Blaze

her pay.”

Not long after I relocated to the place on Lake Phalen, the girls came to see me — the young women. They brought a picnic hamper and we sat on the piney-smelling lakeporch and looked out at the water and nibbled at the sandwiches. It was past Labor Day by then, most of the floating toys put away for another year. There was also a bottle of wine in the hamper, but I only drank a little. On top of the pain medication, alcohol hit me hard; a single glass could turn me into a slurring drunk. The girls — the young women — finished the rest between them, and it loosened them up. Melissa, back from France for the second time since my unfortunate argument with the crane and not happy about it, asked me if all adults in their fifties had these unpleasant regressive interludes, did she have that to look forward to. Ilse, the younger, began to cry, leaned against me, and asked why it couldn’t be like it was, why couldn’t we — meaning her mother and me — be like we were.

Lissa’s temper and Ilse’s tears weren’t exactly pleasant, but at least they were honest, and I recognized both reactions from all the years the girls had spent growing up in the house where I lived with them; those responses were as familiar to me as the mole on Ilse’s chin or the faint vertical frown-line, which in time would deepen into a groove like her mother’s, between Lissa’s eyes.

Lissa wanted to know what I was going to do. I told her I didn’t know, and in a way that was true. I’d come a long distance toward deciding to end my own life, but I knew that if I did it, it must absolutely look like an accident. I would not leave these two, just starting out in their lives with nothing but fresh tickets on their belts, carrying the residual guilt of their father’s suicide. Nor would I leave a load of guilt behind for the woman with whom I had once shared a milkshake in bed, both of us naked and laughing and listening to the Plastic Ono Band on the stereo.

After they’d had a chance to vent — after a full and complete exchange of feelings, in Kamen-speak — things calmed down, and my memory is that we actually had a pleasant afternoon, looking at old photo albums Ilse found in a drawer and reminiscing about the past. I think we even laughed a time or two, but not all memories of my other life are to be trusted. Kamen says when it comes to the past, we all stack the deck.

Maybe si, maybe no.

Speaking of Kamen, he was my next visitor at Casa Phalen. Three days later, this would have been. Or maybe six. Like many other aspects of my memory during those post-accident months, my time-sense was pretty much hors de fucky. I didn’t invite him; I had my rehabilitation dominatrix to thank for that.

Although surely no more than forty, Xander Kamen walked like a much older man and wheezed even when he sat, peering at the world through thick glasses and over an enormous pear of a belly. He was very tall and very Afro-American, with features carved so large they seemed unreal. Those great staring eyeballs, that ship’s figurehead of a nose, and those totemic lips were awe-inspiring. Kamen looked like a minor god in a suit from Men’s Wearhouse. He also looked like a prime candidate for a fatal heart attack or stroke before his fiftieth birthday.

He refused my offer of coffee or a Coke, said he couldn’t stay, then put his briefcase aside on the couch as if to contradict that. He sat sunk full fathom five beside the couch’s armrest (and going deeper all the time — I feared for the thing’s springs), looking at me and wheezing benignly.

“What brings you out this way?” I asked him.

“Oh, Kathi tells me you’re planning to off yourself,” he said. It was the tone he might have used to say Kathi tells me you’re having a lawn party and there are fresh Krispy Kremes on offer. “Any truth to that?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Once, when I was ten and growing up in Eau Claire, I took a comic book from a drugstore spin-around, put it down the front of my jeans, then dropped my tee-shirt over it. As I was strolling out the door, feeling clever, a clerk grabbed me by the arm. She lifted my shirt with her other hand and exposed my ill-gotten treasure. “How did that get there?” she asked me. Not in the forty years since had I been so completely stuck for an answer to a simple question.

Finally — long after such a response could have any weight — I said, “That’s ridiculous. I don’t know where she could have gotten such an idea.”

“No?”

“No. Sure you don’t want a Coke?”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

I got up and got a Coke from the kitchen fridge. I tucked the bottle firmly between my stump and my chest- wall — possible but painful, I don’t know what you may have seen in the movies, but broken ribs hurt for a long time — and spun off the cap with my left hand. I’m a southpaw. Caught a break there, muchacho, as Kamen says.

“I’m surprised you’d take her seriously in any case,” I said as I came back in. “Kathi’s a hell of a physical therapist, but a headshrinker she’s not.” I paused before sitting down. “Neither are you, actually. In the technical sense.”

Kamen cupped one hand behind an ear that looked roughly the size of a desk drawer. “Do I hear — a ratcheting noise? I believe I do!”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s the charmingly medieval sound a person’s defenses make when they go up.” He tried an ironic wink, but the size of the man’s face made irony impossible; he could only manage burlesque. Still, I took the point. “As for Kathi Green, you’re right, what does she know? All she does is work with paraplegics, quadriplegics, accident- related amps like you, and people recovering from traumatic head injuries — again, like you. For fifteen years Kathi Green’s done this work, she’s had the opportunity to watch a thousand maimed patients reflect on how not even a single second of time can ever be called back, so how could she possibly recognize the signs of pre-suicidal depression?”

I sat down in the lumpy easy chair across from the couch, listing to the left as I did it to favor my bad hip, and stared at him sullenly. Here was trouble. No matter how carefully I crafted my suicide, here was trouble. And Kathi Green was more.

He leaned forward — but, given his girth, a few inches was all he could manage. “You have to wait,” he said.

I gaped at him. It was the last thing I had expected.

He nodded. “You’re surprised. Yes. But I’m not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and on the subject of suicide my mind is quite open. Yet I’m a believer in responsibilities, and I tell you this: if you kill yourself now — or even six months from now — your wife and daughters will know. No matter how cleverly you do it, they’ll know.”

“I don’t—”

“And the company that insures your life — for a very large sum, I have no doubt — they’ll know, too. They may not be able to prove it — but they will try very, very hard. The rumors they start will hurt your children, no matter how well-armored against such things you may think they are.”

Melissa was well-armored. Ilse, however, was a different story.

“And in the end, they may prove it.” He shrugged his enormous shoulders. “How much of a death-duty that would mean I wouldn’t venture to guess, but I know it might erase a great deal of your life’s treasure.”

I wasn’t even thinking about the money. I was thinking about a team of insurance investigators sniffing around whatever I set up, trying to overturn it. And all at once I began to laugh.

Kamen sat with his huge dark hands on his doorstop knees, looking at me with his little I’ve- seen-everything smile. Except on his face nothing was little. He let my laughter run its course and when it had, he asked me what was so funny.

“You’re telling me I’m too rich to kill myself,” I said.

“I’m telling you to give it time. I have a very strong intuition in your case — the same sort of intuition that caused me to give you the doll you named — what did you name her?”

For a second I couldn’t remember. Then I thought, It was RED!, and told him what I had named my fluffy blond anger-doll.

He nodded. “Yes. The same sort of intuition that caused me to give you Reba. My intuition is that in your case, time may soothe you. Time and memory.”

I didn’t tell him I remembered everything I wanted to. He knew my position on that. “How much time are we talking about, Kamen?”