From the stoop’s top step, the thorned heap of numbers glittered.

Janice bent and pinched the tail of a nine. It hissed when she pulled it from the pile, and she dropped it.

“You hear it too, Janice?” broke her focus. Clavelle Cohen stood in a seagull-gray apron. She was the Bible Study Group instructor at St. Barnaby’s Church.

“So bizarre!” she said. “I was just…grmmph…crawling around looking for a screw to the piano bench when, Whammo! Well of course I thought the whole house was gonna collapse. Braced myself for the whole piano to come down whack me. And I wouldn’t even been crawling around had the screws not fallen out through a hole in this apron!”

“But Ms. Cohen,” said Janice, “I know what really happened.” And she told her about the giant sneeze.

Meanwhile, the neighbors of Jenkins Alley crouched out to inspect their own horned tangle of numbers. Piles glistened.

In Dutt’s wake, numbers lay splayed. After work, Dutt would kiss his parents, traipse to his room and face off with the coat mannequin he bought at Jeckin’s Antiques. He’d prod his fencing sword into the meat of the torso. “Scoundrel! Cad!” he’d call. During a normal day’s idle tedium, when Dutt’s thoughts had nothing pressing to step toward, he waded in fantasies of knighthood: King Arthur of 1312, prepping to duel for his kingdom. He could wade in fantasies all day if he wanted, with so little work to do. He didn’t even have to worry about wearing a clean uniform; Dutt could wear his grungy collared shirt.

At least, before the Sneeze.

Dutt’s rustling puffs, as he bopped around a gnawed looking brick corner, presaged his arrival onto Janice’s block. A zero from Loper’s house cartwheeled. People pecked around, bending down, reaching for a number, turning it over to the clouded side.

Janice sat on the stoop’s third step and faced Dutt. Using the number’s serifs like hooks, she strung a three, three, seven and two (all different sizes and shades of steel and bronze) onto her railing, where they skated down the rail and clacked against each other.

Dutt’s shadow fell on her sneakers as he marched over, the pushbroom head bounced behind him, a typewriter bar in clacking ellipses. “Hey!” he said. “Who did all this?” His shadow cloaked her, stripping the shine from the pile and highlighting ice in her eyes, “I don’t want you to think I’m a mean guy.” He showed her his palms in innocence, letting the City Property-issued broomstick drop between thumb and forefinger. “I just would like it if you didn’t mix those things up.” He bent down and the broom lowered too, a ramp shedding its sharper angle. “Let’s try to keep them together, ok? So we can have easy clean up.”

“You’re the hokey man. You pick them up.”

Brat. Dutt was about to respond when someone called his name. As he rose, the broomstick tripoded along with him and he spun to face Clavelle Cohen.

“What are you attempting with her?” she said. He wanted to get out of there fast. But something about the kid’s accusation of what he was supposed to do made him say, “I wasn’t sure what to do about the numbers. And I saw her here mixing ‘em. I just didn’t know if we should keep them separate…for recycling…or for what.”

“Isn’t that your job?”

Again with what he was supposed to do. “I think what you show people is very small and unrepresentative!” he shouted. “I bet you heard something that night, huh?” He saw himself bearing a sword against her. Beige tipped her teeth. On his heel he stepped back and scurried toward the pub, Cilantros, barrel rumbling, broom tucked under his arm.

“Not the giant sneeze again.”

Janice reached up but Cohen refused to take her hand - Janice had something to do with this mess. Janice was a bad influence on Bible Studies students, encouraging them to draw obscene pendants on the teen models in the textbooks, having the highest tardiness rate, and speaking out in class with unfounded doubt.

Teacher and student walked through the number-littered block, each sidewalk square having at least a handful of threes and fours.

Janice led Cohen inside her house.

To Cohen, candles on the hallway wall evoked orange eggs. Cohen had only been in the kitchen once before, to talk to Janice’s mother, Everett, about her daughter’s attendance. Poor child. Now in the kitchen, veins of valencia sloping into the sink signaled dusk. She smelled musky cooking oil and looked up to see Janice on the stairs, beckoning. Cohen recalled the dungeon scenes from the movie, Die, Die, Demon! Yes - Cohen had covered her hair with a butterfly scarf. Worn those big bug-eye sunglasses so as not to be recognized by any students or their parents in the Baltimore Hippodrome. As the theatre lights had dimmed, the film’s eerie soundtrack commenced - a barroom parlor piano. And then the footsteps on the stairs before the lover ascended the steps to find the other waiting with the knife - it all made her heart beat. Her fingers found herself on the sustained kiss and grope of the hero. She’d gone home exhausted, with the itch to learn the movie’s theme on her baby grand. But once she’d shut the door to her apartment and took off her disguise, the numbers had fallen.

