Quote:"Reine did not wake up until almost seven that evening. A rhyme kept running through his head. There was a silly twerp, who couldn’t even burp. But he hadn’t made that up himself, so he had no difficulty in getting rid of it. He got out of the guest bed with the empty beer can under his arm and decided that he was not hungry. He was never hungry when he first got up, as if his stomach were stuffed with air. He burped, went out to the stairway garbage chute, and threw the beer can down it, counting the seconds before the can rattled into the bin. Three seconds. If you fell — was there time to relive your life in three seconds?

The beer made itself felt, and he went into the bathroom to pee. It felt so good he wanted to shout. He tried out a couple of squeaks, but they weren’t up to much. If you gave a full-throated yell, you could be heard in the john in the apartment below, and they might phone the police, thinking there had been a break-in. He pulled his penis out into a long pink string and let it go; it at once wrinkled up again. Penis, prick, cock . . . or wee-wee, as Mom used to say when he was small. None of the words sounded right. Penis sounded like the name of a spice, prick sounded nuts. And cock? Cock sounded brittle in some way, like a thin pipe of brick-colored clay. Cockpot. Drop the cockpot on the floor. Ocarina. Clay cuckoo. The right word was male member. He inspected his male member, which looked like a skin ice cream cone. He pulled down his trousers and examined the base of his male member and the wrinkled pale brown scrotum. Good, no hairs, only a little white down. How long had he got? A year? Two years? The day he reached puberty, all was lost. Then he would be drawn into the world of adults and there would be no return. Imprisoned in hominess and other mucky things, your thoughts would never again be pure. All your energy would go on getting sex, and there would be nothing left to solve problems like whether God existed and if so, what had he sounded like when he created Adam. Perhaps this was his last summer, as children matured so young these days: two in his class already had hair. Every day, Reine examined his private parts with tenor as if he were scared of cancer.

He pulled up his jeans, flushed the john, then unscrewed the knob on the tank and lifted the lid. He had fastened a piece of paper inside the lid with some blue tape. He pulled it free and checked that all was in order. On the paper was: