A Dirty Job

1 BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH—HE KINDLY STOPPED FOR ME—

Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below. Blessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him—him; his wife, Rachel; and now, newborn Sophie. But despite his attention, his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis Memorial, Death slipped in.

“She’s not breathing,” Charlie said.

“She’s breathing fine,” Rachel said, patting the baby’s back. “Do you want to hold her?”

Charlie had held baby Sophie for a few seconds earlier in the day, and had handed her quickly to a nurse insisting that someone more qualified than he do some finger and toe counting. He’d done it twice and kept coming up with twenty-one.

“They act like that’s all there is to it. Like if the kid has the minimum ten fingers and ten toes it’s all going to be fine. What if there are extras? Huh? Extra-credit fingers? What if the kid has a tail?” (Charlie was sure he’d spotted a tail in the six-month sonogram. Umbilical indeed! He’d kept a hard copy.)

“She doesn’t have a tail, Mr. Asher,” the nurse explained. “And it’s ten and ten, we’ve all checked. Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.”

“I’ll still love her, even with her extra finger.”

“She’s perfectly normal.”

“Or toe.”

“We really do know what we’re doing, Mr. Asher. She’s a beautiful, healthy baby girl.”

“Or a tail.”

The nurse sighed. She was short, wide, and had a tattoo of a snake up her right calf that showed through her white nurse stockings. She spent four hours of every workday massaging preemie babies, her hands threaded through ports in a Lucite incubator, like she was handling a radioactive spark in there. She talked to them, coaxed them, told them how special they were, and felt their hearts fluttering in chests no bigger than a balled-up pair of sweat socks. She cried over every one, and believed that her tears and touch poured a bit of her own life into the tiny bodies, which was just fine with her. She could spare it. She had been a neonatal nurse for twenty years and had never so much as raised her voice to a new father.

“There’s no goddamn tail, you doofus! Look!” She pulled down the blanket and aimed baby Sophie’s bottom at him like she might unleash a fusillade of weapons-grade poopage such as the guileless Beta Male had never seen.

Charlie jumped back—a lean and nimble thirty, he was—then, once he realized that the baby wasn’t loaded, he straightened the lapels on his tweed jacket in a gesture of righteous indignation. “You could have removed her tail in the delivery room and we’d never know.” He didn’t know. He’d been asked to leave the delivery room, first by the ob-gyn and finally by Rachel. (“Him or me,” Rachel said. “One of us has to go.”)

In Rachel’s room, Charlie said: “If they removed her tail, I want it. She’ll want it when she gets older.”

“Sophie, your Papa isn’t really insane. He just hasn’t slept for a couple of days.”

“She’s looking at me,” Charlie said. “She’s looking at me like I blew her college money at the track and now she’s going to have to turn tricks to get her MBA.”

Rachel took his hand. “Honey, I don’t think her eyes can even focus this early, and besides, she’s a little young to start worrying about her turning tricks to get her MFA.”

“MBA,” Charlie corrected. “They start very young these days. By the time I figure out how to get to the track, she could be old enough. God, your parents are going to hate me.”

“And that would be different how?”

“New reasons, that’s how. Now I’ve made their granddaughter a shiksa.”

“She’s not a shiksa, Charlie. We’ve been through this. She’s my daughter, so she’s as Jewish as I am.”

Charlie went down on one knee next to the bed and took one of Sophie’s tiny hands between his fingers. “Daddy’s sorry he made you a shiksa.” He put his head down, buried his face in the crook where the baby met Rachel’s side. Rachel traced his hairline with her fingernail, describing a tight U-turn around his narrow forehead.

“You need to go home and get some sleep.”

Charlie mumbled something into the covers. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes. “She feels warm.”

“She is warm. She’s supposed to be. It’s a mammal thing. Goes with the breast-feeding. Why are you crying?”

“You guys are so beautiful.” He began arranging Rachel’s dark hair across the pillow, brought a long lock down over Sophie’s head, and started styling it into a baby hairpiece.

“It will be okay if she can’t grow hair. There was that angry Irish singer who didn’t have any hair and she was attractive. If we had her tail we could transplant plugs from that.”

“Charlie! Go home!”

“Your parents will blame me. Their bald shiksa granddaughter turning tricks and getting a business degree—it will be all my fault.”

Rachel grabbed the buzzer from the blanket and held it up like it was wired to a bomb. “Charlie, if you don’t go home and get some sleep right now, I swear I’ll buzz the nurse and have her throw you out.”

She sounded stern, but she was smiling. Charlie liked looking at her smile, always had; it felt like approval and permission at the same time. Permission to be Charlie Asher.

“Okay, I’ll go.” He reached to feel her forehead. “Do you have a fever? You look tired.”

“I just gave birth, you squirrel!”

“I’m just concerned about you.” He was not a squirrel. She was blaming him for Sophie’s tail, that’s why she’d said squirrel, and not doofus like everyone else.

“Sweetie, go. Now. So I can get some rest.”

Charlie fluffed her pillows, checked her water pitcher, tucked in the blankets, kissed her forehead, kissed the baby’s head, fluffed the baby, then started to rearrange the flowers that his mother had sent, moving the big stargazer lily in the front, accenting it with a spray of baby’s breath—

“Charlie!”

“I’m going. Jeez.” He checked the room, one last time, then backed toward the door.

“Can I bring you anything from home?”

“I’ll be fine. The ready kit you packed covered everything, I think. In fact, I may not even need the fire extinguisher.”

“Better to have it and not need it, than to need it—”

“Go! I’ll get some rest, the doctor will check Sophie out, and we’ll take her home in the morning.”

“That seems soon.”

“It’s standard.”

“Should I bring more propane for the camp stove?”

“We’ll try to make it last.”

“But—”

Rachel held up the buzzer, as if her demands were not met, the consequences could be dire. “Love you,” she said.

“Love you, too,” Charlie said. “Both of you.”

“Bye, Daddy.” Rachel puppeted Sophie’s little hand in a wave.

Charlie felt a lump rising in his throat. No one had ever called him Daddy before, not even a puppet. (He had once asked Rachel, “Who’s your daddy?” during sex, to which she had replied, “Saul Goldstein,” thus rendering him impotent for a week and raising all kinds of issues that he didn’t really like to think about.)

He backed out of the room, palming the door shut as he went, then headed down the hall and past the desk where the neonatal nurse with the snake tattoo gave him a sideways smile as he went by.

Charlie drove a six-year-old minivan that he’d inherited from his father, along with the thrift store and the building that housed it. The minivan always smelled faintly of dust, mothballs, and body odor, despite a forest of smell-good Christmas trees that Charlie had hung from every hook, knob, and protrusion. He opened the car door and the odor of the unwanted—the wares of the thrift-store owner—washed over him.

Before he even had the key in the ignition, he noticed the Sarah McLachlan CD lying on the passenger seat. Well, Rachel was going to miss that. It was her favorite CD and there she was, recovering without it, and he could not have that. Charlie grabbed the CD, locked the van, and headed back up to Rachel’s room.

To his relief, the nurse had stepped away from the desk so he didn’t have to endure her frosty stare of accusation, or what he guessed would be her frosty stare of accusation. He’d mentally prepared a short speech about how being a good husband and father included anticipating the wants and needs of his wife and that included bringing her music—well, he could use the speech on the way out if she gave him the frosty stare.

He opened the door to Rachel’s room slowly so as not to startle her—anticipating her warm smile of disapproval, but instead she appeared to be asleep and there was a very tall black man dressed in mint green standing next to her bed.

“What are you doing here?”

The man in mint green turned, startled. “You can see me?” He gestured to his chocolate-brown tie, and Charlie was reminded, just for a second, of those thin mints they put on the pillow in nicer hotels.

“Of course I can see you. What are you doing here?”

Charlie moved to Rachel’s bedside, putting himself between the stranger and his family. Baby Sophie seemed fascinated by the tall black man.

“This is not good,” said Mint Green.

“You’re in the wrong room,” Charlie said. “You get out of here.” Charlie reached behind and patted Rachel’s hand.

“This is really, really not good.”

“Sir, my wife is trying to sleep and you’re in the wrong room. Now please go before—”

“She’s not sleeping,” said Mint Green. His voice was soft, and a little Southern. “I’m sorry.”

Charlie turned to look down at Rachel, expecting to see her smile, hear her tell him to calm down, but her eyes were closed and her head had lolled off the pillow.

“Honey?” Charlie dropped the CD he was carrying and shook her gently. “Honey?”

Baby Sophie began to cry. Charlie felt Rachel’s forehead, took her by the shoulders, and shook her. “Honey, wake up. Rachel.” He put his ear to her heart and heard nothing. “Nurse!”

Charlie scrambled across the bed to grab the buzzer that had slipped from Rachel’s hand and lay on the blanket. “Nurse!” He pounded the button and turned to look at the man in mint green. “What happened…”

He was gone.

Charlie ran into the hall, but no one was out there. “Nurse!”

Twenty seconds later the nurse with the snake tattoo arrived, followed in another thirty seconds by a resuscitation team with a crash cart.

There was nothing they could do.

2 A FINE EDGE

There’s a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality—there’s mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

So Charlie was barely even aware of his own shrieks in Rachel’s hospital room, of being sedated, of the filmy electric hysteria that netted everything he did for that first day. After that, it was a memory out of a sleepwalk, scenes filmed from a zombie’s eye socket, as he ambled undead through explanations, accusations, preparations, and ceremony.

“It’s called a cerebral thromboembolism,” the doctor had said. “A blood clot forms in the legs or pelvis during labor, then moves to the brain, cutting off the blood supply. It’s very rare, but it happens. There was nothing we could do. Even if the crash team had been able to revive her, she’d have had massive brain damage. There was no pain. She probably just felt sleepy and passed.”

Charlie whispered to keep from screaming, “The man in mint green! He did something to her. He injected her with something. He was there and he knew that she was dying. I saw him when I brought her CD back.”

They showed him the security tapes—the nurse, the doctor, the hospital’s administrators and lawyers—they all watched the black-and-white images of him leaving Rachel’s room, of the empty hallway, of his returning to her room. No tall black man dressed in mint green. They didn’t even find the CD.

Sleep deprivation, they said. Hallucination brought on by exhaustion. Trauma. They gave him drugs to sleep, drugs for anxiety, drugs for depression, and they sent him home with his baby daughter.

Charlie’s older sister, Jane, held baby Sophie as they spoke over Rachel and buried her on the second day. He didn’t remember picking out a casket or making arrangements. It was more of the somnambulant dream: his in-laws moving to and fro in black, like tottering specters, spouting the inadequate clichés of condolence: We’re so sorry. She was so young. What a tragedy. If there’s anything we can do…

Rachel’s father and mother held him, their heads pressed together in the apex of a tripod. The slate floor in the funeral-home foyer spotted with their tears. Every time Charlie felt the shoulders of the older man heave with a sob, he felt his own heart break again. Saul took Charlie’s face in his hands and said, “You can’t imagine, because I can’t imagine.” But Charlie could imagine, because he was a Beta Male, and imagination was his curse; and he could imagine because he had lost Rachel and now he had a daughter, that tiny stranger sleeping in his sister’s arms. He could imagine the man in mint green taking her.

Charlie looked at the tear-spotted floor and said, “That’s why most funeral homes are carpeted. Someone could slip.”

“Poor boy,” said Rachel’s mother. “We’ll sit shivah with you, of course.”

Charlie made his way across the room to his sister, Jane, who wore a man’s double-breasted suit in charcoal pinstripe gabardine, that along with her severe eighties pop-star hairstyle and the infant in the pink blanket that she held, made her appear not so much androgynous as confused. Charlie thought the suit actually looked better on her than it did on him, but she should have asked him for permission to wear it nonetheless.

“I can’t do this,” he said. He let himself fall forward until the receded peninsula of dark hair touched her gelled Flock of Seagulls platinum flip. It seemed like the best posture for sharing grief, this forehead lean, and it reminded him of standing drunkenly at a urinal and falling forward until his head hit the wall. Despair.

“You’re doing fine,” Jane said. “Nobody’s good at this.”

“What the fuck’s a shivah?”

“I think it’s that Hindu god with all the arms.”

“That can’t be right. The Goldsteins are going to sit on it with me.”

“Didn’t Rachel teach you anything about being Jewish?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I thought we had time.”

Jane adjusted baby Sophie into a half-back, one-armed carry and put her free hand on the back of Charlie’s neck. “You’ll be okay, kid.”

Seven,” said Mrs. Goldstein. “Shivah means ‘seven.’ We used to sit for seven days, grieving for the dead, praying. That’s Orthodox, now most people just sit for three.”

They sat shivah in Charlie and Rachel’s apartment that overlooked the cable-car line at the corner of Mason and Vallejo Streets. The building was a four-story brick Edwardian (architecturally, not quite the grand courtesan couture of the Victorians, but enough tarty trim and trash to toss off a sailor down a side street) built after the earthquake and fire of 1906 had leveled the whole area of what was now North Beach, Russian Hill, and Chinatown. Charlie and Jane had inherited the building, along with the thrift shop that occupied the ground floor, when their father died four years before. Charlie got the business, the large, double apartment they’d grown up in, and the upkeep on the old building, while Jane got half the rental income and one of the apartments on the top floor with a Bay Bridge view.

At the instruction of Mrs. Goldstein, all the mirrors in the house were draped with black fabric and a large candle was placed on the coffee table in the center of the living room. They were supposed to sit on low benches or cushions, neither of which Charlie had in the house, so, for the first time since Rachel’s death, he went downstairs into the thrift shop looking for something they could use. The back stairs descended from a pantry behind the kitchen into the stockroom, where Charlie kept his office among boxes of merchandise waiting to be sorted, priced, and placed in the store.

The shop was dark except for the light that filtered in the front window from the streetlights out on Mason Street. Charlie stood there at the foot of the stairs, his hand on the light switch, just staring. Amid the shelves of knickknacks and books, the piles of old radios, the racks of clothes, all of them dark, just lumpy shapes in the dark, he could see objects glowing a dull red, nearly pulsing, like beating hearts. A sweater in the racks, a porcelain figure of a frog in a curio case, out by the front window an old Coca-Cola tray, a pair of shoes—all glowing red.

Charlie flipped the switch, fluorescent tubes fired to life across the ceiling, flickering at first, and the shop lit up. The red glow disappeared. “Okaaaaaaay,” he said to himself, calmly, like everything was just fine now. He flipped off the lights. Glowing red stuff. On the counter, close to where he stood, there was a brass business-card holder cast in the shape of a whooping crane, glowing dull red. He took a second to study it, just to make sure there wasn’t some red light source from outside refracting around the room and making him uneasy for no reason. He stepped into the dark shop, took a closer look, got an angle on the brass cranes. Nope, the brass was definitely pulsing red. He turned and ran back up the steps as fast as he could.

He nearly ran over Jane, who stood in the kitchen, rocking Sophie gently in her arms, talking baby talk under her breath.