Janice and Cohen treaded on the spongy carpet. “I,” Janice began and exhaled, “I was going to say don’t tell my mom until I remembered.” She looked at the bedroom door.

“Open the door,” said Cohen.

“Hang on.”

It opened in a squeal that reminded Cohen again of Die, Die, Demon! The door’s shake made her aware of the next tock of her heart.

As Janice watched Cohen walk in, she couldn’t help but notice the pale band of the teacher’s neck’s half-cylinder, darkness lapping at the submerged edges, descending. Through the open bay window, their neighbor’s pocked brick wall confronted them.

Cohen felt a breeze on her face. She palmed the wall for a switch - and felt masking tape covering the toggle. “What’s this?” she asked Janice, trying to worm her finger under.

“I don’t want to wake her up,” Janice whispered.

“Wake up who?”

By now Cohen’s eyes had adjusted. On the bed’s blanket glinted the silver thread of teardrop embroidery. A handful of numbers littered the floor next to the bed. Cohen saw a wooden grandfather clock with a blank white face: its numbers were missing.

And there was a woman drooped over the clock. Her pasty leg crossed over the face’s right corner. A flamingo-pink bra’s underwire girded her white pot belly. The woman snored then shuddered. Rough gooseflesh wrinkled her leg; the muscle at the calf was so heavy that it seemed to fall from the leg. She looked like a child who’d scaled a tree and fainted on top. Cohen tried to play it cool. “Another…sculpture?”

“Yes.”

“You have too much spare time.”

“But I made it for you! It took a really, really long time.”

To the floor, Cohen said, “Sometimes, my dear, it takes a long time to push out a brownie.” The ceiling fan shifted inside its collar. “This is it?”

“No! I told you..I know what made the numbers fall!”

Cohen scanned from the woman’s toes (stuffed into gabardine heels) up to the three rolls of stomach girded by a belt (wet-looking). “Do you know what that is up there?”

“Someone bad, M’am.”

“Not necessarily bad but,” Cohen thought about the movie again. “It’s a damn woman of the night!” A prostitute had been the hero, if you could even call her a hero of Die, Die Demon! At least she was the one who lived all the way to the end. But it was her father who turned out to be the demonspawn. Which would make her… Cohen ambled over to the window and peered down a level to the street. “How did she get up here? Did you bring her up?”

“I don’t know, Miss. But as soon as she came up here—”

The pair stopped as the woman gasped and hiccuped.

“What is she doing inside your mother’s house?”

“I said I don’t know! She just…appeared last night. Same night the numbers fell.”

Cohen cocked her head and peered up. Ridiculous. White hair feathered inside the clock woman’s nostrils. “I’m going to wake her up. Get her some clothes. Put a blanket over—”

“No!” yelled Janice. The clock woman gurgled and smacked her lips. “She’s very cranky when she wakes. I like her better sleep.”

Cohen frowned at the clock. Then she turned back to Janice. “You know what: I don’t care what you do.” She marched past Janice and crossed the threshold into the hallway. Being in the presence of unsavory characters, which she felt happened weekly in this community, always made her hands speckle. But she did seek out the lurid entertainment - the movie being only the latest example of which - which actually made her feel the most like a human she’d ever felt in her 38 years of life. “Where’s the bathroom?” she called over her shoulder and then, “Ah, sorry.” And then Cohen felt upset since her apology shattered any teacher’s authority she held over this spectacle.

“Chaos, Gordon,” said Loper. “All these numbers in the street. They have to mean something. Know what I think? End of humanity.”

At first Dutt had thought he’d want to talk about the discipline he’d doled out when Janice was messing with the numbers. “Sure,” said Dutt. He’d been ready to tell Loper something, but then Loper had gone on about his bathshit theories again and Dutt forgot what he’d wanted to say. He smelled dishsteam and whiskey. As Dutt dredged his mind now for whatever it had been - all he could remember was the feeling of what he wanted to tell him: he knew it was urgent. So all he had was the imprint, the ghost-image of what he wanted to say. ‘I’m the stupidest person I know,’ thought Dutt. ‘Although maybe it’s because I’m alone with my thoughts all day.’

