Originally published in MungBeing.

Go to part 1 | part 3…

Aaron Telco was a decent guy when I knew him in school. He was three grades older than me, so he would have been perfectly justified in acting like a dick around my friends and me, but he always wore his age with grace, as if it were an accident. He was Edgar’s cousin, and the two chatted occasionally, usually about stupid things their parents had done. 

Aaron graduated ahead of his class and went straight into training to be an EMT. He was on first response the night Edgar killed Martha and her mother, but that happened in a different jurisdiction. 

I ran into him at the hospital after I heard that Edgar, though still in a coma, was all right for visitors. The door to Edgar’s room was closed, but the nurse had told me to go on in, so I knocked and pushed it open. Aaron was standing next to Edgar’s bed, his hand resting on some piece of beeping machinery. He settled his eyes on my face for a good long moment while he dredged up my name, then said: “He’s asleep.”

“Has he woken up?” I asked. 

Aaron shook his head. “He opened his eyes a couple of times, but there’s nothing behind them.”

“That’s weird,” I said.

Aaron nodded. “You guys keep in touch?” he asked. 

“We’re classmates,” I said. “He’s got a million friends.”

“I thought he’d have graduated by now,” said Aaron. 

“We’re still the young cusses,” I said. Then: “Does it help him to hear a familiar voice?”

“Maybe,” said Aaron. He slapped his hand nervously against the top of one of Edgar’s monitors, as if trying to fix the reception on a TV set. “I’ve been here too long,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

The cafeteria had a free pot. One sip and it clung to my teeth like some chemical solvent. Aaron steered me toward a table in the corner and waited for me to sit before taking a chair opposite mine. “I feel like I owe you an apology,” he said.

“It’s not that bad,” I said, mock-toasting him with my Styrofoam cup.

“I was a dick to you back in school,” he said. 

“I probably deserved it,” I said. “I always thought you were nice to me.”

“I was, to you. But you had a lot of nicknames, back then. I guess you’ve outgrown most of them, now. I started a few.” For the last two years, I had been wanting to confess to Emma that the first time I met her, I had called her a space cadet. I wondered if Aaron was feeling the same low pang of guilt. “It wasn’t very nice of me,” he added; then he grinned into his coffee and took a big, steaming gulp. “I got away with it, though. I guess you didn’t even notice.”

I shook my head. 

“See, I have this theory,” said Aaron. “Everyone on Earth has some stupid super power. Nothing great, like flying or heat vision, but dumb things, like being able to tell if you’re on the ground floor, or guessing the right thing to order off a menu. Me, I was always able to tell when I’d get caught. I lied all through high school. I passed eleventh grade biology without hardly attending, because I told my teacher I did the reading at home, and he sucked at writing tests. I kept two girlfriends at the same time, and they never found out. I ended up dumping them both. I convinced the whole graduating class that you were gay for your friend. What’s his name? The smart one.”

“Harald,” I said.

“Yeah, him,” said Aaron. “I’m sorry. Some of the senior girls thought it was cute, at least.”

“You always talked about your parents behind their backs,” I said.

“Yeah. They never caught me, either,” said Aaron. He froze as a code call went over the intercom. There was a cardiac arrest on floor three. Aaron downed the rest of his coffee and leaned back in his chair. He took a deep breath. “Two weeks ago I answered a call for a head-on collision,” he said. “Guy who called it in said he saw one car swerving all over the road, thought about calling it in, and then felt guilty when he waited until after there was a crash. He sounded really broken up on the phone, apparently, and he was still on scene when we got there. I can’t stand guys like that, all guilty over things that aren’t their fault or even their business. He was right, though; he should have called it in. The guy that was swerving turned out to be dead drunk. He went limp on impact, landed tits up on the asphalt, unconscious but still alive. Other car had a dad and a little girl, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Had her learner’s permit in her wallet, and ear buds in her ears. They went stiff; and, even though they were buckled in, they both died. 
“So, we were there to pick up the drunk. It was me, the driver, and my training partner. It didn’t take much to get the bastard stabilized, so we got him on a stretcher and into the ambulance. My partner sat up front with the driver; I stayed back with the drunk. I stared at him for a while as we tore through the city, lights on fire. He was an ugly man. Had a big old brow ridge like a gorilla, and a unibrow. Probably wasn’t smart enough, evolved enough to handle driving a car in the first place. 

