets it on the floor between
his legs, exhales, admits defeat. Amy laughs.
Donny shrugs. His shoulders look heavy when
he does this.
Lamb feels temporary sympathy. He walks
over to the refrigerator. Opens it. Searches for
alcohol. There is nothing. He opens the freezer
and finds an old water bottle half-full of Jim
Beam. He takes the bottle and puts it on the
counter. Opens the refrigerator again. Rummages
around for something to mix with whiskey. A
carton of soy milk. A can of seltzer water.
Nothing. Lamb realizes he has forgotten to drink
anything alcoholic for several consecutive days.
He feels healthy and decides to give up drinking.
He will exercise every morning before work. He
will eat more vegetables. He will floss more
frequently. He will become a better person with
a greater lung capacity. Lamb looks at the wall
and imagines the cells inside his brain
multiplying. Growing larger. He feels smarter.
He stands with his eyes closed for five minutes.
He places his hand on his heart. It is beating
gradually. He wonders if his pulse is strong for
someone his age. He counts the beats in his
chest. Loses count.
There is shouting when Lamb opens his
eyes. Donny is jumping in front of the television.
Donny says, “Finally. Thank you God.” Lamb
stares at the sink. Blinks at a stack of dirty dishes.

Amy, puzzled, watches Donny from the

kitchen, still jumping. She looks at Lamb
standing in the kitchen looking at the dishes.
Lamb looks away. Sulks. Takes the bottle in
his hand. Walks to the couch.
“You won?” Lamb says. He rubs his eyes
and tries to focus. He stares at the bottle and
wonders what to do. He smells the contents. His
spine stiffens.
39
 Adam Moorad
“Did we decide to go yet?” Amy says. She
stands and walks over to the sink, picks up a
plate, drops it. It thunders against the sink’s
hollow basin.
“Where are we going?” she says.
“I don’t know if I want to go,” Donny says,
eyes glued to the television screen. An animated
version of him twirls a sword as he climbs the
stairs of a castle to the song of trumpeters.
Cartoon flags blow. Confetti flies. At the top of
the staircase, Donny embraces a princess. Donny
looks at the television, happy. Almost proud.
Lamb wishes he could always feel the way
Donny looks right now.
“Come on,” Amy says. “It’s not like you
have to wake up early tomorrow. You can bring
a friend.”
“Donny doesn’t have any friends,” Lamb
says. He takes a sip from the bottle and coughs a
lot. He cannot stop coughing. “Besides, he
doesn’t have any money.” His eyes water when
he hands the bottle to Donny. He hears voices.
The television murmurs in muted breaths.
Nothing makes sense to him. He tries to listen.
Water running. Amy is washing dishes.
Donny looks at the bottle and the princess.
Smiles. Takes the bottle. Offers Lamb the
controller. Lamb doesn’t move.
“I always have money to drink,” Donny
says. He takes a sip and looks at the bottle. He
takes another sip.
“So when are we going?” Lamb asks. He is
beginning to feel less nauseous. Still nauseous.
He stands up and walks over to Amy. There are
only three dirty dishes left. Lamb says, “Do you
want some help?” and kisses the back of her arm.

“Almost done,” she says. “I don’t care

anymore.”
She shuts the faucet off. Turns around. Dries
her hands on Lamb’s shirt. Lamb touches his
stomach. He feels malnourished but fat. He says,
“I need to lose weight.”
“If you were any thinner you wouldn’t
exist,” Amy says. She opens a makeup cache and
applies something to her face. “Now where are
we going?”
“Let’s go wherever you want to go,” Lamb
says.
“Yeah,” Donny says. “You decide.” He sits
41
 Chapter Four
in front of the television. Yellow boxer shorts.
Glasses. The game restarts. He is back at the start
of his mission. He must travel across hundreds of
galaxies again. He must duel aliens in hand to
hand combat for interstellar domination again.
He must fight for good against evil. He must save
the princess again.
Lamb thinks about his yellow bow-tie and
cummerbund. He wonders if the bow-tie and
cummerbund were sold together or separate. He
imagines they were sold individually. He
pictures the two articles of dress clothing alone
in different strangers’ closets. Separate and tired.
Miles and miles of highway apart. Bombs along
the highway. Every other mile. Cows and
steeples. Airplanes in the sky. Voices on the
radio, murmurs in the television. Ultraviolet
light. He feels cool and serene, like Michael
riding a buffalo in some pasture on the frontier.
Lamb sits in front of a fan. He adjusts himself and
leans backward. He feels nothing. He moves the
fan. Nothing. Again and nothing again. Am I
dying? Cancer on his arms. He will focus all his
energy on better, healthful living. He will be
persistent and disciplined and this will save him
from an early death. From lost arms. From the
inevitable.
Donny must save the princess from death.
From aliens. From a galaxy. From cancer. From a
galaxy of cancer.
Lamb feels the urge to fight cancer. He will
cut off his arms if he has must to save his life. He
can use an axe or his father’s chainsaw. If
Cynthia died of cancer, he wouldn’t care. She’d
drink eggnog and fall out of her chair. Michael
wouldn’t say anything because he never does.
They’d laugh about it together at the dinner
table. Brothers. Laughing, looking out the
window at American flags in people’s yards.
These people would go on to die in downtown
Baptist hospitals. He touches his face and
realizes he is smiling.
“Okay,” Donny says. “Let’s go if we’re
going.”
“Where?” Lamb says.
“Around the block,” Donny says. He stands
up. Walks to his closet. Climbs into a pair of
pants on which he wipes his glasses.
“That place is awful,” Amy says. She slips
on shoes, kicks them off, and tries on another
pair.
“It’s okay,” Lamb says. “I’ve been there.”
Amy looks worried. Donny walks to the
door. Opens it. Amy looks at Donny, then at
43
Lamb.
“The sooner we leave, the sooner we get
back,” Lamb says. She looks at him. She wears a
bored expression. He doesn’t know what else to
say.
Amy decides on a pair of shoes. Puts them
on. Follows Donny out the door.
“I saw your plants today,” Donny says to
Amy. “They look dead.”
“I will water them extra tomorrow,” Amy
says. “They’ll come back to life.”
Lamb wonders how much water it takes to
bring something back to life. Envisions the
ocean’s size and depth. There are waves
crashing into a shore. A breeze. Salt. He thinks
about drowning. Is he drowning? Capsizing.
Sinking. Lamb breathes. He is bringing himself
back to life.
Donny looks at Lamb and says, “Don’t drink
too much,” and laughs. Lamb laughs with
Donny, not knowing why.
“Don’t worry,” Lamb says. He looks at Amy.
“I have work tomorrow.”
Amy doesn’t say anything. She digs through
her purse. Finds a tube of lipstick. Uncaps the
tube. Puckers. Applies.
It is cool outside. The trees along the
sidewalk are imposing. Large green branches
reaching around in every direction. They are oak
trees. Lamb’s father cut down the oak in their
front yard with a chainsaw. It was dying, he said.
There were small, green twigs growing from the
stump but the larger branches were barren.
Lamb’s father told him to go inside. Lamb
obeyed. His father cut. Lamb watched from a
dining-room window. Sawdust fell on the lawn.
It looked like confetti.
Lamb closes his eyes. Pictures his father in
the yard working. He thinks about doing work.
About his career. He feels a strange sense of
guilt. He has never done any real work in his life.
He has never had a callous or a sore back from
manual labor. He’s spoiled and useless.
He once fantasized about a redeeming life
of moral and praiseworthy value. He would like
to meet the perfect woman, an Indian princess
and marry her. Move out to the country and buy
a piece of property. A farm, log cabin. On the
frontier. He would have goats, horses, cows,
chickens. He would plant crops and work in the
fields. He would grow his own food. The harvest
would be the most exciting time of year. He
45
 Oikos
would have many children who would work in
the fields with him. He would teach them the
value of a hard day’s work. Teach them how to
live redeeming lives. His children would teach
these values to their children, his grandchildren,
who would climb on his lap and ask him to tell
stories about his life as a young man. They
would want to hear about the adventures and
experiences of their grandfather. Lamb would tell
these children stories. This makes him happy.
Proud of the life he has lived.
Lamb is shivering. Donny and Amy walk
into the bar. He follows them in. Looks around.
The bar is full of blue neon with many people
talking, screaming, and laughing. Singing
together. Enjoying themselves. The company of
others. Lamb feels alive and suddenly wants to
die. The bar is crowded and there is no place to
sit. Everyone looks happy. What should he do to
feel the way the people in the bar look? Lamb
thinks he should have stayed in. He has work in
the morning and doesn’t want to feel hungover.
He thinks he should quit his job and move to the
country. He hopes Donny and Amy will only
want one drink. Donny and Amy talk to one
another and Lamb doesn’t know what to say. He
doesn’t want to speak. Impassioned murmurs
surround him. Lamb can’t hear anything clearly.
He hopes no one asks him any questions and
thinks about calling his father. He wonders what
he’d say. Loses his train of thought. Counts the
seconds as they pass. Loses count. Feels
awkward and antisocial. Tries to think of a way
to participate. Donny, how is the job search
going? Amy, I like your shoes. Hey guys, how do
you feel about buying a Webber grill for the
balcony?
People swarm around the bar. John Cougar
Mellencamp sings, “Come on baby make it hurt
so good.” There is only one bartender on duty.
His shirt has a palm tree on the chest. Its
branches look tired. He ignores Donny hunched
over the bar waving cash in the blue neon light.
Donny says curse words to himself out loud.
Amy looks around the barroom at other girls.
Jealously. Touching her earrings. Looking at her
shoes. There is no place to move. Lamb looks
around. Sees a television. Candlelight. There are
strange animal taxidermies hanging from the
walls. A fish. A deer. A buffalo. He rubs his eyes.
He keeps rubbing. Lamb tells Amy he will be
right back. He walks to the bathroom through a
labyrinth of amorphous forms. At the sink, he
furiously scrubs his hands. The bathroom is dark
and messy. There are no paper towels or soap.
Lamb looks at himself in the mirror. His face
is still where it should be. His eyes. His ears. In
place. He looks at his hair. Feels greasy. Less
nauseous. He can hear John Cougar Mellencamp
47
 Adam Moorad
singing, “You don’t have to be so exciting.” He
moves his feet and realizes he is standing in a
puddle of water. Disgusted, he stands still in it.
He doesn’t want to move. He is a volcanic
island, pushed through the earth’s crust by the
geothermal energy. Again he looks at his
reflection and wonders how to erupt. He longs to
erupt. He will erupt. John Cougar Mellencamp
says, “Sometimes love don’t feel like it should.”
Lamb runs his fingers through his hair. He looks
at the soap suds on the sink, popping, running
down the drain. He presses his arms together.
This body is decomposing. This skin is withering.
He looks at his hands. His skin. He feels tired.
He is dying. He will die in the Baptist hospital
downtown. Someone knocks on the bathroom
door. Lamb looks at himself and then away. He
feels removed from everything he touches. Tired.
Sick. His fingers are miles away. The door knob
is in a different galaxy. The mirror is a different
time zone. Lamb steps out of the puddle slowly.
Splashes. Ripples glance off the soles of his
shoes. He coughs. He coughs again. He spits.
Sees a roadside in his reflection. A steeple. His
building. Brick. Balconies. A chainsaw. An
alcoholic water bottle from long ago. Dries his
hands on his t-shirt. Opens the door. There is a
fat man standing outside. He is wearing a
cowboy hat. Sweating. Lamb gives him a half
smile. The fat man has no face. Lamb passes.
Disappears into the crowd of people. Lamb looks
around. The bar is dark. The air is opaque. His
vision blurs. There is cigarette smoke. Blue neon
light. He is alone. He will remain this way,
suspended, dying, alone with everyone.

