The Very Merry Pranksters

I

Henry stared at the coffin, and thought about killing his wife.

The room, perfumed and stuffy, was filled with the blurry sound of chat, a hundred polite conversations going on simultaneously. Ted the Infinitely Wealthy had passed away suddenly, shockingly, and his death seemed unreal to everyone in the room, one of Ted’s famous pranks, and everyone half-expected Ted to pop out of the coffin with a bottle of champagne and demand that everyone dance. The closed coffing added some weight to this delerium, as everyone secretly wondered if it was maybe filled with sand, or someone elses body entirely. It was a meme that jumped from person to person without being spoken, mysteriously, and the whole room was making idle chatter while thinking, ashamed of even the thought, that maybe Ted the Infinitely Wealthy had not died of a sudden aneurysm after all, that maybe he was hiding somewhere, watching them all on closed-circuit TV, laughing.

Ted had done similar things in the past. Henry put his wife out of his mind for a moment, recalling some of the pranks. He’d never found them very funny, personally; pranks always seemed mean-spirited to him, as if it wasn’t bad enough that Ted the Infinitely Wealthy was so infinitely wealthy, he had to treat everyone around him like they were players in his personal troupe, entertaining him with their antics. To Henry’s thinking, the frequency and complexity of Ted’s pranks had increased in direct proportion to how ruined by money he’d become. Ted had always been rich, born rich, but as a kid his terrible home life—a nasty divorce, a father who’d kept his mother and Ted in near-poverty as they sued and counter-sued each other over support—had made him a moody, melancholy, but grounded individual. When he’d finally come into infinite wealth on his eightteenth birthday, it hadn’t seemed real for some years, and he lived simply, Henry remembered, for some time after that. Slowly, though, the money had crept into his life. The pranks had begun as good clean fun, an acknowledgment that Ted was rich and could do amazing things if he wanted. As time went on, though, Henry had detected a streak of meanness in the pranks, and in Ted.

Faking his own death, Henry thought suddenly, actually wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

He went back to staring at the coffin and thinking about killing his wife.

The coffin sat on a raised dais, surrounded by flowers. A large picture of Ted the Infinitely Wealthy was displayed on a stand, a smiling, tanned young man with thinning hair and a growing paunch, dressed casually. Henry couldn’t tell where the picture had been taken, but it looked recent, and gave the impression that Ted had been caught by surprise, turning suddenly and smiling reflexively when he saw the camera. The effect of pleasant surprise was so perfect, Henry thought it gave credence to the idea that the whole death and funeral business was faked, that the photo had been taken a week ago in preparation.

Henry glanced down at his hands, which he’d cupped soberly so he wouldn’t have to worry about them.

Behind him, he could hear the soft whispering of his wife and Gina Gerrano, usually referred to as The Tart—another in a long series of silly nicknames acquired during college and never abandoned, Henry thought, despite their advancing middle-age and the sheer ridiculous weight of them. He could still refer to The Tart in the company of old college cronies and be instantly understood, just as he could refer to TIW and everyone knew he was referring to Teddy. The origins of these names were sometimes famous stories, recounted endlessly, and were sometimes lost to memory. Henry himself was known as The Hick. He’d never liked the nickname, though he’d pretended to for many years. He’d launched a campaign to discourage its use, but no one took him seriously about it.

His wife, who’d gone to a different college and didn’t like many of his friends, thought the whole nickname thing was silly and didn’t hesitate to tell him so. Her name was Miranda. All of Henry’s friends called her The Shrew when she wasn’t in the room. Henry had taken to thinking of her as The Shrew, and when he spoke about her to his friends he called her by that nickname.

The Shrew and Gina were gossiping, soft whispers followed by giggles. He could just make out that they were discussing the Frank Malarchy incident, which was still fresh in the air. Henry hadn’t known Frank in college, so Frank had no nickname, and was known simply as Frank, or, sometimes, Malarchy. For the past few weeks, he’d been dubbed The Secret Millionaire by the secret committee on nicknames. Henry sighed. He’d discussed Frank Malarchy’s situation so often, he couldn’t bear to even think about it.

The coffin was a rich, dark wood, varnished and buffed until it shined. Henry thought it was a waste of effort to spend so much money and time making a coffin so beautiful, only to burn it into cinders. Better to just have a plywood box painted up nicely.

He was hot and sweaty; in order to get to the viewing on time he’d raced straight from work, after having worn an appropriately somber suit all daty, broiling out in the lunchtime sun. He felt like he’d generated enough heat to begin a sustainable chain reaction, and that he’d never be cool again. Sweat lay on his forehead permenantly, reappearing immediately whenever he summoned the strength to wipe it away. It felt like the coffin was already on fire, burning merrily away just a few feet from him. Then he thought about turning away and asking Miranda if she was as hot as he was, but didn’t. He knew she wouldn’t be. And with Gina sitting there in her tiny skirt that was really inappropriate for a wake, she’d feel the need to make it sound like he was insane for asking. And then he’d spend the rest of the evening straining to hear their whisperings, to make sure he couldn’t hear his own name mixed in there.

He thought again about life without her.

He tried to be reasonable and practical in his daydreaming. He tried to imagine the advantages of a dead wife and the disadvantages. Aside from an initial social awkwardness with mutual friends, the only real disadvantage he could think of was incarceration, which loomed large enough to pretty much be the entire category. The advantages were not dramatic. They did not include a new lover—a younger, flashier model; the thought alone made him weary. They did not include travel, or expansive living, or, in fact, any real changes to his social life or pattern of existence outside of dropping a few acquaintances he regarded as strictly Miranda’s. There was only one advantage he thought about: Time.

He thought about his life. Ten hours a day at work, including commute. At home, it was all Miranda, all the time. The moment he walked through the door, she had his time planned out. There were dinners with friends he’d rather not go to, chores he thought could be postponed, a million social occasions he didn’t care about, and television shows he didn’t want to watch. He ran through it in his mind: It wasn’t that she forced him, really. She never commanded or got angry—it was mysterious, and as he sat staring at the coffin, his face took on an expression of wonder. He couldn’t explain how it happened. He couldn’t point to anything she did or said to force him into devoting every second of his life to her, but somehow she did. The proof was in the result: He hadn’t had a complete thought in months, if not years. Every time he started to have a complete thought, something would happen and she would burst in on his thoughts, demanding attention, demanding thought, demanding time.

He’d tried to steal back time by staying up late and getting up at odd times, in order to sit and just exist during a time when she wasn’t there, intruding on his every perception. But that hadn’t worked. He was sleepy and disjointed, and the world was too quiet and too deserted at three in the morning. The feeling that he had to tip-toe around and be insulated against noise drove him crazy, and he spent most of those experiments sitting at the kitchen table drinking bourbon, terrified to move. And Miranda was a light sleeper, and more often than not woke up the moment he tried to creep from bed, and complained about his thoughtlessness.

If he killed her, he thought, he’d instantly get every non-work hour back. He’d have hours and hours to himself, reclaimed on the battlefield.

Having justified the cause to himself, Henry began pondering the method. The morality of murder never worried him, but by his own admission he hadn’t had a complete thought in years. How could he plot a murder of any quality?

He thought Stanley Morgan would help him. He’d known Stanley since school and Stanley was usually the one who gave people nicknames. He had a fetish for nicknames, and generally dubbed everyone he met with one within hours of meeting them, always enthusiastically and publicly. Stanley was, Henry thought, completely amoral and wouldn’t be opposed to murder in any philosophical sense, and Stanley hated Miranda. Stanley had, in fact, advised him not to marry her.

Sweating, Henry twisted around and searched the room for Stanley, finding him near the exit, slightly overweight and ruddy-faced, but in a way that seemed prosperous instead of gluttonous, a fleshy blonde man with shining blue eyes who always seemed damp. Henry thought Stanley had a lot of physical qualities against him, from a social perspective, and yet he was usually the most popular man in the room. Or hated fervently, which was almost the same thing.

He looked back at the coffin, pushing his hands through his damp hair, which was long. His wife’s words brushed against his back, kitten’s claws. It felt to him like she was pushing him gently towards the coffin, as if she wanted him in it, and he thought, dammit, if Ted the Infinitely Wealthy was planning to emerge triumphantly from the coffin amidst confetti and a brass band, he should do it now, immediately.

He stared. Nothing happened. The soft cloud of chatter still enveloped him.

The fact that even at Ted the Infinitely Wealthy’s wake Miranda ran him was irritating. He wanted to stand up and go over to where Stanley and some of the other men were talking, but he felt her behind him, felt her glances in his direction stabbing into his back. He knew she would say something if he stood up, knew she would criticize him. He could hear her voice in his mind, snapping and sharp, a joke muttered to Gina, who would laugh, covering her mouth, her eyes darting to him and then away.

He pushed his hands through his hair again, and imagined the scene without her: The same wake, the same people, but no Miranda. He imagined himself moving through the room easily, free, smiling at people and shaking hands, flirting a little. He would go out to the parking lot whenever it struck him to and smoke a cigarette. He would go out with everyone afterwards and have coffee and cake at a diner, laughing about some of Ted’s past escapades. He would go home and strip down to his underwear and have a beer, and just luxuriate, just sit and relax, soaking in the lukewarm air of his apartment, floating, happy.

“Gathering wool, Hank?”

Henry started and glanced over at Stanley, who seemed to have just materiallized in the seat next to him. Stanley, rosy-cheeked, was smiling. He always looked like he’d just run a short distance, Henry thought. Always red and damp, slighlty out of breath. He had a long face with a long, pointed nose, and had appeared to be about sixteen years of age since he’d been ten.

Henry shook his head and sat up straight. “Contemplating death.”

Stanley glanced at the coffin. ‘Ted? In a better place. No one should be allowed to just waste their money like that.”

“He lived pretty well.”

Stanley snorted. “Listen, Hickie, living well isn’t the goal. Some people endow universities, cure cancer, change the course of world events with their immense riches. Teddy played games and blew out an artery at thirty-four. Fuck him.”

Henry shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”

He could feel Stanley’s eyes on him. “Listen, Hickie, we’re all going out to Pirelli’s later to discuss Ted’s lack of wisdom and general good health. You should come, or else you’ll probably end up as the secondary comic relief subject of the evening. If you’re there we’ll bust your chops, which is a lot more dignified.”

Henry frowned, aware that Miranda was right behind him and no doubt listening. To his horror, Stanley suddenly twisted around in his seat and laid a hand on Miranda’s knee. Henry turned awkwardly with him.

“Sorry to interrupt—hey Gina—but it’s okay with you if Hank stops off for some coffee with the men afterward, right?” He smiled boyishly. “We’re going to remember Teddy and tell some embarrassing stories about everyone that tangentially involve Teddy. Old school chums and all that.”

The two women glanced at Stanley, at each other, and then back at Stanley. “Is there some sort of homoerotic ceremony involved?” Gina said, snapping gum enthusiastically. “Loincloths? Wrestling?”

Stanley grinned, his smile a wide, wondering expression that implied he’d just discovered something amazing and was wondering whether to share it or keep it to himself. “There may be some singing. The evening might end with some hugs.”

“Any grab-ass?”

Stanley winked. “Only if Hank here comes.” His eyes, bright, clear, and steady, swiveled to regard Miranda. “What do you say, Mir?”

Henry flashed an awkward, uncomfortable smile.

“Jesus, Stan, Hank can do what he wants,” Miranda said brightly. “I figured you boys might want to go out and do something like that.” She looked at Henry. “You should go.”

“Okay,” Henry said. He didn’t look at her. She studied him for a second, and then smiled at Stanley.

“Don’t get him into trouble,” she said with a smile that Henry thought was probably the most frightening thing he’d ever seen. Stanley seemed unaffected, nodding amiably and slapping Henry on the shoulder as he stood up. “See you later, buddy. Ladies.”

Henry turned back towards the coffin slowly, waiting for Miranda to say something. But she didn’t, and after a moment he slumped down a little and stared again, thinking: sleeping until noon. Beer for breakfast. Baseball games on every TV in every room, different games. Pornography. Other women. Having the guys over for poker or pornography or the game on TV. Waking up every day and knowing that every minute of every hour was yours to decide what to do with.

After a moment he realized he was smiling, and quickly sobered himsel.

All of it, just beyond Miranda. He closed his eyes and listened to her soft whispers, unintelligible. He was reminded of the way she would whisper to him in bed years before, right after school when they’d first met. A blind date he hadn’t known he was being fixed up on, and there she was, pretty, confident, and he was flattered that she was interested in him, that she wanted to talk to him and that she gave him her number. And he loved fucking her, when they got there two weeks later, on an evening filled with Saki and a light summer rain and her demonstrating her skill at removing her bra under her shirt, and when he’d first held those cold breasts in his hands, the little hard nipple in each palm, he thought he’d finally become a man after years of feeling awkward and stupid around women, and here was his reward. And in bed with him, late at night, sweaty and exhausted, she would whisper to him, a sleepy, rambling speech that would trail off into soft snores.

Henry now knew that he hadn’t liked her much, even then. He’d liked sleeping with her, but that wasn’t really the same thing.

The coffin came back into focus. That’s where it all ends, he thought. We’re all just beetles tied by thread to pins, walking around and around, staggering around blindly, not realizing that every step brings us closer to the center, where we’re wrapped up and trapped, wriggling, helpless. He pictured it, his own death, or tried to; the best he could do was a sudden, unexpected blackness. But that was bullshit. He considered it for a moment; there had to be a slight delay between something happening and the information being transmitted along the rusted, twisted bundle of nerves that was his body. He decided to call that delay one second. He figured he was living his life one second in the past—that everyone was. Like light from the sun being delayed eight minutes. If the sun exploded, it would be eight minutes before anyone knew it on Earth—his life was like that. If he stepped on glass and cut himself, it was one second before that info reached his brain—it happened on 9:05:05, say, but he didn’t feel it until 9:05:06.

Sitting hunched on the uncomfortable metal folding chair with the frayed padded vinyl seat, Henry made fists with both hands.

Every second that he perceived meant that he hadn’t died, which meant that if he was still perceiving moments, he was still living one perceived moment from then. As far as Henry could tell, this meant he was immortal. And the idea of being married to Miranda forever frightened him.

There was a sound from the coffin.

Henry went still, staring at the oblong box, the flowers, the picture of Teddy smiling back at him. A…scratching sound, prolonged and muffled. A scratching sound. For a few moments Henry sat very still and waited, the only part of him in motion his eyes, which roamed over the coffin, searching for some hint as to what the sound had been. Nothing seemed amiss. Nothing obvious appeared. The lid to the coffin did not lift up, revealing Teddy and a bottle of champagne.

He closed his eyes and thought: I could quit my job, live off my savings for a year, and no one would complain. I could re-arrange all the furniture in the apartment. I could wear black socks and sneakers and shorts.

He paused. Slowly, he turned in his seat, far enough to see most of the room, but not far enough to include Miranda in his view. He scanned the familiar faces around, most of which he knew to some degree or other. His eyes jumped from face to face.

There was Deidre, recently emancipated from another Henry, looking a little weathered, but she’d had a hard time of it and he thought she’d be one you had to get drunk first. Get drunk first and then she’d attack you, starved for affection, and it would be angry and heated and afterwards she’d be pissed off an quiet and you’d feel like she wanted you to leave, but if you started to make noises about leaving that would just make it worse. She was wearing a simple dark dress, her hair up in a complex way, long earrings dangling against her neck. He’d always thought Deidre was pretty hot, even here, a few years older and a little heavier than he remembered. She always looked to Henry like a girl who was just comfortable in her skin, no matter what, a girl who woke up, tossed on whatever was handy, and ran.

He shifted past the empty seats around Deidre and settled on Adrian, tall, slender girl. Scuttlebutt was that it wasn’t all that hard to nail Adrian Parker; she was thirty-six and still working as a waitress, wore short skirts and got drunk frequently. Henry summoned a short fantasy sequence: He appears in her bar, a sad but stoic man who’s wife has recently died. He orders drink after drink and she is solicitous, concerned, her large green eyes fixed on him worriedly. After her shift is over she joins him, listening sympathetically as they do shots, her knee, encased in dark nylons, brushing his. When they get back to her place, it is a mess, and she gets high while he makes himself at home, and she leads him to the bedroom gently, being careful, slow, intense.

He blinked and studied her for a moment. She wasn’t a kid any more, but she still had an innocence about her. She had the largest handbag he’d ever seen clutched to her side, and kicked one leg nervously. She was skinny and didn’t look altogether healthy, but something about the too-thin face and dark bags under her eyes gave her a trashy look he found appealing.

He moved his roaming eye to the wives. There were a lot of wives, these days; a period Henry thought of as wasted time had culminated in a spasm of weddings. At one point, he’d thought people were just marrying whoever happened to be still single, or maybe just marrying for the gifts. When he and Miranda had gotten hitched, it had been a novelty; he’d been one of the first. All he could remember about his own wedding was a numbing amazement that a woman as beautiful as Miranda would agree to marry him. He’d stood in the bathroom at his parents house the morning of the wedding and stared into the mirror, trying to see what she saw in him, what was attractive about him. He hadn’t been able to answer the question, and had spent the whole wedding sweating and staring at his new wife, floating about in a backless wedding gown she somehow managed to make dissolute.

It wasn’t a novelty any more. Everyone was married. This despite the fact that it was patently ridiculous that the men and women he’d gotten drunk with were now joined by matrimony and, god help him, contemplating babies.

He glanced at Susan and Bob, upright citizens dressed in suits, stiff-backed, eyes forward, sitting next to each other but always with a shiver of air between them. Bob was getting chunky and jowly and had taken to better-tailored suits to hide it. Susan was getting plump, too, a tall, big girl who’d always been the tallest girl in her class, who’d always been a little fleshy. Henry had a clear memory of Susan, Bob’s new girlfriend, sitting on his dorm room floor, flushed and sweaty from a run, knees together and hair pulled back in a pony tail. He imagined her that way now: Heavier, older, but still long-legged and gawky, red-cheeked, healthy. He would be spending time over their house a lot—everyone would invite him over, trying to keep him in motion, keep his mind off his dead wife. Bob would be away on buisness, and Susan would come home from a run, fresh, tired, semlling of good sweat and shampoo. They’d begin talking about school, about old times, and they’d admit there’d always been a mutual attraction, a curiosity, and without warning they’d end up on the kitchen floor. He imagined her skin, slimey with sweat, and the way her hair would spill out onto the floor tiles when she released it.

Henry shifted in his seat and crossed his legs to hide the inappropriate erection he’d generated.

Susan suddenly looked up and their eyes locked. Without thinking, henry looked away in instant consternation, and burned in embarrassment. He knew he should have smiled, played it off, been cool. He turned back to the coffin and stared at it again, feeling Susan behind him. He’d always imagined something could have happened with Susan if he’d met her before Bob. Which only made him certain she knew what he’d been thinking.

Miranda’s hand on his shoulder made him jump.

“We’re going out for a smoke, jumpy,” she said as she and Gina stood up.

Henry watched them go, still stunned, after years, at how attractive his wife was. He saw the other men glancing after her, and wondered if she’d ever had an affair. IT must be hard, he thought, to be so desired all the time. It wouldn’t surprise him. He thought suddenly that discovering her in bed with another man would maybe be a good motive for killing her. A crime of passion. He liked that idea: Passion. Getting worked up and swearing and going out with Stan and Bob and getting shitfaced and then claiming the next day that he couldn’t remember a thing. He didn’t know if that would get him out of prison, but he thought it was worth thinking over.

He looked back at the coffin. And thought that Teddy was lucky.

“What’s up, Hicky?” Stanley panted. “Teddy would have been aghast at your unfashionably somber attitude at his funeral.” He glanced at his watch, squinting in the dim light. “Actually, he still has two minutes to make a jolly appearance and save this whole social disaster.”

Stanley had thickened over the years, but he carried it well, like a man born to be fat and enjoying the ride. He walked with a spread-legged posture, giving the impression that every step was effort, that his natural inclination was sitting down—as if he had sharp stones in each shoe. He’d removed his tie upon hitting the night air and suggested to henry that they walk to the diner, since it was a cool, glorious evening.

Henry kicked at a stone. They were walking in the breakdown lane of the highway, cars speeding by every now and then, a sweep of headlights and the roar of an engine, Henry was kneely aware of impending death, and hugged the curb as much as possible.

“I dunno. Call it existential malaise.”

“All right,” Stanley said immediately. “It’s existential malaise. Glad we could clear that up.”

“You know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“Because I don’t even really know what that means.”

“All right,” Stanley said, breathing heavily. “Let’s back up and start by stipulating that something’s up with you, yes? You sat at poor Teddy’s viewing like, well, like you gave a fuck that Ted the Infinitely Wealthy was dead. Which I am pretty sure you don’t.” He looked slantwise at Henry. “Do you?”

Henry shrugged. “He died young.”

Stan nodded. “God rest his eternal soul, which is probably doign good drugs with Jesus in heaven right now. I hope he wasn’t a secret sinner and in hell, because teddy wouldn’t be able to hack hell. Okay, so it’s not Teddy. Like the rest of us, you’re probably too giddy with the thought that you might be in that cocksucker’s will to be depressed about it, yes? Yes. Well.” He raised both eyebrows and spread his arms, palms up, in a gesture familiar to henry, who estimated he’d seen it performed a million times since he’d met Stanley fifteen years before. “Okay, it isn’t the untimely demise of the richest man we knew. Hmmmn. Me? Is it me? Have you found out about something I did to you years ago and covered up?”

Henry didn’t answer right away, but stared at the shards of glass and mysterious gray dust collected on the side of the road for a few steps. Then he looked up suddenly. “What? Uh, no. No. Listen, it’s—”

Stan held up a hand. “Please. The Master is at work and would like to guess.”

“—Miranda. It’s Miranda.”

“And The Master guesses Miranda. Ah.”

They walked in silence for a moment. A green van whipped past them at high speed. Henry tried to inch closer to the side, while maintaining what he hoped was a casual outward attitude.

“I’m disappointed, Hicky,” Stand said with an explosion of breath. “I mean, that’s so obvious. You’ve been married seven years now. Do you realize what a statistic you are now? Seven years in and starting to think you’ve made a terrible mistake? I mean, it’s common.”

“Jesus, Stan.”

Stan put his palms up and shook his head. “I’m not trying to be insulting—”

“It just comes naturally?”

“—but I mean, come on. Next you’re going to tell me you’re banging the checkout girl or something.”

Henry frowned. “What checkout girl?”

“That one, in the supermarket near your house. The tall brunette one, legs like a fucking racehorse. Always wears pink sneakers.”

“Why the hell are you going to the store near my house? You live fifteen minutes away?”

Stan made a whirling gesture with his hand. “Because of the checkout girl, of course. Let it drift. I’m single—I can bang all the checkout girls I can get drunk enough to dig me. You’re married and you tell me that Miranda is why you’re moping about what is likely the social occasion of our year—Teddy’s funeral. This doesn’t surprise me. That woman was born to ruin men. She’s gorgeous, and a shrew. You never had a chance.”

Henry kicked at a stone again. “I don’t even know why she married me. She acts like she’s exasperated with me all the time.”

“She was slumming, that’s why she married you. Thought she wanted a common man, someone to ground her. You were so pure, so honest, so fucking boring, Hicky, that she thought you’d be the anchor to keep her in the darkest depths of the ocean, safely pressurized, keep her from floating up towards the light too fast and exploding.”

Henry looked at Stan’s shoes as they walked. “So basically, I’m boring.”

“Not any more. You were boring. Right now I find you fascinating, because I can tell there’s something you want to get off your chest. Tell Uncle Stan. He can make it all better.”

“I doubt that.”

“Try me. What have you got to lose? If you don’t tell me I’m just going to make something up and truck it around to everyone as true gossip, so you might as well just tell me.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes. Henry waited for Stan to explode back into noise, demanding attention and information, but nothing happened. They plodded along, and three cars had torn by before Henry sucked in a deep breath and spoke again.

“I’ve been thinking, a lot, lately, that I wish I wasn’t married any more.”

A few steps of silence.

“That’s it?” Stan said, turning his head to stare at Henry as they walked. “Jesus, maybe you are that boring. Divorce isn’t anything to bellyache over. You don’t have any money, so no worries there. No kids. A few awkward meetings with lawyers and you can get on with acquring cats and dying alone over decades.”

Henry began shaking his head, watching his shoes moving.

“Now, Miranda, on the other hand,” Stan continued brightly, a smile, “is saucy, and I predict a quick descent into debauchery. Or perhaps I merely imagine it, with a deep level of detail. Doesn’t matter. The details are unimportant, actually, the point is, the divorce’ll go like this: You, in your underwear, drinking cheap beer and crying as you watch pay-per-view pornagraphy; her in a nightgown with a champagne glass, looking hot to trot. There, I just saved you some time and money, not to mention extreme embarrassment. Now let’s go eat some crappy diner food and drink coffee until we’re pissing our pants.”

Henry kept shaking his head. “I can’t divorce Miranda.”

“Damn straight. You’re too frail.”

“No, I mean—there is no such thing as divorce with her. She’d fucking stalk me until my dying day. She wouldn’t even care about keeping us together. It would be the principle of it. That I would dare suggest she wasn’t the most wonderful woman in the world.” He stopped shaking his head and looked up; the neon sign of Pirelli’s diner, blinking drunkenly and soaring up majestically into the night, raised up by decades-gone optimism, was just ahead of them. “No, Stan, I’d have to kill her.”

Having said it out loud, Henry was amazed to discover it did not sound completely ridiculous. He liked the somber way it had emerged, dry and matter-of-fact, without hysteria or self-consciousness. He wanted to say it again, just to experience saying something like that in public.

Stanley laughed. “Let me get this straight, Hicky,” he said, panting slightly. “You’re afraid to initiate legal proceedings against Miranda, but you think you could kill her?”

Henry was still staring up at the ancient, dimmed sign that read PIRELLI’S DINER, FINE FOOD AND DRINK. He shook his head slowly, his eyes fixed on the sign. “Or have her killed.”

“Now you’re hiring desperate underworld types to lure her to a remote location and beat her to death. Henry, I don’t think you’re being honest without yourself, viz-a-vie your ability to plan, commit, and cover-up crimes.”

Henry wasn’t paying attention. he watched the sign bobbing gently in the night as he approached it. It seemed like every step her took had no effect on the distance between him and the sign. As if the distance were infinite, the sign always there, always dilapidated, fading but never completely gone.

He imagined that Stan grew serious, and stopped, and they sat on the crub watching the cars speed by while Stan said “Look here, you’re serious? Okay, here’s how you do it” and sketched out a brilliant, unexpected plan. He imagined they stayed out late, drinking and plotting, and that when he returned home in the morning, scruffy and boozy, he reacted to Miranda’s unhappy remonstrances with grins, calm, and apologies. He imagined waking up the next day, calling in sick from work, and sitting around in his pajamas, eating a leisurely breakfast, drinking coffee with abandon.

Henry looked over at Stan suddenly. “What?”

“I said,” Stan panted with some effort, “all this talk of murdering your wife is making me hungry.”

Henry smiled and looked from Stan’s red face to the Pirelli’s sign. “Me too.”

Henry stared down into his coffee, and thought about killing his wife.

It was funny. He could sometimes go hours without thinking. Just moving mechanically, exercising, everything inside him clicking and whirring in harmonious movement, outwardly responsive and attentive, but inwardly just static, blank space. He would snap out of it suddenly, without warning, and have no memory of the preceding hours aside from a vague impression. Usually it was at work, sitting at his desk. Sometime after his coffee and before lunch, it was as if he were opening his eyes but they were already open, and he’d find his hands moving, his work done, everything as it would have been had he been awake.

Now he stared down into his coffee and couldn’t stop thinking, his mind racing with ideas. He suspected Miranda would be irritated at him—was probably already irritated at him—for staying out late, but he couldn’t bring himself to worry over that. He felt numb, cocooned somehow, impervious to feeling.

Stan sat across from him in the crowded booth. Henry glanced up as he sipped his coffee and studied Stanley, their Chairman, a benevolent figure who hadn’t changed much since school—he was chubby, flushed, and saw humor in everything, his laugh a dry rasp that sounded more like a choke, trailing off into a hissing noise as he shook his head vigoruously, his whole body moving, fingers wiggling, toes tapping, torso shaking. Henry loved to make Stan laugh, and worked hard at it because watching it happen was so entertaining.

Stanley was telling the story of Frank Malarchy to those at the table who didn’t know it.

“Y’all recall how Frank was dating Sheila Rohm up until about six months ago? And yes, the concensus was that he was way out of his league. Sheila’s hot, Frank’s a shlub, this is public domain. For a while though it seemed to work—something about Frank’s slope-shouldered shlubiness seemed to heat Sheila up. My sources tell me for a while there the two were slutting it up all over the place, usually in public.”

“That’s true,” Bob Mellon interrupted, waving his cigarette around. “They did it in the spare room at Teddy’s that weekend we all stayed over—with me and Suze sleeping in the next bed.” He looked around, sucking deeply on the cigarette his wife wouldn’t have allowed him to have. He cocked his head. “Well, not really sleeping, actually. Who could sleep with Sheila making noise like a chipmunk over Frank’s smoker’s gasp?”

Everyone laughed, except Henry.

“Right,” Stan continued. “So anyway it was the luckiest three months of Frank’s lackluster life. She finally wised up a few eeks ago, and dumped him. Something ugly happened between them—no one knows what. We’re working with threads and rumors, and some imagination. All we know is, they both showed up at Teddy’s party last month with chips on their shoulders, out for blood. You guys remember, the night of the storm? Fucking horizontal rain, streets flooded, all that shit? Only the promise of Teddy’s legendary open bar and buffet lured people there.

“Sheila arrived in full-on slut wear, if you recall, already pre-chemicalized by some blessed soul—she was obviously bent on making Frank suffer all night by shaking her tits in his face and then probably having public sex with some random guy to rub it in. Not to be outdone, Frank imbibed enough liquid courage to kill an elephant and began saying terrible things about her.” Stan shook his head, lighting a cigarette. “Terrible, terrible things.”

Henry thought back to that night, and remembered that Sheila, a short, baby-fat blonde with nice curves, had actually talked to him quite a bit. She’d been very, very inebriated, with pupils like pinpricks, and was wearing a cut-off T-shirt and no bra. All he really remembered, he realized, was that she wore no bra and had an outie belly button. He remembered being vaguely aware that she was flirting with him, drinking something clear out of a plastic cup and slurring her words so badly he wasn’t sure what she was saying. He remembered that she’d suggested they go somewhere “and talk” and that, aside from being surprised at her sudden interest in him—even if it was adequately explained by brain-damaging drug abuse—he’d felt Miranda moving around the place like a small sun orbiting him, and resented the fact that he had to move away from her as fast as possible, that he couldn’t even enjoy flirting.

“So around midnight, after consuming lord-knows what with the blessing of Ted the Infinitely Wealthy—may he rest in peace—Sheila decided that enough was enough and she was going to squash Frank like a bug. So she tottered into the living room—the all-white one, you know, with the big round sofa in the middle, and jumped up onto the sofa, miraculously kept her balance, and announced that she had something to say. Now if, say, Bob here had done that, sweaty with shirt tails untucked, no one would have paid any attention. But Sheila was a hottie in a shirt that promised to reveal her tits at some point in the evening, and even the girls were fascinated. So everyone shut up, and fuck if she didn’t launch into a speech entitled ’10 Reasons Frank Malarchy was a Shitty Boyfriend’.”

Bobby had always been fat and his hair was receding from his face, giving the impression that his head was growing, swelling. He’d always worn overlarge, flowing clothing in order to maintain a comfort level despite his heft, and his dark suit looked to henry like a black hole, a huge floating body sucking all light towards it.

“You’re fucking kidding,” Bob said, laughing, his whole face jiggling. I was at that party. Where the fuck was I when this happened?”

Stan nodded. “You were wedged into the fridge trying to reach a sandwich in the back, you fat fuck,” he said without hesitation. Over the wave of genial laughter this incited, he waved a hand and continued. “Anyway, there she is, so high she’s probably not even breathing any more, and she starts publically cutting Frank’s balls off. I mean, at first we all just stared at her as she jumped up and made this announcement and started shouting her list. We just ignored her, politely, you know? And so she starts–Uh-oh, everyone; we’ve lost Henry again.”

Henry looked up and blinked. “Sorry! Sorry.” he said, feeling hot and sweaty. He’d always drifted, his whole life, and his friends laughed at the familiar sight of The Hick lost in thought again.

He’d been constructing an elborate sexual fantasy involving Sheila as he remembered her from that party and himself, and any of the other sundry girlfriends, wives, and single women he knew who happened to stumble into his thoughts, usually besotted and wearing lingerie. He realized that the Henry starring in these fantasies were not actually him, but some sort of UberHenry who could actually cheat on his wife, throw caution to the wind and wreak havoc on his social life, and, of course, actually attract all those women. He wondered if UberHenry actually existed somewhere, in some alternate universe, if there was a version of him sleeping with every woman he’d ever met, whenever he wanted.

He liked the idea. And assumed that UberHenry had met Miranda at some point in their lives, slept with her, and then kept walking.

“And so she starts shouting out her reasons,” Stan continued, his voice raspy. “’TEN!’ she shouts, and then—I swear, I could have married the girl—she pauses for a dramatic moment, and we’re all just starting to pay attention to her. So she says, softer, ‘He’s a lousy lay!’. That got our attention, you bet. She just barrels on. ‘NINE!’ she shouts. ‘He listened in on my phone conversations!’”

“Shit,” Bobby muttered, rubbing a hand over his face.

“You said it,” Stan agreed. “Now suddenly we’re all paying attention and getting into it. It’s not every day you see someone you know publically eviscerated like that. So she holds up another finger, swaying up there on the round couch like she might puke and fall over at any moment, and hits us with numero eight: ‘He reads at what appears to be a third-grade level!’” Stan was lost to a momentary spasm of giggles at the memory, and held up a hand to forestall any argument. “I. . .swear . . to God!”

Bob looked around, his jowls quivering. “I think I did see him moving his lips while reading the paper, once.”

Stan jumped back in, cigarette waving from the corner of his mouth as he waved his hands and struggled for breath. “Okay, okay! So now we’re all into it, and when she starts on number four we all beat her to the punch, so the whole fucking room shouts SEVEN! and people are starting to drift in from other parts of the house. We’ve all been at Teddy’s for hours, soaking him for every penny he’s got, and here’s the best entertainment we’ve had in years. So we’re all shouting, and she starts getting buoyed up by the energy, because we’re all so fucking delighted to be tearing Frank’s heart out like this. So, four, she says ‘He’s one hell of a momma’s boy!”

Bob burst into laughter. Stan stared at him with a half smile on his face, his eyes bright and excited. “I swear,” Stan said into the gale of laughter, “I swear, see, that this is word-for-word what she said. I am not making any of this up.

“So now we’re all shouting the countdown, the whole place, just roaring, and it goes like this.”

Stan took his cigarette out of his mouth and half stood, leaning over the table, arms out. Henry, startled back into the present, thought about what it must be like to be Stanley. Stanley said whatever he wished, and did whatever he wished. He’d never been close to Stan, but he’d spent thousands of hours with the man over fifteen years and he thought he’d learned a few things about him. He wondered if maybe Stan was really the UberStan, and what, exactly, the UberStan did with his time. Gambling? Drinking? Drugs?

“SIX!” Stan mock-shouted, his voice rising into a quavering falsetto. “He pressured me into having sex with him that night at Marios I drank too much and threw up for three hours!

“FIVE! He drinks too much!”

“Jesus!” Bob interjected, and everyone laughed. Henry noticed a second later and joined in without knowing what they were laughing at.

“FOUR! He never took my side against his friends!”

“That’s because we’re always right!” George The Greek said in a cloud of smoke, his light accent thickening with the night.

“Bullshit—none of us were Frank’s friend!” Bob argued, and everyone laughed. Henry was careful to be on time with his guffaw.

“THREE! He dresses like he’s thirteen years old!

“TWO! He makes less money than anyone else in this room!”

“Ouch!” Bob laughed, shaking his head.

Stan was bright red and sweating freely, and Henry thought he looked a bit like Richard Nixon: Sharp, long nose, bags under his eyes, sweaty and shifty. “ONE!” he panted, straightening up. “And this one really killed us all, because it’s so fucking sad. She lowered her voice and said, he always backs down from a fight, because he’s such a fucking coward. And everyone turns, like we’re suddenly collectively psychic—the hundredth monkey in the room or something—and there’s Frank. Already shitfaced, and now he’s fucking terminally humiliated.”

They table grew momentarily somber as the men contemplated such a level of humiliation. George, who chain-smoked, sniffed at his coffee and wrinkled his nose, eternally dissatusfied with the weak, sugary stuff Americans called coffee. Bob drained his own cup and stared sadly into it, always sad when something good was gone. Henry stared at the others in turn, thinking their nicknames as he did so: Peter, The Mystery; Benny, The Outstanding Negro; and Chauvik, The Prince. He thought suddenly that it was ridiculous that they were all grown men and he knew them better as nicknames than people.

He wondered what they were thinking, if they could tell he was sitting there with murder in his heart, if it gave off some sort of radiation that was palpable.

“So Frank starts drinking seriously. And everyone’s helping him. I mean, as entertaining as Sheila’s outburst had been, we all felt a little guilty about having taken part in it and everyone wanted to have a shot with Frank to reestablish good relations, you know? So Frank is so fucked up he’s puking, he’s passing out, he’s crying in the bathroom. Between wishing for death because he’s puking up a lung in Teddy’s bathroom, he’s weeping over his broken heart, and Sheila is either the One that Got Away or a complete she-bitch, depending on how recently Frank’s puked. He mercifully passed out around two in the morning, and by then everyone was fucking bunking down. I mean, it was howling outside. Horizontal rain, lightning, shit, no one was going home. Poor Ted had fifty people to put up, most of whom were drunk as hell and rowdy. Some time about three in the morning, as best we can figure, Frank wakes up, goes outside in his bare feet and no jacket, gets in his old beater of a Nova, and tries to drive home.”

There were whistles all around, appreciative of the risk Frank had taken. Henry recalled that Saturday night, he remembered not being able to sleep, Miranda snoring softly next to him in the bed. When it had become apparent that no one would be wise to drive home that evening, she’d found a spare bedroom upstairs in Teddy’s Party House—a modest townhouse he used mainly to host parties—and claimed it as their own. It had smelled dusty and damp, but had sported a bed frame with a mattress, and with their coats as blankets it wasn’t too bad. He’d lain awake anyway, heart pounding from too much booze and cigarettes, cadged without Miranda’s approval, and stared out the window at the awesome amount of rain being dumped everywhere.

“Fucking moron’s blitzed and the roads are flooded. He gets down onto Route One and right around that big traffic circle he hits an ocean of water, floods his engine, and stalls right there. Moron promptly passes out, sitting there in the middle of Lake Highway.”

“Fucking Frank, man!” Chauvik, plump and tan, said loudly, waving his manicured hands in fluttering half-circles, “He’s so fucking stupid! Just pass out, sleep it off!” He laughed a little nervously.

Henry silently disagreed, and marveled at the pristine condition of Chauvik’s fingernails, which gleamed perfectly. He understood the urge to just get away, the claustrophobic feeling that closed in when you’d been humiliated. Chauvik, he knew, had often been humiliated in public, so it surprised Henry that he didn’t understand this.

“Anyway,” Stan said, glancing down at his hands as he transferred some ash from his cigarette to the ashtray. “While all this is going on, while we’re all fucking sleeping in Teddy’s house, somebody is robbing ATMs downtown, driving a stolen BMW. Stole, what, seventy-five thousand dollars or something? Seventy-five, eighty grand in the trunk, and what does this Nobel Laureate do too? That’s right, drives into Lake Highway right behind Frank, except the stupid motherfucker does it at like eighty miles per hours, spins out, slams into the divder—and here’s where stories differ.”

Henry marveled at the way everyone hung on Stan’s words. He knew Bobby and George had been there, and he thought most of them had already heard the story, at least. Yet they stared at Stan and listened attentively. He’d seen the girls do it too, the easy way Stan opened his mouth and made them laugh, made them interested. He wondered if Stanley had had any affairs with the girls he knew. He wondered, for a moment, if Stanley and Miranda had ever been more than unhappy acquaintances, if maybe—the horrible thought flooded him with a warm wave of adrenaline—their antipathy was feigned, if maybe Miranda spent happy hours listening to Stan, secretly, and acted like she hated him in order to throw him off.

Henry stared down into his coffee and stirred it listlessly.

“What everyone agrees on,” Stan continued, “is that Frank showed up at the Congress Street police station several hours later, drenched and hungover, and reported that his car was stalled in the middle of the higway, and that a black BMW had crashed nearby and the driver appeared to be dead. When the police arrived, they found both cars, identified the black BMW as the vehicle used in the ATM thefts, pronounced the driver dead, and immediately began to wonder where in fuck the seventy-five grand was.”

“Now wait a sec,” Bobby said, clearing his throat in a phlegmy way that Henry associated with fat people. “Do we really think Frank Malarchy stole seventy-five grand?”

“Why not!” Chauvik said excitedly. “Why not!”

“Wait a second!” Bobby protested, leaning forward over his coffee. “Do we really believe that stupid fuck wakes up, still half-shitfaced, sloshes through the lake of water during a terrible storm, finds a dead guy in a crashed car, somehow decides to search the goddamn car, finds seventy-five grand in loose bills—fucking heavy, my friends—walks it home through the storm, and isn’t seen by anybody, then walks all the way back, and isn’t seen again? Let’s all take a moment and picture Frank in our minds. Is that man this type of hero?”

“No one saw him, this is true,” George said in his ponderous, thick English. “And no one has been able to find the money.”

“That’s the story, anyway,” Stan said, leaning back and waving genially at the waitress. “Our Frank’s either a sad, alcoholic loser, or a criminal genius. From what I hear the cops have had a guy following him around for weeks.”

Henry considered seventy-five thousand dollars. It wouldn’t change his life. He sat and stirred his coffee fitfully and calculated how long he could live off of seventy-five grand. He posited a scenario wherein he murdered Miranda and got a life-insurance payout or something similar, or seventy-five thousnad dollars after taxes. Even assuming he moved to a cheaper, smaller apartment—maybe even to a cheaper, smaller place to live, to avoid the sort of endless speculation he saw Frank afflicted with, the did-he or didn’t-he bullshit—he didn’t think seventy-five grand would last him more than a year or two. At best. He saw himself driving cross-country, a simple bag of clothes and possesions, a few dogeared books, and a sack full of cash, augmented slightly, perhaps, by the sale of everything he owned and the liquidation of a few accounts. He’d be mysterious, sticking to back roads and staying in local hotels, the sad young man who kept to himself, tipped well, and paid in cash for everything. And who carried a gun. Henry thought he would definitely need to carry a gun, with tens of thousands of dollars in a bag next to him in the car.

The key, of course, would be to not let anyone see the cash. No one would try to steal what they didn’t know was there.

He found this idea interesting, and kept the fantasy going, seeing himself moving in and out of America’s forgotten small towns, exciting interest. Saw himself sitting at a bar drinking bourbon after bourbon, and the sad, good-looking waitress would keep trying to get him to talk, and he’d just smile sadly and answer evasively.

Hnery liked this image so much he kept toying with it, adding details and expanding the cast of characters, until he suddenly realized that his name was being repeated.

“Hank…Hank….Hank…” Stan was saying, and everyone was staring at him, smiling. “Ah, he’s back again, kids!”

“Sorry,” Henry said, hurriedly sipping his coffee. It had gone cold and he fought a grimace as he choked it down. The whole table laughed.

“I swear,” Bobby said, grinning widely, “Sometimes we could all just get up and leave and Henry would just sit there, staring.”

“He’s borderline autistic,” Stan reminded everyone sagely. “I diagnosed him myself back in school, after that time he sat staring at a fly for a fucking hour in the cafeteria.”

Internally, Henry grimaced. he’d been known as The Fly for weeks after that, and it had threatened to become his permenant nickname.

“I remember that!” Chauvik said loudly, waving his hands. “I remember we were all sitting at the next table, watching him, and you were like, Don’t go, Mr. Fly, you are my only friend! Ha ha!”

Henry blinked stupidly in shock at the fact that he was being made fun of by Chauvik, who had long held the title of Most Easily Abused. He fell back on the only defense he could think of. He extended his middle finger, in general, towards them. Bobby made a face and an ominous moaning sound, and everyone laughed and returned to the conversation.

Henry started stirring his coffee again, unnoticed, and imagined what sort of new friends he’d make, in his new life.

II

Miranda stared at the back of Henry’s head, and thought about what a bitch Gina was.

God, the woman could prattle on and on. Miranda didn’t know why Gina thought she had anything to say, all the woman did was whore around and gossip about everyone. And take care of that little rat-dog of hers that she carried around in her purse all the time, bringing it into the least appropriate places. Miranda couldn’t imagine what spark of propriety had convinced the whore to leave the rat-dog at home tonight—she’d fully expected Ted’s wake to be graced by that shivering, yelping rodent.

Still, she made a point of talking with Gina at every social occasion ruined by her presence, because Gina was a whore. A whore with a great body. She’d watched Gina make her way through just about every man in the room, over the years, and made it her business to monitor the whore’s activities at every social occasion. She didn’t imagine that Henry offered some sort of irresistable target—she knew Henry was tiresomely resistable—but Gina’s steady burrowing through the beds of every man in her immediate social circle made Miranda think that attraction, charm, sex appeal didn’t matter—it was just a reflex, a habit. She more or less thought Gina might seduce Henry simply because he was there.

Miranda had always been able to feign interest and engagement in a conversation while paying little if any attention to it. She let her mind roam around a mental picture of the room while keep them physically on Gina or Henry’s neck, absorbing keywords from Gina’s endless stream of prattle and sorting them into a coherent string that gave her a basic map of the conversation.Which was pretty much always the same: A ridiculous sexual encounter, angry screeds against whatever unlucky people she’d come across recently, and gossip about all their mutual acquaintances, viscious and meanspirited, which Miranda was supposed to assume was never turned around against her, no, certainly not, not the moment she walked out of the room and her warmed seat was taken by another woman, Gina’s small, dark eyes barely lifting off Miranda’s retreating backside before she smiled cruelly at her new partner and sank her teeth in.

Miranda had no illusions.

Gina was buried deeply in a long anecdote about a coworker she’d had an affair with a year before, and a bad situation he’d gotten into on the job—her expression gleefull, her satisfaction at his problems almost palpable. She climbed out of it inch by inch, giving so much detail Miranda stopped paying close attention, confident she knew the basic story, which was that he was an asshole and the worst mistake of Gina’s life and she’d thought he was okay but he turned into such a prick when they’d broken up and now Gina hoped he died and suffered and went to hell eternally.

Poor Teddy, she thought. She’d had a bit of affection for Ted, though she’d never admitted it. Privately she hadn’t been sure whether her sympathy for him was simply a byproduct of the dazzle of his money. The dazzle was hard to squint through. He’d been like a bright light moving through the room, or more like a man enveloped in brilliance, slowly shrinking and burning up, hidden from view. But he’d been funny, she thought. Teddy had been reliably entertaining, every time she’d seen him. He viewed money as something to be spent, and she agreed completely. Money should be spent. Enjoyed. She always liked it when reading about some famous person from the past who had made fortunes and spent them all, in succession, people who had made several fortunes, and enjoyed spending them, and then set about building more fortunes. That was the way to deal with money. Money was just bits of paper that gave you permission to do things—youo wanted a soda, money gave you permission to have one. You wanted a yacht, money gave you permission to have one. It was that simple.

Her eyes flicked back to Henry’s neck, shaved red by the barber. Henry treated money like a limited supply of oxygen, and watched every dollar bill leave his wallet with mute horror. He was the sort of person who, left unattended, died one day alone known as the crazy guy down the street who fed the pigeons every day, and when they finally hauled his body from the stuffy house they would find hundreds of thousands of dollars stuffed away here and there, hidden bank accounts, jars of fucking pennies. He’d be a secret millionaire if she let him. Sometimes she forced him to spend money just to remind him of how silly he was.

Secret Millionaire reminded her of Frank Malarchy. She bent her ear to Gina and laughed slightly at whatever it was that Gina had said. Gina telegraphed anything she thought was amusing by braying whorish laughter loudly, so Miranda didn’t need to pay attention for jokes—she just listened for the tell-tale snort that preceded every burst of laughter from the woman, and chuckled in a noncommital way. Frank had always had a thing for her, Miranda knew, and had been trying to get her into bed for years. She’d never done anything with him, but it had been fun to flirt, to play the game, to make him think there might be a time when she’d give in. They’d had a lot of fun running down Henry together. At every endless party Teddy threw, or every boring after-work cocktail hour she’d had to endure with Henry and his loud, snotty college pals and their slutty wives and girlfriends, she and Frank had always found themselves alone somewhere, by the jukebox, at the bar, tucked in a booth somewhere, sharing a cigarette and making fun of her husband. And Frank would put his hand on her knee and lean in to whisper something crude and exciting in her ear—usually a simple but effective variation on I want to fuck you—and she’d wait a beat or two to register her disapproval. She didn’t think she would ever have let Frank do anything, Frank being vaguely employed and only moderately charming, but it was always fun to play at it. She wondered if Frank, the Secret Millionaire, was ever coming back. She didn’t understand his consternation about it—if he had stolen the stolen money, it would be pretty cool.

Henry’s social circle, always limited, was now sadly depleted of anyone Miranda found even remotely interesting. Teddy was dead, and Frank was MIA, leaving her with Stanley, who hated her and took few pains to hide it, Bobby, who was fat, and the Indian guy and the Greek guy. Miranda was not predjudiced, but something about The Greek and the Indian just drove her crazy. The Greek smoked like a fucking chimney, and was never happy with anything in restaurants unless they were Greek restaurants, and spent the whole meal complaining that the Greek version of everything—the coffee, the cigarettes, everything—was better. The Indian laughed at everything and used his hands too much, and stared at her tits as if he were invisible and she couldn’t see him. She imagined the Indian guy hiding in her closets, sometimes, watching her, and it creeped her out.

She knew their names, but she purposely forgot them unless the information was immediately needed.

So, pickings were slim with Henry’s group, who were basically just a bunch of tired old frat boys who’d never joined a frat. Ted and Frank had supplied whatever spark had been available.xxxx She saw nothing but endless, desultory evenings making conversation with Gina and the other dimwits these guys had managed to attract to their sputtering flame. She thought she might have to do something about the situation, make some new friends for her and Henry. She’d allowed this to go on too long. They needed some couple friends, couple friends who were not Bobby and Susan. Bobby was too fat, and his softly jiggling jowls always distracted and disgusted her. She always found herself pondering his crotch, wondering what it was like to reach down there, under those folds of flesh, and grab him, how Suse managed to fuck him without puking every night. Bobby was nice enough, but they always seemed to be going out to dinner when they saw Bobby, and watching him eat made Miranda want to hide in the bathroom. She imagined the food, not even chewed or digested, but whole, like in cartoons, flowing through him and depositing itself into his body—a ham in his thigh, a steak into one ass cheek. It upset her.

Stan appeared next to Henry. Miranda blinked. He’d appeared in a blink, one moment not there, floating behind her somewhere, and the next he was there, ignoring her rudely and talking to Henry. She struggled to listen to the men’s conversation and Gina’s prattling simultaneously. Then Stan was twisting around to face her. Said something about the men—as if there were any representatives of that endangered species nearby—going out for coffee and conversation. All the while pushing his greasy hair out of his face and leering at her and Gina openly, rudely.

“Sorry to interrupt—hey Gina—but it’s okay with you if Hank stops off for some coffee with the men afterward, right?” He smiled directly into Gina’s breasts.”We’re going to remember Teddy and tell some emabrrassing stories about everyone that tangentially involve Teddy. Old school chums and all that.”

Miranda glanced at Gina, and was appalled to find her grinning happily at the moron. Probably contemplating humping him in the bathroom, she thought, and let her mind wander as the two exchanged flirtations. Stan wasn’t a bad-looking man, she reflected, excpet for his bizarre penchant for long hair and the fact that he had a bulky, not-exactly-fat body that always bunched up underneath his clothes in an uncomfortable-looking way. With a weekend of grooming and shopping, she thought it entirely possible he could be made into something attractive. Although, she reflected, his tongue would have to be cut out.

She realized that Stan had spoken to her. She smiled at them, knowing the affect of her smile on most men. “Jesus, Stan, Hank can do what he wants,” she said patiently. Henry was always acting like she cracked the whip on him. She thought it was probably wishful thinking, since Henry usually needed a kick in the ass to do anything—he would sit and stare at the same spot for hours if uninspired. She thought Henry would probably want nothing more than a firm hand to take charge and point him at things. She didn’t have time for that. She’d grown accustomed to being able to leave Henry alone for long periods and find him exactly where she’d left him, absorbed in something, distant and thoughtful. If he ever started moving about randomly, she’d worry, and it was comforting to think of her Henry as always there, reliable.

That was what had attracted her to Henry in the first place. As opposed to most of the boys around her, and almost every boy around him, Henry was the sort of guy who did what he said he would. Granted, he said he’d do precious few things, but at least if he said he was going to be somewhere, there he was. If he said he was going to do something, he did it. There was no recklessness with him, no motherfuckery.

Motherfuckery. She liked the word, suddenly popping into her head. An old girlfriend of hers used to use it all the time, used to talk about ‘the general aura of motherfuckery’. Miranda resolved to find a way to start using the word out loud.

Gina leaned in and began whispering about Stan, what promised to Miranda’s trained ear to be a lengthy treatise on his fuckability. Gina tended to rank every man she met on an ever-lenghtening scale of fuckability, with zero being only under very odd circumstances and 10 being right here, on the floor, in public. There was no man on Earth, Miranda thought, who would rank so low that Gina couldn’t think of any circumstance where she would fuck him. Every man had his moment, with Gina, and the only variable was whether he would be within fucking distance of Gina when that moment came.

Miranda listened with one ear, studying the necks of the men sitting in front of her, whispering.Henry’s was clean and groomed, a simple square cut. He went to the barber weekly, emerging just fractionally different, subtly improved each time. Stanley’s neck, on the other hand, was hidden by his girlish hair. She hated long hair on men. Stanley had been sporting the same mullet since college, if photos and reports were to be believed, and while she normally would have found that admirable she disapproved of the style he’d decided to be consistent with, which negated any points he got for consistency.

Gina took a breath and paused. “Let’s go have a smoke.”

Miranda considered. She was once again trying to quit and thought she might have enough medicinal nicotine in her system to be poisonous, but thought the chances she would die at Teddy’s wake pretty slim. “Fine.” With a quick word to her husband, she followed the other woman out of their aisle.

As they passed people seated in the uncomfortable chairs, she stole glances at everyone. Bobby and Suse, looking sober and decent, if fat and jowly. Deidre, who’d finally ditched the Other Henry, whose aura of motherfuckery had been huge, sat looking distant and bored. Miranda thought Deidre was just gorgeous, but the girl didn’t know how to present herself. She was gorgeous, but she wore this drab dress, her hair a mess on her head like a nest, no makeup, looking tired. Miranda quickly looked away, never sure if Deidre was in a good mood or not, and Deidre’s bad moods frightened her.

Passing by Adrian Parker, she didn’t look at the woman. Adrian Parker, she hated.

Out in the parking lot, the air was cool and sharp, slicing through her sweater and hardening her nipples. Gina shook out a cigarette and lit it for her, and they stood for a moment with their arms wrapped around each other, staring out at the cars, shivering.

“I can’t believe Ted’s gone,” Gina sighed, smoke billowing out of her.

Miranda pondered the sudden question in her heart of whether Gina and Ted had ever slept together. Putting aside her confidence that Gina had slept with just about everybody, the thought disturbed her because she’d always viewed Teddy as a sexless wonder. The idea that the cheerful, fat, moon-faced man she’d known might actually have sexual organs bothered her, and she put the idea out of her mind as quickly as she could. She sucked in Menthol smoke and waited to see what Gina would say. Miranda didn’t like to speak first. She preferred finding out what was on other people’s minds.

“You don’t worry about Hank getting into trouble with the boys?” Gina said simply, smiling. “Maybe they’ll go raise some hell?”

Miranda smiled. “I never worry about Hank,” she said. It was true, she thought. Hank was a rock. She felt like she could leave Hank sitting in a room staring at a fixed point for hours, come back and find him exactly where she’d left him, blinking dimly in the sudden light of her appearance. He had never, forced her to wonder where he was or what he was up to.

“I don’t know,” Gina wondered out loud. “Those guys can sometimes get a little crazy.”

Miranda wanted to ask what that meant, that word, crazy. Her mind balked at imagining Stan, with his greasy long hair, or Bobby, with hams where his legs should be, doing anything crazy.

“What does crazy mean? Hookers? Drugs?”

Gina laughed. “Sure. I don’t know.”

The thought disturbed Miranda, and she wondered if she should take a firmer hand in Hank’s social life and the amount of time he spent with Stan, who was worthless, but whom she’d assumed to be harmless. Suddenly, Stan’s grin took on a sinister cast in her memories, a leer mocking her and her innocent assumptions about her husband, who, it suddenly seemed entirely possible, was probably spending all his evenings screwing all sorts of tail, from stewardesses in Norwegian threesomes to check-out girls at the supermarket, all while Stan and his other friends stood around in a circle, slapping and hooting and giving each other smug, secretive looks, communicating their anti-Miranda conspiracy.

The image was so clear, for a moment, she could amost hear the clapping, the chanted encouragement, as Henry deflowered the checkout girl, probably right there in the supermarket where she shoppeed, right there on the checkout counter, on the rubber conveyer belt.

As quickly as the paranoid vision appeared, she dismissed it with a twitch of her head. “Not Henry,” she said. “It sounds boring—and he is boring, a little—but he would never do anything like that.”

Gina nodded. “’Cause he loves you.”

Miranda shook her head, grinning. “Because he’s lazy.”

She did believe that Henry was fundamentally good, that he would never hurt her or betray her. But she also knew her insurance policy against Stan and his fellows was the simple fact that anything which required effort Henry shunned carefully. He was so protective of his time, she thought the idea of him having any sort of extramarital affair was just ridiculous.

“Well, anyway,” Gina said, flicking her cigarette out into the parking lot, “It’s not fiar, is it? We assume the boys are out having goddamn orgies, because they probably are, but no one is gonna assume we’re out having orgies, are they? Because we don’t.”

“This is a bad thing?”

“Sure,” Gina said, nodding absently as she searched for her pack of cigarettes, a skinny woman with no chest and buck teeth—not the least attractive woman Miranda knew, but certainly in the middle of the pack. “Doesn’t it irritate you that we assume the boys are out having the time of their lives, while we assume we’re all home knitting or some such bullshit? It’s like men have permission to fuck around.”

“Bullshit,” Miranda said immediately, irritated with herself for putting herself in the position of being trapped, alone, with Gina. “I’d personally cut Henry;s balls off if he cheated on me. No hesitation.”

“Sure,” Gina said, finding her new cigarette and holding it up as if it somehow proved her point. “But don’t you see, that’s what sucks: We have to spend our time thinking and plotting revenge before the fact, we have to always be ready for the disaster. Men don’t. They go out, get drunk in strip clubs, and come home smelling of perfume, but they know we’re gonna be there, waiting. Pissed off, but waiting.”

Miranda decided not to bring up Gina’s comliant role in encouraging the men of their little social group. She felt tired, suddenly. Too many nights spent with the same people, she concluded. Birthday dinners, movies, cocktails, abllgames—always with the same people, just rotated in and out of seats.

She needed some new friends, she resolved with sudden inspiration. And Henry was coming along for the ride, because he needed new friends too, even if he didn’t realize it.

The door behind them opened, warm deadly air seeping out, carrying Stan and Bobby out with it like flotsam.

“Women!” Stan said cheerfully. “With cigarettes! This must be heaven.”

While he waited politely to be offered a cigarette, Miranda looked him up and down. “Don’t you think that’s in poor taste?”

“Isn’t it mysterious,” Stan said by way of response, thrusting his hands into his pockets and pacing slowly around them, “that Ted the Infinitely Wealthy apparently had no family? We’re the only people here. There’s not a blood relative in the room. Me and The Hick had to make all the goddamn arrangements.”

Gina frowned. “Who’s the executor of his estate?”

“Who knows? None of us were contacted by anyone. For all we know Teddy kept his money in a big pile in the basement, using a wheelbarrow to cart mounds of cash off when he needed to buy something. We should organize a search party of the properties, see what we can find.”

“Shit, it’d take us years to go through all the square footage that rich bastard had,” Bobby complained, accepting Gina’s cigarette with a nod. “We’d have to organize several teams and spend decades ripping through the places.”

“I’m actually considering it,” Stan said, staring out into the sea of cars. “I’ve got nothing to lose. And I’m broke.” He eyed Miranda’s cigarette as she lifted it to her mouth and inhaled. “Can I bum a smoke?”