“No, he was worse than that. He was a shit, a bit of useless flesh cut off from everything good about life. He killed that little girl and the kicker was he didn’t even know it. For all he knew, he had died in that crash.

“It wasn’t hard to kill him, morally or otherwise. Easy enough to tweak the hardware and the wetware. Nothing traceable; when we pulled up to the hospital, it looked as if he’d died of head trauma from landing on the pavement. I stood in the ER filling out paperwork for half an hour, and during that time the drunk’s family came in because they’d heard about the accident but hadn’t heard that their husband and father was dead. I stood right next to them, the clipboard shaking in my hands, and I fucking felt like the angel of death.”

Aaron had crumpled his coffee cup in one hand. Bits of it flaked to the linoleum floor, white on gray. I stared at my hands and tried to get the tastes of coffee and hot blood out of my mouth. 

“I don’t think I have a super power,” I said.

“I can teach you how to kill a man,” said Aaron. “If you want.”

After that, we both went back to Edgar’s room. Aaron sat in a corner chair, his neck angled over his lap, while I sat next to the bed. I wanted to say something to Edgar, just to line up my life with the movies, but it didn’t feel right with Aaron sitting there. Others of Edgar’s friends had gotten wind that it was all right to drop by. A couple of librarian-types I didn’t know came bringing some of Edgar’s favorite CDs, and I offered up my uncomfortable seat. I said goodbye to Aaron; he grinned instead of replying. 

When I got home, it took me a while to find the number for the police station. I didn’t think it was worth calling emergency over, but I figured I could call in weeks-old crimes to the officer on duty. I had to dig out the previous year’s copy of the yellow pages out of a stack of recycling I had never gotten to taking outside for my mother, since I couldn’t find this year’s. 

I told the officer who answered the phone that I had heard a man confess to killing a drunk. The whole time I spoke my heart was pumping so hard in both directions, it felt as if two halves of my blood were at war; one half wanted me to finish the tattle, the other wanted me to let it go. I could feel my body rocking with the tidal forces of the battle, and when the officer asked me if I had a name for him, I said, “I didn’t catch it. He had brown hair, wasn’t taller than me, five-nine, and had blue eyes.”

I told Emma about the whole thing the next time I saw her. “Poor you,” she said. “Always late to the game. Everyone else gets there first.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said.

Emma nodded thoughtfully, and I fully expected her to launch into a story about how she had lived on the streets and killed dozens of gang members in her life before she moved up here. Then I remembered what she told me about the young boy that she had killed, just as she said: “Sometimes death can transform something ugly into something powerful, or something puny into something beautiful. It’s never what you expect.” Then she sighed. “I don’t learn as much from you, these days,” she said. “You used to tell me everything you could think of. It’s not your fault. There’s just not enough to learn. I feel as if I’m telling you everything.”

First thing that came to mind in the wide space of that almost-invitation was god. I asked her if she still believed in him. She smiled, shook her head. “But I don’t believe in the weatherman, either. I need something falsifiable, like human courage,” she said. 

#

Most everything I know of Emma I learned from other people. I first heard about her from Harald, and it was his description of her that I saw when she came around the corner on her way to class. Edgar told me about her history, about how she had had to run away from California because she didn’t belong there, and because some people were after her. She was like an alien to me, and I used my friends to dissect her. 

It wasn’t until we started going out that I really learned a few things about her for myself. I learned that she was scared of children because they asked too many questions. I said that she wouldn’t mind questions if she didn’t have something to hide. I learned that she was incapable of experiencing internal orgasms, and that she wore contacts to cut down on glare because the sun was too bright for her. I learned that the reason she liked sad stories was because she believed that sadness was the base emotion for humanity; she believed that humor got in the way of truth, and happiness didn’t move in a wave but in a decaying orbit around a core of bare heartbreak. I learned that she hated being lied to, that it made her sad.

