Y has been getting up earlier and going to bed earlier than he used to. He’s not as scared of death as he is of dying. Death is going to be like a dream. He has always loved dreams. He never has had a problem with falling asleep or waking up in the night.
When the house was burning I had to carry Y to safety. He was still asleep when I laid him down on the sidewalk. He walked around the city block in his t shirt over his turgid penis humiliated that he had been saved. He would rather have slept engulfed in flames.

I was happy to have saved Y. He said I wanted him dead like everyone else.
Everyone wants to take something from you, he said. They will take whatever you have if they can. I wanted no part of his stupidity. I went to Starbucks on West Broadway and Houston.
I passed by W’s house. I wanted to have a conversation with her about her paintings. They are unusual portraits of women with babies. Women either have babies or they want them I thought. She has a grown up eighteen year old daughter who doesn’t like her and now she wants another child. She had rather die than take care of her husband who has been gardening.
W’s blue eyed husband doesn’t want to live without W but he also doesn’t want another child. He has his daughter who he loves and she loves him. He has mental blocks from abuse and distrust. I met his sincere face in the living room. He looked me dead in the eye. I leveled his brow with a candle holder. I fucked him for good measure.
Y hired four nannies as drug mules. It was in the eighties when the middle class was tenuous and fathers had to deal drugs to make ends meet. Nanny 1 explained to me that in Somalia cousins marry one another to keep wealth in the family. She pointed to a high rise and said that whoever owns it his family will be rich for generations unless an outsider marries into the family.
The four nannies congregated at the Hudson waterfront for water taxis to Chelsea. They are a vast organization with chapters and sub chapters in every state of the Union. Spindly financiers have insinuated themselves. They have babies that need to be looked after.
I recorded nanny 2. What I will do with the recording I haven’t decided. It may serve as a document of how a class of immigrants survived in the late nineties after a nanny killed a white child on the upper east side. I doubt nanny 2 was aware that she is a purveyor of cocaine. The strollers had a compartment underneath the seat that was undetectable.
Nanny 2 ascended the staircase. She was dressed in a white pants suit. She has four children of her own. They make their own way to public school in the Bronx. Nanny 2 has to be with her stroller and the babies twelve hours a day. She never mentions the father of her children.