I met Emma when I was nine and she was older. I was in the park playing snakes in the grass while mother was in getting her hair done. I crawled belly-down around trees and over paths while dog-walkers and baby-strollers clicked and rolled around me. I didn’t have any friends to play with — not in our city, where the people kept to themselves and smelled gray, like steel wool. There was nobody at my school I knew who could lie in the grass with me and not play guns.

I slithered around the park until my shirt was soaked clear through and I started to shiver. That’s when Emma said, “What a funny game.” She was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table nearby, leaning back on her arms like bridge struts to support herself. I didn’t say anything back. She had green eyes and she used them, always moving, always blinking. I remember her skin was green, too, and I remember that the sun came down through the trees and so everything was green. “I know a good game,” she said. She slipped off the table and landed awkwardly on her feet. She almost lost her balance and grinned. “Follow me,” she said.

I stood up and followed her like any other kid. She led me back into the trees, where all the other people’s sounds turned into antsteps and rain. She pushed deep into a band of bushes, letting the branches snap back into my face, showering me with dew. Then she stopped and faced me. She smiled like a girl and reached her hands above my head. She shook the branches she could reach and drenched me with morning drops. I didn’t complain much — I could have gotten any wetter — but I think I scowled. Emma answered it by withdrawing her hands. Clenched between them was a riot of green leaves, their angles and veins all in tangles and misunderstood shapes. She rolled the leaves in her fingers, making them dance until I almost believed that her fingers were the dead things and the leaves the living. Then se closed both hands as if she were praying, catching all the green behind her skin. She didn’t pray, though. She let her eyes go back and forth all over me. When I was about to chatter my teeth on purpose, she opened her hands like a butterfly’s wings. 

Standing on her palm was a tiny bird, a green sparrow with twigs for legs and the spear of a birch leaf for a beak. It was as perfect and delicate as an origami animal, and, at first, that’s what I thought it was.

“Teach me how to do that,” I said.

Emma blew a kiss over the bird and its feathers ruffled. Its head turned and I turned to stone, as if my next breath would frighten the creature away — of, if not the creature, then the quiet birthday feeling that had filled me up.

The bird picked at its plumage and cocked its head to one side. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked Emma. I didn’t answer, still afraid to move. “Well?” she prompted.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” said Emma. She sounded satisfied. She sent a ripple down her arms; when it reached her fingers, the bird took flight, leaving behind a small cloud of downy leaves. I tried to keep it in view, but I lost sight of it in the branches, or maybe it had turned into just leaves again. I didn’t think so, because I could still hear the small desperate flutter of its wings.

My neck went still from staring up. Emma tucked her fingers under my chin and pulled my gaze down into her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and then slipped like a cat between two shrubs. Her passage let a wisp of light into our hiding place.

When mom finished getting her hair done she said I couldn’t take any leaves with me, and I had to drop two pocketfuls on the ground.

#

The next day, I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but mother made me anyway. She took me to church, where I didn’t talk much to the other kids and she sang way louder than I did on the hymns. I told her a couple of times that I felt like throwing up, so she let me pass the sermon in the bathroom.

On the drive home, I listened to the rain and asked mother what miracles mean. She didn’t understand me, though, and said, “Something wonderful that you can’t explain.” That made me think of maths, which isn’t what she meant. 

I didn’t make it back to the park for almost two weeks. I missed three days of school during that time because I was sick. Mother took me to the doctor on a Friday, and after the checkup she had to go to the drug store, so I asked if I could go to the park while she shopped. “Don’t you want to look at the toys?” she asked. I told her I didn’t want to and she dropped me off next to the monkey bars.

Emma was sitting at the bottom of the little kids’ slide, kicking gravel with her bare feet. I didn’t say, Hi, and she didn’t look up. 

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be in school,” I said. She nodded and drew a plus sign with her big toe. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked. Instead of answering, she patted the slide beside her. I sat down. She smelled a bit like burning insulation, so I asked her if she was feeling all right. 

“I am,” she said. “What are you learning about in school?”

I squinted, trying to remember anything that might be more important than Emma. “We learned about Cortez last week,” I said.

“Tell me about Cortez,” said Emma.

I shrugged. “He killed a lot of people he shouldn’t have. He brought diseases from the old world and he wiped them out without his soldiers.”

“I like that story,” said Emma. “It’s sad.”

“I could tell you others,” I offered.

“I would appreciate that,” said Emma. “You don’t know how much.”

I wanted so badly to ask her how she had made the bird out of leaves, but I was afraid that if I opened my mouth she would disappear, as she had from the bushes. 

She looked up from the equations in the sand toward the sound of a barking dog. I watched her eyes trace shapes around the figures of the dog and his owner, around the old couple reading on a blanket, around everyone else but me — she seemed to be using her stare to cut holes in the world, to section off the people she could see like cookies on a sheet.

Mother came and found me and said, “Come on.” Emma gave me a wave with the tips of her fingers. “Who’s your girlfriend?” mother asked after she closed the car door.

“Mom,” I said, and I rolled my eyes.

#

It was summer the first time I tried to kiss Emma. Mother had told me to stay in bed that night, to save my strength. She said I had mono, the kissing sickness, but I figured if I had a kissing sickness I ought to at least have my first kiss.

Mother was right that I didn’t have much strength, but I had enough to make it to the bus stop before service ended, and the only thing I felt wrong was a vibration in my legs every time I took a step, as though my bones were humming.

Somehow I knew she’d be waiting for me, and she was, waiting at least. She didn’t notice me, even when I coughed — I couldn’t help the coughing. She was standing out from under the canopy of trees, hands loosely at her sides, staring up at whichever stars she could see.

“There aren’t very many,” she said when I turned me head to follow her stare. With something as wide as the sky to focus on, her eyes were just about rolling from their sockets. Mine weren’t; I just locked onto the brightest I could see, called it Mars, and tried to catch it moving. 

“There are plenty,” I said. 

Emma nodded and made a smile I was sure was for me, though it was aimed toward infinity. “Would you like to see them?” she asked.

“They look just like the sun,” I said.

Her hand caught mine, fingers locking into fingers. “Don’t hold your breath,” she said. My bones stopped humming. The weight left my body; my blood seemed to run faster and freer. I looked down. The shadowed park was gaining a shape, like the horizon accepting a curve at the right distance. I could see the slide and the monkey bars and the bike path and they all drew closer together. I couldn’t help asking, “How do you do this?” Her answer was a grin.

We floated up through the grimy air, the buzz of artificial light below us, driving us further away. When we crossed out of the bed of smog it was as if a curtain had been torn away. The sky grew even larger. It was cold inside of me. Stars exploded into view like ants from a crumbling hill. My breathing slowed; it felt as if my lungs were freezing. Emma smiled and pointed with her free hand. Her lips moved, but I don’t remember any of what she said. I could tell that there was heat out there in the universe; I could practically see it, but I couldn’t feel the barest blush of it on my skin.

Emma took me down. I coughed when we re-entered the hanging exhalations of the city. When I could see the park and feel my lungs expanding, I tried to lean over and kiss her. She caught my face in her hand and turned both away. “Please don’t spend your innocence on me,” she said, and we fell the rest of the way.

#

While I was sick in bed I couldn’t visit her, not because mother told me not to, but because I could barely get my legs to hold my body up and balanced.

A new doctor told me new things, and mother said we could afford it, whatever it was. She heard a story on the news about asbestos being blamed for an outbreak of sickness in the area of the park, and she told me I couldn’t play there anymore. To make up for it, she bought me toys and books and video games. It was nice of her to do it, but I ran out of interest in them all. My bed became a swamp of plastic and paper. I wanted Emma to visit me, but she didn’t know where I lived, or even that I missed her. She must think I didn’t want to see her anymore, I thought. I wondered if she cared, or if her eyes just kept on slicing fractions off the world.

Then one day I almost didn’t wake up, mother told me, and I when I finally did it was in the hospital. It smelled of paint and varnish and gave me a headache. I figured I’d be able to go home that night — being so close to so many doctors should have done something to me. After dark, while the nurse turned my arm numb with her needles, mother asked me if I wanted her to stay the night. I told her I didn’t want to stay the night. She promised she’d come back first thing in the morning.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The nurses clipped back and forth in the hallway, and every couple of hours they returned to put medicine in my IV and cold hands on my face and chest. I tried watching TV. A game show almost put me to sleep —almost, but not quite. I was just beginning to see dreams in the drab colors of the screen when the show went all to static and a shadow fell over my bed.

It was Emma. She padded into the room so silently that I thought she might be floating. She put her finger to her lips and made my smile stay quiet. She sat on the bed next to my shoulder and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see that her eyes were still, her pupils at rest on my face. I hoped I looked as strong as mother had taken to telling me I was.

“I’m sorry,” Emma whispered. “I still like the sad stories.”

“What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I came to apologize,” she said. “Do you remember when I took you to see the stars?” She asked it as though I could forget, as though it had been nothing more than an idle conversation on a drearily normal day. I told her that, of course, I remembered. “I spent my innocence on worlds you can’t believe — neither could I, when I came to them, but I learned to. I learned everything about them. I have to apologize because I’m grateful to you for your open eyes. Your innocence is gone, and now you have no excuse for ignorance, but you have given me surprise. I have hoped for ages that I could find something that would build an unfamiliar expression on my face, a disquieting, perfect sensation in my nerves. I don’t think I ever will.” She was smiling as she said this and there were two tears on her face in symmetry. “But I do not discount the pleasure, and the envy, of seeing that wonderment on another person’s face.”

I opened my mouth to ask her things I didn’t need answers for. I think I mostly just wanted her to hear my voice. She put a warm hand over my mouth and went on. “I’m sorry for what I stole from you.” She withdrew her hand.

“It’s all right,” I said. My head was throbbing from the hospital smell and my gut had gone cold as a fist in winter. Emma smiled at me and got up to leave. I reached out a hand to stop her and, though I only brushed the fabric of her jeans, I succeeded. “Will you kiss me?” I asked, and two more perfect tears spilled over her lashes. She leaned over my body. Her dark hair fell in light waves over my face. She whispered something that I didn’t catch  — it sounded like a name from a history book — and then she touched my lips with hers. She tasted like ozone, hot and important. She smelled like a tree, like the breeze of a bird’s passing. She felt like fire, so hot I can barely write it, and it stayed with me long after she had slipped out of my room. I don’t think I’ll feel anything like that again.

Go to part 1 | part 2…

It was snowing hard the day of the annual Winter Parade. I met Harald in the park after church. He had already staked out a good spot underneath a big elm right next to the sidewalk. It was our tradition to dive for candy tossed from the floats; we had given up on trick-or-treating years ago, but we kept this one up. Thick, wet flakes hissed through the thick branches and the few stone-dead leaves. Harald turned his head up to the sky and laughed.

“Weatherman said it’d be almost fifty today,” he said. 

“Never sunny on Sunday,” I said. “You’re always on about the weatherman.”

“He’s cooler than God, man,” said Harald. “The weatherman doesn’t hide from his responsibility. He doesn’t apologize for his inaccuracies, but he stands up the next day as if nothing was wrong and he tells you to dig out your umbrellas, folks. He’s a liar, but he trusts you enough to know that he ain’t always right. God don’t want you to know when he’s wrong.”

“Selfish punk,” I said, without really meaning for it to go one way or the other, sarcastic or funny. Harald didn’t take either.

The first floats began to chug past, balanced in the beds of old Datsuns. The martial arts school put on a roving display, but it didn’t look right because all the students were wearing these big black slippers. The food bank tried to mix things up by holding open grocery bags and inviting the onlookers to toss in non-perishable items. Harald tossed one of his shoes at them, and said: “Real leather!”

A ripple of sighs preceded the Junior Miss float. Three girls sat on tiers, as though they were spirits of wedding joy reclining on a cake. At the top, alternating hands in her princess wave, Adrianna Telco beamed at the crowd. She was a year behind us, but there wasn’t a girl in our grade that matched her for looks. She crossed preference boundaries; if you dug Asian chicks, you’d still like Adrianna; if you had a bit of a porker fetish, your eye would follow her anyway; if you were a girl, you’d count her up there with Angelina on the list of women you’d go gay for. 

Emma had been my type, but I always had trouble tearing my eyes away from Adrianna. She had mocha skin and hair like a fall of cherry juice. Emma had always been interested in my reaction to Adrianna, but never jealous. As the float passed our tree, I glanced away. 

Harald noticed. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Emma’s not watching.” I knew if I challenged him, he’d rise to the occasion. It’s the way he fought. I was a little tired of hearing his voice, so I turned back to the float. Adrianna was looking right at us, smiling wide, her lips the shape of a bow ready to be shot. She and Martha had tried to be friends, once. Birthday invitations were traded, and Martha went to one of Adrianna’s parties. She brought a doll as a present, but didn’t feel like wrapping it. Adrianna’s parents had chuckled and thanked Martha for the gift.

The next day at school, I was out on the soccer field and lunch when I saw Adrianna come up to Martha, holding the gift. They traded some words, and then Adrianna held the doll out. Martha took it back. Then Adrianna threw her arms around Martha and hugged her like girls do.

She was waving at me, and I waved back. Someone screamed, wordless, and I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. It made me think of a bird that flies into the path of a car, but it wasn’t a bird. It hit Adrianna’s face and changed it in an instant, breaking her skin and drawing up blood without any passage of time. As if it were a subliminal message in a movie, a single frame that clicks out of place as quickly as it appeared, I thought that blinking might change things back to normal. 

Someone had thrown a rock. Adrianna put her fists to her face and got blood on her dress. The other princesses struggled up from their seats and the float stopped, though someone yelled: “Keep going! Keep going!”

Another rock sailed high over the float, and now the crowd was turning on the man who threw it. I caught a glimpse of the young lawyer from Martha’s funeral; he was stabbing his finger at the air, at the float, and yelling about something. I caught my cousin’s name, ripped high out of the lawyer’s throat. 

Harald and I both rushed to the float, to see if there was anything we could do. I ran into football players and the chess club president, all setting themselves up as a human shield while the driver of the float yelled for everyone to sit down so he could move. Harald bent to the asphalt and retrieved the first rock. He hurled it back toward the lawyer. The lawyer ducked, but I saw other Brigades around him, all curled into themselves, fists and faces.

The sidewalk became a battle line. Some of the adults were screaming at us kids to calm down; others, like the lawyer, were trying to break across the asphalt and run us down. I heard somebody scream: “It’s your family that remembers! Your family remembers!” I added my voice in: “Martha was my cousin!” There wasn’t room for anything but the simplest of arguments, like a static battle. Pick one defensible position and stay there. My counterpoint was swallowed in the swell of rough confusion.

Parents on one side were ordering their children to cross the street. Children burst with profanity, seizing upon its quick power to cut the tethers of their parents. Harald climbed to the top of the float and thrust his fists in the air. “Fuck you and your God!” he cried. “Martha’s with the weatherman, now!”

The lawyer and the other Brigades had just needed an excuse. They charged and their momentum carried the rest of adults onto the pavement. The hands of working fathers met the wet necks of sons; the shrill voices of mothers knifed into the ears of daughters. It looked like a Hollywood brawl, but completely one-sided, like maybe some natural born killers versus the Buttercream Gang. 

With the other juniors and seniors, I avoided most of it. It was the freshmen and sophomores that took the brunt of the assault, while we older kids rallied around the float. I hung around the back, out of sight of the young lawyer. I thought about tactics and war games, and, without even trying or meaning to, imagined myself in the thick of battle. The imaginary me made a feint around the float’s tailpipe and took out Martha’s great aunt Judy, who was yelling about soap and superstition. He then danced up the tiers of the float and shielded Adrianna from the crowd. Harald kicked at him, to get back his share of the spotlight, and the two boys began to fight dirty, mouths and fingers both. 

What really happened was great aunt Judy got her hand on the driver and yanked the keys out of the ignition and two police officers showed up to help widen the distance between kids and adults. A hole in the clouds — almost perfectly round, as though God had poked his finger through — framed the sun for a moment, and Harald laughed himself sick, crowing: “Your God don’t say if he’s failing or not!”

It wasn’t as heroic, but I climbed up the backside of the float so my eyes were level with Harald’s sneakers. I hissed at him. “You ever read Ecclesiastes?” Now he was kicking glitter at the police officers. I made two fists and drove one each into the backs of his knees. He lost his balance and crashed down to the second tier, breaking off a plywood bundle of lace and foam. 

I slid down to the pavement as fast as I could. When Harald got to his feet, I was around the other side of the float and getting suspended from school for a week. When Adrianna was loaded, sobbing, into an ambulance, I didn’t bother her with any sympathy.

#

The whole world settled down after that: no snow, no fights, a couple lawsuits that sparked and faded like fireworks. The new year came and went. A new semester got underway, and Harald and I didn’t share any classes. 

I started to feel sick during baseball practice; running the bases made my legs cramp up and the tendons under my groin began to feel like frayed wires, pumping bad current. I toughed it out for a couple of months, and then told mom. She got me an appointment with our physician, and he quickly passed me up the ladder to a specialist. 

The specialist asked me if I had been playing near any hazardous chemicals. I told him about the asbestos in our walls at home, but that I wasn’t much of a guy for playing right up against walls. He asked me if I were sexually active, and I told him: “Yeah, I were.” He wanted to know how long ago, so I told him about Emma and me. He wanted to know if Emma had been displaying any similar symptoms, and I told him that she hadn’t been. 

He did a biopsy on me, and when the nurses got me into a hospital room they shut the door and asked me a bunch more questions. Had I noticed any trouble getting or maintaining an erection? How frequently did I masturbate? What products did I use for lubricant? I answered as quietly as I could; they had to ask me to repeat a few answers.

They kept me overnight, while they waited on the results of the biopsy. The next morning, the specialist came in alongside my breakfast and told me not to eat too quickly. “It’s malignant,” he said. 

“Oh well,” I said, shrugging. “Amputate it.”

It didn’t turn out to be that simple. The cancer was in my blood, and could only be killed off by radiation. The specialist told me I’d never be able to have children again, and I asked if it would hurt more than a vasectomy. He said it wouldn’t. “Kill two birds with one stone,” I said.

