Chapter 3 of an unfinished book based on The Odyssey, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. This episode opens with the series' musical introduction and universal cold open, then follows a single story — the next chapter after Episode 5 — out of a moonless bedroom and down into the machine under paradise.

Tonight, just after midnight, arrangements break in a moonless bedroom beside a long white bed, in a silver wastebasket where tissue and eucalyptus catch, down a concrete servants' stair, and in a black sedan called a raft where half a plan meets half a warrant.

Virgil has rehearsed leaving for years. Tonight he does it with the vulgarity of happening: practical pockets, garage-dust shoes, and a fax page folded against his ribs. He feeds a small fire of discarded beauty — napkin, ribbon, eucalyp ...