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There were cracks in the ceiling. I studied them like a map and got to know them quite well as I lay on her bed waiting for news. I had a job dropping off the daily, but that went up in smoke when I called to say I'd be gone for a few days, I didn't know how many. Her kitchen was better stocked than the one in my shoebox of a place. I could hang out and eat the occasional sandwich and investigate the cracks in the ceiling, and that beat the newspaper gig hands down. One crack forked like the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. I knew because there was a little map in a history class I took in fourth grade or thereabouts. It showed these rivers and called them, or maybe the land between them, The Cradle of Civilization. I could picture the fourth-grade map very clearly. It was a sort of marvel to me to spot The Cradle of Civilization up on the ceiling like that.

What I saw, as I looked up at this V on its side, was a cornucopia with all the bounties of civilization generating spontaneously inside and pouring out into the open world around it: agriculture, law, science, art, entrepreneurial razzle-dazzle; cattle, contracts, inventions to boggle your mind, statues, paintings and fast-food franchises, all cooking to perfection out on the desert there in that Fertile Crescent and blorping over the edge into the laps of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and to what end? Was it truly, as I suspected, so that a few millennia later, I could lie here unemployed on squeaky springs, contemplating a cracked ceiling? At the time this line of thought seemed secure enough to take a step further. Wasn't it possible that I was a dupe in an elaborate farce, in which Bernice, at this moment, was standing outside the door, waiting for her cue, on receipt of which she would bust into the room, saying, "I have a letter for you," or "Run for your life - the building is on fire!"

* * *

She phoned me the next night like she said she would, though it was another three days till I saw her. The dog doctor had done a fine job she told me. Five months later, when the cast came off, she did take to wearing long-sleeved shirts, and her left hand never worked quite right, but I didn't doubt that her cousin had gone above and beyond the call. I never asked why the man would put his ass on the line under such unpromising circumstances.

In preparation for her homecoming I went shopping. I paid for the bread and lifted the steak. I paid for the potatoes and lifted the wine, because this is how the unemployed go shopping.

She came home and rested. While she slept I set the table. When she rose I walked her to dinner and lit two small candles, and as the flames flickered, the eyes of this amazon, this savage, so brazen in the face of bullets and god knows what sort of treatment in the hands of a dog doctor, filled with tears. Ah yes, my friend, it's because of moments like these that we insist on our survival.

They call me John the Leech, leech because I steal. Mine is the gift of the invisible hand, the unseen maneuver. To not use this talent for the betterment of myself and my fellows would be to rend the very fabric of the universe. The ability to cause assorted products to vanish from under the watchful eyes of proprietors intent on turning a reasonable profit, came to me, not from a determination to break laws or to provoke inventory and accounting difficulties, but through eons of evolution. I had no say in it. Somewhere in that thick pudding that serves as central command to the drab decisions that get me through one day and into the next - do I go right or left here? if I take a little nap on the bus will I miss my stop? etc. - there is a set of relays, a magic track, that generations of improbable mutation have polished to chromium-like perfection. The speed, the dexterity, the coordination is all up there. The brain says, "Now!" and the hand obeys. I told you about the steak, about the bottle of wine. Did I tell you I once appropriated a pair of shoes from the feet of a federal investigator? Oh yes. It may even be possible that if a certain bank job had been planned with these lightning synapses in mind, things would have gone differently. But at that time, how could she have known?