Loper’s forearms splayed across the tablecloth. The turquoise bud of his tie twitched against his throat while he drank his Bernigan’s Breakfast Stout. “I’ve started counting the piles. There’s hundreds of ‘em. Know what they are?”

“What?”

“Some kind of poison witchcraft. Makes people forget their needs. Think that their life, the way it is now, it ain’t enough and they belong in some other standing. Or that they’re harboring a second, secret life.”

“Are you sure?”

Loper said he wasn’t.

“To be honest I haven’t really got to them yet,” said Dutt.

Loper scrunched his face. “Isn’t that your job?”

“I’m upset. I mean, I took this job, you know, knowing how people would see me. What image I’d project in this role.”

“As hokey man?”

“I took it so it could be parallel from my real life. So that the life I actually wanted to focus on…you know,” towards his glass he made a cutting motion. But Loper looked at him strangely.

“What?”

“Swordsmanship!”

“You still do that?” Loper’s fingers, interlaced crookedly, seemed to appear as extensions of his mouth, feelers. “Didn’t know you kept that up, bud. I don’t think you can compartmentalize your life like that. Two different strata.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about. It’s about that now I have all this work, you know?” Dutt used to be able to just fuck off and fence for half the day, sticks on lamppoles, working on different en gardes, albers, and pflugs. But now the sight of the piles signaled how much he was about to lose from his life’s purpose. And he hadn’t even picked up a single number.

Then, noises rumbled from the stage. Forks clattered. Once one layer of sound - skeins of clanking silverware - quit, then another sound, like the air conditioner’s roar, would be revealed as having been there from the start. “But now that I’m so busy—” Dutt shouted over the din, “It feels like. I need to find something new, a new part of me, rather than just wait or grin and bear it.”

“I wanted you to come here to see someone. A performance like.”

Dutt continued: “And it’s forcing me to realize,” waiting for another churn to finish. “That I have fissures in my life.”

“You need to get out more, Gordon. Find yourself a lady. I don’t think she’s the one.”

“What? Who?”

“I told you - the performance.”

“Performance?”

On the wall by another booth, three ice-cube sized squares of red light swirled. Two voices amplified. “Here we go,” said Loper. From the booth behind him, a figure, still blurred in Dutt’s vision, fell on the carpet. Another, broader shadow fell onto it. Crash! The other figure clapped onto the first. A brawl. Sweat, beer, and perfume all calcified in his throat while those on barstools swiveled to watch as the two fighters peeled and stood at opposing sides of the booth, steadying themselves, leaning on the cushion in front of a turned-over barstool which was all Dutt saw glimpsing over a bare shoulder. He saw neither their ponytails nor resolute faces, nor could Dutt have known that these were the women Cilantro’s wrestling managers had recruited to fight each other in a pinch - since the crowd fav Loper had wanted to introduce Dutt to had disappeared (and in fact had minutes ago reappeared on top of Janice’s grandfather clock). The hokey man glimpsed wet bra straps and stomach rolls, the new volume mushrooming over other voices.

“I’m leaving,” said Dutt.

“Wait!” said Loper. Can you believe this place? They have scheduled lady fights?”

“What?”

Usually now, they have another broad up there. A blonde with a pot belly.”

A blue heel flew and hit Dutt’s shoulder. He didn’t remember anything like that, and had been coming to this pub for years.

“I thought you’d like her. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut her loose. On account of the things she says.”

“What’s that?”

“Weird stuff. But stuff you’re into. She kind of, berates the audience.”

“You think I’d be into that?”

“You’re into the weird stuff.”

“Thanks.” Dutt stood from the booth.

Loper said he was sorry and that he hadn’t meant to hurt Dutt’s feelings. “It’s just…this thing with you, if you want to know man-to-man, needs to be solved with someone to talk to.”

“Talking to you right now.”

“You and I, we’re from different worlds.”

“You sound like my parents.”

Loper’s voice lowered. “Your parents are concerned too.”

