Audrey got fired from her job at the lab on the Friday afternoon before the winter holiday shutdown and so had an entire nine days worth of what would have been vacation but was now her actual real life routine to pretend that she was just on vacation after all before the dark truth set in on the following Monday that she really had no commitments and nothing to do, ever, really, for perhaps the first time in her life. The fact that winter shutdown applied to Audrey during her tenure at the lab raised the question every year of who fed the cockroaches during the interim and also the question of whether the cockroaches even needed to be fed as regularly as she had been asked to feed them the rest of the year. Which further raised the questions of just what the heck her bigshot scientist father told his subordinates to make them hire her in the first place and why, if he had ever bothered to follow-up and had figured out that she had been assigned roach duty, he hadn’t exercised his influence just a smidgen further.

So Audrey spent the holidays sulking around her parents’ Brattle Street residence on the outskirts of Harvard Square, each morning at the plumber’s butt of dawn enduring an incessant bumping at the guest room door until it creaked open and then HTC’s rough tongue scraping up her forehead until she wrenched herself upright. Snoozing into her latte and handicapped by a floundering ego, she only managed to legitimately finish the Wednesday Times crossword before resorting to several audience polls on Thursday and, ashamedly, Wikipedia on Friday. If her daddy knew about her shenanigans at the lab, he declined to mention them. To say that the family was comfortable financially would be a sizeable understatement (more accurate would be to specify the level of comfort one experiences while pancaked on a massage table slurping daiquiris through the face-hole via several crazy straws in an assortment of neon tints, the masseuse’s hands having been plastered with gold leaf), and Audrey knew that she was in no danger of being guilt-tripped into reemploying herself any time soon, especially not without relying on some form of nepotism. The prospect of never again having to brave Soldier’s Field Road at rush hour on her way to the amoeboid hump of Allston’s industrial district brought on a delicious calm that was further augmented by her momsie’s robust winter stews.

Sitting in an armchair under an afghan blanket and wanting very much to use the supine HTC as a footrest, she glimpsed an epiphany that eludes most wealthy children until they’re too old to take advantage of its implications: that there was in fact no reason to get another job, ever, that the conditioning that defined her secondary and post-secondary education (a vocation just out of reach — one could really make something of oneself, one could really self-actualize, if only. . . etc, etc.) was an illusion that ensnared the gullible and the underspoiled. If there was one thing Audrey learned in college, it was that pretending one didn’t have money when one actually did was gauche and unprincipled and contributed to one or more of the industrial complexes, at least according to her cohorts who had money but pretended they didn’t.

Audrey was no slouch, but she relied on cosmic indemnity almost to a fault (e.g. driving as close to the yellow line as possible and assuming that everyone parked in accordance with the six-inch rule). Had yet to decapitate any side-view mirrors and as such piggy-banked each uneventful car ride as a datum in the empirical though disturbingly uncontrolled study of her own luck. All this in contrast to her neurotic penchant for planning ahead and possibly irrational love of subway timetables. Her father had never pretended that the laboratory assistantship was anything more than callus development; her possibilities for promotion at Stemzyne were all but wishful thinking, burdened as she was with her comparative literature degree. Not that Audrey had ever envisioned or prepared in even the most theoretical getting psyched-up way for a career in biochemistry. So the whole firing thing ended up being somewhat of a relief, what with the whole never again having to listen to the arm-hair prickling hisses of the Madagascar Hissing species silver lining and all.

—  

By six in the evening on that first Monday back at home she found herself thoroughly pickled in the tub with a glass of Chateau Singe Blanc. In a few moments she would burst forth from the depths in resplendent nakitude, sloughing off perfumed bathwater like a bourgeois leviathan, and drip her way to the refrigerator where she would plunge, thumb and index finger hyperextended, into the container of leftover szechuan green beans. The overachieving central heating system reduced much of the need for clothing. It was during moments like these — shoulders slumped, very slightly wall-eyed in greasy catatonia, breasts straining floorward — that she allowed herself the brief satisfaction of believing that Howard’s evening had turned out similarly pathetically, that neither Beacon Hill studio nor sycophantic Labradoodle could distract him from the crushing reality that he had been successfully ambushed by male pattern baldness. Howard, who thought it was endearing and not at all grotesque to use the term “peepee” and who occasionally had white stuff in the corners of his mouth.

Oil had beaded along the length of the green bean she held poised before her already glistening lips; each pearl encased a brown fleck of monosodium glutaliciousness. But Audrey’s maternal lineage had blessed her with the metabolism of a praying mantis and despite the regularity with which she troughed out of take-out cartons at odd hours, her petite derrière produced only the most perfunctory of jiggles when agitated. She bore this in mind always. Even so, one had to have standards or else one’s complexion would begin to reflect the light fixtures. She tapped the bean in a practiced cigarette-flick motion and it sneezed droplets.

Unlucky that her forced emancipation from nine-to-five had come when it did: she had noticed the inertia twining around her abdomen as soon as she crunched up the gravel drive of 166 Brattle and now that she’d spent even a few hours in her natural habitat, had all but abandoned all real-world aspirations in favor of televised cooking programs.

—  

Audrey’s apartment was on the seventh floor of the imposing concrete structure known by the moniker Mystic Towers (denoted as such by aluminum plated lettering clamped onto its façade in the kind of unimaginative sans serif font that had come into vogue for soft rock compilation album inserts). Its recessed windows reinforced the overall impression of an above-ground bunker, the whole thing an obsessively right-angled homage to 1960s brutalist architecture.

The obvious advantage to living inside the eyesore was that one’s fenestrated views were generally pleasant and unencumbered by the building’s own fascistic blot against the Back Bay skyline. And what delectable glazing it was; the entire northeast wall of Audrey’s living room was a floor-to-ceiling, triple-paned, anti-glare window installation [U value < 0.8 W/(m2K)] that had the muted quality one finds on the observation side of a two way mirror. A fully-equipped kitchen ballooned off this space, separated by an island and three leather barstools with brushed steel legs that splayed outward at their bases. Somebody must have had a brushed steel fixation because the kitchen was totally motifed out: fridge, dishwasher, even microwave were practically dipped in the stuff, surfaces awash with that characteristic pattern of overlapping fanned brushstrokes. Audrey eschewed reflective surfaces; her bathroom mirror was the only such object in the entire apartment and amounted to nothing more than a glorified vanity, perfectly round and only ten inches in diameter, situated at eye level and possessing the slightest of concavities.

The bathroom’s focal point couldn’t have been anything except the aforementioned bathtub, an estate sale relic that Audrey had pounced on for an embarrassing sum of money and whose clawed feet delighted her in a way that toed (clawed) the line between irony and fanciful admiration, the latter of which was never voiced aloud to anyone, ever. She spent many hours soaking and many hours lounging clothesless in her hermetically matte apartment between soaks, refusing to identify as a nudist because nudism to her implied a community of people who tolerated and maybe even enjoyed — basked in — each other’s nakitude, which was not the sort of thing that Audrey abided. She invited no one to view the full spectacle of her gleaming dermis — not even herself.

Her daily time-in-the-tub increased so alarmingly in the months after the fixture’s installation that she questioned whether her routine had reached the limits of indulgence. She felt entrapped by some Pavlovian mechanism of her own accidental creation; the central air would clunk on and her skin would positively crackle in response, the laundry cycle would finish and her hair would plaster itself across the nape of her neck. She had no excuse after she bought the humidifier, but until that point she would tell herself that the bathwater’s surface molecules saturated the building’s dry air and were gratefully absorbed by the various non-human organisms with which she cohabitated. The Fuzz in particular appeared to thrive in a more tropical climate, and Audrey tried to appease the Fuzz whenever possible.

The living room was connected to the bedroom by way of a small, poorly lit hallway off of which were also the bathroom on one side and the closet where the Fuzz made its home on the other. The Fuzz lived in a tupperware container inside of a Nine West shoebox on the floor of the closet, although it had begun to seriously overflow the tupperware container and could now be said to live mainly in the shoebox, as if the tupperware were some plaything that served the same function as a clay pirate shipwreck in a fishbowl; in conclusion meaning the Fuzz meant business, ostensibly.

Their relationship had begun as a tumultuous one, Audrey’s and the Fuzz’s, its foundations having been forged in mutual distrust — innocent mycophobia on Audrey’s part and pure survival instinct on the part of the Fuzz (Audrey had made quite an effort to shake the Fuzz into her compost bucket so that she could wash out the tupperware container, even going so far as hitting the tupperware against the lip of the bucket in an effort to dislodge the Fuzz, which wasn’t having any of it, and then trying to use the sink’s spray nozzle to water-blast it into the drain disposal, a tactic that was definitively thwarted by the Fuzz’s supreme water-wicking ability). But what had begun as a stand-off soon evolved into tolerance and tacit respect, Audrey impressed by the Fuzz’s tenacity especially on a slick plastic surface and the Fuzz presumably just glad the agitation had subsided.

Not that Audrey believed the Fuzz to be sentient or anything because what a cockamamie idea that would be; no, clearly it was just a collection of spores and as such was probably more accurately referred to by the third person plural pronoun instead of the singular. But Audrey, in her everlasting endeavor to be more self-aware, had noticed somewhere along the way that she tended to be somewhat small-minded when it came to identity politics; she therefore worked to counteract her own knee-jerk prejudice whenever possible in such a way that she almost felt she had developed a knee-jerk prejudice against knee-jerk prejudice and had to stop thinking about the conundrum before she felt lightheaded. It was not her place, she decided, to pass judgment on whether or not the Fuzz’s smoothly orchestrated behavior indicated collective consciousness. She felt better using singular pronouns and a capital F in her internal monologue, even though the latter would require a clunky explanation if she ever wanted to articulate to anyone else that she was explicitly doing it (mold, unlike the whole data versus datum fiasco, subscribed to the English for Dummies school of syntax and so it was loads more socially acceptable to just refer to it [the mold] as “it” [the mold] and be done with it [the debate]).

The Fuzz had soon been relegated to the closet for purely practical reasons: Audrey recognized that a quart of gray-blue fluff in the kitchen didn’t exactly complement her sterile aesthetic and might draw unsavory remarks from guests. (The heinous double standard regarding mycelium and crystal gardens, both of which often resemble psychedelic cauliflower, was a matter of some soreness between the two of them.) Then, of course, there was the issue of expansion — the Fuzz appeared to be somewhat of an asex addict — and finally the simple fact that the Fuzz found more to eat when it was placed next to her shoes.

