Crimes of Paris

Masha was sleeping over again, ostensibly because she’d spent too much on heat last month and needed to keep her house cold for a few weeks to stay on budget. “Go, coal, go!” she yelled whenever we passed the billboard in town about the president’s alleged war on the same. She was joking. Also broke. She sprawled on my hard, cheap couch under all the blankets she’d brought, mostly flimsy polar fleece items but also some absurdly nice things: an antique cabin quilt with velvet patches, an iridescent throw her mother had bought in Nigeria in the seventies. Usually, the latter hung on her wall, next to the curator card it came with. Masha’s relationship to economics was muddled but not unhappy. “Can we watch something mean?” she said. “I’m ready to cast a gimlet eye on the world.” Her blue heeler Klaus, not big on “mean,” butted her hip. “I left his food at the house,” she said. “Do you have some cheese and crackers or something?” I went to the kitchen to fix Klaus something like a dog dinner. Excluding chocolate was about the only thing I knew to do. I settled on a half can of tuna with some mozzarella and croutons. Klaus nudged it a few times and then set a grudging pace, deep breathing every few bites in martyred resignation. “You are stronger than you were yesterday, but not as strong as you will be tomorrow,” I told him. It’s what my gym emblazoned over the towel drop. That poster always made me think of Masha, describing as it did the tiny muscle I felt growing inside me somewhere midskull, as though the Hindu third eye were really a flexing fist. I wasn’t in love with her—i almost always preferred men—but she provoked all the same feelings as a love affair in the first post-honeymoon chapter: the struggle to find lines and edges, to resist the melt. She was my best friend in Careyville, where I’d moved for medical school, but she required a certain amount of resistance to her torpors. The effort consumed in holding out against her was forming a sinewy clump in my head, possibly at the expense of higher-order thinking. When I came back to the living room, a man made up to look like Richard Nixon was shouting from Masha’s laptop. “Secret Honor. It’s the eighties doing the seventies. Incredible.” She rolled over on the couch to make room for me. I burrowed under the blankets and was asleep in minutes. What do I know about the Nixon