Miranda smiled and let smoke leak out of her nose. “Sure.” She rummaged through her purse for her pack, aware that Stan was ogling her. Being ogled by Stan had become a familiar sensation. She imagined she could actually feel the photons bouncing from his eyes onto her chest, a whispery touch against her nipples. She handed the pack over and he winked, completely unashamed, and Miranda tried very hard to be annoyed with him.

“Imagine you’re right,” Bobby said. “Imagine there’s a suitcase full of cash or something. Imagine we didn’t go searching his house. Houses.”

“Enough,” Miranda said. “He’s dead. Have some respect.”

Stan held his cigarette in an oddly effeminate manner, pinched delicately between two fingers. “Why? Teddy didn’t respect his own life. He’s dead at thirty-three for a reason, Mir. He treated his vascular system like a treat-delivery mechanism, and something gave.”

Bobby nodded. “He had the body of an eighty-year-old man.”

“Just have some outward respect, then,” Miranda complained, flicking her cigarette into the night.

“Yes’m,” Stan said, tipping an invisible hat.

Gina followed Miranda back inside. “You sure you trust Henry with those guys?” Gina said. “They’re fun and all, but don’t you get the feeling they’re plotting evil out there?”

Miranda laughed. “Plotting? Sure. Capable of it? Nah. Besides, I love Henry. I know he’d never hurt me.”

III

The foyer was dusty and strangely crowded with furniture, as if someone had randomly purchased unmatched pieces and crammed them into the small space without concern for their size or appropriateness. The walls were of dark wood, and small square panes of glass in the door offered the only light into the room, a weak gray mist of artificial light that hovered near the glass and did not seem to touch anything. A huge wooden secretary filled one wall, and piles of mail, all unopened, covered it like square mold growing upwards.

The sound of keys in the lock scattered the dust like sparrows. When the door opened, it’s hinges squealed softly, subliminal noise. The weak yellow light from the hall outside didn’t seem to increase or penetrate any further as the door opened. Only the rectangle of light increased, then disappeared as two men filled it.

“This,” Henry said dispiritedly, “is one of your worst ideas ever.”

“Nonsense,” Stan said, tossing the keys onto the nearest pile of mail and stepping into the foyer decisively. “Ted appeared to me as a ghost last night after the wake and told me to come here. I suspect we’ll find him hovering in one of the bathrooms.”

“I suspect you’re going to try and steal the brass fixtures in the bathrooms,” Henry said unhappily.

“And what if I do? Teddy won’t be using them any time soon. Now, come on. You said you need to meet in a private place to chat. Let’s raid the dead man’s liquor and chat.”

Henry glumly followed Stan deeper into the apartment, hands in pockets, head down, watching his feet. “I was thinking a bar neither of us had ever been to, actually. Someplace with cold beer and dim lighting.”

“Well,” Stand called out from some future room ahead of Henry, his voice echoing stonily, “I can offer you warm Scotch and almost complete darkness. Close enough? Come in and tell Stanley what’s bothering you. He promises to be discreet.”

Henry considered Stanley and could nothing about his experience with him that would hint at any type of discretion. But there was no one else, he didn’t think, he could broach such a subject with. No one else would take him seriously.

Teddy’s apartment felt sealed off from air to Henry, the air recycled and stale. Dust was everywhere. Teddy had treated his many apartments, condos, and hotel suites as safe houses, staying at one for a few weeks and then abandoning it for another, for no perceivable reason. Bobby had once suggested that Teddy simply left when a home needed cleaning, when his stink had settled into everything, when he’d managed to puke in every room again, that he decamped mainly so professional cleaners could move in like an army and scour the place. Henry had to admit this was a possibility, as Teddy was famous for shitting where he ate and could certainly afford it.

The narrow hallway opened up into a large, high-ceilinged room, all dark wood and a cold marble floor. His footsteps echoed as he entered, a hollow noise; there was no furniture in the room aside from a large wet bar at the far end, where Stan was busying himself.

“I figure, if there’s anywhere that Teddy might have some cash stashed, it’d be here. He always treated this place like his home base, you know? This is where he always did business.”

Henry accepted a warm glass of Scotch, raised it to his nose, and inhaled the aroma. Good Scotch always made him feel young, immature, like he was faking it. His clothes suddenly felt too big and he thought better of everything he’d planned to say to Stanley, who knocked back a healthy shot with a wince and immediately refilled his glass. Breathing heavily, he picked it up and swung around to face Henry.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

Henry considered. He sipped his drink, pleasantly surprised at how good it was—Tedy had cash, but no sense—and entertained doubts about telling Stanley anything.

Stanley began wandering the empty room with his drink. “No? Change of heart?” he spun around as he walked. “Perhaps you just need a drink to stiffen your resolve, though I guess it’s only fair to warn you that if this is about your unresolved homosexual crush on me, I am not interested. At least not at the moment.” He waggled his glass. “Maybe after a few more of these.”

Henry smiled around his glass. Stanley had always been able to drink a shocking amount of liquor without any outward signs. He sometimes seemed to just pop up out of bed the next day with no ill effects either, even when everyone else was green. He’d lived with Stanley for a year back in school, and he knew why they were really at Teddy’s abandoned townhouse: So Stanley could snoop around.

Henry had always felt like a junior member of the group, especially back in school, and when Stanley had asked him if he’d like to move into an off-campus apartment, Henry had passed through several stages: Dellight, fear, suspicion, and then a constant level of minor annoyance once he was actually living with him. Stanley had already burned through every other friend he had because he liked to snoop, and all his other friends had spent a few months under the same roof watching in disbelief as Stanley went through their wallets, their papers, their mail, and, once or twice, their pockets. Henry recalled waking up one morning to find Stanley, in soiled terrycloth robe, coffee in hand, merrily reading some letters he’d bundled together and hidden in his desk drawer. Stanley had evinced no shame or worry at being caught, and had presented Henry with the watertight defense that if he’d been doing something wrong, he wouldn’t be doing it right in front of him with no effort at all to conceal his activities.

Henry recalled being swayed by this argument, incredible as it seemed to him now.

So he’d known that Stanley was coming to Teddy’s place in order to seek out personal papers and spend a few delighted hours going through secrets. He’d jumped on the opportunity because it was guaranteed to be a time he’d have Stanley alone. Now that he was there, drinking a dead man’s booze and breathing a dead man’s air, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.

“Take your time, Hicky,” Stan said, wandering off. “I’m going to explore.”

Henry let him wander and stood for a moment with his drink in hand. He remembered the apartment vaguely; it had been off Teddy’s hard rotation for a long time, for some reason, and he hadn’t thrown any parties in it for at least a year. Teddy’s approach to parties had been to purchase huge gobs of liquor and food, leave it randomly seeded throughout his abode, and let the guests fend for themselves. He’d never had a staff or hired a caterer; every party had resembled parties from school, just replacing the kegs of beer with expensive wines and liquors and the bargain-bin chips with foie gras and shrimp cocktails. While people wandered the place searching for fresh bottles and untended grub, Teddy would be free to wander as well, performing only the glad-handing part of hosting, which was the only part he enjoyed. Whenever anyone suggested he might want to pay more attention to his guests, Teddy usually suggested they throw their own parties.

Henry thought the empty place resembled Teddy perfectly, and the thought made him sad. Despite being Infinitely Wealthy, he doubted Teddy had more than a handful of possesions, and couldn’t think of a single one. Teddy had a lot of homes, a bunch of cars, and spent money freely, but he had never actually owned much stuff. Henry thought of his house, bought three years before and still twenty-seven years away from actually being his; in his mind’s eye, it seemed packed full of useless crap collected over the years. There were blank brown boxes all over the place that contained mysteries, things he’d packed up one day and hidden away in the spirit of organizing, promptly forgotten, and now figured he could probably gather them all up and toss them in the garbage without investigation and never miss anything in them. But if he opened them, first, of course, he’d miss everything within them, terribly.

Henry considered this to be unfair. He circled the room in a slow daze, feeling morose, finally settling near a wall where a window, he felt strongly, should be. There were no windows in the room, but he felt that one should be in this wall, looking down on traffic, little people scurrying around, the weather framed for his enjoyment safe beyond thick glass.

“Jesus!” Stan boomed, entering the room from a different door. “I’m fucking outraged. The place is empty! Hey, Hick! Don’t zone out on me now!”

Henry turned slowly, long ago practiced at not being baited. Miranda teased him all the time about how he got lost in thought, standing in place, ignoring people even when they called out to him. He remembered when they’d first started dating, Miranda had always treated his reveries as cute, adorable. He’d wake from one, a cold cup of coffee in one hand, an open window in her apartment before him, the sun warm on him, and a lengthy consideration of a series of stray thoughts behind him, and turn to find her on the couch, studying him. And she’d smile at him and say “That was a long Think, huh?” and he’d smile shyly back and apologize, and she’d say “Don’t apologize, you’re a genius. Geniuses need to think.”

He didn’t know when it had changed. It had been subtle. He was saddened to think that she no longer had faith in his genius, and thus no longer tolerated his Thinks, especially since the only explanation he could come up with was that she’d at some point suspected his genius would lead to an invention or process that would make them very rich. He had no idea how else to explain how she’d once thought his lengthy reveries a sign of genius and now seemed to consider them a sign of brain damage.

Stanley looked around the room as if just noticing for the first time that there was no furniture. Without any fuss he sat down cross-legged on the floor and set his gleaming glass of booze in front of him. “Well,” he said. “Since my fortune-hunting appears to be stymied, why not tell me what you wanted to talk about? We’re alone here, and you have my undivided attention.”

Henry was amused by the literal-interpetation of this Stanley employed, leaning forward to rest his chin on laced fingers, eyes fixed on Henry.

He hesitated, finally deciding that with Stanley, there was nothing to lose. “I have this crazy idea.”

“Excellent,” Stanley said immediately, and then leaned forward again expectantly.

“I think I want to kill my wife.”

Stanley didn’t move for a moment. “Murder,” he said slowly. “You want to murder your wife. Don’t mince words. Why?”

Henry immediately felt better. It was just talk, after all, and Stanley had been the right person to vent it on. Stanley was crazy enough to take it just a bit seriously, and would end up making Henry feel ridiculous about it, he thought, which would work out or the best. “Why?” he laughed, heart racing.

Stanley shrugged his eyebrows and spread his hands before him. “Do you hate her? Has she done something terrible to you? If so, shame on you for not telling me before. I thought we were compadres.”

Henry took a step to his left and paused, then another step, gradually working into a gentle cycle of pacing. “Hate? No, I don’t hate her. It’s like I was saying to you yesterday: I need to get away from her, but I can’t divorce her. She’d ruin me.”

“No divorce, check. So you’ve explored all the other options and decided to murder her. Hmmph.”

Henry faltered. Stanley’s tone was difficult to read, and he began to be afraid that he’d offended some obscure Rule of Polite Society that Stanley observed.

He sipped his drink deeply and began to pace, one hand in his pocket. “Stan, let me tell you a story.”

They’d only been married a year. It still didn’t seem like they were married; nothing had changed except he was expected to wear a ring on his hand every day. It was all dates, wine and movies and watching her glide across restaurant floors in her knee-length skirts and hair up in a complex bun, looking like she smelled good. They still fucked regularly, and he still experienced a thrill of possessive amazement when she stripped down to her thong underwear—he got to sleep with this beautiful creature. He got to touch her any way he wanted. It still stunned him.

They’d gone out with some of her coworkers one night, a casual after-work cocktail hour. He remembered Miranda had been gorgeous, in one of her sassy moods, dancing around with a martini in her hand and whispering naughty things into his ear, and he’s felt expansive and lucky, a man of the world, a man with a grogeous piece of ass for a wife, a man completely in sync with his better half. After a few Scothc-in-sodas the feeling increased. He watched her chatting with her friends proudly, buzzing with confidence that this woman was going to walk into old age with him and make it a lot more enjoyable.

When one of the secretaries, a giggly young girl named Candace, had appeared before him with a colorful cocktail in one hand and a long cigarette in the other, rosy-cheeked and bursting out of her blouse, he regarded her with amusement and no interest beyond a professional male assessment of her tits. He felt secure in his relationship with Miranda, worldly, willing to let this girl buffet him with her flirty eyes and short skirt—why not? He and his wife were the Super Couple, ready to take on all comers. He chatted with her. He bought her a drink. He was amazed that she thought her little-girl act was going to have any affect on him, and when he looked up and found Miranda’s eyes on him, he winked cheerfully, sharing the joke with his wife. Or so he thought.

The startling part of it, of course, was that Miranda continued to act perfectly normal—his hot, smart wife—the whole evening. She was a smiling, joking, ass-wiggling dynamo. Up until they said their goodnights and walked out into the bracing chill of the night.

Even then, he’d been already attuned enough to her to realize within seconds that his entire perception of the evening had been sadly, ruinously, mistaken. Miranda instantly transofrmed from the saucy, hot wife he’d been amazed to have to a stranger, cold and aloof, refusing to touch him, look at him, or even respond to him when he began demanding, then begging her to tell him what was wrong.

They went home like that, an eternity of silence. Henry usually preferred to ride subways and busses in silence; he hated having public conversations and often wished Miranda would shut the hell up and let him ride in peace. Now he found himself desperate for her to speak. They sat alone in the subway car, Miranda sitting stiffly across from him, her face turned away. Henry tried in vain to make her speak for a few minutes, then turned to brooding over the events of the evening, trying to decipher what her complaint could be. The young secretary was the obvious cause, of course, but he couldn’t believe it. He had done nothing wrong there, and had even taken pains to make sure Miranda was in on the joke of it all. Looking back on this from the cold, empty train ride, it seemed less convincing, and he began to worry.

Worry coalesced into fear when they arrived home, and she suddenly ran ahead, unlocked the front door with their keys, and shut the door in his face, locking it behind her.

He spent a moment making absolutely sure he didn’t have his own set of keys with him (and was vaguely ashamed of the short spark of relief that swept through him when he confirmed that he didn’t) and then spent a few profitable minutes yelling into the door, more, he knew somehow subconsciously, in order to keep face. After his moment of bluster, he walked a block and a half down to Duffy’s, sat down at the bar, and ordered a beer. He drank it slowly, on purpose, staring steadily at the television above him. When he was done, he walked back to the apartment and found the front door open. This wasn’t comforting, and he hesitated, suddenly afraid.

The apartment was silent—almost silent, at least. What he took for silence resolved into a soft crackling noise that mystified him at first, and then slid under his skin and began slicing away at his nerves. By the time he made it to the living room where the fire was, he was sweating and his stomach was threatening to send his beer right back up for reconsideration. Miranda was seated on the couch, flipping through a magazine, and smiled at him as he stopped in the doorway. The smile was what really haunted him. It wasn’t a self-satisfied smile, or a smug smile, or triumphant. There was no meanness in it. It was a sweet, happy-to-see-you smile. And in the middle of the room, in the large washbasin they’d been using to store pots and pans in the kitchen, his entire baseball card collection was burning down to embers.

“Baseball cards,” Stan said slowly. “She burned your baseball cards ten years ago, so you’re going to murder her.” He paused, studying the floor where he sat, and then smiled up at Henry. “Actually, that makes a little more sense.”

“No,” Henry pleaded, suddenly, dropping down to sit directly across from Stan, so close that the other man was momentarily put off his reserve and leaned back suddenly, forced to use the palms of his hands to balance himself. “No, you don’t get it. The cards meant something to me, sure, it was terrible to lose them, but the point is, this is how Mir handles shit like that. All I did was flirt a little and she burned away a piece of my childhoos—a fucking cherished piece of my life. Poof! Gone!” He paused, and in the silence of the moment they could hear the traffic outside, dimly, in the distance. “Imagine what she’d do if I fucking divorced her.”

Henry stood again and began a slow, lazy circuit of the room. Stan just watched him, one eyebrow slowly raised as he regained his usual aplomb.

“No, Stan,” Henry said slowly. “There’s no legal, civilized way out. I have to kill her.”

Stanley sat there considering the cold, robotic way Henry said the words. On the one hand, he thought this was some cold shit he was hearing, and aside from the fact that he didn’t care much for Miranda in general he was a firm believer that you should never support or aid in anything you wouldn’t want done to yourself, and murder was pretty high on the list of things he didn’t want done to him. On the other hand, he thought the whole scheme had a very small chance of ever turning into anything serious, and in the meantime might afford him some gloriously entertaining moments.

Considering this, he felt it his duty to at least take a stab at talking sense into The Hick, if only for future indemnification.

“Henry,” he said, the name sounding strangely and malformed in his mouth, as if he were addressing a stranger he’d just met. “Listen. You’re not a killer. In a fight, Miranda would kick your ass, and you don’t even like to kill bugs at home, you’re such a secret Buddhist. How do you imagine you’ll have the balls to kill her?”

This seemed a safer tact than the legality or morality of murder in general, which Stanley suspected he was soft on. And now knew that Henry was soft on.

Henry scowled, and Stan thought it was the most frightening expression he’d ever seen Henry make. His whole face filled with blood, darkening, and deep, unhappy furrows appeared all over his face.

“I don’t necessarily have to do anything myself,” he said.

Stanley blinked, unprepared for this response. “Well, no,” he admitted. “But who would you get to do it for you? Me? Bobby? Chauvik?”

Henry waved it aside. “I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking,” he said. “I’m just thinking out loud, to be honest.” He sighed. “I don’t know. I know this is kind of crazy. I’m just…depressed. I know I need to get away from her. She’s killing me. But there’s no way. You just don’t get it, you haven’t had to live with her all these years.”

Stan shrugged, gazing up at Henry with a smile. “Divorce her. Take the hit.”

Henry shook his head and walked over to the wall again, imagining a window. “I can’t take the hit.”

Stanley looked down at his hands and considered. Henry just stood, staring at the wall. From experience, Stanley thought he could rely on Henry to just stand there, staring, for quite a long time.

“So,” Stanley finally said, gathering his willpower for the long rise to his feet, “You dragged me here just so you could vent a little, sound out the idea of murdering Miranda, get it off your chest? I hope you’re going to at least buy me lunch after putting me through this bullshit.” He looked forlornly around the room. “And nothing hidden here by Teddy for us to find and gloat over. A pity.” He paused. “I suppose we could knock out a few walls, see what’s in there.”

“I didn’t ask you to meet me so I could talk this out,” Henry said quietly, still facing the wall. Stanley regarded him quizzically, relaxing back onto the floor, and wondered if Henry saw something that no one else could. “I asked you here to help me figure this out.”

Stanley smiled again, squinting up at Henry’s back. “Figure it out?”

“Plan it.”

Stanley shook his head slightly, trying to clear it. “I’m sorry—you want me to help you plan a murder? Your wife’s murder?” He leaned back on his elbows. “I’m not sure I dislike Miranda enough to do that to her.”

“You hate Miranda.”

“Well,” Stanley raised his hand and waved it dismissively even though Henry couldn’t see him. “Well, hate is a strong term. I hate to dither, but really, hate? I hate lite beer. I hate the New York Yankees. I hate politics. I just dislike Miranda. Intensely.” He held up one finger as if forestalling an assumed objection. “But not nearly enough to brain her with a pipe and wrap her up in a rug. Although I assume you have a much better plan in mind than that.”

Henry turned and spread his hands, forcing a smile to his face. Stanley had an instinctive dislike for the expression that this produced on Henry’s face. “Look,” Henry said mildly. “I’m not asking you to actually do anything. I probably won’t do anything anyway. It’s an…an intellectual exercise, call it.”

Stanley climbed to his feet with a grunt, swayed a bit as he got lightheaded and planted one hand on Henry’s shoulder to steady himself. “An exercise, eh? Okey dokey. We’ll role play a little, while away a few desultory afternoons imagining your wife being killed by our hand. Sounds like a wholesome way to entertain ourselves. Come on. Teddy’s secrets have remained impervious to my powers for another day. Let’s go have a drink.”

Henry frowned. “Too early for me.”

Stanley, recovered, slid his hand around Henry’s shoulders until his arm was squarely around him and began pulling him towards the entrance. “You just asked me to help plan your wife’s murder, motherfucker,” he said mildly, smiling. “Nothing‘s too early for you.”

IV

Stanley stared at himself in the speckled mirror across the bar and smiled. He was a fan of cocktails, in general. Morning, afternoon, evening—he considered time to be a collective figment of everyone’s imagination. Having a drink at eight in the morning was pretty much the same as having a drink at eight at night, so he didn’t worry himself over details like time of day. Cocktails were one of the Great Things. They were refreshing, inspirational, relaxing, and sophisticated—clear evidence of civilization. You needed knowledge and patience to create liquor, and you needed creativity to mix them into palatable recipes. Every time he held a glass in his hand he felt like singing the joy of being alive and educated.

The bar was deserted so early in the afternoon. It didn’t have a kitchen and didn’t get populated until well after seven at night. Stanley didn’t know why they bothered opening so early, but he was glad they did. The bar was long, polished wood and brass fixtures stretching deep into the room, glowing in the afternoon sun, clean and worn by infinite hands. The sawdust on the floor was fresh and clean. The stools were just as old, comfortably bowed by endless weights, the sort of furniture he theorized you could rely upon because they’d been tested and compressed over the years until they were fused into shape, their molecules pressed so tightly together only a significant force—unlikely to be delivered by paunchy buttocks—would be able to separate them. He imagined that in a barfight one of those stools weilded as a weapon would likely explode catastrophically upon impact, a modern-day Tunguskan blast, sweeping the bar and probably most of the neighborhood off the map.

He grabbed a handful of beer nuts, smoothed out his newspaper, and sipped bourbon on ice. He felt content. He usually did feel content, and could only recall vague, widely-spacedmoments of dissatisfaction during his life. He was a man, he thought, of few needs: Food, shelter, liquor, and something to read. Possibly something to snack on inbetween meals, but that was probably negotiable. Sitting at the bar, a fresh newspaper before him, he was as happy as he ever was. Which was very happy.

Skittering on the icy edge of his thoughts was Henry and the bizarre noontime excursion they’d just taken together, but he resolutely refused to think about it.

“What’s the story, Stan?”

The bartender was a thin, wrinkled old man who looked dry as a desert and completely humorless, his long face set in a permenant scowl. Stanley had seen him grin once and shuddered at the memory of it. He was of the opinion that everyone should be genetically altered in utero to be physically attractive, and rejected arguments that this would debase beauty and start the human race down the road to genetic ruin as cute people with ugly genes found mates who would have normally rejected their ugliness and begat scads of cretins. He thought instead that the Museum World created by all this beautification would inspire everyone daily, and that people would still be able to smell the bad genes on people and avoid them no matter how good they looked.

“The same,” Stan said easily, dropping his newspaper. He had the same conversation with the bartender, whose name escaped him, every day. “Working too much, drinking too much.”

“Thank god,” the bartender said, and wandered away.

Stan didn’t know the man’s name, and didn’t care. He had the look of an ancient Booze Survivor: Thin and sallow from years of liver abuse, working in the same bar he’d probably lived in for decades, a stained coffee cup clutched in one spastic hand. He probably got paid shit to open the place, pour shots of booze for the pathetic dregs who wandered in off-hours, and clean up a bit. Stan thought he’d seen him tracking the path of the bottles with weary, yellowed eyes, like a cat tracking its can of food.

Picking up the newspaper again, he scanned it with a profound sense of satisfaction. He wasn’t hungry, particularly, and nothing overtly ached or twinged. He had a drink and a quiet, sunny place to sit and read, and Stanley’s only real wish, aside from finding something like a sack of money hidden in one of Teddy’s forgotten properties, was that he be undisturbed for a few hours.

He idly rubbed his stomach and contemplated a burger for lunch.

The idea of murdering Miranda, of course, was ridiculous, though entertaining. He kept chuckling, imagining the various ways Henry’s madness might end: Usually with miranda beating him senseless prior to calling the police. He amused himself for some time just staring at the newspaper and imagining increasingly unfortunate ends for Henry as he attempted to kill his wife: Henry tripping and shotting his scalp off, Henry being beaten by a group of enraged women led by Miranda, Henry in court staring off into space while government experts reveal his secret stash of pornography and detailed accounts of The Fly incident.

He’d always known that Henry and Miranda were not right for each other and were destined to break apart violently. He’d assumed for some time that it would be he doing the breaking up since it had seemed like miranda did nothing but flirt with him when they saw each other. He’d looked forward to the golden moment when he’d be half dressed and riding her like an out of control tobaggon when henry walked in, paused in shock, and possibly passed out on the spot. The moment had never come, and over time he’d come to realize that what he’d interpreted as flirtation might have actually been dislike. This only changed his fantasy about Miranda—who he’d still sleep with in a moment, he knew, if the opportunity ever presented itself—slightly.

And he knew that if he were patient, most opportunities did present themselves. The problem was never opportunities. People, in general, were weak and curious and lazy and they did the most unexpected things when circumstances were right, so he had no doubt that someday he’d find himself in a position where Miranda was beddable, and then the only question was whether he would go for it or not. He assumed this with quiet, unshakable confidence, idly imagining Miranda in various poses, positions, and costumes. It would be a shame, he thought, scratching his nose, to kill something that pretty. A good-looking woman, even one who hated your guts, was a treasure in your life.

Still, it was an interesting intellectual exercise, and Stanley let his paper drop and swirled the liquor around his glass, watching the sun glinting off the golden liquid. How would one kill his wife and get away with it? As he saw it, there were two basic routes: One, kill her and make sure no one noticed, or two, kill her and make sure no one knows she was murdered. The first seemed much more complex; aside from moving far away and claiming she joined a cult, he didn’t see how you could convince friends, family, and coworkers that your wife was simply not returning their phone calls. Although he supposed you could keep all correspondence to the written kind and use machines to generate them—e-mail, word processors—and that might work for a while. Still, he thought the inescapable conclusion was that the world would have to know about her death, and be convinced it was an accident.

Smiling vaguely, he produced a pen from his jacket pocket and began jotting notes down on the newspaper.

There was, of course, the Sudden Impact method, where you waited for the right moment—chance or manufactured—and knocked her down the stairs or in front of a car or into the ocean, or whatever. Sudden, so there was no tell-tale trail of evidence, nothing left behind, no weapon and a believable story. But risky, of course, because people never displayed their full acrobatic or athletic potential until faced with a split-second death-defying moment, and he thought it was entirely possible that Miranda would display some impressive moves if suddenly thrust in front of a speeding truck or similar.

Failing a sudden act-of-god sort of murder, Stan thought he would favor the polar opposte: Something subtle and carefully planned. Poison over a long period, the quiet weakening of automobile brakes, the discovery and exploitation of a severe allergy—these were the sort of patient, easily overlooked methods that might pay off if you had years to spare and boundless energy, or desperation. The amount of research and preparation required was daunting, of course, and Miranda struck him as the sort of healthy individual who didn’t have allergies, the sort who would merely get a case of indigestion and then be immune to poison for the remainder of her life. Besides, Henry’s impassioned plea for understanding had implied a great deal of immediate and worrying frustration, so asking the man to wait five years for a careful plan to pay off probably wasn’t going to be a popular plan.

He took a deep sip from his tumbler and felt himself warming to the intellectual problem. How could you murder a woman like Miranda and get away with it.

He considered the problems as a warm feeling spread outward from his belly. First, she was smart and strong-willed, not the sort of girl to be fooled into a trap or to miss any signs of trouble. Second, she was strong and healthy, without any obvious vulnerabilities to exploit. Finally, she was a charming, attractive girl who had lots of friends and strong family connections—someone who would be missed immediately if she went missing.

“Freshen you up over here?”

Stan glanced up at the bartender, startled. Then he smiled and drained the dregs from his glass. “Sure. Listen, let me ask you a question,” he continued easily. “If you were going to kill your wife, how’d you do it?”

“A man after my own heart,” the bartender said with a crooked, gap-toothed grin as he plucked a bottle up and began to pour. “Reckon I’d stick with the old KISS principle, right? Keep it simple. Good plans are simple plans. The more details you got, the more that can go wrong. You only got one or two details, a lot easier for a man to keep ’em straight.”

Stan laughed, raising his glass. “Sounds like you’ve done some thinking along these lines.”

“Every man’s been married,” the bartender said seriously, “He’s thought about gettin’ out the easy way.”

Stan grinned. “The easy way, huh?”

There would be another funeral, Stan thought idly; another viewing and another round of gatherings. Which reminded him that Teddy’s funeral was the next morning. He imagined what he was going to wear; he wanted sobriety, of course, but he didn’t want to be boring. And he wanted sobriety with deep jacket pockets so he could smuggle a good flask into the ceremony, which he thought Teddy would appreciate. He swirled the liquor in his glass again and figured he was going to be a no-show at work again, and thus would most likely need to find a new job soon. Jobs were dull and annoying.

He thought about possible jobs, and considered the life of a mortician. The only aspect of that lifestyle he thought of as a disadvantage was the deadline-oriented aspect of it. Otherwise he thought it might even be an interesting sort of job. The ability to get to know people so intimately in a way was tempting, though he doubted if there was much left in the pockets when they arrived at the funeral home. He thought about Teddy, who had expired in a bathrobe with two Thai hookers secreted in his jacuzzi. All that man had had in his pockets were condoms and cigarettes. He’d been changed into a ridiculous double-vreasted suit the man would never have worn during life, and Stan got depressed thinking about poor Teddy the Infinitely Wealthy going down into the dirt dressed in a fucking suit he would never have worn, and as he drained his glass with a pleasant burn and wince, he thought he had half a mind to break into the funeral home, pop open the coffin, and see that Teddy went to his reward in the right style.

He paused, the glass poised. He stayed still for a long moment, and then slammed the glass down onto the bar. “Hey!” he shouted. “More booze, and quick.”

The bartender wandered over, bottle in hand. “Had an inspiration?”

“Hit me double, leave the bottle. I gotta be drunk as hell tonight.”

Stan’s next memory was the sound of breaking glass, and as he rose up out of a shadowy existence that did not include consciousness he was surprised to discover a large number of facts: He was freezing, it was dark, he was outside, his jacket was wrapped around his forearm, a window had been smashed, and that window led directly to the basement of the funeral home.

He blinked dumbly at the window, which was small and narrow, and found it very difficult to concentrate for any length of time. The window meant something, he was sure, but whatever it symbolized seemed hidden from him, an inscrutable puzzle sent to him as torturous punishment. He straightened up, his jacket still wrapped around one arm, and considered the wisdom of going home to sleep. Or possibly lying down in the cool, wet grass at his feet and sleeping, which, since it cut out the laborious work of getting home, seemed wisest.