—  

Mystic Towers, an Exeter Street institution, was perfectly equidistant from the Boylston and Newbury Starbuckses, a freak geographic coincidence that Audrey had verified with both stopwatch and pedometer. Faced every morning with the dilemma of which location to patronize, she often stood for entire minutes below the tenement awning and waited for some impulse she couldn’t define. It was easier than multiplying out the complex algorithm of (lighting – barista cuteness factor) * crowd coefficient * (1 / bathroom cleanliness), which on a given day was usually not statistically significant anyway.

Newbury Street stretched in a northeast-southwesterly line, bracketed on the east by the Public Garden and ending rather shockingly a short jaunt west of the Hynes Convention Center T stop; that is to say that the ambiance and old money of Newbury Street actually ended several disconcerted steps in front of the T, at which point the concerned boutique hound would suspect that she or he had unknowingly stepped through a portal out of the realm of lavish brownstone facades and into a warehouse district overlooking the Mass Pike (which, incidentally, would be a pretty much accurate description of the events taking place except that, when the shopweary traveler turned back in search of solace, a humungous and vaguely square window that sparkled like rippled ice but when one looked closely was actually made up of tens of thousands of many-colored globules of light would be thankfully absent). Audrey never ventured past Trident Booksellers and Café.

The Newbury ’Bucks fell well short of this boundary. Hunkering in the heart of tourist country, it attracted steady influx of vaguely Scandinavian youngsters toting fabric-handled paper bags from apparel retailers. The implicit flaunting of exchange rate was made all the more irritating by the fact that these hordes never appeared to include members older than sixteen. But the employees, headsets a-crackle, took it in stride, laughing amongst themselves at some private joke that swelled and ebbed but never seemed to slow down business. Audrey ordered a “medium” latte, always preferring to avoid Coffee-talian in a gesture of defiance that provoked a twitch of either disdain or relief, depending on the server.

“Hey.” The speaker’s sweater camouflaged her so well in the forest of argyle that Audrey almost did a double take. She recognized the young woman as a vague acquaintance, probably one of those hip Jamaica Plain dwellers who surfaced every once in a while at a shindig above Huntington Avenue and always managed to lay every female present with a Kinsey score greater than zero. Someone whose commitment to puns hadn’t impressed Audrey initially and whose apparent unwillingness to use her MacBook’s Photobooth software in lieu of a mirror just now had left her with severe hat head. Nevertheless, seating options were slim.

“Well hello,” she said. “Are you homesteading?”

The woman looked down at her table awash in yellow notepaper and empty flatware. “Now that you mention it, I think I might be,” she said. “But I haven’t made it very far west.” Her voice, Audrey was now re-noticing, was one of those voices that dismissed any inclination a listener might have had toward the auto brush-off: incongruously low and mmmph, and why hadn’t she remembered?

“Manifest Cappuccino,” said Audrey, and regretted it immediately.

But the woman laughed until she coughed, and Audrey wondered if she wasn’t the one who needed to be chagrinned after all. The freedom of quippage (quippling fweedom?) implied by this revelation was almost too much to comprehend, and so she stuffed it away for the time being into her mind-backpack.

“Audrey!” came the call from the command deck of the SS Curvy Counter. Audrey excused herself momentarily to retrieve her latte and took her time stirring in simple syrup at the coffee-coutrement station.

“Sorry,” she continued when she came back, “I don’t remember your name.” It was a lie. They had already twice introduced themselves, once at this very Starbucks when the woman’s ballpoint exploded onto her scone and then again at Ivey’s twenty-sixth birthday party. Audrey often employed this tactic when meeting a person for the second (or third or even fourth in special cases) time; it created the illusion that she was a fascinating person with too many fascinating morsels bouncing around underneath that trendily disheveled coif when in fact her memory picked up detritus like statically charged wool.

The woman regarded her with amused incredulity for a moment. She probably knew she had a memorable face: strong nose with delicately flared nostrils, eyelashes to die for, a squishy bottom lip that she distorted constantly for conversational effect. Still eyeballing Audrey, she said dubiously, “It’s. . . Charlotte.”

Audrey floundered. No one had ever called her bluff before; had the woman thought she was merely being coy? She despised people who resorted to petty devices in order to gain sexual capital. But now she had been tripped up by her own savvy and had invited this gross misjudgment. Even more dire was the height of the woman’s eyebrows, which had begun the long, slow nose-dive from playful to confused to embarrassed to sour grapes.

“Charlotte, let’s speak candidly.” Audrey unshouldered her laptop tote and slid into the blonde-maple ergonomic tuchus receptacle across from the woman.

“I’m all ears, Audrey.”

“You’re well aware, then, Charlotte, that I knew your name all along.”

“I am,” she said.

“You’re sharp, Charlotte. I like that.”

“I like to think so, Audrey.”

“Are you mocking me, Charlotte?”

“That depends on what kind of game you’re playing, Audrey.”

The only thing worse than people who take themselves too seriously, Audrey thought, was people who didn’t take themselves seriously enough. This philosophy dictated a very specific amount of seriousness with which to take oneself in a given situation and only a sliver of wiggle room if one happened to estimate incorrectly. She felt dangerously uncalibrated. And yet. . .

