Death Bliss
The bubbles in his water glass have stopped rising.
"Your sister," he says, "is very well situated."
I do not know what that means. I know exactly what that means.
The man reaches into his pocket and withdraws a folded sheet of paper, cream-colored, heavy stock, the kind of paper that costs more than the meal I ate on the train. He unfolds it once, twice, and lays it on the marble between us. The numbers are typed in a clean serif font, and the zeroes stretch across the page like a row of small open mouths.