49
 Five
Donny is laughing at the neighbor.
“I wonder if he knows we can hear him,” he
says.
“Probably not,” Lamb says. “He doesn’t
know anything.”
The neighbor coughs. Grunts. Sounds like
he's dying. His television is at full volume. The
sound comes up through the floor. Lamb and
Donny sit listening.
“We should say something sometime,”
Donny says.
“Like what?” Lamb says.
“I dunno,” Donny says. “We should ask if
he needs help with anything, or whatever.”
Lamb pictures Donny knocking on the
neighbor’s door. The neighbor moves slowly and
takes a long time open his door. He wears a
sweaty nattered tank top and an oxygen mask.
He is sweating and wheezing.
“How can I help you?” Donny says. The
neighbor coughs. Makes grunting noises. His
lungs sound like tortured animals. He closes the
door in Donny’s face.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Lamb
says.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Donny says.
The neighbor’s television makes a loud
squealing noise. Two people are having an
argument about something on television. The
word “sex” is audible. Donny laughs. Lamb
stands and walks over to the bookshelf. He stares
at the spines of some books for several seconds.
Irrationally, he thinks reading will drown out the
horrible sounds he’s hearing.
Donny sits on the sofa with his computer in
his lap. He’s been there all day sending emails,
résumés. He is looking for a job.
The sound of a loud automobile engine
zooms through the building, racing against the
walls. Lamb pictures stock-cars flying through
the hallways of the building, rattling the
foundation.
Donny closes his computer. He’s can’t
stand it and has had enough. He jumps up and
down several times. Each time, he lands with a
51
heavy thud.
Thud. “Come on,” Donny says. “Help me.”
Thud.
“Stop,” Lamb says. “He’ll hear you.”
Thud.
The neighbor coughs. Grunts. Spits. Coughs
more.
Donny jumps once more—thud— then sits
back down.
“I wished I lived in a house,” Donny says.
“Fuck apartments.”
“Fuck people,” Lamb says.
“Yeah,” Donny says. “This is horrible.”
“What’s horrible?” Lamb says.
“I don’t know,” Donny says. “All of it.”
They are quiet for a while. The neighbor is
suddenly quieter too.
“Do you ever think about moving home?”
Donny says. “Back with your parents.”
 Donny never speaks about his parents. All
Lamb knows is that they’re divorced and live
somewhere in a far-off region of America.
Somewhere Lamb's never been and never will
be.
“Never,” Lamb says. “I’d rather deal with a
dying neighbor.”
“Yeah,” Donny says. “I guess.”
“Where do your parents live?” Lamb says.
Donny doesn’t say anything. He opens his
computer slowly. He stares at a blank screen.
The second Lamb asks this questions he
feels like he’s done something wrong. Something
changes inside the room. Inside Donny. His
breathing freezes. His limbs become frigid. He
picks a magazine up off the table—as if to save
Donny from having to speak—and turns his face
to the wall. He wants to tell Donny not to say a
word.
The neighbor coughs. The television
squeals. His grunting sends a thousand vibrations
up through the floorboards.
“They’re faraway,” Donny says, and leaves
it at that.
53
 Six
“We’re not ready,” Cynthia says into the oven.
She has oven mitts on both hands, cradling a
casserole dish. Lamb watches her move, holding
the dish away from her awkwardly. Like a diaper,
he thinks. The mitts are stained with some kind
of ancient sauce. Cynthia sets the casserole
down and holds her hands upward. He thinks it
looks like she’s juggling.
Michael walks into the kitchen. He hasn’t
shaved in several days. He’s growing a beard.
Michael looks at Lamb and says, “How do
you like my beard?”
Lamb looks at Michael. Michael scratches
his face. He stops and washes his hands. Flares
his nostrils and looks around. He says, “Yum.”
Michael looks at Cynthia. She is standing in
the center of the kitchen with hair in her eyes.
Gray-blonde. Messy. Curling from her scalp’s
matted regions. Lamb thinks Cynthia looks ill. Or
distressed. He can’t decide. She reminds him of a
lunch lady in a school cafeteria. Hair-netted.
Frantic. Lamb sees himself in the lunchroom. He
is ten years old. In kindergarten. There are
yellow trays. Yellow French Fries. Yellow walls.
The ceiling. His skin. Everything. Yellow. Lamb
watched Cynthia. Her skin looks yellow. Her
eyes. Jaundiced.
Is my life a Coldplay song?
Recently, he has fantasized of running away
from everything. He has pictured himself on
multiple occasions climbing in his car and
driving away. Across the country. In his mind, he
doesn’t tell anyone when he leaves. Sometimes
Michael is with him, but most of the time he is
alone on the road. It is night. He rides along a
moonlit highway. There are plains and rolling
hills. Herbivorous animals roaming. The earth
opens wide in an inviting way. Beckons him
onward. Towards something faraway from
everything. To a place where he can go and be
something else someplace else. Lamb has
visualized this place many times and it, if only in
his mind, is out there somewhere, waiting.
Lamb is at his father’s home. Since he
arrived, his father has been on the phone talking
in a different room. His voice travels through the
house. Lamb has the mental image of sound
waves traveling through the air. Penetrating the
hollow drywall towards his head. Kneading his
eardrums with a microscopic pitchfork, echoing.

55
 Adam Moorad
When Lamb was growing up, they lived in a
small, one-story ranch house with yellow
aluminum siding at the end of a cul-de-sac. In
the backyard was the forest where the deer lived.
He remembers watching them, walking out into
the garden to eat the perennial flowers his
mother had planted before he was born. They
had thin antlers, bleached by the sun and rain;
bone the color of sand. Brittle enough to snap
right off, Michael told him, then. Michael was
older and taller. He knew things better.
Years later, looking back, Lamb often
thought the forest would overtake the house with
him inside it, carefully working itself across the
property to the dented aluminum planks. Lamb
waited and watched from his bedroom window
to see if glass would crack when tree branches
touched them. This is one of his earliest
memories.
In the backyard, Michael would tackle him,
twist his arms and legs, then punch and say,
“You can’t get away.” And then he would ask
Lamb questions . Does this hurt? Does that? Can
you feel this? What does it feel like? Are you
going to scream? And Michael would let him go,
watching the expression on his brother’s face as
he ran into the forest and Michael chased,
shouting and laughing—barking, even—until
they both believed, screaming, they were wild
animals too.
There were other things they did, Lamb can
recall. They loved building things in the brush to
hide inside, where they thought only their
mother would find them. They would stack rocks
around black puddles on the forest floor and
pretend they were wishing wells. When Lamb
peered into their reflections, he became afraid he
would fall in and drown but tried not to show it
to Michael if he could.

57
 Chapter Six
Cynthia will not stop moving. She darts from one
side of the kitchen to the next. Lighting candles,
toweling countertops, slicing carrots into small,
identical pieces of orange chunk. Everything is
done with a tempo and inaccuracy that makes
Lamb nervous.
Cynthia is cooking dinner. A roast. She turns
around. Opens the oven. When she does, the
kitchen fills with dry heat. Lamb feels dried-out.
She closes the oven. For some reason, he thinks
about the desert. He sees the sand, the sun, the
dunes. Bedouin tribesmen crossing the Sahara on
camelback, swallowing their own resinous
mucus for hydration.
Cynthia’s hair sticks to her forehead.
“Your father’s talking to the dermatologist,”
she says matter-of-factly. She peers at the clock
over the oven. She says, “We’re still not ready.”
“The dermatologist?” Michael says. “Why?”
He rummages in the refrigerator.
“There was a mole,” she says. “The
dermatologist called it problematic. They cut if
off with a laser.”
“Really?” Michael says. He sounds excited.
“I love lasers.” He looks at Lamb. Lamb doesn’t
say anything, but nods. Mumbles accordance
under his breath. Something indecipherable.
Even he can’t understand. He looks around the
kitchen. Breathes. He pictures a laser. A pink
beam of acidic light slicing his father’s body into
small, identical pieces. Lamb thinks about
carrots. He smiles.
“What?” Cynthia says. Her eyes fix on the
clock. She looks at Lamb then back at the clock.
The clock says six-thirty. The red, carmine glow
makes Lamb think of Hell. Devils. Demons.
Time. Cynthia wipes her fingers on her apron
then rests them on her waist.
“Um, nothing,” Lamb says. He puts his
hands in his pockets and looks at his clothes. He
is wearing wrinkled khaki pants and a button-
down shirt. There are creases in his elbows. He
feels his clothes are some sort of costume. He is
uncomfortable. Lamb looks at Michael’s clothes.
His clothes are cleaner and neater than Lamb’s.
Lamb looks at his shoes. They are unpolished
and scraped. He stares at his scuff marks for a
very long time. He decides he will polish his
shoes. He will iron his pants. He will take his
shirts to the dry-cleaners on a weekly basis. I will
look normal. He whispers normal to himself.
Begins to feel queasy. There is a metallic flavor
on his tongue he can’t understand. He closes his
eyes. Rubs them. Presses his eyeballs towards the
59
back of his skull. When he opens them,
everything is cloudy and white. For a second, he
thinks he is on an airplane. In the sky. In heaven .
Going somewhere. Feeling. Something, then
nothing.
Lamb dreamed things as a child. Some were
reoccurring. He was in heaven. There were Civil
War soldiers marching in formation across a
mountain range of clouds. They had bayonets
upturned and cannons pointing. Beards. Drums.
Lamb remembers the gold glint of the buttons on
their uniforms. The glimmer. His mother was
there. She wore a long dress and sat on a rocking
chair. She had a needle and thread. She sewed
stars to an American flag and would wore a
thimble and bonnet. She would never answer
when he asked her what she was doing. He
would look at her for a very long time, watching
the star-spangled embroidery appear gradually
against blue cloth. He can still see it all. The flag,
the marching. He'd wake up wondering what it
all meant. Trying to remember. Trying to forget.

61
 Oikos
Lamb hears Michael say his name.
“What?” Lamb says. He looks up and
around. Michael is standing next to him beside
the refrigerator.
“Do you want a beer?” Michael says. He
holds a can in front of Lamb. Lamb sees the can.
He touches it instinctively.
“I don’t know,” Lamb says. “I
mean—Okay.” He holds the beer in his hand for
several seconds, watching condensation
coalesce on the cold metal in the hot room.
Michael looks at Lamb and points at
Cynthia. Her back is turned. She has her arms
inside the oven poking her roast with a red
rubber spatula. Lamb sees the rubber and thinks
about condoms. The spatula touches the roof of
the oven and begins to melt. There is a sizzling
sound. A serpentine hiss. Serpents. Demons.
Hell. Lamb and Michael watch. A small pall of
smoke trails out of the oven to the ceiling. Lamb
stares into the oven. Feels anxious. He pictures
the oven as a sleeping volcano waiting to erupt.
Lava. Sulfur. Ash . Scientists will never predict the
explosion. Casualties will be numerous.
Survivors will suffer. Aide will be slow to arrive.
Celebrities will hold a telethon to raise money
for survivors. Leonardo DiCaprio will request
everyone’s support. Lamb can feel the
subterranean pressure amassing in his joints. His
father says something from a different room.
Something about lasers. Lasers cutting into
human bodies. Lamb opens his beer. Takes a sip.
The carbonation soaks holes in his teeth and
tongue.
Michael walks over to Cynthia and asks her
if she needs help.
“What?” Cynthia says. She wipes her
forehead with the back of her wrist. Her face
contorts. She looks tense. Afraid. She blinks.
Exhales. Blinks again.
“Use this,” Lamb says. He takes a fork from
the countertop and hands it to Michael. Michael
hands it to Cynthia. She holds it but doesn’t
know what to do. Lamb watches. Things are
moving at a laboriously slow speed. He wants to
scream. Lamb thinks, Things aren’t working right.
He swallows. Chews his lip. Swallows again.
Michael takes the fork. “Like this,” he says.
He reaches his hand in the oven and pokes the
roast with the fork. Michael begins to sweat.
Lamb thinks the kitchen feels cramped with the
three of them. Crowded. Full of pressure. He can
feel a force beneath the surface of the earth
through his feet. Grumbling. He watches Cynthia
63
 Adam Moorad
watching Michael watching the roast, waiting for
the oven—for something—to blow.
“Be careful,” Cynthia says. She looks at
Michael.
“Is it done?” she says. Wipes her face.
Michael looks at the roast. At the fork. At
the roast again. He has a serious expression, as if
thinking deeply about an answer that isn’t there.
“Five more minutes,” he says.
When had it begun? Probably years ago when
the house was new and freshly painted. Lamb
had always wondered what the lot on which his
house sat would look like if it had never been
built. He went on thinking about an earth
without homes. Everything still wooded. A thick
thicket of forest. Undeveloped. Unpolluted.
Indian-owned. This is what intrigued Lamb about
the past. The crack and curl of time like burning
wood, leaving behind ashes for others to poke
and prod for warmth. He would think about his
mother. Where was she in the time-piles of soot
inside him? He wondered if she lived in a house
wherever she was, now. He would picture one. It
was smaller, with bits of brick seen through
weaves of ivy. For Lamb, this notion worked for
a while.
In the attic he and Michael would hide.
Stepping across the plywood rafters between
pink cakes of insulation. Michael would
sometimes guide him with quizzical looks. To
coax him along. To get him involved in
something new. They would stay in the attic for
what seemed like days. Stationed on some
pinnacle atop the planet, counting moonbeams
on their way though space. But over time, when
they came back down to earth again, there was
something about the house that troubled Lamb.
Something still to this day. And to this day there
were no answers.
65
 Seven
Lamb tells Michael they need to run away. They
are sitting at the dining room table across from
one another. Michael nods his head.
“Okay,” he says. “Where?”
They are alone. Cynthia clamors in the
kitchen. There is the sound of running water – of
things being lifted and set back down. Their
father is somewhere talking still. Lamb and
Michael stop and listen silently to the transient
sounds browsing around them. Their father
laughs. They look at one another.
“Anywhere,” Lamb says. His eyes are big.
He looks excited. “Alaska. Or the Grand
Canyon.”
“I don’t know,” Michael says. He scratches
his face. Lamb wonders why Michael is growing
a beard. If he is attempt to prove something to
someone with his facial hair. If so – What? And
who? Sprouts of hair germinate sparsely across
his cheeks and around his lips. Lamb thinks it
looks like dirt.
“What don’t you know?” Lamb says. “What
about Wyoming?” He lays his arms on the table.
He leans forward. He looks at Michael. Michael
is thinking.
“Wouldn’t you rather go someplace warm?”
Michael says. “For a vacation?”
“The Grand Canyon is warm,” Lamb says.
“It’s in Arizona. It’s warm there.”
“I mean someplace warmer,” Michael says.
“With sand.”
“Arizona has a desert,” Lamb says. “Deserts
have sand.”
“I mean beach sand,” Michael says. “Not
desert.”
Lamb and Michael don’t say anything for a
while. Minutes pass. Michael picks the edge of
his placemat. Scratches his chin.
He says, “If I’m going on vacation, I have to
be near a beach.”
Lamb looks at Michael wondering what to
say. He says, “I don’t want to go on a vacation. I
want to stay on vacation.”
“And not come back?” Michael says.