After that, I was in twice a month for radiation treatments, after which my whole damn body felt like burnt wiring. Each time, they let me hang out on the long-term floor, sleep all day, claim to be too tired to do homework, and watch TV when I felt like it. Mostly, I watched infomercials. 

Even those got old after three months of the routine. I took to wandering the halls, smiling at people who looked like they might smile back. It was on one of these circuits of the halls that I stumbled on Edgar’s room. 

He was awake, half-sitting in his adjustable bed, picking at the dirt under his finger nails.

“Hey, Steve,” I said. He looked up and, after letting my greeting echo a couple of times, gave me a big smile.

“Hey,” he said. “What are you in for?”

“Life,” I said. “May I come in?”

“Be my guest,” said Edgar.

I hobbled in and took a seat on the corner of a chair, the rest of which was populated by flowers. “You’ve got a fan club,” I said.

Edgar gave me a weak smile, but he shouldn’t have bothered. I knew he wasn’t keen on all the attention, never had been. All through high school, I had tried to shore up my self-esteem by thinking that he and I were the same in that regard. The difference was that his distaste was from experience, and mine was from its lack.

“How are they treating you?” I asked.

“Like an amnesiac,” said Edgar. “Every morning they ask me if I can remember my name, and if I can wiggle my toes, and what’s the capitol of England. They think I’m going to have a relapse.”

“Can you have a coma relapse?” I asked. “I bet they panic when you take a nap.”

“When they let me take a nap,” he said. “Always checking up on me, taking my pulse.”

“I hear you,” I said, shifting flowers and settling further back in my seat. “I hear you.”

I was in for another couple days, so I hung out in Edgar’s room as much as possible. If I was annoying him, he never let on. I started most of the conversations, but once they had momentum he didn’t try much to slow them down.

Another batch of flowers arrived, and Edgar invited me to sit at the foot of his bed so I wouldn’t have to fight with them. We talked about school and books and enough about religion for us to share a couple of self-conscious snickers. He offered to teach me the guitar, so we wasted one afternoon trying to build calluses on my fingers. He said it wouldn’t work without calluses.

When my therapy was over, I stopped by his room to tell him I’d visit. The treatments were making me feel as weak as I had ever been, as if I had to be careful breathing or I’d blow myself over. 

“You going to be here a while longer?” I asked.

“Not if I can help it,” he said. Then he reached down beside his bed with a hand tethered to an IV and lifted his guitar. “Here,” he said. “You ought to keep practicing.”

“Thanks,” I said. I could barely lift the thing, and my fingers were still sore from the last practice. “You gonna need it?”

Edgar shook his head. His lips trembled, as though holding back words and breath that he didn’t want to let loose. “I used to believe that art was the highest form of human expression,” he said. “I don’t anymore.”

“So what is?” I asked. A nurse knocked on the open door and slipped past me. She fiddled with Edgar’s IV pump and checked his pulse. By the time she left, the air had cleared of all questions and was too thin for answers. I had to say something, though, not to have the last word, but to be remembered. “Martha was my favorite cousin,” I said. I regretted it all the way to the curb, where mom picked me up in our old station wagon.

I sat in the passenger seat, resting my forehead against the glass and listened to my teeth vibrating gently in my skull. Mom tried to talk to me, but I could barely keep my eyes open. I drifted in and out of sleep, lulled by the motion of the car, jolted awake by its turns. I remember cracking my eyes open, the whole world a smear of blue-tinted color as mom wheeled around an intersection.

That was it, then, the power that Edgar and Harald and Emma all shared. Art is not the ultimate expression of humanity; power is. Power becomes beautiful in display, for suicides and saints, and is both irredeemable and irreversible, unlike the creation of a work of art, which contains value and frailty. God, if there is such a creature, is an artist who bestows value on his beasts. The beasts, in their capacity for destruction, undo his effort and make it their own.

The radiation was burning in my brain. Mom had to take me around the shoulders to get me in to bed, guiding my feet and muttering: “Come on. You aren’t helpless.”

#

Three months later, my cancer was fully in remission. I had missed too much school to graduate that year, so in April I dropped out, temporarily, and picked up a job with a local plumber. My family, from the Brigades all the way across to my side of the family tree, was happy for my success in fighting off the cancer. I told them I hadn’t done much, but that the doctors and nurses ought to thanked.

Aunt Riley — who chose God over doctors — threw a dinner party soon after in celebration of my healing. I asked her to make sure God came, so I could thank him properly.

The day of the party was an anniversary of sorts for Emma and me; a year ago that day, I had first kissed her on the cheek. My lips had burned until I went to bed. Aunt Riley called at lunchtime to ask me to come up a little early, because her well was acting up again. I said I’d be right up. I grabbed my toolbox and mom drove me up. Aunt Riley greeted us at the door. She kissed me hard on the cheek, making a noise in her throat because her lips were so dry they wouldn’t smack. As mom went inside to help aunt Riley with the dinner, a breeze stirred the air around me and the kiss sloughed off my skin. 

The well was out in the middle of the yard, covered by an old shipping palette to which a sheet of tar paper had been stapled. I hauled the cover off and peered down into the gloom. She had overdrawn the water, again; she kept having this problem because she pumped water so fast that the well didn’t have time to recharge. Her pump was sucking air, probably had been for a while, so I let myself drop to the platform on which it rested. The well itself was covered by a grid of two-by-fours, and went down a good thirty feet. I knelt down on the boards and flicked at the grimy switch on the pump. It coughed into silence and I shivered, a spring chill settling on my shoulders. The pressure gauge on the pump ticked down to zero and stayed there. I adjusted the feed pipe a couple inches down; aunt Riley usually had a quick enough inflow that the well would charge up again in just a minute or so, and faster if I adjusted the depth. I waited to a count of sixty, inspecting the cracks in the concrete to keep me occupied. 

I switched the pump back on, and it choked like a fish on air. The pressure gauge stayed at zero. I flicked the switch again and waited another minute. I heard a car squelch over aunt Riley’s muddy drive and poked my head up like a prairie dog’s. A couple distant cousins had arrived, probably to share dinner. I waved at them and then dropped out of sight.

The pump still refused to grab water. Wasn’t nothing for it but to go down to the bottom of the well and check the intake manually. I slid the two-by-four lid off the circular hole. As I did, a bubble of silence seemed to rise out of it, expanding to fill the well housing, pressing into my ears. It was depth and solitude and came with a musty smell of earth and old water. 

