I was making my way east, William said. To Louisiana. Hoping to reunite there with my sister. Suddenly falling ill, encountering the lean-to, I resolved to encamp there for the night.

  But you never did leave that lean-to, said Clyda.

  Never did, said William sadly.

  William was a trapper, said Clyda. One of the best.

  And Clyda was “between gigs,” he said.

  But enough about us, said Clyda.

  (But it would not be.

  I knew their type:

  Tormented, obsessive, grasping, decidedly not elevated. Generally to be avoided.

  And yet here I was again, as in life: held in place by politeness.)

  You did not succeed in viewing the eclipse, said William.

  My viewer thingy ended up over there in the weeds, said Clyda.

  And is there still, said William. Albeit returned to dust.

  You never reached your sister, said Clyda. Your corpse, partly devoured by coyotes, remained rotting in that lean-to, through the long, unseasonably cold winter that followed.

  But enough about us, William said.

  They turned to me with difficulty, doing their best to feign a modicum of interest.

  You, ma’am? said William.

  What’s your story? said Clyda.

  They seemed to be bracing themselves in case I might answer.

  No doubt your end was fascinating? said William.

  My end? said Clyda. Was fascinating. To me. In my final moments, I was hit by a second car. Can you believe it? That’s when I knew I was definitely not making it back. To Adrian’s. Where my friends were.

  Waiting for the chips, said William.

  Adrian’s house? said Clyda. Gone. There was no house there for a while, then there was this different house. Then that one got torn down. And now?

  Forest, said William.

  All forest, said Clyda. Jeez Louise.

  In the final hours of my suffering, said William, two cowpokes came by, saw that I was of the darker hue, and rode on.

  Heartless, said Clyda. Not even a drink of water did they offer.

  It was hard, said William. Hard for me.

  It’s hard for everyone there at the end, said Clyda.

  Hard for you too, ma’am, no doubt? said William.

  Both were trembling with the effort of trying to avoid once again turning the conversation back to themselves.

  To no avail.

  Then night came on, William said. And I thought: I shall never see another sunrise. My sister will forever wonder what became of me.

  I couldn’t believe it, honestly, said Clyda. I actually felt my spine crack. And never did find out who won the game.

  She looked at me hopefully, as if I might know.

  When Clyda first arrived, William said, I had been here nearly one hundred and fifty years. And alone, always alone.

  Alone no more, Clyda said. Am I right?

  Alone no more, said William. Truly. What a happy day that was for me.

  For me? said Clyda. Not the best.

  But now? said William.

  No complaints, said Clyda.

  And yet, said William.

  Sometimes boring, said Clyda.

  At first her story completely bored me, said William.

  Likewise, said Clyda.

  Because it was not my story, said William.

  Same, said Clyda.

  Then, gradually, we learned, said William. We became, with time, nominally more able to endure listening to one another.

  And now we hardly mind it at all, said Clyda.

  Although, always best to be brisk, said William.

  Keep things snappy, said Clyda.

  Brevity much preferred, said William.

  Get through your deal as fast as you can, said Clyda. So as not to bore William.

  So as not to bore Clyda, said William.

  (Good God.

  Were they recruiting me? Auditioning me?)

  The end is hard, William said.

  Hard for everyone, said Clyda.

  Hard for you too, ma’am, no doubt? William said, with a prompting nod.

  Well, no, actually.

  The end had not been hard for me at all.

  * * *

  * * *

  —

  For me, it had just been: sliding into the car, thinking about where to buy the roast (Humbolt’s? O’Malia?), then about autumn (did the cold weather cause the leaves to turn or did something chemical happen inside the trees at the same time every year?), putting the key in the ignition, turning the key, and then—

  No pain, no fear, just a feeling of disinterested interest as I found myself propelled up through the roof, “I” going off in one direction and what was left of “Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine” going off in, well, several others.

  Then, as if flung by an invisible hand, “I” kept going, across town, tracking Tremaine Avenue, cutting across Elman Park, being guided, it felt, to some specific place, and soon I was nearly there, and found myself zipping through the gray picket fence of a unkempt yard, making a beeline for a grim-looking fellow who sat at a metal table nervously smoking, and then I passed directly into him, coming, in this way, to know rather too much about him.

  Over me washed a feeling that no one got me, no one liked me, I could always tell from the first minute I met someone, by that snot-assed look on his or her face, like, Ugh, no no no, get away from me, dirtbag, pronto.

  And that starts to eat at a guy.

  You think I’m shit? Okay, you got it, I’m shit.

  Watch your wallet, watch your back, watch your house, fuckhead.

  Like that.

  People were stupid, you could mess with them so easy. They left their doors open, kept their keys under the mat, loaned you their car, told you around what time the security guard generally dozed off, believed it when you said that your mom recently died, your grandpa had dementia, you yourself had a fast-growing melanoma and used to be in the CIA and still knew some pretty badass hombres over there.

