Don Dellilo

from the story "Sine cosine tangent" Zero K

I was afraid of other people’s houses. After school, sometimes a friend might talk me into going to his house or apartment to do our homework together. It was a shock, the way people lived, other people, those who weren’t me. I didn’t know how to respond to the clinging intimacy of it, kitchen slop, pan handles sticking out of the sink. Did I want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? Just walking past a bathroom, a woman’s stocking draped over the towel rack, pill bottles on the windowsill, some open, some capsized, a child’s slipper in the bathtub—it made me want to run and hide, partly from my own fastidiousness. The bedrooms with unmade beds, somebody’s socks on the floor, the old woman in nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life gathered up in a chair by the bed, hunched frame and muttering face. Who were these people, minute to minute and year after year? It made me want to go home and stay there.

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The smell of other people’s houses. There was the kid who posed for me in his mother’s hat and gloves, although it could have been worse. The kid who said that he and his sister had to take turns swabbing lotion on their father’s toenails to control some hideous creeping fungus. He thought this was funny. Why didn’t I laugh? He kept repeating the word “fungus” while we sat at the kitchen table to do our homework together. A half slice of withered toast slumped in a saucer still damp with spilled coffee. Sine cosine tangent. Fungus fungus fungus.