There was a row of rebar handholds down one side of the well. I swung myself onto them and went down, hand over hand. The bars were cold as bones. Every rung down took me further into the silence.

When I reached the bottom, still hanging onto the ladder, I felt around with the toe of one boot. There wasn’t much light down there, but there wasn’t much room to get lost, either. I could hear my boot splash lightly against water, and risked leaning a little further down. My foot hit mud before the water had a chance to seep over my sole. I let go of the ladder and got down on my haunches. The well was almost dry. I felt the walls; they were slick with moisture, and thick with clay. I fumbled around with my arms until I found the intake pipe. I slid my fingers to its end and then measured the distance to the puddle that was all that was left of aunt Riley’s water. There was about a foot of gap.

Wasn’t much I could do, at that point. I rubbed my hands together to shake off the mud and to warm them up. When I stopped moving, the silence was total. I was alone, a creature at the root of creation. The smell reminded me of Emma’s room, with all her dead leaves. 

I looked up. It was mid-afternoon, but in the lens of the well’s opening I could see needlepoint stars against a royal blue sky. Someone had told me, in the tone of an urban legend, that you could see stars in broad daylight. I stared; a reverse vertigo hit me, and I leaned back against the muck of the wall. I had never thought that stars could be so beautiful; they were too far away to signify anything, or to act as anything but pixels in a giant, inscrutable screen that played for the world. 

I had to close my eyes. Tears I hadn’t known were there squeezed out from under my lids and seemed to freeze against my cheeks. I began to climb out of the hole, hand over hand.

I covered the well up and crawled out of the housing; the sounds of the motion of air, of spring birds, of supple leaves scraped against my ear drums like steel wool. As the sun began to coax the cold stiffness out of my joints, I looked up. The sky was blue, like a dusting of fine powder. I could see the moon, but that was it.

Inside, I cleaned up and told aunt Riley the bad news. She’d have to drill deeper; the water table was all used up. She made a face, and then patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The Lord will provide.”

A dozen or so of my extended family crowded around aunt Riley’s table. They all wished me well, and the younger ones wanted to rub my bald head for good luck after I assured them that cancer wasn’t contagious.

“Would you say the blessing?” aunt Riley asked me.

“Sure,” I said. Everyone but me bowed their heads; everyone but me closed their eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to. I stared at the downturned faces of my relatives, with their soft noses and their puffed cheeks and trimmed hair, and I couldn’t even blink. “Dear Lord,” I began. I didn’t want to say a word. I could think of thousands of them, but I wanted to shut up, to let everyone else have their turns. I thought about what my family needed —warmth and water, money, food, and fun — and I asked God for only those things. When the “amen” sounded, I went quiet. That night, I dreamed about wax and failure and standing in a crowd that stared up at the sun. 

The end

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. 

Return to part 1 | continue on to part 3…

Sammy came on like a plague of handshakes. “Hey, buddy. How’re you? Say, did you hear about the Wands kid?” I gave him a firm grip and lied that I hadn’t; I barely got the words out before Sammy went plowing ahead. “Yeah, no, he got thrown out of class. Cheated on a test. You ever do that? Had drugs on him, too.” I had no idea how old Sammy was. He acted twelve and looked sixty. Probably somewhere in between. I’d been hearing the story about the Wands kid for a couple of years now, and guessed it was quite a bit older than that. 

“Wow, man,” I said. Sammy always seemed to be discovering conversation. Like a child, he never picked up on the difference between reality and fiction.

“Yeah,” said Sammy.

“See you around, Sammy,” I said. I was late for an appointment with my physician. Sammy tended to hang out in one of two places: the hospital and the food bank. Together, those two places gave him all the human interaction and sustenance he apparently needed. I would often volunteer at the food bank and, before my frequent trips to the hospital had started up, that had been just about enough of a Sammy dose for me. Seeing him in both places made it seem as if he were following me around, like a grade school hanger-on. I tried to gently remind myself that it was more like I had invaded his territory.

“Yeah,” said Sammy. I gave him a grin and edged past into the hospital waiting room. “Do you know him?” I heard him ask a middle-aged lady who had come up the walk behind me. “He’s a good guy. He helps a lot.”
“Why doesn’t he talk to one of you?” I asked my god as I waited for my turn at the admissions desk.

“I was about to commend you on your charitable character,” said my god.

“Well, I sure don’t mind helping him out now and then, if I can, but why doesn’t he spend some of that babble on one of you?”

“I’m not sure,” said my god. “All I can tell you is that he has never spoken to me.”

“Downside of a pantheon,” I said. Through a window, I saw Sammy make an unsuccessful grab for someone else’s hand, and turn the gesture into a gracious unseen wave. As he did, I noticed a cheap, filthy bandage on his hand where his index finger ought to have been, paper towel and packing tape. “Was he in the war?” I asked my god.

“He didn’t talk to me back then, either,” said my god. “I suspect he talks to you more than he does to any of us.”

After my appointment, I stopped at the hospital’s cafeteria for a couple cups of coffee. As I had expected, Sammy was still hanging around the front door. He was picking at the cigarette stubs in the waist-high ashtray, experimenting with putting some of them in his mouth. I held out one of the coffees. “Hey, Sammy,” I said.

He took the coffee and saluted me with it a couple of times. “Hey,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee much, anymore, no. But it’s the thought that counts.” He took a big, scalding gulp and grinned at me. 

“I never noticed your finger before,” I said. 

“It’s good, it’s good,” he said, putting the wounded hand into one of the pockets of his army-green coat. Before he got it hidden, though, I got a glimpse of bright-red blood leaking through the bandage; the cut was fresh. “It’s good,” he said again. He may have meant the coffee.

I gave him a nod in lieu of a wave and said, “See you at the bank, Sammy.”

“All right, take care,” he said. I think he repeated it under his breath.

As I drove home, I talked with my god. A while back, I noticed a tendency in myself not to talk with him unless I was also doing something else. I would chop firewood and talk to my god; I would watch TV and talk to my god; I would write in my journal and talk to my god. At bedtime, when other people would say their prayers and get a little advice on how to improve the following day, I would not talk to my god and he would not talk to me. 

That night, while cooking myself a meal of pasta and pie, I asked about the war, which led to a discussion of the necessity of violence, which was followed by an argument on the relative value of human beings. My god was gentle in his words, but by the end I could hear a near boil in his tone. “You all have different values,” he said. “Empirically divined, but only for us, since you lack the necessary skills.”

“How much am I worth?” I asked as I put on my pajamas.

“You are worth my time,” said my god, after a slight pause. The heat left his voice, and I bundled myself in a cocoon of heavy blankets.

#

When I got to the food bank the next morning there was already a crowd out front. The director of the bank often plead for orderly lines, but he never got anywhere.

I edged my way toward the front door, as politely as possible. Normally, the crowd was only too eager to let me pass through, recognizing my arrival as another step toward a meal; but today, there seemed to be another sort of hunger driving them. A couple regulars got me with their elbows and grumbled at me to keep out of the way. I felt as if I were fighting to the stage at a concert.

Sammy was the object of the crowd’s attention. When I emerged from the press of bodies, he grinned at me. “Did you hear about the Wands kid?” he asked.

“Hey, Sammy,” I said.

“He got locked in a forest, yeah. His dad did it to him.” His eyes were bloodshot and yellow just above the lids. He looked as if he had been rubbing grit into his tear ducts, all the red, scraped skin on his cheeks.

“You feeling all right?” I asked.

“He pissed on the wall,” said someone behind me. “Gonna snap,” said someone else. 

“He cheated on a test,” said Sammy. Then, in one movement, he spun to face the brick wall and flung his left arm across it. With his other hand, he pulled a wide cleaver from inside his army-green jacket. Before I could do much more than realize my blood had gone cold, he brought the knife down on his outstretched wrist. Three sounds came up at once: metal on brick, on flesh, and on bone. He screamed, pulled his good hand back and let it swing again. This time, I only heard metal on brick.

My startled muscles carried me toward him, but I tripped over the curb and went down. Sammy kept flailing with the cleaver, raising it only scant inches before smashing it into the wall, over and over, as if the number of swings were important. He must have passed out before reaching his goal, because as I reached him he toppled over into my arms, and I saw tears of frustration in his eyes, different from tears of pain in that they dried much slower and seemed to glitter much more sharply in the overcast light. 

#

A few days later I had another appointment at the hospital. I went in a little early so I could swing by Sammy’s room. When I asked after him at the nurse’s station, the ward clerk said, “Thank you, god. He’s sure in need of a friendly voice; he’s worn out all the good humor ’round here.”

“She’s been praying for someone to distract him,” said my god as I made my way down the hall toward Sammy’s room. Then, with a note of pride, he added, “I didn’t figure you needed telling.”

The smell of sick exhalations coming from each room combined with the natural vertigo my meds gave me to leave a solid headache. It felt like a brick was resting at the top of my spine.

Sammy was just coming out of his room as I arrived. His gown didn’t fit him well, and his feet were only half-in a pair of hospital-provided slippers. He was holding a brown paper lunch sack in his hand. “I threw up some,” he said, holding the bag out toward me.

“The nurse will probably want to measure it,” I said, taking it from him.

“Well, they can’t,” said Sammy. “You’re a good guy,” he added, as if it were slightly less important.

“You look a little pale, Sammy,” I said. “Let’s sit down, yeah?”

“Okay,” he said. I set the bag of vomit down on the floor as soon as his back was turned.

His room was large enough for two beds, but his was the only one. I could see scuff marks on the tile where the other bed had been. The rest of the space was strewn with his clothes: shirt, torn socks, brown corduroys, tighty-whities, and the big green coat. They were spread out to cover the maximum area. It smelled as if the air hadn’t been stirred in a long, long time.

“They couldn’t get your hand back,” I said. I leaned against the wall. There was something comforting about the smell in the room; it was almost like being in the presence of something much older than myself.

“Think positive,” said Sammy. “Are you thinking positive?”

“I try and keep it up,” I said. “You having any problems? Anything I can help with. I can sneak you some coffee.”

“Hey,” said Sammy. It sounded as if he had just realized I was in the room. “I’ve got a question.”

“What’s that?”

“Where is my soul?” he asked.

I hesitated. “I’m sure your god could answer that a whole lot better than I can,” I said. “I’m not even that clear on my own physiology.”

“It’s not a place,” said my god. I repeated it to Sammy. “It’s hardly even a thing.”

Sammy stroked the bandage that covered the stump of his missing hand. “Cool,” he said. “All right. Think positive.”

“Sorry, man,” I said. “I guess that’s not a lot of help.” Sammy nodded, bobbing his neck kind of like a quail. “Got an easier one for me?” I asked.

“No sir, all right,” said Sammy. “It’s good to see you, hey. I’ll see you around.” He sat down on his bed and kicked off his slippers. His feet didn’t quite reach the floor.

#

The following weekend I had two hundred packages to put together so the food bank regulars would have something special for the upcoming holidays. Cans of spaghetti, small boxes of cereal with prizes inside, some ribbon. It was a big job, but I had somebody to pass the time with.

Thanks to the situation with Sammy, my god was in a lamenting mood.

“There was a time when we gods had power,” he said. “We had our words, yes, but our words could do much more than just spark the neurons in the brains of our worshipers. We could conquer armies with a breath; we could lift mountains with a half-realized whim; we could lift the spirits of the downtrodden as lifting water from a stream in cupped hands.”

“So, what happened?” I asked. My god had often told me this story, but he told it like a gently senile grandfather; details changed at every telling, and each new wrinkle to the story made me feel closer to his true, unedited self.

“What happens to a muscle that goes unused? What happens to a brain submerged in mindless activity? Our power atrophied. We had once been timeless; then, one morning, it was as though we had been pushed from a bridge over the river of time and were now adrift within it — cold, restless, weary in motion.

“We used to feed you as we would the fish, suspended above your strange and uncomfortable world. Then we were among your minds, but held distant from your world, and weakened by some force — or lack of force — that we did not understand.” He pulled all other sounds out of my hearing, filling my head with silence. It was his equivalent of a sigh. “We learned, though,” he continued. “Our power left us because we no longer needed to use it. Not for you, mad people though you are.”
His long monologue added a comfortable dissonance to my work, like an invisible hand keeping the curve of my emotion from exceeding its bounds.