I learned how she died from the old man who gave her a room and fed her. He called me up one afternoon to ask for my help, and told me I wouldn’t want to give it. I had been taking a nap. I went over right away, my head buzzing from being ripped out of dreamland. It didn’t stop buzzing. The old guy had put Emma into a plywood box with and nailed a lid on top. He needed help lifting it downstairs to the truck, and then lifting it to where she was going to be buried. He talked the whole way down the stairs, into the cab of his truck, while we drove, and while we walked through the wet grass carrying Emma over a foothill of the Cascade mountains.

“She was conscientious, she was. She figured out what to do in case of— in case of this, because she wasn’t supposed to be with me an’ the wife. We wasn’t legally supposed to have her. She figured out just where she wanted to go and everything, so we wouldn’t have any weird questions. We tell the cops that she ran away again, if they ask. But they won’t ask. They didn’t ask the first time, when she ran away from her foster folks in California. There was a little boy there; he ended up dead, and Emma came up here before the questions started. My wife and me, we knew her foster parents from way back, and we sent them Christmas cards a few times. 

“She never was a problem. Talked easy with the wife and me, and always did the chores we asked her to. She said she liked us, and for some reason she knew about being an electrician, which is what I did before I retired. Still do it, sometimes. She knew about cooking, and helped out in the kitchen without our askin’. We’re gonna feel her bein’ gone.

“I want you to know, kid, I don’t judge you one bit. Had my fair share of judgin’ back in the day, when I used to build crop circles, and I know that kind of thing can make you lose sleep. I didn’t just build the crop circles; I believed in ‘em. I thought I was doin’ the Lord’s work, whoever the Lord was, by making the circles. Like building a temple so the worshipers have a place to go, y’know? Anyway, I got called crazy for years, and my wife, well, she got called worse, so I gave it up eventually. But I know how tough it is to have other people’s thought be worth more than your own, right?

“Can’t judge you for having a little fun, anyway, and I don’t want you to judge yourself, neither, because, hey, sometimes your thoughts aren’t worth much, y’know. When they’re the wrong sort of thoughts, I mean. So you two had relations. It’s what you do. I been with my wife my whole life. Only ever had relations with one other person, and that was only halfway because I was drunk and all she did was put her mouth on my pecker. So what? The wife and I parked over the hill from the drive-in on our first date. Most of the boys had just come back from the war; I had just moved into the city. We could see the screen, but couldn’t hear it. It was something to do with aliens. And don’t kid: we never thought those folks dressed up in rubber suits looked like anything but what they were. I watched maybe half of it and then she climbed on up me like a bear cub and said: ‘You don’t know it, but you got me.’ Best thing I ever did, and I don’t know what it was. Never much for questions, and I didn’t start then.

“You should know what happened to Emma, though it ain’t pretty. It’ll keep you from asking questions you don’t need to. Just accept that the world does stuff without your knowing, or doesn’t care what you know.

“She figured she was pregnant. Could see it starting, and the wife and me even talked to her about it. She didn’t want to say much, just that she was interested in the boy that did it to her. We asked her if she wanted the baby, or if she wanted to give it up. She cried a little, then. She asked us if we knew about genetics, and I said I knew enough to know that Hitler’s master race was bullshit. She said that the father and mother and all their fathers and mothers come to a point with the birth of a child, as if there’s all these parallel Vs, like the ripples of ducks on a pond, and each child is at that point. She said there was so much wrong between the two of you, on your different angles, that— I’m sorry, son, but she said the baby wouldn’t be worth a breath of cold air.

“We thought she was being dramatic. You know how teenage girls can be.”

We were out of breath and digging the grave, now. The old man kept talking, right through his grunts of effort, so every other word was weak from indrawn breath.

“We offered to help, Lord knows, any way we could,” he said. “But she said not to bother, that she wouldn’t be a burden. My wife mixed up some of her tea for morning sickness. Some old recipe that came down her mother’s side of the V.