“What?” Jane said. “I know you have some big cushions down in the shop somewhere.”

“I can’t,” Charlie said. “I’m on drugs.” He backed against the refrigerator, like he was holding it hostage.

“I’ll go get them. Here, hold the baby.”

“I can’t, I’m on drugs. I’m hallucinating.”

Jane cradled the baby in the crook of her right arm and put a free arm around her younger brother. “Charlie, you are on antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, not acid. Look around this apartment, there’s not a person here that’s not on something.” Charlie looked through the kitchen pass-through: women in black, most of them middle-aged or older, shaking their heads, men looking stoic, standing around the perimeter of the living room, each holding a stout tumbler of liquor and staring into space.

“See, they’re all fucked up.”

“What about Mom?” Charlie nodded to their mother, who stood out among the other gray-haired women in black because she was draped in silver Navaho jewelry and was so darkly tanned that she appeared to be melting into her old-fashioned when she took a sip.

“Especially Mom,” Jane said. “I’ll go look for something to sit shivah on. I don’t know why you can’t just use the couches. Now take your daughter.”

“I can’t. I can’t be trusted with her.”

“Take her, bitch!” Jane barked in Charlie’s ear—sort of a whisper bark. It had long ago been determined who was the Alpha Male between them and it was not Charlie. She handed off the baby and cut to the stairs.

“Jane,” Charlie called after her. “Look around before you turn on the lights. See if you see anything weird, okay?”

“Right. Weird.”

She left him standing there in the kitchen, studying his daughter, thinking that her head might be a little oblong, but despite that, she looked a little like Rachel. “Your mommy loved Aunt Jane,” he said. “They used to gang up on me in Risk—and Monopoly—and arguments—and cooking.” He slid down the fridge door, sat splayed-legged on the floor, and buried his face in Sophie’s blanket.

In the dark, Jane barked her shin on a wooden box full of old telephones. “Well, this is just stupid,” she said to herself, and flipped on the lights. Nothing weird. Then, because Charlie was many things, but one of them was not crazy, she turned off the lights again, just to be sure that she hadn’t missed something. “Right. Weird.”

There was nothing weird about the store except that she was standing there in the dark rubbing her shin. But then, right before she turned on the light again, she saw someone peering in the front window, making a cup around his eyes to see through the reflection of the streetlights. A homeless guy or drunken tourist, she thought. She moved through the dark shop, between columns of comic books stacked on the floor, to a spot behind a rack of jackets where she could get a clear view of the window, which was filled with cheap cameras, vases, belt buckles, and all manner of objects that Charlie had judged worthy of interest, but obviously not worthy of a smash-and-grab.

The guy looked tall, and not homeless, nicely dressed, but all in a single light color, she thought it might be yellow, but it was hard to tell under the streetlights. Could be light green.

“We’re closed,” Jane said, loud enough to be heard through the glass.

The man outside peered around the shop, but couldn’t spot her. He stepped back from the window and she could see that he was, indeed, tall. Very tall. The streetlight caught the line of his cheek as he turned. He was also very thin and very black.

“I was looking for the owner,” the tall man said. “I have something I need to show him.”

“There’s been a death in the family,” Jane said. “We’ll be closed for the week. Can you come back in a week?”

The tall man nodded, looking up and down the street as he did. He rocked on one foot like he was about to bolt, but kept stopping himself, like a sprinter straining against the starting blocks. Jane didn’t move. There were always people out on the street, and it wasn’t even late yet, but this guy was too anxious for the situation. “Look, if you need to get something appraised—”

“No,” he cut her off. “No. Just tell him she’s, no—tell him to look for a package in the mail. I’m not sure when.”

Jane smiled to herself. This guy had something—a brooch, a coin, a book—something that he thought was worth some money, maybe something he’d found in his grandmother’s closet. She’d seen it a dozen times. They acted like they’ve found the lost city of Eldorado—they’d come in with it tucked in their coats, or wrapped in a thousand layers of tissue paper and tape. (The more tape, generally, the more worthless the item would turn out to be—there was an equation there somewhere.) Nine times out of ten it was crap. She’d watched her father try to finesse their ego and gently lower the owners into disappointment, convince them that the sentimental value made it priceless, and that he, a lowly secondhand-store owner, couldn’t presume to put a value on it. Charlie, on the other hand, would just tell them that he didn’t know about brooches, or coins, or whatever they had and let someone else bear the bad news.

“Okay, I’ll tell him,” Jane said from her cover behind the coats.

With that, the tall man was away, taking great praying-mantis strides up the street and out of view. Jane shrugged, went back and turned on the lights, then proceeded to search for cushions among the piles.

It was a big store, taking up nearly the whole bottom floor of the building, and not particularly well organized, as each system that Charlie adopted seemed to collapse after a few weeks under its own weight, and the result was not so much a patchwork of organizational systems, but a garden of mismatched piles. Lily, the maroon-haired Goth girl who worked for Charlie three afternoons a week, said that the fact that they ever found anything at all was proof of the chaos theory at work, then she would walk away muttering and go out in the alley to smoke clove cigarettes and stare into the Abyss. (Although Charlie noted that the Abyss looked an awful lot like a Dumpster.)

It took Jane ten minutes to navigate the aisles and find three cushions that looked wide enough and thick enough that they might work for sitting shivah, and when she returned to Charlie’s apartment she found her brother curled into the fetal position around baby Sophie, asleep on the kitchen floor. The other mourners had completely forgotten about him.

“Hey, doofus.” She nudged his shoulder with her toe and he rolled onto his back, the baby still in his arms. “These okay?”

“Did you see anything glowing?”

Jane dropped the stack of cushions on the floor. “What?”

“Glowing red. Did you see things in the shop glowing, like pulsating red?”

“No. Did you?”

“Kind of.”

“Give ’em up.”

“What?”

“The drugs. Hand them over. They’re obviously much better than you led me to believe.”

“But you said they were just antianxiety.”

“Give up the drugs. I’ll watch the kid while you shivah.”

“You can’t watch my daughter if you’re on drugs.”

“Fine. Surrender the crumb snatcher and go sit.”

Charlie handed the baby up to Jane. “You have to keep Mom out of the way, too.”

“Oh no, not without drugs.”

“They’re in the medicine cabinet in the master bath. Bottom shelf.”

He was sitting on the floor now, rubbing his forehead as if to stretch the skin out over his pain. She kneed him in the shoulder.

“Hey, kid, I’m sorry, you know that, right? Goes without saying, right?”

“Yeah.” A weak smile.

She held the baby up by her face, then looked down in adoration, Mother of Jesus style. “What do you think? I should get one of these, huh?”

“You can borrow mine whenever you need to.”

“Nah, I should get my own. I already feel bad about borrowing your wife.”

“Jane!”

“Kidding! Jeez. You’re such a wuss sometimes. Go sit shivah. Go. Go. Go.”

Charlie gathered the cushions and went to the living room to grieve with his in-laws, nervous because the only prayer he knew was “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” and he wasn’t sure that was going to cut it for three full days.

Jane forgot to mention the tall guy from the shop.

3 BENEATH THE NUMBER FORTY-ONE BUS

It was two weeks before Charlie left the apartment and walked down to the auto-teller on Columbus Avenue where he first killed a guy. His weapon of choice was the number forty-one bus, on its way from the Trans Bay station, by the Bay Bridge, to the Presidio, by the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’re going to get hit by a bus in San Francisco, you want to go with the forty-one, because you can pretty much figure on there being a nice bridge view.

Charlie hadn’t really counted on killing a guy that morning. He had hoped to get some twenties for the register at the thrift store, check his balance, and maybe pick up some yellow mustard at the deli. (Charlie was not a brown mustard kind of guy. Brown mustard was the condiment equivalent of skydiving—it was okay for race-car drivers and serial killers, but for Charlie, a fine line of French’s yellow was all the spice that life required.) After the funeral, friends and relatives had left a mountain of cold cuts in Charlie’s fridge, which was all he’d eaten for the past two weeks, but now he was down to ham, dark rye, and premixed Enfamil formula, none of which was tolerable without yellow mustard. He’d secured the yellow squeeze bottle and felt safer now with it in his jacket pocket, but when the bus hit the guy, mustard completely slipped Charlie’s mind.

It was a warm day in October, the light had gone autumn soft over the city, the summer fog had ceased its relentless crawl out of the Bay each morning, and there was just enough breeze that the few sailboats that dotted the Bay looked like they might have been posing for an Impressionist painter. In the split second that Charlie’s victim realized that he was being run over, he might not have been happy about the event, but he couldn’t have picked a nicer day for it.

The guy’s name was William Creek. He was thirty-two and worked as a market analyst in the financial district, where he had been headed that morning when he decided to stop at the auto-teller. He was wearing a light wool suit and running shoes, his work shoes were tucked into a leather satchel under his arm. The handle of a compact umbrella protruded from the side pocket of the satchel, and it was this that caught Charlie’s attention, for while the handle of the umbrella appeared to be made of faux walnut burl, it was glowing a dull red as if it had been heated in a forge.

Charlie stood in the ATM line trying not to notice, trying to appear uninterested, but he couldn’t help but stare. It was glowing, for fuck’s sake, didn’t anyone see it?

William Creek glanced over his shoulder as he slid his card into the machine, saw Charlie looking at him, then tried to will his suit coat to expand into great manta-ray wings to block Charlie’s view as he keyed in his PIN number. Creek snatched his card and the expectorated cash from the machine, turned, and headed away quickly toward the corner.

Charlie couldn’t stand it any longer. The umbrella handle had begun to pulsate red, like a beating heart. As Creek reached the curb, Charlie said, “Excuse me. Excuse me, sir!”

When Creek turned, Charlie said, “Your umbrella—”

At that point, the number forty-one bus was coming through the intersection at Columbus and Vallejo at about thirty-five miles per hour, angling toward the curb for its next stop. Creek looked down at the satchel under his arm where Charlie was pointing, and the heel of his running shoe caught the slight rise of the curb. He started to lose his balance, the sort of thing we all might do on any given day while walking through the city, trip on a crack in the sidewalk and take a couple of quick steps to regain equilibrium, but William Creek took only one step. Back. Off the curb.

You can’t really sugarcoat it at this point, can you? The number forty-one bus creamed him. He flew a good fifty feet through the air before he hit the back window of a SAAB like a great gabardine sack of meat, then bounced back to the pavement and commenced to ooze fluids. His belongings—the satchel, the umbrella, a gold tie bar, a Tag Heuer watch—skittered on down the street, ricocheting off tires, shoes, manhole covers, some coming to rest nearly a block away.

Charlie stood at the curb trying to breathe. He could hear a tooting sound, like someone was blowing a toy train whistle—it was all he could hear, then someone ran into him and he realized it was the sound of his own rhythmic whimpering. The guy—the guy with the umbrella—had just been wiped out of the world. People rushed, crowded around, a dozen were barking into cell phones, the bus driver nearly flattened Charlie as he rushed down the sidewalk toward the carnage. Charlie staggered after him.

“I was just going to ask him—”

No one looked at Charlie. It had taken all of his will, as well as a pep talk from his sister, to leave the apartment, and now this?

“I was just going to tell him that his umbrella was on fire,” Charlie said, as if he was explaining to his accusers. But no one accused him, really. They ran by him, some headed toward the body, some away from it—they batted him around and looked back, baffled, like they’d collided with a rough air current or a ghost instead of a man.

“The umbrella,” Charlie said, looking for the evidence. Then he spotted it, almost down at the next corner, lying in the gutter, still glowing red, pulsating like failing neon. “There! See!” But people were gathered around the dead man in a wide semicircle, their hands to their mouths, and no one was paying any attention to the frightened thin man spouting nonsense behind them.

He threaded his way through the crowd toward the umbrella, determined now to confirm his conviction, too far in shock to be afraid. When he was only ten feet away from it he looked up the street to make sure another bus wasn’t coming before he ventured off the curb. He looked back just as a delicate, tar-black hand snaked out of the storm drain and snatched the compact umbrella off the street.

Charlie backed away, looking around to see if anyone had seen what he had seen, but no one had. No one even made eye contact. A policeman trotted by and Charlie grabbed his sleeve as he passed, but when the cop spun around and his eyes went wide with confusion, then what appeared to be real terror, Charlie let him go. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I can see you’ve got work to do—sorry.”

The cop shuddered and pushed through the crowd of onlookers toward the battered body of William Creek.

Charlie started running, across Columbus and up Vallejo, until his breath and heartbeat in his ears drowned all the sounds of the street. When he was a block away from his shop a great shadow moved over him, like a low-flying aircraft or a huge bird, and with it Charlie felt a chill vibrate up his back. He lowered his head, pumped his arms, and rounded the corner of Mason just as the cable car was passing, full of smiling tourists who looked right through him. He glanced up, just for a second, and he thought he saw something above, disappearing over the roof of the six-story Victorian across the street, then he bolted through the front door of his shop.

“Hey, boss,” Lily said. She was sixteen, pale, and a little bottom heavy—her grown-woman form still in flux between baby fat and baby bearing. Today her hair happened to be lavender: fifties-housewife helmet hair in Easter-basket cellophane pastel.

Charlie was bent over, leaning against a case full of curios by the door, sucking in deep raspy gulps of secondhand store mustiness. “I—think—I—just—killed—a—guy,” he gasped.

“Excellent,” Lily said, ignoring equally his message and his demeanor. “We’re going to need change for the register.”

“With a bus,” Charlie said.

“Ray called in,” she said. Ray Macy was Charlie’s other employee, a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor with an unhealthy lack of boundaries between the Internet and reality. “He’s flying to Manila to meet the love of his life. A Ms. LoveYouLongTime. Ray’s convinced that they are soul mates.”

“There was something in the sewer,” Charlie said.

Lily examined a chip in her black nail polish. “So I cut school to cover. I’ve been doing that since you’ve been, uh, gone. I’m going to need a note.”

Charlie stood up and made his way to the counter. “Lily, did you hear what I said?”

He grabbed her by the shoulders, but she spun out of his grasp. “Ouch! Fuck. Back off, Asher, you sado freak, that’s a new tattoo.” She punched him in the arm, hard, and backed away, rubbing her own shoulder. “I heard, you. Cease your trippin’, s’il vous plaît.” Lately, since discovering Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal in a stack of used books in the back room, Lily had been peppering her speech with French phrases. “French better expresses the profound noirness of my existence,” she had said.

Charlie put both hands on the counter to keep them from shaking, then spoke slowly and deliberately, like he was speaking to someone for whom English was a second language: “Lily, I’m having kind of a bad month, and I appreciate that you are throwing away your education so you can come here and alienate customers for me, but if you don’t sit down and show me a little fucking human decency, then I’m going to have to let you go.”

