I found the switch on the cord, about eighteen inches up from the base. I flicked it.
The corner lit up. It had been unfinished since Pratt moved in, and now it wasn't.
"Okay," I said. "That's a good lamp."
Pratt looked at the corner. I picked a small square of Styrofoam off his sleeve. It was packing material, clinging there without his knowledge.
"This calls for a drink," I said. "I've got beer next door. Give me forty-five seconds."
He didn't say no, which I'd learned was one of Pratt's ways of saying yes.
I returned and held up two bottles from the back of my fridge. He took one and opened it with the flat of his palm against the counter edge in a single clean motion. I did mine the same way because I wasn't going to be the guy who needed a bottle opener.
One of us moved toward the couch. I don't remember which. We ended up angled toward each other with an empty cushion between us. He sat up straight, and I pulled one foot up under me because I'd never learned to sit like a person who owned furniture.
"You do this a lot?" I asked. "Buy something and then take a month thinking about where it will live?"
"If the placement will affect traffic flow." Pratt drank his beer. "Moving it later costs more than waiting."
"The lamp was against the wall for, what, three weeks?"
"Five."
"Five weeks," I said. "Did it ever occur to you to just—put it somewhere and adjust if it was wrong?"
"You've got a printer in a box in your living room."
I opened my mouth.
"Eight months," he said.
I closed my mouth. "That's different."
"How?"
"The printer is—okay, the printer is a symbolic object. It represents the possibility of becoming someone who prints things. The day I unbox it, I've made a commitment to a specific version of myself, and I'm not sure I'm there yet."
"That's not different."
"It's completely—" I stopped. Thought about it. Looked at the lamp in the corner, finally lit, sitting where it belonged. "Okay, maybe it's not so different."
Pratt turned his head to look. I watched him. "Good corner," I said.
"Yes."
I took another drink and then excused myself to use the bathroom. On the way back, I noticed his bedroom door was open. I glanced in as I passed. There was a single blanket, folded with care, lying along the baseboard beside the bed.
I stood in the hallway for a moment and looked at it.
Then I went back to the couch. Pratt was where I'd left him. I sat six inches closer than before.
"The blanket on the floor—"
"It's where I sleep—before games."
He looked at me with no change in expression.
"Every game?"