Spying a coffin leaned up against a basement wall, however, reminded him of his reasons for shivering in the cold outside the funeral home, and he smiled a slackjawed sort of smile and unwrapped his jacket deliberately, pulling it back on for the slim protection from the elements it represented.Then he sat down in the wet grass, stuck his legs into the window, and started to drag himself towards the opening.

When he landed, quite well, on the balls of his feet, glass cracking under his weight, he thought suddenly of alarms and security systems, and froze for a number of minutes, listening to the dead air. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, which was somehow different and more dark than the darkness outside in the night air, he realized he was staring at the same coffin leaning against the wall that had inspired him from without, and thought it unlikely that a funeral home, filled with nothing but dead bodies, would have a security system of any note. Having come to this happy conclusion, Stan stood up on his numbed and aching knees and looked around. He was surrounded by coffins, most of which were stacked in a decidedly random manner, and had an aged and dusty look about that that reassured him. There were no decomposing bodies propped up in the coffins, he was sure, and this emboldened him to pick his way carefully towards the dark foreboding stairs that led up into more darkness. He wondered how dark it could possibly get, if he could just keep finding darker areas that he would then adjust to, only to discover an even darker area further up and further in.

Carefully, he tested his weight on the bottom step and instantly retreated from the ear-splitting noise of it, a creaking sound so grotesque he could not bear it. The silence that crowded around him seemed suddenly suffocating, however, and he steeled himself for a second, swaying run up the stairs into the near-complete darkness, which he stopped after about fifteen steps with the sudden, heart-pounding realization that there might be a wall or a sharp spike or a dead body directly ahead of him. A few more tentative steps brought him to a door, which he opened by the brilliant technique of turning the knob.

On the first floor of the building, he quickly oriented himself, to his surprise. He knew exactly where he was and where Teddy’s body was, and he made his way there with what he thought was admirable savoir faire and coordination. The room was exactly as he remembered it: Metal folding chairs standing in silent witness, the flowers arranged in still life, the coffin on its little altar at the end of the room, closed and gleaming in the mysterious glow that seemed to infuse the whole place. He staggered up to it and half-fell forward, throwing his upper body across the coffin lid. The varnished wood was cool against his hot cheek, and he stayed that way for a few moments, enjoying the sensation, resting his eyes. Something had seemed very important just a few moments before, but it eluded him now. Cooling down and resting his eyes were much more important, he thought. Just a few moments, just until the sweat stopped running into his eyes, until his core temperature went down a tick.

He wished mightily for a flask of something decent.

When he opened his eyes agin, he had no idea how long he’d been splayed out over the coffin. A sizable river of drool had collected beneath his open mouth, and he felt stiff and painfully restricted. He straightened up with a groan of suffering and squinted down at the coffin again, allowing himself, from experience, a minute to let his immediate situation come back to him. When it did, it was like a sleeping limb waking up: Pinpricks of light punching through the gray shroud, until the coffin before him and the room around him were fully illuminated again, and he smiled with refreshed pleasure at his own genius.

Without further hesitation, he wriggled his fingers under the rim and thrust the lid of the coffin up.

Teddy lay there, grim, pallid, stiff. Nothing natural about him, Stan thought. You always heard people talking about how natural the corpses were at these things, but he didn’t think there was anything natural about them. Teddy looked like his blood and internal organs had been drained out of him and replaced with chemicals, and not fun, buzz-giving chemicals, either.

After a moment, though, it seemed to Stan as if Teddy were the source of the mold-like, mysterious glow that crept through the air. He seemed to be giving off a greenish-blue light, his final half-life decaying. Stan smiled down at Teddy the Infinitely Wealthy, pleased.

“It’s an experiment.”

Henry stared over his cup of coffee and said nothing.

They were in the Funeral Director’s office, which looked disappointingly like just about every other office either one had ever been in. Stan was still in yesterday’s clothes, Henry could tell, and had the stale smell of used liquor pouring out of his pores. He looked like shit. Which was to be expected, Henry reflected, when you’re found by a Funeral Director passed out on the floor of his office the day of your friend’s funeral, having obviously broken in the night before and caused some minor property damage.

Stan sipped his own cup of coffee gingerly and scowled, pushing it away. “Oh, shit, that’s gonna make me puke.”

“In about two hours you’re supposed to carry that coffin to and from the hearse,” Henry said in his usual implacable tone. “You gonna be up for it?”

After receiving a blank check to be used to cover the cost of a new basement window, the Funeral Director had been willing to assume Stan was crazed with grief, and intimated to Henry that finding Stan on his floor in the morning was not even the best such story he could tell, if his professional standards did not preclude telling such stories. He was even willing to donate his office, temporarily, to the two men as they negotiated Stan’s recovery. Miranda, restrained by the presence of witnesses, had simply stared at Stan coldly and walked off leave the two men to their own devices.

“I’ll be fine. I’ve had worse hangovers.”

Henry nodded as if he remembered, which Stan thought was certainly possible, since his own memories of his hangovers were insufficiently detailed to rule out the presence of anyone. Mahatma Ghandi might have booted him out of a bar in Vegas, for all Stanley could remember of most of his jaunts.

“Okay,” Henry said cheerfully enough. “So: An experiment?”

Stan reclaimed the cup of terrible coffee and nodded with sudden, clear-eyed enthusiasm. “Yes, an experiment.” He winked. “Tying into our conversation of yesterday, actually.”

Henry looked down at his hands. “Oh shit.”

“No!” Stan shouted, then looked around and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “No, it’s a good experiment. Purely an intellectual exercise, of course. But trust me! Hicky, trust me—this is going to be interesting.”

Henry refused to look up from his hands. “Oh, no, no no no Stanley,” he moaned. “Not today. I mean, Teddy’s going into the ground, Stan. You could at least keep your goddamn mouth shut for a few hours, right?”

“Hell yes! In a moment I go into stealth mode—and I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same—but if it worked, I’ll be very excited.”

Stan stood up, and Henry lifted his eyes to watch him struggle for balance. “Stan, please. I was…in a mood yesterday. I wasn’t serious.”

Stan winked. “I know.” He made feeble, depressing attempts to groom himself, smoothing the unsmoothable wrinkles in his jacket, fumbling with his stained tie, running one pale and sweaty hand through his hair. “It’s okay. How do I look?”

Henry sagged a little where he sat. “Go home. Get some rest. We’ll draft Chauvik into pallbearer service.”

“Chauvik? Come on, Hicky. Teddy’d rather be rolled through the city streets in a barrel than have that motherfucker handling his coffin.”

“Teddy won’t know. Teddy’s dead.”

There was a momentary awkwardness in the room. “Fuck that,” Stan said suddenly, attacking his tie again. “Teddy knows what’s going on. And he would fucking approve of me, you fucking prick. Teddy was the best of us, and he would want us all out there shitfaced, not velcroed into our suits and looking like a fucking lifestyle commercial. Okay? So live with it. I’m going to be stinking out there and Teddy’s gonna be fucking laughing his ass off and if your wife so much as looks at me funny, I’ll slap her.”

Henry spread his hands. “Go right ahead.”

Stan paused, breathing heavily. “Okay, then.”

“So, are you going to tell me the big secret?”

Stan winked. “After. Let’s go bury Ted.”

V

Robert Seagreaves stared at Stanley with a mixture of admiration and horror. It was a cloudy, brisk day; Bobby, using just a little imagination, could be convinced that the cosmos missed Teddy and was putting on a show in honor of his passing. Stan, on the other hand, had apparently put on a show the night before, as he stood with everyone else around the open grave looking gray, wrinkled, and seedy—a man suffering through an epic sort of hangover. He was sallow and wrinkled and obviously photophobic. He looked like a homeless man, unwashed and undergroomed, hollow, glassy eyed and shivering.

While harboring a certain amount of jealousy that Stan was svelte and well-proportioned and therefore managed to pull off his homeless look with a modicum of charm—whereas a fat man like himself had to guard against any sort of sloppiness or insufficient grooming lest he be labeled a slob. Thin people could wake up and wear yesterday’s clothes and look cool. Fat men had to be impeccable in their appearance, because anything less just opened them to jeers and cruel jokes.

Thinking this, he absent-mindedly adjusted his tie and shot his cuffs.

Stan fascinated him.Everyone was dressed soberly, standing respectfully while the priest—whose presence was something of a mystery to Bobby, as he had no idea who’d contacted him—droned on. The mysterious members of Teddy the Infinitely Wealthy’s family stood slightly apart, strange, European-looking people in dark clothes and sunglasses. No one knew anything about them. Stan, on the other hand, was in his dark-grey but not-quite-black suit from the day before, unshaven and swallowing bile furiously as he fought the urge to vomit all over Teddy’s coffin. Stan also appeared to be openly impatient with the proceedings, shifting his weight and fidgeting constantly. Bobby knew Stan would get away with it—no one would say anything to him, and in a few hours he’d reemerge showered and shined and it would all be forgotten. He didn’t know how Stan managed it, every time, effortlessly.

He glanced at Susan and then quickly away, lest she imagine he was misbehaving and chastise him. Susan didn’t hesitate to chastise. He found it charming, her fesity, no-bullshit attitude, though he knew other people found it annoying and thought he was weak for putting up with it. He knew the image some people had of him: The fat, weak man, dominated by his short, bossy wife. It was a cliche, and he hated that people saw him that way. But it wasn’t true. He gave as good as he got. He just didn’t do it quite as loudly as Susan did, and anyway, he liked her bossy ways. He liked the fact that he always knew where he stood with his wife. There was never any guessing, any bullshit—one look at her and he knew if she was happy or unhappy and why. He’d listened endlessly to Henry’s barking about Miranda, how he never knew where he stood with her, how every morning was an adventure because Miranda might be pissy or depressed or ecstatic or horny—lord only knew. Bobby had heard Henry tell that story a million times since he’d begun his unexpected relationship with a woman who was clearly two or three levels out of his league, attractiveness-wise. It always made him appreciate his own Susan. She never scared him, because he always knew what she was thinking.

Things were happening, the priest was finishing up and everyone was shifting politely in preparation for the action to come. Bobby wasn’t a Catholic and it was all very myserious to him, the endless praying, the costumes, the ceremony. He just wanted it to be over, to be at Donovan’s Steakhouse having limp finger foods and a cold drink, the social hour after the reception. He was curious if any of Teddy’s disapproving and mysterious family would show up. They’d been invited, he knew.

He glanced at Henry and Miranda. As usual, a quick, dirty scene between him and Miranda flashed through his mind—Bobby had never cheated on his wife, but he thought about it a lot. Usually the women who starred in his fantasies didn’t keep top billing for very long. Usually they starred in an increasingly complex series of plots and then faded from his imagination as he got used to them, discovered their imagined flaws and got tired of fucking them in a million ways. Sometimes he could extend their imaginary shelf life by pairing them up with other girls, past and present, but they usually faded in the end.

Miranda, though, had remained at the top of the list. It wasn’t just one thing that fascinated him about her, it was just her total package. She was gorgeous, that was true, but plenty of gorgeous women had made their way through the silty backwaters of his mind and disappeared forever. Something about her, something subliminal and genetic kept her foremost in his mind. He’d never admitted it to anyone, and had taken pains to act completely neutral around her, to give no indication of what he did with her in his mind—he would be mortified if anyone guessed, if anyone had the ridiculous image of the fat man with tall, skinny Miranda. Sometimes, when thinking about her, he would lose his suspension of disbelief and look at the tableau he’d created and flush from embarrassment, the idea that he would even presume to fantasize.

He looked at Henry. Henry looked well-groomed, which he knew was a driect result of Miranda. Prior to living with Miranda, Henry had been a train-wreck, fashion-wise and grooming-wise. He’d been one of those endless teenagers, never quite rising above wrinkled shirts and worn jeans and bed-head. Now he gleamed like a new penny, no doubt due to a half hour of Miranda’s fussing. He usually bore it all with good humor, which Bobby thought was to his credit, but today the Fat Man thought he detected a hint of resentment about Henry, a glimmer of pissed-off attitude. Or maybe, he thought charitably, maybe Henry was just pissed off that his friend had died young and was being buried.

He looked at Stan. Stan was watching the coffin slowly lower into the grave with an avid expression that Bobby did not like very much.

At Donovan’s, things returned to normal. The relatives did not show up, and after an hour or so of stiff politeness, everyone began relaxing and enjoying themselves, and Bobby felt better. He hated solemn, stiff occasions. He preferred easygoing, casual moments where he could slouch and relax and not worry too much whether his shoes were shined or his belt buckle centered—he always aorried about these things, but when the occassion was casual he could do so privately, without everyone inspecting him for compliance. Susan had, unfortunately, chosen a table with a bunch of vague acquaintances he wasn’t much interested in, so when he saw Stan—scrubbed and redressed at some point between the funeral and the restaurant—approaching the bar, he made a cheerful excuse and hurried over to them as quickly as he thought his dignity would allow.

“Roberto!” Stan sang out as he arrived. “Have a drink on me.”

“It’s open bar, Stan,” Henry reminded them.

“Right. Have a drink anyway.”

Bobby slid gratefully into a stool and sat as close to the bar as his stomach would allow. Clasping his hands in front of him, he tried to look comfortable.

They were the only ones at the bar; their drinks came immediately. Shots of liquor was a little harsh in the middle of the day, but Bobby was game as long as it didn’t get out of hand. A toast to Teddy was appropriate.

“To me,” Stan announced gaily, raising his glass. “And my successful experiment!”

Bobby frowned. “Experiment?”

Henry covered his face for a moment and then leaned his whole head on an upturned palm. “Don’t ask,” he said into his palm.

“Fuck that,” Stanley said cheerfully. “Ask!”

It took Bobby a moment to realize they were waiting for a decision from him on the matter. He flushed, wondering if he was being made fun of. “Okay,” he said. “What experiment?”

Stan knocked back his shot with a grunt and slammed the glass down onto the bar loudly. “Okay! The experiment—” he broke into a gale of coughs, holding up one hand towards Bobby to forestall impatience. The coughing fit went on and on, until Bobby glanced past Stan at Henry, who was still sitting with his mouth buried in his palm, staring tiredly.

“Okay,” Stan gasped, bringing himself under control. “Okay, the experiment: Last night I broke into the funeral home, stripped Teddy naked, and left a note taped to his chest.”

Bobby stared, trying to rearrange the words so that they made some sense. He looked past Stan again at Henry, who just shrugged his eyebrows tiredly. Looking back at Stan, he tried to piece it all together. It came out the same.

“Wait—” he managed.

“You heard right,” Stan interrupted, signalling the bartender for another drink. “I removed Teddy’s clothes because he would never, never want to be buried in that hideous suit—”

“And because you were drunk as a fucking skunk,” Henry added from behind his hand.

Stan ignored him. “—and I left a note on him claiming responsibility. And you know what?”

Bobby shook his head, sipping his own shot gingerly. Stanley, despite a shower and a change of clothes, still reeked of alcohol, and the sight of him knocking back hair of the dog made Bobby a little queasy. “What?” he asked.

“Oh, Jesus, don’t play along,” Henry moaned.

“Nothing,” Stan announced. “Absolutely nothing. They obviously never checked the coffin, obviously never opened it. Teddy is going to his final rest bareassed naked as he would have wanted, and no one ever noticed.” He turned back to Henry. “Thus proving, mon frère, that it could be done.”

Bobby smiled unhappily, pretty sure that he was the butt of some outlandish joke. He looked to Henry for some support, but Henry was staring down at the bar as if he’d just found something really interesting there, swimming in the melt from his glass.

Stan nodded to himself and pushed away from the bar, his second drink untouched. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have to go throw up.”

Bobby watched him walk off, stiff and dignified. “Come on, Hank, what the fuck was that all about?”

“Stan is having a nervous breakdown,” Henry said immediately, looking up at him but still speaking directly into his hand.

Bobby decided to give up, fearing that he would just invite mockery if he persisted. He took a second small sip from his shot. Midafternoon drinking was definitely not his thing.

Henry rubbed his eyes. “Shit, Bobby, you ever feel like you said too much and can’t take it back?” He waved a hand around. “It’s out there now and you’ve got to pay the price for it?”

“Sure,” Bobby said, smiling down into his glass. “All the goddamn time.”

“Good. I’d hate to be the only one.”

Henry pushed off from the bar and drifted away without saying anything else. Bobby stayed where he was for a few seconds, feeling awkward, and then walked back to his table, leaving his half-full glass where it was.

Bobby hated it when they had secrets, which was often. Stan had always had a way of making him feel like they’d just been talking about him, a way of looking, a vague attitude of smug mockery. Bobby had long ago realized that part of that was just the way Stan was, and part of it was himself, his own fear of mockery. He thought everyone was mocking him at some point. He pushed the sad, cooled appetizers around his plate and tried not to be hurt that he wasn’t included.

He couldn’t help it: He found himself staring over at the table where Henry sat silently while Stan cackled next to Miranda, a hand familiarly on her shoulder as he told one of his stories. He thought that whatever they were plotting, it was probably a lot of fun.

VI

Henry stared at Stan and Miranda.

He’d known plenty of people who ostensibly did not like each other, who’d managed to sleep together. He himself could think of a few women he hadn’t liked especially well he’d still managed to fuck once or twice or more. One of the main characteristics of all the examples he could think of was a very public, very obvious dislike of each other—except when they were banging each other’s brains out.

He was leaned back in his chair, the front legs an inch off the floor, his arm thrown over the back of his own chair and his hand resting on Miranda’s. He studied them.

Miranda was smiling. And saying terrifically mean things to Stan, but smiling as she did so, as if the insults were one big joke. She kept stealing Stan’s cigarette, plucking it out of his hand in what suddenly appeared to Henry to be a familiar gesture, something she’d practiced.

He looked at Stan: Stan always looked like he was fucking your wife. It proved nothing. He’d had that look on his face long before there was a Miranda.

“What did you really do with TEddy’s clothes, you pervert?” she said, a little tipsy. “You’re such a little freak.”

To Henry, her smile was too natural, too wide and easy, and the way she was leaning towards Stanley, away from him, obscuring Stanley from his sight, bothered him. It was a secretive, familiar attitude that troubled him. On the one hand, he thought that it was very likely the attitude had come from the long years Stan and Miranda had spent hating each other. It was possible that they’d spent so long bickering that it had become second nature, and he could even imagine the bickering and dislike becoming, slowly, so familiar and natural that it made them happy to exercise it.

He could imagine this, but he wasn’t sure he completely believed it.

Stan left his cigarette in his mouth to defend it against theft, and Henry watched his face. He thought he could etect a smug look of satisfaction on Stan’s face, a suspicious sort of look. Henry wouldn’t put anything past Stan. Miranda was the sticking point. He knew Stan would fuck his wife if the opportunity came. And Henry knew he had the sort of good-looking wife that other men wouldn’t mind seducing. And Henry thought that Miranda’s standards had been low enough to find him attractive—still, after years of thickening belly and slowing wits—so how much of a stretch was it to think she might find Stan attractive?

He studied Stan, and concluded it was a pretty big stretch. Still, it was within the realm of possibilites.

He wondered if he should just get Stan to admit it, confront him. He imagined how great an excuse that would be, the easy way out. He felt the noble outrage, the righteous anger, the depressed wallowing that would follow—the ability to play the martyr and walk away with his honor intact. He wondered how Miranda would react, if she’d be cowed by her own lamentable behavior and shame, or if she’d still view any attempted separation as an act of war.

He breathed in the exhaled smoke around him. Act of War, he concluded glumly.

“My dear, you’re the one who brings up my perversion, because secretly you like my perversion. Especially since you’re married to Mister Normal over there. Look at him! So smug! So normal! But you crave perversion, don’t you.”

“Oh, Stanley,” she said, plucking the cigarette from his mouth. “Give it a rest.”

Stan turned and winked at Henry. Henry squirmed in his seat and recalled their conversation in the bathroom upon arriving at the restaurant.

“Aren’t you proud of me?”

Stan was leaning against the hand dryer, one around looped over it affectionately. Having changed and showered at home, he looked remarkably decent for a man who’d arrived at his friend’s funeral with a loiver glowing softly from ill-advised boozing. Henry crossed to a urinal, undid his pants, and began urinating. “Proud of what?”

“My experiment.”

Henry sighed. “Remind me again what that accomplishes?”

“My amusement. Teddy’s probably final wishes respected. And your education.”

This said with such serious, quiet dignity that Henry glanced over his shoulder, abandoning supervision. “Excuse me? My education?”

“Pursuant to our conversation yesterday, mi amigo. I’ve given you the secret, if you want to actually pursue it.”

Henry turned his attention back to the urinal. “Stan, I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t mean it. I was in a mood.”

All this was true, but Henry stared ahead at the porcelain and thought about it again. He thought about the rest of his day—depressed that he could easily anticipate every event that was coming his way—and imagined Miranda wasn’t there to plan and enforce every moment of every day.

“Quit blaming your gorgeous bitchy wife for all your problems, Hick,” Stan said easily. “And listen to my genius. You wanted to know how to kill your wife and get away with it. I give you: The Naked Teddy.”

Henry shook off and flushed, turning to the sinks without looking back at Stan again. “What in hell are you talking about?”

“You got me thinking aoout this morbid but admittedly fun topic of How To Kill Miranda and Get Away with it. Or call it The Really Cool Kids who Killed Someone and Got Away With it, an after school special with a very special lesson. But anyway, you started me thinking on it, and I thought, what’s the main problem with any murder? I mean, the killing is always easy, right? Easy to kill someone. I could kill you right now.”

Henry raised his dripping face from the basin and looked at Stan in the mirror. Stan’s eyes were sunken and dark, his face waxy. He looked thin end sweaty.

“No,” Stan went on, not noticing the attention. “The problem isn’t the murder, it’s the body. The problem is getting rid of the body.” His face took on e philosophical expression and he waved his hand around. “You knock her over the head, bam, she’s dead, and chances are no one is going to know about it for a while. That isn’t the problem. The problem is, what do you do with her? You can’t just leave her in the basement, right? And if you put her someplace, she’ll get found, eventually. The body is everything. It shows the manner of death, can hint at the time of death, has all sorts of physical evidence—and it confirms that a murder has, indeed, taken place. Where can you hide a body where it won’t be found?”

It took Henry a moment to realize the Question wasn’t rhetorical. He blinked and shifted his eyes to his own face, red and wet, in the mirror. “Where?”

Stan preened, unseen, behind him. “In a fucking coffin, apparently.”

Henry kept staring at himself, watching the droplets roll down his face.

“I stripped our friend naked and left a goddamn note, Hicky. Not a word. Not a peep out of anyone. No one looked in that coffin. Hick, you could totally stick another body in there and no one would ever know.”

Henry nodded to himself. “We would know.”

“Well, sure, as the murderer, you would know,” Stan said gaily. “But no one else. So there you go. My gift to you.” He pushed off from the wall and headed towards the stalls “One component of the perfect murder, gratis. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have one hell of a beer shit to take.”

Henry watched him in the mirror until he disappeared into one of the stalls.

“Are you okay, Grumps?” Miranda asked, leaning back in her seat with her glass of wine. “You’ve been Quiet.”

Henry looked at her and smiled. “Just thinking about Teddy.”

It wasn’t true, but it would do. He put the image of Miranda and Stan out of his head with a quick glance at Stan—chubby, long hair in disarray, sweaty Stan—and just regarded her for a moment, thinking that she was too pretty for him. He felt glass-like and calm, a placid pool of disinterested flesh, insulated somehow from all concerns, and could see this clearly. MIranda was stunning, truly beautiful, and the idea that she would find him attractive was ludicrous. He was thin and bony, angular and ill-proportioned, with unruly hair and a body that never hung clothes well, a man who didn’t make a lot of money and whose friends seemed to personally offend her on a daily basis. It was impossible. He saw that clearly. It had all been a terrible mistake.

“Yeah,” she said, looking down and then back at him. “He was so young.”

He wanted a cigarette. He could still smell the smoke on Miranda, knew he’d be able to smell it on her, in her hair, for the rest of the night. But he couldn’t. Oh, he could, certainly; Miranda would have to give him a pass since she’d been trading one with Stan just a few moments before. But there would be a price, always a price. She would guard it, hidden, until it was useful for her to regurgitate it all over him and burn him into ash, cackling over the horded ammunition. He could think of five or six smoldering pieces resentment she was hording against future fights already, carefully secreted away in case she needed to deflect any righteous anger or shift the subject back to why she was angry with him, her anger continuous, convenient, eternal.

He thought of that cigarette, staring at the table, people moving around him and just out of his field of vision, the whole world swirling around him. The simplest things denied him—so easy to just reach forward, pluck one from the pack Stan had abandoned there, light one up, inhale. So simple, and yet he couldn’t move, because Miranda was watching.

When he glanced back at his wife, it was with an eye towards her size, her weight.

Still, he thought with a mental sigh, it was crazy, it was impossible. He was no more a murderer than he was a rocket scientist. He was a small man who would work at small things feverishly until he died, probably in the middle of one in an endless series of meaningless tasks, still mystified and unenlightened. Someone would emerge from the grey mass behind him, step over his body, and take his place.

He rubbed his eyes, leaned back in his chair so the cigarettes were out of reach, and watched his wife work the table.

Miranda was, he knew, the girl that other women hated on sight. She was smart and pretty and was comfortable in the company of men. Other women naturally designated her their biggest threat in terms of their own husbands and boyfriends. Watching Miranda interact with other women was fascinating: The tension was palpable, and, he thought, obvious, but it was all big grins and affectionate words, and then the girls would march off to the ladies room in lockstep to apply shields of makeup and call her names and mock her behind her back, while Miranda would usually take the opportunity to make nice with their husbands and boyfriends, mostly out of spite. He watched her chatting up Chick Parker, who he knew she despised, and it was disturbing and exhilirating to watch her working it, her smile iridescent, her eyes flashing with gorgeous interest, her hand touching Chick lightly on the arm as they chatted, exhibiting what appeared to all eyes to be real affection.

His sense of disturbance was only increased by the fact that Chick, who was fully aware of Miranda’s feelings for her and who hated Miranda in turn, was playing the same part with equal gusto if not equal skill. He was stunned by the fakery: They both knew they were each acting, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. He couldn’t take his eyes off them; they were fascinating, every facial tic, every steely-eyed grin, every calculated touch and gesture. He wondered who, exactly, they were laboring to fool, since it was certainly not each other.

Summoning his strength, he produced a grin as false as he could manage and excused himself, kissing Miranda on the cheek and remembering a million times before, his lips on her skin, each time marginally less exciting, less affectionate than the time before, until he’d reached zero and started going backwards. She still smelled good, her cheek warm. He offered Chick the strained grin he reserved for other women in Miranda’s presence and headed unceremoniously back to the bar. Without meaning to, he picked up Bobby and Chauvik in his gravitational pull, swirling them up to the bar with him like satellite bodies in orbit.

He pounded the bar without a glance at either of his two satellites, who were obviously delighted that someone had put their thoughts into action and broken the seal on the bar. He imagined them grinning on either side of him.

“Whisky, por favor,” he said crisply.

The bartender, a sallow college-aged kid who would not, Henry was sure, know anything at all about good whisky, unfolded himself without hurry and approached.

“Open bar ended fifteen minutes ago,” he said instructionally.

“Fuck it. Whisky.”

He drank a shot quickly and demanded another, then another. Bobby and Chauvik, swept up in the moment, kept up with him, excited by this sudden and energetic debauchery. They coughed and pounded the bar after each shot like in old times. Fortified, Henry bought a pack of cigarettes from the bartender and lit one, using Bobby’s bulk as a shield from his wife.

Feeling suddenly, forcefully drunk, he held up his fourth shot and turned to his friends. The cigarette in his mouth bobbed up and down as he spoke. “Not dead yet, boys,” he said.

He felt good. Something about the recklessness of his behavior made him feel better about everything.

“Slow down, Henry!” Chauvik shouted, giggling. His round brown face was a little flushed, but his suit was immaculate, pressed and buttoned down. He turned, grinning to Bobby, who was his fashion opposite in a suit that had become wrinkled and ill-fitting despite his best efforts. “This is not going to end well!” Chauvik said, laughing. “Not going to end well!”

“You ‘re right,” Bobby agreed, a little less humorously. “But no thing much does, huh? Teddy proved that today. The paths of glory, and all t hat jazz.”

“Lead but to the grave,” Henry said, leaning in and putting his arm around Bobby. “Damn straight. And fuck, men: None of us are very glorious.”

“Speak for yourself,” Stan said, appearing out of nowhere, drawn by the smell of liquor and nicotine, the odor of male bonding. “I’m fucking glorious as all hell.”

“It ‘s true!” Chauvik decided excitedly. “Stanley’s a glorious person.”

Henry pushed off from Bobby and enveloped Stan in a one-armed embrace, “Dr. Stanley, I presume. Let me ask you a serious question, oh glorious one.”

Stan let his eyes move from face to face as if judging the mood. “Sure,” he said, pulling his hands from his pockets and fetching the fresh pack of cigarettes from the bar. “What I don’t know I make up.”

Chauvik nudged Bobby. “This is going to be interesting!”

“Stan,” Henry said, leaning in close to him. “Did you ever fuck my wife?”

Bobby, in the midst of downing another shot, choked and erupted into a sweaty, red-faced coughing fit.

Chauvik launched himself into a paroxysm of excitement, throwing his arms out and jumping back from the bar as if burned. “Oh my god!” He shouted . “I can’t believe this!”

Stan stared at the bar, his face a mask of concentration. “Stan?” Henry said, staring at Stan’s cheek. “I said—”

Stan shook him off. “I heard you, cocksucker;” he hissed. “The bathroom. Now.”

Without another word, he turned and walked off. Chauvik buried his head in his arms on the bar. “I can’t believe he said that!”

Henry glanced at Bobby, who had bent down with his hands on his knees in an effort to get his breath back.””If anyone needs me,” Henry slurred, “I’ll be in the bathroom.”

Bobby nodded weakly.

“That,” Stan said tightly, “was fucking out of line.”

Henry waved his cigarette around dismissively. “Oh, fuck you, Stan. You make your fucking living being out of line. THat’s your whole schtick. Don’t start whining about it now.”

Stan ran a hand through his long, limp hair. “Excuse me? Is this Henry before me? Or some doppleganger?” He squinted at him. “A very drunk doppleganger.”

Henry shrugged. “It’s an easy question, Stan. A yes or no question, actually. A binary equation. Shouldn’t be too hard to answer. So why nnot answer it? And then we can put all this unpleasantness behind us.”

“This is some unpleasant shit,” Stan said. “We bury my one best friend and the other accuses me of fucking his wife.”

