THE NECROLOGIST (The End)

The bar is a pustulant hole in the wall. Few patrons on a Wednesday night, and the ones there are too busy drowning in scowling impotencies to pay Bill any mind. He didn’t want to go anywhere he normally would have, anywhere with the selection and ambience and dignity to which he’s accustomed. Normally he’s partial to a quality single malt, but tonight he couldn’t bother with anything that came with standards. Bill just asked for the strongest whiskey there and almost took the barkeep’s head off when the man asked how he wanted it.

Bill wraps his hand around his second glass of pity-party as the stranger slides onto the stool beside him. All the empty seats around the bar and the guy picks the one right next to him. If he was on his game, Bill’s antennae would’ve poked up at just that. The sallow stranger is almost emaciation-thin, and the oversized cream-colored suit only underlines the death camp physique. Sunken cheekbones, bone-gray eyes, and skeletal hands wrapped in papier mâché. If Bill was paying attention, he’d be reeling from the sun-dappled field of peonies that spills from the freak’s mouth as he orders a beer.

Peony-Skeleton takes a sip and says, “It’s a wonder how often work takes me into these places. It’s not often enough I get to just sit and have a beer and not have to sell anything.”

Bill turns to him. “Are you speaking to me?”

“No. No, sorry. I was just waxing what-have-you. I do that sometimes. Usually in the car. My wife says it makes me look like a mental patient, but the irony is talking to yourself is kind of therapeutic. When I was a kid I would do it in a whisper. Would get made fun of for it a lot too. One day this guy asked me, ‘Why do you talk to yourself?’ I said, ‘Because intelligent conversation is hard to come by.’ Since then I just do it out loud and to Hell with someone looking at me funny. Anyway, I was on my way home and just felt like stopping in some place for a drink.”

Bill fingers his glass. “Yeah, me too.”

“I’ll be honest,” says Flowers-at-a-Headstone, “I feel a little guilty. I’ve been working all day, my wife would like to see me before she goes to pilates—or krav maga or spin class or whatever she’s into now—and I’m taking time away from her. And I know she can’t wait to get away from the kids for a while, which I get. She’s had them all afternoon, and kids are demanding and selfish. Not that you can fault them for it. I mean, they’re kids. They don’t know any better yet. But, hey, look at me, complaining about selfishness, and here I am being selfish, stopping off for a beer.”

Bill swirls his little glass of whiskey, watches the eddies of alcohol threaten to crest and break before pouring some into himself. “How old are they?” he asks, oblivious.

“Olivia is twelve, and Mia is eight.”

Bill nods. “You don’t want to keep them waiting too long.”

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I do love those kids. I really do. We’re teaching Mia to ride a bike right now, and we should’ve taught her before now, but kids these days. I told her, ‘You have to learn to ride a bike. I know you like the computer and your devices and everything, but you have to learn to ride a bike. You just do.’ But to her credit she’s not fighting us on it anymore, so if that’s a sign she’s growing up, I’ll take it. Olivia though—too fast. Growing up way too fast. She’s got a boyfriend. This little rat bastard in her school. My wife’s all proud of her. Her little girl is growing into a woman. Olivia got her period not too long ago, and we both cried but for very different reasons. She thinks it’s wonderful and magical and beautiful. I tell her, ‘You think it’s wonderful because you remember being a little girl who was frustrated she wasn’t a grown woman already.’ She doesn’t believe me when I tell her she’d be losing her mind if we had a son going through puberty.”

Bill finishes his whiskey and motions for another. He lets the booze burn its way down as he ignores every instinct that tells him to keep his mouth shut, then says, “My wife missed all that. She died when the kids were still young.”

“I’m sorry, buddy. I didn’t mean—”

“No, that’s all right. It was a long time ago. My oldest was nine, the youngest five.”

“How many do you have?”

Bill waits for his new drink to arrive before saying, “I had three.”

Pocketful-of-Posies turns back to his beer. “I must be hopping around on one leg, my foot in my mouth the way it is.”

Bill waves him off. “You have nothing to be sorry for. My eldest son wants nothing to do with me, my youngest son is dead, and my daughter is confined to a psychiatric institution. And it’s all because of me.”

The gangly chatterbox tells the bartender to put Bill’s tab on his. Shaking his bobble-head by way of apology, “I don’t intend to trivialize or take for granted the gravity of any of your family issues, but I doubt very much that all the blame rests solely on you.”

Bill looks into his whiskey and sees summer sun glinting off beachfront surf mere minutes from the house where his mother and sister were preparing dinner for the whole brood. Where the smell of steak on the grill and vinaigrette over pasta salad perfumed the wreck room. Where all the children washed after a day in the sand and seawater while he sat on the balcony, reclining into a cocktail.

I don’t like seeing him this weak. He’s better than this.

 “What’s your line of work?” Bill asks.

“Sales.”

“I’m a writer.”

“Are you now?”

Bill shrugs. “A kind of writer at any ratee. There’s a kind of lopsided validity people give to the written word. People read something, they imbue it with the power of gospel. ‘So it is written.’ They look to writers for answers. God knows why. We don’t know anymore than they do.”

“It’s funny you say that. I was just observing the other day, for the first time in my life, that author is the root word for authority.”

“Someone gets into a position of authority, and they start writing laws. Napoleon, Justinian, Caesar—”

“Hammurabi.”

“I saw a comedian once making fun of the Bible. He said, ‘Why would god write a book?’ Why wouldn’t he? Talk about the ultimate author.”

“ ‘In the beginning, there was The Word.’ ”

Bill allows himself a micron of a smile, then throws back his whiskey. “You think he has any regrets?”

“God?”

“Yeah. You think he ever looks back at all his decisions, everything he did, everything he didn’t do, and says, ‘Boy, I fucked up.’ ”

“I’d like to think he does.”

“But then that begs the question: Why doesn’t he do something about it? He’s god. He can if he wants. What’s stopping him? It can’t be authority. There’s none higher. So, what is it? Pride? Laziness? Fear? What’s to stop him from re-writing his creation? He could wave his hand, and none of us would be the wiser. No butterfly effect. He’d cross it out like a line through a bad sentence. Why won’t he do something about it?”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “But if he’s got problems, they’re not like ours.”

Bill nods.

“But I do know, Bill, that while we’re still here on this earth, it’s not too late for us to do something about our mistakes. That much I do know.”

Bill turns to the man. “How’d you know my name?”

“Well, you told me your name when we started talking.”

“No, I didn’t,” Bill says. “And you never told me your name.”

The man’s deathly pallor is suddenly so obvious. Bill wants to smack himself for being so careless. He wants to set the entire bar alight from his seat, let the black smoke flood the room, feel the fire engulf the walls, and watch as the skin peels from his arms. He looks at the man in the seat next to him.