“I don’t think she meant to commit suicide. That’s how it ended up, though. I mean, you look at a guy who falls onto a train track in front of a freighter, and, even if he didn’t meant it, he’s still a suicide, right? He’s the one that did it; he’s the one that killed himself, even if he tried so hard not to.

“Emma checked out an anatomy book from the library and took a coat hanger from the front closet. I thought a girl her age would know just about where everything was, but there was the book, open on her bed when I found her. She put a loop on the coat hanger so she wouldn’t poke through, but it didn’t help. What happened was she pushed too hard, kid. I’m sorry it ain’t more complicated than that. Just the point of crossed lines.

“She gave a puncture to someplace in her abdomen. She didn’t cry out, but she fell off her bed and I came upstairs to make sure, well, to make sure it wasn’t you doing somethin’ you oughtta not. I knocked on the door and she said: ‘Please don’t,’ but I could hear somethin’ dirty like pain in her voice, and I thought, damn it, not until you’re twenty-one, girl. 

“There was blood coming out of her parts and spreading out like it should have been in some good shape like a circle, but pooled and slurped up by the sheets and then the carpet.”

The old man took a moment of silence as we lowered Emma’s crate into the dirt. It had been getting lighter all through the hike, and now it was the lightest ever, as though she had vanished from inside. We didn’t try and do a good job filling the hole back in; we just swept the dirt back in with our boots and hands, stamped on it a couple of times, and then headed back for the road. I held my hands close to my face, so I could smell the wild soil.

“So don’t feel bad,” the old man said. “Girls like Emma, they come along once in a thousand years. She’s the kind that takes your memories and rewrites them, yeah? She’s the gold standard for all your love in the future. Girls like Emma, they’re worth pining for. Count yourself lucky to have crossed wires with her.”

For once, he seemed to be waiting for some kind of reaction from me. “Yeah,” I said. I wanted it to sound like a wall, thick and lead, but the open air took it, and tinted it green, and the rocks almost echoed it back to me. “It’s what she would have wanted,” I said.

“Don’t know about that,” said the old man. “Don’t know what my wife wants half the time.” He chuckled. “You know what this means, son? Means I’ve got so much in my brain I can talk for three hours without even breathing. I see you ain’t much got a word in edgewise, but you don’t look like you wanna, neither. I see that. You ain’t got the years for talkin’.”

“Just don’t feel much like it,” I said. 

The old guy grinned at me and, because of the slight shaking of his head, his eyes twinkled. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll keep talking, and some day, when you’ve got something to say, you come on over. My wife’ll fix you something good to cheer you up.”

#

Uncle Gyro had been full of get-rich schemes since the day I met him. He was an armchair marketing wizard, cursing the TV during the infomercials, saying: “I coulda done that. What idiot doesn’t come up with something like that?”

After aunt Edith died, he decided all he wanted to do was watch TV. Mom and I would visit him twice a day to make sure he got his food and to keep the house in a decent state. School was in session, so we’d go once before my classes started, and once after final bell. While mom emptied uncle Gyro’s catheter bag, I’d prepare him a meal, usually a sandwich and a glass of milk. I’d hand them over on a piece of his wedding-present china while mom tried to talk to him about the weather or the local politics. He stopped responding, but I always caught the barest film of clever light in his eyes that made me think he was ignoring us on purpose, that he’d finally cashed in on the benefits of being an old man, being stubborn silence, willful helplessness, and the option to yell at whippersnappers.

After a couple of months, it got to be too much for mom, and she made the decision to stick him in a care facility. I think that was all part of his plan, because the place we chose had way more channels on the TV than his home set did. 

We still visited him after school a couple times a week. Sometimes, when mom was busy at the church, I came by myself. I think uncle Gyro preferred it when I was alone, because old men and young men have the same carte blanches and I once cheerfully swore at his caregiver for putting too much mustard on his sandwich.

Out of nowhere one cold afternoon he spoke to me. “I’m going to make a fortune,” he said. I was doing my homework on a little table next to the window. By the time I looked up from it, he was staring at the TV screen again, if he’d even glanced at me. 