Now Dutt took two steps back from the table. “Oh my God,” he said. He stomped past the wood front podium. Against its front, neon barlight fractured.

Loper’s eyes burned into Dutt’s back as the hokey man passed packs of seated people. “Hey Dutt, when you gonna pick up those numbers?” shouted an off-work gravedigger.

Dutt hurried toward the exit. “You all think you understand me enough…enough to stick other people in my way! When I don’t want to talk to anybody!”

Cigarette smoke plumes ballooned toward haze-dulled streetlights. It reminded him of anglerfish who’d lived at ocean’s bottom for so long that they had grown their own lights. He heard a rummaging and saw a woman picking through the trash.

She hunched toward the curb. “No need to be scared of me!” she said. He looked at her sifting through some broken mugs. He hoped she wouldn’t leave those for him to pick up. “I’m not!” he said, though her presence and her hunched back did remind him of a raccoon. And he hated raccoons.

“Something very strange just happened to me. I’m trying to find some answers.”

“In the trash?”

“I don’t know,” she said, rummaging inside a can that smelled like rancid milk and banana. “I was just at that girl’s house. Janice’s.”

“Something wrong with her, right?”

“Yes. I try to be a good influence, a mentor to her, when I can. But she brought me over there. She said she knew what caused the collapse. A person, someone wearing close to nothing. Just splayed up on the grandfather clock, half asleep.”

“What?”

“She brought me over on the pretext of telling me why they’d fallen. She said it was someone who was responsible.”

Dutt perked up. “A person knocked those down all at once?” Shadows under his elbows grazed the ground and happiness surged in chest. The mystery was closer to solving!

“That woman up there, I think she’s the reason it all fell down. She’s the key to all this.”

He nodded.

She laughed. “I never think like this. I definitely don’t confide in you!”

“Tragedy makes people who wouldn’t warm up to me do it. I’m not sure if this is special to me. Or if it’s just…tragedy as a whole.”

Streetlight brushed her cheeks. She asked what he was suggesting.

“I don’t know why numbers are out this far,” said Dutt. “No one lives around here.”

“Delinquents,” said Cohen.

“No homes or address boards for them to fall off of, anyway. Probably kids just kicking-” and he stopped himself.

“Listen,” her arm appeared in front of his chest and he walked into it. “I don’t like kids! I never did.” And her face froze. The spindly, geodome jungle gym shone in the square. The bars appeared like spider legs. Something pale, dove-white and round had welled-up under her cheek. Tears.

“That’s ok,” he said. “Are you ok?”

“Yes, it's just. I don’t know why I just said that. I’m sorry. But I’m not damn Mother Goose!”

Dutt felt a warmth in his jowls. “Nobody…who thinks of you like that?”

“They all do! They’ve cast me into this role and I’ve accepted it. That’s the worst part. I’ve accepted this role. With Janice. With you. And I keep on living. That’s how it gets over on you. You just keep on living, and no one ever stops to ask if this is what you wanted. I had to put on a scarf to go to the movies for Christ’s sake! I thought it would hurt my reputation if they saw me. It never stops.” She scratched her cheeks. “And it sweeps - no, it gradually introduces itself to you and it sticks around.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s like you, Gordon. You’re a streetsweeper. A hokey man. But you’re refusing to pick up these numbers. I admire - I actually admire - you resurfacing to conform to your job's role.”

“Well, my passion is fencing and swordsmanship. Streetsweeping is a sort of outlet to my—”

She slapped his cheek.

“There’s the lazy son-of-a-gun now,” came from the father’s pink bald spot, in the eye of the vortex.

Cohen’s appearance made them turn their faces from their blurry reflections in the glass clock. “Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“Wait, you're the Bible Studies teacher?” Cohen knew that the whole neighborhood looked to her for leadership. Dutt’s mother thought the old lady needed to get laid. Everybody knew her husband wasn’t doing it. The father would’ve done the laying himself. Not that he thought about her often, but sometimes he imagined those blackboard fingernails dragging his flesh.

Dutt interrupted. “I didn’t have a good time with Loper. I don’t appreciate you setting me up for a date with him.

Mother matched his volume. “When are you going to man up?”

“The numbers aren’t my fault!”

“But you’re our hokey man.”

“Pick up your own damn…people can pick up their own damn numbers!”

“Gordon!” his Father croaked.