“Please, sit down,” Charlotte continued.

“I already have,” said Audrey.

Charlotte collected her papers, suppressing a smile, and tapped them on end. Instead of squaring the stack she was mashing the sticking-out paper corners into the tabletop. She stuffed them into her backpack and closed her laptop lid. “Thanks for meeting me here,” she said. “You weren’t followed, were you?”

“I looped the block twice,” said Audrey.

“Good,” said Charlotte. “Now Audrey, tell me: have you ever seen a man die?”

Audrey took a leisurely sip without breaking eye contact. “Charlotte, frankly I don’t think this level of play-pretend dialogue is completely sustainable given our fledgling acquaintance. Just to check in, I’d like you to know that I feel like I’ve been jogging for the last several minutes and I think my stamina is withering.”

Charlotte put her elbows on the table and folded her hands with the fingers inward, like a zipped zipper. “Audrey, you are an A plus communicator. I can tell.”

Audrey recognized at this point that the gauntlet had been thrown down. A heightened alertness descended; she grew sure that her pupils had dilated to the size of M&Ms. “You really know how to put a girl at ease,” she said.

“Careful. My Jewish heritage has equipped me with an infallible sarcasm radar. Are you off-balance? You don’t look it. And incidentally, are your fingers pickled?”

Audrey ran her thumbs over the rest of her digits, the divots and ridges dragging over each other, before folding her hands in imitation of Charlotte’s. “No,” she said.

“I don’t believe you, but I can see that I’ve overstepped the arbitrary boundary I set for myself when you came over here.”

“Which was?”

“Never to say the word ‘pickled’ aloud, under any circumstances, ever.”

“Wow,” said Audrey. “You really blew it, didn’t you?”

“I sure did. And just so you know, I didn’t make that rule in response to your obviously pickled fingertips, which I noticed immediately when you sat down — ”

“You just did it again,” said Audrey.

“ — but rather because I find conversations more exciting when I limit my ability to make food metaphors.”

“You’re approaching a level of flirtatious absurdity usually only employed by breathless, prepubescent boys. As if you can’t help yourself.”

“I resent that,” said Charlotte, who looked delighted.

“I’m just saying you have some habits that I’m discovering, one by one, as this conversation unfolds, that could probably be labeled quirky at best. And also coming from a place of verbal privilege, which suggests both that you’re well-educated and also that you suffer from ennui.”

“Ouch. But then again, not as quirky as pretending to forget an acquaintance’s name in order to appear aloof and uninterested.” There was an extended pause in which Charlotte’s demeanor shifted abruptly, as if the blocked door at which Audrey had been hurling herself suddenly opened gracefully from the opposite side. “Could I take you out sometime?” she said.

“I think you just did,” said Audrey, but felt herself metaphorically lurching forward in response.

“My worst fears have been realized. Can I have a do-over?”

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad. Your self-deprecation is endearing.”

“Well I have to dash, but maybe sometime we could see each other in a setting not conducive to verbal sparring, i.e. not a chain coffeehouse; they always leave me feeling spiny and out of sorts.”

“I’d like that, I think,” said Audrey.

“Good, me too,” said Charlotte.

The encounter ended like a successful spaceship detachment. It was only after they had Bump’d iPhones and Charlotte had glided through the doors and down the sidewalk that Audrey let out her exhaust fumes and checked her hull for scrapes and magnetically attracted barnacles.

She walked back up the block clenching her heinie with a sort of — when one thinks one might like a person, or else thinks said person might sort of like one and one’s into that, a little bit, or at least one thinks one could be into it, maybe someday, or at least one thinks this person likes one but one’s not even sure and what a letdown that would be if the person totally didn't and one had expended all that energy maybe liking them in response to their maybe liking one, the whole thing just cooked up basically out of thin air in the first place because one’s bored and, let’s be honest, horny, and anyway one’ll probably never run into the person ever again so maybe the whole thing is a bust? — sort of confused swagger.

—  

A flyer taped up on the door under the Mystic Towers awning was thwapping against the glass and then against itself, curling and uncurling as if beckoning at her. Audrey could see that it had been scrawled in blue marker, not photocopied. She spread her fingers across the sheet of paper to keep it from flapping. It read: “SERIOUSLY — what smells?”

To be perfectly truthful, her thoughts did leap to the Fuzz in those following two seconds when her nervous system demanded a reaction that was either guilty or oblivious (she subconsciously chose the former). Of late, her furry housemate had acquired a faint but cloying scent that made her sniff outward through her nose in short jerky breaths whenever she encountered it. But Audrey also knew that she tended toward self-obsession, and so self-corrected here by assuming what she thought was a perfectly neutral stance but in fact directed all suspicion away from herself and diluted it among her many neighbors. Especially disdained the anonymous sign-poster, who hadn’t even posted a name or apartment number (presumably in order to avoid a smelt it-dealt it type situation).