“Shit!” the man says. “They’re never going to let me live this down. Bill, I swear to you, I’m shocked you let me get this far. I got my leads for the week, saw your name was one of them, and I said, ‘Forget it. There’s no way I’m going to hook Bill Canarsie. It’s not happening, even with the man in mourning.’ But then I get this close, and I make a fucking rookie mistake. I’m never going to hear the end of it.”

Bill turns to his empty glass, pushes it away, “Who are you with?”

“You don’t want to suss it out?”

“Do I look in the mood for a game?”

Undead Garden grins and shrugs. “I’m with Morningstar.”

Bill throws down a couple of sawbucks.

“No. Remember?” says the man from Morningstar. “I’m picking up your tab.”

Bill stands. “No, you’re not.”

“C’mon, Bill. You know that’s not how it works.”

Bill does know. He doesn’t need to look around to see that the bar is now empty save the two of them. He doesn’t need to listen to hear the unnatural absence of any noise. And he doesn’t need to try the door to know that he’s not leaving. Not until he’s heard the man’s pitch. He sits back down.

“Thanks, Bill,” says the Mephistopholean agent. “You’re a sport.”

“Not that good a one. If I’m going to sit here and listen to you shill for your demonic timeshare, I want a name.”

“Oh, don’t cheapen it. ‘Timeshare.’ Bill, you’re not going to believe how—”

“Your name.”

The shadows in the sales-monster’s face deepen and thrum. His eyes dilate with bloody viscosity. “Don’t try and stonewall me, Bill.”

“Give that half-ass glower to someone who doesn’t know how the business works.”

“Your business, Bill. Not mine.”

“I force my way out that door, my employers slap me on the wrist at worst. You try and detain me against my will, they will snuff out suns going after you and your ingrate fucking boss.”

“I don’t have to detain you, Billy, and you know it. There’s no way you’re leaving that stool before you hear what I’ve got to say.”

“A name.”

The man leans toward him with a smile before saying, “Levi.”

“Fine. Bullshit, but fine. Whatever you say, Levi.”

Levi, or whatever his—or its—name is, claps his hands, and hops off his seat. “Good. Now that the foreplay’s out of the way…” He vaults over the bar and grabs his glass. “Hope you don’t mind if I service myself first.” He puts his glass to a tap and yanks the lever. “Only time I ever get to enjoy a drink anymore is when I’m working. It really is amazing how often work brings me into a bar. It’s my favorite perk of the gig really. Sweet nectarous libation,” and pours a mouthful of beer into his head.

He sets his glass down and grabs a bottle from the top shelf. “This is more your speed, right?” He pours Bill two fingers worth. “Now,” says Levi, “it’s all your fault, so you say. I don’t think it is, personally, but that doesn’t matter. You think it is. So, what are you going to do about it? You could probably get Rhesus deprogrammed easily enough. You’ve got the connections for that. And you’ve probably got enough money to get Elena sorted out too. But there’s not much you can do about Stilico. Dead is dead, am I right? But that’s not really the problem.

“No, the problem is you know why it all happened. That’s why you don’t go to your bosses and cash in some of that goodwill you’ve earned over the decades. You could whisper your sins into an Ear and make every Tom, Dick, and Harry across terra firma remember a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells who looked a jewel-encrusted gift horse straight in the chompers. What else could you have done, loving and open-minded papa you are? ‘Poor Bill. All he did for those kids, and look what he has to live with.’

“But you know, Bill, it’s not like those cosmic contortionists of sorrow who sign your paychecks to cut a client some slack. That’s what you’d be at that point. A client. Still I’ll bet they’d make an exception for one of their biggest earners. Question is, would you want that? You know the kind of bargain they drive. You’ve done it for years. What do you think you’d have to pay? Think of all those obituaries you’ve written, and all the Sisyphean karma you’ve meted out for services rendered. Think of the most nauseating, agonizing retributions you’ve extracted from those sad sacks who hired you. Now try and imagine a price a hundred times worse. That’s what you’d have to pay to believe that your kids didn’t destroy their own lives on account of you. So, what’s to be done about it?”

Levi’s a pro. Bill can’t deny it, much as he wants to. He can imagine all the hours the man from perdition spent alone, in front of a mirror, practicing his pitch. Every syllabic emphasis, every inch of gesticulation. Even his current posture, a call to action of shrugged shoulders, outstretched arms, and upturned hands, is the well-honed craft of a consummate professional. Bill can’t help but shudder at its unmistakable allure.

“So,” he says, “I let you give me my children back? Just as they were?”

“Better,” says Levi. “Better than they ever were. They’re not going to resent you for demanding so much of them, run from you for never telling them you were proud. They’re not going to follow some idiot muse into idealistic quicksand out of embittered rejection of you and everything you’re about. They’re going to know that you’ve always had their best interests at heart. More than that, they’re going to believe it. They’re going to feel it. They’re going to hear the wisdom in your words. They’re going to feel the warmth between them. And they’re going to love you for it. They’re going to want to make you proud because they’ll be thankful they have you. They’re going to be climbing to the rooftops and singing out, ‘Hallelujah, the father I got me!’ They’ll have never done any of it, Bill. Why would they want to when they have you?”

Bill dares to sip the drink Levi’s poured him. “And in exchange,” he says, “my soul.”

Levi busts a gut. His laugh is hyena-smug, and he slaps the bar twice. “His soul! He thinks we want his soul! Oh, Bill, no. What do we need your soul for? You are so much more valuable to us with it right there inside you. We want you to work for us.”

Now it’s Bill’s turn to laugh, but all he has in him is a mirthless scoff. “I come work for you? You think it’s that easy?”

“Why not?”

“You ever hear of a non-compete clause?”

“Morningstar invented the non-compete clause, Bill. And that’s not me just blowing smoke. I mean Morningstar literally invented it. We know how to get around one. There’s not a non-compete in the cosmos Morningstar can’t render null and void.”

“Even if that was true—”

“It is.”

From under a hooded brow Bill shoots a dare at Levi. “Why would I want to work for you?”

“You wouldn’t be working for me, Bill. You and me—we’d be on equal footing. Colleagues. Only one you’d answer to would be the Star of the Morning himself.”

Now Bill looses a full-throated guffaw that slaps the unwavering smirk off Levi’s face. “You’ve been at the same place for too long. You know, businessmen get not a bad wrap but an incorrect one. People who hate business, hate capitalism, who don’t get that life is just a collection of transactions right down to two little atoms exchanging and sharing electrons—what they think is that all businessmen care about is money. That greed dictates their every decision.”

Bill shakes his head. “It’s ego. Turn yourself into a fly and plant yourself on any wall in any office or boardroom in the world, and you’ll see men and women making fiscally stupid decisions because they think it makes them look better. Or because the smart idea was already voiced by the young buck who’s looking to make a name. They have to complicate matters and make mistakes because you don’t make headlines playing it safe.