“Listen to your adult son!” Cohen cut in. Turning back: “They really baby you, huh?” she said.

To her the house smelled like mothball potpourri and mice.

In the clock’s white face Dutt watched his father grimace. “Why’d you set me up with Loper, huh? What did you tell him to say?”

Father said, “Tell you to get your ass in gear. You can’t keep ignoring your own.”

“That’s not what he was saying!” Dutt said, storming up to his room.

Cohen said: “You can’t keep doing this. You need to let him make his own mistakes. The school and parent’s authority. It can only take him so far. I see his pain. It’s time for you to let go. You and your proxies.”

He tried to hide his Fencing Fantasy magazines by setting another milkcrate on top of the stack, but to no use. Then he walked over to his mannequin practice dummy where he kept his sword. He slipped it out of the holster and it shone. (It was the only time he ever felt attractive.) But Cohen seemed too busy taking in the odor of the sneaker-smelling room.

“No one knows I fence, nobody here knows. I wish that could be my thing. Instead of a glorified garbage man. Wish I had talent. Do you think a private passion can still be nurtured, cultivated, and eventually you show it to people? Or do you know if it’s a public skill right from day one?”

Cohen said: “I guess that’s what we’ll figure out.”

When they got to the raised front step, numbers clung. “What did she tell you?” asked Dutt.

“Just that there was someone in there. That she was going to…that she was the reason the numbers fell.” Cohen explained how Janice had taken her into the room and showed her the woman asleep on a clock.

“What happened when she woke up? Did she wake up?”

“I didn't stick around.”

“We should call the police,” Dutt said.

“C’mon Gordon. When’s the last time you got to test out your dream? Actually do the thing you’ve been casting around for?” She reached to his belt and slipped her sweaty fingers alongside the sword hilt. He heard himself sigh.

Dutt knocked once and the door creaked open.

The arc of Janice’s head blotted out the kitchen candlelight behind her. Dutt drove the door further open. Cohen pushed herself ahead. “I want to show Mr. Gordon here just what you showed me. And see how he feels…how my friend feels.” She grabbed his wobbling shoulder, steadying him. “What my friend has to say.”

Dutt and Cohen stopped, panning to the hallway. The woman, who had been asleep on the clock, was now wearing Janice’s mother’s cobalt bathrobe and lumbering drowsily toward them.

“You two need to help me!” she gasped in shaky breaths. “She won’t let me leave!”

“Draw your sword, Gordon!”

“I can’t!” A tight pain curled in his forehead and his arms felt of granite. So Cohen gripped Dutt’s arm and wheeled him around. She pushed the space between his shoulder blades and with the other, reached to his waist. She pulled out the sword and sliced it toward the ceiling fan. Hiss.

“This goddamn clock. These goddamn numbers. First you take your mother, and now you’re trying to pass off a - I know you killed her!”

“No!” said Janice.

“A what? I am a performer. At Cilantro’s, I swear! I’m just trying to get back to work. I swear!”

“She’s lying!” said Janice.

“She’s telling the truth,” said Dutt. Everyone looked at him. “You must be the fighting people. A fighting person. All they had last night was a…janitor doing it.”

“That’s me!”

“I’m telling the truth!” said Janice. “I know it sounds wrong. But she was up there as soon as the numbers sneezed.”

“That is enough,” said Cohen. She sprung at the woman with Dutt’s sword. She cocked back her arm and then thrust it forward. Can you see the tip? Dutt sharpened it after each prod into his mannequin, which bore the punctures. Embedded in that blade lay days and nights practicing. Of hoping he would amount to something close to fantasy. A happy debut. The blade disappears into the clock woman’s vanillayogurt neck. A mound of skin inches to the side, away from the blade. The blade pushed aside a slice of skin, revealing cherry underneath. Cohen doesn’t follow through and her arm swatted left.

The woman crumpled into Janice’s arms, her painted fingernails tearing at her own lips then down to her neck. Janice collapsed under the woman's weight, gripping the hair near the wounded’s widow's peak. Blood arcs down.

Cohen tossed the sword back into Dutt’s hands. “That’s how you be a knight, Dear,” she said.

He scooped up another number, 6, and dropped it into his pulled up shirt. Then he deposited it into the barrel where it landed with a hollow clink. It was love that was supposed to take that place of passion. He used the side of his hand to brush a clot of numbers into the barrel. He kicked over the barrel so its open mouth faced the street. He toed numbers inside. Passion was, in fact, a reason for love. He kicked the barrel down the street, then went to the sidewalk and brushed numbers together, and then threw everything into the barrel. That woman was supposed to mean something to him. And now without her, he needed new life meaning. At the end of the block Dutt bent and gathered some piles. Some were clean, some were dusty.

The numbers with holes he could lace through his fingers, and sometimes the numbers with hooks too. He carried stacks out into the street. He deposited them into the barrel, and when it was full, into the orange and red milk crates by the shop window of the comic book store he frequented. He kept them in his shirt’s paunch until they got too heavy, and then he tipped them into the crates or the barrel. He dragged the containers from sidewalk to sidewalk, stooping over, stretching to reach for the single kicked-away numbers. By stacking the two crates he could carry both at once before dumping them into his barrel.

It took about sixteen trips to fill the barrel. Dutt worked until, at the night's end, having collected all the piles, his knuckles bled.

At home he left the barrel next to his bedroom window outside, covering it with a blue tarp, and went upstairs to bed. His soft pillow muffling his ear evoked the ocean.

“We’re so proud of you, sweetie. Finally stepping up to the plate.”

“We both knew - your mother and I did - that you’d meet the challenge as—”

“When he saw fit! You work by your own timetable.”

“You’re so independent. But frankly we were a little concerned. But you met the task head on.”

“It must’ve taken you all night!”

“It did,” he said.

“And with the…well, we were wondering, what kind of glue did you use? To get them all back?”

“Pardon?”

“He used a hammer and nail I’m sure. To put them all back. Our little prodigal boy.”

“But how did he know which went where?”

The sidewalk joints blurred underfoot as Gordon hurried to Janice’s house. He knocked on the door which peeled back and caught the chain. Cohen opened in her glasses and pearl necklace. She welcomed Dutt inside.

Janice’s mother, Everett, and Ms. Cohen sat at the coffee table.

Janice motioned for Dutt to follow her into the kitchen.

Everett introduced herself to Dutt, but all he said was, “I…” Then he blurted out that he did not in fact fix all the numbers back on the houses. All he'd done was pick them up. And that he might just take the credit and let people think he did.

“I know,” said Janice. “Come.”

Everett and Janice and Dutt and Cohen went into the room upstairs.

Chandelier light streaked the broken grandfather clock base.

“Now I swear,” said Everett. “This wasn’t broken yesterday.”

Cohen lowered on her haunches to examine the sideways clock. A triangular hole gaped in the clock’s center. Glass pebbles speckled the carpet. Daylight on the face of the clock brought out a dinginess, like a dinner plate cooked on too much. Clusters of splotches were visible and the numbers were where they were supposed to be.

“Has this always been broken?” asked Cohen. How did she know she couldn’t teach any longer? She felt like all her interests - what she played on piano, for example - were bent toward appeasing kids. I will resign tomorrow, she thought.

And she would.

Dutt was telling Loper how he’d never drank a Bernigan’s Breakfast Stout actually at breakfast before. “But I feel like I need it,” Dutt said. To the table’s center, he stretched out his arms. An automobile parked outside tweaked its side-view mirror and the light smear shivered. “I just told you. She got the lady you wanted me to meet, I'm sure of it.”

“And I’m saying that NO, I just saw the girl two seconds ago. In the kitchen.” He pointed between their stouts.

A woman with a thick beige bandage over her index finger stood at their table’s side. Her belt clip clicked up against the table.

“Tell us, Honey,” said Loper, sliding four fingers past his knuckles. Dutt shivered. “Tell us what you think about belonging here in Bolton Hill. The numbers. Dutt here wanted to be a hokey man for just one reason. It gave him time to be a knight. Isn’t that crazy?”

The woman said, “It’s not...right. I’m worried about the before and the after. You’re either up and out of it or you're here pouring pints. I feel myself getting older. I just think we’re all bigger than our nine to five. I know I am. I want to be the cow jumping over the moon. Like in the fairy books.”

“Yeah!” said Loper, raising his glass to toast. “Ain't she a beaut?”

The woman looked at Loper, shook her head, and smiled at the young man. “How do you know this guy?” she asked, leaning in.