5.
Paul has been lying in bed for three days. He can’t move. He’s been told he pulled his back out when he fainted in Vivian’s back bedroom.
Vivian Middleford. The woman in her underwear and b*a. The woman who touched her lips to his forehead when he was lying prone on her couch. The paramedics and police all around. She kissed his forehead. He thinks. Did she really do that or was he just imagining that?
Paul is on Robaxacet and Tylenol and anything else his doctor says he can take. Chicken noodle soup, which he can’t bear to eat, and ginger ale – Sophie thinks he’s got the flu, Paul guesses – and even a bottle of cough syrup.
The dead person in Vivian’s back bedroom, murdered, and then the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania, and Paul’s ba