“That sort of power wouldn’t be unwelcome, now,” I said. “Cut down on my medical bills. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who would refuse a miracle.”

“Unfortunately, you do not decide what is necessary, for us gods or for yourselves. That is a balance given over to some science that you are ill-equipped to test.” Silence rolled through my head, again. “Miracles are slow wonders, kid,” he said. “They’re happening, but their birth and growth are far more deliberate than you are capable of seeing.”

#

I read about Sammy’s latest episode in the weekend paper. The dry, journalist prose put a welcome distance between the experience and me. “…white male in mid-thirties reported causing a disturbance on 300 block of Old Elm.” Just a few blocks down from the food bank. I had wondered why Sammy hadn’t shown up for our holiday celebration; I had also wondered about the sirens I had heard, but not so hard.

“He prays to a loner deity,” said my god. I was driving to the hospital to visit Sammy. After the doctors got him stabilized, they had moved him to the mental wing. I had one ribboned package left over from the party, and an empty prescription in need of a refill.

“Which one?” I asked my god.

“Not one I’m familiar with,” said my god. “He refuses to speak with me.”

“Sammy or the loner?”

“Both.”

I parked my car and shoved open the door. There was a solid wind moving over the asphalt like a brusque man in a slow-moving line, all low grumbles and thick skin. The sky was purple and seemed close, as if I could reach up and grab a fistful of lightning.

“Can they reattach his leg?” I asked as I bundled myself, head down, to the front entrance. Inside, the air was thin and smelled of new carpet.

“No,” said my god. “His cut was too ragged and too slow. There was nothing the surgeons could do to save it.”

“That’s a sort of power,” I mused. “Defying the gifts of talented men.”

“That is not the sort of power that would rob us of ours,” my god replied.

Sammy was sleeping off some pain meds when a nurse showed me to his room. He wasn’t classified as dangerous, but his remaining leg and good arm were strapped loosely to the frame of his bed. The straps meant for his other limbs curled limply on the tile floor.

I sat down and waited for him to wake up. I felt my god retreat from my mind. Thunder shook the distance, crossing miles to growl weakly at the window.

I thought about the stories of great, fickle gods of the past — told to me in deadpan by my god — who demanded sacrifice and rewarded it with disinterest. I thought about the unassuming races of history who submitted their wills to the weather and the seasons, believing that there were gods who would take their offerings and transform them into longevity. I wondered if it might have been a temptation, to surrender control, like a child in its mother’s arms.

“Hey, friend.” Sammy rolled his whole head to face me. “What’s your name again?”

“Come on, man,” I said. “You remember me.”

Sammy showed me all his teeth. They were yellow and jagged and did a poor job of hiding his tongue. “I’m asking the wrong questions,” he said.

I smiled. I had a good smile, since I had to use it a lot. Some of the outcasts who would come by the food bank were in such a slur of alcohol, you couldn’t make heads or tails of them. All you could do was smile. I had begun to think of my smile as its own word in the language; it changed its meaning based on inflection and, every so often, it dropped right out of my vocabulary, like when you can’t remember a word that means “uneducated” but you know it starts with an S.

It didn’t matter what I thought my smile was. Sammy was deaf to it; he twisted in his straps showing me his back. I tried some other words.

“Folks miss you at the bank, man,” I said. “I’m supposed to take back good news to ‘em. Have the doctors told you when you can go?”

Sammy grunted. I could see his jaws working, bulging out the skin of his cheeks. I slumped down a little further in my seat. I see his sort of posture all the time in my volunteer work. He was giving up. It was a weighted silence, and seemed a reluctance to respond for fear of being lifted bodily from a comfortable hole. I had often seen it happen when a co-volunteer asked one of the unfortunates to talk about managing what little money the latter had. I hadn’t once seen one of them gladly hand over the decisions that guided their few bills to the educated suggestion of a volunteer. It was about control; they would cling to the tiniest sphere of influence, and I had seen it many times pop like a soap bubble.

Funny, though. I had never pegged Sammy as the master-of-his-own-destiny type. He was always far too generous with his thoughts, his history, his hand shakes.

He made a noise, sort of a sob, and ground his teeth together so hard I thought I could hear the enamel popping. 

“What was that, Sammy?”

He turned his head toward me. Blood stained his chin like a red goatee; he spit a hunk of flesh from between his teeth. It landed on the sheets with the sound of heavy rain. It was the tip of his tongue. “Where is my soul?” he asked in a clotted voice, indistinct, as if he had lost interest in speech.

#

After that, I did a little giving up of my own. I had seen plenty of men and women at the nadir of their lives, but they had all known it. Sammy’s bemused ignorance of the reasons for his self-destruction put a distance between us that I was hesitant to cross back over. 

That’s part of a lie. Sammy didn’t make the distance; I did. I walked out of his room. I rolled my eyes when the nurse asked how he was doing. I tried to spin my mind away from him by counting the seconds between lightning and thunder.

That lasted for as long as the storm did. I had other things to occupy my time — volunteer work, my health, the job that paid the bills — but I kept coming back to Sammy. 

“You have taken your responsibility as far as you need,” said my god. “There are others whose needs are much clearer.” He told me about a few; the ones who had talked to him, at least.

“Why not work a miracle,” I said. I had meant it as a joke, but by the time the words reached my tongue they tasted much more bitter. My mouth twisted. My god couldn’t see it. He backed away and left me in peace for a while. 

I passed the next couple of weeks with the inside of my head feeling like a desert. I could sense the natural mutation of the world around me, but it seemed no more important than the shifting of dunes. When I closed my eyes, even the colors there seemed flat and desaturated, like the screen of a dying television. My responsibility to Sammy had not been fulfilled; there was a contract between us, reaffirmed every time I stopped to listen to him. Breaking that contract would leave me stranded in the desert sensation, which is not so much devoid of water as empty of life. 

My god was the one to break the silence. “You do the things that we can not, you know,” he said one morning as I brushed my teeth. “Your simple handouts are small miracles. Envy is not an emotion becoming of a deity, but perhaps we approach it. The act of raising a loaf of bread in thanksgiving is your greatest power.”