67
 “No,” Lamb says. “I mean yes.”
“I don’t know,” Michael says. He empties
his beer. Burps. “I have to think about it.”
Cynthia walks into the dining room with a
basket of bread. She sets it on the table. She
looks at Lamb and Michael. She smiles and asks
Michael if he’s hungry. Michael looks at Lamb
and nods. Cynthia laughs in a panicky way.
“Help me,” she says. She walks away.
Michael stands and follows her. Lamb stands and
follows him. Michael opens the refrigerator and
takes out another can of beer. He opens it.
Drinks. Lamb thinks about drinking another but
doesn’t. Michael looks at Lamb.
He says, “Why do you want to run away?”
Lamb looks at Michael then at Cynthia. He
isn’t sure if she’s listening. He doesn’t know what
to say.
“I’m not sure,” he says, in a quiet voice.
“Because I have to do something.”
“I think we’re finally ready,” Cynthia says.
She opens and closes the oven. She asks Lamb
to get his father. Lamb stares at the wall for
several seconds then walks into the family room.
His father is sitting with his legs propped-up on
an ottoman talking on the phone. Lamb looks at
the walls. There are pictures of family portraits.
Framed newspaper clipping. Replica prints of
Great Lakes landscapes.
“Time to eat,” Lamb says.
“It’s time?” his father says. He looks at
Lamb. His face is creased. Leathery. Carrot
orange.
“Yeah,” Lamb says. “Time.” He looks at the
ceiling then at the floor.
“Okay,” his father says. “Let me say good-
bye.” He sits up. Lamb walks away, dragging his
feet with his legs. Dragging his legs with his
body. Dragging.
At the table, Lamb’s father asks Lamb about
work.
Lamb thinks about his job. He pictures his
office and the people he works with. There are
faceless people in the unmarked cubicles typing
numbers into blank computer screens.
“I don’t know,” he says. He folds his hands.
“What does that mean?” his father says.
69
 Oikos
When he does, Lamb has the mental image of
magma chamber. Deep inside the earth’s crust.
Pressure. Tectonics. Anger. Heat. Shoots of
molten rock drill upward through layers of land.
To the surface. Into the atmosphere. Lava streams
across the countryside. Engulfing homes.
Railroads. Lamb.
“It means I don’t know,” Lamb says. He
stares at the chandelier. There are light bulbs in
the shape of candle flames. He looks at the
dining room floor. The floor is dark. Blank. No
lava. No heat. Lamb can hear Michael chewing
with his mouth open. Breathing. Cynthia passes
around the basket of bread. Michael takes two
pieces of bread and piles them onto his plate.
Lamb’s father takes a sip of wine. He takes
another.
“You don’t know?” his father says. “That’s
not good.”
Lamb used to think his father knew most
things. Lamb remembers thinking this when he
was younger. He has a specific memory: Sitting
with his father on a sofa. Watching Jeopardy.
Alex Trebek quizzed contestants. An accountant
from Des Moines. A mother from Dallas. A high
school math teacher from Sacramento. The
category was Shakespearian tragedies. Hamlet.
Macbeth. Romeo and Juliet. Lamb’s father had
his response before any of the contestants could
press their buzzers. He answered out loud then
looked at Lamb with a smile on his face. Lamb
recalls feeling happy that someone someplace
had the answers to questions. Only later did
Lamb learn what reruns were.
“I don’t care,” Lamb says. He clenches his
teeth tightly. His jaw muscles flex and begin to
ache. He rearranges his silverware on his
placemat to run perpendicular to the edge of the
table.
“You need a plan,” his father says. He looks
at Lamb. Lamb sees him and looks away.
Michael butters a roll with his fingers. His
hands look slimy. He says, “I have a Five Year
Plan.” He smiles at the table with a mouth full of
food. “This is delicious,” he says.
“Thank you,” Cynthia says. “I’m glad you
like it.”
“If I ate like this every day, I’d be fat,”
Michael says.
“You are fat,” Lamb says. He doesn’t know
why. Michael rolls his eyes. Lamb stares at his
plate. He hasn’t eaten a thing.

71
 Adam Moorad
“Are you not feeling well?” Lamb’s father
says.
“Maybe you should lie down?” Cynthia
says.
Lamb looks at his father then at Cynthia.
Their skin looks rubbery. Rutted. But somehow
transparent. Lamb stares through their skin as
they chew. He can see there skeletons working,
gnawing. He can hear their teeth chattering
against one another’s skulls at night in bed. Lamb
pictures his skeleton. His bones. The cartilage
between them. Dissolving. His body.
Disintegrating into a fine power. Sand. In his
mind, a wind blows. He becomes a dune.
 Eight
The television. Lamb and Michael sit with their
father in front of it. Lamb feels the onset
drowsiness; his limbs feel weary; dead-beat,
thick with yeast and gravy; eyelids heavy, moss-
covered. He yawns and covers his mouth. The
flesh around his elbows feels spongy. He
considers passing out. Rest will satisfy his body
and deliver new life to his mind. How does
Lamb feel? My mind is weak and hollow. He
decides to sleep then against it. When was the
last time he slept here? He tries to remember. A
summer several years ago. A tornado, hail, wind,
rattling window panes—Lamb and Michael slept
in the basement listening to thunder and
counting the seconds between the crash and
flash of lightning.
Lamb yawns. The television groans of car
insurance, after shave, fuel-efficient automobiles.
Support Annie Rabbit. “Chick has a lopsided
face,” his father says. Lamb yawns again.
“My chest hurts,” Michael says. He touches
his sternum and stretches.
Lamb watches his father rise gingerly.
Rearranges the cushion of his chair then sits back
down. His father’s legs are rickety and withered.
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 Chapter Eight
Those are my future legs. He touches his thighs,
feels sick.
The local news. School children joining
gangs at an alarming rate. Drugs. Violence.
Problematic moles on society’s torso. The PTA
plans laser deployment.
Lamb father’s looks at Michael. He says,
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight,” Michael says. “I’m almost
thirty.”
“You’re not that old,” their father says.
“I feel older,” Michael says. He belches
through his nostrils then looks at Lamb. Lamb
does not move. A reality television show
appears. People are forced to live with one
another. No one gets along. People fuck, feel
depressed, shout, cry, hula-hoop and twirl
batons for cash prizes. They all wear expensive
jeans. Men drink champagne with
interchangeable women in tropical hot tubs.
Nothing happens and there is implication in this
alone.
I cannot think.
“I think I’m going back to school,” Michael
says.
“Yeah?” their father says. “For what?”
“I want to learn another language,” Michael
says. He looks at the ceiling, then the television.
He runs his fingers through his beard several
times.
“What language is that?” Lamb says.
“English?” He doesn’t recognize his voice. There
is a toneless monotony to his pitch that makes
him feel like an alien.
“Yeah,” Michael says. “English.” He
knuckles Lamb in the ribs. “Don’t be stupid.”
They watch a television commercial for
erectile dysfunction. A woman says, “Pleasure.”
Lamb grips his cell phone, checks the time. His
hands feel abnormally large. He leans forward.
His fingers are heavy and arthritic.
There is an issue of National Geographic on
the coffee table in front of him. He picks it up
and flips through. There are pictures of things in
exotic foreign places: donkeys, camels, llamas,
rickshaws, carts of merchandise pushed by
straining boys in third world bazaars. Bushmen
in the African savanna. Oregonian loggers in
wool hats shivering on the Cascade Mountain
75
Range. Everything he sees seems culturally
relevant and aesthetically pleasing. He wishes he
lived in a place culturally relevant and
aesthetically pleasing enough to be featured in
National Geographic. This would make life
better. He pictures himself with callused hands
in a flannel shirt and looks around the room. He
would have a more genuine life. His existence
would be, if only temporarily, valid.
 Nine
Lamb leaves for the bathroom. Inside, he locks
the door. Looks at himself in the mirror and runs
the faucet. Small spuds of whisker budding on
his chin. Root slowly developing deep in the
pores of his skin. He splashes water on these tiny
saplings. When he dries his face, he sees himself.
Nothing has changed. He closes his eyes. Holds
his hands to his face. Leaves them there. Pictures
a thick beard. A red bed of fuzz. He visualizes
his hair growing long over his shoulders. His
hands are worn with axe-forged sores, arms
strong, legs sturdy, handshake firm.
For one second, everything seems real.
He leaves the bathroom. The air inside the
house is still full with the smell of supper. The
television murmurs. In the kitchen, now, and the
air inside it has cooled. His face is damp. His
bangs drip water onto the bridge of his nose. He
opens cabinets. There are bowls. Plates. Pots.
Pans. He wonders what to do for several
moments. He opens the refrigerator. Mustard.
Orange juice. Mayonnaise. He finds a beer.
Opens it. Drinks. The can feels cold, good
against his skin. It’s dark outside. Lamb can see
himself in the black glass of the window. He
walks over to the window. Examines the pane.
 Oikos
There are several dead insects trapped between
the glass and the screen. He examines their small
curled bodies. Antennae corroded by sun and
dust.
He stands in the kitchen drinking. Seeming
himself. Wishing he was somewhere. He peers
through his reflection into the backyard. He lived
here once. He played here as a child. He closes
his eyes. 60 Minutes has made us all think in
terms like these, he thinks.
In the woods, he sees himself standing
among tree trunk and thicket.
 Ten
“Do you want to watch a new movie or an old
movie?” Amy asks. She picks up a DVD case and
holds it to her face.
Lamb rubs his hands together. It’s cold
inside the video store. A movie is playing
somewhere. He hears the dialogue. Something
about the Civil War and blacks fighting it. Lamb
isn’t sure.
Amy puts the DVD down and looks for
another. She picks up a copy Children of Men.
Lamb watches her as she does this. They were
talking about something.
“It makes no difference,” he says. He stands
with his back to a wall of videos. He touches his
face and neck. Amy hums. Lamb looks around.
Listens. He recognizes Denzel Washington’s
voice. It’s coming from someplace inside the
store. The checkout counter. Denzel Washington
says something about Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln. Or food.
“I’ll watch anything,” he says. He is bored
and wants to be someplace else. He thinks, I
never want to be where I am.

79
 Adam Moorad
He hates the video store. All stores are
boring. The walls are white. The air is yellow.
Dank halogen fixtures. Shelves strewn with
vague, plastic rectangularity. Life is a video
rental.
Amy reaches around Lamb. She picks up a
different DVD. Lamb can see an image of David
Bowie on the cover. He recognizes David
Bowie’s face from one of Donny’s album covers.
There is make-up on David Bowie’s face. His
hair is long. Greasy. It falls neatly around his
face. David Bowie wears a threatening
expression, as if he’s about to speak. Lamb
listens.
Denzel Washington says he’s from
Tennessee. He ran away as a child.
Amy talks about Halloween but Lamb
cannot understand. He pictures himself running
away from home. As a black child. Barefoot in
the antebellum South. Standing in a tobacco
field, a cotton field. People wear straw hats.
People slice grain with rusted antique sickles. For
a moment, he has a histrionic psychic
experience with history. Something permanent
and durable. Something spiritual. Something
from The Past. Amy touches his arm then steps
away. The spirit dies.
 “I heard this’s good,” Amy says. She holds
David Bowie’s face in Lamb’s face.
“From who?” Lamb says.
“Donny, I think,” she says. “Donny likes
David Bowie.”
“Donny likes David Bowie,” Lamb repeats.
Monotone. He doesn’t know why. He closes his
eyes. Imagines Donny watching David Bowie
movies on television alone. The room is dark.
Eerie. Donny stares at the television screen. His
hair is long. Greasy. His face is threatening.
Lamb opens his eyes when he feels Amy’s
hand on his back. He jumps. He doesn’t trust her
fingers. He stands still. Amy pets his back. Lamb
thinks about moving. She keeps petting. He feels
a prickling sensation spread across his forehead.
His hair is hanging in his eyes like a strange
helmet. He swallows. The air around him tastes
spoiled and lifeless. He swallows again. His
throat hurts. He thinks there is a glandular
abnormality occurring in the back of his throat.
His tonsils. An infection . Lamb wonders if it’s
genetic. Chromosomal.
Lamb believes there is something wrong
with the way he thinks. That he is afflicted with
unnatural levels of anxiety when it comes to,
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 Chapter Ten
well, everything. This is unhealthy for him and
society. He should relax, start smoking
marijuana. Smoking marijuana would pacify him
in a positive way. A societal obligation . Amy
stops petting.
Denzel Washington says, America .
Lamb exhales gradually.
“I feel like drinking wine,” Amy says. She
walks away.
“Okay,” Lamb says and slowly follows her
to another aisle.
In the documentary section, Amy tells Lamb she
dreamt a dream.
“I had hundreds and hundreds of plants.
And it was impossible to water them all,” Amy
says. “And I was really worried I’d kill them.”
She looks at Lamb to see if he’s listening.
“Isn’t that scary?” she says.
“For a dream?” Lamb says. He looks at
Amy’s ears. She has earrings on. They dangle in
a distracting way when she speaks. Earrings are
superficial. Wearing jewelry is a morally shallow
practice.
“Yeah,” Amy says. “A dream.”
Lamb doesn’t say anything. Passively
impassive.
“Isn’t that scary?” she asks again.
“Yeah,” Lamb says. He pauses. “I mean, I
guess.”
“Well I thought it was,” Amy says. She
squats down. Looks briefly at the bottom shelf.
Stands back up. “I thought I saw something
good,” she says.

83
 Neither speaks for several minutes. Lamb
feels tired. His eyes find a television screen
playing on the opposite side of the video store.
Denzel Washington stares at a field of people.
Amy asks him about Halloween.
“When you were a kid, what was your
favorite costume?” she says. Her eyes are big.
Her voice sounds excited.
“I don’t know,” Lamb says. “I was Davy
Crockett once. I hated Halloween.” Lamb thinks
about Halloween. All holidays. He visualizes a
pumpkin pie. A pumpkin pie and whipped
cream. Cynthia .
“You hated Halloween?” Amy says,
offended. Lamb has said something
blasphemous—something disrespectful about
The Past.
“Are you serious?” she says. “That’s
strange.”
Lamb puts his hands in his pockets and
thinks. “I don’t think it’s strange.”
“I bet your brother liked Halloween,” she
says.
“I don’t care,” Lamb says. “I mean—he was
older. I mean—he is older.” Lamb recalls
Halloween. Any given. Dressed as Davy
Crockett. Michael is a gorilla. They stand on the
front steps of a house. Their father takes their
picture. It’s dark and wet outside. Rain droplets.
Camera flash.
Lamb loses his sight to this vision. When it
returns, Amy is staring at him.
“You’re always so negative,” she charges.
“You shouldn’t be so negative.”
Lamb looks at Amy then looks away. His
mouth is dry. He swallows. Thinks about his
tonsils. His tonsils are infected. They will have to
be removed.
Amy watches the Civil War movie, now.
Denzel Washington uses a common slur for
black Americans several times on camera. Her
eyes enlarge. “I can’t believe they’re playing this
movie,” she says.
Lamb is silent. He looks around for
something to do. Becomes overly aware of the
hair on his head. He runs his fingers through his
bangs in a repetitive motion. He feels nervous for
several seconds. The feeling passes.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Amy says. Her eyes
85
 Oikos
are fixed on the screen. Denzel Washington is
gone.
He watches her watching. She is superficial
and kind of stupid. He says, “I’m not mad at
anyone.”
Amy’s eyes are on the television. Her
earrings dangle. She doesn’t hear Lamb or
pretends she doesn’t. She says, “Morgan
Freeman looks a lot like my grandmother.”