Audrey’s key to the front door was a plastic fob whose convenience lay in the fact that she didn’t need to remove the key ring from her coat pocket to open the door, just sort of needed to jump up and aim her hip against the plastic mechanism, which always gave a satisfying click when she was accurate in her aim, as she was today. The door clacked open and a pungent whiff rolled over Audrey as she stepped inside the tiny entryway, which was already oppressive in its sparseness — walls dentist-office white and an elevator whose metal cage resembled a foldout laundry rack. The presence of stink made all the more puzzling by a complete absence of dilapidation and/or visible air vents.

The smell emptied like a gushing wave from the elevator as the door opened on the seventh floor. But the hallway up here had a markedly lower concentration of stink particles, and those that had stowed away in the elevator dissipated, flinging themselves in all directions and bouncing off the walls like errant ping pong balls.

Inside her apartment, she could barely detect anything out of the ordinary at all. A twinkle of relief. Took off her jacket and hung it in the closet above the Fuzz, which resided in its shoebox and presented itself innocently up at her.

“You look cozy,” said Audrey.

The Fuzz was placid, preened its hyphae demurely.

“For the record, I never thought it was you,” she said. Only a white lie, she told herself; it looked maybe a little placated. She continued: “I met someone.”

The Fuzz didn’t possess synapses capable of belief.

“Yes, really.”

The Fuzz was speechless.

“You don’t need to say anything,” said Audrey. “I understand.”

The Fuzz always remained taciturn during these exchanges, though Audrey told herself the reason wasn’t that it was trying to act cold towards her but rather because it had no means of communication that corresponded with Audrey’s means of comprehension. She often wondered if the Fuzz’s sound-emitting abilities were more along the lines of the television’s high-pitched whine — were the two of them discussing her behind her back, supersonically? But no, Audrey was just enjoying a private joke. What was the Fuzz, anyway, except perhaps an innovative art installation (lately it had developed some really impressive tie dye-like rings of brilliant blue-green), all the more novel because she was its only viewer, patron, creator.

Audrey leaned over and picked up the shoebox, which peeled up off the floor with a slurp. To her dismay, an oblong welt was visible on the hardwood underneath where the box had been, looking spotted and brownish and altogether not a fun time to clean up.

“Ew, what did you do?” said Audrey. She lay the shoebox on the floor again next to where it had been. The gentle impact of the box’s corner hitting the floor jolted the Fuzz in such a way that the mound of gray-green-blue fuzz that constituted the Fuzz collapsed like a soufflé and a charcoal-colored cloud of particulate matter puffed outward from a puncture in the center. Audrey jerked her head away. The cloud smelled like malodorous fromage de parfum fort: perhaps Limburger, Stilton, Stinking Bishop. Except understandably less appetizing when emitted from a several-month old inedible substance.

—  

“Ivey.”

“What? I’m listening.”

“You’re looking over my shoulder.”

“I’m still listening.”

“This is important,” Audrey said.

Ivey tore her eyes away from the door. “Don’t you fucking hate coffeeshops? I’m so distracted.”

“Ivey, I’m doing something illicit.”

“It’s not ee-licit, it’s ih-licit.”

“Will you listen to me for a second?”

“What’s the scoop, are you growing weed or something?”

“Sort of,” said Audrey.

“Okay, now I’m listening.”

“What? Why would that catch your attention? You don’t even smoke anymore.”

“Correct. I don’t. Listen, do you even have any idea how lucrative it is to farm marijuana?”

“It’s not weed.”

“What the fuck, then, Audrey, are you talking about?”

“I’m growing. . . something.”

“You’re not really giving me a whole lot to go on, here.”

“I’m sorry,” whined Audrey. “I haven’t told anyone yet. It’s kind of weird.”

“Maybe it bears reminding that I tell you in detail about ninety-eight percent of my bizarre sexual exploits.”

“I shudder to think what you might be withholding.”

“You get the point.”

“But it’s like, pathological weird. Not just nipple clamp weird.”

“Audrey.”

“I’m growing mold.”

“You’re growing mold.”

“I’m growing mold. But — ”

“Homegirl, I’m growing mold. I think I have a can of tomato sauce in my fridge from nineteen-ninety. It’s a family heirloom. My mom even grows mold sometimes. That’s hardly illicit.”

“There you go normalizing and validating again.”

“Oh I’m sorry, did you want me to think you were a freak?”

“I’m trying to prepare you for the veritable David Lynch marathon of weirdness that I’m about to unload upon you.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll keep it clamped.”

“Thank you. So number one, this mold I’m growing lives not in my fridge but in my closet. Number two, I put it there. Number three, sometimes I talk to it. Number four — actually, strike number three from record; it’s irrelevant. Number four — are you following this so far?”

“Yes. Talking mold. Got it.”

“Great. Number four — ”

“Would you quit it with the numbers?”

“Sorry. The point is, I think the Fuzz — this mold — might actually have somewhat of a malevolent agenda with regard to my apartment building.”

“The Fuzz? Real cute.”

“Which is worrisome considering its not-so-humble origins.”

“Uh oh. I’m guessing as in not-your-average bread mold. As in eat-your-face-off mold.”

“As in cultivated-in-a-laboratory mold.”

“A laboratory? What la — ohhh. Oh, it’s all. . . Okay, I’m starting to piece together the whole picture, now.”

“I thought you might.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“And now you are wondering, you with your pulpy-spy-novel-honed shrewdness, you are wondering just what the heck my motivations might have been for liberating a small sample of what was then a mere culture in a petri dish of agar from a locked incubator during my unreasonably short lunch hour. For smuggling it outside into the blinding sunlight and back to my apartment in my recently-vacated lunch container.”