“Your boss had the cushiest gig in all of existence, but his ego told him to piss it away, and he was dumb enough to do it. Why would I want to work for that fucking thing?”

Levi waves his hand and rends the bar into a storm of ectoplasmic shards. Bob can’t help but wince and flinch at the maelstrom of cosmic jetsam. Beyond it all is nothing, the visible patina of Void. Bob can’t keep his eyes open, but he can’t not hear Levi’s voice.

“Because you know it’s better to reign in Hell. Because you enjoy extracting payment. I know how much sweeter it is to sell than to let them buy on their own steam. I know it’s not guilt that brought you into this bar. You’re angry your kids didn’t listen. You tried to make them understand. But you failed. When the Morningstar last failed, he endured torment beyond mortal comprehension. But you know what he’s taught me? All that timeless agony and immeasurable depravity is nothing compared to the feeling of walking off the field a loser.”

And with the hellscape bora swirling around him and the ethereal debris rushing past him mere inches from tearing him to confetti, a curtain falls, and Bill is cocooned in unflappable certainty. Levi, so proud of his brand recognition, has overplayed his hand. He’s good, but he’s no professional. Bill knows who Levi is now, and he remembers who Bill Canarsie has always been. His hands fall to his sides, his barstool is a lounge chair propping him into repose, and his whisper gags the storm.

 He points to the absence of everything beyond. “Throw yourself in.”

“What?”

“Go on. I’ll take your place, you take the Void.”

“No,” Levi says, forcing a laugh. “No, the terms are—”

“New terms: I go to work for Morningstar, and you consign yourself to non-existence.”

“No. No no no! This is a seller’s market, and—”

“I’m doing the selling here.” Bill slides off the end of his stool and stands, his arms outstretched to expose the soft meat before Levi’s slavering eyes. He asks the man from Morningstar, “How bad do you want to win?”

I’m not just proud of Bill. I’m happy for him. The thing about these cosmic beings and elemental forces is that they’re naturals. They’re born with a gift and see no reason to develop it. To work. Bill is a human, and he worked his ass off to become something more. The smile he was wearing when he walked out of the bar—he earned that.

THE NECROLOGIST (Pt. 2)

There’s a reason you shouldn’t do business with friends and family. If Bill Canarsie has a shortcoming it’s that he likes helping the people who mean something to him. That’s a big shortcoming. With anyone else the man’s a surgeon, but with a good friend, a man with whom he’s shared adventures and spilled blood… well, he’d have been better off without.

Bill has his phone to his ear. He keeps his voice to a stage whisper. No one needs to hear the message he’s leaving for his son. “Rhesus, it’s been three weeks. I’m hearing rumors from the State Department. They’re afraid you’re going native. What are you doing? This isn’t what we talked about. I want to hear from you. Please.”

He hangs up with nothing more to do than sit in the sheriff’s office and wait. He looks around at the commendations, the framed photographs of law enforcement people, the cheap attempts decoration. He squirms in his chair of imitation grain and cheap acrylic upholstery. He would never have subjected himself to such dizzying depths for anyone but a real friend.

Bill hears an iron collision from some distant quadrant of the building. About time, he almost mutters. The door opens. The sheriff walks through first, appropriately servile, then two guards. One of them has an obnoxious moue spackled on the front of his head, but Bill ignores it—he’s a kid, he doesn’t get it. Between the guards and sheriff comes his friend, Carl Fulsome, chairman and C.E.O. of Fullmach Industries. The man has spent the better part of the last two decades carving the commercial world into an oyster of his own design. He’s bankrolled senators, plied them buffets of vice, and hung the remaining skeletons in their closets. He’s elected presidents like he was Leo crowning Charlemagne and brought them to heel like Gregory at Canossa. He’s now spent twelve hours in the county jail. His coif of silver and black has lost some luster and definition. His eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep. As he walks into the sheriff’s office, his steps are heavy and his soles scrape the linoleum. This is no circumstance to befit a titan.

Bill shakes the sheriff’s hand. “Thank you, Sheriff,” he says. “I appreciate your understanding.”

“Happy to help, Mr. Canarsie.” The sheriff turns to his prisoner. “I’ll give you as much time as I can, Mr. Fulsome. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

Fulsome dismisses the man and his guards with a grunt. The office door closes, and the two old friends embrace.

“How are you getting on, Carl?”

“The board’s giving me the runaround. I’m protected for right now, but that’s not going to hold past this week.”

Bill sits. “When do you think you’ll make bail?”

Fulsome is pacing, a mill’s wheel starved for grist. “My lawyer should have it together by tomorrow,” he says. “Nancy’s not taking my calls. Won’t let me speak to the kids. She’s going to use this to fleece me dry in a divorce just because she can.”

“Want me to talk to her? Get her to think things through and—”

“I want you to help me, Bill.”

The best necrologist in the business tenses up. He rubs his hands together, tries to get another fire started. “What does your lawyer say?” Bill asks.

“He talks about dragging out the process, burying the prosecution in motions, outlawyering them. He thinks he’s managing my expectations, but at five grand an hour he can’t even do that, let alone get rid of the body and the prints and the fibers and all that.”

“Has the prosecutor offered a deal?”

“I’m not taking it.”

“If you did, how long would you—”

“I’m not pleading out.”

“If you did—”

“Less than fifteen.”

“You should take it.”

“Are you a fucking lawyer now?”

“I’m your friend, and I’m telling you to take the deal.”

“I am not going to prison.”

“Carl?”

“No!”

“Listen to me, Carl.”

“I know what you can do, Bill, and I want you to do it for me.”

“Listen to me.”

“Bill!”

“Carl, fifteen years or my price? Make the deal.”

“Your price is that high?”

“Yes, and you don’t want to pay it.”

“Try me.”

“I’m not kidding, Carl.”

“Neither am I. Name it. Name your price.”

Bill feels the walls closer than Fulsome does. He chokes on the compressed air. He leans forward in his seat and rubs his eyes, for no reason other than to delay the agonizing inevitable. “First,” he says, “you have to tell me your story.”

“You know the story.”

“I need to hear it from you. The whole thing. No spin, no prevarication, no lies. I need to know what the obituary should say.”

“It should say he was a bright kid who had a great future ahead of him, he was well liked by all, and Fullmach will miss him dearly. Why is that so—”

“You don’t dictate the obituary, Carl.”

“Just do this for me!”

Bill lifts his head. He meets his friend’s weary, wrathful gaze. He’s seen Fulsome direct that look at others many times over the years, and he’s seen those on the receiving end of it wilt and like greenery under an apocalyptic sun. But Bill doesn’t wilt. “Carl,” he says, “you are a very wealthy man. I know what you’re capable of, so trust me when I tell you that all your wealth and prestige and power holds no sway with the forces I serve. People much heavier than you have tried to throw their weight around with us. They’ve all failed. Our terms are not negotiable, and you don’t want to agree to them. So, for the last time, as your friend, don’t ask me to do this for you.”