“I didn’t accuse you of anything,” Henry said primly, holding up a placating hand. “I asked you a fucking question.”

Henry hoisted himself up onto the sink and crossed his legs, balancing one arm across his knees, the cigarette burning loosely between two fingers. Stan leaned back against the wall, hands in his pockets, and they stared at each other in silence. Stan’s shirt had come untucked, his belly pushing at the buttons.

“Fine,” Stan said slowly. He looked down at his shoes. “No, Hicky, I did not ever sleep with Miranda.” He looked up under his hair at Henry. “Funny you should ask, since we were discussing issuing a drastic sort of divorce on her just recently.”

Henry smiled lazily. “All right, all right. Forget it. I got it in my head and it wouldn’t get out.”

“Fuck you,” Stan sighed. “But okay: You’re married to an incredibly hot woman and it was bound to warp your brain eventually.”

Henry ashed into the sink. “She’s warped my mind, alright, Stan. Every thought I have—fuck, I can’t even think any more. Every time I turn around, she’s there, staring at me. She’s out there right now,” he waved vaguely at the door, “Waiting on me, looking for me. I go back out there, I open that fucking door, there she’ll be. I go to the car later, she’s in the seat next to me. I go home, her again. I don’t get a single thought without her, you know?”

“No,” Stan said. “I have no idea. My head is filled with glorious images of Stan, Stan, always Stan—nothing but Stan. It’s a pleasant world. I’d strongly suggest you move there.”

Henry laughed, looking sleepy. “Is there a Henry world?”

“Apparently not.”

“Not with Miranda,” Henry sighed. “Jesus, I thought I was so lucky, nailing her.”

“You were. But let me ask you something—and I am in no way trying to give you the idea that I have ever or would ever screw your wife, whom you wish dead—but let me ask you: Is it really so bad? You have a gorgeous wife, a decent job, and a friend like me. What’s to complain about?”

“That’s part of the problem, man,” Henry said with a desultory sigh. “If it was tragic, if there was high drama, I’d at least have the comfort of being involved in tragedy and drama. The ordinariness of it…that’s fucking depressing. I’m just another shlub who can’t hack marriage.”

“All right, Hicky; I’ll sleep with your wife to provide you with drama. Damn, all you had to do was ask.”

Henry laughed and slid off the sink, dropping his cigarette onto the floor. He stood swaying for a moment and then caught his balance. “Do you think your coffin idea would actually work?”

Stan considered. “In a perfect world, yes. But in the real world there are just too many possible fuckups. So, in theory, yes, it’d work. In practice, however, your chances would be fifty-fifty. Now let’s go out and drink.”

Henry shook his head, staring down at the floor. “Work tomorrow.” He pointed at Stan without looking up. “You too.”

“Sorry,” Stan said sadly, sighing and thrusting his hands in his pockets. “But I think I had to sack that job.”

“Again?” Henry said. “Jesus, Stan, man’s got to live.”

“I hate jobs,” Stan said. “I hate them worse than anything. They just suck the life out of you.”

Henry sighed. He thought to himself that he hated his job too. He thought he totally hated his job, the meaningless paper pushing endlessness of it, and suddenly resented Stan for stealing it, for taking hating his job for himself. He quickly lost himself in a fast examination of Things Stan had stolen from him—they were all things that couldn’t be touched, all abstract things, things he’d never be able to prove, but he resented Stan anyway.

He remembered Stan stealing the leadership of his little group from him, back in college; He’d been an unlikely and benevolent dictator, leading Bobby and Chauvik and Frank around from not much to little else, and then one day early on in Sophomore year Stan had sat down at their lunch table and since that moment—he could identify the exact second—and since that moment he’d been a follower, one of Stan’s minions, without minions of his own.

He remembered Stan stealing a thousand moments, countless stories. A quick succesion of them flashed through his mind, endless repetitions on a theme.

Stan, walking up to him in a bar, putting his arm around him, and chatting up the girls he’d been talking to.

Stan, at his birthday party, getting drunk and dancing by himself, everyone clapping in rhythm and cheering.

Stan, at Teddy’s funeral, somehow contriving to make it into a Stan Adventure, complete with naked corpse, petty crime, and a few dramatic speeches.

Henry stared at the wall just above Stan’s head, and thought about killing Stan.

VII

Chauvik looked around the table and thought, not for the first time, that he was not cool.

He’d known this, to some extent, his entire life. He didn’t think he was totally without social graces or charm—he thought he hovered, pathetically, on the dividing line between acceptably cool and totally uncool. He dip down often, and he rose up occasionally, but he knew he was never going to be truly cool, truly accepted and desired company.

He knew this by the tables he sat at.

Man was a social animal—he knew this. No matter how advanced he fancied himself, it all boiled down to tribes and social groups. He knew his first day of high school, sitting at a thinly populated table in the rear, that it was going to be a long four years for him. Every wedding he went to, he knew exactly where he stood on the pecking order, and it was rarely high. He was always on the outer edge, just barely involved. He always had a sense of being admitted only after it was determined that enough space was left for him.

Looking around the table he was out now, he knew his stock hadn’t changed much. It was him, Fat Bobby, and a bunch of nobodies. All the cool people were at other tables, gathered together for protection, carefully separated from the rest of the people. From the undesirables.

He sipped his water and sighed unhappily. He’d never found a way to break free from this obscure gravity that held him back. He’d always been nipping at the edges of everything. He didn’t mind sitting with Bob, although Bob was fat and slovenly despite his best efforts and Chauvik felt that all a man had to do was not eat like a pig and get off his ass now and then to stay in some type of shape. He didn’t understand how anyone could put up with being so grossly overweight. To his eye, Bobby never looked comfortable. It must be maddening. He didn’t mind sitting with Bob, though. But it was obvious from the fringe-friends and losers they were seated with that their relative positions had not risen, and this depressed him.

He glanced over at Henry, Stan, and Miranda. Stan and Miranda were sharing a cigarette and smiling at each other, leaning across Henry to whisper. He could only see the back of Miranda’s head, but he knew what she looked like: Hot. Always ball-achingly hot. He’d only fantasized about fucking her, but then he’d fantasized about just about all his friends girlfriends and wives. He was careful and scrupulous in his behavior towards them, of course, never giving a hint of what he thought about—but he always felt like they knew anyway, and despised him for it. The girlfriends, the wives—they were all inexplicably cool to him, even though he was sure he was exactly correct in his behavior. He was polite, interested, always smiling—but not too pushy, or invasive. He knew girls did not like to be crowded or forced to deal with false intimacy. He was careful not to stare at them, not to touch them inappropriately, to give the impression that he didn’t care one way or the other about them.

And still, there was a gulf between them and him. Awkward silences, and a distinct impression that they did not want to be left alone with him. And not just one or two, but all of them, all of them exchanging looks and miming messages to each other, acting as if he were a turd in the room.

He didn’t understand it.

With the men, he had a better comprehension—he wasn’t cool. He had never been, when he was young due to the stifling rules his parents had forced upon him. As a child he’d always been very different from his classmates, never allowed to do the same things, always dressed differently and forbidden to do things the other kids took for granted. He’d hated his childhood for that reason—it had been an endless litany of insults and near-beatings, various snubs and social nightmares. From an early age he’d made the decision to push his culture and parents as far away from him as possible. He’d dressed like his classmates, talked like them, and tried to cultivate a cheerful, optimistic attitude towards every situation—and still, he felt like he’d gotten just so far, and no further. He was always there, always involved, but he was never in on the secrets, never part of the inner circle.

He blinked and turned towards Bobby, who had said something. He leaned forward attentively. “What’s that, buddy?”

“Doesn’t it seem totally wrong that our reaction to Teddy being dead is to eat and drink and act like we’re at some sort of cocktail party?” He shook his head, jowls jiggling. “Fucking smalltalk, idle chatter.”

Chauvik widened his smile. “You would prefer somber philosophical discussions? That’s crazy, Bobby! It’s better this way. Teddy has gone back to the source, you know, he’ll be born again. Think of it that way. He’ll be born again and he’d want to hear about a good party, not boring discussions.”

Bobby sighed. “Maybe. Maybe. I’m not convinced. I’m a fatalist, Chauvik. You’re dead, you’re dead.”

“Then what does it matter how we react to it? The dead will never know.”

This bit of wisdom pleased Chavik. He felt like he’d scored a point.

Bobby scowled. “Fuck, that’s depressing.”

Chauvik scrambled to perform some damage control. “No! Well, I mean, yes, of course it is depressing when you think about it that way. But as I was saying, I do not think of it that way. Teddy will return, be reborn. He will throw more parties.”

Bobby sipped water. “Fuck, he wasn’t even forty years old, you know? Too young to die. It makes you think. You’re minding your own business, and secretly, silently, some valve or switch or tube inside you is goging soft, ballooning out, and poof!” He snapped his fingers and looked at Chauvik. “You’re gone.”

Chauvik paused before replying, eyeing Bobby’s sagging cheeks and red face. He figured Bobby had mortality on the brain because it must be hard to be so grossly fat and have death staring you in the face. He didn’t understand how people allowed themselves to get like that; he remembered Bobby back in school, he had always been big and fleshy, but in the last few years he’d grown morbidly huge, and he had to be aware of the chance he ran. Chauvik didn’t understand; all you had to do was not eat so much and take a few walks. It wasn’t hard.

“Hell,” Bobby said. “You know what I mean? If Teddy can just go like that, snuffed out, then why not me? Or you? And I mean, he wasn’t even forty. In twenty years, will anyone even remember him?”

This had not occurred to Chauvik, and he considered it carefully. Teddy had always been, and it was easy to assume his memory would live on. But if Teddy were not there, actively championing his own memory, as he had been, then what? New people, new parties, new pranks would fill up the space, and Teddy’s memories would get pushed further and further back, until they were so distant, so covered in newer moments, they might very well have never actually existed. For some reason the thought filled him with a sudden, unwanted feeling of dread.

He stood up, suddenly just wanting to be away from the table, from Bobby, from everyone. But he didn’t know immediately where he was planning to go or what he was planning to do, he just needed to walk, to be moving away from the cloud of dread that had misted up around him. He looked down at Bobby and they stared at each other for a moment.

“Yes, Chauvik?” Bobby asked with a hint of sudden humor.

“I’m—I’m going to the bathroom.” Chauvik finally managed.

Bobby nodded, smiling. “If you’re waiting for me to grab my compact and join you, Chuav, you’ll be waiting a long time.”

Chauvik’s cheeks burned and he forced a grin. “C’mon, Bobby!”

He didn’t wait for Bobby’s response. It would either be a pity response, easing him out of his embarrassment, or a cruel response, burying him deeper, and he couldn’t bear either. He just turned away and wandered across the floor, realizing he didn’t know for sure where the bathrooms were in the restaurant. He just kept walking, his eyes held ahead of him, until he saw the sign marked RESTROOMS and made for it, imagining Bobby watching him walk away, studying him for more signs of weirdness, even though that was crazy, even though Bobby had looked away and forgotten all about it immediately. He walked with a stiff, careful gait and kept his eyes on the floor until he managed to stiff-arm his way through the bathroom door.

He headed directly for the sinks, still feeling hot and flushed. He twisted open the cold water spigot and splashed water onto his face.

“You okay, Your Highness?”

Chauvik froze at the sound of Stan’s voice. Slowly, the old gears ground through his surprise and placed a cheerful smile on his face, and a laugh forced its way out.

“A little tired, is all, Stan my man! You just hanging out in bathrooms now?”

Against his will, a giggle escaped into the wild, a trill of laughter he hated and desperately wanted to destroy. It seemed to echo back at him a little.

Stan always made him nervous. Stan with his chubby, long-haired presence, always filling up rooms, his hoarse laughter swelling in the air and reaching every ear within range effortlessly, drawing people to him. Stan was, on the one hand, chubby and vaguely handsome, as if he’d been a good-looking boy swollen into an overweight man—harmless-seeming, too soft and damp to be dangerous, but on the other hand had a wicked tongue and knew how to embarrass—Chauvik knew this from painful experience. Stan never seemed to mean any harm, of course. He was affable, smiling, the first to slap you on the back and declare that it had all been for fun. It was just that Chauvik didn’t always believe it.

He paused and peered more closely at Stan. “You okay?” he asked.

Stan didn’t look okay. He was sweatier than usual, and was standing with one arm thrown over the towel dispenser, staring at an odd angle down at the tiled floor.

“Hmm?” Stan’s eyes flickered up to his and then down again as he started tearing at his thumbnail. “Sure, sure. Never better. Buried one of my best friends today, but managed to slip in there and strip ‘im naked first, so that was okay. Think I lost another job, sure, but fuck it, there’s always another job.” He looked up suddenly, eyes bright. “That’s the thing, Your Highness. They always tell you that getting a job is hard, that you better play by the rules and be careful, don’t get fired, for god’s sake. But you know what? There are always more jobs. That’s the point: Jobs are punsihment for living. What they can’t stand is you not having a job.” He sighed. “Plus, I’ve got a new project. A mental exercise. It’s really kind of interesting, and it’s just absorbing my thoughts.”

“Huh,” Chauvik said. He wanted to dry his hands, but was afraid of an awkward moment if he moved towards the towel dispenser and Stan didn’t get out of the way. So he stood where he was, hands dripping, and said “Huh,” again.

“It’s an interesting problem,” Stan went on, clearly talking to himself. “Not many would understand, of course, got to keep it between me and The Hick, but still, fascinating.” He glanced up as if suddenly remembering—or realizing—that Chauvik was there. “You make it a habit of standing around in bathrooms with mysteriously wet hands, Your Highness?” He clucked his tongue. “Bad idea. People will come to interesting conclusions.”

Chauvik flushed again. He forced himself to step forward towards the towel dispenser. As he’d feared, Stan made no move to shift aside. He stared at Chauvik as he approached and didn’t move as he reached out for a towel, pulling two out quickly and stepping back to dry his hands. “So what’s the project? Probably something crazy! You’re always into crazy things!”

Chauvik struggled to make his tone as cheerful and interested as possible. When Stan didn’t respond immediately, he glanced up to find him staring at him, chewing his thumb. After a moment of this Stan shook his head.

“Nah, forget it. You wouldn’t be hip to it.”

Chauvik blinked. Stan had immediately gone back to staring at the floor, as if dismissing Chauvik from his mind, and thus from reality. Chauvik shifted his weight nervously and forced his smile to stay in place.

“Ah, come on! I’m curious!”

For a moment, Chauvik thought Stan had completely dismissed him from his thoughts, as he just continued to stare at the damp, grimy floor. Then Stan slowly raised his eyes up and transferred his steady, bright-eyed gaze to Chauvik himself. After a few seconds, Chauvik felt nervous under that dancing green look and shifted his weight again, afraid to look away and look stupid. He refreshed his grin.

“What?” he asked.

Stan nodded. “Tell you what, I’ll tell you the project, but not here, not now.” He sobered suddenly and nodded again, curtly this time. “Not at Teddy’s post-burial fete, okay? Later. I think actually, I can use some help with it. What do you say? You up for an adventure?”

Chauvik checked his facial expression and tried to keep the sudden trepidation he felt out of it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be involved in whatever Stan was plotting. The situation of actually being invited to take part had never come up before, and panic was welling up, distantly, inside him.

“Sure!” he heard himself saying. “I’m in!”

Stan nodded again, and pulled his hand from his trouser pocket to slap it down onto Chavik’s shoulder. “Thanks, man. I knew I could count on you.” They stood like that for a moment, solemn and silent, and Chauvik became painfully aware of the ridiculous grin on his face, which he found himself powerless to control or terminate.

“Now,” Stan said, straightening up and retrieveing both arms, “let’s go back out there and honor Teddy by getting inappropriately drunk. Have you seen Henry?”

Chauvik shook his head, still grinning. “I don’t think so.”

“Excellent. I need to talk to him.”

When Chauvik emerged form the bathroom, he stood for a moment blinking in the relative gloom of the dining room. He couldn’t see Stan or Henry anywhere. After a few seconds he became very conscious of standing in front of everyone, peering around and squinting, and swallowed another hard knot of sudden nervousness. He walked briskly to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic, taking it with him to the table, where he found Bobby missing as well. He wanted to quickly look around and see if anyone else seemed to be gone, but forced himself not to.

If they wanted to exclude him, that was fine. He was a grown man, and they could exclude him from anything they wanted. Sipping his drink he tried to see the other tables without moving his head and being obvious. He paused, drink held halfway to his face, and noticed that Miranda was sitting alone at their table, idly stirring a martini and staring into space. He looked down at the smeared, crowded table and then stood up without looking up again, glass in hand, and walked over to her table, trying very hard to appear casual and unconcerned. He knew instinctively, and from long experience, that he was not succeeding.

She did not appear to notice him until he sat down across from her, pushing a friendly grin onto his face and making sure his eyes were rooted firmly on her gorgeous face, even while split-second movies starring her flashed through his mind. She jumped a little and stared, then smiled what Chauvik thought was the fakest smile he’d ever seen.

“Chauvik!” she chirped. “How are you?”

“Good!” he said, nodding. “Good!” He tried stopping his head and was pleased when it stopped bobbing up and down. “I mean, I don’t want to act like it’s a good day or anything, because, you know, because of Teddy, but me, personally, I’m fine. How are you?”

She made a face that Chauvik immediately found adorable. “I’ve been abandoned by my husband, how do you think I am? Half drunk, sick of death, and ready to go home!”

Chauvik analyzed his smile and decided he couldn’t do anything with it, so he left it sitting on his face and forged forward. “I noticed Henry was gone! I saw you sitting here alone and thought I’d come over and keep you company.”

Another flash of scenes, Miranda’s face contorted, her limbs on him, the smell of her.

“You’re sweet, Chauvik.” Her face sobered and she sipped her drink. “I can’t believe Teddy’s. . .gone. I keep expecting him to jump out from behind something and go ta-da! or something.”

“Yeah! I know! I feel the same way! But you know what would be really like Ted? If he waited yearsand years before popping up somewhere!”

A thrill of connection went through him. Miranda seemed happy to see him.

She clapped her hands. “Yes! That would be perfect Teddy!”

A moment of silence followed, with them grinning at each other, and Chauvik had the horrible realization that he had exhausted his conversational gambits with Miranda. As her smile faded—his remained at the same wattage—he felt the moment turning awkward, and cast about desperately for a way to forestall the decay. Finally he leaned forward sharply.

“So what are your husband and Stanley up to? I ran into Stan and they’re plotting something.”

He regretted it immediately, for a variety of reasons. One, he felt dimly that this was perhaps information Stan hadn’t wanted Miranda to know, since Stan was eternally plotting to keep wives out of various loops. Two, the sudden stoniness in Miranda’s face told him that this was a sore subject for her, Stan and Henry plotting, and long experience told him that without any justification Miranda’s warmth and tolerance of his presence would be infected and ruined by her cold mood towards her husband.

She narrowed her eyes and put her hand on his arm, which momentarily shocked Chauvik so much his smile disappeared from his face. Her skin felt warm against his. Every conscious thought was suddenly crowded out by a rowdy series of erotic images starring Miranda’s hand.

“What are they up to! Chauvik! You must tell me!”

The cheerful way she said this was belied by the irritated look in her eyes, but her smile was wide and the hand on his arm influential, and Chauvik found himself smiling out of sheer instinct. At the last moment he rallied for a final spurt of resistance.

“Aw, I don’t really know anything. Stan was probably joking anyway.”

She looked crestfallen, but then eyed him suspiciously. “C’mon, Chauvik. You are all thick as thieves. Spill.”

A thrill went through Chauvik that he couldn’t explain and didn’t consider very deeply. “I, uh, I really don’t know. Stan said he was getting something together, but hasn’t told me anything yet.”

Another silence, though Chauvik thought this one less awkward. They were both, he thought, contemplating some of the other projects Stan had ‘gotten together’ over the years, often involving Teddy the Infinitely Wealthy as a co-chairman of the organizing committee. Some had been lighthearted and hilarious, some cruel and controversial. Many had simply dissipated into the air, forgotten and never brought off.

“Listen,” she said, leaning forward. In his peripheral vision, Chauvik could see the way her breasts spilled forward in her dress, and kept his eyes riveted to hers. She was smiling. “You’re my eyes and ears, Chauvik. You’re my spy in Stan’s house. Let me know what’s going on. I’ve got a funny feeling about whatever it is they’re getting up. It just feels squishy to me.”

She wrinkled her nose in a way that Chauvik found adorable. He wondered if perhaps he was in love with Miranda and just didn’t know it. The idea appealed to him, especially since it would never amount to anything. He saw himself pining away for her, desperately unhappy but unable to do anything about it due to social constraints and his deep friendship with Henry. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became: he was desperately in love with Miranda, and it was hopeless. The mere thought made him crave alcohol to wallow in. Something harsh and adult, like Scotch. He imagined himself, drink in hand, staring soulfully across the room as she danced with her husband, flashes of thigh and imagined perfume.

“Well, I’m sure it’s nothing. . .” he said feebly.

She placed her hand on his arm again, a shock going through him. “C’mon, Chauvik! It’ll be fun to zoom Stan a little. He’s used to zooming everyone else.”

Chauvik manufactured what he imagined was a charming smile. “Yes! That would be fun!” He nodded his head. She smiled gaily at him and leaned back in her seat, breasts jiggling. He smiled back. The silence between them stretched into another threateningly awkward moment, and he squirmed mentally, wondering if he should try to continue the conversation or just admit defeat and slink off to contemplate the burning passion he had just discovered for Miranda.

He brightened, thinking of a smooth way out of the moment. “Need another drink?” he said, standing up. He pictured the inviting glass of Scotch, and a wonderfully morose feeling swept through him. He was going to enjoy being ruined, he thought.

She shook her head, cocking it to one side. “I’ve had enough. I’m fallin’ asleep here.”

“Okay,” he nodded and made his way to the bar, where he ordered a Scotch on the rocks. The bartender asked him if he had a Scotch preference, and his tone made Chauvik think that maybe he should have one, that maybe a Scotch preference was one of those things grown-ups always had. He tried to remember any brand of Scotch he could, but came up blank and gave up, just waving his hand as if he’d been through this a million times. “Whatever you’ve got.”

When it arrived, he stared at the golden liquid in the tumbler for a moment. He had to admit that with the icecubes and the soft lighting, it looked beautiful, attractive. It looked like it ought to be an enjoyable thing. He lifted it to his nose and inhaled, and immediately had to suppress a spasm of coughs. He put the glass back down and stared at it nervously, unsure of his next step. The stuff smelled like gasoline. He imagined his insides melting away if he swallowed any.

The horrible idea that Miranda might be watching struck him, and he quickly plucked up the glass again, tried to strike a pose that looked sufficiently soul searching and world-weary. He didn’t think he had it in him.

VIII

Stan opened his eyes and stared, for a moment, up at the ceiling. It was white and veined with spidery cracks, and he knew it so well he could close his eyes and still see it. He experimented with this for a moment, opening and shutting his eyes, and then rolled halfway over and reached for his pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, extracting one and placing it in his mouth. He blinked and it was lit, an action so ingrained he didn’t have to think about it consciously anymore. He watched the smoke drift upwards and curled his toes under the sheets. He was content, and thought that his happiest moment every day was when he initially woke up. The joy of relaxing in his warm blankets, still sleepy, the lingering glittery dust of his dream—invariably, there was a dream, and while he rarely remembered any real details, his disintergrating memories always made the dream seem like it was wonderful, a spectacular moment of his imagination.

He inhaled deeply and considered what to do with his day.

He’d gotten paid the night before, he assumed. He’d timed his abandonment of yet another job precisely, knowing that it would be days before any real alarms went off. With luck, he might even get paid in two weeks, too, if he had the energy to make some calls and beg for some mercy. He might not. It was only money, and sometimes he didn’t see the point in striving for it. As he lay smoking in bed, curling his toes rhythmically and staring at his ceiling, it seemed entirely possible that this was actually the whole purpose of his existence, just to do these things.

After a while, when nothing better occured to him, he got out of bed and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. It was glorious, this first stage of unemployment. Since not paying any bills went hand-in-hand with not holding down jobs for very long, he was momentarily flush with cash. Desperation and privation had not yet set in, and his friends had not yet taken on the judgemental tones and harping actions of The Worried, constantly refusing to loan him sums of money and constantly urging him to get another position somewhere. It was glorious. It was just endless free time.

Dressed and suddenly finding himself smelling vaguely of cigarettes and whisky, he went outside and walked half a block to a small grocery called Oscar’s. Oscar’s wasn’t owned or run by anyone named Oscar anymore; as far as Stanley knew (and his will to investigate had been small) Oscar himself sold out about fifty years before he’d arrived on the scene. The current owner, a portly black man who could always be found sitting on a little stool behind the register, ran the business in a shipshod way, allowing shoplifting, spoilage, and malaise to make his stock questionable and frustrating. He somehow conjured up excellent coffee, however. Stanley assumed that the black man—whom he always mentally referred to as Oscar despite knowing full well that it wasn’t his name—loved coffee as much as he did.

With two large cups of light and sweet coffee, Stanley went back to his apartment and stole a newspaper from the front steps. He sat at his kitchen table drinking and reading, in silence. In the back of his mind, he summed up his cash situation, deducted three dollars for the coffees, and stared, mentally, at a stark number for a moment, trying to ferret out any other deposits of money he might investigate. It didn’t seem likely that anyone would loan him any more, and it didn’t seem likely that he’d forgotten hundreds of dollars in a jacket pocket—although it was depressingly possible that he’d forgotten hundreds of dollars in a bar or taxi. So he finalized the number in his head and began contemplating economies.

He’d gotten good at this, after years of ditching jobs just before disasters of his own making came down the pike to drown him. He had a good idea of what things cost, and how much of everything he would need. Cigarettes, a certain amount. Liquor, a certain amount. Food, a certain amount. Rent, carfare—everything had a firm number in his head, and is was just a matter of multiplying it out and dividing it into his cash, and he knew how long he could go without getting a new job. Usually he was able to add in some borrowed cash that would extend his vacation, but a gut instinct told him he’d pumped everyone he knew too much recently and that the well had gone dry, especially now that Teddy the Infinitely Wealthy seemed to be really, actually, irrevocably dead.

By this calculation, he had four months before he’d be eating dog food and scrounging amongst other people’s couch cushions for coffee money, before the really nasty symptoms of scurvy would make themselves noticed. Four brief months. But you could get a lot of living done in those four months, especially since your time wouldn’t, by necessity, be weighed down with constant expensive meals. And he knew what he was going to use the time for: His new project, murdering Miranda.

Noon found Stan fervently hoping that someone would buy him lunch. Part of his successful unemployment strategy was embracing the charitable instincts of those around him. A free lunch, a glommed drink here and there-they extended his unemployed time period by weeks and often improved his nutritional intake so much he fell temporarily in love with his benefactors. Stan thought he was one good physical ailment away from being able to live off of charity for the rest of his life: One manfully tolerated injury or defect, and he’d have lunch bought for him all the time. He’d contemplated various fraudulent worker’s compensation schemes, had envisioned throwing himself down some stairs and living off 80% of his salary for the rest of his miserable, eat-through-a-straw life. Depending on the day, he often found the idea of being a wealthy invalid not unattractive. He usually imagined a very pretty nurse taking care of him. The lighting in his scenes was particularly good, golden light making him seem solemn and heroic—stoic. He framed his imaginary scenes with a camera low to the ground, gazing up at him lovingly, making him seem always like the largest thing in the room, even when others were standing near him, through the use of forced perspective.

He was loitering outside Henry’s office building, smoking a precious cigarette and shivering, underdressed for the weather, standing hunched over to try and keep the wind out of his thin jacket. When Henry appeared, he straightened up immediately and affected a casual, unconcerned look. He waved.

Henry, wearing a good coat but looking tired, stopped and stared for a moment, then walked over, shaking his head. “Stanley, Stanley,” he said slowly, shaking hands. “What do I owe the honor to?”

“Unemployment,” Stanley said immediately, grinning, cigarette wagging up and down. “Buy me lunch. I want to talk to you about something. An idea I had while hanging out with Chauvik in the bathroom.”

Henry sighed. “How about I buy you lunch specifically so you don’t tell me about that.”

They started walking. “Quit your job again, huh?” Henry said after a moment.

Stan nodded, trying to combat the cold with a brisk pace. “Sure, sure. Had to. Work, as you are walking proof of, rots your brain. I needed some fresh air, restore the oxygen to my brain.”

Henry sighed. “What you up for? Burgers okay?”

“Sure, sure. Anything. Someplace with a bar.”

Henry sighed again. “You’re not going to live long like this, you know.”

“Define long.”

“Much longer than Teddy.”

Stan waved his cigarette. “Bah! Ted had no fucking sense. Ate and drank like it was all ending up pasted into someone elses arteries.”

“You’re no paragon of virtue, Stan.”

“Hicky, no one is. But I figure I got the same chance as anyone else of seeing a hundred. No cancer, no stroke, I might bury you someday.”

Henry smiled. “Don’t doubt it. You’re good peasant stock. I’m a frail arsitocrat.”

Stan nodded seriously, carefully smoking his cigarette down to the filter. “Too much inbreeding.”

“Okay, was there really something you wanted to talk about, or was this just episode one of Stan Bums a Meal?”

Stan drummed his fingers on the table and stared at his half-finished beer, trying to gauge if Henry was in any mood to be touched for a second. He postponed the decision, leaning back and smiling. Out of the cold wind, he felt himself again, in charge of the situation. “Remember what we were talking about a few days ago? At Teddy’s funeral?”

Henry looked unhappy. “It was a bad day, Stan,” he said quietly. “Just let it drift.”

Stan shook his head. “Listen, I’m not saying you really meant it. I’ll stipulate that you did not, okay? But it got me thinking.”

Henry snorted. “Sure did. Teddy’s bare-assed in the ground you though so much.”

Stan opened his mouth, but reached for his beer instead and drank deeply. The place was a small bar that served its beer in frozen pint glasses, slivers of spontaneous ice floating in the beer, and had a surprisingly deep menu for a place that looked like it had been redecorated last thirty or forty years before. A hum of voices and gelatinous rock music filled the air.

“Look,” he said carefully, “Look—I know this is a little weird, but you got me thinking. Purely on the theory side of things. Purely as an intellectual pursuit. How could it be done? If someone wanted to kill someone—to murder them—how could it be done and you get away with it?”

Henry leaned back in his own chair and studied Stan. “An intellectual pursuit?”