I spit toothpaste into the sink. “I don’t understand the direction of my life,” I said. 

“Life has no direction,” said my god. “Life is not a journey; it is a shape.”

“I don’t quite understand the shape my life is in,” I said.

“Then I am fully jealous,” said my god. “You should be grateful for the chance to understand, because that makes times like this all the more potent.”

“Times like what?” I asked, just as the phone rang. 

“Your doctor,” said my god, and I could hear the play of good humor in his voice.

A little thrill sprang up in my chest. I picked up the phone. 

“Good news!” crowed my doctor on the other end. He was a serious man most of the time, but always had a glint in his eye that suggested he would only be too willing to run wildly through the streets. “It’s my pleasure to tell you that your test results came back and you’re finally in remission. Congratulations!”

My heart pumped a salve through my veins, and I felt the shape of the world begin to soften. I felt relief like the victory of a gambler; it was sudden, unexpected, and I had no immediate idea of what to do with it.

“If I could kiss you, I would,” said my god, with a note of pride in his voice. “But don’t think this lets you off the service hook.” My doctor laughed at something only he could hear.

“Why did you let him tell me?” I asked after I hung up the phone. 

“I don’t abuse what power I have,” said my god.

#

When I went back to visit Sammy, I felt buoyed by my good news. My good intention — the one I pinned down in words — was to share some of my mood with him, to see what minor joy might slough from me to him.

“Don’t,” said my god. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions which were not realized.”

I didn’t pay attention. I felt as if that wide desert in my mind lay between us. There was just a stretch of clean linoleum between Sammy and me. “He deserves as many miracles as I do,” I said. My shoes made a pleasant click on the hospital floor.

The nurses had been able to keep him from losing any more of his parts, but I wasn’t fully prepared to see him again after having stashed him at the back of my mind. He looked thin from underfeeding, and his body couldn’t quite square up with his bed. His head pulled to one side, and his stumps of arm and leg broke all hope of symmetry.

“Don’t,” said my god as I paused outside the door.

“I don’t understand why not,” I said. 

Perfect silence fell around me. “I said that I do not abuse what power I have,” said my god. “Had I the desire, I could ball your emotions up and play with them like a cat with a toy, but I haven’t that desire.”

I stepped back from Sammy’s door and sat down on a nearby bench. “What do you mean?” I asked. 

“Your mood is the lens by which you perceive the shapes of everything. Your mood belongs to me, held entirely in the realm of your mind.”

“I can choose to be happy without your interference,” I said. 

“That is a decision I wouldn’t expect you to make,” said my god. The silence came in, once more, and then my head was filled with his insistent words. If my time earlier had been a desert, this felt like a swamp, all curled decay and thick, complex patterns inside my eyes. “I have found the deity to whom Sammy speaks. He is a child god, a new birth, though old enough to your perception, and he is petty as his youth describes. He spins cruelty about him like carnival sugar, clotted and shapeless. He claims an insatiable curiosity, but my fellow gods do not believe that there is any motivation less than exercising a thoughtless power over the poor souls that trust him to be their guide.”

I sat back against the wall and let my head clear. “You gods are taking advantage of him.”

“I am not,” said my god.

I breathed out a lungful and was slow pulling it back in. “And to think I was in such a good mood this morning.” I rose and entered Sammy’s room. I felt my god withdraw, leaving noise where there had been silence.

Sammy cracked open his eyes to look at me, then slid his focus toward the blank wall. “Hey,” he said. “It’s good to see you, man. Yeah.” His words sounded drunk, coming off his ruined tongue. 

“Hey, Sammy,” I said. I pulled a chair over to his bedside. Neither of us said anything for a while, but you couldn’t hold it against us. After a while, I wasn’t sure if Sammy even remembered I was in the room. I cleared my throat and asked, “Do you believe in a god?” It sounded stupid to ask.

“I hear voices sometimes,” said Sammy. His skin was gray as storm clouds. He coughed and then moaned, trying to lick his lips with the ragged line of his tongue. His lips were chapped and splotched with a deep red where he had been chewing. It looked painful; it looked like the least of his pain. I bent over him, we my own lips, and kissed him lightly. It was all I could do. Sammy just stared at the ceiling.

“Sometimes I hear voices, too,” I said, sitting back in my chair.

A young man in a nurse’s uniform rapped politely on the door and came in. “Hi there, Sammy,” he said with an affected brightness. “Sorry, but it’s time to check on your vitals again.”

“It’s not a good idea,” said Sammy. He scowled, as if unsatisfied with how the words had come out. “It’s not a good idea,” he repeated.

“Well, we’ve got to know how you’re doing, so we can keep you healthy.”

Sammy started to thrash around on his bed. The nurse gave me a look of long suffering. “Want me to give you a hand?” I asked.

“Can’t do blood pressure, now,” said the nurse. “Just hold his head still while I take his temperature.”

I got on my knees next to Sammy’s bed and took his head in both my hands. His skin was rough, unshaven, and blotched with sweat. He stared at me and calmed slightly, our pupils reflected one another in the faint light. The nurse bent over and pushed a thermometer into Sammy’s ear. A short beep, and then he was done. “Ninety-nine,” he said. “Looks like the antibiotics are working, Sammy.” 

Sammy didn’t reply. He just stared at me. “Where is my soul?” he asked, slurred by his slow and damaged tongue.

“I’ll be back to check on your blood pressure, okay, Sammy?” said the nurse. “Thanks,” he said to me. I smiled at him and pulled my hands away from Sammy’s cheeks. 

“Where is my soul?” asked Sammy. He didn’t break his gaze away from me.

I reached up and tapped my temple. “It’s here,” I said. “It’s right here. Keep that, all right? Let them take everything else off you. Let them scream themselves hoarse.” His eyes unfocused. I laid my fingers on his temples. The nerves and tendons all up my arms shuddered with repressed energy, as if they wanted to act out all the things I couldn’t figure how to say. “This wasteland . . . They have to cross it to reach you. It’s yours.” 

My ineloquent muscles — tongue, arms, and heart — sagged from exertion. I let my body sink back into the chair. 

Slowly, Sammy raised his one good hand to his head, index finger and thumb sticking out like a playground gun.