But nobody showed up, so he sat awhile looking at the wall. It was one of those Saturdays that feel like Sunday. He didn’t know how to explain this. It happened intermittently, more often in the warmer months, and it was probably normal, although he’d never discussed it with anyone.

•

After the divorce he felt an odd numbness, mental and physical. He looked in the mirror, studying the face that looked back. At night he kept to his half of the bed with his back to the other half. Over time a life slithered out. He talked to people, took long walks. He bought a pair of shoes but only after testing them rigorously, both shoes, not just one. He walked from one end of the shoe store to the other, four times at various speeds, then sat and looked down at the shoes. He took one shoe off and handled it, pressing the instep, placing his hand inside the shoe, nodding at it, tapping with the fingers of his free hand on the rigid sole and heel.

The salesman stood in the near distance, watching and waiting, whoever he was, whatever he said and did when he wasn’t there.

•

In the office his desk was set alongside a window and he spent time looking at a building across the street, where nothing was visible inside the rows of windows. There were times when he could not stop looking.

He looks and scratches, semi-surreptitiously. Certain days it’s the left wrist. Upper arms at home in the evening. Thighs and shins most likely at night. When he’s out walking, it happens now and then, mostly forearms.

He was forty-four years old, trapped in his body. Arms, legs, torso. Face did not itch. Scalp developed something that a doctor gave a name to, but it itched only rarely, then not at all, so the name didn’t matter.

His eyes swept the windows across the street horizontally, never vertically. He did not try to imagine the lives inside.

•

He began to think of the itch as sense data from the exterior, caused by some outlying substance, unanalyzable, the air in the room or on the street or in the atmosphere itself, a corruption of the planetary environment.

He thought of this but did not believe it. It was semi-science fiction. But it was also a form of comfort during those long periods of unrest when he was stretched and then curled and then belly down in bed, a raw body in cotton pajamas, awash in creams and lotions, trying not to scratch or rub.

•

He told his friend Joel that Saturday sometimes felt like Sunday and he waited for a response. Joel had two kids and a wife named Sandra. They were Sandra and Joel, never the reverse.

“Saturday, Sunday, so what. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if Tuesday felt like Wednesday? Even better, if Tuesday of this week felt like Wednesday of next week.”

Joel was a fellow-member of the office staff. He wrote poetry when he was able to find the time and he’d recently stopped trying to get the work published. He said, “How’s the itch? I think of the itch in world history and my mind goes blank.”

The friend, the former wife, the doctors and nurses’ aides in scrubs and sneakers. They knew. No one else.

“An emperor, a member of the royal family. You need a context that you can work with. A famous statesman scratching in secret. Something that you could research, find some satisfaction.”

“You think so.”

“Or Biblical, absolutely. You might find that you’re part of a great narrative, thousands of years. The Holy Land. The Itch.”

“One word. A single syllable.”

“Four letters. Do you read the Bible, ever? A plague in Bible times. I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Do the research. I know I would. I can imagine how awful. Middle of the night.”

“Middle of the day.”

“Even worse,” his friend said.

•

He was seeing a woman, superficially seeing her. They were two reticent individuals, and he hadn’t said a word about the itch. When and if intimacy occurred, he hoped it would not be unanticipated. She might otherwise feel traces of the lotions and ointments, his body to hers, arms, legs, elsewhere, the ointments and hypoallergenic creams, the super-high-potency corticosteroids.

They had dinner now and then, went to a movie, implicitly working out a routine that did not bury them in total mutual anonymity.

Her name was Ana with a single “n,” and this was a fragment of information that interested him. The fact of the missing “n.” He liked to scribble the name, pencil on notepad, large “A,” small “n,” small “a.” In the office he entered the name on his desktop device in different fonts, or all caps, or upside down, or cursive, or boldface, or in the characters of remote non-Roman alphabets.

At dinner she spoke about the movie they’d just watched. He’d nearly forgotten it, scene after scene of foreboding menace. The near-empty theatre was more interesting than the movie. He leaned across the dinner table, sort of half comically, and asked about her name. Adherence to a family tradition? A name from a European novel?

No such tradition, she said. No foreign influence. Just a name spelled a certain way.

He nodded slowly, marooned in his slanted body posture and surprised at the disappointment he felt. Eventually he sat back, still nodding, and found himself imagining her body. Always the body. This was not an erotic set of curves but something even more wondrous, the basic body, the primitive physical structure.

She said that her mother’s name was Florence.

But her body, here, in the chair across the table, the human, the person, the mass of flesh and blood ascendant over hundreds of thousands of years or more, millions of years, a body no different, essentially, in its sheer bodiness, from the humped and half-crawling forms that preceded it.

He told himself to stop. They talked about the food and the restaurant. He asked her what her father’s name was.

•

In the morning he walked along the hallway in the building where he worked, careful not to look directly at others heading toward their offices, four or five, suits and ties, blouses and skirts. He liked to imagine them going nowhere, remaining in place with their feet moving up and down and their arms swinging slightly.

•

His former wife had a certain kind of smile that he kept remembering. She isn’t looking at him; she is smiling into space. Those four years together, before the seething weeks of conflict, how she blew kisses across the dinner table to wish away the itch, those summer-evening jogs along the river.

The symmetry of the itch, both thighs, the crook of each elbow, left ankle, then right. The crotch does not itch. The buttocks, yes, when he removes his trousers before going to bed, and then it stops.

He could not forget the smile. It was a beautiful moment, borne in memory, her head turned away to the transfiguring past, the grandmother with a gift for storytelling, something way back then, and he wanted to follow the smile into her life, to join her spell of recollection, a minute or an hour, in flawless time.

•

They were at Sunday brunch, two couples, and there was a football game on the TV placed over the bar at the other end of the room, the sound turned off. He could not stop looking at the screen. The brief action, the slow-motion replays, three or four replays of an ordinary run or pass or punt, different camera angles, and he joined the conversation at the table and ate his pancakes and kept on watching. He watched the commercials.