ggs are bad enough. An omelet is worse. Omelets require fork and knife. Lainie should have thought of that. What kind of wife doesn’t think of that? Strickland takes the fork in his right hand. The knife, though, is not so simple, not with these fingers. He glances up at her. She’s unmindful of him. There’s no other way to put it. A year and a half spent fighting in the Amazon while she did what? Wipe up juice spills? A wife is supposed to anticipate her husband’s needs. Keep things spic-and-span, in all realms of his life.

Look at this place. Weeks have passed since their Baltimore arrival and still the house is backcountry, something from the Tapajós region. Wet bras and stockings loop from the shower rod like rattan vines. The heat’s cranked to verão levels. The television makes insect roars while Timmy and Tammy charge like tusked peccaries. And those fucking unpacked boxes. When he does manage to relax, the boxes surge upward like the Andes, and he’s back there again, his feet caught in the sucking mud (shag carpet), breathless in the fever mist (air freshener), paralyzed before the stalking jaguar (vacuum cleaner).

A man doesn’t like to feel like prey in his own home. More often he stays late at Occam, despite having nothing to do. How can a home television set compare with sixteen security monitors? “You’re never home,” Lainie sulks. He has shrinking sympathy. She finds the upheaval of the move invigorating, and he has begun to hate her for it. Because he can’t share in it, not until the asset is finished and his ass doesn’t belong to Hoyt. Maybe if she’d clean the place his heart would stop pounding and he could stand being here.

Family breakfast, the whole reason he’s awake after only four hours of sleep. How come he’s the only one at the table? Lainie’s calling the kids, but they don’t listen. She’s laughing, like their behavior is permissible. She’s chasing them. She’s barefoot again. Is this some kind of bohemian fad? Poor people go barefoot. They’re not poor. He pictures Elisa Esposito’s coral-pink shoes, her exposed toes, even pinker. That’s how all women should be. In fact, Elisa strikes him as the natural evolution of the female species: clean, colorful, silent. Strickland looks away from his wife’s feet in disgust, back to his plate, the uneatable omelet.

The last time he changed his bandages, he pushed his wedding ring back onto his swollen, discolored ring finger. He figured Lainie would appreciate it. But it’d been a mistake. Now he can’t get the ring off. He tries to get the fingers to grip the knife. The pain is like twine being dragged through his arteries. His face is pouring sweat. The house, it’s so goddamn hot. He looks for something cold. The bottle of milk. He picks it up, slurps from it, and gasps when finished. He spots Lainie in the kitchen, frowning at him. Because he drank from the bottle? Last year he ate raw puma butchered on the jungle floor. Still he feels guilt. He sets down the bottle and feels lost, a stranger. He’s a decaying finger, and Baltimore is the body rejecting his reattachment.

He picks up the fork, manages to squeeze the knife in his left palm.

The knife catches on cheese, the handle clanking against the wedding ring. Pain flares. He mutters bad words only to find Tammy sitting across from him, staring. The girl is getting used to seeing her father struggle. It makes him feel weak, and he can’t afford that, not with General Hoyt getting daily updates from Occam. He’ll need to betray no sign of frailty if he hopes to convince Hoyt that his quick, brutal path, not Hoffstetler’s lenient, winding one, is the right route to take in regard to the asset. Before Hoyt rang his red office telephone in the dead of night, Belém had been the last time he’d heard the general’s voice. And it had rattled him. He’d preferred pretending that Hoyt had been left behind with the broken-down Josefina.

Tammy’s cereal is untouched and bloating.

“Eat,” he says, and she does.

Hoyt’s voice did what it always did to Strickland. It’s like he’s one of those old metal soldiers, and Hoyt wound him. He’ll snap his heels. He’ll redouble efforts to enforce army doctrine upon Occam. Distantly he feels a melancholy. What little progress he’s made at home will continue to move slowly. The lumbering inroads he’s made with the children. The interest he’s made himself take in Lainie’s chronicles of shopping and childcare. It occurs to him that Hoyt isn’t altogether different than the asset. Both are unknowable, somehow larger than their physical forms. Strickland is merely the secondary jaw that lashes from Hoyt’s skull, and he’ll have to keep biting, just a few weeks longer.

The knife catches and falls, its handle thudding past his bandaged fingers. It feels like they’ve been twisted in their sockets. Strickland slams the table with his right fist. Silverware jumps. Tammy drops her spoon into her bowl. He feels tears, that unacceptable expression of vulnerability, rush to his eyes. No, not in front of his daughter. He fumbles from his pocket the bottle of painkillers. He bites off the lid, taps the bottle too hard. White pellets dance across the tabletop until stickiness grabs them. Why is the table sticky? What kind of household is this? He nabs two, then three, then what the hell, four, and pushes them into his mouth. Grabs the milk bottle and swigs—fuck germs. The pills and milk form a paste. He slurps it down. Bitter, bitter. This house, this neighborhood, this city, this life.