“Kleptomania? A pathological desire to undermine authority figures? You were maybe still hungry?”

“None of these, in fact.”

“You belong to an international mold smuggling cartel, your real name is Gertrude or something, you’re packing fuzzies at this very moment.”

“Maybe of interest to you would be the label on the petri dish?”

“I’m guessing this is an important clue?”

“The label had my name on it.”

“Your name.”

“I just said that, yes.”

“But. . . why?”

“Exactly.”

“No but tell me.”

“Well I don’t knowww, Ivey. Obviously if I knew, I would have started this conversation maybe a little differently, maybe along the lines of like, ‘Guess what? Turns out daddy-doo’s most recent genetic research was all about collecting my DNA and turning it into mutant mold so it could blanket the Greater Boston Area with human spore clones who feed on caffeine and owning class self-loathing.’”

“So you do know why.”

“One of many thousands of possible explanations, yes. Although the spore clone motif is generally regarded as somewhat unimaginative and also overused these days, if I do say so myself.”

“Well maybe you should have wised up when they started ID’ing you with random tongue scrapings instead of key cards.”

“Har har,” said Audrey.

“My scone tastes like a spore clone,” said Ivey, grimacing. She opened her mouth and let the half-soggified crumbles dribble down her outstretched tongue back onto her plate. Their neighbors at the next table, whether in politeness or revulsion, averted their eyes.

Audrey regarded the antics with mild disgust for a moment. “Anyway,” she finally said, “now you know basically everything I know.”

“What the shit, Audrey,” said Ivey. “And now it’s trying to eat your apartment building? Audrey Jr. is trying to eat your apartment building?”

“Well it’s not Little Shop of Horrors, for chrissakes,” said Audrey.

“I didn’t say Audrey II. That would be extremely poor taste; I on purpose didn’t say Audrey II, for that reaso — ”

“But I’m now thinking that maybe I should never have liberated it into the blinding sunlight after all. Like maybe it’s actually dangerous and now I don’t have a clue of how or where or when to dispose of it, or like whether it will even let me dispose of it or what.”

“You’re in a bit of a pickle, is what you’re saying.”

“What is everyone’s obsession with pickles, these days?” said Audrey, half to herself.

—  

“Hello?”

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey honeypie.” A long pause, rustling. “Let me get my headset and call you from the cell, hang on.”

“Okay,” she said. “Bye.”

Audrey clicked on the television set. There was no use trying to do anything else with the following fifty seconds; she was never going to get them back. A commercial for detergent was shimmering across the flatscreen on mute accompanied by the high frequency drone of the box itself.

“Mom is waiting for a phone call from her podiatrist,” said her father when he got back on the line.

Click — the screen twinkled off.

“Grody,” said Audrey.

“You’re telling me. I share a bed with it,” he said.

Silence accumulated. He was, she suspected, perched in front of his laptop at the dining room table atop his favorite kneeling rocking stool. It was seven-forty-eight; the bridge dads would come a-wrangling in less than fifteen minutes.

“Dad?”

“So what’s doing, sweetheart?”

“Just sitting on the sofa,” said Audrey.

“Well I’m so glad you called,” he said. “I’m afraid I only have a few minutes before bridge night.”

“I know,” said Audrey.

“I’ve been trying to get your sister to play but it doesn’t seem — ”

“She’s not my sister.”

“ — like she’s interested. Don’t be petulant, Audrey.”

“I’m not being anything. She doesn’t have any thumbs.”

He seemed not to hear her. “I was in Lincoln today meeting with the principal of that new charter school they’re starting out there and she seemed really keen on the idea of taking me on as a consultant. Sounds like they’re interested in developing some sort of isotope-laced chocolate milk cocktail so they can really give those tykes free run of the compound and still remain delightfully understaffed.”

“Is that even legal?”

“That’s not really my job to figure out, sweetheart.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, my darling?”

Audrey clicked on the television again and zonked for half a minute in the dull purple-white flicker of the very same detergent ad, no doubt airing on repeat in one of those sole sponsorship deals that had swept the digital cable providers by storm. “Nothing,” she said.

“Okay lovey, I have to go.”

“Okay,” said Audrey.

“Call again,” said her father.

“Someday,” said Audrey. The line beeped dead. She put the receiver down on the couch next to her and let her head loll against the wall. The apartment smelled vaguely earthy, like her parents’ wine cellar, and sour, like expired milk. It was the same smell she had noticed in the downstairs entryway.

“What the shit,” said Audrey, to herself. It was more of an exhalation than actual laryngeal vibration; she often conversed with herself alone in the apartment in this way, half out loud. The carbon monoxide detector was just chilling on the wall, however, so Audrey allowed herself to sink into the soft cushions for a moment longer. Was it time for her next stint in the bathtub? The wall clock read seven forty-eight.