Lily sat down on the chrome-and-vinyl diner stool behind the register and pulled her long lavender bangs out of her eyes. “So you want me to pay close attention to your confession to murder? Take notes, maybe get an old cassette recorder off the shelf and get everything down on tape? You’re saying that by trying to ignore your obvious distress, which I would have to later recall to the police, so I can be personally responsible for sending you to the gas chamber, that I’m being inconsiderate?”

Charlie shuddered. “Jeez, Lily.” He was continually surprised at the speed and accuracy of her creepiness. She was like some creepiness child prodigy. But on the bright side, her extreme darkness made him realize that he probably wasn’t going to go to the gas chamber.

“It wasn’t that kind of killing. There was something following me, and—”

“Silence!” Lily put her hand up, “I’d rather not show my employee spirit by committing every detail of your heinous crime to my photographic memory to be recalled in court later. I’ll just say that I saw you but you seemed normal for someone without a clue.”

“You don’t have a photographic memory.”

“I do, too, and it’s a curse. I can never forget the futility of—”

“You forgot to take out the trash at least eight times last month.”

“I didn’t forget.”

Charlie took a deep breath, the familiarity of arguing with Lily was actually calming him down. “Okay then, without looking, what color shirt are you wearing?” He raised an eyebrow like he had her there.

Lily smiled and for a second he could see that she was just a kid, kind of cute and goofy under the fierce makeup and attitude. “Black.”

“Lucky guess.”

“You know I only own black.” She grinned. “Glad you didn’t ask hair color, I just changed this morning.”

“That’s not good for you, you know. That dye has toxins.”

Lily lifted the lavender wig to reveal her close-cut maroon locks underneath, then dropped it again. “I’m all natural.” She stood and patted the bar stool. “Sit, Asher. Confess. Bore me.”

Lily leaned back against the counter, and tilted her head to look attentive, but with her dark eye makeup and lavender hair it came off more like a marionette with a broken string. Charlie came around the counter and sat on the stool. “I was just in line behind this William Creek guy, and I saw his umbrella glowing…”

And Charlie went through the whole story to her, the umbrella, the bus, the hand from the storm sewer, the bolt for home with the giant dark shadow above the rooftops, and when he was finished, Lily asked, “So how do you know his name?”

“Huh?” Charlie said. Of all of the horrible, fantastic things she might have asked about, why that?

“How do you know the guy’s name?” Lily repeated. “You barely spoke to the guy before he bit it. You see it on his receipt or something?”

“No, I…” He didn’t have any idea how he knew the man’s name, but suddenly there was a picture in his head of it written out in big, block letters. He leapt off the stool. “I gotta go, Lily.”

He ran through the door into the stockroom and up the steps.

“I still need a note for school,” Lily shouted from below, but Charlie was dashing through the kitchen, past a large Russian woman who was bouncing his baby daughter in her arms, and into the bedroom, where he snatched up the notepad he kept on his nightstand by the phone.

There, in his own blocky handwriting, was written the name William Creek and, under it, the number 12. He sat down hard on the bed, holding the notepad like it was a vial of explosives.

Behind him came the heavy steps of Mrs. Korjev as she followed him into the bedroom. “Mr. Asher, what is wrong? You run by like burning bear.”

And Charlie, because he was a Beta Male, and there had evolved over millions of years a standard Beta response to things inexplicable, said, “Someone is fucking with me.”

Lily was touching up her nail polish with a black Magic Marker when Stephan, the mailman, came through the shop door.

“’Sup, Darque?” Stephan said, sorting a stack of mail out of his bag. He was forty, short, muscular, and black. He wore wraparound sunglasses, which were almost always pushed back on his head over hair braided in tight cornrows. Lily had mixed feelings about him. She liked him because he called her Darque, short for Darquewillow Elventhing, the name under which she received mail at the shop, but because he was cheerful and seemed to like people, she deeply mistrusted him.

“Need you to sign,” Stephan said, offering her an electronic pad, on which she scribbled Charles Baudelaire with great flourish and without even looking.

Stephan plopped the mail on the counter. “Working alone again? So where is everyone?”

“Ray’s in the Philippines, Charlie’s traumatized.” She sighed. “Weight of the world falls on me—”

“Poor Charlie,” Stephan said. “They say that’s the worst thing you can go through, losing a spouse.”

“Yeah, there’s that, too. Today he’s traumatized because he saw a guy get hit by a bus up on Columbus.”

“Heard about that. He gonna be okay?”

“Well, fuck no, Stephan, he got hit by a bus.” Lily looked up from her nails for the first time.

“I meant Charlie.” Stephan winked, despite her harsh tone.

“Oh, he’s Charlie.”

“How’s the baby?”

“Evidently she leaks noxious substances.” Lily waved the Magic Marker under her nose as if it might mask the smell of ripened baby.

“All good, then,” Stephan smiled. “That’s it for today. You got anything for me?”

“I took in some red vinyl platforms yesterday. Men’s size ten.”

Stephan collected vintage seventies pimp wear. Lily was to be on the lookout for anything that came through the shop.

“How tall?”

“Four inches.”

“Low altitude,” Stephan said, as if that explained everything. “Take care, Darque.”

Lily waved her Magic Marker at him as he left, and started sorting through the mail. There were mostly bills, a couple of flyers, but one thick black envelope that felt like a book or catalog. It was addressed to Charlie Asher “in care of” Asher’s Secondhand and had a postmark from Night’s Plutonian Shore, which evidently was in whatever state started with a U. (Lily found geography not only mind-numbingly boring, but also, in the age of the Internet, irrelevant.)

Was it not addressed to the care of Asher’s Secondhand? Lily reasoned. And was she, Lily Darquewillow Elventhing, not manning the counter, the sole employee—nay—the de facto manager, of said secondhand store? And wasn’t it her right—nay—her responsibility to open this envelope and spare Charlie the irritation of the task? Onward, Elventhing! Your destiny is set, and if it be not destiny, then surely there is plausible deniability, which in the parlance of politics is the same thing.

She drew a jewel-encrusted dagger from under the counter (the stones valued at over seventy-three cents) and slit the envelope, pulled out the book, and fell in love.

The cover was shiny, like a children’s picture book, with a colorful illustration of a grinning skeleton with tiny people impaled on his fingertips, and all of them appeared to be having the time of their lives, as if they were enjoying a carnival ride that just happened to involve having a gaping hole being punched through the chest. It was festive—lots of flowers and candy in primary colors, done in the style of Mexican folk art. The Great Big Book of Death, was the title, spelled out across the top of the cover in cheerful, human femur font letters.

Lily opened the book to the first page, where a note was paper-clipped.

This should explain everything. I’m sorry.

— MF

Lily removed the note and opened the book to the first chapter: “So Now You’re Death: Here’s What You’ll Need.”

And it was all she needed. This was, very possibly, the coolest book she had ever seen. And certainly not anything Charlie would be able to appreciate, especially in his current state of heightened neurosis. She slipped the book into her backpack, then tore the note and the envelope into tiny pieces and buried them at the bottom of the wastebasket.

4 THE BETA MALE IN HIS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Jane,” said Charlie, “I am convinced by the events of the last few weeks that nefarious forces or people—unidentified but no less real—are threatening life as we know it, and in fact, may be bent on unraveling the very fabric of our existence.”

“And that’s why I have to eat yellow mustard?” Jane was sitting at Charlie’s breakfast counter eating Little Smokies cocktail sausages out of the package, dipping them in a ramekin of French’s yellow. Baby Sophie was sitting on the counter in her car-seat/bassinet/imperial-storm-trooper-helmet thingy.

Charlie paced the kitchen, marking off his evidentiary points in the air with a sausage as he went. “First, there was the guy in Rachel’s room that mysteriously disappeared from the security tapes.”

“Because he was never there. Look, Sophie likes yellow mustard like you.”

“Second,” Charlie continued, despite his sister’s persistent indifference, “all the stuff in the shop was glowing like it was radioactive. Don’t put that in her mouth.”

“Oh my God, Charlie, Sophie’s straight. Look at her go after that Lil’ Smokie.”

“And third, that Creek guy, got hit by a bus up on Columbus yesterday, I knew his name and he had an umbrella that was glowing red.”

“I’m so disappointed,” said Jane. “I was looking forward to raising her on the all-girls team—giving her the advantages I never had, but look at her work that sausage. This kid is a natural.”

“Get that out of her mouth!”

“Relax, she can’t eat it. She doesn’t even have teeth. And it’s not like there’s a moaning Teletubby on the other end of it. Oh, jeez, it’s going to take major tequila to get that picture out of my head.”

“She can’t have pork, Jane. She’s Jewish! Are you trying to turn my daughter into a shiksa?”

Jane snatched the cocktail sausage out of Sophie’s mouth, and examined it, even as the fiber-optic strand of drool stayed connected to the tiny kid. “I don’t think I can eat these things ever again,” Jane said. “They’ll always conjure visions of my niece blowing a terry-cloth puppet person.”

“Jane!” Charlie grabbed the sausage from her and flung it into the sink.

“What?!”

“Are you listening at all?”

“Yes, yes, you saw some guy get hit by a bus so your fabric is unraveling. So?”

“So, someone is fucking with me?”

“And why is that news, Charlie? You’ve thought someone was fucking with you since you were eight.”

“They have been. Probably. But this time it’s real. It could be real.”

“Hey, these are all-beef Lil’ Smokies. Sophie’s not a shikster after all.”

“Shiksa!”

“Whatever.”

“Jane, you’re not helping with my problem.”

“What problem? You have a problem?”

Charlie’s problem was that the trailing edge of his Beta Male imagination was digging at him like bamboo splinters under the fingernails. While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes—size, strength, speed, good looks—selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastodons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an angry, woolly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows. When Alpha Males set out to conquer neighboring tribes, to count coups and take heads, Beta Males could see in advance that in the event of a victory, the influx of female slaves was going to leave a surplus of mateless women cast out for younger trophy models, with nothing to do but salt down the heads and file the uncounted coups, and some would find solace in the arms of any Beta Male smart enough to survive. In the case of defeat, well, there was that widows thing again. The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.

The problem (Charlie’s problem) is that the Beta Male imagination has become superfluous in the face of modern society. Like the saber-toothed tiger’s fangs, or the Alpha Male’s testosterone, there’s just more Beta Male imagination than can really be put to good use. Consequently, a lot of Beta Males become hypochondriacs, neurotics, paranoids, or develop an addiction to porn or video games.

Because, while the Beta Male imagination evolved to help him avoid danger, as a side effect it also allows him fantasy-only access to power, money, and leggy, model-type females who, in reality, wouldn’t kick him in the kidneys to get a bug off their shoe. The rich fantasy life of the Beta Male may often spill over into reality, manifesting in near-genius levels of self-delusion. In fact, many Beta Males, contrary to any empirical evidence, actually believe that they are Alpha Males, and have been endowed by their creator with advanced stealth charisma, which, although awesome in concept, is totally undetectable by women not constructed from carbon fiber. Every time a supermodel divorces her rock-star husband, the Beta Male secretly rejoices (or more accurately, feels great waves of unjustified hope), and every time a beautiful movie star marries, the Beta Male experiences a sense of lost opportunity. The entire city of Las Vegas—plastic opulence, treasure for the taking, vulgar towers, and cocktail waitresses with improbable breasts—is built on the self-delusion of the Beta Male.

And Beta Male self-delusion played no small part in Charlie first approaching Rachel, that rainy day in February, five years before, when he had ducked into A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books to get out of the storm, and Rachel granted him a shy smile over a stack of Carson McCullers she was shelving. He quickly convinced himself that it was because he was dripping with boyish charm, when it was, in fact, simply because he was dripping.

“You’re dripping,” she said. She had blue eyes, fair skin, and dark loose curls that fell around her face. She gave him a sideways glance—just enough consideration to spur his Beta Male ego.

“Yeah, thanks,” Charlie said, taking a step closer.

“Can I get you a towel or something?”

“Nah, I’m used to it.”

“You’re dripping on Cormac McCarthy.”

“Sorry.” Charlie wiped All the Pretty Horses with his sleeve while he tried to see if she had a nice figure under the floppy sweater and cargo pants. “Do you come here often?”

Rachel took a second before responding. She was wearing a name tag, working inventory from a metal cart, and she was pretty sure she’d seen this guy in the store before. So he wasn’t being stupid, he was being clever. Sort of. She couldn’t help it, she laughed.

Charlie shrugged damply and smiled. “I’m Charlie Asher.”

“Rachel,” Rachel said. They shook hands.

“Rachel, would you like to get a cup of coffee or something sometime?”

“That sort of depends, Charlie. I’d need you to answer a few questions first.”

“Of course,” Charlie said. “If you don’t mind, I have some questions, too.” He was thinking, What do you look like naked? and How long before I can check?

“Fine, then.” Rachel put down The Ballad of the Sad Café and counted on her fingers.

“Do you have a job, a car, and a place to live? And are the last two things the same thing?” She was twenty-five and had been single for a while. She’d learned to screen her applicants.

“Uh, yes, yes, yes, and no.”

“Excellent. Are you gay?” She’d been single for a while in San Francisco.

“I asked you out.”

“That means nothing. I’ve had guys not realize they were gay until we’d gone out a few times. Turns out that’s my specialty.”

“Wow, you’re kidding.” He looked her up and down and decided that she probably had a great figure under the baggy clothes. “I could see it going the other way, but…”

“Right answer. Okay, I’ll have coffee with you.”

“Not so fast, what about my questions?”

Rachel threw out a hip and rolled her eyes, sighed. “Okay, shoot.”

“I don’t really have any, I just didn’t want you to think I was easy.”

“You asked me out thirty seconds after we met.”

“Can you blame me? There you were, eyes and teeth—hair, dry, holding good books—”

“Ask me!”

“Do you think that there’s any chance, you know, after we get to know each other, that you’ll like me? I mean, can you see it happening?”

It didn’t matter that he was pushing it—whether he was sly or just awkward, she was defenseless against his Beta Male charm sans charisma, and she had her answer. “Not a chance,” she lied.

“I miss her,” Charlie said, and he looked away from his sister as if there was something in the sink that really, really needed studying. His shoulders shook with a sob and Jane went to him and held him as he slumped to his knees.

“I really miss her.”

“I know you do.”

“I hate this kitchen.”

“Right there with you, kid.”

The good sister, she was.

“I see this kitchen and I see her face and I can’t handle it.”

“Yes, you can. You will. It will get better.”

“Maybe I should move or something.”

“You do what you think you need to, but pain travels pretty well.” Jane rubbed his shoulders and his neck, as if his grief was a knot in a muscle that could be worked out under direct pressure.

After a few minutes he was back, functioning, sitting at the counter between Sophie and Jane, drinking a cup of coffee. “You think I’m just imagining all this, then?”

Jane sighed. “Charlie, Rachel was the center of your universe. Anyone who saw you guys together knew that. Your life revolved around her. With Rachel gone, it’s like you have no center, nothing to ground you, you’re all wobbly and unstable, so things seem unreal. But you do have a center.”

“I do?”

“It’s you. I don’t have a Rachel, or anyone like her on the horizon, but I’m not spinning out of control.”

“So you’re saying I need to be self-centered, like you?”

“I guess I am. Do you think that makes me a bad person?”

“Do you care?”

“Good point. Are you going to be okay? I need to go buy some yoga DVDs. I’m starting a class tomorrow.”

“If you’re going to take a class, then why do you need DVDs?”

“I have to look like I know what I’m doing or no one will go out with me. You going to be okay?”

“I’ll be okay. I just can’t go in the kitchen, or look at anything in the apartment, or listen to music, or watch TV.”

“Okay then, have fun,” Jane said, tweaking the baby’s nose on the way out the door.

When she was gone, Charlie sat at the counter for a while looking at baby Sophie. Strangely enough, she was the only thing in the apartment that didn’t remind him of Rachel. She was a stranger. She looked at him—those wide blue eyes—with sort of an odd, glazed look. Not with the adoration or wonder that you might expect, more like she’d been drinking and would be leaving as soon as she found her car keys.

“Sorry,” Charlie said, averting his gaze to a stack of unpaid bills by the phone. He could feel the kid watching him, wondering, he thought, how many terry-cloth puppet people she’d have to blow to get a decent father over here. Still, he checked that she was securely strapped in her chair, then went off to grab the undone laundry, because he was, in fact, going to be a very good father.

Beta Males almost always make good fathers. They tend to be steady and responsible, the kind of guys a girl (if she was resolved to do without the seven-figure salary or the thirty-six-inch vertical leap) would want as a father for her children. Of course, she’d rather not have to sleep with him for that to happen, but after you’ve been kicked to the curb by a few Alpha Males, the idea of waking up in the arms of a guy who will adore you, if for no other reason than gratitude for sex, and will always be there, even past the point where you can stand to have him around, is a comfortable compromise.

For the Beta Male, if nothing else, is loyal. He makes a great husband as well as a great best friend. He will help you move and bring you soup when you are sick. Always considerate, the Beta Male thanks a woman after sex, and is often quick with an apology as well. He makes a great house sitter, especially if you aren’t especially attached to your house pets. A Beta Male is trustworthy: your girlfriend is generally in safe hands with a Beta Male friend, unless, of course, she is a complete slut. (In fact, the complete slut through history may be exclusively responsible for the survival of the Beta Male gene, for loyal as he may be, the Beta Male is helpless in the face of charging, unimaginary bosoms.)

And while the Beta Male has the potential to be a great husband and father, the skills still need to be learned. So, for the next few weeks, Charlie did little but care for the tiny stranger in his house. She was an alien, really—a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine—and he didn’t understand anything about her species. But as he tended to her, talked to her, lost a lot of sleep over her, bathed her, watched her nap, and admonished her for the disgusting substances that oozed and urped out of her, he started to fall in love. One morning, after a particularly active night of the feed-and-change parade, he awoke to find her staring goofily at the mobile over her crib, and when she saw him, she smiled. That did it. Like her mother before her, she set the course of his life with a smile. And as it had with Rachel, that wet morning in the bookstore, his soul lit up. The weirdness, the bizarre circumstances of Rachel’s death, the red glowing items in the shop, the dark, winged thing above the street, all of it took a backseat to the new light of his life.

He didn’t understand that she loved him unconditionally—so when he got up in the middle of the night to feed her, he put on a shirt and combed his hair and tested to see that his breath was free of funk. Within minutes of getting poleaxed with affection for his daughter, he started to develop a deep fear for her safety, which, over the course of a few days, blossomed into a whole new garden of paranoia.

“It looks like Nerf world in here,” Jane said, one afternoon when she brought in the bills from the store and the checks for Charlie to sign. Charlie had padded every sharp corner or edge in the apartment with foam rubber and duct tape, put plastic covers on all of the electrical outlets, childproofed locks on all cabinets, installed new smoke, carbon monoxide, and radon detectors, and activated the V–Chip on the TV so that now he was incapable of watching anything that didn’t feature baby animals or learning the alphabet.

“Accidents are the number one cause of death among children in America,” Charlie said.

“But she can’t even roll over on her stomach yet.”

“I want to be ready. Everything I read says that one day you’re breast-feeding them and the next day you wake up and they’re dropping out of college.” He was changing the baby on the coffee table and had used ten baby wipes so far, if Jane had the count right.

“I think that might be a metaphor. You know, for how fast they grow up.”

“Well, it’s done when she’s ready to crawl.”

“Why don’t you just make a big foam-rubber suit for her, it’s easier than padding the world. Charlie, it’s scary-looking in here. You can’t bring a woman here, she’d think you’re nuts.”

Charlie looked at his sister for a long second without saying anything, just frozen there, holding a disposable diaper in one hand and his daughter’s ankles scissored between the fingers of the other.

“When you’re ready,” Jane stumbled on. “I mean, I’m not saying that you’d bring a woman here.”

“Okay, because I’m not.”

“Of course not. I’m not saying that. But you have to leave the apartment. For one thing, you need to go downstairs to the store. Ray has turned the point-of-sale computer into some kind of dating service and the truant officer has stopped by three times looking for Lily. And I can’t keep doing the accounts and trying to run things and do my job, too, Charlie. Dad left you the business for a reason.”

“But there’s no one to watch Sophie.”

“You have Mrs. Korjev and Mrs. Ling right here in the building, let one of them watch her. Hell, I’ll watch her for a few hours in the evening, if that will help.”

“I’m not going down there in the evening. That’s when things are radioactive.”

Jane set the stack of papers on the coffee table next to Sophie’s head and backed away with her arms crossed. “Play what you just said back in your head, would you.”

Charlie did, then shrugged. “Okay, that sounds a little crazy.”

“Go make an appearance at the shop, Charlie. Just a few minutes to get your feet wet and put the fear of God in Ray and Lily, okay? I’ll finish changing her.”

Jane slid in between the couch and the coffee table, nudging her brother out of the way. In the process she knocked the dirty diaper to the floor, where it fell open.

“Oh my God!” She gagged and turned her head.

“Another reason not to eat brown mustard, huh?” Charlie said.

“You bastard!”

He backed away. “Okay, I’m going downstairs. You’re sure you got this?”

“Go!” Jane said, waving him out of the room with one hand while holding her nose with the other.

5 DARKNESS GETS UPPITY

Hey, Ray,” Charlie said as he came down the steps into the storeroom. He always tried to make a lot of noise on the steps and usually fired a loud and early “hello” to warn his employees that he was coming. He’d worked a number of jobs before coming back to take over the family business, and had learned from experience that nobody liked a sneaky boss.

“Hey, Charlie,” Ray said. Ray was out front, sitting on a stool behind the counter. He was pushing forty, tall, balding, and moved through the world without ever turning his head. He couldn’t. As a San Francisco policeman, he’d caught a gangbanger’s bullet in the neck six years ago, and that was the last time he’d looked over his shoulder without using a mirror. Ray lived on a generous disability pension from the city and worked for Charlie in exchange for free rent on his fourth-floor apartment, thus keeping the transaction off both their books.

He spun around on the stool to face Charlie. “Hey—uh—I wanted to say that, you know, your situation, I mean, your loss. Everybody liked Rachel. You know, if I can do anything—”

It was the first time Charlie had seen Ray since the funeral, so the awkwardness of secondary condolences had yet to be forded. “You’ve done more than enough by picking up my shifts. Whatcha working on?” Charlie was trying desperately to not look at the various objects in the shop that were glowing dull red.

“Oh, this.” Ray rotated and pushed back so that Charlie could see the computer screen, where there were displayed rows of portraits of smiling, young Asian women. “It’s called Desperate Filipinas dot-com.”

“Is this where you met Miss LoveYouLongTime?”

“That was not her name. Did Lily tell you that? That kid has problems.”

“Yeah, well, kids,” Charlie said, suddenly noticing a matronly woman in tweed who was browsing the curio shelves at the front of the store. She was carrying a porcelain frog that was glowing dull red.

Ray clicked on one of the pictures, which opened a profile. “Look at this one, boss. It says she’s into sculling.” He spun on his stool again and bounced his eyebrows at Charlie.

Charlie pulled his attention from the woman with the glowing frog and looked at the screen.

“That’s rowing, Ray.”

“No it’s not. Look, it says she was a coxswain in college.” Again with the eyebrow bounce, he offered a high five.

“Also rowing,” Charlie said, leaving the ex-cop hanging. “The person at the back of the boat who yells at the rowers is called the coxswain.”

“Really?” Ray said, disappointed. He’d been married three times, and been left by all three wives because of an inability to develop normal adult social skills. Ray reacted to the world as a cop, and while many women found that attractive initially, they expected him eventually to leave the attitude, along with his service weapon, in the coat closet when he arrived home. He didn’t. When Ray had first come to work at Asher’s Secondhand, it had taken two months for Charlie to get him to stop ordering customers to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Ray spent a lot of time being disappointed in himself and humanity in general.

“But, dude, rowing!” Charlie said, trying to make it all better. He liked the ex-cop in spite of his awkwardness. Ray was basically a good guy, kindhearted and loyal, hardworking and punctual, but most important, Ray was losing his hair faster than Charlie.

Ray sighed. “Maybe I should search for another Web site. What’s a word that means that your standards are lower than the desperate?”

Charlie read down the page a little. “This woman has a master’s degree in English lit from Cambridge, Ray. And look at her. She’s gorgeous. And nineteen. Why is she desperate?”

“Hey, wait a minute. A master’s degree at nineteen, this girl is too smart for me.”

“No she’s not. She’s lying.”

Ray spun on the stool as if Charlie had poked him in the ear with a pencil. “No!”

“Ray, look at her. She looks like one of those Asian models for Sour Apple Flavored Calamari Treats.”

“They have that?”

Charlie pointed to the left side of the front window. “Ray, let me introduce you to Chinatown. Chinatown, this is Ray. Ray, Chinatown.”

Ray smiled, embarrassed. There was a store two blocks up that sold nothing but dried shark parts, the windows full of pictures of beautiful Chinese women holding shark spleens and eyeballs like they’d just received an Academy Award. “Well, the last woman I met through here did have a few errors and omissions in her profile.”

“Like?” Charlie was watching the woman in tweed with the glowing frog, who was approaching the counter.

“Well, she said that she was twenty-three, five feet tall, a hundred five pounds, so I thought, ‘Okay, I can have fun with a petite woman.’ Turns out it was a hundred and five kilos.”

“So, not what you expected?” Charlie said. He smiled at the approaching woman, feeling panic rise. She was going to buy the frog!

“Five foot—two-thirty. She was built like a mailbox. I might have gotten past that, but she wasn’t even twenty-three, she was sixty-three. One of her grandsons tried to sell her to me.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, you can’t buy that,” Charlie said to the woman.

“You hear the expression all the time,” Ray went on, “but you hardly ever meet anyone really trying to sell his own grandmother.”

“Why not?” the woman asked.

“Fifty bucks,” Ray said.

“That’s outrageous,” the woman said. “It’s marked ten.”

“No, it’s fifty for the grandmother Ray is dating,” Charlie said. “The frog is not for sale, ma’am, I’m sorry. It’s defective.”

“Then why do you have it on the shelf? Why is it marked for sale? I don’t see any defect.”

Evidently she couldn’t see that the goofy porcelain frog was not only glowing in her hands, it had started to pulsate. Charlie reached across the counter and snatched it away from her.

“It’s radioactive, ma’am. I’m sorry. You can’t buy it.”

“I wasn’t dating her,” Ray said. “I just flew to the Philippines to meet her.”

“It is not radioactive,” the woman said. “You’re just trying to jack up the price. Fine, I’ll give you twenty for it.”

“No, ma’am, public safety,” Charlie said, trying to look concerned, holding the frog to his chest as if shielding her from its dangerous energy. “And it’s clearly ridiculous. You’ll note that this frog is playing a banjo with only two strings. A travesty, really. Why don’t you let my colleague show you something in a cymbal-playing monkey. Ray, could you show this young woman something in a monkey, please.” Charlie hoped that the “young woman” would win him points.

The woman backed away from the counter, holding her purse before her like a shield. “I’m not sure I want to buy anything from you wack jobs.”

“Hey!” Ray protested, as if to say that there was only one wack job on duty and he wasn’t it.

Then she did it, she quickstepped to a rack of shoes and picked up a pair of size-twelve, red Converse All Stars. They, too, were glowing. “I want these.”

“No.” Charlie tossed the frog over his shoulder to Ray, who fumbled it and almost dropped it. “Those aren’t for sale either.”

The tweed woman backed away toward the door, holding the sneakers behind her. Charlie stalked her down the aisle, taking the occasional grab at the All Stars. “Give them.”

When the woman butt-bumped into the front door and the bell over the jamb jingled, she looked up and Charlie made his move, faking hard left, then going right, reaching around her and grabbing the laces of the sneakers, as well as a scoop of big, tweedy ass in the bargain. He quickstepped back toward the counter, tossed the sneakers to Ray, and then turned and fell into a sumo stance to challenge the tweed woman.

She was still at the door, looking as if she couldn’t decide to be terrified or disgusted. “You people need to be put away. I’m reporting you to the Better Business Bureau and the local merchants’ association. And you, Mr. Asher, can tell Ms. Severo that I will be back.” And with that, she was through the door and gone.

Charlie turned to Ray. “Ms. Severo? Lily? She was here to see Lily?”

“Truant officer,” Ray said. “She’s been in a couple of times.”

“You might have said something.”

“I didn’t want to lose the sale.”

“So, Lily—”

“Ducks out the back when she sees her coming. The woman also wanted to check with you that the notes for Lily’s absences were legitimate. I vouched.”

“Well, Lily is going back to school, and as of right now, I’m back to work.”

“That’s great. I took this call today—an estate in Pacific Heights. Lots of nice women’s clothes.” Ray tapped a piece of notepaper on the counter. “I’m not really qualified to handle it.”

“I’ll do it, but first we have a lot to catch up on. Flip the ‘Closed’ sign and lock the front door, would you, Ray?”

Ray didn’t move. “Sure, but—Charlie, are you sure that you’re ready to go back to work?” He nodded to the sneakers and frog on the counter.

“Oh, those, I think there’s something wrong with them. You don’t see anything unusual about those two items?”

Ray looked again. “Nope.”

“Or that once I took the frog away from her, she went right for a pair of sneakers that are clearly not her size?”

Ray weighed the truth against the sweet deal he had here, with an apartment and under-the-table income and a boss that had really been a decent guy before he went 51/50, and he said, “Yeah, there was something strange about her.”

“Aha!” said Charlie. “I just wish I knew where I could get a Geiger counter.”

“I have a Geiger counter,” Ray said.

“You do?”

“Sure, you want me to get it?”

“Maybe later,” Charlie said. “Just lock up, and help me gather up some of the merchandise.”