“Will you leave it to me?” I asked. There was a comfort in the dark humor, a natural contrast with the snow-reflected light that kept the world from overbalancing. 

“Of course I will,” said uncle Gyro. “But you have to help me. You have to fill out the patent paperwork, because I can’t even grip myself to piss anymore, much less hold a pen.”

“What’s your idea this time?” Uncle Gyro had been trying to score a jackpot all his life, with as little effort as possible. He used to make aunt Edith go buy his lottery tickets for him. Every so often, he tried to convince mom to invest in one of his ideas, but she never did. “I’ve got fifty bucks left over from Christmas.”

“I’m going to patent the sandwich,” he said.

“I think it’s been done,” I said.

“No,” he insisted. “No, it hasn’t.” His voice slipped up a few pitches. “You’d think somebody would have done it by now, but nobody has. It’s like the wheel. Who has the patent to the wheel? Bill Gates? Is that how he got so rich, I’d like to know. Everybody uses the wheel, but nobody owns it. Everybody uses sandwiches, but nobody owns them. But you’ve got to be specific with these things,” he added. “You can’t just write a paper that says: The Sandwich, and send that in. You’ve got to be careful. My sandwich will be bread, of any variety, then mayonnaise, then mustard, then meat, of any variety, then lettuce, cheese, and another slice of bread. That last slice of bread doesn’t have to be the same kind as the first one, see. They’re separate, so you can’t get around it.”

“I don’t like mustard,” I said.

“Well, I don’t want you paying me royalties anyway,” said uncle Gyro with a grin. His eyes slipped over the TV screen; some flash-in-the-pan company was advertising special picks to hold large sandwiches together. The picks had sharp, hollow edges, so you could stab out bites without jeopardizing your meal’s structure. “It’s brilliant,” said uncle Gyro.

“McDonald’s already has a way around you,” I said. “They have three slices of bread, and two sections of meat.”

Uncle Gyro snorted and sank back into his chair. I had unbalanced the world again. I moved away from the window, so as not to block the light, and dug my wallet out of my pants. I opened up the fold and took out the two twenties and the ten. I had been thinking about using them to buy a gift for Emma, but they had been sitting listless since she died. I dropped the bills into uncle Gyro’s lap.

“I’ve gotta go home,” I said. “But just let me know when it’s time to fill out the patent application.” I started packing up my books and binder. “You’re gonna outlive me, uncle Gyro,” I said. “All those ideas you have. Something’s bound to last forever.”

“It’s not the root of all evil,” uncle Gyro muttered. I glanced up. He was fanning himself uselessly with the three bills. “Your friend, what’s his name. The one who killed our little Martha.”

“Edgar,” I said.

“No,” said uncle Gyro. “That’s not it. The Telco boy.”

“He changed his name to Steve in fifth grade,” I said. 

“Steve, yeah,” said uncle Gyro. “His folks are some of the worst people I’ve ever known. They’re petty and unconcerned, careless. I knew his dad back in the sixties, before he started up with his first wife, before he got in on the computer business. Which wife is he on, now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Three, I think.”

“I just had the one, and I was way better at it. So he had the ideas. He had the girls and turned out to have the luck. Me, I hang on to things. I hang on to them; maybe I hang on to them too long. It ain’t money that’s the root of all evil. Money’s keeping your friend alive. So it’s not money; it’s value. Evil happens when you value something too much, or not enough, or don’t even give it a number at all.” He shook his head and crumpled my money into his fist. “I hold on to things too long,” he said. 

I really wanted to say something, if for no other reason than to get him to explain himself, but his eyes closed and his face paled and he fell into one of his episodes. The caregivers said that when they happened, we should humor them, to make it easier on him, or to play along if he’s faking it, because laughter has healing properties, or something.

This one was bad and real. I sat down, unwilling to leave him like that. The sun went unbalanced and slid behind the mountains, followed by a brief, jittery sunset. I turned on a lamp and tried to do some more homework, but it didn’t seem worth my time. I spent three hours there, listening to him breathe, before a caregiver came and took him away to dinner. The whole walk home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was three wasted hours, three hours that could have been better spent

A couple weeks later, mom and I went down to the morgue to pick up uncle Gyro’s effects. The receptionist handed us a manila envelope and, while mom filled out some paperwork, I took a peek inside. He didn’t need a wallet or keys at the care facility, so all the envelope contained was a four-by-six pad of lined paper filled with cramped drawings and upward-slanting notes, his over-the-counter magnifying glasses, two twenties, and a ten. 

#

Harald and I worked the refreshment table again for uncle Gyro’s memorial. Harald poured the juice while I kept the coffee flowing. I chatted with the familiar faces from the church and community, faces to which I had never bothered to attach names. Harald kept his mouth in a thin line, nodding briskly to acknowledge the juice drinkers. I hadn’t had to tell him about the service, or to ask him to help me out afterwards; he volunteered, and my guess is that it was because of Emma. She should have been there with us, and by his presence Harald made her absence all the more apparent. I don’t know if he did it to savor the deep bitterness or to get me depressed; he had done both before.

Aunt Riley was the last in line. “My pump’s gone out again,” she told me with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

“Again?” I said. “That’s the third time in as many months.”

“I know, I know. I hate calling you up just to flip that switch, but it’s really impossible for me.”

“No,” I said. “I’m glad to do it.”

Harald offered her a glass of juice, but she declined it. “Your mom said you and he spent a lot of time together toward the end.”

“I don’t know how good a company I was,” I said. 

“I have to ask: did he mention me?” asked aunt Riley.

I shook my head. “He talked to you like you were in the room a couple of times,” I said. “He laughed himself silly telling you he got you ‘all riled up’.” 

She smiled and held it. “I always thought I’d get through to him some day,” she said, the bend of her lips failing to twist the tone into a happy range. “It hurts, you know? It’s hardly my business to say, but it hurts that my own brother could be in hell, now. I can’t say, of course. Only God knows the heart, but he’s got a book of names, and when I dream about it, I can’t see his but way down on the list.”

“Mostly he talked about things he could do to get himself rich. For a bit, he thought he had invented ice cream. Accused me of industrial espionage when I went and bought him some from the kitchen.”

Aunt Riley gave a rueful shake of her head. “It’s like I always tried to tell him: the Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“Bullshit,” said Harald to his juice pitcher. It was only two syllables, but it contained a spectrum of emotion ranging from glee to frustration. It occurred to me that he may have had a completely different reason for tagging along. He looked up at aunt Riley and shook his head, the gesture too quick to fall into either negation or pity. I could tell he was having fun. It didn’t used to be that he’d look out for fun just for himself. I remember in fifth grade, he ran all across the playground to get me so we could torment an anthill together. By the time we got back to the ants, the bell was ringing for us to come inside.

The next year, we were in middle school, and we didn’t have recess anymore. We felt as if we were growing up; Harald made the biggest deal about it out of all of us. He wouldn’t run in the halls, or aim spit at the girls during lunch break. He lectured me about the way I acted in front of teachers, and generally became a pain in the ass. Later that year, I slept over at his house and we spent the whole night talking about girls we both liked. The next week, I got dirty, pity giggles from all of them, and found out that Harald had told them about my crushes, but not about his own. 

I forgave him, clueless as to why, in about a month, but it wasn’t until high school that I found out how he had turned into such a dick overnight. It was at another sleepover, this time in some girl’s house after a Halloween party. We were down in the basement in a corner behind a couch, both drenched in fake blood, because we had been zombies. The stuff smelled like mold and frosting. Harald had gotten a bunch in his hair when a jock had held him down and given him a noogie. I offered to help him get it out, because he kept complaining.

He said: “You’ve got to stop being so damn helpful. You remember my dad? He was always so cheerful about getting up to give you his seat, or getting you a drink from the kitchen. Anything you asked, he’d just jump on it. You know why? Because he was desperate to be liked, and terrified of wrong impressions. 

