The room is blue, and dark, and very quiet. At the foot of the pallet mounded with white pillows under the angled ceilings he’s sitting, and dark hair eaves his shoulders, a great beard brushes his chest, his back and upper arms are hatched with more hair curling with the curves of sagging muscle, down to his thick round waist. His legs are folded tailor-fashion, bare feet tucked under bare thighs, hands held loosely open on his knees, his cock a-jut, tip of it darkly swollen, glistening, there before his thick-furred paunch. Mustache wide in a simple smile beneath eyes simply, gently closed, there between his beard, his hair, serenely still, so very quiet.

Explosions rip the television screen, chatter of gunfire, Angels comin thick an fast Sarge, and the guy on the beanbag leans back and forth, thumbs and fingers frantically working the controller in his lap. The view on the screen wheels, jerks, dials and meters in the corners whirling, flashing, galloping along in a tight-packed herd of wildly colored centaurs, garish pastel zebra stripes, neon leopard spots, Appaloosa rainbows, all wrapped in khaki saddlebags, human torsos draped in bandoliers, big guns in their outsized hands, Get to cover! Under the cable! Your six, your six! and another explosion. “Shit!” he yelps, tap-tapping, laughing, “Shit!” Over across the room a woman’s headed toward a grand dark staircase, and the other man in the room looks away from the screen, starts after her, “Ellen,” he says, dodging around a dark wood column, “hey, Ellen, wait up.” She stops, a couple steps up, looks down at him. “How long, exactly,” he says, “is he gonna be staying here,” and he points, up the stairs, past her. She shrugs. More explosions, more gunfire, the guy on the beanbag whoops. “Long as he needs,” she says. Her black hair spiky short, the inky lace of tattoos edging the collar of her running shirt.

“It’s just,” he says, at the foot of the stairs, tall and heavyset, cardigan blue. “The occasional overnight guest is one thing, but – ”

“My room, my friend, my business,” she says. “You won’t even know he’s there, Dan, unless you go out of your way.” The loudest explosion yet, and “Shit!” yells the guy on the beanbag. The television’s gone red. She’s turning to climb the stairs. “Ellen!” says the man in the blue cardigan, starting up, “Ellen, he was, what the hell was he doing, wearing my shirt?”

She looks down at him again, and maybe shrugs. “Looks better on him,” she says, and up she goes, up another flight, up under the very peak of the house. At the end of a cramped hall a door, cut at an angle the top to fit the slope of the roof.

The door to that blue room opens, and she steps in, a shadow dressed in black, flashes of silver piping, “Phil?” she says. “You’re, ah, oh.” Stretching out a foot to prod the black huddle of a discarded suit, there on the floor by the door. Splash of yellow within, and blue and white, a rumpled aloha shirt. “Hungry?” she says. “I was gonna go for phở.” Still in the doorway, hand on the jamb. “Did you want some?” Creak of a floorboard as she steps back, out into the hall. “I’ll bring some back,” she says. “You’re welcome to half the bed, if you need it.” The door swings shut. The latch clicks, quietly.

Rattle of glass, yellow bin in his hands, blue letters along the side say Portland Recycles! Clang and clink he sets it down, chock full of bottles, brown glass and green, clear, four or five of them wine bottles long and slender, the rest soda bottles, beer. Squatting he pulls out a wide-mouthed jar, the label mostly torn away, and holds it up in the light. “Fuck,” he says, setting it down. Smacks it, topples it, sends it rolling a hollow rumble away down the linoleum clunk against the wall. “Fuck,” he says, again, rattle and clink, and “shit,” and then “damn.”

Over by the floor-length curtains a brown and green sleeping bag, someone in it, rolling over, a voice, sleep-muzzled, “What.”

“Bits,” he says, “of pickle,” waving a hand, and dark hair swings about the shoulders of his warm-up jacket, blue and grey.

“So rinse it?” The sleeping bag hunches and flops open, whoever’s in it sitting up, a woman, wrapped in a puffy pink and orange parka. “Why should I,” he’s saying, “why couldn’t they,” and he shoves the bin, a chiming crash. “We’ll just have to get some. Bread-and-butter pickles. Trader Joe’s.”

“You want to,” she says, and she’s pinching the bridge of her nose, “you want to buy a new jar of pickles, and, what, eat them all, or throw them out, and the rinse the jar, because you don’t want to rinse the jar?”

“The label on that one,” he says, and then “dammit! It’s the perfect size.” Stomping the length of the room to snatch up the jar, and then through the door. Clomp and clatter, a squawking wrench, the rush of water.

She sighs, crawls out of the sleeping bag, long yellow hair a-dangle from the parka’s fur-lined hood. She slips on a couple of red canvas shoes and heads off carefully through the garbage strewn across the floor, more bottles, empty, all sizes and colors, glass and plastic, quart-sized cartons and half-gallon cartons and little pints and half-pints, cereal boxes and pasta boxes stacked and wrapped together with blue masking tape and black friction tape, towering masts of emptied rolls of plastic wrap and toilet paper, paper towels, plastic tubs tall and squatly broad, whole ranks of them that say Nancy’s in letters of various hues, all laid out in a relatively tidy grid, narrow paths between and through them all where she places her feet, aglets of her undone laces clacking against the floor, until she reaches a wide cleared curl of an aisle of sorts, edges marked with long strips of more blue tape.

He’s at the sink, fiercely scrubbing the jar, “Basic civic duty,” he’s saying, “think of other people, come on.” Slamming the jar on the counter by a dozen or more empty jars and bottles, scrubbed clean, gleaming. Yanking the faucet to shut off the water. “Luke,” she’s saying, “Luke,” and he looks up to see her there, hands stuffed in the pockets of her parka. “The hell you wearing that for,” he says, scooping wet shreds of label from the sink.

“It’s freezing,” she says.

“You know why it’s cold,” he says, dropping the mess plop in a swollen garbage bag that yawns there on the floor.

“So I’m wearing this.”

“You look ridiculous.” He shakes the slop off his hand.

“There’s still a smell,” she says. He’s headed past her, out of the kitchen. “Luke,” she says, following, “Luke. We’re gonna need – ”

“Don’t,” he says, kneeling by an untidy patch of garbage.

“We’re gonna need money,” she says. “Rent. The fifth. It’s next week.”

“We’re always,” says Luke, “gonna need,” plucking up a cereal box, “so get a job,” he says, grabbing another, a clownishly colored bird on the front of it.

“I had a job,” she says.

“Jessie,” he says, “don’t, just,” and he looks up, a shrug. “Your sister’s gonna be here soon. Right? So maybe she’ll have something for you. For us.”

“My,” says Jessie, frowning. “Luke, now is not the – ”

“Don’t,” he says, leaning over to place one of the boxes right next to a yellow plastic jug.