At the checkout counter, Amy suggests

vegetarianism. “Because it’s healthy,” she says.
Lamb hears the word “healthy” and thinks
about his throat. Swallows. Coughs. Tastes the
air. It has a strange, stagnant flavor. He coughs
again. His face is red. His eyes begin to water.
“What’s wrong?” Amy asks. Concerned.
“I don’t want to be a vegetarian,” Lamb
says.
“Why?” Amy says. “We could be healthy.
What do you have against vegetarians?”
“I don’t have anything against anything,”
Lamb says. He coughs again.
 “Then why don’t you want to be a
vegetarian?” she asks.
“I don’t want to be anything,” he says.

87
 Eleven
Amy and Lamb are walking. Irene is standing in
the parking lot. Irene and Lamb look surprised to
see each other. Amy looks at Irene, then at
Lamb, then at Irene again. Lamb looks around
but doesn’t say anything.
“Hi Lamb,” Irene says. Her voice sounds
enthusiastic. “It’s been—what—like, forever?”
Irene gives Lamb a hug and tells him it’s
good to see him. Lamb feels Irene’s arms around
his neck. He thinks about his arms. His arms are
hanging. He doesn’t know what to do. He hugs
Irene then steps away. Lamb has suffered a minor
defeat.
Lamb went to school with Irene long ago.
They were friends. Lamb and Irene were
romantic once in a time before puberty. They
had the same teacher for sixth and sevenths
grades. They sat together. Copied one another’s
work. Lamb remembers. He is fourteen years old.
Looking at Irene’s desk. Reading her answers to
an American History pop quiz. After several
seconds, he introduces Amy to Irene.
“This is my girlfriend—Amy,” he says.
 “Your girlfriend?” Irene says. “How nice.”
Amy smiles at Irene. The girls touch hands.
They look at one another in an awkward way.
Lamb wishes to disappear. Silence for five
seconds.
“So how are you doing?” Irene says.
“I’m good,” Lamb says. He doesn’t want to
elaborate. He inhales, exhales, and thinks, I
should start smoking marijuana .
“It’s—like—so weird to see you,” Irene says.
“I live here again.”
Lamb doesn’t know what to say. He says,
“That’s awesome.” He looks at Amy. She wears a
mask of pleasantry.
“I guess so,” Irene says. “Actually, I hate it.”
It is the kind of moment which moves both
very fast and slow, creating a sense of urgency
inside of him that he doesn’t know what to do
with. Amy and Irene start talking about mutual
acquaintances. People and places. Things from
The Past. Lamb considers The Past. He is Amy
and Irene’s only mutual acquaintance. He feels
his hands in his pockets. He shivers. “How’s
college?” he says to Irene.
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 Chapter Eleven
“College is okay,” Irene says. “I’m taking a
semester off. I don’t know what to major in.”
“Yeah?” Lamb says.
“Yeah—I sort of liked Psych, but I didn’t
want the classes.”
“I know what you mean,” Amy says. Lamb
looks at Amy. Maybe she’s having a good time.
He is surprised. Amy smiles for real.
“I moved back a couple weeks ago,” Irene
says. “Back with my parents.”
“That’s nice,” Lamb says.
Irene says, “Yeah.” Vacantly.
Lamb closes his eyes and tries to picture
what Irene’s parents look like. He has the mental
image of old people sitting at a dinner table,
eating pumpkin pie. He is unable to recognize
anyone. Lamb is grinding his teeth. He looks at
Amy’s hands. She holds David Bowie’s face
between her fingers.
“So—what are you guys doing tonight?”
Irene says.
“A movie, some wine,” Amy says. Irene
laughs so Lamb laughs.
“We should do something sometime,” Irene
says.
“We should,” Amy says.
“That would definitely be awesome,” Irene
says.
Lamb says, “Definitely.” Is he standing too
far away from Amy and Irene? There are miles of
sidewalk separating them. Everything is in slow
motion. The world rocks. Lamb can hear other
voices around him. Emanating from somewhere
he cannot see. There are figures in front of him
that begin to murmur. Sway. Laugh.
“I think we’re going to go,” Amy says to
Irene. She turns to Lamb. Lamb smiles for a
moment. Then, very slowly, turns around and
walks away.

91
 Twelve
"You look skinny," Amy says to Lamb. He isn't
there when she turns. He never sits still indoors.
Behaves as if he belongs somewhere else and
believes it.
"I think it’s ’cause I have AIDS," he calls to
her from the bedroom, then says, "Not really."
They’re watching figure skating. Amy looks
at Lamb and rolls her head around in a theatrical
way. This is what she always does when he says
vaguely disturbing things in passing. He watches
her neck, thinking female figure skaters spin their
heads the exact same way when they bow to a
crowd.
He wanders and settles down in front of the
television on the separate end of the sectional
sofa.
They sit there motionless with all the other
people on the television, watching white ice
skaters doing things unilaterally with bouquets.
"I wish I could do that," Amy says.
"You know you could if you wanted," Lamb
says.
 He talks about fast-food and thyroids. He
tries to recall the last time he went swimming. A
lake in the woods behind his old house. Michael
was there. Felt like bathwater. Amy talks about
the bath and says it hasn't been cleaned in a very
long time.
Television people cheer with joyous faces.
They are faraway, standing, smacking their hands
together, moving from one foot to the other.
Lamb stares at the ceiling fan and sighs, thinking
everything looks the same again. Amy watches
and Lamb sees the glare of the screen on her wet
eyeballs. Her eyes are too far apart for a person.
He envisions her with the eyes of a horsefly—a
thousand lenses reflecting a thousand identical
television screens.
During a commercial, he moves behind her
slowly. As he does so, she can see him.

93
 Thirteen
Lamb dreams a dream. He is in a chair having
his hair cut. It’s raining outside. He looks at his
reflection in a mirror. Sees a window behind
him. He stares. Feels nauseous. Watches rain
hitting the window, running down glass,
disappearing. A maroon smock engulfs his body.
The hairdresser holds a pairs of scissors. It is Rita.
She works the scissors around Lamb’s head. Slow
then fast then slow again. She is a large woman
with small feet. Dominican. Lamb thinks all
Dominican women are genetically predisposed
this way. He feels a hair on his eyelash. He
blinks. He blinks again. Less nauseous. Still
nauseous. Rita snips. The blades scrape together
with magical crystal inertia. A clump of hair falls
on Lamb’s smock. He sees rolls off onto the
floor. He shivers. He pictures Rita inadvertently
cutting off one of his ears. He closes his eyes.
Sees one of his earlobes floating in midair,
plummeting towards the floor. There is blood. It
looks like honey against the maroon smock.
Lamb presses his tongue against his teeth. Tastes
something sweet. Opens his eyes. Sees an
earlobe on the floor in a pile of hair. His. Lamb
looks around. Listens. Dreams he is dreaming.
Thinks he can hear better without his ear. He
looks at Rita’s fingers then his legs. His thighs
begin cramping violently. The pain feels good.
Rita messes Lamb’s hair then combs it. She
messes and combs again. There is a curl in the
center of Lamb’s forehead. He feels an immense
amount of hatred for the curl. Veins bulge from
his temples. He becomes sick. Rita spins Lamb
around, turning him away from the mirror. She
stares at him. Tells him she has just experienced
a grim premonition. Her lips do not move. Her
mouth hangs open. Her teeth are small, yellow,
and genetically predisposed this way. Lamb
looks at the window then at the scissors. His
thighs burn and twitch. Rita is silent but
somehow able to communicate with Lamb
telepathically. She says she has the supernatural
ability to forecast cancer in people. She has done
this on several occasions in her native country
and has been correct. She has saved some
people’s lives, but has lost others. She refuses to
lose another. Rita says she cannot lose Lamb. His
business. His hair. Lamb feels beads of sweat
coalesce around his eyebrows. He becomes
angry. He looks at Rita. Feels confused. He sees
a clump of hair resting on his smock on his
stomach. The clump begins to crackle and
smoke. The smoke smells like honey. He moves
his legs. Dislodges the clump. Watches the
clump fall to the floor. Flaming. He looks at Rita.
Her eyes are wide with childlike alarm. She says
the word, “Growth.” The word, “Inoperable.”
The word, “Sorry.” Lamb imagines dying and
feels dead. He thinks he always knew he had
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 Adam Moorad
cancer. Knew he was gradually developing a
cancerous condition that would threaten his life.
A growth. In his brain. His mind. Materializing.
Dematerializing. Rita explains a holistic
treatment plan designed to inhibit the spread of
carcinogenic molecules within the body. Lamb
looks around. Sees the window. The rain. Rita
says something in Spanish and Lamb cannot
understand. He coughs. He coughs again. He
cannot stop coughing. Rita stares at Lamb.
Senses his confusion and begins to laugh. She
hums. Her lips are still. Lamb watches her.
Adjusts himself beneath the smock. Looks at the
ceiling. At his ear. Feels doomed. Closes his
eyes. Opens them. Closes them. Keeps them
closed. Rita is still holding the scissors in her
hand. The blades grind. Magical. Crystal. Inertia.
Lamb. Nauseous. Shivering. He wishes Rita
could cut a hole in skull and cut out his
cancerous growth with her scissors. Magically.
Rita turns Lamb around so he is facing the mirror
again. He looks at himself. Feels aesthetically
inadequate. Half his head is cut. Lamb has the
desire to ask Rita to shave his head on the
assumption he has cancer. He thinks it seems
like the right thing to do. He doesn’t say anything
and tries to relax. A telephone on the wall begins
to ring. Rita walks over to the wall. Answers the
phone. Lamb looks at the phone against Rita’s
ear. The chord swinging. The rain falling. His
legs throbbing. Face itching. The smock feels
heavy across his shoulders. He tries to breathe.
Rita talks in Spanish for fifteen minutes. Lamb
can feel tiny pieces of hair sticking to his face
and neck. He tries to blow air upward, across his
face. He blows again. He closes his eyes.
Dreams he daydreams. Sleeps restlessly, unable
to satiate the desire to scratch.

97
 Fourteen
Lamb’s phone is ringing. It hardly ever does this.
He’s lying on the floor with his hands on his
stomach, staring at the ceiling. Donny is in the
kitchen showing Amy how to cook. He hears the
words “sugar” and “butter.” He thinks about
diabetes.
His phone is on his desk. His desk is miles
away, in his bedroom. It might be Cynthia
calling, something about his father. His
problematic mole. Could be the landlord, calling
to tell Lamb his downstairs neighbor has died.
Emphysema. How sad. Might be Michael, telling
Lamb he’s ready to run away. He can leave
tomorrow.
He goes to his desk and looks at his phone,
not recognizing the number. He answers.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hey, Lamb.” It’s Irene.
“Hey,” he says.
“I called your house and your mother gave
me your cell,” she says.
 “My stepmother,” he says. He speaks
quietly, pressing the mouthpiece against his face,
perhaps prematurely clandestine.
Amy comes to the doorway, holding a
rubber spatula. She watches Lamb for a second,
then walks back to the kitchen.
“How’s it going?” Irene says. “Alright,” he
says. “Life good?” she says. “Okay,” he says.
They talk about nothing. He answers her
questions in monosyllables, revealing nothing.
Butter melts in the kitchen, blending with sugar.
Making diabetes.
“Is something wrong?” Irene says.
“I’m just tired,” he says. He tells her about
his work, about all the hours he’s had to log at
the office. When he hears the word “log” come
from his mouth, he begins to feel sick. He tries to
keep his answers short, hoping he doesn’t
unintentionally say anything else that will add to
the nausea rising inside him.
Lamb agrees to meet Irene for dinner one
night. He doesn’t want to see her. He doesn’t
want to see anyone. He doesn’t know why he
agrees to anything.