Stan nodded, pushing back toward the table. “Yes! I don’t know how to explain. Sometimes I get an idea and I wonder how it could be done, how it would work, and I start chewing over it, and chewing over it, and I can’t get it out of my head until I come up with a solution. So I asked myself, how could it be done? The whole Teddy thing,” he waved his hand. “I apologized for that. I was drunk and I thought that was the solution, you know? I was too drunk to realize it was just a small part of the solution.”

Henry’s expression didn’t change. “A small part.”

Stan nodded. “Yes! I mean, think about it, it’s an ideal body disposal solution, but before you can dispose of a body, you have to have a body, right?”

Henry didn’t move. “I suppose that’s true.”

Stan finished his beer with a gulp and decided to break his rules and order another on his own dime, waving at the waitress. “But it’s only half the story. I mean, someone who used to be there suddenly disappears, it’s not like they’re gonna ignore it as long as there’s no body. You have to explain it, right? And even if you explain it, there’s gonna be suspiscion, right?”

Henry nodded his head, once, unblinking. “Of course.”

Stan pulled out his cigarettes and extracted one, waving it around unlit. “Of course—you’ve thought of all this. I’ve only had a few days to think on it, it’s all coming to me bit by bit.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and began feeling himself up for a light. “I mean, that’s the rub when it comes to murder, right? There’s always an investigation. You need a way of doing that will throw off any pursuit. You need to be able to have your whole life examined and come through it without a snag. The obvious answer is, you need to get someone else to do it for you.”

Henry suddenly sagged, relaxing all at once. “That’s your brilliant plan? A hit-man?”

Stan shook his head as he hunched over to light his cigarette. “No, no no. That’s fucking amateur. Fucking suburban husbands talk about that shit, throwing money at the problem. No, I had a brilliant idea. Actually, I have to give credit to Chauvik. The Prince did it unintentionally, but he gave me the basic idea. The trick here is that we get people to do this for us without them realizing it.”

Henry blinked and a little smile of perplexity appeared on his face. “What?”

Stan waved his hands. “Now, this is all just a mental exercise, right? This is what scientists call a thought experiment. And I haven’t worked through all the details, so don’t jump to any conclusions, just hear me out. The basic idea is this: Our friends are, by and large, pretty dumb, right?”

Henry frowned. “Well, I—”

Stan shook his head. “Fuck the polite shit, Hicky. They’re dumb as posts, by and large. Out of all of us, I’d say you, me, and your wife are the only people who make the IQ meter jump at all when we walk into a room. Chauvik? Dumb as shit. Bobby? Dumb as shit. Gina, George, Deidre, Adrian, Susan? My god, Hickie—that’s a fucking rogue’s gallery of stupidity. But these are the materials we’ve been handed—blunt, dull blades. But I have an idea how to use them.

“The brilliant part of what I’m thinking is that if it works, your murder is accomplished, and not only will you have an actual, bona-fide alibi, but you will have diced up the actual act of murder into so many small pieces, each performed by a different person, that non one could put them all together.”

Henry leaned forward frowning. “How exactly do you do that?”

Stan paused to order another drink from the waitress. He felt expansive, heated from within and in perfect health, a clicking, whirring machine that could never break down or rot. “This is the really brilliant part: You get everyone you know to do a small part of it—a part small enough that it would be impossible to extrapolate the whole picture, especially since the person wouldn’t know the ultimate goal. Plus, as I’ve mentioned, the people we’re talking about would be dumb.”

Henry leaned back. “That. . .” he paused. “That sounds ridiculous.”

Stan leaned forward so suddenly he made the table rattle. “No, it could work! Look, step back a moment. Forget murder. Think of it this way: Say you want to steal a book from someone, okay?”

“A book.”

“A diary, maybe.”

“A diary.”

“A diary of an old girlfriend in which she describes your gruesome and embarrassing sexual peccadilos.”

Henry nodded. “Okay. Let’s say that.”

“So you want to steal this book before it ruins your future political aspirations, okay? So you get five friends—friends who have access to the apartment, friends who can get in there without causing a ruckus or taking chances—and ask them to do you some favors. Ideally you make the favors unremarkable, but even if they appear kind of strange to your friends it’s not the end of the world as long as they don’t know what favors everyone else did.”

Stan licked his lips and nodded to himself.

“Something like this: Friend one leaves a pre-stamped envelope in an unobtrusive place—no address, just stamps. Friend number two gets in there and takes the diary from its hiding place and puts it on a bookshelf in another room. Friend number three takes it from the bookshelf and places it inside the aforementioned envelope, which he hides in a drawer. Friend four retrieves the envelope and brings it to friend number five, who accepts it, addresses it, and mails it.”

Henry frowned again. “And why does everyone do these bizarre things? And why wouldn’t they just go to the girlfriend and spill everything?”

Stan shrugged. “Plenty of possible reasons. As a favor, no questions asked. A prank. A dare. Or just a bald plea for help against your Ex—please help me screw over my ex, trust me, moving that book into a drawer will drive her crazy—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because the main thing is, even if your Ex starts to suspect something’s happening, if they ask Friend Three what you asked him to do, he says—totally truthfully—you asked him to put this book in an envelope and hide it in the drawer, and that’s it. No one actually knows what happened. Only you—everyone else has one piece that doesn’t make any sense without the rest. Maybe if you got all five people into a room and compared notes the whole thing comes out, but what are the chances?”

Henry stared for a second, and then dropped his gaze to the tabletop. He sat in silence for a moment. “So you’re saying we could divide the actual murder into small pieces, and somehow convince people to do these meaningless, bizarre tasks that result in murder, but no one knows what they’ve done.”

Stan nodded, accepting a fresh drink from the waitress. “Exactly. It’s cumbersome, I admit, but fuck—it just might work if you planned well.”

Henry’s face had taken on an expression Stan couldn’t identify. He studied it for a moment in an attempt to categorize it, because it occurred to him that in the long years of their acquaintance, he had never been at a loss to accurately predict and describe Henry’s moods and thoughts. In his mind’s eye, Henry always appeared in scenes subtitled, his inner monologue written out in white letters for everyone to see. When Henry was angry his face closed up into an amusing little-boy face of rage—lips pursed, eyes narrowed—and when he was pleased he couldn’t stop himself from beaming llight and approval around the room. His puzzlements were obvious and his reactions transparent, as a rule, and it disturbed Stan greatly o look at the familiar crags and valleys of his friends aging, deeping face and see an expression he’d never seen before, one completely alien and obfuscated.

“It’s either genius or crap,” henry said slowly, staring at Stan’s beer with a steady, flat gaze. “What do you propose to do with it?”

Stan shrugged. “Test it out.”

Henry brought his eyes up to Stan’s, and Stan, for once, didn’t enjoy the encounter. “You want to kill Miranda as an experiment?”

“No!” Stan hastened to throw his hands up and deny this. “Of course not. I see this as a mental exercise. I don’t intend or want to kill anyone.” He peered at Henry thoughtfully. “Do you?”

Henry leaned back in his seat, folding his hands in his lap, his eyes still on Stan in a curious, unhappy way. He looked flushed and hot to Stan. “Jesus, Stan, of course not,” he said flatly, archly.

Stan licked his lips and savored the unfamiliar sensation of being unsure of where Henry was standing or what he meant. He’d always known Henry was a man without subtlety, w ithout nuance, without a hidden thought or a motivation that could not be easily uncovered with some gentle, genial probing. A Henry with hidden assets and secrets was disturbing—but exciting, as if he’d just met his old friend for the second time, the entertainment and bits of interesting fluff that might be extracted from him still unknown factors, mysteries upon mysteries.

Stan felt his recent malaise fading away, falling off him like chunks of crust. This, he thought, this was fucking interesting.

“So you in? See if we could pull this off?”

Henry leaned forward again, his face still, his eyes steady. Stan sipped his beer to hide his delighted grin. Henry was just an endless parade of pleasant surprises today. He chalked up coming to accost Henry for a free lunch as one of the best decisions he’d made in recent months.

“Stan,” Henry said deliberately. “Why do you want to do it? A lot of trouble to not kill someone, yes?”

Stan choked back giggles of delight, reveling in this—codes! subtext! unspoken understandings!—and forced a shrug. “I just want to know that about myself. Could I do it? It might be a useful skill to practice, secret murder.” He winked. “You never know when a skill like that might come in handy.”

Henry nodded. “Okay. Let’s try it.”

Stan winked and raised his glass. “To murder.”

Henry nodded, and Stan thought he’d never seen Henry move with such deliberate, controlled precision. “To murder,” he said.

IX

Miranda lay in bed and stared at the back of Henry’s head, and wondered what the hell was wrong with him. He was deep in one of his traditional brown studies, monosyllabic and cranky. They didn’t come too often, thank goodness, but when they came it was almost as if she could sense him sliding away from her, sense him removing from her sphere of influence. It never lasted for very long, but it was implacable and uncontrollable, and disturbed her to no end.

She wanted to reach out and stroke the slightly curly hair on the back of his head, but she didn’t. He would just grunt and whip his head forward as if her touch hurt him. She knew this mood very well. She’d even seen glimpses of it when they’d been dating, but it hadn’t reared its head entirely until after they’d married. But even that, like so much of her life, had begun a shockingly long time ago. She didn’t feel old, and the way men still paid attention to her told her she wasn’t old—at least not too old—but the way things snuck up on her, like being with Henry for so damn long, it made her feel old and used-up. She thought maybe something new, something fresh might help.

Studying the back of Henry’s head, she wondered again if he might be having an affair.

On the surface, the idea was ludicrous. Henry was lazy and immovable on the best of days, and had never showed too much interest in other women. But this suddenly made her think it was perhaps a careful ruse, that maybe he was deeply, desperately interested in other women and various perverse sexual adventures with them but had always been careful to mask this lusting behind feigned disinterest.

Just as quickly, she dismissed this idea as absurd. This was her Henry, after all, and the man didn’t have any masks in him.

This, however, sparked a new thought, that maybe Henry, who had always been alive more in his head than outwardly, might be having an imaginary affair, an ongoing mental shagging with someone. This struck her as exactly Henry’s speed, and she immediately saw him lying there, having hot illicit adulterous sex with a variety of imaginary women. Imaginary? No, she was suddenly also certain that Henry lacked the particular imagination it would take to completely invent a whole woman, and if he was having illicit adulterous imaginary sex, it was with an imagined version of a real woman.

She quickly scanned the list of likely subjects, and decided that Gina, simply because of ease of access, and Chick Parker were the prime candidates. Denise might be on the list, she supposed, but she just didn’t think Denise was the sort of girl to inspire that sort of effort. No, she included Gina for the simple fact that Gina was a whore and would jump on any man she caught sight of, like a wild cat hunting in the wild, and she included Chick because Chick was the sort of long-legged sad girl that men always wanted to take home, like a stray kitten, and make dinner for, put band-aids on her knees, and fuck silly. And those sort of girls, Miranda knew, always let it happen with a sweet, mystified look on their face, as if they could never, in a million years, understand how it had happened.

Still, it didn’t seem to fit. As far as she could tell—and Miranda was pretty sure she told things pretty well—Henry had nothing for Gina. He’d always even seemed a little put off by her, a little disgusted, like maybe he could see all her former conquests swimming in her blood, too. And Chick, while she knew that Chick Parker, the sad, leggy perma-waitress was Henry’s type, she’d long ago marked Chick as a girl she would be watching very carefully when it came to Henry. She knew her husband did not always act as bright as he really was—was borderline socially-autistic, sometimes—but even he could not possibly have missed the signs.

If he was boffing someone on the side, then, Miranda had to conclude that it was someone outside their circle. Some little piece at work, or some acquaintance of Stanley’s. She wouldn’t put the role of pimp beyond Stan, unfortunately.

She sighed. Or maybe, she conceded to herself, maybe he was just tired and unhappy and the rest was in her head. Henry loved her, she knew. She didn’t think he would ever hurt her on purpose. By accident, through sheer stupidity, yes.

Henry lay on his side and stared at the digital clock, red letters humming in the twilight of their bedroom. He wished Miranda would turn her light off and put the room in the kind of darkness he wanted, but if he rolled over to ask this he would reveal to her that he was still awake, and she might want to talk about something. He could tell she had something on her mind, and had entered into the active attempt to communicate it to him. He’d responded the only way he knew how, by pretending to be distracted, unhappy, and vaguely irritable. He knew that if he just continued to feign sleep he’d make it at least until the morning, where, with some artful avoidance, he might make it all the way into the office without speaking more than three words to her. And once at the office he had the impenetrable wall of voicemail and meetings and work, work work to defend him.

Throw in a few after-work events, he thought—which Stan could always be counted on to organize, esepcially now that he was desperate for funds—and he might go days before hearing whatever it was Miranda had in mind—and by then it might become moot, or forgotten.

He thought of him and Stanley, plotting murder for the intellectual rewards. He was pretty sure they would forget about it in a week, leaving behind a raft of scribbled notes to be laughed at years later, like the time they’d plotted to grow mairjuana plants in their closets and sell weed at deep discounts, half a notebook filled with fake corporate logos, distribution strategies, potential franchisees, and even a last-ditch, cops at the door plan for getting rid of evidence, hilarious in its naivetee and bullshit factor. The theory of Merry Pranksterism Stan had outlined was interesting, he thought, and could be adapted, maybe, for any number of purposes; it was interesting to think of the whole world being run that way, people receiving small, inexplicable marching orders and doing them—on whims, to fulfill favors owed, for whatever reason—and halfway around the world, after weeks or months, something seemingly unrelated happened—you dial a number from a pay phone in Manhattan, say, and two months later a bag left unattended in Heathrow airport explodes—and the various interlocked cogs never know what happened, never realize their role, or their relationship to each other.

Henry thought the pranks could work both ways. The cogs didn’t have to think they were playing pranks; they could have pranks played on them. Like asking someone to call you at a number, and when they call there’s no answer—but that bag in Heathrow still explodes.

Thinking about a world run by an illuminati like Stan, a council of Stans, long greasy hair and patrician voices and long, twitchy noses, cheap and easily amused, Henry drifted off into genuine sleep, and had a dream.

HENRY’S DREAM

He was driving, and didn’t see himself as if in a movie—in Henry’s dreams, he was always seeing things from his own point of view, which he’d heard somewhere, from someone, was very unusual. He was driving at night, and the radio was on, and an old song was playing really, really loudly. EVerything in the dream happened on the backbeat oif the song, as if frames had been removed from a movie, little instant jump-cuts that moved the scene forward faster than reality.

I was alone, I took a ride

I didn’t know what I would find there

Another road where maybe I

could see another kind of mind there

Ooo, then I suddenly see you

Ooo, did I tell you I need you

Every single day of my life

You didn’t run, you didn’t hide

You know i wanted just to hold you

And had you gone, you knew in time

We’d meet again for I had told you

Ooo, you were meant to be near me

Ooo, and I want you to hear me

Say we’ll be together every day

Got to get you into my life

What can I do, what can I be

When I’m with you I want to stay there

If I’m true I’ll never leave

And if I do I know the way there

Ooo, then I suddenly see you

Ooo, did I tell you I need you

Every single day of my life

Got to get you into my life

He was steering along a dark, winding road, sometimes it seemed like he was creeping up the side of a mountain, with the car—which was, he realized, a very old car, ancient in its design and operation—clinging to the road by some miracle of friction. The song was pounding, the brass part slicing through the air and hurting his ears, the volume so high it distorted the singer’s smooth velvet voice. The road comes in at quick snapshots with the beat, bam-bam-bam, closer, closer, closer. And then there he was. It was Miranda’s house. He didn’t know how he knew that, since it wasn’t their house, the house they lived in, and there was no sign. It was a huge, modern-looking house with lots of glass, hanging on the very edge of a cliff, a comically elongated cliff that jutted out like a Dr. Seuss illustration over a boiling sea miles below.

Cut, cut, cut, and he was out of the car and walking, the beat splicing him forward a few blacked-out steps at a time. Hand on the door, now inside, moving down a hall, step step—splice, hand on the door, inside, and there was Miranda, sleeping, curled up in bed, in the exact position she’d been in when he went to sleep—he remarked on this to himself, mentally, as he dreamed—on her side, slightly curled up, feet twisted around each other. Splice, splice, splice and he was looming over her, and now, strangely, he could see his hands, and he realized that it was strange that he could still hear the song, clear and loud, too loud, despite having left the car far behind him.

And then, she opened her eyes and startled. He plucked up the pillow and pushed it down onto her face, pushing down on it to the beat of the song, pow!, pow!, pow! And, inexplicably, blood began to soak the pillow, really fast, a red bloom spreading until the whole pillow was soaked and dripped and it was as if her head had burst, like a grape, and he was just pushing the soggy pillow into the mattress.

I was alone, I took a ride

I didn’t know what I would find there

Another road where maybe I

could see another kind of mind there

Ooo, then I suddenly see you

Ooo, did I tell you I need you

Every single day

Then, the fade, the long fade-out of the song, and he knew, somehow, that if he didn’t get out of the house before the song ended, faded completely to black, he would be dragged into the sea, the house would slide backwards off its moorings and disappear, with him in it, into the boilings below. To the beat—pant, pant, pant—he turned and ran, but he found he was totally slicked in blood, and couldn’t get any traction. Slipping and sliding and falling, the house began to tilt, and he would slide back several steps every time he slipped. He couldn’t make any headway. The song grew dimmer and dimmer, receding, and the dreaded silence welled up around him like insulation, making it harder to move, harder to breathe.

The silence terrified him, and grew more and more complete every second, while his motor control shriveled until he could only spin on the floor, drenched in slick blood, powerless to even stand, as the house tilted, and the silence became solid and grasping and too late he realized the silence was behind him, below him, and was what he would be poured into when the house finally finished tilting.

Waking, he sat bolt upright in complete silence and almost cried out, but stopped himsef. He was wet head to toe with sweat. The quiet of his room terrified him, and he thought that a sound—any sound—would be a comfort, would break the spell of his dream, but he dared not make any noise, afraid to wake Miranda, suddenly very afraid that if she asked him what was wrong he would break and cry and tell her everything and beg her forgiveness. So he sat panting in the darkness, rigid with fear, but did nothing.

Miranda, disturbed, shifted drowsily and muttered something in her sleep, and the spell was broken. The dark seemed to shatter into a million silent shards, revealing a similar, but less frightening darkness behind it. He sat for a few moments more, panting, and then lay down in his damp sheets and forced himself to breathe deeply and relax.

Miranda opened her eyes and discovered herself alone in a cool bed, a dim, ghostly light flooding in from somewhere else in the apartment. This had never happened before, and her first instinct was incredible fear for Henry. He was more or less incompetent, and the idea that he might kill himself doing the simplest things, like sleeping, didn’t sound far-fetched to her. A wave of affectionate worry swept through her, and she wondered if she should get up and find him, the better to staunch massive bleeding or call 9-1-1 as early as possible. But she also knew this would annoy Henry, and that would annoy her, and they’d end up having the same stupid fight they always did, and he’d sulk the rest of thenight.

So she lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling. She realized she could hear him fussing about in the kitchen, and relaxed a little—unless he was staggering around bleeding everywhere it sounded safe enough. A little insomnia, and very little even incompetent Henry could do to hurt himself with that.

Sometimes at times like that she imagined life without Henry. It was largely the same: Quiet, and still, with mysterious noises that both annoyed and endeared her.

At the kitchen table, Henry stared down at his glass of Scotch and congratulated himself on being stealthy and silent. He did not want Miranda to discover him sneaking booze in the middle of the night; she would complain that it would keep him from sleeping, that he’d wake up fuzzy and cranky the next day, that it was bad for him, all sorts of things. Most of which, he knew, were true, but there was no cheese at the end of that highway, so he let it drift and sipped his drink, swirling the ice around to cool it down.

The kitchen floor felt sticky, and the walls looked ominous and stained in the bad light of mid-morning fluorescence. The whole room felt shabby and constricting to him, as if dirt had accumulated on the walls over the years, crusting them, slowly reducing the space available inside, the floorspace shrinking. He squared his shoulders and took a small, shuddering sip of his drink.

He needed a plan.

It was not enough to merely mildly desire your wife dead, he thought. Thousands, if not millions, if not every husband had such desires at one time or another and very few, he was sure, ever managed to turn them into something real. And most of them quickly went to jail, convicted and despised. The difference between him and most husbands, he thought, would be actually doing it. And the difference between him and the few that also did it would be planning it well enough to avoid punishment, or even suspicion.

Stan’s idea was brilliant, he thought, but so fucking hard to make happen. It depressed him, this perfect skeleton of a plan, because he had no idea how to make it actually work. Various people doing strange, unrelated things that added up to no more Miranda—it seemed impossible to figure out. But on the other hand, he didn’t have to—he knew Stan, had known him for years. Stan would stay up late nights, figuring this out, coming up with the perfect plan. Stan would hand him every detail, he knew, in some obscure attempt to figure out the fucking universe. Stan, who amused himself by doing vast sums in his head, sitting there for minutes adding and carrying digits and checking his steps, just for the hell of it. Stan who once figured out a way of estimating people’s weight based on their height and their waistline, spending a few hours winning free drinks in a bar by guessing people’s weight’s, over and over, within five pounds. Stan who forgot his algorithm the next day and was never able to repeat the feat.

In a few weeks, Henry was sure, Stan would have it all worked out. He’d give him the sequence of events, the script, the patter, the way it all locked in together, and he’d be really proud of himself, of another obscure intellectual triumph. And then he’d forget all about it, wash it down with booze and digest it and wake up desperate for a loan and a job interview and another pointless intellectual exercise.

Henry took a drink and nodded to himself. It would all fall into place. All he had to do was wait for Stan to plan everything for him, and then do it exactly as Stan specified. He’d been pretty much doing whatever Stan suggested for years anyway, so it felt natural.

X

Stan sat in a bar called Teddy’s Bar, still poleaxed by the sheer horror of the pun, and studied his reflection in the mirror. He felt good: Showered, shaved, in clean clothes, his hair under control for a change. He felt trim and fit, which was unexpected but appreciated, and he sent a mental nod of encouragement to the cosmos in hopes that more days like this would be coming his way. He thought maybe he’d attained some sort of midlife balance, his body not yet worn down enough to break down, but the rough edges smoothed down, leaving him, strangely enough, more flexible and streamlined. He thought maybe all the booze had had a wonderful smoothing affect on him, and vowed to keep it up.

It was one in the afternoon, all the suckers were at work, and he let his bourbon neat mellow for a bit while he bent his mind towards the problem of Murder the Very Merry Prankster Way.

Licking a finger, he selected a bar napkin from the pile and extracted a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket. Bending over the napkin, he began to laboriously print out names and scenarios. He quickly came to realize that orchestrating a murder that not only didn’t appear to be a murder but which involved four or five unwitting accomplices, each given a task they would both accomplish and never connect with the murder was very, very difficult. After a few minutes of scratching at the napkin, he set the pen down and took a sip of his drink, contemplating.He’d managed to come up with some general principles for the project, and that was a start: One, the people involved should never connect their prank with the crime, Two, the pranks themselves should appear to be actual pranks, with an obvious punchline, Three, the death must appear accidental and invite no suspicion. This was a tall order. He sat for a few moments feeling despair sweep through him, as it seemed totally impossible. When this wave of black feeling passed, he glanced down and was amazed to discover that his glass was empty, and the bartender, an aging hottie who still had the body, squeezed into tight black jeans, but was losing her face, wrinkled and steamed by too many cigarettes, too many bumps in the bathroom, too many nicked shots of whiskey, was standing in front of him expectantly.

“Warm that up for ya?” she asked, smiling. Stan blinked at her. For a moment, he imagined her at twenty, essentially the same but young and pretty, and thought it must be really sad to wake up one day and realize you were no longer the hot young bartender working the night shift and getting lots of tips just because of the way your tits looked in a tight black T-shirt.

He nodded, snapping himself out of the spell. “Sure. Why not?”

She winked, pulling a bottle from the shelf. “That’s the spirit. On the house.”

Stan was struck with the unattractive possibility that she was hitting on him, but then his glass was full, ice cracking, and she was moving off to keep track of her other customers, who were slow to anger but held grudges for years and years. Stan scanned the rest of the place and found stiffened, wizened old men, and felt suddenly vibrant anf flexible, scrubbed and young. He toasted his reflection in the mirror and glanced down at the napkin. This wasn’t going to be easy.

He listed a few general categories of murder in a neat list: POISON, FALL, CRASH, FIRE. These seemed reasonable accidents—anything involving a weapon would be too obvious unless an extremely complex story was wrapped around it, so he thought the only chance would be to engineer a total accident via pranks. After a moment, he scratched out POISON. He didn’t know anything about poisons, and he thought that anything that showed up in blood tests or the like would blow the whole cover. What was needed was a pure accident, but one arranged via a series of pranks that didn’t have obvious connections.

He tapped his pen on the napkin for a few moments, staring at the short list: FALL, CRASH, FIRE.

Crash seemed risky. It would involve either sabotaging the workings of a car, which would be apparent to an investigation, or somehow arranging an Act of God. With reluctance, he scratched it out as well. That left him staring down at FALL and FIRE.

These seemed more reasonable. A fire could be engineered without any tell-tale signs of arson, he was sure, and people fell—down stairs, in the shower—all the time. The chances of engineering such an accident without leaving any sign of various Merry Pranksters involved seemed favorable, if not easy. Fires killed people all the time, people fell all the time. The trick was to somehow arrange for one of these to afflict someone on cue, with all escape cut off by previous pranks. Timing was a factor, as well, since Henry had to be away from home, but Stan decided that would be easy enough to arrange since Henry would be in on all the details.

He stared at the two words and tapped his pen against the napkin.

Both approaches had their drawbacks, their inaccuracies. Fires might not burn as quickly or as brutally as imagined, and even with escape routes stopped up by clever pranks, desperate people sometimes found ingenious avenues of flight from flames. A fall, no matter how brutally engineered, might result in mere maiming or even in only slight injury. Of course, if the plan worked even a miserably failed murder would have few reprecusions for Henry and himself, theoretically—the victim would simply assume a terrible accident had occured, and none of the pranksters would know of their involvement, either. That was what made the concept so appealing, so brilliant: If done properly, with patience and attention to detail, it would a silent, undetectable muder attempt.

Stan thought he might write a book, or at least a magazine article, about it once he figured out the way.

As he thought of it, the idea appealed to him, taking the perfect murder and releasing it unto the world, like a plague. He imagined that the whole legal system would have to be refined to handle this new concept. The rules of evidence handling and investigation would have to be adjusted to compensate for the thousands of Merry Prankster Murders being plotted and committed. Old friends would regard any strange prank-like requests with suspicion, and traditional bonds of affections and camaraderie would erode under the strain.

He would, of course, publish it under a psuedonym, maybe in an underground zine, and merely enjoy the spectacle of watching society unravel because of something he did. It sounded a little hyperbolic at first, but as he considered it, it seemed likely: Who wouldn’t occasionally murder someone if they could do so without being punished or even suspected? People would be getting bumped off all the time. Divorce rates would plummet as husbands and wives arranged Merry Prankster deaths for their spouses, lawsuits would diminish as neighbors and business partners spent a few months arranging subtle prankster murders. The whole world would change because of this, he thought, and when he was ninety—assuming he was not pranked out of existence some decades before then—he would reveal his role in it and sail off into history reviled and infamous.

Reviled and Infamous. He liked it. he also liked the term pranked and wrote it carefully on his napkin in block letters. He would have to be certain to use the term liberally in his treatise on the subject, in order to set the jargon from the get-go.

He looked down at his napkin again. The words FIRE and FALL were still staring at him, with no details backing them up. He picked up his glass and was again surprised to find it drained. He contemplated himself. he didn’t feel drunk.

“Another?”

He looked up, startled to find the bartender back again, bottle in hand and poised to pour. She looked a little better, eh thought. Maybe she was just one of those people who looked bad in the morning, all bloated and blotchy, and then smoothed out as the day progressed.

He nodded, smiling. He felt good, healthy and streamlined. “Why not,” he said amiably.

“Why not!” she agreed, grinning, tipping the bottle and pouring with a little gusto.

He eyed her, smiling. “Can I buy you one?” he offered, feeling generous. He wasn’t interested in picking her up, but felt happy and wanted to share it by doing good deeds.

She hesitated. “A little early for me. . .” she said, but she was smiling.

She was tempted, Stan could tell, and he nudged her. “C’mon!”

“Why not?” she said, with a laugh.

“Why not!”

She poured herself a shot from the same bottle, they clinked glasses, and she downed hers with a flourish while he sipped his gingerly. She winked at him.

“Thanks, partner,” she said, and wandered off again.

Stan bent his mind to the task at hand again, feeling peaceful and good. But the two words were still there on the napkin, and nothing else.

He cleared his throat and bent down lower to concentrate. He thought the best approach would be to figure out how, exactly, to kill someone with a fall or fire and then work backwards from there, isolating the steps involved and somehow engineering pranks to accomplish them. So he thought, how do you get someone to fall down the stairs, or sleep peacefully through a three-alarm fire?

It suddenly occurred to him that burning down your house in order to kill someone, while possibly worth it, was not ideal. With some reluctance he scratched out FIRE, and stared at the single option he’d left himself: FALL.

There would be, he thought, just a few simple requirements to engineer a deadly fall: One, a sedated or inebriated state to ensure wobbly feet and a lack of balance—but not enough to risk unconsciousness. Two, a long enough fall with a rigged step to ensure a fall in the first place. And finally, an empty house so no one would call for help or assist the victim in any way if she should somehow survive the fall—even if she did, a few hours of lying in a pool of her own blood should take care of it. He licked the end of his pen and made a sub-list under FALL:

1. inebriation (nothing illegal)

2. rigging

3. abandoned

After a moment, he circled the three items and labeled them PRANKS. These were the three basic categories that would have to be broken down into sub-pranks and assigned to people. The more they were broken down, he thought, the smaller and more obscure each individual action was, the smaller the chance that anyone would ever put it all together. After a moment’s consideration he fit a fourth line inside the circle: 4. lure. He assumed there would have to be a way of ensuring that the victim followed the correct route to the rigged step, that a lure of some sort would be required. Four main pranks, but of course he couldn’t convince someone to rig a step and not remember doing so when she fell down the fucking stairs, so there was a lot of refinement still to be done.

He was cheered, however. Organization always cheered him. Made him feel like someone—himself, presumably—was in charge and keeping track of things.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

Stan glanced up, and blinked at the bartender. She stood with bottle poised, and he was stunned to find his glass yet again empty, just ice and air. He nodded vaguely, and she began to pour without looking at the glass or bottle, stopping at precisely the right moment, as if she’d been born with an innate sense of what a jigger was.