Over the next hour Ray watched as Charlie moved a set of what seemed randomly chosen items from the store to the back room, directing him to under no circumstances put them back out or sell them to anyone. Then he retrieved the Geiger counter that he’d obtained on a sweet trade for a stringless oversized tennis racket and tested each item as Charlie instructed. And, of course, they were as inert as dirt.

“And you don’t see any glowing or pulsating or anything in this pile?” Charlie asked.

“Sorry.” Ray shook his head, feeling a little embarrassed that he was witnessing this. “Good first day back to work, though,” Ray said, trying to make it all better. “Maybe you should call it a day, go check on the baby, and make that estate call in the morning. I’ll box this stuff up and mark it so Lily won’t sell or trade it.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “But don’t throw it out, either. I’m going to figure this out.”

“You betcha, boss. See you in the morning.”

“Yeah, thanks, Ray. You can go home when you finish.”

Charlie went back to his apartment, checking his hands the whole way to see if any of the red glow from the pile of objects had rubbed off on them, but they seemed normal. He sent Jane home, fed and bathed Sophie, and read her to sleep with a few pages from Slaughterhouse-Five, then went to bed early and slept fitfully. He awoke the next morning in a haze, then sat bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and heart pounding when he saw the note sitting on the nightstand. Another one. Then he noticed that this time it wasn’t his handwriting, and the number was obviously a phone number, and he sighed. It was the estate appointment that Ray had made for him. He’d put it on the nightstand so he wouldn’t forget. Mr. Michael Mainheart, it read; then upscale women’s clothing and furs, with a double underline. The phone number had a local exchange. He picked up the note, and under it was a second piece of notepaper, this one with the same name, written in his own handwriting, and under it, the numeral 5. He didn’t remember writing any of it. At that moment, something large and dark passed by the second-story bedroom window, but by the time he looked up, it was gone.

A blanket of fog lay over the Bay and from Pacific Heights the great orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge jutted through the fog bank like carrots from the faces of sleeping conjoined twin snowmen. In the Heights, the morning sun had already opened the sky and workmen were scurrying about, tending yards and gardens around the mansions.

When he arrived at the home of Michael Mainheart the first thing Charlie noticed was that no one noticed him. There were two guys working in the yard, to whom Charlie waved as he passed, but they did not wave back. Then the mailman, who was coming off the big porch, drove him off the walkway into the dewy grass without so much as an “excuse me.”

“Excuse me!” Charlie said, sarcastically, but the mailman was wearing headphones and listening to something that was inspiring him to bob his head like a pigeon feeding on amphetamines, and he bopped on. Charlie was going to shout something devastatingly clever, then thought better of it, for although it had been some years since he’d heard of a postal employee perpetrating a massacre, as long as the term “going postal” referred to anything besides choosing a shipping carrier, he felt he shouldn’t press his luck.

Called a wack job by a complete stranger one day and shouldered off the sidewalk by a civil servant the next: this city was becoming a jungle.

Charlie rang the bell and waited to the side of the twelve-foot leaded-glass door. A minute later he heard light, shuffling steps approaching and a diminutive silhouette moved behind the glass. The door swung open slowly.

“Mr. Asher,” said Michael Mainheart. “Thank you for coming.” The old man was swimming in a houndstooth suit that he must have bought thirty years ago when he was a more robust fellow. When he shook Charlie’s hand his skin felt like an old wonton wrapper, cool and a little powdery. Charlie tried not to shudder as the old man led him into a grand marble rotunda, with leaded-glass windows running to a vaulted, forty-foot ceiling and a circular staircase that swept up to a landing that led off to the upper wings of the house. Charlie had often wondered what it was like to have a house with wings. How would you ever find your car keys?

“Come this way,” Mainheart said. “I’ll show you where my wife kept her clothes.”

“I’m sorry about your loss,” Charlie said automatically. He’d been on scores of estate calls. You don’t want to come off as some kind of vulture, his father used to say. Always compliment the merchandise; it might be a piece of crap to you, but they might have a lot of their soul poured into it. Compliment but never covet. You can make a profit and preserve everyone’s dignity in the process.

“Holy shit,” Charlie said as he followed the old man into a walk-in closet the size of his own apartment. “I mean—your wife had exquisite taste, Mr. Mainheart.”

There was row upon row of designer couture clothing, everything from evening gowns to racks, two tiers high, of knit suits, arranged by color and level of formality—an opulent rainbow of silk and linen and wool. Cashmere sweaters, coats, capes, jackets, skirts, blouses, lingerie. The closet was shaped like a T, with a large vanity and mirror at the apex, and accessories on each wing (even the closet with wings!), shoes on one side, belts, scarves, and handbags on the other. A whole wing of shoes, Italian and French, handmade, from the skins of animals who had led happy, blemish-free lives. Full-length mirrors flanked the vanity at the end of the closet and Charlie caught the reflection of himself and Michael Mainheart in the mirror, he in his secondhand gray pinstripe and Mainheart in his ill-fitting houndstooth, studies in gray and black, stark and lifeless-looking in this vibrant garden.

The old man went to the chair at the vanity and sat down with a creak and a wheeze. “I expect it will take you some time to assess it,” he said.

Charlie stood in the middle of the closet and looked around for a second before replying. “It depends, Mr. Mainheart, on what you want to part with.”

“All of it. Every stitch. I can’t stand the feel of her in here.” His voice broke. “I want it gone.” He looked away from Charlie at the shoe wing, trying not to show that he was tearing up.

“I understand,” Charlie said, not sure what to say. This collection was completely out of his league.

“No, you don’t understand, young man. You couldn’t understand. Emily was my life. I got up in the morning for her, I went to work for her, I built a business for her. I couldn’t wait to get home at night to tell her about my day. I went to bed with her and I dreamed about her when I slept. She was my passion, my wife, my best friend, the love of my life. And one day, without warning, she was gone and my life is a void. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

But Charlie did. “Do you have any children, Mr. Mainheart?”

“Two sons. They came back for the funeral, then they went home to their own families. They offer to do whatever they can, but…”

“They can’t,” Charlie finished for him. “No one can.”

Now the old man looked up at him, his face as bereft and barren as a mummified basset hound. “I just want to die.”

“Don’t say that,” Charlie said, because that’s what you say. “That feeling will pass.” Which he said because everyone had been saying it to him. As far as he knew, he was just slinging bullshit clichés.

“She was—” Mainheart’s voice caught on the edge of a sob. A strong man, at once overcome by his grief and embarrassed that he was showing it.

“I know,” Charlie said, thinking about how Rachel still occupied that place in his heart, and when he turned in the kitchen to say something to her, and she wasn’t there, it took his breath.

“She was—”

“I know,” Charlie interrupted, trying to give the old man a pass, because he knew what Mainheart was feeling. She was meaning and order and light, and now that she’s gone, chaos falls like a dark leaden cloud.

“She was so phenomenally stupid.”

“What?” Charlie looked up so quickly he heard a vertebra pop in his neck. Hadn’t seen that coming.

“The dumb broad ate silica gel,” Mainheart said, irritated as well as agonized.

“What?” Charlie was shaking his head, as if trying to rattle something loose.

“Silica gel.”

“What?”

“Silica gel! Silica gel! Silica gel, you idiot!”

Charlie felt as if he should shout the name of some arcane stuff back at him: Well, symethicone! Symethicone! Symethicone, you butt-nugget! Instead he said, “The stuff fake breasts are made of? She ate that?” The image of a well-dressed older woman macking on a goopish spoonful of artificial boob spooge was running across the lobes of his brain like a stuttering nightmare.

Mainheart pushed himself to his feet on the vanity. “No, the little packets of stuff they pack in with electronic equipment and cameras.”

“The ‘Do Not Eat’ stuff?”

“Exactly.”

“But it says right on the packet—she ate that?”

“Yes. The furrier put packets of it in with her furs when he installed that cabinet.” Mainheart pointed.

Charlie turned, and behind the large closet door where they had entered was a lighted glass cabinet—inside hung a dozen or so fur coats. The cabinet probably had its own air-conditioning unit to control the humidity, but that wasn’t what Charlie was noticing. Even under the recessed fluorescent light inside the cabinet, one of the coats was clearly glowing red and pulsating. He turned back to Mainheart slowly, trying not to overreact, not sure, in fact, what would constitute an overreaction in this case, so he tried to sound calm, but not willing to take any shit.

“Mr. Mainheart, I appreciate your loss, but is there something more going on here than you’ve told me?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I mean,” Charlie said, “why, of all the used-clothing dealers in the Bay Area, did you decide to call me? There are people who are much more qualified to deal with a collection of this size and quality.” Charlie stormed over to the fur cabinet and pulled open the door. It made a floof-tha sound that the seal on a refrigerator door makes when opened. He grabbed the glowing jacket—fox fur, it appeared to be. “Or was it this? Did the call have something to do with this?” Charlie brandished the jacket like he was holding a murder weapon before the accused. In short, he thought about adding, are you fucking with me?

“You were the first used-clothing dealer in the phone book.”

Charlie let the jacket drop. “Asher’s Secondhand?”

“Starts with an A,” Mainheart said, slowly, carefully—obviously resisting the urge to call Charlie an idiot again.

“So it has nothing to do with this jacket?”

“Well, it has something to do with that jacket. I’d like you to take it away with all the rest of it.”

“Oh,” Charlie said, trying to recover. “Mr. Mainheart, I appreciate the call, and this is certainly a beautiful collection, amazing, really, but I’m not equipped to take on this kind of inventory. And I’ll be honest with you, even though my father would be spinning in his grave for telling you this, there is probably a million dollars’ worth of clothes in this closet. Maybe more. And given the time and space to resell it, it’s probably worth a quarter of that. I just don’t have that kind of money.”

“We can work something out,” Mainheart said. “Just to get it out of the house—”

“I could take some of it on consignment, I suppose—”

“Five hundred dollars.”

“What?”

“Give me five hundred dollars and get it out of here by tomorrow and it’s yours.”

Charlie started to object, but he could feel what felt like the ghost of his father rising up to bonk him on the head with a spittoon if he didn’t stop himself. We provide a valuable service, son. We are like an orphanage to art and artifact, because we are willing to handle the unwanted, we give them value.

“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Mainheart, I feel as if I’d be taking advantage of your grief.”

Oh for Christ’s sake, you fucking loser, you are no son of mine. I have no son. Was that the ghost of Charlie’s father, rattling chains in his head? Why, then, did it have the voice and vocabulary of Lily? Can a conscience be greedy?

“You would be doing me a favor, Mr. Asher. A huge favor. If you don’t take it, my next call is to the Goodwill. I promised Emily that if something ever happened to her that I wouldn’t just give her things away. Please.”

And there was so much pain in the old man’s voice that Charlie had to look away. Charlie felt for the old man because he did understand. He couldn’t do anything to help, couldn’t say, It will get better, like everyone kept saying to him. It wasn’t getting better. Different, but not better. And this fellow had fifty more years in which to pack his hopes, or in his case, his history.

“Let me think about it. Check into storage. If I can handle it, I’ll call you tomorrow, would that be all right?”

“I’d be grateful,” Mainheart said.

Then, for no reason that he could think of, Charlie said, “May I take this jacket with me? As an example of the quality of the collection, in case I have to divide it among other dealers.”

“That would be fine. Let me show you out.”

As they passed into the rotunda, a shadow passed across the leaded-glass windows, three stories up. A large shadow. Charlie paused on the steps and waited for the old man to react, but he just tottered on down the staircase, leaning heavily on the railing as he went. When Mainheart reached the door he turned to Charlie, extending his hand. “I’m sorry about that, uh, outburst upstairs. I haven’t been myself since—”

As the old man began to open the door a figure dropped outside, casting the silhouette of a bird as tall as a man through the glass.

“No!” Charlie dove forward, knocking the old man aside and slamming the door on the great bird’s head, the heavy black beak stabbing through and snapping like hedge clippers, rattling an umbrella stand and scattering its contents across the marble floor. Charlie’s face was only inches from the bird’s eye, and he shoved the door with his shoulder, trying to keep the beak from snapping off one of his hands. The bird’s claws raked against the glass, cracking one of the thick beveled panels as the animal thrashed to free itself.

Charlie threw his hip against the doorjamb then slid down it, dropped the fox jacket, and snatched one of the umbrellas from the floor. He stabbed up into the bird’s neck feathers, but lost his purchase on the doorjamb—one of the black talons snaked through the opening and raked across his forearm, cutting through his jacket, his shirtsleeve, and into the flesh. Charlie shoved the umbrella with all he had, driving the bird’s head back through the opening.

The raven let out a screech and took flight, its wings making a great whooshing noise as it went. Charlie lay on his back, out of breath, staring at the leaded-glass panels, as if any moment the shadow of the giant raven would come back, then he looked to Michael Mainheart, who lay crumpled on his side like a stringless marionette. Beside his head lay a cane with an ivory handle that had been carved into the shape of a polar bear that had fallen from the umbrella stand. The cane was glowing red. The old man was not breathing.

“Well that’s fucked up,” Charlie said.

6 VARIABLE SPEED HEROES

In the alley behind Asher’s Secondhand, the Emperor of San Francisco hand-fed olive focaccia to the troops and tried to keep dog snot from fouling his breakfast.

“Patience, Bummer,” the Emperor said to the Boston terrier, who was leaping at the day-old wheel of flat bread like a furry Super Ball, while Lazarus, the solemn golden retriever, stood by, waiting for his share. Bummer snorted an impatient reply (thus the dog snot). He’d worked up a furious appetite because breakfast was running late today. The Emperor had slept on a bench by the Maritime Museum, and during the night his arthritic knee had snaked out of his wool overcoat into the damp cold, making the walk to North Beach and the Italian bakery that gave them free day-old a slow and painful ordeal.

The Emperor groaned and sat down on an empty milk crate. He was a great rolling bear of a man, his shoulders broad but a little broken from carrying the weight of the city. A white tangle of hair and beard wreathed his face like a storm cloud. As far as he could remember, he and the troops had patrolled the city streets forever, but upon further consideration, it might have just been since Wednesday. He wasn’t entirely sure.

The Emperor decided to make a proclamation to the troops about the importance of compassion in the face of the rising tide of heinous fuckery and political weaselocity in the nearby kingdom of the United States. (He found his audience was most attentive to his proclamations when the meat-laced focaccia were still nuzzled in the larder of his overcoat pockets, and presently a pepperoni and Parmesan reposed fragrant in the woolly depths, so the royal hounds were rapt.) But just as he cleared his throat to begin, a cargo van came screeching around the corner, went up on two wheels as it plowed through a row of garbage cans, and slid to a stop not fifty feet away. The driver’s-side door flew open and a thin man in a suit leapt out, carrying a cane and a woman’s fur coat, and made a beeline for the back door of Asher’s. But before he got two steps the man fell to the concrete as if hit from behind, then rolled on his back and began flailing at the air with the cane and the coat. The Emperor, who knew most everyone, recognized Charlie Asher.