—  

More than anything in the world, Audrey dreaded waking up in the morning with a throat full of sandpaper, tonsils screaming as she turned her head this way and that, a sensation somehow too painful and sudden to be definitively associated with the common cold but instead stowed away in the category of nostrils-stinging-when-one-too-quickly-makes-the-transition-from-heated-interior-to-frigid-exterior pain, a sort of crescendo of burning that can sometimes be headed off with a skillfully timed scrunching of the face but more often than not just grabs hold and must be endured until it decides to dissipate. Once the feeling set in, there was no reprieve. No amount of vitamin C, antioxidants, Echinacea, zinc, nasal cauterization, tonsil extraction, laryngectomy, hot tea, Vaseline daubs, morphine, chicken soup, psychoanalysis, get-well cards, or acupuncture could reign in the stampeding virus and the tsunami of malaise that accompanied it, confining her to sinus-bulging hours of romantic comedy. Dreaded that odious Neti Pot and its terrifying cousin, the hydrogen peroxide mouthwash regimen, both of whose praises had dribbled out of the mouth of her father (and dribbled, and dribbled) for as long as Audrey could remember. On top of that not being able to decide whether the presence of a fever would be vindicating or just depressing, and whether taking one’s temperature was even worth it in the first place if it were going to require a certain percentage of mental CPU capacity.

Now, cocooned in the down comforter in front of the TV, she lusted after those scratchy days during which the sore ribs, chapped nose, nausea, short-term memory loss, and puffy eyes inevitably loomed, yes, but only in some hazy concept of the future. Camel-backed tea by the gulp.

The sunlight lay in a rhomboid swatch across the carpet; Audrey felt marooned inside a malfunctioning shell. The television held no delight for her in such a state, but moving her eyes elicited a deep ache somewhere down her eye sockets, an agonizing pull in the center of her skull, and so she had no choice but to stare straight ahead at whatever happened to be in front of her.

It was during times like these that she missed Howard. Despite the abundance of curly hair everywhere except the top of his head and the nauseating sound of his chewing just about anything, Howard had displayed towards her a level of dotage and affection that, while perhaps not exceeding that which he displayed towards Carlotta the Junkyard Dog (a nickname Audrey dared not utter in the presence of either of them), at the very least came close to matching it. Howard, who worried that his noticeable lack of hardship and economic difficulty held him back from being the best novelist he could be, as if his social location in the role of Catholic white male placed him at a disadvantage amidst a literary audience who didn’t want to read about protagonists who felt guilty about being boring.

Audrey, who found that dating men did wonders for her ego, had tolerated these foibles in part because they cemented her into the pants of the relationship.

—  

A soft noise awakened Audrey as the night rounded four AM. Whatever it was, it had stopped by the time she hauled herself for the most part out of REM, but she was left with impressions of swishing, of two feathery items tickling one another in passing, and of what she felt sure was a made-up word: winkle. The zigzag line of Boston fluorescence that managed to evade her blinds made its usual glowing appearance on the far wall. Its shape stamped itself in neon afterimages all over the ceiling. A slow drizzle back into consciousness. Audrey’s — snnrrk — sinuses felt astonishingly clear given the hyperbaric chamber of the past several days; her relief at noticing this vaulted her remaining neural blips out of stage one sleep and into the living room. No blinds here, only twinkles of light from underneath a bleak gray cloud cover that seemed to be perpetually descending. Triple paned windows filtered ambient city noise into a throbbing rumble punctuated by the pitched-down whines of car horns. The honks would sort of Doppler to and fro along side streets, and produced some serious synesthesia when Audrey shut her eyes for a moment. Called forth images of like, those tilting mazes with holes and a silver ball.

Coming alive like this in the middle of the night after so many consecutive hours in her now-discarded chrysalis of bedspread made her feel glittery and insectile. She stood in the doorway to the hall and contemplated making coffee since going back to bed was out of the question. But something about coffee felt too chemical at the moment, as if it would corrode the delicate tissue of her esophagus. Her eyes kept locking onto various pieces of furniture even as her peripheral focus shifted restlessly around the room. She needed to be elsewhere, experienced a sudden onslaught of nostalgia for the late-night high jinks of her late adolescence. There was, she knew, a 2001 Volvo station wagon parked in the subterranean garage eight stories below with her name on the registration.

The subterranean parking lot only had one level and maintained a pretty constant temperature of fifty degrees Fahrenheit, even in the frigid Massachusetts winter. The fact that Audrey could often, as in now, see her breath puff out in front of her face in little tufts was more related to the presumably hazardous levels of exhaust fumes that pooled in the corners and managed to avoid any half-hearted advances the ventilation system could conjure up. Audrey’s dented Volvo was parked next to a snazzy Beemer that hadn’t been there when she’d pulled into the space, which, jeez, given her lost time in the clutches of illness, was nearly a week ago now that she thought about it. Even though the garage could be accessed on foot only from within the building, which employed that state-of-the-freakin’-art key fob entry technology, and by car only through a cement maw located on a side alley, the front of which was monitored around the clock by motion-sensing closed-circuit video feed; even though all of that, Audrey had this superstition about checking the backseat and hatchback of her car for ill-meaning stowaways. Ivey’s aunt’s best friend’s daughter had allegedly, several years back, gotten into the driver seat of her car, which she had left foolishly unlocked outside a Seven Eleven in Waltham, only to be vigorously fondled from behind by a hoodlum who’d been crouching in the well of the backseat. The girl, whose name Audrey couldn’t recall ever learning, had displayed some quick computation and had apparently yanked the seat adjustment lever and used her track- and/or field-toned legs propped up on the dashboard as well as the hoodlum’s own backwardly directed force on her upper torso to launch herself rearward, causing the thug to whack the back of his skull on one of the plastic headrest stumps behind him, the corresponding headrest of which had long since disappeared, and subsequently to sustain a whopper of a concussion. Though probably a fair-sized chunk of good old-fashioned luck had been involved too. Audrey checked the back of the Beemer, too, just for good measure.