“Pranks,” Stan said, staring at her wonderingly. Did she have bartender superpowers?

“Pranks, huh? You mean like dirty tricks you play on friends?”

He nodded again. Her eyes were very dark green and seemed far too large. He thought maybe he was hypnotized. “Sort of.”

She grinned, tossing the bottle in the air and catching it deftly. “My friends and I did stuff like that, years ago. When we all first moved here we spent a few months just playing pranks on each other—that’s all we did for weeks! I’d wake up and find all my furniture gone, they replaced all my liquor with water. Man, those were crazy times.”

Stan nodded again, smiling. “Holy shit, you’re right.”

“What?”

Stan waved, bending back down to his napkin. “Lot’s of pranks,” he muttered, ignoring her. “Lots.”

“Good afternoon, Henry Simmons.”

“You’re blessed by Stan.”

“Jesus, did you just wake up?”

“Of course not. I’m a little insulted. I’m a dynamo. I’ve been at it hammer and tongs for hours.”

“You sound a little drunk, actually.”

“Impossible. Sober as a judge. Listen, I’ve got a plan.”

“…okay.”

“Jeez, a little enthusiasm?”

“I’m at work, you bastard.”

“This is why I quit all my jobs, this bullshit.”

“Yes, which is why I end up buying all your meals, right? Look, maybe we could talk later. Have a drink.”

“My heart’s melting. But listen, let me just hit you with the basic concept, because it’s brilliant.”

“Fine. If I hang up on you, my boss walked in.”

“Pussy. Listen: The problem is the fact that any of these pranks, by themselves, won’t seem very amusing, and will seem kind of strange. I mean, if we go with the Fall scenario—”

“The what?”

“Later. If we go with that one, she’s going to have to be drunk, or drugged, but drunk is less suspicious and thus better. But how do we make sure she gets drunk, especially if she isn’t inclined to be? We need someone to spike every beverage in the house. But if we ask someone to do so, even under the guise of a prank, it’ll be really really weird, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“So, we’ll need to camaflouge the pranks.”

“…”

“Hicky?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I mean we need a Blitzkrieg of pranking. We need to get everyone involved in a constant storm of pranks. We need to declare a Era of Pranks. If we get all the usual suspects involved, the little pranks we pull to set up our murder will get lost in the mix, and it’ll all be in the spirit of fun. Get it? Lots of pranks.”

“Lots.”

“A Bllitzkrieg. We’ll have Bobby and Chauvik run ragged playing pranks. We’ll play pranks on them, too. And in the middle of it all, when I ask Chauvik to spike Miranda’s sodas, it won’t even register as something unusual. It’ll just be another in a long series of semi-bizarre pranks.”

“Stan, this is starting to sound so fucking insane it might even work.”

“The key is you have to have freinds like Chauvik and Bobby, and to a lesser extent George: Lackey-minded individuals who do whatever you tell them.”

“So what’s next?”

“We test it.”

“Test it?”

“Well, shee-it, Hicky, we ain’t gonner actually kill the woman!”

“Says you.”

“But we want to satisfy ourselves that the plan would actually work, were it to be put into motion. Otherwise we’ll just wonder, forever. It’ll haunt us. So we need to come up with a list of confederates who we can assign pranks to, a list of pranks to play, and then recruit our footsoldiers.”

“Booze’ll help with that. Get everyone drunk and we’ll have a blood-brother ceremony.”

“Now you’re talking—but we shouldn’t have some lame meeting where we make an announcement or anything. I think we should start simply by raining down pranks on our unsuspecting lackeys, and when they start paying attention we’ll bring them in.”

“Aces.”

“What the fuck is this, now?”

Stan was comfortable with distrust—it was familiar coin and he dealt with it easily. He tossed some nuts into his mouth and didn’t look at Bobby as he replied “Pranks.”

Bobby stared down at the sidewalk for a moment, watching his feet appear and disappear beneath his huge, unweildy stomach. “Pranks. Jesus. What are we, twenty-two again?”

Stan still didn’t look at Bobby. Bobby’s stomach freaked him out. He’d invented a name for Bobby’s condition: Bulbosity, a condition where a man’s belly became the largest and most powerful part of his body, the rest of his existence subjugated to the needs and desires of the belly. Bobby’s Bulbosity was quite advanced, to the point where Stan couldn’t help but see Bobby as, essentially, a food-delivery mechanism for his stomach. He didn’t like to look at Bobby because a vividimage of an evil mastermind stomach pulling levers and mashing buttons to animate Bobby always came to mind. There was certainly room in that abdomen of his for something like that, and it often seemed disturbingly possible to Stan.

“It’s just for fun, Robert,” he said. “I didn’t realize that after thirty we were supposed to just lie back, spread our legs, and think of England.”

“I don’t know what the fuck that means.”

“It means why not have some fun? It’s not like I said dig up bodies from the cemetary and screw their dead skulls. I said “play some pranks”. Hicky and I were discussing it. Granted, we were very drunk, but it seemed like a fun way to spice up our otherwise gray and adventure-less lives.”

Stan realized that Bobby’s labored breathing was producing a wheezy, irresistable rhythm that he timed his pace to: Wheeze, step, wheeze, step. He wondered if Bobby was going to someday just up and have a heart attack right next to him, without warning.

“But, Stan—Jesus, where is this place, anyway—who says our lives are fucking gray? Who says we need some adventure?”

Stan stopped and put a hand out to gently stop Bobby, who stood breathing heavily and sweating, peering down at him. “Bob,” Stan said, wiping peanut oil and crumbs onto his jacket’s lapel, “I say our lives are gray. Look, it’ll be fun, okay? Like old times. We’ll prank each other for a few weeks, have some crazy times, and then we can sit around and drink beers and laugh it up. It’ll be something we talk about for years—the Winter of Pranks.”

“It’s not winter yet.”

“Really? Fuck, it’s cold.”

Bobby wheezed along unhappily for a while. “Who else in in for this?”

“Henry, and me, obviously. You know Chauvik will go in. I’m betting George, too.” He risked a glance at Bobby and shuddered. “I’m considering bringing the girls in on this, too.”

“The girls, huh?”

Stan nodded, turning his attention back to his nuts. Nothing much changed, with men: If girls were involved—even slightly used, married or unavilable ones—any activity suddenly grew more attractive.

“I’m not sure I have time for this bullshit, Stan.”

Stan sighed inwardly, outwardly masking it with a mouthful of nuts. He chewed his way through them contemplatively. “Uh-huh.” He wondered what Bobby imagined he was busy with. Susan, probably, the never-ending drudgery of keeping Susan happy. Not easy for a man who couldn’t see his toes any more, Stan imagined. “Bobby, I hate to tell you this, but not participating on the prank side of things will not mean you are immune from pranks.”

“Aw, shit, what the hell does that mean?”

“Just that you’re going to get pranked once I get this show on the road. The question is, are you going to be able to retaliate?”

“Jesus.”

Bobby looked mournful, huffing along the sidewalk with his briefcase clutched in one sweating hand. Stan glanced up and spotted a likely-looking restaruant at random and shot an arm out, stopping Bobby’s forward motion. “We’re here.”

Bobby eyed the place, a small Italian bistro with tiny tables and smaller seats. “This is where you want to have dinner?”

Stann nodded, stuffing his bag of nuts into a pocket. “Sure. A little vino, and little pasta—what could be better?”

“A booth,” Bobby said. “Fuck this. Let’s go someplace else.”

The only thing worse than having dinner with a sweaty fat man, Stan reflected, was having dinner with a petulant sweaty fat man. Still, he figured he needed to get Bobby on board—Bobby was the key to the Usual Gang of Idiots he had to work with. He knew that without Bobby, the whole plan might fall apart.

He needed the Gang of Idiots. They were key to distancing Henry—and himself—from the crime. They were necessary insulation, and he was starting to think he was going to have to approach each of them individually. A wave of weariness swept through him. He closed his eyes and spent a profitable moment searching for nuts in his teeth with his tongue.

“Okay, let’s go grab some pizza.”

Watching Bobby eat, Stan revised his position on obesity. he hadn’t realized that he had a position at all on the subject, but it came to him with sudden force: The argument that obesity was a disease was complete shit. He watched Bobby eat half a large pizza pie while breathing noisily through his nose and quietly set aside his second slice in distaste. Bobby had always been a big-bellied, thick kind of man, but Stan estimated he’d gained about fifty pounds since they’d met back in school, and Stan was suddenly very forcefully of the opinion that Stan had quite simply eaten fifty pounds worth of bad food.

“So where’d this prank bullshit come from, anyway?” Bobby asked around a mouthful.

Stan sipped his soda. “Bob,” he said, “sometimes I just get bored. I mean, is this it? Wake up, go to work—”

“Or not, in your case.”

“—have a few beers, and then boom! You’re teddy, dead, and everyone dancing on the casket. I’d like to at least have a little more fun. I’m not that old yet.”

“And ‘pranks’ is your idea of fun?”

Stan shrugged. “Everything depends on scale. You have one guy standing outside with a sign that says MURDER THE GOVERNMENT and he’s nuts. You have five thousand people standing outside with the same sign and it’s a protest. Sure, if I start pranking people and everyone just rolls their eyes at me and gets pissed off, I’m an asshole. If we’re all pranking each other in a spirit of fun, it’s a lighthearted romp, and we’re all very smart, entertaining fellows.”

Bobby nodded, chewing rapidly. Stan thought he could see Bobby expanding, growing fuller and redder as he ate, as if he was inflating with grease and cheese. “Yeah, okay, if you and Hank convince the rest of us to go along, then we’re all assholes and that’s fine. Just like in school, huh? One of us drinking ber for breakfast and then upchucking in the dining hall is an asshole. All of us doing it was somehow cool. But,” he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin in a curiously dainty gesture. “Really, we were still assholes, weren’t we?”

Stan squinted at Bobby. “No, we weren’t, Bob.”

Bobby looked away, embarrassed. “Ah, shit, Stan, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant—”

“Look,” Stan said, lacking patience for the endlessapology, “It’ll be fun. I mean, whatever happened to fun? Enjoying ourselves? Half of us got married—and everything went straight to shit.”

“Aw, come on, now, Stan—”

“I mean it. Look, we just thought it would be fun. You don’t want to play, don’t play. No big deal.”

They sat in awkward silence for a time. Stan didn’t mind. He returned his attention to his half-finished slice of pizza and let his mind wander.

“Shit, you’re right,” Bobby said, laughing. “I’m too goddamn stiff for my own good.”

Stan grinned around his pizza. He loved Bobby—predictable. “Excellent! Bob, we’re gonna have a lot of fun, that’s all. You’ll be glad you got on board, I think.”

“You think?”

Stan winked. “Depends on how well you play.”

XI

Chauvik padded through his apartment in nothing but a voluminous white robe which hung carelessly open, his hairy tan body peeking out from the blinding folds of fabric randomly. He rubbed at his eyes incessantly as he padded, finding his way through his under-furnished apartment by memory and feel. There were three rooms in his apartment that he did not use, ever, and they remained empty and dusty as the day he’d moved in. This kept the area he needed a mental map of relatively small. He spent most of his time in his bedroom and the bathroom, and very little in the kitchen or the living room.

There was almost no furniture in the place. He had a large canopy bed in his bedroom, a large oak desk, a large leather couch, and a huge television in the living room, and nothing else. He liked the feeling of space around him—carpeted, climate-controlled space.

Scratching himself, he walked into the expansive, white-tiled bathroom and paused. His sleepy brain took a moment to chew through the fact that his toilet was missing.

He stared at the empty, rough-looking spot on the floor, pipes and rusty-looking grout spilling out of it, and then whirled to sit on the edge of the tub, letting his robe hang open and dangling his hands helplessly between his knees. He contemplated the state of his bladder and wondered if he should just piss in the tub while showering. Glancing up, he noticed a crisp yellow note stuck to the wall directly opposite him, at head-level. He reached out and peeled it off.

Dear Chauvik: You’ve been pranked. Stan & The Hick.

He licked his lips and glanced around the room, feeling watched. He wondered how they’d gotten in. His bladder pressed urgently against his insides, but he didn’t think he was ready to urinate in anything but a toilet, yet. There was something terribly. . .digusting about urinating in his tub, or, god-forbid, his sink.

Still staring at the note, he reached out and plucked the phone from the wall. It was white, and easily missed against the blinding white of the wall.

He dialed and sat staring at the note as he waited, one leg suddenly humming into a constant motion. Suddenly he glanced up and his face took on a wide grin.

“Stan! You bastard! A man’s toilet is sacred!” He laughed, barking and loud, echoing off the walls. “Game on, motherfucker! Right back at you!”

He hung up and the smile disappeared from his face. He crumpled the note up, moved as if to throw it, and then stopped, arm halfway in the air, and looked around the bathroom again, finally stuffing the note into a pocket of his robe.

“Fuckers,” he muttered, hoisting himself to his feet and slamming the phone back into its cradle.

He padded back through the apartment, eyes scanning every surface, seeking clues. He saw none. It appeared that his toilet had somehow been beamed out of the place via advanced technology, while he slept. It occured to him as he walked that the bathroom was removed by two largely empty rooms from where he slept, and was quite near the front door. Two men, being very quiet and skilled, might have managed to enter his apartment, unhook his toilet, and abscond with it. Although how they did so without leaving a trace he had no idea. It gave him a terrible feeling of unease.

He stripped off the robe in his bedroom and quickly dressed, the feeling of being watched making him rush. If people could enter his space and steal his toilet without waking him or leaving a trace, anything might happen. They might be in the place at the moment, watching his reaction, fuck, filming him. He needed to piss above everything else, immediately, and having realized he would rather explode and die painfully than urinate into anything but a toilet in his own home, he busied himself dressing in order to go seek a public restroom to use.

As he tied the laces of his sneakers, he wondered how he could get back at them. Not only did honor demand it, but it was part of the game he’d agreed to play. He didn’t remember agreeing, but he must have, and it didn’t matter, as he knew he would have anyway. He figured he would call Bobby and see if he would help. And maybe. . .a little thrill went through him. . .maybe he’d call Miranda and see if she’d conspire against her husband, help him out—he thought there was a good chance she might. He wasn’t always sure that Miranda even liked Henry all that much—although that was silly. She was his wife.

Outside, it was cold, and that made him need to urinate even more. He grimaced against the cold and the sharp pressure of his bladder, cursing Stan and his Bright Ideas. Stan was a devil, he thought.

The problem was that he would never be able to be as creative or adventurous as Stan. As he walked to the deli around the corner he tried to think of something outrageous he could do in retaliation, and nothing came to mind. He knew he’d end up doing something simple, something he’d seen in a movie or TV show, and all he’d get for the effort would be Stan’s raised eyebrow and silent disdain. He fucking hated Stan, he thought.

The realization made him stumble.

It was true: He hated one of his oldest friends. The image of Stan’s face in his head made him clench his fists, and he wanted nothing more than to think of a humiliating, crushing prank, something that would subtly communicate how he felt, really make Stan feel it. Chauvik thought of the expression on Stan’s face when he dealt his crushing blow, and it warmed him. He’d never seen Stan with a look like that, and it occurred to him that maybe his role in life was to to climb that mountain, to be the first person to ever make Stan doubt his supremacy.

In the deli, he waved negligently to Omar, who nodded curtly back, and walked directly to the scummy bathroom in the back. It was not strictly a public bathroom, but Omar’s regular customers knew it was there and Omar himself had no objection to people using it in emergencies, especially since he had not cleaned it in thirty years. The bathroom was his block’s Vegas, Chauvik thought—whatever happened in the bathroom stayed in the bathroom. From the look of it, lots of things had happened in the bathroom, and Chauvik had long ago vowed to die rather than actually touch anything in it with his bare flesh.

As he pissed, he contemplated Stan.

He was afraid of Stan. His strategy had always been to tow Stan’s line as much as possible, just to stay on the right side of him, and most of the time Stan treated Chuavik like an afterthought. As he shook himself dry, Chauvik realized with a pang of horror that he’d gotten pretty comfortable just staying out of Stan’s way. The idea of going up against him now made him shiver.

He walked back to his apartment with his head down, studying his sneakers. He didn’t understand how this had happened. He was, he thought, easily the smartest one out of all of them, and probably made the most money. Yet here he was, alone, and terrified of a fat, greasy-haired man who didn’t have a dime to his name. He trudged back up to his apartment in a bad mood, wondering how he could somehow strike back, finally put Stan in his place. He was smart—how come he couldn’t think of a strategy?

At his apartment, there was a telephone message from Stan. He stared at the number on his phone’s display for a moment, a creepy feeling of being watched in his head. When he pressed play he braced himself for something horrible.

“Chauv, I just heard what Henry did. I wanted you to know that I had nothing to do with that prank—Hank is just throwing shit around like the half-bred monkey hick he is. Pranks are fine, but this was an invasion of privacy, and I think it’s a sucky prank. Give me a call. I have an idea how you can get back at the little prick.”

Chauvik stared at the phone, dimly aware that he was going to be late for work, and tried to retrench himself mentally. Stan was offering to partner up with him in a scheme of revenge, and that was instantly appealing—the relief he felt thinking that Stan had been against him and now was on his side was palpable and impossible to ignore. He wasn’t sure he believed the story, and suspected Stan had his own reasons for betraying Henry, but the simple fact of the matter was that Chauvik strongly believed that it was always—always—better to be on Stan’s side of things. No matter what.

Sighing, he made a mental note to call Stan back from the office and agree to help him in whatever bizarre plot he was hatching. He pulled off his clothes and padded, naked, back to the bathroom, scratching himself and shaking his head at the absurd way the day had begun. Sweeping aside the shower curtain, he paused again, staring, noticing for the first time that all the faucet handles were also missing.

Bobby Walked briskly to the car, keeping his eyes straight ahead. He didn’t know if those fucking kids from across the street were watching him, or if they’d already headed for school, and he didn’t care. He’d be damned if he was going to live his life terrified of a bunch of grammar-school hooligans who liked to call him names.

At the car, he paused to set his briefcase down and shrug his jacket back into place. No matter how carefully he moved, his jacket was forever riding up on his arms and bunching up just under his chest. He felt like an idiot with a too-small jacket on, like a clown, and he yanked at the fabric angrily, hoping the damn kids—who liked to call him Fatty as he walked down the street—weren’t anywhere watching. He sometimes managed to feel dignified, belted into his overcoat, his shoes shined and his hair carefully combed, but all it took was one shouted FATTY followed by raucous adolescent laughter and he felt like he was eleven again, the only kid in class who couldn’t climb that fucking rope in gym class.

It was depressing, to be fully grown and still at the mercy of kids.

He’d considered his revenge possibilities. He’d considered approaching their parents, but this worried him. First of all he suspected that kids like that came from parents who were similarly stupid and cruel, or at best would be ineffectual at controlling their offspring, adding salt to his wounds when the kids were given more ammunition against him. He’d considered going after the kids—they each weighed about ten pounds, from what he could see, and he knew from personal experience that he could put a scare into just about anyone once he got his blood up. But that entailed actually catching the kids. He hadn’t timed himself in the hundred-yard dash recently, but he doubted he could catch anything—and certainly not his breath—meaning such a strategy would certainly end in humiliation and frustration.

He felt his pockets for his car keys and sighed, sucking in the cold air. There was nothing for it. They were just kids—legally protected, fast, impervious. The perfect predator. And somehow over the years he had become prey.

He opened the door, tossed his briefcase in, and struggled into the front seat, grunting with extra effort. When he’d finally squeezed himself in, he blinked for a moment at a bright yellow note pasted onto the steering wheel. He couldn’t read the tiny words on it, so he leaned forward, squinting.

Hey Bobby: Don’t put the car in drive. You have been pranked. Love, Stan and The Hick.

Bobby blinked again. Pranked? He remembered the ridiculous conversation he’d had with Stan and Henry, regarding practical jokes and their mad desire to resurrect their practice from forgotten childhood, left-behind adolescence. He’d gone along, mainly because he’d been pretty drunk at the time, and had actually forgotten all about it almost immediately. The whole terrible conversation came back to him as he sat in his car, and he felt an icy ball of dread form in his stomach. Stan, he thought. The fucking bastard had altered reality again. He’d reached out with his greasy fucking hands and with a wave of his grotesquely long fingers had made pranks a normal subject of conversation, a verb, something you could actually do with your time.

He was afraid to get out of the car.

Instead, he rolled down the window and tried to crane his neck out and around, scanning the world directly around him. He couldn’t see anything that alarmed him. Which alarmed him more, and with a grunt of irritation he struggled to undo his seatbelt and open the door.

Once out on his feet again he scowled around, searching the immediate area of his car for signs of tampering. Was it a game? Was it something subtle he was supposed to figure out? He had a strong urge to ignore the immature fuckers and just drive off, breaking whatever obscure rules they’d invented for the game. As he stood there, arms angrily akimbo, however, he noticed that his car was up on cinder blocks: All the wheels had been removed.

All he could think of, at first, was: Where in fuck did they get the cinder blocks from?

And then there was Susan, sticking her head out the back door, waving at him.

“Bobby! It’s Stan! On the phone! Says it’s urgent!”

The sour look on her face told Bobby what she thought of Stan in general, and about Stan calling at eight in the morning in specific. Bobby had noted that women universally seemed to hate Stan once they got to know him. There was usually a brief honeymoon period where they found him charming, and then boom, after six months or so, they hated him forever after.

“Fat Bobby!”

Bobby stood feeling hot and scratchy in his kitcen, still enveloped in his winter coat, and was momentarily stunned that Stan would not only strip the wheels off his car, not only call him at eight in the morning to crow about it, but would then begin the unwanted conversation by calling him Fat Bobby.

“Stan, I’m in no mood.”

“Look, I understand. Listen, it wasn’t me—Hick’s been putting my name on fucking pranks all week! It’s like a meta-prank. He’s blaming me for all his pranks.”

Bobby dimly recognized one of Ted the Infinitely Wealthy’s pet phrases: Meta-prank. He could not immediately remember it’s precise definition, but his unreal, uncomfortable feeling of being twenty again was reinforced, and he half expected Teddy to drive up in some ridiculous sportscar and demand he play hooky from work so they could go gamble, offering to stake Bobby with thousands of dollars.

He managed a vague noise of acknowldgement.

“I’m running around like a madman doing damage control, man,” Stan went on, sounding very convincing, Bobby thought. The problem, of course, was that Stan always sounded convincing. Bobby was sure Stan believed everything he said, on some level.

“Listen, I’m investigating revenge strategies. Chauvik’s been affected as well, I think the bastard hit everyone. The thing is, these pranks are kind of above and beyond good clean fun, don’t you think? He’s screwing with people, and blaming me. I guess he thinks this is all funny. He stole Chauvik’s toilet, for god’s sake.”

Bobby grinned a little. Something about the image amused him. He wondered if Chauvik was even capable of using a toilet not his own.

“I gotta go, Bob, but don’t believe this bullshit, okay? I did not fucking steal the wheels off your car. Henry did. We’re going to get back at that asshole. This means fucking war, okay?”

Bobby didn’t know what else to do. Feeling unreal, he nodded at empty space. “Okay.”

“Aces,” Stan said, and hung up.

Bobby kept the phone to his ear for a moment longer, staring. He felt sure he was dreaming. Where else but in a dream did Stan Morgan call him and claim he hadn’t removed all the tires from his car, or Chauvik’s toilet. Slowly he returned the phone to its cradle, feeling floaty and disconnected. He turned and found Sue watching him from the kitchen, coffee cup cradled in her white hands.

Fuck it, he thought. “Going back to bed,” he said to Sue, smiling. “I think I’ve got a fever.”

Gina contemplated her face in the mirror and was, as always, immediately dissatisfied. It wasn’t a bad face, she thought, just as it wasn’t a bad body attached to it. A little coverup here, a little lift there, and she usually had no trouble catching a man’s eye. But as she squinted through a mild, annoying hangover—just four glasses of wine, and a hearty dinner! She was getting old—she could see the lines and sagging of age, and wondered how much longer she would be able to turn heads, even with an easy reputation and a lot of liquor. She was single and had no serious male prospects, and she thought time was running out, and fast.

She pulled her hair back and snapped a rubber band into place, bent down and started running water into the sink. She had to shake the blues off, had to scrub the night before off and get a move on. She was running late and that prick at the office was gunning for her, probably because he was bald and fat and had no chance with her.

Splashing water on her face, she looked into the mirror again, her sharp nose dripping, and thought, shit, in a couple of years he’ll have a chance, at this rate. A quick pornographic image of him shoving his flabby body in her made her blanch.

All the good ones were either taken—like Henry, who was a little soft and who wouldn’t have made her cut ten years ago, but now looked like a fucking champion—or fucking gay. Or they looked like good choices—like Stan—but were real turds. At least she’d had the opportunity to observe Stan and realize his turdness. Most of the Turds out there looked perfectly normal, and it took some wasted time and some regrettable physicality to identify them.

She’d let a few good ones slip away, too, she admitted, letting her mind wander as she scrubbed soap into her face. Gina loved washing. The warm water, the scents of soap and clean linens, the damp, intimate atmosphere of the bathroom—she enjoyed luxuriating. She did her best thinking in the tub, sipping wine and letting the room steam up. Lathering, watching her wrinkled, sagging hag face disappear in a pure white mask of suds, she contemplated the few good ones she’d fucked and then pushed away, afraid of setting. They’d all seemed so boring, at the time, stable young men who would never be rock stars or movie stars or rich, not even close. But she figured they were all married now, married and moderately faithful, married and no longer one of the men she could meet, dance with, seduce, and claim.

And time was etching itself into her face, every day.

The Wedding Madness had started just a year or so before, and ever since she’d been unable to stop thinking about it. Every man that smiled at her, bought her a drink, was polite to her in an elevator starred in a quick, detailed movie as her Husband. It was driving her crazy; men she wouldn’t have even considered speaking to a few years before were instantly in her head, mowing the lawn, drinking beer from a bottle, cursing at the television. She could not see herself in these fantasies, but she thought it quite likely there was a mumu or similar housedress involved. And possibly knee-high stockings.

It wasn’t fair. Guys like Stan got to be as fat, sweaty, and old as they wanted, and still get married, eventually. She had no doubt that Stan, greasy long hair and all, would someday easily find a wife. But she was on a schedule, and knew without liking it much that in a few yeras she wouldn’t be an attractive wife. The quality of men to sleep with would decline, and sooner or later she wouldn’t be able to get laid at all, and she’d have to start buying cats.

Splashing water on her face, she scrubbed ruthlessly.

She started the shower running to get it hot and walked back to her bedroom to spend a few profitable moments choosing an outfit.

Her bedroom was the largest room in the apartment—it was meant to be the living room, but she’d made it into her bedroom because of its size. The front door opened into it, which was not ideal, but she’d consttructed a hallway from the front door halfway into the room with tall bookcases, giving her some privacy. This way, when you entered the apartment you faced a row of bookcases and weren’t staring directly at her bed. The small room in the back, off the kitchen, which would be ideal for a bedroom if privacy was your number one concern, was used as the small, tightly-packed living room. She only used the living room when she had parties, guests numbering fewer than four generally never made it past the kitchen, and single guests usually never made it past the bedroom.

Privacy wasn’t her concern, however. Shoes were.

She’d lost count of how many shoes she owned. They were stored everywhere: The closets, under the bed, in kitchen drawers, and, mainly, in the bookcases. She’d bought extra shelves for the bookcases and squeezed as many pairs as she could on each shelf, so they gleamed at her invitingly whenever she looked up. Some, she knew, she’d only worn once, and some she hadn’t yet worn, waiting for a special occasion to inspire her. She firmly believed that a woman’s attractiveness stemmed from her feet. Feet were, she thought, the ugliest parts of the body—all flat and grotesque, easily bruised, with nails that required constant grooming and care. Gina didn’t feel comfortable unless her feet were dressed properly.

She stood in the middle of her bedroom, with light flooding in from the windows, and ran her eyes over the shoes lined up in the shelves. For a moment, she couldn’t put her finger on the feeling of unease that welled up inside her. Everything seemed to be normal, in its place, but the whole room suddenly seemed strange and suspect. She stood still, just staring around, until it finally clicked into place: Half her shoes were gone. There were no pairs. One shoe from each pair had been removed, and remaining shoes spaced evenly so it was not immediately obvious. A quick storm through the rest of her apartment revealed that every pair of shoes had been split—except for a pair of grubby tennis shoes, left sitting in plain sight on her kitchen table with a small yellow note:

Gina: You have been pranked. Love, Stan and Henry.

She stared at it in sudden, paralyzing fury. Her shoes. A prank involving her shoes. And leaving her with a fucking pair of sneakers to wear.

With a jerking, angry motion she looked at her watch and calculated her options. If she called in complaining of traffic, she could probably make it to the mall on her way to work and acquire a pair of replacement shoes. Except that she’d used that excuse an awful lot, hungover and regretful, and she thought everyone would think she’d had another bad night. She weighed the humiliation of everyone thinking she’d had another one of those nights against the horror of walking around in beatn-up tennis shoes, and was paralyzed for a moment by the spectre of equal horror.

With a snarl, she snatched the shoes from the table. The note flew up into the air and wafted gently on the air, and she snatched at it, crumpling it up in one hand. She stormed out of the kitchen, cursing into the air. She pushed herself into jeans and a T-shirt—and the shoes, which felt hot and tight on her feet—and marched to the front door. As she tore it open, the phone started to ring, but she ignored it.

XII

“You’d better stay out of sight for a while.”

Henry studied his bourbon morosely. “Everyone fucking thinks I’m the king asshole of the world right now.”

Stan nodded sententiously. “Yes.”

“You did this to me.”

“For a cause. We’re performing a grand experiment, Hicky. This is all in the service of science.”

“You’re the king asshole. Everyone knows that.”

“Knew that, Hicky. I’ve presented them with a whole new worldview.”

“Bastard. You’re a bastard, Stan.”

“Jesus, it’s only temporary. A momentary dip into the asshole pool, and then everything will go back to normal.”

Henry nodded drunkenly. “Except Mir will be gone.”

Stan paused with his shot glass halfway to his mouth. “Just an experiment, Hank. We’re just going to toe that line a bit, see if it could be done. Right?”

Henry nodded. “Right.”

Stan’s eyes lingered on Henry for a moment more, then he tilted his head back and drained his shot glass, banging it twice on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “Anyway, it’s working like a charm. We’ve got everyone on board—they’re all so pissed at you they’re happy to help me kick your ass. Now all we have to do is think up the right series of pranks. I’ve got a few thoughts on that.”