99
 Irene sounds excited. Lamb simulates
excitement by agreeing with everything Irene
says.
“This will be fun,” she says. “I know,” he
says. “Like the old days,” she says. “I know,” he
says.
When Lamb hangs up, Amy reappears. She
licks the dough from the spatula. She is working
on becoming a diabetic. He sees it.
“Who was that?” Amy says.
“Irene,” he says.
“Irene?” she says. “That’s nice. I like her.”
She tells Lamb that she thinks it’s nice he keeps
in touch with old friends. She wishes she did.
She hardly keeps in touch with any of hers. She
doesn’t care for most of them, anyways.
Lamb says he’s tired and wants to sleep. He
crawls into bed and pulls the covers over his
body. Amy leaves the bedroom and closes the
door. The television is on in the other room. Amy
is watching it, licking her spatula, raising her
blood pressure. The television murmurs. He can
hear her turn the volume up as he closes his
eyes.
 Fifteen
Lamb awakes. He stares at the ceiling with his
arms above his head. The sheets stick to his legs
and he can’t get comfortable. Amy is next to
him, asleep, breathing through her mouth. It’s
been two weeks since her grandmother died. She
is tired. Lamb is tired but cannot sleep. He rolls
over. Looks around the room. The rutted drywall
reminds him of the moon. This lasts for hours.
He closes his eyes. Wonders if his vital organs
will cease function from lack of rest. If his brain
will decompose and shrink from overuse.
For a moment, Lamb hears music,
electronically random, industrially complex. A
voice. Muted bars weakly painting a lunar
soundscape. Ambient and low. He sits up.
Listens. Nothing. He turns. Looks at Amy.
Pictures her dreaming a dream about plants.
About her grandmother at rest in a happier place.
Playing crochet. Barefoot on a manicured lawn
with Jesus Christ him-fucking-self and the Twelve
Disciples. Lamb wonders if he will end up in
heaven one day. In his mind he runs through his
Spiritual Vitae, wondering if he has managed to
accrue enough moral savings to buy entry
through the Golden Gates. He wonders if heaven
or anything exists . Lamb wishes Amy were
awake. He thinks of feigning a heavy snore or
 Oikos
pretending to shout her name in his sleep in an
attempt to wake her. He considers telling her he
loves her, but doesn’t want to lie. He thinks, I
only partially love Amy. He watches her breathe.
Lamb moves. Kicks his feet in an awkward
way. Slowly, he opens his eyes. Then closes
them. Then opens them again. The faint beams
of light filter through the blinds. Lamb looks at
the ceiling then at Amy. Wonders if she is taking
her contraceptives correctly. He wonders what
he would do if she conceived. He is unable to
move, feeling vaguely paranoid. Lamb thinks
Amy looks very happy. He is envious of her
ability to slow down. To let go. To relax. He is
never relaxed. He stares at her face, her mouth,
her very long neck. The rest of her is covered in
blanket. Lamb rolls over. Looks at whatever
objects he can see in the room from his bed. He
reads the spines of paperbacks on his bookshelf.
The bible is the biggest. A paternal Christmas gift
two years old. Lamb examines the thickness of
the spine. Christians don’t care about trees.
The temperature in the room rises and Lamb
feels hot. His legs are on fire. He glances at the
window, thinks the sun might be rising. He
crawls out of bed, feels dizzy, walks through his
apartment. There are no windows. His eyes
gradually adjust to the lack of light. The
television is on and muted. Lamb stares at the
screen. A pregnant woman does step-aerobics on
a yoga mat. She wears a neon orange leotard.
She smiles at the camera. At Lamb. He stares at
her, rubs his eyes, wonders if he is asleep or
awake and if this woman is an example
subscriber to Cosmo.
Lamb moves towards the kitchen sink.
Stands. Rocks one way, then another. Turns on
the faucet. He fills a glass of water. Drinks half
the glass and pours out the rest into the fish
bowl. He tries to remember the last time the fish
was fed. He doesn’t care. He feels sick.
Dehydrated. He looks down at his legs. He
thinks his calves are abnormally large. He wants
to walk but is paralyzed, listening. There is a
dog. A siren. Then silence. He lumbers gradually
into the bathroom and closes the door. It is very
dark. He fills the bathtub with cold water. The
tub fill slowly. He watches with a blank gaze.
When the tub is full, he climbs in.
Lamb’s heart beats heavily. He is unable to
feel calm. He fanaticizes about checking into a
hospital, claiming he's being poisoned. He lies in
the tub. Traces stains on the ceiling with his
eyes. He thinks about cleaning the stains. He
looks at the toilet. A broken chain hangs from the
bowl. Rusted. I am rusted. At just twenty-four,
his joints and bones have oxidized with age,
soaking in the dark, pruning like an old man
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 Adam Moorad
covered in stretch marks. Lamb notices the
reflections of his feet sticking out of the water.
His body is a magma core of molten rock waiting
for the right moment to shift. To erupt. Lamb is
about to erupt or at least wants to.
Lamb stares at his chest through the surface.
His thighs. His navel. He touches his heart. He
imagines his blood vessels contracting in the
cold water. He thinks about varicose veins. He
pictures varicose veins on a pregnant woman
doing step-aerobics in a neon orange leotard,
feet covered in corns and bunions. Lamb is
aroused.
Lamb wants to move but cannot move. He
thinks he could move with ease if his calves
were smaller. He rolls onto his side. Submerges
his face. Dolphins spiral playfully in droves
through the rippled water around him. They
jump. Dive. Crawl across his thighs and stomach
with their flippers. Screaming. Laughing. Singing
the chorus in marine-life-acapella. Lamb pulls
the drain and watches his body slowly emerge
from beneath the surface until there is nothing
around him.
Drizzling bodily runoff onto the floor, Lamb
stands.
In the bedroom, Amy has not moved. She is
dreaming. Her grandmother trims rose bushes in
The Garden of Eden. Lamb opens the blinds,
looks out the window. The sun is not yet up. He
feels disoriented, staring at the rooftops across
the street. The moon hangs still and white. No
clouds or stars. Lamb rubs his hands together,
still soaking wet. He sees the fading tracers of a
plane.
He steps out onto the balcony for ten
minutes. There is the row of dead potted plants,
lined up and dumpy. They're Amy's. She did not
know how to care for them and murdered them
as such.
He looks around then walks back inside. He
sits at the kitchen table.
There is nothing I can to do keep from
feeling the way I feel.