The most figuratively tangible component of that whole coming-of-age process Audrey remembered from her late teens, or rather the component that packed the largest and most lasting psychoanalytical type wallop, was the newfound freedom to really bullet that Volvo around town in the wee hours; the lingering emotional polyps that had affixed themselves to her heartstrings during these formative midnight joyrides could still produce feelings of euphoria when memories were dredged up, as they were about to be momentarily. Her dashboard digital clock now read four-fifty. It had taken her nearly forty-five minutes to gather her various appendages into undies, bra, socks, jeans, long sleeve thermal v-neck, sweaters, hiking boots, ear muffs, scarf, down jacket, and gloves, in that order, because of the various distracting elements of her apartment. Visual inspection upon opening the closet door revealed that the Fuzz’s condition had neither improved nor deteriorated (though it would have been impossible to actually say what either of these scenarios might have looked like or exactly how she would have known she was looking at one or the other, she now realized) but Audrey’d noticed a conspicuous lack of odor that had made her embark upon a pillow- and carpet-sniffing expedition, the likes of which had been heretofore unprecedented in unit number seven-sixteen (excepting, of course, step fourteen of her mother’s patented Comprehensive Quintosensory Apartment-Search Rubric, performed on-site by the woman herself). Then, of course, all of the pillows had had to be put back in their respective resting places on the sofa and adjusted to the appropriate devil-may-care tilt. And all this interrupted by long, dazed starings off into the beyond (beyond in this case meaning all of those particularly eyeball-attracting furniture fixtures) because she was still waking up, even though she had not even once entertained the idea of going back to bed, not once, no how, that’s how awake she was.

Sure was odd that Audrey’s resurrection from her sickbed coincided so perfectly with the Fuzz’s veritable like, post-shower deficiency of stench. The elevator, too, had reverted to its mild scent of dingy, vinegar-based cleaning fluid. If it all had been a fucking dream Audrey was going to have some serious soaking to do, i.e. some serious in-tub contemplation of whether or not she was a serious crazo. But she considered the dream thing an unlikely possibility even while at the same time recognizing that serious crazos tended to consider their mental states to be most likely completely sane.

If it had been summer, the horizon in her rear view mirror would have displayed the faintest blush of dawn as she turned left onto Newbury; January’s night had hours to go yet. As she drove westward, the dark circled in place, wiggled its rear like a restless cat, and settled in again, five AM indistinguishable from three. The Pike was practically empty except for one or two guttural hot shots who were doing something to the tune of ninety, which was in the range of too haadcoahh for Audrey’s faithful silver stallion, pedal to the mat as she may. She took the Brighton Cambridge exit and bombed up Mem Drive, the frozen Charles coiling languidly to her left. The route took her within feet of her parents’ house and for a fleeting moment she actually considered turning left onto Brattle and pulling into the drive. Her father at this very moment would be toweling off his jaw line in front of the mirror to catch any smudges of shaving cream that might have escaped his razor, would brush his teeth with straight up baking soda and water before padding downstairs in his sweats to receive the steaming mug of Columbia’s finest that the latte machine would so punctually proffer at five fifteen, Eastern Standard. Would pop open his MacBook and play a couple hands of online bridge until the Times arrived, at about which point Audrey’s mother would regally descend the staircase, one step at a time, in her cotton nightgown to delve with her husband into the news of the morning, though not before both of them shared the same affectionate smoocheroonie (sic) that they had been sharing, every morning, for their past twenty-nine years of marriage. HTC slept in most mornings when Audrey was not home, according to the latest reports, though recently it had become difficult to tell when HTC was awake since this state of being was usually characterized by blob-like inertia, unresponsiveness to visual or tactile stimuli, and lack of appetite.

Audrey’s version of the early morning routine was constructed partially from hearsay, partially from conjecture, but primarily from a detailed itinerary that her father had, for a brief and particularly irritating several-week period during Audrey’s high school career, typed up every morning and left next to her school things in a campaign to entice her to wake up earlier (no way would Audrey ever claim even a sliver of responsibility for bringing “smoocheroonie” into the household vernacular). The campaign had ended abruptly one afternoon when an anonymous and strongly-worded note had been affixed to the refrigerator containing an itinerary of a archetypal high school student’s nightly routine that had detailed things no parent would want to know about any child, genetically associated or no, things so lewd and debauched that neither of the parental figures at 166 Brattle dared question their one-and-only cherubic offspring about the provenance and/or veracity of that dastardly notepaper affixed to the fridge with a stately Harvard University magnet, nor did they dare move Audrey’s one AM curfew up by even a minute, as if doing so would be an admission of defeat.

She realized that she had been sitting at the stop sign for several wistful minutes and only the earliness of the hour had prevented her from being honked or prodded from behind by a frisky bumper.