Bummer erupted into a fit of yapping, but the more levelheaded Lazarus growled once and took off toward Charlie.

“Lazarus!” the Emperor shouted, but the retriever charged on, followed now by his bug-eyed brother in arms.

Charlie was back on his feet and swinging the cane as if he was fencing with some phantom, using the coat like a shield. Living on the street, the Emperor had seen a lot of people battling with unseen demons, but Charlie Asher was apparently scoring some hits. The cane was making a thwacking noise against what appeared to be thin air—but no, there was something there, a shadow of some sort?

The Emperor climbed to his feet and limped into the fray, but before he got two steps Lazarus had leapt and appeared to be attacking Charlie, but he soared over the shopkeeper and snapped at a spot above his head—then hung there, his jaws sunk into the substantial neck of thin air.

Charlie took advantage of the distraction, stepped back, and swung the cane above the levitating golden retriever. There was a smack, and Lazarus let go, but now Bummer launched himself at the invisible foe. He missed whatever was there, and ended up performing a doggy swish shot into a garbage can.

Charlie made for the steel door of Asher’s again, but found it locked, and as he reached for his keys, something caught him from behind.

“Let go, fuckface,” the shade screeched.

The fur coat Charlie was holding appeared to be swept out of his hand and was pulled straight up, over the four-story building and out of sight.

Charlie turned and held the cane at ready, but whatever had been there seemed to be gone now.

“Aren’t you just supposed to sit above the door and nevermore and be poetic and stuff?!” he shouted at the sky. Then, for good measure, added, “You evil fuck!”

Lazarus barked, then whined. A sharp and metallic yapping rose from Bummer’s garbage can.

“Well, you don’t see that every day,” said the Emperor as he limped up to Charlie.

“You could see that?”

“Well, no, not really. Merely a shadow, but I could see that something was there. There was something there, wasn’t there, Charlie?”

Charlie nodded, trying to catch his breath. “It will be back. It followed me across the city.” He dug into his pocket for his keys. “You guys should duck into the store with me, Your Majesty.” Of course Charlie knew the Emperor. Every San Franciscan knew the Emperor.

The Emperor smiled. “That’s very kind of you, but we will be perfectly safe. For now I need to free my charge from his galvanized prison.” The big man tipped the garbage can and Bummer emerged snorting and tossing his head as if ready to tear the ass out of any man or beast foolhardy enough to cross him (and he would have, as long as they were knee-high or shorter).

Charlie was still having trouble with the key. He knew he should have had the lock replaced, but it worked, if you finessed it a little, so he’d never made it a priority. Who the hell thought you’d ever have to get in quick to escape a giant bird? Then he heard a screech and turned to see not one, but two huge ravens coming over the roof and diving into the alley. The dogs arfed a frantic barking salvo at the avian intruders and Charlie put so much body English into wiggling the key in the lock that he felt an atrophied dancing muscle tear in his hip.

“They’re back. Cover me.” Charlie threw the cane to the Emperor and braced himself for the impact, but as soon as the cane touched the old man’s hand the birds were gone. You could almost hear the pop of the air replacing the space they had taken up. The dogs caught themselves in mid-ruff; Bummer whimpered.

“What?” the Emperor said. “What?”

“They’re gone.”

The Emperor looked at the sky. “You’re sure?”

“For now.”

“I saw two shadows. Really saw them this time,” the Emperor said.

“Yes, there were two this time.”

“What are they?”

“I have no idea, but when you took the cane they—well, they disappeared. You really saw them?”

“I’m sure of it. Like smoke with a purpose.”

Finally the key turned in the lock and the door to Asher’s back room swung open. “You should come in. Rest. I’ll order something to eat.”

“No, no, the men and I must be on our rounds. I’ve decided to make a proclamation this morning and we need to see the printer. You’ll be needing this.” The Emperor presented the cane to Charlie like he was turning over a sword of the realm.

Charlie started to take it, then thought better of it. “Your Majesty, I think you’d better keep that. It looks as if you might be able to use it.” Charlie nodded toward the Emperor’s creaky knee.

The Emperor held the cane steady. “I am not a worshiper of the material, you know?”

“I understand that.”

“I am a firm believer that desire is the source of most of human suffering, you’re aware, and no culprit is more heinous than desire for material gain.”

“I run my business based on those very principles. Still, I insist you keep the cane—as a favor to me, if you would?”

Charlie found himself affecting the Emperor’s formal speech patterns, as if somehow he had been transported to a royal court where a nobleman was distinguished by bread crumbs in his beard and the royal guard were not above licking their balls.

“Well, as a favor, I will accept. It is a fine piece of craftsmanship.”

“But more importantly, it will permit you to make your rounds in good time.”

The Emperor now betrayed the desire in his heart as he let fly a wide grin and hugged the cane to his chest. “It is fine, indeed. Charlie, I must confess something to you, but I ask you to grant me the credulity due a man who has just shared witness, with a friend, of two giant, raven-shaped shades.”

“Of course.” Charlie smiled, when even a moment before he would have thought his smile lost somewhere in the months past.

“I hope you won’t think me base, but the second I touched this, I felt as if I had been waiting for it my whole life.”

Then, for no reason that he could think of, Charlie said, “I know.”

A few minutes before, inside the store, Lily had been brooding. It wasn’t her general brood, the reaction to a world where everyone was stupid and life was meaningless and the mere act of living was futile, especially if your mother forgot to get coffee at the store. This one was a more specific brood, that had started out when she arrived at work and Ray had pointed out that it was her turn to wear the vacuuming tiara, and insisted that if she wore the tiara, she actually vacuum the store. (In fact, she liked wearing the rhinestone tiara that Charlie, in a move of blatant bourgeois sneakiness, had designated be worn by whoever did the vacuuming and sweeping each day, and no other time. It was the vacuuming and sweeping she objected to. She felt manipulated, used, and generally taken advantage of, and not in the fun way.) But today, after she’d put the tiara and the vacuum away and had finally gotten a couple of cups of coffee in her system, the brooding had gone on, building to full-scale angst, when it began to dawn on her that she was going to have to figure out this college-career thing, because despite what The Great Big Book of Death said, she had not been chosen as a dark minion of destruction. Fuck!

She stood in the back room looking at all the items that Charlie had piled there the day before: shoes, lamps, umbrellas, porcelain figures, toys, a couple of books, and an old black-and-white television and a painting of a clown on black velvet.

“He said this stuff was glowing?” she asked Ray, who stood in the doorway to the store.

“Yes. He made me check it all with my Geiger counter.”

“Ray, why the fuck do you have a Geiger counter?”

“Lily, why do you have a nose stud shaped like a bat?”

Lily ignored the question and picked up the ceramic frog from the night before, which now had a note taped to it that read DO NOT SELL OR DISPLAY in Charlie’s meticulous block-letter printing. “This was one of the things? This?”

“That was the first one he freaked out about,” said Ray matter-of-factly. “The truant officer tried to buy it. That started it all.”

Lily was shaken. She backed over to Charlie’s desk and sat in the squeaky oak swivel chair. “Do you see anything glowing or pulsating, Ray? Have you ever?”

Ray shook his head. “He’s under a lot of stress, losing Rachel and taking care of the baby. I think maybe he needs to get some help. I know after I had to leave the force—” Ray paused.

There was a commotion going on out in the alley, dogs barking and people shouting, then someone was working a key in the lock of the back door. A second later, Charlie came in, a little breathless, his clothes smudged here and there with grime, one sleeve of his jacket torn and bloodstained.

“Asher,” Lily said. “You’re hurt.” She quickly vacated his chair while Ray took Charlie by the shoulders and sat him down.

“I’m fine,” Charlie said. “No big deal.”

“I’ll get the first-aid kit,” Ray said. “Get that jacket off of him, Lily.”

“I’m fine,” Charlie said. “Quit talking about me like I’m not here.”

“He’s delirious,” Lily said, trying to pry Charlie out of his jacket. “Do you have any painkillers, Ray?”

“I don’t need painkillers,” Charlie said.

“Shut up, Asher, they’re not for you,” Lily said, automatically, then she considered the book, Ray’s story, the notes on all the items in the back room, and she shuddered. It appeared that Charlie Asher might not be the hapless geek she always thought him to be. “Sorry, boss. Let us help you.”

Ray came back from the front with a small plastic first-aid kit. He peeled back Charlie’s sleeve and began to clean the wounds with gauze and peroxide. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Charlie said. “I slipped and fell in some gravel.”

“The wound’s pretty clean—no gravel in it. That must have been some fall.”

“Long story.” Charlie sighed. “Ouch!”

“What was all the noise in the alley?” Lily asked, needing badly to go smoke, but unable to pull herself away. She just couldn’t imagine that Charlie Asher was the one. How could it be him? He was so, so, unworthy. He didn’t understand the dark underbelly of life the way she did. Yet he was the one seeing the glowing objects. He was it. She was crestfallen.

“Just the Emperor’s dogs after a seagull in the Dumpster. No big deal. I fell off a porch in Pacific Heights.”

“The estate,” Ray said. “How’d that go?”

“Not well. The husband was grief-stricken and had a heart attack while I was there.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, he just sort of became overwhelmed thinking about his wife and collapsed. I gave him CPR until the EMTs came and took him off to the hospital.”

“So,” Lily said, “did you get the—uh—did you get anything special?”

“What?” Charlie’s eyes went wide. “What do you mean, special? There was nothing special.”

“Chill, boss, I just meant will we get the grandma’s clothes?” He’s it, Lily thought. The fucker.

Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know, it’s so strange. The whole thing is so strange.” He shuddered when he said it.

“Strange how?” Lily said. “Strange in a cool and dark way, or strange because you’re Asher and you’re out of it most of the time?”

“Lily!” Ray snapped. “Go out front. Dust something.”

“You’re not the boss of me, Ray. I’m just showing my concern.”

“It’s okay, Ray.” Charlie looked like he was considering how, exactly, to define strange, and not coming up with anything that was working. Finally he said, “Well, for one thing, this woman’s estate is way out of our league. The husband said he called me because we were the first secondhand store in the phone book, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of man to do something like that.”

“That’s not that strange,” Lily said. Just confess, she thought.

“You said that he was grief-stricken,” Ray said, dabbing antibiotic ointment on Charlie’s cuts. “Maybe he’s doing things differently.”

“Yes, and he was angry at his wife, too, for the way she died.”

“How?” Lily asked.

“She ate silica gel,” Charlie said.

Lily looked at Ray for an explanation, because silica gel sounded techno-geeky, which was Ray’s particular field of geekdom. Ray said, “It’s the antidesiccant that they pack with electronics and other things that are sensitive to humidity.”

“The ‘Do Not Eat’ stuff?!” Lily said. “Oh my God, that’s so stupid. Everyone knows you don’t eat the ‘Do Not Eat’ stuff.”

Charlie said, “Mr. Mainheart was pretty broken up.”

“Well, I guess so,” Lily said. “He married a complete fucktard.”

Charlie cringed. “Lily, that’s not appropriate.”

Lily shrugged and rolled her eyes. She hated it when Charlie dropped into Dad mode. “Okay, okay. I’m going outside to smoke.”

“No!” Charlie jumped out of the chair and put himself between Lily and the back door. “Out front. From now on if you have to smoke you go out front.”

“But you said that I look like a child hooker when I smoke out front.”

“I’ve reassessed. You’ve matured.”

Lily closed one eye to see if she could better glimpse into his soul and thus figure out his true agenda. She smoothed over her black vinyl skirt, which made a tortured, squeaking noise at the touch. “You’re trying to say I have a big butt, aren’t you?”

“I absolutely am saying no such thing,” Charlie insisted. “I am simply saying that your presence in front of the store is an asset and will probably attract business from the tourists on the cable car.”

“Oh. Okay.” Lily snatched her box of cloves off the desk and headed out past the counter and outside to brood, grieve really, because as much as she had hoped, she was not Death. The book was Charlie’s.

That evening Charlie was watching the store, wondering why he had lied to his employees, when he saw a flash of red passing by the front window. A second later, a strikingly pale redhead came through the door. She was wearing a short, black cocktail dress and black fuck-me pumps. She strode up the aisle like she was auditioning for a music video. Her hair cascaded in long curls around her shoulders and down her back like a great auburn veil. Her eyes were emerald green, and when she saw him looking, she smiled, and stopped, some ten feet away.

Charlie felt an almost painful jolt that seemed to emanate from somewhere in the area of his groin, and after a second he recognized it as an autonomic lust response. He hadn’t felt anything like that since Rachel had passed, and he felt vaguely ashamed.

She was examining him, looking him over like you would examine a used car. He was sure he must be blushing.

“Hi,” Charlie said. “Can I help you?”

The redhead smiled again, just a little, and reached into a small black bag that he hadn’t noticed she’d been carrying. “I found this,” she said, holding up a silver cigarette case. Something Charlie didn’t see very often anymore, even in the secondhand business. It was glowing, pulsating like the objects in the back room. “I was in the neighborhood and something made me think that this belonged here.”

She moved to the counter opposite Charlie and set the cigarette case down in front of him.

Charlie could barely move. He stared at her, not even conscious that to avoid her eyes he was staring at her cleavage, and she appeared to be looking around his head and shoulders as if following the path of insects that were buzzing around him.

“Touch me,” she said.

“Huh?” He looked up, saw she was serious. She held out her hand; her nails were manicured and painted the same deep red as her lipstick. He took her hand.

As soon as she touched him she pulled away. “You’re warm.”

“Thanks.” In that moment he realized that she wasn’t. Her fingers had been ice-cold.

“Then you’re not one of us?”

He tried to think of what “us” might be? Irish? Low blood pressure? Nymphomaniac? Why did he even think that? “Us? What do you mean, ‘us’?”

She backed away a step. “No. You don’t just take the weak and the sick, do you? You take anyone.”

“Take? What do you mean, ‘take’?”

“You don’t even know, do you?”

“Know what?” Charlie was getting very nervous. As a Beta Male, he found it difficult enough to function under the attention of a beautiful woman, but she was just plain spooky. “Wait. Can you see this thing glowing?” He held out the cigarette case.

“No glow. It just felt like it belonged here,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie Asher. This is Asher’s.”

“Well, Charlie, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t know exactly what you are, and it doesn’t seem like you know. You don’t, do you?”

“I’ve been going through some changes,” Charlie said, wondering why he felt compelled to share this at all.

The redhead nodded, as if confirming something to herself. “Okay. I know what it’s like to, uh, to find yourself thrown into a situation where forces beyond your control are changing you into someone, something you don’t have an owner’s manual for. I understand what it is to not know. But someone, somewhere, does know. Someone can tell you what’s going on.”

“What are you talking about?” But he knew what she was talking about. What he didn’t know was how she could possibly know.