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 Sixteen
On the highway to work, Lamb perspires though
he is very calm. He is surprised by this calm and
tries to enjoy it.
He pretends he is not driving to work but on
a road trip across North America with Michael.
On vacation? No. On a pilgrimage. A
Volkswagen van headed west. Michael reads a
roadmap. The sun sets over the Pacific thousands
of miles away. Buffalo roam the plains in
multitudes.
Lamb believes things are changing. Life is
becoming dramatically different from the way it
was. He has attained the confidence to approach
life in an entirely different manner. The way I
once approached life.
He tries to recall his old self. Temporary
nostalgia, confusion, and then he realizes that
life expects strange things from young men.
Young men are supposed to forget that there are
thousands of cities full of thousands of women. It
is unlikely that any man finds the right woman
for him. Life tells them to pick the best one out of
the women they can attract. Everything is
arbitrary, nothing is impulsive. I want to be
impulsive again. He says the word “impulsive”
three times out loud. He will book plane tickets
to a city he has never visited. He will meet a
woman who he can love. He will tell the woman
he loves her. He will not be partially lying. He
will feel okay with the idea of hypothetically
reproducing with this woman. Could he ever
have kids with Amy? He remembers one time he
thought so. A hot night, Lamb and Amy walked
five blocks to an Italian ice stand. He paid.
Impulsively. Amy smiled . Everything was okay.
Lamb takes his exit. He doesn’t want to go
to work. He would not have to go to work for
several weeks if an earthquake were to strike.
This would allow him time to think. He would
be able to exercise, take up a hobby. He pictures
himself in bed, reading the bible, Job teaching
him about inherent virtues of selflessness. He
would equip himself with the tools needed
realize his ultimate happiness. He stares at the
lines along the highway. He imagines an
earthquake tearing a crevice through the planet.
Plates shift. Crush the highway and the exit ramp
into gravel. He looks at the rearview mirror.
Makes eye contact with himself. He says,
“Earthquakes never occur in this region.”
Lamb pulls into the parking lot at his office.
He sits in his car and stares at his building. He
loses track of time. His engine is still running. He
feels sick. Considers calling-in sick. He thinks
107
that if he was really sick, he could die, and
considers his reasons to live.
Lamb feels disoriented but wants to
concentrate. He looks at his building. Hands on
the steering wheel. Ten and two o’clock. He
concentrates on the building, counts its bricks.
He loses count. An ambulance flies down the
road. The siren makes a familiar scream.
He looks at the clock on the console.
Worries about being late for work.
Time is worrisome.
 Seventeen
Cubicles, telephones, and computer screens.
Lamb turns on his computer and stares at
the bare walls of his cubicle unable to do
anything. He considers reading emails or getting
coffee. Coffee has caffeine. Caffeine will lead to
anxiety and fuel insomnia. Anxiety and insomnia
will lead to stress and a depressed immune
system . Lamb regrets not calling-in. He walks to
the break room and prepares a cup of green tea.
He looks around then walks back to his desk.
People talk about weekend plans. Lamb desires
“weekend plans.” Children’s extracurricular
activities. The voices are absorbed by the hollow
mesh of his cubicle. Lamb cradles the cup of tea,
deciding what to do.
He sits down and takes his daily vitamin.
Moves his tongue around in search of a metallic
flavor. Nothing. He wonders if he is providing
his body with enough absorbable nutrients on a
routine basis. He thinks he should do more
things routinely. This would make him a more
effective and industrious person. He decides to
not do anything work-related for fifteen complete
minutes. He will be better equipped to do things
fifteen minutes from now. He opens his mailbox,
reads several junk emails.
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 Oikos
At lunch, he calls his brother. “Hello?”
Lamb says.
“Hey,” Michael says. “What’s going on?”
“I want to quit my job,” Lamb says.
“Okay?” Michael says. He wrestles with the
phone. Lamb can hear him struggling.
“You can always try to get fired,” Michael
says. “That way you don’t have to quit.”
“Good idea,” Lamb says. He wishes he was
more like his brother. He begins to feel woozy.
His ears ache. His breath tastes like wood. “Do
you want to meet for dinner?”
“I hate dinner,” Michael says. “It depresses
me.”
“Everything depresses me.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Michael says. “I mean,
Me too.”
“I’m already hungry.”
“Okay,” Michael says. “What are you doing
right now?”
“Not working at work,” Lamb says. “Same
here.” “I’m aging at an accelerating rate,” Lamb
says. “Same here.” “I’m 50-years-old inside,”
Lamb says. “I’m 80.” Lamb doesn’t say anything.
“How’s Amy?” Michael says.
“Her grandmother died.”
Silence.
“So that happened,” Lamb says. “She’s been
planting things.”
“She’s been what?” Michael says.
“Gardening,” Lamb says.
“Huh,” Michael says. “Did you ever meet
the grandmother?”
“Can’t remember,” Lamb says.
“That’s okay,” Michael says. “I mean, Sorry
to hear that.”
Lamb looks at his computer. His eyes begin
to throb. He closes his eyes and feels the need to
do something with his hands. He holds the
phone between his shoulder and ear and folds
his arms. “I need to get back to work,” he says.
He unfolds his arms. Rubs his hands together.
Blows into them. Touches the mouse on his
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 Adam Moorad
computer. Wiggles the cursor. Tries to think of
something to say.
“Call me when you get off,” Michael says.
“Okay,” Lamb says. He hangs up the
telephone.
He walks to the bathroom, swinging his
arms. He feels as though he is walking too fast.
He considers an appropriate office speed and
slows down. How fast is too fast? He is scared of
moving too slow.
 Eighteen
It is not yet time. Lamb stares himself down
in the dead reflection of the television, waiting to
disappear. He is meeting Michael for dinner. He
wants to leave immediately, looks at his feet and
face in the blank screen. Sees himself staring at
himself. Wonders what he’s thinking.
When he makes eye contact with his
reflection, it feels like an enormous suction cup
has been placed over his face. Gently tugging his
eyeballs from his sockets as he breathes. He
looks at his legs, crosses them, and looks at his
reflection. In his screen, he looks like James
Bond. He uncrosses his legs and stares. His
ankles and shins appear disproportionate and
instantly he thinks they feel that way.
Lamb watches the clock. It will not move.
He makes the conscientious decision to leave
earlier than necessary to meet Michael. He
thinks, Making conscientious decisions is an
attribute of an industrious person . He is
encouraged by this observation and becomes
temporarily confident in his ability to function in
society.
He leaves a note on the kitchen table for
Amy, telling her she can eat dinner without him.
113
 Chapter Eighteen
She’ll be angry if I don’t leave a note. He
wonders if she will be angry if he does not end
with, “Love, Lamb.” He considers the weight of
the word love, its poundage amassing across his
shoulders, feels his vertebra compress, and is
disoriented.
He writes, “L-u-v,” before quickly scrawling
his name. Moves the note from the kitchen table
to the counter beside the sink. He tries to see
Amy in his mind. He can’t. He musters an exotic,
cigarette-smoking woman who is not Amy. This
woman lives a progressive lifestyle in an artistic
community. He fantasizes for several minutes
about this woman. Pictures what life would be
like if he was with this woman.
Lamb’s stomach cramps as he drives. He thinks it
was foolish to leave so early. Why does he do
these things? He predicts himself at a table in the
restaurant, chewing ices cubes alone,
embarrassed. He decides to go to a coffee shop
instead. To kill some time. He parks his car and
walks inside. Killing time is gratifying. Just inside
the entrance, he wonders why he is where he is.
He cannot remember. There are people sitting
quietly at tables with laptop computers and
textbooks. Coffee people. These people are
concentrating intensely on things that will bring
great meaning and dimension to their lives and
the ailing global economy. He is briefly awed at
the prospect of all this genius and continues
standing motionless.
He feels one-dimensional and wonders
what to do. For a second, he thinks he might
pass out. He wraps his arms around himself.
Shivers while trying to avoid eye contact with the
coffee geniuses, whose faces are grave with self-
stimulant. The problem with them is that they’re
idiots; all recovering alcoholics still in need of a
place to be at night with other people.
To the left of the entrance, there is a
newsstand. Someone has placed something that
doesn't belong on the newsstand. A smaller-
than-usual, white magazine. Lamb picks it up.
He reads the cover: little white poetry journal is
115
written in light green letters. He looks for a price.
There is no price. He pockets it. He hopes that
anyone watching will believe this is why he was
where he was. He does not know why he was
where he was. He walks out to his car, feeling
momentarily lost, wondering if he will be
arrested for stealing the thing called little white
poetry journal. He looks at the sky. The sun is
still out. It is abnormally light outside. Time itself
is elongating. He rubs his eyes into focus. There
are clouds. The ambient hue of an impending
dusk. Lamb closes his eyes. Sees a yellow moon.
Wonders what the planet looks like from outer
space. He pictures himself alone on the surface
of the moon. No one is around for a hundred-
million miles. His breath condenses. Hangs in
the bare lunar air before drifting away.
When he opens his eyes, he feels okay.
The car starts perfectly. Lamb exhales
deeply as he listens to the ignition. He removes
the magazine from his pocket and throws it into
the backseat of his car. He doesn't know why he
took it.
He rests his fingers on the steering wheel.
The pistons vibrate below the hood. He can feel
the mechanical rhythm in his fingertips and
draws strength from it. He imagines the motor’s
entrails combusting with perfunctory precision. I
could drive across the entire continent of North
America right now if I wanted. He's had this
recurring thought for several years in similar
situations, he realizes.
Lamb is the only person in the parking lot.
He sits behind the wheel, holding his stomach
with both hands. A white pigeon sits atop a fence
surrounding the parking lot. A white pigeon
walks up to the black one. Black pigeon rises
and walks away hurriedly down the fence. White
pigeon follows—chases—in a sort of avian-
sexual advance. The black pigeon looks alarmed.
Lamb is alarmed. He wonders why the black
pigeon won’t just fly away. Lamb wishes he
could fly.
A minute passes. Lamb reverses his car,
then realizes his door is ajar. He stops the car in
the middle of the parking lot. He opens and
closes his door three times, slamming it each
time. It won’t shut. Lamb looks around for a non-
existent complaint department. He wishes Amy
was with him right now so he could complain to
her. Blame her. Maybe I blame her too much for
things she has no power over. He slams his door
again. Agitation grows. The door closes. Lamb
pulls away.
He drives to the restaurant with his hands
on the wheel. Ten and two. He spins the wheel
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 Oikos
aggressively as he comes to each turn. James
Bond. He pictures himself in a white tuxedo
behind the wheel of an Aston Martin, leisurely
sipping Bollinger RD as the motor purrs. He
thinks about the last time he wore a tuxedo. His
father. The wedding. Easter. Michael on the altar
beside him. Matching tuxedos. Bowties.
Cummerbunds. They folded their arms in an
identical pose. Their father stood with his back
towards them, holding Cynthia’s hand. It was a
hot day. There was no air conditioning. He is
sweating now.
At the restaurant, Lamb feels stupid asking
to be seated. The hostess smiles at him. There is
a thirty-minute wait. Lamb gets mad and
disoriented. Perfumes and seared fish incense his
hunger; his musculature is dissolving; his pulse
has begun to wane.
He considers going to the restaurant bar and
sitting there all night drinking. He will not eat
anything. He will forget about meeting Michael.
Michael will arrive finally and will be unable to
find him. He will call Lamb ten times and leave
three messages, each one gaining in anger and
volume, before leaving the restaurant. Lamb will
listen to the messages in the bar and order
another drink. And another. He will fantasize
about exotic women smoking cigarettes. Phil
Collins will sing a song. Bruce Springsteen will
sing a song. Happy people will listen and feel
happier. Sad people will listen and feel sadder.
Someone will hit a hole-in-one. Someone will
drop their club in mid-swing and have a heart-
attack.
Lamb realizes he is still standing at the
hostess’ table and feels awkward. He has the
opportunity to be normal if he reacts quickly but
he is unable to speak. Slowly, he turns and
leaves the restaurant. He sits down on a bench
outside, feeling empty in the stomach. He wants
a cigarette. He remembers how he and Amy
used to smoke all the time. She’d buy packs of
cigarettes and share them. Sometimes, when she
only wanted one, she would give him money for
an entire pack. It made him happy. It was nice of
her. She is usually very nice. He opens his eyes
and closes them and tries to recount all the
things he used to do differently.
He checks his watch. The one his father
gave him, yes, always accurate. Something
special about it yet unimportant to the world at
large. Like Lamb, who walks to his car and sits in
the passenger seat. He waits for Michael.
“Michael will be here in sixty seconds,” he
says out loud. He is angry at Michael. He thinks
Michael should already be here, then feels the
need to prepare himself for his brother’s arrival.
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This, he believes, is a conscientious decision.
What will he want to talk about when he gets
here? Lamb wants to convince Michael to drive
across North America with him. He wants to
point out to Michael that it is very important.
Our lives will change in a dramatic way. We will
become different individuals. We will no longer
be dull people who don’t care about their lives
or what they do.
Michael doesn’t come. He is fifteen minutes
late. Lamb thinks about going home to spite his
brother. He wonders if the watch his father gave
him is inaccurate. If Time itself handed down to
him was flawed from the outset.
When Lamb turns his head, Michel’s car
pulls into the parking lot. He watches Michael
park and debark, not bothering with the lock. It’s
a piece of junk which doesn’t deserve to be
locked.
“How long have you been here?” Michael
says.
“I wanted to get here early.”
Michael looks around. Lamb holds up his
watch and says, “There’s a thirty minute wait.”
Michael rolls his eyes then looks at the
ground.
“We can wait at the bar?” Lamb says.
Michael nods. They walk inside.
“What have you been doing?” Michael says.
“You look lousy.”
“I don’t know,” Lamb says. “I’m starving.”
At the bar, Michael shakes his head. He
orders two beers and hands one to Lamb. It
comes in a mug. The handle drips on the
counter. “We shouldn’t drink too much if we
haven’t eaten,” Lamb says. “I’m not really
hungry,” Michael says. He guzzles. “I’ll drink
yours if I have to.”
“I don’t want to get hungover,” Lamb says.
“Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”
Michael shrugs. “I don’t care,” he says. He
glances at the television above the bar. His beer
is already gone. Phil Collins sings twenty years
ago. Golfers are waving clubs on a putting green.
Lamb looks at his beer and wonders what to do.
He imagines what life would feel like if he never
had to do anything. He sees his mother
preoccupying herself in her spare time. Power-
walking up and down the sidewalk in the old
neighborhood. Vacuuming the living room
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carpet. Rearranging the cushions on the sofa.
Lamb looks at Michael then down at his beer.
Michael looks at Lamb cradling his mug.
“What?” Michael says. “What?” Lamb says.
“You looked like you were about to say
something,” Michael says.
Lamb shakes his head. He has trouble
breathing. He closes his eyes. Concentrates
deeply on pulling oxygen in and out of his lungs.
He feels his vertebrae compress. When he opens
eyes, nothing has changed.
 Nineteen
The downstairs neighbor has emphysema again.
Lamb is hungover and hears him from the
balcony. He sits eating a bagel, looking at Amy’s
dried plants and her radio, and wincing at the
periodic coughs from downstairs. He stares at the
dials and contemplates. The speakers are rusted,
covered in cigarette ash, spots of paint. She
doesn’t take care of things. The neighbor coughs
again. The neighbor is dying. Lamb closes his
eyes. He looks at the radio. He reaches with his
foot and presses a button. The plastic stings his
skin. The radio still works. Lamb feels a warm
sense of affirmation. Things still work. David
Bowie chimes in about a Japanese hairdo. There
is interference.
He looks at his foot, then around the
balcony. He has the mental image of David
Bowie smoking on a New York City sidewalk in
1 977, staring at a green puddle, implanting
existential irony in the madness of the Cold War.
Nobody recognizes David Bowie. This moment
of anonymity is strengthening. Lamb wishes he
was in a situation where he yearned to be
anonymous. The neighbor moves around
downstairs. Spits. Lamb pictures his own lungs
and capillaries, gummed with tar and paint-
thinning compounds. Wonders if he will ever
develop emphysema. Or an equally debilitating
condition . He rubs his hands together furiously.
Feels the friction through his fingertips. He stares
at Amy’s radio. Touches his face. Spits. Lamb is
eating a bagel because it’s the only thing he can
stomach. As he chews, his jaw burns. He thinks
his tongue is swelling. David Bowie says
something about spiders from Mars. His tongue
is not swelling.
Lamb feels malnourished and frozen in the
aftermath of an unexpected nuclear disaster. He
should eat healthier food. His brain would
function more effectively. Like David Bowie’s
brain . He wonders what David Bowie’s diet
consisted of during The Rise and Fall of Ziggy
Stardust. David Bowie does not eat bagels.
David Bowie dines on cocaine and Bloody
Marys, humming slow hypnotic rhythms into
cashmere scarves, imagining deranged romantic
themes through his glacial alienation in a
dialogue with God from a Tokyo rooftop. He
does not want to work today. He wishes he had
the courage to make a life-altering decision. He
is tired and weak. He imagines David Bowie as
Ziggy Stardust sitting beside him on the balcony,
eating a fucking bagel. Staring at Amy’s radio.
Feeling ambivalent towards the present. Listening
to the dying neighbor gargling tar and paint-
thinning compounds. Himself as David Bowie’s
friend. He wishes David Bowie was his
roommate instead of Donny. They’d sit on the
balcony all day, looking to the radio for
emotional clarity, smoking cigarettes, counting
butts, aware but unconcerned by the impending
threat of emphysema. Of nuclear disasters and
death . Lamb would learn to be artistic—he’d
gradually become a progressive thinker. David
Bowie would employ the Socratic Method to
teach Lamb the message of Ziggy Stardust. Of
postmodernism and the Die Brucke movement.
Lamb thinks about Berlin and feels queasy. He
thinks, My brain is not effective. He would be a
more productive person if he was raised by his
biological mother and not Cynthia. Lamb
wonders if David Bowie was raised by his
biological mother. If any event in his childhood
directly inspired The Rise and Fall of Ziggy
Stardust. Lamb wonders if he is unhappy. If
David Bowie is unhappy.
Lamb bites his bagel. Chews. Looks over the
balcony. Feels like an alien. He wants to spit the
bagel out. He swallows it and looks at the sky.
He feels his pupils squeeze shut. It is quiet. Lamb
listens for his neighbor. Nothing. He wonders if
his neighbor is dead. Lamb thinks about his
father. About Cynthia. Cynthia has no
conception of postmodernism. She is not a
progressive thinker. He remembers one time
when Cynthia came home with a bag of bagels.
It was Sunday. She looked happy to be doing
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 Oikos
something Lamb might appreciate. When Lamb
saw the bagels, he pretended to not be happy.
Cynthia offered to toast Lamb a bagel.
David Bowie describes the Leper Messiah
behind the retro stream of a locomotive purr.
Rattling pistons fade in and move across the
balcony. There is static. The radio chokes and
fizzles. Lamb blames Amy’s irresponsibility for
the naturally occurring atmospheric disturbance.
He breaks off a piece of his bagel and throws it
over the balcony. He imagines pigeons will fly
into the alley, eat the piece of bagel and feel
nourished. “Enjoy,” he says out loud. He might
vomit. He wants to. He makes the decision to
never drink again. No. He will never eat bagels
the morning after drinking again. He imagines a
scenario in which he’d be required to eat bagels,
unconsciously manifesting a hypothetical future-
life, listing each caveat in his head:
Marriage to Amy.
Her opening a bagel joint.
A neighborhood hotspot.
The servers won’t like Amy.
She is irresponsible.
They’ll tell jokes behind her back.
Lamb smiles. As a person, Amy is happier
than him. She is physically smaller and has more
energy for life. Lamb thinks it is inevitable that he
will marry Amy. In his head, he matches her first
name with his last name. He contemplates
having kids with Amy and wonders what their
offspring might look like. Lamb will be the legal
guardian of these children. Amy will be their
primary breadwinner. Lamb will be nothing but
responsible for raising her offspring. He will give
all his money to these children. He will be very
poor. He considers this. He cries and continues.
He will be forced live on a fixed budget. He will
eat bagels everyday.

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 Adam Moorad
Lamb calls his office and tells them he is sick. He
has the flu. He doesn’t want to infect anyone. He
wanders around his apartment for thirty minutes.
Everyone everywhere is doings things that bring
them happiness and fulfillment. He wonders
what their secret is. He wonders if happy people
make the conscientious decision to pursue
happiness. How far happy people will go to
remain emotionally fulfilled. Everyone who is
happy is an enemy. A threat to his latent and
everlasting unhappiness. Lamb wishes he was
more conscientious and had the ability to make
conscientious decisions unconsciously. He
wonders when his father made the conscientious
decision to marry Cynthia. Lamb entertains the
idea of going outside but is afraid to leave his
apartment. Ziggy Stardust watching from a
spaceship, knowing what the future holds.
He walks through the apartment feeling
vaguely omnipotent. He passes the television.
The screen is on, the sound is off. Lamb presses
the power button and the screen dies. A layer of
dust coats the glass. Lamb thinks about cleaning
it. He will clean it later. He sits down on the sofa
before the television. He sees his reflection. He
lies down and makes the conscientious decision
to fall asleep.
Lamb experiences an anxiety attack. When
he sleeps he dreams of heights. He sees deep
gorges and city blocks. These voids spread with
profound mass through Lamb’s mind. He is
unable to move. He is on the rooftop of a large
building. The building is burning. Lamb doesn’t
know what to do. He looks down at the ground
and marvels at his own elevation. There are
other people on the rooftop looking down with
Lamb. Everyone is dressed in black. The cement
beneath their feet begins to increase in
temperature. Thin veils of smoke curl from the
cracks atop the building. The heat is tolerable.
Then immense. There are sirens. Lamb looks
over the ledge. He sees the rooftops of other
buildings not on fire. Amy is there – so is Cynthia
– standing, watching Lamb standing, watching
them. Their building is not on fire. A person on
Lamb’s building jumps off the roof. Another
person jumps. Another. Some leap as far as they
can. Others move slowly to the ledge and let
themselves fall. Ziggy Stardust stands on the
corner of the roof. His hair is red. He is wearing
a zebra-striped leotard. He looks at Lamb.
Combs his hair several times. Points confidently
at an incoming airplane. He winks before back-
flipping over the edge in a tight spiral. Now,
Lamb is on the roof alone. The smoke thickens.
He sees the reflection of his building in the
windows of other buildings. Lamb takes a picture
on himself on the rooftop with his camera
phone. He looks at the picture. He is smiling.

