“I’d like a job,” Ash says.

I have a mouthful of coffee. I hold it there for a moment, in the interest of not redecorating.

“A job.”

“An occupation. Employment.” He is buttering toast with the terrible focus he brings to all small tasks. “A thing I do on a schedule that has nothing to do with anybody wanting anything.”

“You’re a demon.”

“I’m aware.”

“You’re a nine-hundred-year-old creature of appetite who materializes out of the dark when people light candles.”

“Twice a week,” he says. “Which leaves a hundred and sixty-six hours.”

And there it is, and I put my cup down, because I know exactly where this came from. It came from a hedge cutting in a jar on my windowsill, and a Sunday he spent in a rambler in Vancouver because he chose to, and a conversation at this table about what happens in forty years.

“You want somewhere to be,” I say.

“I want somewhere to be expected,” says Ash. “There’s a difference. Nobody has ever expected me. They’ve wanted me, which is the opposite, because wanting is what makes me arrive and expecting is what happens when you already know I’m coming.” He puts the knife down. “Cora, do you know what it would be like to be somewhere at nine o’clock because I said I would be?”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s get you a job.”

That was Tuesday. I’d like the record to show that on Tuesday I thought this was going to be easy.

✦ ✦ ✦

“He has no social security number,” Priya says.

We are around my dining table again, which is where this family now conducts business. Margot has the binder. Priya has the laptop. My mother is on speakerphone from her kitchen, which is a thing that happens now, and which nobody has ever formally agreed to.

“He has an address,” Margot offers.

“An address is not identity.”

“He has a Costco card—”

“Margot.” Priya takes off her glasses, which is how you know it’s serious. “I want to be gentle about this. A Costco membership is not a government-recognized form of identification. It is a promise between a man and a warehouse.”

“That’s beautiful,” says Ash.

“It’s ruinous,” says Priya. “You have no birth certificate. No passport. No driver’s license, no tax history, no bank account, no credit file, no school records, no vaccination record, no fixed date of birth, and no legal existence in any jurisdiction on this planet.” She puts the glasses back on. “You are, from an underwriting perspective, the single most alarming individual I have ever encountered, and I once did a file on a man who owned nine boats.”

“So what do we do?” I say.

There is a silence.

“We could forge it,” says Margot.

“Margot.”

“What! People do!”

“People go to prison—”

“I’m just saying I have a laminator,” my sister says, with enormous dignity, “and nobody in this family has ever once let me contribute.”

“Margot,” says my mother, from the phone.

“Mom—”

“You will not laminate a federal document.”

“It was one idea—”

“It was a felony,” Ellen says. “Priya. Is there a lawful route?”

Priya looks at the ceiling for a while.

“There’s a route,” she says. “It is long, it is grim, it involves a delayed registration of birth and a judge, and it would require him to produce evidence of continuous residence, which he cannot, because he has been continuously resident since the reign of Henry the Second.”

“Third,” says Ash.

“I’m going to ignore that,” says Priya.

✦ ✦ ✦

So the plan, such as it is, becomes this: we get him an interview anyway.

Not because it can go anywhere. Priya was extremely clear that it cannot go anywhere, in the tone of a woman putting a disclaimer on the record so she can’t be blamed later. But Ash wants to know what it’s like, and I have watched this creature discover free samples and a hot dog and a laminated card with his name on it, and I have learned that the experience is the point.

“Where?” Margot says.

And Ash says, in the voice of a man who has been thinking about it since Tuesday and waiting to be asked: