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.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.