  Felt: Best hop up and get rid of the incriminating mess in the basement (auto manuals, tin snips, a plastic bin with a red label reading Explosives), plus that extra lump of C-4 in the shed which, no worries, I had a plan, which was what those burlap bags tucked under the back steps were all about. (Mastermind!)

  Felt: At peace or something like it for the first time in—well, ever. I’d done it. Had made a plan and seen it through. Unlike my plan to bring a live kangaroo to the U.S. and make it box a bobcat. Or my plan to have a restaurant that served only scrambled eggs.

  I’d set out to blow up that pockmarked little shit of a cop who’d put me away once before and meant to do it again, and now that jagweed was—guess what?—blown up.

  Check that shit off the list.

  * * *

  —

  Suddenly I knew what had happened, and why:

  Ha ha, oh gosh, I realized, I’d been blown up.

  Blown up by (I suddenly knew his name) Paul Bowman, who’d meant to blow Lloyd up but had blown me up instead, because Lloyd and I had switched cars, just for today, so Lloyd could take mine to the shop.

  I tried desperately to ease out of Paul Bowman but found I couldn’t.

  Whoever/whatever had put me in there wished me to stay put.

  Wondering: Had the deed really been done?

  If so, with me not going back to jail and all, I could go ahead and have that family I’d always wanted, one that would admire the shit out of me, as in: Thanks, God, for giving us this dude who’s so frigging responsible because, even though he could still be out there getting all kinds of tail, instead he scores us this tight little rental, with a garage for all his tools and a ping-pong table out back on which he and the son he’d soon have, off his foxy wife, once he met her, would play a nightly game after dinner, although, however, if I, Paul Bowman, a.k.a. “the Bow,” started losing and said it was time for bed? Kid best jump.

  Daddy, the kid might ask. Did you ever kill a man?

  I’d rather not answer that, son. Get out of here. Go clean your room. Or else.

  From that, the kid would know that, yeah, it was sometimes necessary to blow a motherfucker up, if that motherfucker started threatening your family.

  The family you might someday have.

  Wisdom that will serve you well, my son, as you grow into a man, a man always a little scared of your badass dad, as is right and salvatory.

  * * *

  —

  Because I was now Bowman he suddenly did not seem strange to me.

  At all.

  Who else could he have been but exactly who he was?

  He seemed, if I may say it this way, inevitable.

  An inevitable occurrence, upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgment.

  He had left his mother’s womb with a particular predisposed mind and started living, and immediately that predisposed mind had run up against various events, and been altered in exactly the way such a mind, buffeted by those exact events, would be altered, and all the while he, Bowman, trapped inside Bowman, had believed he was making choices, but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.

  His feelings (of rage, of shame, of being worthless, of needing to lash out preemptively at even the slightest threat) were all real and he must suffer them every day, and why? Because he had been born him. But he had not chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. And then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects, including, but not limited to, the desire to blow up Lloyd, whom he perceived (correctly, by the way, in the relative sense) to be his enemy.

  At what precise moment could Paul Bowman have become other-than-Paul-Bowman?

  And how? How was the change, the opting out, the departure from the formed-in-the-womb, the choosing to be other than what one was, supposed to occur, precisely?

  He had been done badly, by fate, from the beginning, having been born with certain disadvantages (limited intelligence, crude features, an almost nonexistent sense of curiosity), and then, as he grew, had acquired a host of concomitant disadvantages, such as: a strange, aggressive manner of speaking, a predisposition to be offended, regrettable taste in clothing, and a tendency to slip too easily into mindless reactive violence.

  But what, of all of the above, could have been changed by him?

  That is: even his ability to alter/overturn such negative predispositions as existed in him had also been, I saw, predetermined (baked in, as it were). Yes: even that—his ability to improve himself by willing himself to do so—was inherent, fixed, nonnegotiable, had been granted to/forced upon him at birth.

  Likewise his ability to alter his ability to alter his abilities.

  Likewise his ability to alter his ability to alter his ability to alter his abilities.

  And so on, in perpetual series.

  From there inside him, I regarded Bowman, his left leg shaking madly beneath the table.

  He was so agitated, so ashamed, so afraid of being caught and also (good Lord) would soon learn that he’d blown up the wrong person, a mistake he would then (stupid! stupid!) have to add to the long list of mistakes he’d made, dating back to his earliest days, like, for example, the time he’d drunk a whole little pot of glue in kindergarten because it had looked so much like a thing of real milk.

  Imagine a fellow in manacles: hungry, thirsty, flea-bitten, tormented by his mind in hideous ways. And you (unmanacled, free, comfortable, sane) walk past.