Fulsome spins around a chair, sits, and faces Bill like a mortal enemy on the opposite side of a conference table. “Where do you want me to start?” he demands.

Silence swallows the room, and Bill bows his head. He needs a moment of funereal reflection to muster the professionalism he’ll need for this. Once it’s passed, he inhales sharply and retrieves The Ear from his briefcase. It sits on the sheriff’s desk like a Newton’s cradle as Bill opens his mouth, his voice weak. “Start at the beginning.”

“A couple years ago Rollie  asked me to speak at his school for Career Day. Middle school. The kid was in one of my lectures.”

“What do you mean ‘lectures?’ How did that work?”

“They put each of the parents who came to speak in a room. Each period the students would change, like they were going to different classes.”

“Okay.”

“The kid was in one of them. Said he wanted to go into business. Asked a bunch of questions.”

“What was the kid’s name?”

“What difference does it make? Next thing I know, he was friends with Rollie. Started showing up at the house, staying over. And when he was there, the kid always found an excuse to talk to me. Not even about business. About anything. I didn’t like him, but he’d already wormed his way into one of Rollie’s best friends, so what was I going to do? Tell my son the kid can’t come over? It wasn’t like he was a bad influence or anything.”

“So, he and Rollie remained friends?”

“Yeah. Nancy loved the little shit. He would kiss her ass, call her Mrs. Fulsome. And she’d let him. You know, sometimes I think she even had a crush on the kid, if you can believe that. This fucking kid had everybody buffaloed, I swear to god.”

“What happened between then and now?”

“Junior year of high school they had to do some community outreach, so Rollie asked me to set them up with the Foundation. Fine. Once a week for three months they answered phones on Saturday. Then out of nowhere the kid’s arm-in-arm with Bryce Lonegan. He started nosing into corporate affairs, somehow got hold of a password for the executive springboard—”

“Hold on.”

“—or maybe he hacked it or got somebody to hack into it, but—”

“Hold it, Carl. Go back. How did the kid meet Bryce Lonegan?”

“I don’t know. He met him through the Foundation or something. What’s that—”

“Tell me, Carl. How’d they meet?”

“Why is that so important?”

“Because you’re skirting it.”

“Are you judging me?”

Fulsome lobs the accusation with a fearsome undertone, but Bill doesn’t flinch.

“Are you?” Fulsome screams.

Bill looks at his friend, motionless. It’s not Fulsome’s ferocity that’s stilled him. It’s the sudden onset of rockribbed certainty, that bracing turn of a key that answers all your questions and charts the passage of events you now know will undoubtedly unfold. I’m the only one who can see the faint ember of regret flicker beneath Bill’s lids as he blinks.

He opens his briefcase and returns The Ear to its confines.

“What are you doing?”

Bill’s voice is a thread of silk on the air. “If you wanted my help, you wouldn’t be lying to me.”

“You’re calling me a liar?”

“Yes, Carl, I am. But by all means do something about it.”

“Why are you doing this? Why is this happening?”

“What was the kid’s name, Carl?”

Bill watches the sputtering fissures begin to spiderweb over a man who was once unflappable bedrock. The man who once laid low nation-states is disintegrating, falling in chips and flakes to be carried away by a breeze too lugubrious to register.

“What was his name?”

Bill Canarsie watches an empire collapse, crumble to the floor, its face hiding in its hands as all the lies are shed through tears. Bill can barely discern the name through the hysterics.

“Noah.”

Bill returns The Ear to the sheriff’s desk and closes his briefcase. He sits, his friend weeps, and the hands of the sweatshop-bred wallclock provide a sheepish click of rhythm to the ovine squeal of self-pity. When Fulsome lifts his head, it is soaked and reddened. For the first time in thirty years Bill looks at his friend and sees a very small man. But Bill’s a professional.

“Go on,” he says.

Fulsome swallows, gasps for breath. “Noah,” he says. “I met him at Career Day. Thirteen.” A smile forms, then melts away as the tears return. “So beautiful!”

I’m watching this, and I can’t help but think that I see a twinge at the corner of Bill’s mouth. If I do, if some rasp of emotion peeks out from its hole, I don’t know if Bill is registering disgust or shame or pity or what. But I don’t like it. A pro like Bill can’t indulge a feeling. He can’t give Carl Fulsome a break, and he can’t twist the knife. Carl Fulsome is a figure in a spreadsheet.

“He loved me, Bill,” Fulsome says. “Or I thought he did. We saw each other for four years. I… opened myself to him like I never did to anyone. Not even my wife. We would… If I had to go out of town, I’d fly him out, put him up in my suite—and another room in case I had to have people over—and we would talk. I’d hold him in my arms and tell him… there’s nothing I didn’t tell him. I took care of him, gave him money, bought him whatever he wanted. We made plans. He was my kept woman.

“I brought him to Dubai once, and he just… He laid on top of me while I ran my fingers over the small of his back, and he cried about how he couldn’t tell anyone about us, that they wouldn’t get it. We knew what we had was real, but he hated having to live a lie. I kissed his tears as they ran down his cheek, and… I told him that I hated it too. But we had to be patient. Once he was legal, we wouldn’t have to hide anymore. In the meantime I’d make sure he got into Cornell Business, then a great junior exec position in Fullmach to start, and we’d be off.

“Then, he hooks up with Bryce fucking Lonegan. You know how I found that out? He told me, Noah did. Same time he told me we were through. I asked him why, and he said…” The anger retreats a step as the grief returns and flanks it. “He said Lonegan was prettier. Younger, leaner, a better fuck. Like a teenager knows what good sex is.” The anger sweeps everything else aside. “He looked at me like I’d been a waste of his time. Wasn’t sorry at all. He didn’t even get angry at me for making him feel like the bad guy. The little faggot didn’t care.”

Bill asks, “Where did this happen?”

“At the Foundation. After hours. No one was there.”

“Your suggestion?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t want to meet in public? Some place you wouldn’t make a scene?”

“Aren’t you listening? He didn’t care!” The sting of disregard is fresh all over again. “He knew everything I did to the people who crossed me, and he wasn’t scared of me.”

Bill nods and lets his eyes fall to the floor. “What do you want the obituary to say?”

“I want it to say that the kid got what was coming to him. That he was a sociopathic parasite who hustled the wrong man and got what he deserved. That he made his choices, and you’re a schmuck if you grieve for the loss of that opportunistic little queen!”

Bill nods again and returns the Ear to his briefcase. “I can do that, Carl. But I have to make you aware that I can’t rewrite history. Everyone will think the way you want them to, but the prosecutor will still have all the physical evidence. You’ll still be on the hook for murder. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow in your own bed and—”

“I get it,” Fulsome says. “My lawyers can deal with the murder charge. I want you to make sure no one gives a shit that that kid’s dead.”