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 Chapter Nineteen
Lamb wakes up, removes the covers from
his body, and crawls out of bed. He wishes he
still had the ability to sleep like a child. He
wishes his was a child again. He sits in the chair
at his desk, sweating. He thinks, What am I trying
to think? He places his hands on his face and
holds them there. Attempts to concentrate on
something deeper. It’s hot in the room and Lamb
feels thirsty, not in the mouth so much as the
stomach. He feels like shouting. His tongue wont
move, stuck behind his teeth. He removes
everything from his desk except for his computer.
He looks at the floor then the ceiling then the
wall. He walks around his room. Wonders where
to go. He feels hungry but doesn’t know what to
eat. He thinks about masturbating then recalls
the image of people dressed in black. Jumping
off buildings. Ziggy Stardust watching, smiling.
Slowly, Lamb moves to the corner of his bed and
sits down. He shakes. A picture comes to him: A
man floating in the air. Beams of light around
him. The man takes hold of a beam in his hand,
looks at the beam then bites the ray in half.
When Lamb opens his eye he stares at the chips
of paint hanging from the ceiling above his bed.
There are cracks and white peals. He closes his
eye and sees the floating man again –
surrounded by the sun and moon and stars. No
darkness. Just a man and the light around him.
Lamb hugs his legs and watches his wall with a
vacant face. It is cold and he shivers, feeling the
hollowness of his bones. The air inside them. He
touches his skin, knowing it’s just the edge of
something else.

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 Twenty
A bus stops and drives down the street. Lamb
watches it disappear slowly. Abandoning him on
his front steps. His expression is polarized; he
feels as though he is competing with every being
on earth, running a race against every known
species. His track of time and sense of self
revolve in some strange orbit, out of reach. He
walks down the street through his neighborhood.
The pavement rocks him. Identical apartment
buildings are separated by thin alleyways. Each
building has an irrelevant name displayed by
illuminated signage: The Sierra , The Courtyard,
The Village, The Laurels. Brick buildings. Dried
chunks of Spam. The grout between chunks.
Infected scabs. Green with moss and fungus.
Slow, silent decomposition.
A car pulls up the street, turning right
without indicating, gravitating sluggishly in
Lamb’s direction. He stops and watches the
headlights, blank windshield, scuffed fender. The
driver approaches slowly, tapping on the gas
pedal, before stopping at the curb. Lamb remains
motionless. Amy parks and unrolls the window.
“Don’t just sit there,” she says. “Help me.”
She emerges from the car with two bags of
groceries. Lamb goes to the car. “There’s more in
the trunk,” she says. Lamb takes the bags from
Amy and follows her inside. The sky is cloudy,
looking as though it wants to rain. Amy opens
the full mailbox. “Bills, bills, bills,” she says.
Lamb begins to sweat. It must be the southern
air. He looks around the neighborhood. A
constant layout of neutral color. Hazy. Muted by
the soft mutter of far away voices and motors. He
imagines the expressions of people in kitchens
and bedrooms doing exciting things. Things they
will always remember. Eternal, untouchable
things.
Lamb watches Amy as she climbs the front
steps. She grasps the doorknob. Turns it.
Removes her keys. It’s still locked. Lamb
examines the cracks in the cement steps. He
stares at the stains around them, the dirt inside
them, feeling them through his soles as he tries to
think of something to say. The things he should
do to make the overall appearance of his
residence more appealing: he will cut the grass,
water the lawn, even clean the gutters and trim
the bushes along the entryway. Minor chores. He
sits down with the bags on his lap. Now what?
He thinks about his body and compares it to his
mother’s. Wonders what she’d look like if she
were alive.
“You’re home early,” Amy says. She turns
around. Looks at Lamb. It’s the only eye contact
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he’s had all day.
“I took a sick day today,” Lamb says. His
face looks, feels weary. “But I’m not sick.”
Inside, Amy tells Lamb about her day. About her
conversation with her mother about her father.
About the inconsistent temperature of her office.
About a dog she saw—its size, its eyes, its
tail—then about its owner. “They looked just like
one another.” She laughs. Lamb isn’t sure what
to say. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I lost track of it.”
He circles the apartment and tries to envision a
different furniture arrangement. His mother
would have been able to give him suggestions.
Would have offered helpful ideas on wall colors
or how a lamp should be positioned or how the
closets could be organized to utilize their
maximum capacity. He stops. He paints the
drywall with his eyes and, for a while, is at rest.
Something passes.

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 Adam Moorad
Lamb walks into the bedroom and stretches out
across the covers. He stares at the ceiling for ten
minutes. He thinks, I should paint the ceiling
blue like the sky. He decides he will paint the
sun and moon. The atmosphere will be
permanently clear. Amy walks into the bedroom.
Lamb closes his eyes. He opens them once he
feels her breath around his nostrils.
“I need to have sex,” Amy says.
“Okay,” Lamb says. A minor chore.
Amy tries to hand Lamb a prophylactic, but
drops it.
“Oh, oops.”
“That’s okay.”
“Why don’t you move a different way?”
“Wait a second.”
“It’s already undone.”
“Careful.”
“Hand me that pillow.”
“This one?”
“That one.”
“Lean over this way a little.”
“I can’t.”

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 Chapter Twenty
Lamb holds his eyes shut for a while then opens
them. He can see the smoke detector on the
ceiling. A red light blinks. It blinks again. Lamb
thinks, Is that good or bad? Does it run on
batteries? Do they need to be changed? Do I
need to change? He wonders if these smoke
detectors would function correctly in a life or
death situation. It doesn’t matter.
Amy slips quietly over the sheets. Speaks
soft and indecipherable as she pants. She is
always breathless. Lamb never understood this
about her. Even her silence is winded. It must be
the southern air.
Amy sleeps. Lamb sits awake with his arms
around his knees, believing some grand
misunderstanding is at work. Confusion about
words like “happy” and “sad”—and other binary
terms, like “clean” and “dirty.” He looks out the
window and imagines linguistic scholars
huddled in Ivy League libraries, furiously reading
from dictionaries by candlelight, deciding what
descriptions best fit the definitions of terms like
“hot” and “cold” or “hard” and “soft.” Lamb feels
soft then anxious. He climbs out of bed. Waits at
the window. Looks out at the neighborhood
through the lens of the storm glass. He wonders
if his apartment is a home, or just a habitat. He
inhales. Tries to remain calm. Amy sucks in air
from her nest of sheet and pillow. We are only
inhabitants, he thinks. He looks at the sky and
wishes for rain. He is cold and exposed in his
nudity. Inhibited. “This is inevitable,” he says
quietly.
The sun sets. Lamb wonders how he would
react to a sudden and violent emergency. A
nuclear disaster. An earthquake. He sits on the
bed with his back to Amy. Every emotion is a
cystic ball of siesta—pulsing in a thick,
malignant throb; every thought a waterlogged
memory floating in a black puddle. Yawning,
placated, numb. Caged in insomniac slumber.
Dried chunks of Spam coat his lungs. The world
is not working now. He pictures tomorrow.
Wonders what tomorrow will be like.
“Are you awake?” Amy asks, eyes still
closed.
“Not yet,” he says.

139
 Twenty-One
Lamb sits in the cul-de-sac with his engine
running. His clothes are baggy and he feels
eight-year-old-in-hand-me-downs
awkward—secondhand and recycled. He always
has this feeling. The drab, tawdry feel of
someone else's things around him. Coarse,
odorous, and familiar. The radio says something
about rainforests. Rainforests are shrinking. The
animals inside them are disappearing and dying.
The planet’s temperature is increasing. Icebergs
are melting. The ocean is rising.
Mildly paranoid, he shuts the radio off. The
world is a dangerous place. He rubs his eyes for
several seconds. Recently, he has experienced
reoccurring images of himself wrecking a car.
Breaking his nose on the steering wheel. Not
dead but bleeding. Surviving. He sees himself
hunched over with blood on his face, listening to
the radio, laughing.
He is waiting for Irene. They are going to
eat Chinese because Irene has given up.
“Because I don’t care anymore,” she said. He
looks at his watch and is annoyed. I am only me,
he thinks.
He honks at Irene’s house. Seconds later she
appears at the front door and waves. He thinks
about the ocean, overcome by a landlocked
sensation coming from somewhere inside him,
curling around his spinal column, choking his
bones like a python in the rainforest. He waves
back as she approaches.
Irene puts her seatbelt on quickly. It’s as if
she’s afraid to be seen struggling with it. Lamb
takes her in: skin pink and tatty, hair grown out
with brown roots revealing themselves through a
matted fade of various highlights. What is it they
said about the easy girls? They're always
changing their appearance. He wonders if Irene
is what they call an easy girl. She turns to Lamb
and smiles. Silence for several seconds and then,
timidly in a way that made them both feel weird,
“How’s it going?”
“I’m good,” he says. “Are you hungry?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asks.
She giggles. Her eyes are wide before she closes
them. Easy. “I’m just joking,” she says. She
touches Lamb’s arm and then the dashboard.
There is anxiety concealed in her behavior. He
forces a smile and wants to scream. He says,
“Okay.”
Lamb thinks about seeing Irene in the video
store. He wishes he hadn’t. He doesn’t know
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why. They hardly recognized one another. Amy
said it was okay for him to see Irene because
Amy doesn’t think Irene is attractive or happy.
Lamb pretended he understood. I am never not
pretending.
Several things go through Lamb’s mind as they
drive: mailboxes, bills, the curb, rainforests and
the animals inside them, Bono, the prospect of
the first black president of the United States of
America, the rise of social networking, his future
on the rungs of the corporate ladder, and the
possibility of fucking Irene.
They pass several houses adjacent to the
fairway of an eighteen-hole golf course. Golf
carts rest in the distance. He looks at Irene,
holding herself with her arms. They barely reach
around her anymore. It has been almost two
years since Lamb has last been alone with Irene.
Since before she discovered cocaine and
dropped out of college or she moved back in
with her parents or gained twenty-five pounds.
Before a lot.
It was around Christmas. She called. He
didn’t know why. She had infected everyone in
her family with strep throat. She is dirty. She was
crying. Everyone was ill. “It only hurts when I
swallow,” he remembers her saying.

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 Adam Moorad
It begins to rain.
“Are you sure Chinese is okay?” Irene asks.
“Sure,” Lamb says. “I mean, totally.” He
stares through the windshield. Turns the wipers
on. They wipe. Lamb feels gradually sodden. He
should have worn something waterproof. The
Chinese place is at the mall. Malls have huge
parking lots. Getting wet is inevitable.
“Now that I live here again, we should hang
out more,” Irene says.
Lamb doesn’t want to speak but says, “I
know.” His eyes are irritated. The freckles on the
bridge of Irene’s nose float off her face. He blinks
suddenly watering eyes. His eyelids drag his
contact lenses grinding against his pupils and
across his irises. He should have lasik surgery.
The laser would zap his eyes into focus. It would
be a painless procedure. Things would become
clearer. Everything would make sense.
Irene yawns obnoxiously, pawing her
mouth like an elementary-school Indian. Lamb
tries to breathe. He feel the car filling up with
Irene and her puttering breath. He oscillates
between nausea and calm. His eyes focus and
unfocus. Irene stretches her arms upward. She is
about to rip the roof off his car. He imagines her
driving her arms tearing the roof away in one
swift tyrannosaurus-rex motion. He can feel the
rain falling on his newly-exposed face, the water
rising from the driver’s seat, waves frothing,
rocking him back and forth. On the college radio
station, Robert Pollard laments the Goldheart
Mountaintop Queen Directory. Lamb realizes
that no one is ever going there and returns his
focus to Irene: “When I stretch, I always get a
head rush,” she says. “Does that ever happen to
you?”
Lamb watches the road. A mailbox. The
curb. Rainforests. These things are not clear.
Lasers make things clear. He needs lasik now. He
can think of nothing else. He turns the radio off
and feels momentarily in control of the situation.
“I think there’s something wrong with my
body,” Irene says. “Like, cancer or something.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing serious,” Lamb says.
He smiles at the road.

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Chapter Twenty-One
Lamb brightly remembers swimming in Irene’s
pool on a day before puberty. Underwater, he
opened his eyes and the chlorine irritated them.
He thought he was going blind. When he
crawled out of the pool, Irene asked what was
wrong. In pre-pubescent terms, she told him to
stop faking blindness and ran away. Lamb
remembers himself wrapped in a towel on a
lounge chair muttering indecipherably towards
the sun and feeling blind out of boredom. He’d
taken three deep breaths, felt a pasty dryness in
his mouth, and became convinced, for the first
time, that there was something massive inside
him wanting out.
“I’m going to be a psychologist,” Irene says
at a red light.
“A psychologist, huh?” Lamb says.
“Classes start again this fall,” she says.
“Psychiatry really interests me.”
Silence but for the squeak of the wipers
pushing rain across the windshield. Lamb’s
contacts glide between his cornea and eye
muscles. He rubs his sockets, furiously then
gently.
“I don’t think those are the same things,” he
says. He looks at Irene. She peers out the
window aimlessly. He can tell she’s sunburned.
Traffic begins to move again.
“What do you mean?” she says into her
window.
“Never mind,” he says. He cranks his
window down.
“Where was the college you went to?” he
asks.
“Missouri,” she says. She says something
else that Lamb does not listen to. Peripherally, he
can see her mouth move. A damp breeze blows
through her hair and eyes. He keeps his eyes
ahead of him. Looks at the road. Trees line the
median. There are shrubs. Sidewalks. Illegible
signage to nowhere. When he looks back at
Irene, she is fishing in her purse for a cigarette.
“I need to lose weight,” she says. She
impresses the cigarette lighter. They listen to a
commercial for a car dealership. A commercial
for all-inclusive Caribbean vacations. A
commercial for Lady’s Night at a college bar
downtown. She turns the radio off and lights her
cigarette. Lamb watches as the end of the butt
ignites in a pink cherry. It looks the same color
as Irene’s skin. Her face is a glowing cancer
ember. Rain drops edge across the windshield,
147
leaving crooked trails of oil and saline, and fall
to the pavement, dissolving in the microscopic
cracks on the ground, bleeding little by little
towards the center of the earth.
At the Chinese restaurant—a buffet serviced by
Mexicans with two self-serving lines running
through the middle—a dark-complected man
says, “Sorry. No more food.” Lamb looks at Irene
in confusion. There are several people dining
quietly. Lamb and Irene look at one another,
then at the host. Neither wants to go back out in
the rain. Lamb looks around the restaurant at the
identical families eating Chinese food, sticking
empty forks into blank faces. “Just kidding,” the
host says with a gap-toothed grin. Lamb watches
the gap widen. A girl in a black t-shirt appears
and leads Lamb and Irene to a table. They sit.
“Enjoy,” the girl says. She places two sets of
chopsticks on the table, smiles, and walks away.
Lamb watches her disappear behind a door in
the rear of the dining room.
Irene surveys the trays of food on the buffet
and says, “Delicious.”
The restaurant smells like a zoo. Lamb shuts
his eyes and breathes, tries not to picture a zoo
full of elephants eating fried Chinese food
through their trunks. A gap-toothed man feeds
them with chopsticks. Irene watches him and
says, “Delicious.”
Lamb realizes he hasn’t said anything for a
long time. Irene has managed to pass the entire
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 Oikos
time with talk of the weather, the air, nothing.
Lamb is speechless. He would be happy to not
speak for the rest of his life. He smells the air.
Feels distantly calm. A little nauseous, as if
somehow intoxicated by the aroma of fried-
something. There is a painting on the wall of a
bird on a branch. An ornamental print, washed-
out and earth-toned. The branches stretch from
somewhere off canvas. Everything is two-
dimensional, floating in an ambient drift. The
bird pecks a bushel of yellow fruit. Raw mucous
core. Sweet like honey. Vaguely aromatic. Lamb
thinks the fruit looks like banana-tumors. He
could talk about this but doesn’t. He thinks about
the fruit and cancer and wonders if the fruit is
poisonous. He pictures the bird eating the fruit
and falling off the branch. Dead. Lamb imagines
the branch belongs to a tree in a rainforest. The
tree has cancer. The rainforest and the bird no
longer exist in real life. The bird has red eyes. It
is looking straight at Lamb.
The vaguest prospect of sex with Irene
presents itself to his mind’s eye again as she says,
“I’m thinking about puking again.” She smiles
half-heartedly. Her voice is its own void. “I need
to unload some of this.” She pinches her arm.
Now he is a little afraid of her. There is danger in
her. Amy is not dangerous. Amy is safe. Most
women are not dangerous. Irene is not most
women. Something blurry moves across his
view. Fuzzy globs of nothing create indistinct
ripples of distorted shapes. He fixes his eyes on
the painting. The branch shakes. Lamb thinks the
bird has moved but cannot be certain. The leaves
become velvety and dense, then evaporate.
Lamb’s eyes begin to water. He closes them. An
oyster-like sweat christens his skull. He cannot
concentrate. He thinks his vision is rapidly
deteriorating. His eyes and mind are
dysfunctional balls of corrosion. “That’s how
most actresses stay thin,” Irene says. “I think.”
“I guess that’s true,” Lamb says. He looks at
Irene. They make painful eye contact. She
squints at Lamb and looks away. Lamb watches
the painting. Brush-dipped calligraphy along the
side of the frame begins to rope around in slow,
meticulous movements off the canvas, onto the
wall—as if some invisible freehand is engraving
an ancient language across the restaurant walls.
“Don’t some of them, like, die though?”
Lamb asks. Pauses. He focuses deeply on
inhaling. “Karen Carpenter or someone died that
way.”
“That’s anorexia,” Irene says. “If you vomit,
it’s called something else.” She scratches her
elbow. She looks at Lamb, then at the ceiling.
“I’m starving,” she says quietly to the ceiling.

151
 Adam Moorad
Lamb wonders what Irene is looking at and
follows her line of vision. There are spirals.
Zigzags. Dots. Animals with wings and tails.
These animals are in a rainforest. Patterns and
designs drift in errant rotations making a Stone
Aged picture of petrified heads of cabbage.
Glowing blue, panoramic They remind Lamb of
outer space.
“Are you okay?” Irene says. “I mean, is
something wrong?”
“Yeah,” Lamb says. “I mean, No. I don’t
know.” He looks away. The man behind the
register brings over two glasses of water. He
winks at them individually and retreats to his
register. After a while, Irene tells Lamb about her
current romantic interest. Lamb pays marginal
attention, thinking about the bird. Red-eyed and
static, it watches.
“This one guy does the nicest things for
me,” she says. “I feel really lucky for some
reason. It kind of sucks.”
Lamb isn’t listening but laughs at least once
before responding to anything Irene says. This
will engender forgiveness for the wrong response
to something he doesn’t hear. A dumbfounded
autism moves through him; a cold and stationary
chill.
 “I could never marry a guy like that,” Irene
says. “I don’t know why.” Lamb laughs shortly
and says, “Uh-huh.” He looks at Irene and sees a
nervous and lonely girl in her late-twenties with
a distant fear of infinite loneliness compounding
with each day. He wonders if Amy ever feels the
same way. She wouldn’t say if she did. He
watches Irene drink from her straw and
concludes that he doesn’t know her anymore.
They were close before puberty.

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Chapter Twenty-One
That night, Lamb watches a television show
about biblical prophecies. Amy is gone. Donny
is gone. He is alone watching prophecies.
Several ancient predictions have come to fruition
in modern times. Lamb thinks each prophetic
forecast sounds equally imaginary and
coincidental. On camera, people speak about
when and how the world will end. They hold
Bibles tightly to love-handled torsos. These
people are from Missouri. A landlocked region .
When the people are finished talking, a carousel
of apocalyptic illustrations envelopes the
television. Birds fall from sky. Mountains go up
in flames. Earthquakes tear yawning holes in the
planet.
Later, he thinks about real life for several
minutes. Every once in a while, he catches
himself smiling, laughing a little, feeling
exhilaration and madness. Disappointed and
satisfied with everything. Feeling something.
 Twenty-Two
Amy is dying her hair in order to become
someone else. Lamb watches her from across the
bathroom. Maybe she’s dying it because her
grandmother would. Maybe Amy is dying her
hair in order to become her grandmother. She
sits on the bathroom counter, staring at herself,
gnawing off chips of polish with her teeth and
spitting them into the sink.
Lamb could shave his head, he considers.
He could shave his entire body like an Olympic
swimmer and compete for a gold medal then net
a lucrative endorsement deal with an athletic
apparel brand.
“Donny has a job,” Amy says.
“I know,” Lamb says. “You told me.”
“Oh yeah,” Amy says.
Donny found a job and has been gone for
days. Lamb wonders where he’s gone. It feels
like Donny’s been missing for weeks. Lamb
wonders if he’s said anything to Donny that
wound make him run away. He compiles a list in
his head of all the different names he has for
Donny:
 1) Donny
2) Donald
3) Donald Duck
4) Donnie Darko
5) Donnie Brasco
6) Donny-boy
7) Don Juan
8) The Don
9) Donovan

Donny most likely doesn’t understand any

these names, Lamb is aware, and wonders if
Donny forgotten his real name.
He thinks these sounds are irrelevant. He
wishes he had earplugs to hide from all sounds.
He would wear them right now. He concocts a
plan to buy a pair and wear them for the rest of
his life. To live the rest of his life in a soundless
vacuum.
He plugs his ears. He smiles.
Amy blows a kiss to herself in the mirror.
He wonders if he is alive, if this is life, and
pretends something important has happened in
the other room, calling him away.
 Twenty-Three
Wake-dreaming, Lamb is in his office alone with
the lights out. A miniature buffalo chews the
carpet absent-mindedly, coughing asthmatically
in the dark.
He sits at his desk in this dry place and feels
thirsty. Smoke detectors form red constellations
across the ceiling. He stares into space a while,
then re-focuses on the buffalo. It stops to brush
its snout with a hoof. Lamb believes his life
would be simpler were it lived as a buffalo.
Other than pigeons and rodents, he cannot
remember the last time he saw an animal alive in
the wild. Suddenly, there is a palm tree raining
coconuts, and all but one of these disappear. The
miniature buffalo looks at the coconut and kicks
it at the wall. Lamb doesn’t say anything. He
wonders why the buffalo is in his office. He
moves his tongue around his mouth and tries to
breathe. He rubs his eyes for a while. When he
stops, the buffalo is gone.
 Oikos
Lamb's telephone rings. He answers pensively,
holding the phone like a loaded diaper. It is a
male co-worker Lamb pretends to know.
Pretending is easier than knowing, he reasons.
The co-worker asks if a particular report has
been sent to a particular person. Lamb hears the
question and becomes nauseated. He wants to
sneeze out the nausea. He stares at the telephone
receiver. Red begins to swell behind his eyes. He
is overcome with the urge to light something on
fire. The telephone says something about the
weather. Lamb wishes to know what’s happening
inside his brain. The grey mesh of his cubicle
begins to churn like the ocean. The tide is rising.
His office begins to sink. There are screams.
Icebergs. People are going to drown. He says,
“Yes.”
“Thought so,” the co-worker says. “Thanks
for everything.”
“Uh-huh,” Lamb says. He hangs up the
phone and sits motionless for several minutes.
He slouches in his chair, counting breaths, and
closes his eyes. He sees a buffalo grazing the
Dakota plains. There is a wind whistle over the
pristine horizon. Lamb opens his eyes, pops his
knuckles, and feels normal again.
Lamb is a phony. He has done nothing in his
entire life with a good-natured attitude. All he
has ever attempted to accomplish was done with
the goal of gaining the acceptance of others.
He considers people, their priorities, needs,
and their ability to understand them in relations
to others. People have the need to be liked or
admired. He wonders if he is like or admired by
anyone. Deep down, he doesn’t like or admire
anybody. He only wants them to like him and
admire him. I am afraid of not being liked by
everyone.
He recalls all the close relationships in his
life, recounting deep conversations he has had
with people he thought he wanted to be liked by.
He recalls numerous attempts to listen in a
seemingly interested and sympathetic manner to
people while not really wanting to know or
understand who the other person was inside.
He careens in his swivel chair and wonders
about wheelchair life.

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 Adam Moorad
The Xerox machine ejects paper, reams
streaming into uniform stacks on a tray. This is
how a Xerox machine ejaculates. He stands in
front of the machine for several minutes,
watching estranged print jobs gush from the
machine in plasticized electric euphoria.
He entertains the idea of making one-
thousand copies of a blank sheet of paper. For
the Xerox machine’s pleasure. He is afraid and
does not do this.
At lunch, Lamb walks down the hallway to the
elevator. Waiting, he notices his jaw aching. He
rides to the ground floor and walks through a
revolving door to the sidewalk where there are
rows of people smoking cigarettes. He thinks
about smoking, his lungs, his neighbor: paint-
thinning compounds surging though the varicose
veins bulging from his swelling ankles. He is hot,
he is cold. He is overcome by a vague nostalgia
for the person he was—who never worked in an
office building or took “lunch breaks.”
He walks across the street to a deli. Inside,
he looks around for several minutes. He takes a
sandwich out of a refrigerated display case. He
wants a hamburger, a buffalo burger. Feels guilty
for some inexplicable reason, having the mental
image of everyone on the planet gorging
themselves on raw bison meat. He checks his
wallet, no cash. He never carries cash. He picks
up a bag of jalapeño chips and looks at it. His
fingers are aliens. He puts the chips back. He
picks up a carton of yogurt then stands in line,
impatiently attempting to appear patient.
“One sandwich. One yogurt,” the boy
behind the cash register notes with a robotic
quality, looking at Lamb, who nods without
speaking. The boy looks down at the register.
Types. Reads. He says, “$5.66.” Lamb hands
over his debit card. Lamb watches nervously.
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Chapter Twenty-Three
Waiting. Beads of perspiration dot his forehead.
He is often afraid of his card being turned down.
Despite being financially acceptable, he fears
rejection. He inhales. Holds his breath for ten
seconds. When the credit card machine spits out
his receipt, he breathes a sigh of relief, takes his
receipt, and walks away, gripping the earth
awkwardly with his feet, feeling bent. Worthless.
Used.
Lamb has emails to read. He sets his sandwich
down on the desk. He bumps the cord of his
telephone and it falls off the receiver. Every time
my phone rings I have to pretend to be
something.
He wishes he had a hot towel to wrap
around his head. He smiles.
He eats for a while.
The walls of the office move like an
assembly line. An idea to do something exciting
with his life pops into mind miraculously before
disappearing. The rest of his life flashes before
him. His middle-aged years. There is income and
there are taxes. Handshakes. Fourth of July
parades. Identical suburban homes. And Webber
grills for all.
All the things he loves most in his life stare
at him with abandonment and hatred, all
beneath layers of doubt. Lamb stares back at
them with bags beneath his eyes. He can’t stop
doing nothing. He won’t.
The workday ends in just this way.

163
Lamb parks outside his apartment. He wonders
about Five-Years-From-Now. Where he’ll be
living. What he’ll be doing.
He walks into his building slowly, fighting
the urge to do something unhealthy.
He saunters back and forth across the
downstairs entry. His head throbs, his teeth
ache—his brain is an abandoned warehouse
crammed full of everything ever. Amy. Cynthia.
His reverend father. Donny. Everything is here.
Nothing is there. He imagines a new world in his
mind and envisions the death of the natural
world. The dead writhing bodies of today.
Grotesque images puddle up and evaporate.
He leaves the building staring skyward. He
goes back to his car and sits behind the steering
wheel. He is distant from everything—an orbiting
astronaut.
Five years from now everything will okay.
He starts the engine and rolls through the
parking lot gradually, not knowing where he is
headed. Once finally on the road, he drives fast.
 Adam Moorad

W
as born in Chicago
in 1983. His poetry
and fiction have
appeared in numerous literary
journals. He once killed a snake
with a stick. It was a black
snake. He believes in the
disordered order of things. He
lives in Brooklyn.
moorada@gmail.com
frsh.in/moorad

166
 Credits
Portions of this story appeared previously in the
following publications:
The Catalonian Review
Corium Magazine
dispatch litareview
Emprise Review
Ex Cathedra (defunct)
Gigantic Sequins (print/fall 2010)
jmww
The Medulla Review
mud luscious
Necessary Fiction
Southpaw Literary Magazine
Wilderness House

Editing and production

by P. H. Madore.

167
 Purchase

T
rue believers may obtain a hard
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We know, we know, you're as broke
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Thanks.
phm & am

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