  You cannot free him.

  But you might comfort him.

  I felt a new and powerful truth being beamed directly into me, by a vast, beneficent God, in the form of this unyielding directive:

  Comfort.

  Comfort, for all else is futility.

  And I did so: I comforted Bowman as best I could.

  I was not very good at comforting back then.

  But am extremely good at it now.

  Having comforted three hundred and forty-three charges.

  To date.

  Including my present charge.

  Speaking of which.

  Good God, what was I doing?

  What was I doing here, on this filthy couch, so far from where I was needed?

  My charge was going through a terrible crisis, the worst of his life. Yes, he was rude, abrupt, condescending, insulting.

  But a person could hardly be expected to be his best self under such trying conditions.

  I exploded up, Clyda and William seemingly oblivious to my departure.

  I got hit and killed just there, Clyda called out to no one in particular.

  It was “game day,” William mumbled. Clyda here was making a “chip run.” She got distracted, and—

  It was a eclipse, Clyda said sadly. I had one of those “viewer thingies.”

  I raced back toward the home of my charge, along the avenue, above the woods, regretting the time I’d wasted.

  God forbid he’d died in my absence.

  Here was his neighborhood, a sprawl of mansions in yards big as parks.

  Here was his home, the largest one of all.

  * * *

  —

  I burst in through the bedroom wall, glided down into the orb of his thoughts.

  Where’d you go? he said.

  Away, I said. To collect myself.

  Two fingers on his exposed hand were inscribing an inch-long, stroking arc across the comforter.

  Earlier I may have spoken unkindly to you, he said. Called you certain unkind names.

  Satan, I said.

  Yes, he said.

  Bitch, I said.

  Yes, he said.

  Stupid bitch, I said.

  I’m not myself, he said.

  You’re dying, I said, more bluntly than I might normally have done.

  My charge fell silent. His thoughts grew fearful.

  It was time.

  Time for him to know me.

  Attend, I said, commandingly.

  My tone snapped him to attention.

  You stand accused, I said. Of something. Something involving the weather. You find yourself reluctant to engage with these accusations, lest they invalidate all that you have accomplished.

  He gave a small grunt of surprise.

  Yet these accusations torment you, I said. They loom large as your time approaches. You fear that you may, at the hour of your death, be dominated by them, sent into a panic, and perish in a state of agitation.

  No, he said.

  Yes, I said.

  A faux–Old West clock on the mantel let out a conspicuous tick, the first it had made all night.

  He was off-balance, stung, receptive.

  I could now offer him the most precious gift of all.

  But be not afraid, I said. For you are inevitable. An inevitable occurrence.

  Another tick from the clock.

  Who else could you have been but exactly who you are? I said. Did you, in the womb, construct yourself? All your life you believed yourself to be making choices, but what looked like choices were so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon you that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.

  The clock let out two more ticks, then fell silent.

  Not following, he said.

  What makes the bars of that jail? I said. Your pride in the glories you have accomplished. But if your worth depends on your glories, it must also depend on your sins, which, in your case, are grievous. Are they not? However: forswear the glory, forswear the culpability. The self is the culprit. With the self disavowed, what blame or glory can possibly affix to it?

  Not following at all, he said.

  Let these ideas enter your heart, I said. And thereby be moved toward elevation.

  Just then a smell came into the room.

  Good smell, mostly. To him. Familiar, anyway: prairie grass at dawn, a little cow shit, strangely sweet, a bonfire burning somewhere, but not for fun. It was a work fire and someone’d dropped in a hunk of molded plastic, maybe. Like that. A tumbleweed blew through and a black calf was nibbling at a cabbage garden near the closet door.

  What’s this, my charge said.

  Not sure, I said.

  * * *

  —

  The bonfire smoke cleared and the calf was startled away by a thrown stone. A human figure suddenly stood at the foot of the bed.

  Father, said my charge, amazed.

  What are you, his father said, looking around at the spacious, high-ceilinged room. Big dang deal?

  My charge nodded shyly.

  Best get over it, his father said. Because look where you’re at.

  True, thought my charge.

  He had not seen this coming, this difficult end.

  I had a few of ’em, Father said.

  What? said my charge.

  Sorrowful regrets, said Father. One was, I was too harsh. With you. Was I?

  Maybe, he said.

  All right, then, Father said. So I was. What to do? You see where I’m headed with this.

  No, sir, said my charge.

  It was good to see the old man again. In that familiar country slouch. He was missing the index finger of his left hand from the famous threshing accident and always kept that hand in his front jeans pocket. Sometimes he’d take something out of that pocket (a penny, a lint wad, the last bit of a pencil) and squint at it as if it were more deserving of his attention than whatever it was you were saying. If he ever caught you staring at the stub he’d be brusque with you rest of the day.