“I can do that.”

Fulsome claps his hands. “Good. Now what’s your exorbitant price?”

“Fifty-one percent of Fullmach.”

“What!?!”

“That’s the price.”

“I’m not giving you a controlling interest in Fullmach.”

“It won’t go to me, Carl. It will go to my employers.”

“I don’t care who it would go to. I’m not paying it.”

“Yes, you are, Carl.”

“No, I am not, Bill.”

“Carl, the moment you started telling me the truth, you entered into a binding contract.”

“I didn’t sign any papers.”

“Doesn’t matter. You did.”

“I’d like to see that hold up in a courtroom.”

“The people I work for follow very different laws, Carl. You don’t have a choice.”

“I make one phone call, and I sink the global economy. I think I do.”

Bill stands. “You think because you know what I do that you understand it. You don’t understand anything, Carl. You think money buys what I can do? Money is nothing to the people I work for. Their metric is a language you don’t have the anatomical capacity to speak. They don’t haggle, and they don’t answer questions. They don’t have to. They don’t even have to tell you what you owe them. And the explanation that I’m offering to you at this very moment is nothing more than a professional courtesy.”

Bill waits for all the possible counter-arguments to spin through Fulsome’s mind like reels in a slot machine. He waits for each of them to faceplant on the finality of his words, for his friend to experience the flush of impotence, its concomitant frustration, and then his begrudging acceptance.

Fulsome nods a head full of grinding teeth.

Then Bill adds, “And everyone will know about you and Noah.”

It pains Bill to see his friend erupt into desperate indignation, to hear the betrayal quaver his tone, to watch the tears again well and spill down his face. But Bill never breaks his gaze. He’s stalwart, betrays nothing.

“Everyone who knows me will look at me and see what we did. That kid came on to me! And everyone’s going judge me? Who the fuck are they to pass judgment? Who the fuck are your bosses? I want to meet them.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Bill breathes.

“I’m a fucking customer!”

“So was Faust.”

“Forget it. I don’t want it anymore.”

“They don’t take returns, Carl.”

“I’m not paying!”

Bill leans down and picks up his briefcase.

Fulsome’s finger shoots in Bill’s direction. “You’re judging me too. You want this. You think I deserve to be ruined.”

Bill walks to the door.

“I’m your friend!”

Bill stops with his hand on the doorknob. “This was a transaction, Carl. I was your friend when I told you not to go for it.”

On his way out he tells the sheriff that he and Mr. Fulsome have completed their business.

THE NECROLOGIST (Pt.1)

Bill Canarsie knows a consummate professional makes a good first impression. His appointment is at 2:30, so he pulls into the driveway at 2:28. His car, the luxury sedan of the upper middle-class, is sparkling obsidian, freshly washed and waxed. His jacket, freshly scoured with a lint brush, sways on a hanger in the backseat. Standing next to the car he slides into the jacket and smoothes it out with the flat of his hand.

He reaches across the backseat and retrieves his briefcase. It wouldn’t appear to you as anything special. It’s a handsome briefcase, no cheap knockoff or a bushleaguer’s attempt to outkick his coverage, but nothing remarkable at first glance.

Rebecca Musgrave would never call herself wealthy, but when it comes time to draw up the new class borders, she’ll end up squarely on the side of affluence. The Musgrave house brings to mind words like sumptuous and decadent and other adjectives that pepper commercials for purportedly gourmet chocolate. Burnished arabesques, crystalline panes, molasses-thick tapestries—think Louis XIV ruling over Krypton.

Bill walks the whitewashed path of brick that winds around the side of the house. We never use the front door, Musgrave told him on the phone call. She answers the door in high-income casual, clothes that cost top dollar to look unimpressive. He says no thank you to coffee, and she leads him into the dining room. They sit across from one another. He rests his briefcase on the floor, against the legs of his chair.

“I want to apologize for my husband’s absence, Mr. Canarsie,” she says. “He’s at work right now. He’s been handling most of the arrangements, and I think he just needed a day away from it all.”

“Understandable, Mrs. Musgrave. Have you told your husband about this meeting?”

Her fingers jitterbug around themselves. “I… thought it would be best to take the meeting and then decide if a conversation was even necessary.”

Bill nods. “So you understand, Mrs. Musgrave, if you choose to engage my services, this will be a legitimate business agreement. If you wish to make anyone else, including your husband, a party to it, that is entirely your prerogative.”

“Well,” she says, “I am little concerned about payment. I don’t even know how much you charge. My friend made a point of talking around that.”

“What will happen is I’ll listen to you, and once I have all the pertinent information, I’ll name my price.”

Musgrave swallows.

“But you’re more concerned,” he says, “with your husband seeing the bank statement.”

“Yeah.”

Bill gives her the same smile the sun splashes on the morning horizon. “We have ways around that. We understand how at times like these emotions run high, and we’re very sensitive to our clients’ desire for privacy. As I said, if you decide at any point to inform Mr. Musgrave of our agreement, you have the right to do so at no risk of incurring any kind of penalty, monetary or otherwise, from us. As far as I’m concerned, your husband has nothing to do with this.”

She and every muscle under her skin exhale. “Thank you,” she says. “So, uh, where should I start?”

“Just one moment.”

Bill retrieves his briefcase and sets it on the table. It has no lock, but it knows to only open for Bill Canarsie or his employers. What he takes from it and sets on the table looks so conspicuously mundane, Musgrave wonders if it’s a recording device. She doesn’t ask if it’s a recording device because it so clearly has to be a recording device. And were she to ask, Bill would say that, yes, it is, a proprietary recorder that allows for easy uploading of uncompressed audio files to his company’s secured servers via satellite. He would tell her this, and she would accept it without question as many others have. If he did tell her what The Ear really was and where it had came from, she would ignore it for the sake of her own sanity.

Bill says, “Why don’t you start with how you came to hear of me?”

“Well,” she says, “this woman—she’s one of my oldest friends—she’s married to someone who… knows people the rest of us never learn about. Not that she’s gossipy. She’s not. Well, not about… this. But she’s hinted before about—”

“I understand, Mrs. Musgrave. Tell me about your son.”

The woman’s been steeling herself for this all day. “Eric was our only child,” she says. “We wanted to have more, but there were complications with my pregnancy, and we were told it would be too risky. So, Eric became my world.” Tears threaten to burst loose. “You spend every minute worrying about your child. I use to tell myself it would prepare me in case something ever did happen. But you can’t prepare yourself for the end of the world.”

Bill always keeps a pristine handkerchief in his breast pocket. He’s handing it to her before the first droplet crawls down her cheek.

“Thank you. My friend told me about the service you provide. She explained how to contact you, which to be honest would’ve made me laugh if I wasn’t convulsing every hour. But… I figured, why not try. So, I performed the ritual, and a day later—”

“Protocols, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We prefer the term protocols. I’m sorry to sound hung up on nomenclature. I know it’s not what you care about now, but the word ritual gives the impression there’s something mysterious and sinister about what I do.” He shakes his head. “I provide a service to people, one that is intended to provide those in mourning with some modicum of peace, and I take that responsibility seriously.”

“That’s what my friend said, which is why I decided to contact you.”

“What have you heard about the service I provide?”

“That you’re a necrologist.”

“Do you know what that is?”

“A fancy word for someone who writes obituaries.”

Bill smiles with a hint of laughter. “That’s right. Mrs. Musgrave, before we go any further, I want to be clear about what it is I can and cannot do. An obituary is meant to function a lot like a monument. It’s meant to celebrate someone who’s left us and remind us of all that was special about them. About why they were so loved and valued. I’m exceptional at doing that, but what I can’t do is turn back the clock. What happened has happened. I can’t do anything about that.”

“But you can make people forget? The parts we don’t want to celebrate?”

“I once wrote an obituary for a man who was killed in a drunk driving accident. He was the drunk driver, and he took half a school bus worth of children with him. When people remember him now, they remember a civic-minded teetotaler who called his mother every Sunday.”

Musgrave grips Bill’s handkerchief for dear life. “Eric never had much time for me, even when he was little. You know, you replay incidents, things you haven’t thought about in years, things you thought you forgot, as if you can spot the pattern after the fact and somehow change things. Last night my husband and I had a fight. I told him that if he hadn’t given Eric a sip of his beer when he was nine… like that would’ve changed anything.”

Bill reaches across the table and lays his hand on Musgrave’s. A perfect touch at the perfect time. “How bad did it get?” he asks.

“We knew he had a problem in college. You know, when you find out you’re pregnant for the first time, along with all the doctor’s appointments and classes and shopping and everything, you should have to go to a therapist and learn how to combat denial. We kept making excuses to ourselves for years until it got so bad we couldn’t deny it anymore. He stole from us. Cash out of our pockets, the debit cards out of our wallets. He totaled his car. Thank god no one was hurt. We tried talking to him, we tried interventions, my husband had a fistfight with him in the kitchen at three in the morning one night. Everyone kept telling us we had to kick him out. He had to hit rock bottom.

“He got his girlfriend addicted too. Then she stole from him, and he beat her. When we confronted him, he… he scared us. That’s when we kicked him out. ‘Eric, you either leave this house right now and don’t come back until you’re sober, or you’re going to jail tonight.’ He would call sometimes, try to make us feel guilty. But we wouldn’t budge. Not as long as he was using. The police said that he had spent the last couple months prostituting himself. To support his habit. And apparently he crossed the wrong people. They beat him to death.”

Musgrave’s head falls to the table and she waters it like a flowerbed. But Bill keeps hold of both her hands and lets the warmth and the empathy seep through his palms until it buttresses her upright.

“I don’t want people to remember Eric like that,” she chokes between sobs.

“You want them to remember a young man with a bright future.”

“Yes.”

“You want them to remember a young man of character and dignity. A young man who made others smile and brought love with him everywhere.”

Musgrave nods.

“I can do that for you, Mrs. Musgrave, but only if you tell me the truth.”

Bill feels that familiar frisson in her hands, the one the guilty man feels when he knows he’s caught but isn’t ready to give it up. He’s felt it in countless clients before.

Musgrave’s terror drapes itself in indignant finery as she pulls her hands away. “What do you mean?”

“How’s your marriage, Mrs. Musgrave?”

“W-what exactly does…”

“What’s the state of your relationship with Mr. Musgrave?”

“Where do you get the nerve?”

“My job.”

“My marriage is none of your business, Mr. Canarsie.”

“I’m afraid it is. In order for me to compose an obituary that will have the desired effect, I need to know what effect is desired.”

“I just told you.”

“No. You told me a lie, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“Do not come into my home and call me a liar.”

“Mrs. Musgrave, if I come across as presumptuous or arrogant, it only seems that way because I’m very good at what I do. You were not lying about your son’s life or the circumstances of his death. I’d have known if you were. I also know you’re not worried about what your friends and acquaintances will say or think about your son. But you are genuinely concerned about the repercussions of Eric’s legacy being one of dying violently as a disgraced drug-addicted prostitute.”

“Don’t you say his—”

“So, again, Mrs. Musgrave, how is your marriage?”

Bill keeps his stare bullseyed. It never leaves her, and she has to look away before she crumbles under the scrutiny of a shark. Even with her head turned, the weight is insurmountable.

“He can’t look at me,” she says. “Last night he said he wasn’t going to the funeral if I was there.”

Bill leans back in his chair, folds his hands in his lap, and keeps his eyes on the woman.

She says, “I don’t care if he sees the checkbook.”

Bill nods, and exposes the one unconscious chink in his professionalism. He adjusts The Ear. That’s all, just a small shift one half-inch in the direction of his client. It’s so minor a breach, any boss in his right mind would let it slide.

He says, “I can help you, Mrs. Musgrave. I can write an obituary that will leave everyone, including your husband, remembering Eric as a forthright and loving son.”

“Thank you! Thank you, Mr. Canarsie. When will you have it done by?”

“It will be in every local paper tomorrow morning.”

“And how will I know… when, I mean, if…”

“It will take effect at midnight tonight.”

“Thank you.”

Bill smiles.

“How much do I owe you?” she asks.

“Your husband.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Musgrave will now work for my employers.”

He lets the woman take the time to process, ignoring the sputtered false starts of disbelief and denial.

Finally she gets out, “Is this what you normally do? Make some insane joke at the end?”

“No, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“It’s because of the price, right? It’s so obscene, you start by saying it’s something impossibly crazy?”

“No, Mrs. Musgrave.”

She can’t help but chuckle. “Wait. First of all, my husband’s a chemical engineer.”

“My employers will find use for a chemical engineer.”

“What’ll he be doing?”

“That’s not your concern, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“What’ll he be making?”

“Not your concern, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“Stop calling me ‘Mrs. Musgrave.’ This is absurd. You can’t make someone come work for you. He’s not an indentured servant.”

“We don’t use that term.”

This is the point at which the client is blown away by the audacity, the sheer audacity of it all. Musgrave follows suit, and her laugh grows manic as she grasps at whatever straws of rationalization lay within reach. Bill, consummate, doesn’t let on how much he enjoys his job.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” the woman says. “I should’ve figured this was some sort of con.”

“It’s not, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“Shut up! Then it’s some kind of prank or weird therapy thing. It has to be, because if it was real, my husband would have to agree, and there is no way my husband would agree to this.”

“He already has.”

