Catasterism
By Michael Silberman
From Chapter One
The man on the bathroom floor was wearing one Gucci loafer.
The other one stood upright beside the toilet, polished black leather with the heel crushed flat from a year of being stepped into without hands, pointed at the door as though it had let itself in and was waiting to be told where to go next.
I noticed the shoe first.
Six people were shouting at once. Somebody had left the shower running and nobody had thought to turn it off, so the room was filling with steam behind a naked man I had never met in my life, who kept asking me, with real hope, whether I happened to be a doctor.
“No.”
“You—you know what he took?”
“I know some of it.”
“What does that—what does that mean?”
“It means move.”
He moved. His name turned out to be Trevor, which I learned the way you learn anything at a party like that one: by hearing it screamed at thirty-second intervals from four directions by people who had no intention of doing the thing themselves. Trevor, get a towel. Trevor, call downstairs. Trevor, where’s his phone. Trevor, for God’s sake put some pants on. Trevor did none of it. He stood at the sink with both hands pressed flat against his own cheeks while the steam rolled along the ceiling and drifted out into the suite, and he held that position long enough that I stopped expecting anything from him and started working around him like he was furniture that happened to be crying.
Noticing the shoe first bothered me later, and it goes on bothering me, because I have had a long time to work out what kind of man takes inventory of the footwear in a room where somebody has stopped breathing, and every answer I have come up with is a version of the same answer: I had spent years training myself to look at the one part of a scene that could not put me in prison.
The room belonged to a man named Julian, who sold commercial real estate and who had spent the better part of a year telling me, in the particular voice men use for a future they have already decided to believe in, that he was about to make partner. His company’s website still listed him as an associate. I had checked it once, alone in a parking lot, for no reason I could defend then or defend now, had felt bad about checking, and had gone on knowing what I found anyway.
He was thirty-eight. He had a closet full of Saint Laurent. He owed me fourteen hundred dollars. He was the one on the floor.
“Julian.” Nothing. I slapped the tile beside his face, hard, twice. “Julian.” His eyelids came up maybe a quarter of the way and went back down.
Three small silver stars were stuck to his forehead—somebody had been decorating people earlier in the night, in a mood that had since ended, and the party had gone on long enough past that mood that glitter had quietly turned into medical information.
A woman in a white dress crouched beside me and put one hand down on the floor for balance. “Is he dying?”
“I don’t know.”
“You sell this stuff.” That came from somewhere behind me, out of the crowd, and nobody answered it and nobody turned to see who’d said it, which is the one real advantage of a room with enough people in it: an accusation can go up into the air and circle for a while and never come back down on anybody, and everyone can agree afterward that it was never really said at all.
The woman in white had mascara under one eye and none under the other. She had been crying long enough to ruin half her face without noticing.
“What do we do?”
“Call 911.”
End of excerpt. © 2026 Michael Silberman. All rights reserved.