“Back in sixth grade, that winter, our furnace went out during one night. I woke up freezing, didn’t get warm the whole day. While I was at school, the repairman came over. It was dad’s day off, so he sat on the computer doing bills while mom cleaned and the repairman hammered away at stuff in the basement. It always took him forever to get the bills done, because mom always asked him to do things like dust or sweep as they came to her mind. I think he helped her with the dishes— yeah, his hands were all wet, mom said, when the repairman came upstairs and asked him to run over to the hardware store for some air filters.

“Dad took right off with a grin, dried his hands on the front of his shirt he was in such a hurry. He poked around for way too long at the store, trying to find exactly the right filters. When he came back home, the repairman had left, and mom never told me where exactly she was, but I guess crying in the bedroom. Dad left not long after that, and mom didn’t tell me why. I didn’t find out until just a bit ago that she had been raped, and that she blamed dad for it. I can’t blame her. He was supposed to protect her. That was his entire purpose in life, as much as she needed it.”

I tried to go to sleep after that, since I didn’t have anything to say, and didn’t feel right having nothing to say. The next day, Harald still had the fake blood in his hair, and made fun of me in front of Caroline Grace because we both had a thing for her. So he was a bastard, but he was my best bastard, and he didn’t pick on me so much after sixth grade, at least nothing I couldn’t give back. Since then, he’s been keeping his fun right up at the chest.

“God helps those who help themselves,” he said to aunt Riley. He set down the juice pitcher, handle toward her. “That ain’t your religion. That one’s mine. Christianity is about dying to yourself so you can live for Christ, because there’s a limited space in your heart, and you wouldn’t want to take up too much, would you? Selfishness is a trait of the old fighting religions. You know, the ones that survived the brutality of human origin.

“But even the selfish dead accomplish more in life than the lot of you!” I thought he was going to jump up on a table any moment. “If Edgar Telco had won out against Martha, he would have been a god among men. All that power in one brief point of change! You have the power to beg, and it gets you nowhere.”

Aunt Riley’s mouth had drawn up into itself, erasing the potential for anything but a sharp line. “The Lord keeps a book of names,” she said. “If Mr Telco had succeeded where he rightly failed, his would have been the last name in that book. Now, I don’t know, but the Lord might take pity on the tragedy of suicide, but your friend has got his name so low on the list already, and I don’t know that pity will help. When Heaven’s full up, they’ll turn the sinners away; they’ll turn all manner away.”

“Cast off your chains!” crowed Harald. He wasn’t one to back away from a fight, especially if it was with a bully much bigger than him. 

I grabbed his sleeve and tugged him away from the table. Aunt Riley rolled her eyes at me, and not a few other pairs were staring us all the way outside, while Harald chuckled in his throat. 

“Jesus,” he said when I pushed open the door. We sat down on the sidewalk. 

“Think ahead much?” I asked.

“I don’t believe in God, man,” he said. “I don’t believe that other people should, either. It gets you bitter and broken.”

“It gets you petty and shallow,” I said.

“It gets you nearsighted and political,” he replied, thinking it was a game.

“It gets you damn near everything,” I said. “It’s just life. You try and separate it out, it probably looks pretty stupid, like you with your pants off.” I waited for him to snort and turn fully away before asking: “This is about Emma, isn’t it?”

“This isn’t about anything,” he said. “Except maybe about time.”

“Couldn’t have waited for a better time?” I asked.

Harald grinned and said: “There are those who play the music, and those who write the music down. The music comes out when it needs to, right? Someone calm and scholarly writes it down, later.”

I could tell he had been wanting to say it for a while, but he probably hadn’t meant for his voice to crack. I figured his mind had jumped the same way mine did at the mention of music: straight to Emma, straight to the evening after the funeral for Martha and her mother. “I have a present for you,” I said. I had one small picture in my wallet of Emma. She had taken it soon after our first time, while she was wearing nothing but a skull-and-bones bra, her eye makeup on thick, her eyes let down. It was the only picture she had given me. I dug it out and handed it over to Harald.

“Ain’t that simple,” he said. 

“Maybe she’s in a better place,” I said. 

“Good odds,” said Harald. 

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