Chapter 22 opens with a description of the apartment complex in which the two young men live. The narrator tells us that the apartment is cramped and that they are "complex comrades," meaning that they live in the same building as one another. He tells the young men not to call the other a "boy friend" and to take care of their sister, who is in second grade. He also tells them to stop spying on him and his sister. The young men are surprised to learn that they have been spying on them, and the narrator tells them that he does not write stories as much as his sister does, but that he tried to ask her to write an "erotic novel," but she does not have the experience to write such a thing