“You make people die, don’t you, Charlie?” She said it like she had worked up the courage to tell him that he had some spinach in his teeth. More of a service to him than an accusation.

“How do you—?” How did she—

“Because it’s what I do. Not like you, but it’s what I do. Find them, Charlie. Backtrack and find whoever was there when your world changed.”

Charlie looked at her, then at the cigarette case, then at the redhead again, who was no longer smiling, but was stepping backward toward the door. Trying to stay in touch with normal, he focused on the cigarette case and said, “I suppose I can do an appraisal—”

He heard the bell over the door jingle, and when he looked up she was gone.

He didn’t see her moving by the windows on either side of the door; she was just gone. He ran to the front of the store and out the door onto the sidewalk. The Mason Street cable car was just topping the hill up by California Street and he could hear the bell, there was a thin fog coming up from the Bay that threw colorful halos around the neon signs of the other businesses, but there was no striking redhead on the street. He went to the corner and looked down Vallejo, but again no redhead, just the Emperor, sitting against the building with his dogs.

“Good evening, Charlie.”

“Your Majesty, did you see a redhead go by here just now?”

“Oh yes. Spoke to her. I’m not sure you have a chance there, Charlie, I believe she’s spoken for. And she did warn me to stay away from you.”

“Why? Did she say why?”

“She said that you were Death.”

“I am?” Charlie said. “Am I?” His breath caught in his throat as the day played back in his head. “What if I am?”

“You know, son,” the Emperor said, “I am not an expert in dealing with the fairer sex, but you might want to save that bit of information until the third date or so, after they’ve gotten to know you a little.”

7 THANATOAST

While Charlie’s Beta Male imagination may have often turned him toward timidity and even paranoia, when it came to accepting the unacceptable it served him like Kevlar toilet paper—bulletproof, if a tad disagreeable in application. The inability to believe the unbelievable would not be his downfall. Charlie Asher would never be a bug splattered on the smoky windscreen of dull imagination.

He knew that all the things that had happened to him in the last day were outside of the limits of possibility for most people, and since his only corroborating witness was a man who believed himself to be the Emperor of San Francisco, Charlie knew he would never be able to convince anyone that he had been pursued and attacked by giant foulmouthed ravens and then declared the tour guide to the undiscovered country by a sultry oracle in fuck-me pumps.

Not even Jane would give him that kind of quarter. Only one person would have, could have, and for the ten-thousandth time he felt Rachel’s absence collapsing in his chest like a miniature black hole. Thus, Sophie became his co-conspirator.

The tiny kid, dressed in Elmo overalls and baby Doc Martens (courtesy of Aunt Jane), was propped up in her car seat on the breakfast bar next to the goldfish bowl. (Charlie had bought her six big goldfish about the time she’d started to notice moving objects. A girl needs pets. He’d named them after TV lawyers. Currently Matlock was tracking Perry Mason, trying to eat a long strand of fish doo that was trailing out of Perry’s poop chute.)

Sophie was starting to show some of her mother’s dark hair, and if Charlie saw it right, the same expression of bemused affection toward him (plus a drool slick).

“So I am Death,” Charlie said as he tried to construct a tuna-fish sandwich. “Daddy is Death, sweetie.” He checked the toast, not trusting the pop-up mechanism because the toaster people sometimes just liked to fuck with you.

“Death,” Charlie said as the can opener slipped and he barked his bandaged hand on the counter. “Dammit!”

Sophie gurgled and let loose a happy baby burble, which Charlie took to mean Do tell, Daddy? Please go on, pray tell.

“I can’t even leave the house for fear of someone dropping dead at my feet. I’m Death, honey. Sure, you laugh now, but you’ll never get into a good preschool with a father who puts people down for their dirt nap.”

Sophie blew a spit bubble of sympathy. Charlie popped the toast up manually. It was a little rare, but if he pushed it down again it would burn, unless he watched it every second and popped it up manually again. So now he’d probably be infected with some rare and debilitating undercooked toast pathogen. Mad toast disease! Fucking toaster people.

“This is the toast of Death, young lady.” He showed her the toast. “Death’s toast.”

He put the toast on the counter and went back to attacking the tuna can.

“Maybe she was speaking figuratively? I mean, maybe the redhead just meant that I was, you know, deadly boring.” Of course that didn’t really explain all the other weird stuff that had been happening. “You think?” he asked Sophie.

He looked for an answer and the kid was wearing that Rachelesque smart-ass grin (minus teeth). She was enjoying his torment, and strangely enough, he felt better knowing that.

The can opener slipped again, spurting tuna juice on his shirt and sending his toast scooting to the floor, and now there was fuzz on it. Fuzz on his toast! Fuzz on the toast of Death. What the hell good was it to be the Lord of the Underworld if there was fuzz on your underdone toast. “Fuck!”

He snatched the toast from the floor and sent it sailing by Sophie into the living room. The baby followed it with her eyes, then looked back at her father with a delighted squeal, as if saying, Do it again, Daddy. Do it again!

Charlie picked her up out of the car seat and held her tight, smelling her sour-sweet baby smell, his tears squeezing out onto her overalls. He could do this if Rachel was here, but he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, without her.

He just wouldn’t go out. That was the solution. The only way to keep the people of San Francisco safe was to stay in his apartment. So for the next four days he stayed in the apartment with Sophie, sending Mrs. Ling from upstairs out for groceries. (And he was accumulating a fairly large collection of vegetables for which he had no name nor any idea of how to prepare, as Mrs. Ling, regardless of what he put on the list, always did her shopping in the markets of Chinatown.) And after two days, when a new name appeared on the message pad next to his bed, Charlie responded by hiding the message pad under the phone book in a kitchen drawer.

It was on day five that he saw the shadow of a raven against the roof entrance of the building across the street. At first he wasn’t sure whether it was a giant raven, or just a normal-sized raven projecting a shadow, but when he realized that it was noon and any normal shadow would be cast straight down, the tiny raven of denial vanished in a wisp. He pulled the blinds on that side of the apartment and sat in the locked bedroom with Sophie, a box of Pampers, a basket of produce, a six-pack each of baby formula and orange soda, and hid out until the phone rang.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said a very deep man’s voice on the other end of the line. “Are you insane?”

Charlie was taken aback; from the caller ID, he’d expected a wrong number. “I’m eating this thing I think is either a melon or a squash.” He looked at the green thing, which tasted like a melon but looked more like a squash, with spikes. (Mrs. Ling had called it “shut-up-and-eat-it-good-for-you.”)

The man said, “You’re screwing up. You have a job to do. Do what the book says or everything that means anything to you will be taken away. I mean it.”

“What book? Who is this?” Charlie asked. He thought the voice sounded familiar, and it immediately sent him into alarm mode for some reason.

“I can’t tell you that, I’m sorry,” said the man. “I really am.”

“I’ve got caller ID, you nit. I know where you’re calling from.”

“Oops,” said the man.

“You should have thought of that. What kind of ominous power of darkness do you think you are if you don’t even block caller ID?”

The little readout on the phone said Fresh Music and a number. Charlie called the number back but no one answered. He ran to the kitchen, dug the phone book out of the drawer, and looked up Fresh Music. It was a record store off upper Market in the Castro district.

The phone rang again and he grabbed the handset off the counter so violently he nearly chipped a tooth in answering.

“You merciless bastard!” Charlie screamed into the phone. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been going through, you heartless monster!”

“Well, fuck you, Asher!” Lily said. “Just because I’m a kid doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.” And she hung up.

Charlie called back.

“Asher’s Secondhand,” Lily answered, “family-owned by bourgeoisie douche waffles for over thirty years.”

“Lily, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. What did you call about?”

“Moi?” Lily said. “Je me fous de ta gueule, espèce de gaufre de douche.”

“Lily, stop speaking French. I said I was sorry.”

“There’s a cop down here to see you,” she said.

Charlie had Sophie strapped to his chest like a terrorist baby bomb when he came down the back steps. She had just gotten to the point where she could hold up her head, so he had strapped her in face-out so she could look around. The way her arms and legs waved around as Charlie walked, she looked as if she was skydiving and using a skinny nerd as a parachute.

The cop stood at the counter opposite Lily, looking like a cognac ad in an Italian-cut double-breasted suit in indigo raw silk with a buff linen shirt and yellow tie. He was about fifty, Hispanic, lean, with sharp facial features and the aspect of a predatory bird. His hair was combed straight back and the gray streaks at the temples made it appear that he was moving toward you even when he stood still.

“Inspector Alphonse Rivera,” the cop said, extending his hand. “Thanks for coming down. The young lady said you were working last Monday night.”

Monday. The day he’d battled the ravens back in the alley, the day the pale redhead had come into the store.

“You don’t have to tell him anything, Asher,” Lily said, obviously renewing her loyalty in spite of his douche wafflosity.

“Thanks, Lily, why don’t you take a break and go see how things are going in the abyss.”

She grumbled, then got something out of the drawer under the register, presumably her cigarettes, and retreated out the back door.

“Why isn’t that kid in school?” Rivera asked.

“She’s special,” Charlie said. “You know, homeschooled.”

“That what makes her so cheerful?”

“She’s studying the Existentialists this month. Asked for a study day last week to kill an Arab on the beach.”

Rivera smiled and Charlie relaxed a little. He produced a photograph from his breast pocket and held it out to Charlie. Sophie made as if to grab it. The photograph was of an older gentleman in his Sunday best standing on the steps of a church. Charlie recognized the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, which was just a few blocks away on Washington Square.

“Did you see this man Monday night? He was wearing a charcoal overcoat and a hat that night.”

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t,” Charlie said. And he hadn’t. “I was here in the store until about ten. We had a few customers, but not this fellow.”

“Are you sure? His name is James O’Malley. He isn’t well. Cancer. His wife said he went out for a walk about dusk Monday night and he never came back.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “Did you ask the cable-car operator?”

“Already talked to the guys working this line that night. We think he may have collapsed somewhere and we haven’t found him. It doesn’t look good after this long.”

Charlie nodded, trying to look thoughtful. He was so relieved that the cop wasn’t here about anything connected with him that he was almost giddy. “Maybe you should ask the Emperor—you know him, right? He sees more of the nooks and crannies of the city than most of us.”

Rivera cringed at the mention of the Emperor, but then relaxed into another smile. “That’s a good idea, Mr. Asher. I’ll see if I can track him down.” He handed Charlie a card. “If you remember anything, give me a call, would you?”

“I will. Uh, Inspector,” Charlie said, and Rivera paused a few steps from the counter, “isn’t this sort of a routine case for an inspector to be investigating?”

“Yes, normally uniform personnel would handle something like this, but it may relate to something else I’m working on, so you get me instead.”

“Oh, okay,” Charlie said. “Beautiful suit, by the way. Couldn’t help noticing. It’s my business.”

“Thanks,” Rivera said, looking at his sleeves, a little wistful. “I had a short run of good fortune a while back.”

“Good for you,” Charlie said.

“It passed,” Rivera said. “Cute baby. You two take care, huh?” And he was out the door.

Charlie turned to go back upstairs and nearly ran into Lily. She had her arms crossed under the “Hell Is Other People” logo on her T-shirt and was looking even more judgmental than usual. “So, Asher, you have something you want to tell me?”

“Lily, I don’t have time for—”

She held out the silver cigarette case that the redhead had given him. It was still glowing red. Sophie was reaching for it.

“What?” Charlie said. Could Lily see it? Was she picking up on the weird glow?

Lily opened the case and pushed it into Charlie’s face. “Read the engraving.”

James O’Malley, read the ornate script.

Charlie took a step back. “Lily, I can’t—I don’t know anything about that old man. Look, I have to get Mrs. Ling to watch Sophie and get over to the Castro. I’ll explain later, okay? I promise.”

She thought about it for a second, staring at him accusingly, like she’d caught him feeding Froot Loops to her bête noire, and then relented. “Go,” she said.

8 A STREETCAR NAMED CONFUSION

Into the breech of the Castro district Charlie Asher charged, an antique sword-cane from the store on the van seat beside him, his jaw set like a bayonet, his visage a study in fearsome intensity. Half a block, half a block, half of a block onward—into the Valley of Overpriced Juice Bars and Outlandish Hair Highlights—rode the righteous Beta Male. And woe be unto the foolish ne’er-do-well who had dared to fuck with this secondhand death dealer, for his raggedy life would be fast for the bargain table. There’s going to be a showdown in Gay Town, Charlie thought, and I am gunning for justice.

Well, not really gunning—since he had a sword concealed in a walking stick, not a gun—more of a poking for justice—which didn’t really have the avenging angel connotation he was looking for—he was mad, and ready to kick ass, that’s all. So, you know, just watch out. (Coincidentally, Poking for Justice was the title currently second in popularity at Castro Video Rentals, closely edging out A Star Is Born: The Director’s Cut, and outranked only by Cops Without Pants, which was number one with a bullwhip.)

Charlie turned off Market Street and just around the corner on Noe Street he saw it: Fresh Music, the sign done in blocky, Craftsman-style stained glass, and he felt the hair at the back of his neck bristle and an urgency in his bladder. His body had gone into fight-or-flight mode, and for the second time in a week, he was going against his Beta Male nature and choosing to fight. Well, so be it, he thought. So be it. He would confront his tormentor and lay him low, as soon as he found a parking place—which he didn’t.

He circled the block, cutting between cafés and bars, both of which were in abundance in the Castro. He drove up and down the side streets, lined with rows of immaculately kept (exorbitantly priced) Victorians and found no quarter for his trusty steed. After a half hour of orbiting the neighborhood, he headed back uptown and found a spot in a parking garage in the Fillmore, then took the antique streetcar back down Market Street to the Castro. A cute little green, Italian-made antique streetcar, with oak benches, brass railings, and mahogany window frames—a charming brass bell and a top speed of about twenty miles per hour: this is how Charlie Asher charged into battle. He tried to imagine a horde of Huns hanging off the sides, waving wicked blades and firing arrows as they passed the murals in the Mission district, perhaps Viking raiders, shields fastened to the sides of the car, a great drum pounding as they rowed in to pillage the antique shops, the leather bars, the sushi bars, the leather sushi bars (don’t ask), and the art galleries, in the Castro. And here, even Charlie’s formidable imagination failed him. He got off the car at Castro and Market and walked back a block to Fresh Music, then paused outside the shop, wondering what in the hell he was going to do now.

What if the caller had just borrowed the phone? What if he stormed in screaming and threatening, and there was just some confused kid behind the counter? But then he looked in the door, and there, standing behind the counter, all alone, was an extraordinarily tall black man dressed completely in mint green, and at that point Charlie lost his mind.