“Enough. All right? Enough! What is the matter with you? Do you do this with every person you go to see? Do you really get off on—”

She’s left her phone on the kitchen counter, so the alarum sounds as heavy plastic on buffed marble mixed with the compressed tin wave of “Lips Like Sugar.” Musgrave chases after it with a trickle of Pavlovian drool. She looks at the number and answers. “Tom?… Tom, you have no idea what’s happening right now. There’s a… What?… Tom, what are you talking about?… What do you mean you’re not coming home?”

If Bill’s job required him to listen to the Musgraves’ marriage come to an end, he would, but the who-says-what-and-when is irrelevant. Too bad. On any other day Bill’s mind would be turning to his next appointment. It would be dry-running through potential turns in the conversation, ghost-steering the client toward a sale. But today a rarity transpires: work weaves an accidental spell and triggers thoughts about Bill Canarsie’s personal life. I hope it’s not the start of a bad trend.

Bill uses his own cell phone to call his son. At first he can’t complete the call as dialed, then he remembers to enable interdimensional roaming. He gets through on the second try, but it goes to voicemail. “Hello, Rhesus. It’s your father. I haven’t heard from you since you got there. I had a minute, and I wanted to see how the new post was treating you, find out how you’re acclimating, all that. I shouldn’t have to be the one to call though. Listen, don’t be an ignorant American in a foreign dimension, all right? It’s not like you’re a diplomat to some banana republic. It’s a serious thing. Call me tonight.”

Bill hangs up as Mrs. Musgrave’s hysteria crescendos. “What is happening? Why are you doing this? Tom? Tom!?!”

Bill waits for the tear-wracked wound to drift into his field of vision, but Musgrave can’t collect enough of herself to move beyond turning in his general direction.

“What are you?” she asks.

Bill doesn’t turn to face her. “I promise you I’m simply a man, Mrs. Musgrave. Like your husband and your friends’ husband I have a professional responsibility. I’m seeing to it right now.”

“I don’t want this.”

“It’s done, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“I DON’T WANT THIS!!!”

Bill returns The Ear to his briefcase and closes it. He stands and faces her, never forgetting the necessity of quality customer service. “Please calm yourself, ma’am. Screaming will not change anything.”

“You’re a monster.”

“I’m a businessman, Mrs. Musgrave. I charge what the market will bear.”

Her eyes are off him, searching somewhere for something she can’t even consider. “You can’t do this.”

“You can dispute the charge,” Bill says. “You can find people who will fight on your behalf, but I wouldn’t advise it. If my price is too steep, you do not want to pay theirs. Good day, ma’am.”

Bill heads for the door, his footsteps lightened with the satisfaction of a job well done.

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DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 5 - The End)

I don’t know how I forced myself out of the painting the way I did. I’d been standing there, tangled in the venom of Uncle Mason’s words. The clouds above had stopped drifting. The ripples of the canoe’s wake stood mid-crest. The waterfall had frozen over. I had to escape. I spun away from the painting and planted my face in my hands.

The Uncle Mason’s voice echoed through the gallery with unflappable calm. “Albert Bierstadt was born in Prussia, before Germany even existed. His father was a cooper, which in early eighteenth-century Europe made him next to worthless. They came here when Albert was only a year old. His parents did better here than they ever would have in Prussia. How could Albert not embrace America and everything that came with it? He traveled to Düsseldorf in his twenties to learn how to paint, but he came back and made America the subject of everything he did. At the time he caught a lot of shit for his showmanship and skill at advertising himself. But entrepreneurial flair and selling yourself—that’s baseball and apple pie, and it served him well. America gave Bierstadt everything. How could he not believe it was the work of God?”

I turned toward him slowly. Once I could lift my face out of my hands, I asked, my hands open in a plea, “Do you really believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. He believed it.”

“Then he was an asshole.”

“Anna, our beliefs don’t take form in a vacuum. You know that. They take root in what we know, what we experience every day. You know a nice middle-class suburban existence, so you have the luxury of taking the time to learn about the roots of institutionalized injustice and then passing judgment. You don’t know what ‘hard-scrabble’ means. You don’t understand what it means to be so worried about keeping a roof over your head and feeding your kids that you don’t have the time or energy to worry about the predation of the system. To you fixing the system is a worthwhile goal. To people you’ve never even met the system is just a boot coming down on their throat, and they’re just trying to position themselves so that when it connects, they’ll still be able to breathe.”

“Are you saying I don’t have empathy?”

Uncle Mason’s head sank. He put his hands on his hips.

“Are you?”

He raised his head, his eyes cast to the ceiling. Or maybe the heavens. The pop and squeal of the fireworks were going off. In the gallery’s lachrymose silence they sounded closer than they were.

“Uncle Mason!”

His shoulders sank. His arms fell to his sides. His head drooped. He looked like the condemned hanging from a scaffold.

“Uncle Mason?”

“Shut up!”

His outburst struck with a bone-shattering thud. I was afraid to move. The sole of my flip-flop scuffed the cement floor, and I bristled at the inferno that would spill from my uncle’s face as he turned to excoriate me into ashes. But he never turned around. No conflagration. I steeled myself against the incoming worst.

“This was a mistake,” he said in a mohair whisper, more to himself than to me. He started to amble across the room. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

“Because I don’t agree with you?”

He shook his head. “Because of that. Because you think that’s why I’m frustrated.” He reached the wall, turned, and collapsed into it. Directly above his head was a painting called Marat Assassinated. “I’m sorry, Anna. I look at the young woman you’ve grown into over the last six years, and I’m… proud isn’t a strong enough word. I sometimes forget that you’re still a kid. I know you don’t like to hear that. No teenager does.”

Uncle Mason’s eyes drifted off me and into space, onto something I couldn’t see. “When I was your age,” he said, “I would fight with your grandparents all the time. The Iran-Contra hearings were on television every day, and… I could not understand how good people like my parents didn’t find it disgusting. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t as angry as I was. I remember screaming at my father, ‘Don’t you care what they’re doing down there?’ and him saying, ‘It has nothing to do with us.’ I felt like my parents, these people who gave me life, who I trusted for everything, weren’t the people I thought they were.”

He looked back at me. His face was soured by fear. “I want you to learn, Anna. I want you learn to not be so scared that you confuse frustration with hate. I don’t want you to hate your family.”

“I don’t hate you, Uncle Mason.”

“No. Not me. Your parents, your grandparents, everybody who doesn’t see what you see. Disagree with them all you want, but know that they will always love you.”

“What are you talking about?”

He swallowed. “Talk is cheap, Anna. It’s not what people say that matters. It’s what they do.” He bolted to his feet and marched. I followed.

To the muslin curtain.

Uncle Mason grabbed a corner and pulled. The curtain fell and revealed a painting of postmodern watercolors, abstract non-patterns that seemed to depict nothing.

“This… isn’t Guernica?” I asked.

“It’s the only piece in this whole gallery that’s an original.”