Henry lifted his glass and stared into it as he tilted it towards himself. “I figured you did.”

Stan nodded at the bartender as he arrived to pour Scotch into his shot glass. “Hick, anything on your mind? You’re not a happy drunk today, and since you’re buying the drinks I’m concerned about your mood.”

Henry shrugged, draining his own glass. “Nope, just bored.”

“Bored.”

“Bored. With everything. I sit at my desk and I’m bored. I go home and I’m bored. I’m sitting here with you, and I’m bored.”

“Jesus,” Stan said. “You sound bored.”

Henry shook himself, straightening up. “Eh, I’m just in a bad mood. Sorry. You’re right, this is going to be fun. What’s the plan, then?”

Stan scowled. “No ideas of your own, eh?”

“This is all your idea.”

“Maybe, but you don’t have to be so curmudgeonly about it. Would it kill you to be civil?” He brightened. “As it happens, however, I do have some ideas. I’m gratified that you would turn to me for advice on this subject. As it happens, I’ve been rather brilliant. I called a meeting of Those Abused by Henry’s Midlife Crisis last night.”

“Midlife crisis?”

“Their term, not mine. It’s the most popular theory on the Henry message boards right now. These people have gotten used to you being inoffensive and slightly endearing. Suddenly you’re fucking with them. They don’t want to think you’re just a stealth prick, after all.” He sighed, staring down at his hands contritely. “I’ll admit the first theory was that it was me, in a rubber mask and short pants, pretending to be you, which didn’t amuse me. But I convinced them it was you. And here’s the brilliant part, partner: I convinced them that the best way to get revenge on you would be to play a big prank on you.”

Henry nodded. “That makes sense.”

Stan glanced down at him and nudged him hard with his whole body. “No, you moron. Think about it. We’ll be planning a prank on you. Miranda’s name will never come into it. Total disconnection!”

Henry sat thinking about this for a bit. “Shit. That’s actually fucking brilliant.”

Stan clapped him on the back, nodding. “Damn right, son. Fucking-A brilliant. Once we prove our point I’m going to put all this into a screenplay and make millions.I’d have to star as myself, of course. We could get a monkey of some sort to play you.”

Henry nodded., staring at the mirror across the bar. “Okay, smartass. What’s the brilliant plan, then? Are you just going to say, hey, killing Miranda would be a great prank to play on Henry?”

“That would be silly.”

“Yes it would.”

A moment of silence passed between them. Henry just stared. Stan fiddled with his glass in a fussy, forced manner, as if the exact feng shui position of it on the bar was vitally important, and then turned to Henry suddenly.

“The plan, you ask? Very well, my friend. But I warn you: People with weak hearts should leave the theater, as well as those suffering from vertigo, sausage-fingers, and lumbago. A registered nurse is on duty in the lobby for those who feel they need assistance.

“We start,” he continued triumphantly, “with your newfound sobriety.”

Henry nodded, once, twice, then stopped, turning his head to look at Stan. “My what?”

“You’re giving up The Drink, my friend. That’s step one. You’re going to announce that you’ve reached a point in your life where booze is doing more harm than good, and you’re on the wagon.”

Herny absorbed this. “Well, shit, do I have to actually stop drinking?”

Stan nodded. “Oh yes. There has to be verisimilitude.”

Henry stared. “Well, fuck.”

“There’s a reason, but you have to start this particular meme immediately. It’s got to be in everyone’s mind. Even Miranda. Tell her, make it convincing. Don’t be melodramatic. You’re all puffy and ill-used from booze, it won’t be hard to convince people. But don’t make it alcoholism or a drinking problem. Purely for your health. Understand?”

“No. But what’s next, then?”

“Next is, you have to have a business trip coming up. Doesn’t matter where, but it has to be a real trip. You have to actually go somewhere, for a good reason, and be able to document it. This will be your alibi.”

Henry frowned. “Why will I need an alibi if there’s not going to be a murder as far as anyone knows?”

Stan held up a finger. “One, contingency. Two,” another finger, “verisimilitude. If all the pieces are there there is no reason for anyone to doubt the story, chief. Be careful, though: Don’t tell anyone about this trip, and don’t tell Miranda until you’re about to leave. Act like you forgot, hint that it was last-minute—but don’t say that. Just hint it. but our galley or minions have to think you’re still in town. Otherwise, why would they be playing pranks on you? Got that?”

Henry smiled, straightening up and stretching. “Nope. But it’s starting to sound so complex and idiotic it might work. So please, continue.”
“Well, the rest involves vodka ice cubes, a fire alarm, all the clothes in your closet, and marbles.”

Henry stared at Stan, one eyebrow raised. “Marbles?” He grinned. “I love it!”

Stan grinned back, pushing his long hair back out of his face, his eyes bright and dancing. “I know! The trick is, they’re going to be thinking these pranks are on you. It’ll make sense in context.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me, now.”

“But you’re not very bright.”

Henry seemed to be expanding, like a sponge absorbing water. He was sitting straighter on the stool, smiling. “Okay: Vodka, a fire—”

“Vodka ice cubes,” Stan corrected.

“—Vodka ice cubes, a fire, all my clothes, and marbles. Somehow these ingredients add up to a murder?”

Stan took on a philosophical expression. “Learn from the master, my young friend. Anything can be rolled up into a murder, if you order the events correctly. That’s all anything is, after all, just events. That’s life: One damn thing after another, as the saying goes.”

“Look,” Henry said, lifting his glass, “I know you love the sound of your own voice—”

“I do. Who doesn’t?”

“—but could we move this conversation along?”

Stan nodded and picked up his drink, motioning to Henry to follow him as he moved off towards the shadowed booths in the rear. When they had both slid into one and looked around to make sure there was no one near them, Stan leaned forward.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s how we kill Miranda.”

XIII

Bobby was sweating, and all he could think about was how much he hated to sweat. He detested sweat. It made him feel fat and useless, and it stained his clothes and made it stick fast to his skin.

It was also pitch black and completely silent in the apartment. Every move he made sounded loud and and abrasive to his ears, so loud he imagined neighbors calling the police and complaining. Even though the place was empty, even though he knew it was empty, the darkness and the stillness and the fact that Miranda and Henry might come home at any moment, despite Stan’s insincere asurances, made him feel claustrophobic and paniked. And thus, the sweat.

It didn’t help that every time he moved, the bottles in the bag clinked together, sounding like cowbells being played. They were heavy, too, and a flash of searing resentment towards Stan flashed through him, burning as it went. He had to admit the joke had a certain mean genius to it, and when Stan had first proposed it as revenge for his car—the wheels had never shown up and the car remained on blocks, weeks later—there had seemed to be a kernel of cruelty to it that appealed to him. And Stan had been willing to do the heavy lifting—acquiring and filtering the liquor, running it through a regular faucet water filter three or four times to purify it, making it as tasteless and odorless a vodka as ever walked the earth. Bobby himself had tested some, and admitted it was like very strong water; he’d been impressed that Stan knew you could push vodka through a water filter and purify it. Then again, the idea of Stan knowing how to save five bucks by buying cheap vodka and running it through a water purification system—probably someone else’s water purification system, at that—fit his perception of the universe perfectly.

Now though, dark-blind and sweating, he thought it was all a little ridiculous, and he wanted nothing more than to go home, make a sandwich, and fall asleep on the couch with Suse.

He found his way into the kitchen by memory, having been to the apartment plenty of times. There, he opened the fridge and basked in the cold comfort of its harsh yellow light, giving him something to see by. He scanned the innards of the appliance: No beer, he noted. Henry had started talking about making a Big Change in his life, stopping drinking, and once they’d all been convinced of his sincerity a disturbing awkwardness had settled over everyone. Or at least over Bobby. Henry not drinking was like the Pope crushing puppies. It just didn’t fit. And there he’d been, all night, one arm draped over Miranda’s white shoulder, a glass of water in front of him, a fucking glass of water. No one had quite believed Henry at first, but he appeared to be serious about cleaning up.

The universe was fucking falling apart. Bobby expected to wake up any day and find everyone was pregnant, and maybe Stan finding god or something. The whole fucking universe was fucking falling apart.

He set the bag on the kitchen table and decided to just make noise. If he got caught, if Henry and Miranda returned from their night out and caught him in the kitchen, making ice cubes, he would just explain the concept of revenge to them , pack up his bottles, and leave. Taking a deep breath, he took all the ice trays out of the freezer and brought them to the sink, shaking all the cubes out and running the hot water. He carried the trays back to the table and set them down in a neat line, extracting the bottles of vodka from his bag. Carefully, he opened one bottle and began filling the ice trays with the clear liquid. Vodka and water, guaranteed by Stan to freeze into usable cubes, which would then infiltrate every drink Henry made with booze, ruining Henry’s nascent health binge.

Bobby raised an eyebrow as he poured, droplets of fat-man sweat mixing liberally with the mixture. He had to admit, he loved the joke. He imagined Henry’s face when it was revealed, and he couldn’t stop the grin from spreading across his face. It was funny.

He filled all but one of the trays with the vodka/water mixture and set them carefully aside. Then he produced a black marker from his pocket and began writing a letter on the bottom of each slot in the last ice tray. When he was done, he held the tray up and read the message there:

Pranked: You Boozehound!

Grinning, he gave the marker a moment more to dry and then filled that tray as well. Making sure the marked tray was on the bottom, he returned them all to the freezer and shut the refridgerator silently. In the dark, he stood for a moment, wondering if there was maybe something a little creepy about tricking someone into ingesting a drug.

He thought of his car, and shook off the notion.

Packing up the empty bottles, he checked to make sure the ice cubes in the sink had melted completely, turned off the hot water, and exited the house, humming a song to himself.

“I’m here to seduce you, of course.”

Miranda swirled the ice in her drink and looked at Stan from under her eyebrows. “I’ll bet.”

Gina thought it was all completely stupid.

Stan was simply the limit, though. She’d never encountered such energy, such relentless fucking energy devoted to getting his way. She’d told him his idea was stupid, all the pranks were stupid, and she’d never signed up for the prank shit in the first place, but he didn’t care what she thought about it all. He had a job for her to do, and he was determined that she do it. Fucking Stan. Fucking men and their Peter-Pan syndrome fraternity bullshit, sneaking around playing jokes on each other so they could laugh and get drunk and slap each other on the ass and feel like they weren’t old men with no future, not anymore.

Completely. Fucking. Stupid.

Just to get Stan off her back, she was doing it. She’d fought the good fight but she’d had an epiphany the night before, reallizing that she could well find herself as an aged woman, an old cat lady with a walker and grey hair, and there would be Stan, stooped and greyed himself, in adult diapers, still hounding her to play this joke—this prank, she corrected herself—on Henry.

Besides, she thought grimly, Henry had brought it on himself. Touching a girl’s shoes. It was barbarous.

She paused outside their house, Henry and Miranda’s, and studied it carefully. It was cold. The house looked deserted, as Stan said it would be, but she was suspicious. Having her break into the house just to be assaulted by a shocked Henry and Miranda was just the sort of fucking meta-prank Stanley would cook up. She lit a cigarette and stood shivering on the sidewalk, watching the dark house. Fucking Stan.

She smiled in spite of herself, a quick image of Stan, red-faced and sweaty, looking down at her, a reliable if uninspiring sportfuck. Stan had the one thing other guys didn’t: Discretion. She’d slept with him sixteen times, so far, and while none of those times had left her overwhelmed, as far as she could tell Stan had told no one about their liasions, and that counted for something. Gina knew her reputation, knew it was deserved, and appreciated anyone who didn’t add to it. She also liked the fact that Stan seemed to accept their occasional flings as just that: Meaningless flings. He seemed to forget they’d slept together the moment his pants were back on, his banter with her completely natural, completely unaffected.

She almost warmed up towards the mental image of Stan, but then remembered the bag she was carrying, and her mission, and soured again. Only Stan, with his gently mocking insistence, could convince her to play this ridiculous prank on Henry. This juvenile prank. of course, Henry’s prank on her had been juvenile, too, but at least his prank had had a certain creativity to it. The prank Stan had assigned her just felt annoying. It was a start, she thought, and it certainly saved her the trouble of coming up with her own revenge—Stan had, happily, planned everything.

Taking a final drag on her cigarette, she dropped it onto the pavement and snuffed it under her tennis shoe.

The key Stan had given her turned the lock easily, and she slipped into the house, leaning back against the front door as she softly pushed it shut. She remained there for a few moments, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom, listening for any sign that Mir and Hank were around. There was no sound at all, and Gina thought, well, that’s going to change.

It was creepy, she thought, moving swiftly into the living room and opening the bag on her shoulder as she walked. Creepy how Stan seemed to have this prank all ready, like he had a bag of them just waiting for the right moment, like he’d been planning them for years. It saved her the trouble of thinking one up for herself—and hers would have been more of the tires-slashed, tell-Miranda-he-was-screwing-around-on-her-and-sit-back-and-watch-the-fireworks variety. This was a morsel better in the creativity department.

She crossed to the stereo and sat down on the floor, setting the bag down in front of her and extracting from it a shiny compact disc, a pair of headphones, and an electric timer. There were words written on the shiny silver face of the CD in black marker:

Hi There Henry: You Have Been Pranked. Gina!

She jammed the headphones into the stereo jack and turned on the stereo. As Stan had predicted, the stereo was set to CD and there was no CD in the player. According to Stan, Henry and Miranda had last bought a CD five years previous, and had actually played one in their stereo a year or so prior to that; the stereo was, in fact, kept only because they perpetually planned to throw parties, parties they never actually threw. Gina didn’t know why Stan thought he knew everything about everyone, and she suspected he made up half of it, but it was a scary moment, the empty, dusty CD tray hanging in front of her.

She slipped the CD into the tray and pushed the tray in, then crawled around to the back of the stereo and plugged it into the timer, which she then plugged into the wall. She took a moment to calibrate it properly, and then returned to the front of the stereo. She turned it off, twisted the volume up as high as it would go, and turned it on again. After a brief delay, she heard her own voice, very loud and tinny, coming from the headphones. Satisfied, she crawled back behind the stereo and switched the time off, so that it would turn on when the time came, about ten hours later, when the loving couple was sleeping peacefully upstairs.

Wincing ridiculously, she removed the headphones and stuffed them back into her bag. Feeling a sudden, inexplicable nervousness, she rushed back to the door and hurried through. Outside, she walked briskly for a block or two, breathing hard, feeling a strange need to be far away from the house. Three blocks away, she slowed and lit a cigarette, grinning. She felt positively childish, and enjoyed it.

“Another?”

“Sure,” Miranda said, peering at him quizzicallty. “Plenty of ice this time. I like my drinks cold, Stanley.”

“And your men hot!”

Chauvik could not stop sweating. He felt feverish, and wondered if he was getting sick. The more time that went by, the more he became sure that he was coming down with something terrible, something serious. The sweat was pouring down his face and back, dripping off him, and he felt cold and shivery, his head cloudy. He didn’t think it was wise to stay out; he should be home resting, ready to make an appointment with his GP in the morning, see if they could squeeze him in. Instead, he was in the dark, creeping through Miranda and Henry’s house, feeling a good fever setting in and wondering if maybe he’d hallucinated the whole ridiculous situation—Teddy’s death, the pranks, the whole thing. Maybe he was in a hospital somewhere with IV fluids being pumped into him, raving about pranks while everyone stood around awkwardly, shrugging in mystification.

He wiped his brow and took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. But when he opened them, he was still cowering in the foyer of his friends’ house, planning to do the most ridiculous thing he’d ever considered. He thought of Miranda and Henry, sleeping upstairs. It was quiet, and it was dark, and he thought he could hear them moving around on the upper floor. The thought of being caught made him freeze solid where he was, shivering with fever, unhappy and unconvinced, all of a sudden.

A few days before, sitting with Stan in his small kitchen, he’d been convinced. Henry needed to suffer for what he’d done—Chauvik had been shocked to discover how expensive it was to replace a toilet, and how long it took. He dreaded each trip to Omar’s, with Omar staring at him, knowing what he was about to do. He hated anyone knowing what he was doing…especially when it involved nudity, and bodily functions.

He’d forgiven Stan, or absolved him, or whatever—he’d shifted his red-hot hate to Henry, once Stan convinced him that he’d had nothing to do with it, that it was Henry’s early midlife crisis or something. Henry as an evil mastermind didn’t seem likely to Chauvik, but then the past few weeks had been a roller coaster ride as far as he was concerned—Teddy was dead, Henry and Stan were fighting in public restrooms, and pranks had broken out everywhere. Up was down. Black was white.

And here he was, burning up in Henry’s house, staring up at the door at the top of the stairs, bucket in hand. Bucket. Chauvik felt instantly ridiculous: Stan had proposed the world’s oldest and lamest prank, and had done so with a giddy certainty of his own genius so powerful Chauvik had actually bought into it, for a while. Now, shivering and trespassing, it was fucking ridiculous.

For a brief moment, Chauvik imagined just turning around, exiting the house, and telling Stan that his prank was stupid, too stupid to actually set up. He pictured Stan’s reaction, and his heart left him: He knew he would set the prank up, stupid or not, rather than face Stan’s disapproval.

He looked back up the stairs.

The stairs were marble, gleaming dully in the grey light dripping in from outside. The door at the top lead to the small upper floor of the house—not a house he would have paid good money for, he thought sourly—and was, as Stan had predicted, unlocked and slightly ajar. It also seemed to be very, very far away, and the idea of creeping up the stairs to it and doing the job he’d come to do made his stomach clench in horror. The idea of telling Stan off wasn’t any more palatable. He pictured himself home, with a new toilet installed, sitting in his recliner, eating cookies in front of the TV. He liked this image and tried to hang onto it, but the looming stairs kept taunting him.

With a sigh, he thought that the sooner he tip-toed up there and set the prank, the sooner he could go home, open a box of Mallowmars, and really enjoy the black depression he could feel weighing down on him, the fever he could feel catching fire within him. He knew he would get sicker as he approached that door, and he’d feel better with every step away from it, but he’d rarely been able to do what he wanted and he’d long ago despaired of that ever changing. The best thing to do was to put your head down and push forward, always forward.

Sighing, he began to walk gingerly up the stairs.

Every sound seemed amplified to his ears, his feet scraping along, his breathing echoing off the walls. At the top of the stairs he set his bag down carefully and paused for a moment, listening. There was nothing, however, no noise. He imagined Henry and Miranda asleep just a few feet away, behind the walls, a closed door. He imagined them comfortable, warm, happy. Henry—who had ever imagined Henry would fucking stop drinking? Chauvik didn’t like this new, unpredictable era they were all moving into. Marriages, babies, deaths—he liked it much better when it was all boring same-old same-old, with him sitting at home eating cookies and jerking off in the shower.

He grimaced, forcing the thought out of his mind.

He stared up at the door. It was perfectly positioned, opened exactly at the angle Stan had suggested, exactly the angle he himself would have chosen. With some clear tape and a decent balance, the bucket would sit up there placidly until someone—a sleepy, unkempt Henry—pushed the door open. Then, by careful arrangement of tape, the bucket would topple over, disgorging its contents onto Henry’s head.

Stupid.

Chauvik was completely dissatisfied with the prank. The man had stolen his toilet, for god’s sake. The oldest prank in the universe just didn’t have enough oomph for his taste.

Stan had been persuasive, though. He’d made it all sound like it would all work out and add up to Henry’s humiliation, and at the time, Chauvik had bought it. Sitting in the creepy, silent darkness, however, it seemed suddenly ludicrous.

With a slow, silent sigh, he extracted from his bag the small plastic bucket, the roll of tape, and three bottles of schnapps. Now he worked quickly, wishing to be done and out of the house. He felt that particular type of shivery heat that always predicted a bought of fever; he knew he’d be in bed for days after this, moaning and sweating. He wanted to get done and into his own bed as soon as possible to minimize the damage.

He emptied the bottles into the bucket, the sweet smell of the liquor making his stomach flip. The slippery liquid glugged loudly into the bucket and Chauvik was sure that everyone in the area could hear it. He tried to be quiet with the tape, which required that he move very slowly and precisely, and he could hear his ragged breathing through his nose. When he’d arranged a few strips of tape the way Stan had explained it to him, he stood up, bucket in hand, and then realized he was too short to easily get everything into position. He looked up at the top of the door, feeling the bucket shake in his trembling hands. He thought he might just be able to tip the bucket up there into position—assuming he did not spill the entire contents of the bucket onto himself in the process. But adhering the tape to the lintel and door properly looked more difficult than Stan had made it sound. But then Stan had a good foot or two on Chauvik, and never hesitated to remind him of it.

He stood for a moment, considering the problem. he didn’t want to end up covered in sticky booze, a mess all over the place and having to explain his failure to the dreaded Stan. He bit his cheek and raised himself up on his toes as high as he could, straining to maintain his balance. Without being able to see clearly, he pushed the bucket into position, sucking air through his nose loudly, and when he thought it was in the right spot, he released his grip and relaxed, stiffening in preparation for the loud cascade of bucket and liquid, and only when a few heartbeats had passed did he look up and run a critical eye over the placement of the bucket. It would do, he decided, and spent a few fussy, panting moments making sure the tape was in the proper position. Satisfied, he gathered up his implements and padded down the stairs. He hesitated, and looked back up the staircase, eyeing his handiwork and trying to imagine what Stan would find wrong with it. He sighed, thinking that there was some fun in dousing a newly teetotaling Henry with booze. But it was still unsatisfying.

A sudden creaking noise sent a shockwave of adrenaline splitting through him. With a slight squeak, he tore the door open and escaped into the cold. All the way home, sweating freely, he tortured himself with the suspicion that he’d dropped some piece of evidence that would ruin everything.

XIV

HENRY stared at the coffin, and thought about killing Stan.

He wouldn’t be able to, of course. Aside from there being too many variables he wasn’t genius enough to plan for, there was the simple fact that as far as he could tell, Stan was unkillable, as Stan was not really alive. He pictured himself thrusting a steak knife into Stan, or firing a projectile into him, or simply scratching together a few thousand dollars and hiring some illiterate goon to do it, and Stan would just skip away, laughing. He’d been plagued by dreams of Stan, of late, night after night of Stan leering in his dreams, dreams that always began with Stan talking to him in a park, some vague, dream-park, without any resemblance to any park he’d ever been to, and Stan speaking a language he didn’t understand, although in the dream he did, and could pick out the nouns and verbs and parts of speech without a problem. Throughout the dream whatever it was Stan was saying to him became more and more disturbing, and all he really remembered about the dream was a growing, intolerable discomfort. At the end of the dream, Stan always tore his face off and revealed himself to be Miranda.

He swallowed hard, the dream washing over him, and kept his eyes on the coffin.

No one had said anything. The outward appearance was that everyone believed her death was a terrible accident. Chauvik had spent unfortunate amounts of time beating his breast about his imagined involvement, but that had been the only really uncomfortable moment for him—aside from Stan, of course, who had proven to be one continuous uncomfortable moment, endless and eternal. And Chauvik had, in the end, proven to be easy enough to deal with, once you talked him off the ledge about being the cause of Miranda ‘ s fall. Henry had secretly hoped that Chauvik would turn around and blame Stan, stir some mud up in his direction, but once Chauvik had been convinced to tow the company line about Miranda being way overserved (also thanks to Stan) and that being a bigger reason for her fall, he’d gone back to being his usual fussy self. When there was a sudden commotion behind him, Henry closed his eyes.

“Get your goddamned hands off me Bobby,” he heard Stan say loudly—not a shout, but inappropriately loud. “You think you’re keeping me out of here, you’re fucking kidding yourself, El Lardo. Besides, I knew her longer, and right now I’m the only one who gives a shit, so get the fuck out of my way.”

Without seeing, Henry could picture Bobby shrugging and stepping aside, grinning as he seethed over the insult and tried to think of ways he might regain his dignity. When he felt Stan sit down next to him, he opened his eyes and resumed staring at the coffin.

“How’re you holding up, champ?”

Henry smelled liquor and shifted slightly in the hard, unpleasant seat, “About as well as can be expected.” He said, the words hurting his throat as they tore from it, dry and taloned.

“Oh sure, sure,” Stan said. Henry detected quick, fidgety movements out of the corner of his eye, and had to resist the urge to flinch and whirl. After a moment the sound of a match being struck, and then cigarette smoke, all around him, dense. He saw Stan lean towards him, but resolutely refused to look at him. He was aware of a dim buzz of disapproval from everyone else. But he knew he couldn’t kick Stan out; He couldn’t do anything.

“So, listen, Ace,” Stan whispered. Henry could smell booze. “You put the goddamn bucket back, huh?”

Henry didn’t say anything.

“I know you did,” Stan continued, “because I don’t think the cup of confetti would have caused her to slip and fall down the fucking stairs, you know?”

Henry remained still, holding himself carefully motionless.

“You fucking killed her,” Stan whispered, voice trembling.

“No,” Henry whispered back. “You fucking killed her.”

“Listen to me, you—”

“And you know it, Stan,” Henry continued, still keeping his voice barely audible. “Or else you wouldn’t be whispering.”

For a moment, they were still. Stan vibrated next to him, silent, quivering withsomething Henry declined to analyze—rage? Horror? He didn’t know, and didn’t care. It was enough that Stan was silent. He couldn’t say anything, because he was the one who had planned everything, he was the one who had convinced everyone. He was the one. Henry enjoyed the moment of silence and tried to relax; he found his hands curled into painful fists.

Stan straightened up without turning. “You’re right, of course. You’re right,” he repeated, slightly louder. Suddenly, he stood up. “He’s absolutely right!” he said loudly, turning to face the seated people.

Everyone stared at him, stone-faced and silent. Bobby, a mountain of damp fabric standing by the entrance to the room, dragged his eyes around seeking someone’s eyes to meet, to form an instant alliance with, someone who would silently understand that you did not interrupt the wake of a friend and act like an asshole and get away with it. No one was looking at him, however, and he found, curiously, that without an ally he couldn’t move.

“Listen, I have an announcement!” Stan said cheerfully. Behind him, Miranda had been arranged in a composed position, hands folded, move curved just slightly in an amused grin that was shockingly familiar to everyone. She looked like she was just taking a nap, or pretending to, listening to everything and amused by it all. “I want everyone to know that Henry is a fucking genius. A fucking genius. He’s smarter then me, he’s smarter than you. He may be the smartest man in the goddamn world, as far as I can tell.”

“You’re drunk, Stan,” Henry said mildly from his seat, not looking at him.

“I am,” Stan agreed solemnly. “The fact that you’re not tells me that aside from being a fucking genius, you are the coldest inhuman motherfucker in the world, too.” He turned and thrust his cigarette out. “Robert, stop in your fucking tracks or I will put this out in your goddamn eye.”

Bobby, halfway from the back of the room to the coffin, stopped and threw his arms out. “Stan, come on!”

“Bobby!” Stan shouted, jabbing at the air with his cigarette. “Sit! The! Fuck! Back! Down!” He stuck the cigarette back between his lips and spread his own arms. “I am making a fucking speech.”

Bobby looked around. No one had moved. No one even looked at him. They all sat in silence, rigid and useless. Horror crept up his spine: He was sweating freely and standing in the middle of the room, abandoned and alone.

“If you didn’t know that Henry is an evil genius—evil!—I don’t blame you. I didn’t know it either until a few days ago. You come home and find an old friend you treated like shit for years is dead, it makes you fucking think.”

Silence greeted this.

“Yeah,” Stan said, looking around. “Yeah. Me neither, until recently.” he looked over at Henry, who stared resolutely at the floor, imagining a beautiful moment in time when Stan had already moved on and left, a future moment in time when he was allowed to settled back comfortably inside the bubble of silence that had formed around him, able to ignore everyone without giving offence because he was in mourning. A future moment when he was free to stare at the coffin and imagine all sorts of things. To plan, to organize in his head the next steps, and there were quite a few. It was a pleasant daydream, lasting some seconds as Stan swayed and swept his burning eyes around the room.

“Fuck,” Stan said suddenly, tossing his cigarette onto the floor and staring down at it. It occured to Henry that Stan was very, very drunk.

He looked around, blinking, his eyes leaping from face to face. No one was looking at him, everyone kept their eyes discretely on the floor or soft-focussed. He smiled slowly, the corners of his mouth sloping upwards in tiny increments, and then he suddenly did a little jog, shuffling his feet and throwing his elbows around. As suddenly as he started, he stopped.

“It’s interesting,” Stan said, looking around again. “Being invisible.”

There was no response.

“You’re all the dumbest fucks in the fucking world,” he spat, reaching into his jacket and extracting his pack of cigarettes. “It’s goddamn disgusting. I’m used to feeling superior to all you morons, but this is a new level of dominance I’m unprepared for. If I commanded you all to burst into flames immediately, I bet you’d start to smoke and flare.”

He lit his cigarette and tossed the match onto the floor.

“Stan,” Bobby said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Maybe you should go. It’s been a hard week for all of us.”

“Fuck you, Bobby—but yes, it’s time to go. Step aside, Bob, I don’t want to get within smelling distance of you, you fat piece of shit.”

Bobby raised his hands up and out in a peaceful gesture, and moved into one of the aisles. Stan thrust his hands into his pockets and moved slowly towards the door. No one said anything or moved. At the exit, he paused, glanced back, then shook his head and continued on out.

Behind him, Henry could hear the whole room relax. A slight buzz of amazed conversation sprang up, but around him the bubble of silence was untouched, and he sat, alone, a swatch of cottony silence stretching off in each direction. He ignored the buzz behind him and it receded, a tide moving out and leaving him alone. He was, by dint of mourning, King for a Day, able to command armies with a gesture, to silence rooms with a scowl. People treated him as if he were explosive.

He stared up at Miranda.

She was peaceful and composed, and looked nothing like his wife. He could feel a paranoid finger inching along his brain like a worm, a growing certainty that she wasn’t his wife at all, that this was some ultimate prank, that Stan had out-planned him after all.

He stared at Miranda, and waited for something to happen. The feeling swelled up inside him, growing larger and larger until he reached down with both hands and grasped the seat of his chair, knuckles white, joints creaking. He held his breath and stared, looking for the first sign, which would be tiny, and fast.

Nothing happened.

He relaxed his fingers and brought his hands up to rub the feeling back into them. He thought of having a beer, and suddenly wanted one desperately, a cold, glorious beer, imbibed in a dark bar with sticky floors and smoke in the air and Waylong Jennings on the jukebox. The bubble around him kept the muffled buzz of conversation away, and she remained right where he’d put her. And no one had any idea what happened, except Stan.

Henry stared at the coffin, and thought about killing Stan.

THE END