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I entered a cavelike foyer, lined with broken lamp fixtures made of brass and shaped to look like stalks of wheat. The room was more than forty feet high. The ceiling had once been painted with a mural -- vague, chipped images of country boys and girls hoeing or digging. One girl, her face now vanished, looked like she might be holding a jump rope. Or a snake? The entire western corner of the ceiling had caved in at some point: where the mural`s oak tree should have exploded into green summer leaves, there was instead a patch of blue night sky. I could see the glow of the moon but not the moon itself. The foyer remained dark, electricity-free, but I could just make out piles of trash swept into the corners of the room. The partygoers had hustled off the squatters, then taken a broom to the place, tried to spiff it up. It smelled like piss anyway. An ancient condom was spaghetti-stuck to one wall.
"You guys couldn`t have sprung for, like, a banquet hall?" I mumbled. The marble floor hummed beneath me. Clearly all the action was happening downstairs.
"We`re not exactly a welcome convention," the guy said. He had a young, fleshy face with moles. He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool. "Plus this building has a certain... ambiance. One of the Tallmans blew his brains out here in 1953."

She needed the good mood, the way you need sleep after an all-nighter, the way you daydream of throwing yourself into bed. Every day she woke up and swore she wouldn`t let the farm weigh her down, wouldn`t let the ruination of it (three years she was behind in the loan, three years and no way out) turn her into the kind of woman she hated: mirthless, pinched, unable to enjoy anything. Every morning she`d crick herself down onto the flimsy rug by her bed and pray, but it was actually a promise: Today I won`t yell, I won`t cry, I won`t clench up into a ball like I am waiting for a blow to level me. I will enjoy today.

My neighborhood doesn`t even have a name, it`s so forgotten. It`s called Over There That Way. A weird, subprime area, full of dead ends and dog crap. The other bungalows are packed with old people who`ve lived in them since they were built. The old people sit, gray and pudding-like, behind screen windows, peering out at all hours. Sometimes they walk to their cars on careful elderly tiptoes that make me feel guilty, like I should go help. But they wouldn`t like that. They are not friendly old people -- they are tight-lipped, pissed off old people who do not appreciate me being their neighbor, this new person. The whole area hums with their disapproval. So there`s the noise of their disdain and there`s the skinny red dog two doors down who barks all day and howls all night, the constant background noise you don`t realize is driving you crazy until it stops, just a few blessed moments, and then starts up again. The neighborhood`s only cheerful sound I usually sleep through: the morning coos of toddlers. A troop of them, round-faced and multilayered, walk to some daycare hidden even farther in the rat`s nest of streets behind me, each clutching a section of long piece of rope trailed by a grown-up. They march, penguin-style, past my house every morning, but I have not once seen them return. For all I know, they troddle around the entire world and return in time to pass my window again in the morning. Whatever the story, I am attached to them.

It was miserable, wet-bone March and I was lying in bed thinking about killing myself, a hobby of mine. Indulgent afternoon daydreaming: A shotgun, my mouth, a bang and my head jerking once, twice, blood on the wall. Spatter, splatter. "Did she want to be buried or cremated?" people would ask. "Who should come to the funeral?" And no one would know. The people, whoever they were, would just look at each other`s shoes or shoulders until the silence settled in and them someone would put a pot of coffee, briskly and with a fair amount of clatter. Coffee goes great with a sudden death.