“And we can go in it?”

“Yes.”

“Who painted it?”

“I did.”

“This is yours?”

He didn’t answer.

“Uncle Mason?

He was drowning, flailing. And he was fighting but not the water. Every line of rescue tossed at him he was grabbing and throwing back. He drew a deep breath and said, “The people who created the prints in this gallery made me paint this. It was part of the price.”

I turned back to the painting, tracing the brush strokes with my pupils, trying to see what kind of tithe this was supposed to be.

Uncle Mason said. “I want you to go in without me.”

“Why?”

He wouldn’t look at me. “Once you’re in, you’ll see.”

I kept looking at him, trying to read him, to feel him. He looked old, and I felt tired. His eyes quivered, and I felt frightened. His jaw was viced, threatening to shatter his teeth.

I took a breath of adamantine resolve and turned back to the abstract. At first it was a series of swirls that overlapped, interlocked, and bled into one another. Different shades of red from a deep crimson to a milky pink. As I circled the painting with my eyes, I noticed lines, sharp delineated bolts of black that darted in and out of the red. At the outer boundaries of the painting they were wisp thin, barely noticeable. I followed them through the whirlpool of red to the center of the picture. The crimson was mottled with black mold. At its heart, small enough to barely draw attention, was an ember of darkness beyond black, a deep puncture that exposed a void weaving through reality. I stared into the absence and found myself enveloped in a chill so bracing I clutched my arms around me. I looked back into the red, almost as if expecting to find warmth. Instead an indefinable horror joined with the cold. I felt like I was choking, and as I jerked for air, I entered the painting.

I found myself standing in an alien netherplace, an enclosed rotunda that had risen from a swamp like a desiccated hand and threatened to curl into a fist. Obelisks stood dripping with putrefied flesh. A penannular pool of ichor and tar hissed and belched flights of obscenity. Steps, pock-marked and eroded by rage, starved to devour the feet that would tread on them. Columns excreted by some long-slain menace in its death throes. Every accent and flourish of the rotunda had been mined from open wounds. The entire edifice was a violation.

Five figures stood before me, their faces hidden by impenetrable shadow. Drawn over their heads were hoods that grew out of their shoulders and chests like necrotic tissue stitched together. They stood otherwise naked, pale sexless humanoid malignancies with blackened veins visible through what served them as skin. Their hands were pressed together in prayer. Each finger was a wriggling tuber loosing noxious secretions from its head.

The figures were gathered around a cauldron that was roiling in an unknown tongue. Above, spread-eagled and suspended by chains at her hands and feet, was a woman. She was beautiful, no older than thirty, and dressed in an intricately woven robe with a plunging neckline. She was crying, begging for her life.

Uncle Mason bled out of the darkness. He walked in slow deliberate steps, weighted down by grim imperative. In his right hand he held what looked like a bronzed paintbrush. The teardrop bristles glittered in the cauldron’s iridescence. He held it like a dagger as he approached the woman. She cried out his name in a hysterical plea.

Uncle Mason drove the paintbrush into her heart.

He watched the anguish drain from her face as her life poured out of her chest, into the cauldron. He watched the blood spiral down the bronzed handle of the sacrificial stylus. The light in his eyes was snuffed out, and in the darkness his resolve abandoned him, leaving him alone with just the agony of consequence. He stood still as stone. As he watched the stream of blood slowly die to a trickle, he retraced every step he’d taken on the road to this moment. A freezing wind was sweeping away his tracks, leaving him lost in a cold waste, his only company the wind’s haunting moan. He held his goal in hand and found it weightless.

I backed away until I was in the gallery once again. I turned and saw Uncle Mason seated on the floor, a condemned man. I backed into the wall.

I whispered, “Was that—?”

“Melissa.”

I slid down until I was seated on the ground across from him. All I could do was cry and look at the man.

He couldn’t look at me. “She didn’t want to have kids. She… didn’t want me to be a father.” He looked up at the painting. “She was right. That is my self-portrait.” He bowed his head before his tears erupted.

I wanted to ask him for the full story, his complete biography that detailed his every decision, the thoughts that had nudged him toward his every crime, even the ones I was afraid to imagine. But I couldn’t bring myself to make the simplest stammering utterance. An angel had cut off his wings and presented them to me. I thought of The Night Café and how Van Gogh had given a prostitute his severed ear, gift-wrapped and all. Was Uncle Mason crazy?

No. He wanted me to learn something.

I watched the man weep as I puzzled through the lesson, starting at the sides and working my way to the center. He’d lied when I first asked what was behind the curtain. And it was a lie to scare me out of ever wanting to peak beneath that veil. He had never wanted me to know who he was. Had been. That wasn’t who he was anymore. Or was it? Wait, why did he keep this gallery at all? Uncle Mason had wanted this gallery to learn to understand people he didn’t agree with. He had committed murder to achieve it, a murder he instantly hated himself for. He found the crimes of the white men who commissioned the paintings, who painted them, who committed the acts glorified in them as disgusting as I did. Because he was one of them. But he showed me his self-portrait. He’d decided that I needed to know who he was. He made that decision in the middle of our argument, after I’d challenged him to accuse me of having no empathy. Then he’d said, “This was a mistake.” He’d brought me to the gallery for a different reason.

And I was seized by a horror I’ve never since experienced again. I understood why he’d brought me down in the first place, and I remembered my mother was still above me, watching the fireworks. I understood that he’d showed me his self-portrait because he’d changed his mind, and I remembered Melissa, dying, shattered by the shock of what the man she had loved was doing.

I looked at Uncle Mason seated across from me. I was revolted by what he had done, but I couldn’t deny the guilt spilling out of him. I felt betrayed, but I had no desire to exact vengeance. I stood and walked over to him. I placed my hand on his shoulder. He never looked up at me. I walked out of the gallery.

I never saw my uncle again. A week later the compound would be completely cleared out and put on the market without a word to any of us. My mother would call him as soon as she found out. He would tell her that he was moving the offices to Toronto and would need to base himself out of there, but he would still take care of anything anyone needed. My mother would say that was typical of him.

I have no memory of walking upstairs, through the house, into the backyard. But I remember looking up once I was there and seeing the fireworks still going off. The clouds had rolled in and swallowed the moon and stars. All the lights on the property had been snuffed off. The only illumination in the oceanic darkness was from Uncle Mason’s fireworks.

I saw my mother standing among some of my other family. It was a random grouping. Her, Uncle Rick, Aunt Theresa, one of my older cousins, and one of my younger. I was only able to see them by the light of the pyrotechnics. As the incendiaries exploded, they painted my family in rainbow fire. Every color wrapped around them and made them glow.

I wedged myself beside my mother. She turned to me, smiled, and pulled me close. I rested my head on her shoulder. There was no discord, no divorce. Mom and I just watched in silence as fiery daubs of color painted the cold above.