Blaze

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?”

He sighed as a man does before saying something he may regret. “At least a year.” He studied my face. “It seems a very long time to you. The way you are now.”