Biller kept close tabs on all the vacancies there and said it was the best way. The intended result being that the dog would take him for granted, detect his traces on the floors and walls and in the bed and then unquestioningly settle in as a roommate. So Perkus spent the first night on the surprisingly soft bed alone, half awake in the dark, and up to pace the rooms at first light. He dwelled in the space alone just long enough to posit some conjunction between his new self, shorn of so many defining accoutrements, dressed in an ill-fitting, lumpish blue-and-orange sports sweatshirt with an iron-on decal name, presumably of some star player, his right temple throbbing with cluster, a really monstrous attack, its eighth or ninth day in a row now, ebbing steadily in its fashion but still obnoxious, yet also, somehow, his brain awoken from some long-fogging dream, with a blind spot in sight, yes, but peripheral vision around the occlusion’s edges widened, refreshed—some conjunction between this new self and the apartment in which he’d strangely landed, the apartment which had been fitted, like his body, with hand-me-downs, with furnishings and decor that would be rejected even by a thrift shop.