“You killed her,” Charlie screamed as he stormed by the racks of CDs toward the man in mint. He drew the sword as he ran, or tried to, hoping to bring it out in a single fluid movement from the cane sheath and across the throat of Rachel’s killer. But the sword-cane had been in the back of Charlie’s shop for a long time, and except for three times when Lily’s friend Abby tried to leave with it (once trying to buy it, when Charlie refused to sell it to her, then twice trying to steal it), the sword hadn’t been drawn in years. The little brass stud that you pushed to release the blade had stuck, so when Charlie delivered the deathblow, he swung the entire cane, which was heavier—and slower—than the sword would have been. The man in mint green—quick for his size—ducked, and Charlie took out an entire row of Judy Garland CDs, lost his balance, bounced off the counter, spun around, and again tried for the single draw-and-cut move that he had seen so many times in samurai movies, and had practiced so many times in his head on the way here. This time the sword came free of the scabbard and slashed a deadly arch three feet in front of the man in mint, completely decapitating a life-sized cutout of Barbra Streisand.

“That is un-unfucking called for!” thundered the tall man.

As Charlie recovered his balance for a backhand slash, he saw something large and dark coming down over him and recognized it at the last instant, as the antique cash register slammed down on his head. There was a flash, a ding, and everything got dark and gooey.

When Charlie came to, he was tied to a chair in the back room of the record store, which looked remarkably like the back room of his own store, except all the stacked boxes were full of records and CDs instead of all variety of used jetsam. The tall black man was standing over him, and Charlie thought at first that he might be turning to mist or smoke, but then he realized it was just that his vision was going wavy, and then pain lit up the inside of his head like a strobe light.

“Ouch.”

“How’s your neck?” asked the tall man. “Does your neck feel broken? Can you feel your feet?”

“Go ahead, kill me, you fucking coward,” said Charlie, bucking around in the chair, trying to lunge at his captor and feeling a little like the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail after his arms and legs had been hacked off. If this guy took one step closer, Charlie could head-butt him in the nads, he was sure of it.

The tall man stomped on Charlie’s toes, a size-eighteen glove-leather loafer driven by two hundred and seventy pounds of death and used-record dealer.

“Ouch!” Charlie hopped his chair in a little circle of pain. “Goddammit! Ouch!”

“So you do have feeling in your feet?”

“Get it over with. Go ahead.” Charlie stretched his neck as if offering his throat to be cut—his strategy was to lure his captor into range, then sever the tall man’s femoral artery with his teeth, then gloat as the blood coursed all over his mint-green slacks onto the floor. Charlie would laugh long and sinister as he watched the life drain out of the evil bastard, then he would hop his chair out to the street and onto the streetcar at Market, transfer to the number forty-one bus at Van Ness, hop off at Columbus, and hop the two blocks home, where someone would untie him. He had a plan—and a bus pass with four more days left on it—so this son of a bitch had picked the wrong guy to fuck with.

“I have no intention of killing you, Charlie,” said the tall man, keeping a safe distance. “I’m sorry I had to hit you with the register. You didn’t really leave me any options.”

“You could have tasted the fatal sting of my blade!” Charlie glanced around for his sword-cane, just in case the guy had left it within reach.

“Yeah, sure, there was that one, but I thought I’d go with the one without the stains and the funeral.”

Charlie strained against his bonds, which he realized now were plastic shopping bags. “You’re messing with Death, you know? I am Death.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You do?”

“Sure.” The tall man spun another wooden chair around and sat on it reversed, facing Charlie. His knees were up at the level of his elbows and he looked like a great green tree frog, crouched to pounce on an insect. Charlie noticed for the first time that he had golden eyes, stark and striking in contrast to his dark skin. “So am I,” said the evil mint-green frog guy.

“You? You’re Death?”

“A Death, not THE Death. I don’t think there is a THE Death. Not anymore, anyway.”

Charlie couldn’t grasp it, so he struggled and wobbled until the tall man had to reach out and steady him to keep him from toppling over.

“You killed Rachel.”

“I did not.”

“I saw you there.”

“Yes, you did. That’s a problem. Will you please stop thrashing around?” He shook Charlie’s chair. “But I wasn’t instrumental in Rachel’s death. That’s not what we do, not anymore, anyway. Didn’t you even look at the book?”

“What book? You said something about a book on the phone.”

“The Great Big Book of Death. I sent it to your shop. I told a woman at the counter that I was sending it, and I got delivery confirmation, so I know it got there.”

“What woman—Lily? She’s not a woman, she’s a kid.”

“No, this was a woman about your age, with New Wave hair.”

“Jane? No. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t get any book.”

“Oh, shit. That explains why they’ve been showing up. You didn’t even know.”

“Who? What? They?”

Mint Green Death sighed heavily. “I guess we’re going to be here awhile. I’m going to make some coffee. Do you want some?”

“Sure, try to lull me into a false sense of security, then spring.”

“You’re tied the fuck up, motherfucker, I don’t need to lull you into shit. You’ve been fucking with the fabric of human existence and someone needed to shut your ass down.”

“Oh, sure, go black on me. Play the ethnic card.”

Mint Green climbed to his feet and headed toward the door to the shop. “You want cream?”

“And two sugars, please,” Charlie said.

This is really cool, why are you giving it back?” said Abby Normal. Abby was Lily’s best friend, and they were sitting on the floor in the back room of Asher’s Secondhand, looking through The Great Big Book of Death. Abby’s real name was Alison, but she would no longer tolerate the ignominy of what she called her “daylight-slave name.” Everyone had been much more responsive to calling her by her chosen name than they had been to Lily’s, Darquewillow Elventhing, which you always had to spell for people.

“Turns out it’s Asher, not me,” Lily said. “He’ll be really pissed if he finds out I took it. And he’s Death now, I guess, so I could get in trouble.”

“Are you going to tell him you had the book?” Abby scratched the silver spider stud in her eyebrow; it was a fresh piercing and still healing and she couldn’t stop messing with it. Abby, like Lily, was dressed all in black, boots to hair, the difference being that she had a black-widow’s red hourglass on the front of her black T-shirt and she was thinner and more waiflike in her affected creepiness.

“No. I’ll just say it got misfiled. That happens a lot here.”

“How long did you think it was you?”

“Like a month.”

“What about the dreams and the names and stuff it talks about, you didn’t have any of that, right?”

“I thought I was just growing into my powers. I made a lot of lists of people I wanted gone.”

“Yeah, I do that. And you just found out yesterday that it was Asher?”

“Yeah,” said Lily.

“That sucks,” said Abby.

“Life sucks,” said Lily.

“So, what now?” asked Abby. “Junior college?”

They both nodded, woefully, and looked into the depths of their respective nail polishes to avoid sharing the humiliation of one of them having gone from dark demigod to local loser in an instant. They lived their lives hoping for something grand and dark and supernatural to happen, so when it had, they took it more in stride than was probably healthy. Fear, after all, is a survival mechanism.

“So all these things are soul objects?” asked Abby, as cheerfully as her integrity would allow. She waved to the piles of stuff Charlie had marked with “Do Not Sell” signs. “There’s like a person’s soul in there?”

“According to the book,” said Lily. “Asher says he can see them glow.”

“I like the red Converse All Stars.”

“Take them, they’re yours,” said Lily.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Lily said. She took the All Stars off the shelf and held them out. “He’ll never miss them.”

“Cool. I have the perfect pair of red fishnets I can wear with them.”

“They probably have the soul of some sweaty jock in them,” Lily said.

“He may worship at my feet,” said Abby, doing a pirouette and an arabesque (remnants, along with an eating disorder, of ten years of ballet lessons).

So I’m like a Santa’s Helper of Death?!” Charlie said, waving his coffee cup. The tall man had untied his one arm so he could drink his coffee, and Charlie was baptizing the stockroom floor with French roast with every gesture. Mr. Fresh frowned.

“What in the hell are you talking about, Asher?” Fresh felt bad about hitting Charlie Asher with a cash register and tying him up, and now he was wondering if the blow hadn’t caused some sort of brain damage.

“I’m talking about the Santa at Macy’s, Fresh. When you’re a kid, and you notice that the Santa Claus at Macy’s has a fake beard, and that there are at least six Salvation Army Santas working Union Square, you ask your parents about it and they tell you that the real Santa is in the North Pole, and he’s really busy, so all these other guys are Santa’s helpers, who are out helping him with his work. That’s what you’re saying, that we’re Santa’s helpers to Death?”

Mr. Fresh had been standing by his desk, but now he sat down again across from Charlie so he could look him in the eye. Very softly he said, “Charlie, you know that that’s not true now, right? I mean about Santa’s helpers and all?”

“Of course I know that there’s no Santa Claus. I’m using it as a metaphor, you tool.”

Mr. Fresh took this opportunity to reach out and smack Charlie upside the head. Then immediately regretted it.

“Hey!” Charlie put down his cup and rubbed one of his receding-hairline inlets, which was going red from the blow.

“Rude,” said Mr. Fresh. “Let’s not be rude.”

“So you’re saying that there is a Santa?” Charlie said, cringing in anticipation of another smack. “Oh my God, how deep does this conspiracy go?”

“No, there’s no goddamn Santa. I’m just saying that I don’t know what we are. I don’t know if there is a big Death with a capital D, although the book hints that there used to be. I’m just saying that there are many of us, a dozen that I know of right here in the city—all of us picking up soul vessels and seeing that they get into the right hands.”

“And that’s based on someone randomly coming into your shop and buying a record?” Then Charlie’s eyes went wide as it hit him. “Rachel’s Sarah McLachlan CD. You took it?”

“Yes.” Fresh looked at the floor, not because he was ashamed, but to avoid seeing the pain in Charlie Asher’s eyes.

“Where is it? I want to see it,” said Charlie.

“I sold it.”

“To who? Find it. I want Rachel back.”

“I don’t know. To a woman. I didn’t get her name, but I’m sure it was meant for her. You’ll be able to tell.”

“I will? Why will I?” he asked. “Why me? I don’t want to kill people.”

“We don’t kill people, Mr. Asher. That’s a misconception. We simply facilitate the ascendance of the soul.”

“Well, one guy died because I said something to him, and another had a heart attack because of something I did. A death that results from your actions is basically killing someone, unless you’re a politician, right? So why me? I’m not that highly skilled at bullshit. So why me?”

Mr. Fresh considered what Charlie was saying, and felt like something sinister had crawled up his spine. In all his years, he didn’t remember ever having his actions directly result in someone’s death, nor had he heard of it happening with the other Death Merchants. Of course you occasionally showed up at the time when the person was passing, but not often, and never as a cause.

“Well?” Charlie said.

Mr. Fresh shrugged. “Because you saw me. Surely you’ve noticed that no one sees you when you’re out to get a soul vessel.”

“I’ve never gone out to get a soul vessel.”

“Yes, you have, and you will, at least you should be. You need to get with the program, Mr. Asher.”

“Yeah, so you said. So you’re—uh—we’re invisible when we’re out getting these soul vessels?”

“Not invisible, so to speak, it’s just that no one sees us. You can go right into people’s homes and they’ll never notice you standing right beside them, but if you speak to someone on the street they’ll see you, waitresses will take your order, cabs will stop for you—well, not me, I’m black, but, you know, they would. It’s sort of a will thing, I think. I’ve tested it. Animals can see us, by the way. You’ll want to watch out for dogs when you’re retrieving a vessel.”

“So that’s how you got to be a—what do they call us?”

“Death Merchants.”

“Get out. Really?”

“It’s not in the book. I came up with it.”

“It’s very cool.”

“Thanks.” Mr. Fresh smiled, relieved for a moment not to be thinking about the gravity of Charlie’s unique transition to Death Merchant. “Actually, I think it’s a character from an album cover, guy behind a cash register, eyes glowing red, but I didn’t know that when I came up with it.”

“Well, it makes perfect sense.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” said Mr. Fresh. “More coffee?”

“Please.” Charlie held out his empty cup. “So, someone saw you. That’s how you became a Death Merchant?”

“No, that’s how you became one. I think that you may, uh—” Fresh didn’t want to mislead this poor guy, but on the other hand he didn’t actually know what had happened. “I think you may be different from the rest of us. No one saw me. I was working security for a casino in Vegas when that went sour for me—I have a problem with authority, I’m told—so I came to San Francisco and opened this shop, started dealing in used records and CDs, mostly jazz at first. After a while it just started happening: the glowing soul vessels, people coming in with them, finding them at estate sales. I don’t know why or how, it just did, and I didn’t say anything about it to anyone. Then the book came in the mail.”

“The book again. Don’t you have a copy around?”

“There’s only one copy. At least that I know of.”

“And you just mailed it out?”

“I sent it certified mail!” Fresh boomed. “Someone at your store signed for it. I think I did my part.”

“Okay, sorry, go on.”

“Anyway, when I got to the Castro it was a very sad place. The only guys you saw on the street were very old or very young, all the ones in the middle were either dead or sick with HIV, walking with canes, towing oxygen cylinders. Death was everywhere. It’s like there needed to be a soul way station, and I was here, trading records. Then the book showed up in the mail. There were a lot of souls coming in. For those first few years I was picking up vessels every day, sometimes two or three times a day. You’d be surprised how many gay men have their souls in their music.”

“Have you sold them all?”

“No. They come in, they go out. There’s always some inventory.”

“But how can you be sure the right person gets the right soul?”

“Not my problem, is it?” Mr. Fresh shrugged. He’d worried about it at first, but it seemed to all happen as it should, and he’d gotten into the rhythm of trusting whatever mechanism or power was behind all of this.

“Well, if that’s your attitude, why do it at all? I don’t want this job. I have a job, and a kid.”

“You have to do it. Believe me, after I got the book, I tried not doing it. We all did. At least the ones I’ve talked to did. I’m guessing you’ve already seen what happens if you don’t. You’ll start hearing the voices, then the shades start coming. The book calls them Underworlders.”

“The giant ravens? Them?”

“They were just indistinct shadows and voices until you showed up. There’s something going on. Starting with you, and continuing with you. You let them get a soul vessel, didn’t you?”

“Me? You said there’s a bunch of Death Merchants.”

“The others know better. It was you. You fucked up. I thought I saw one flying over earlier in the week. Then today, I was out walking, and the voices were bad. Really bad. That’s when I called you. It was you, wasn’t it?”

Charlie nodded. “I didn’t know. How could I know?”

“So they got one?”

“Two,” Charlie said. “A hand came out of the sewer. It was my first day.”

“Well, that’s it,” said Fresh, cradling his head in his hands. “We are most certainly fucked now.”

“You don’t know that,” Charlie said, trying to look on the bright side. “We could have been fucked before. I mean, we run secondhand stores for dead people, that’s sort of a definition of fucked.”

Mr. Fresh looked up. “The book says if we don’t do our jobs everything could go dark, become like the Underworld. I don’t know what the Underworld is like, Mr. Asher, but I’ve caught some of the road show from there a couple of times, and I’m not interested in finding out. How ’bout you?”

“Maybe it’s Oakland,” Charlie said.

“What’s Oakland?”

“The Underworld.”

“Oakland is not the Underworld!” Mr. Fresh leapt to his feet; he was not a violent man, you really didn’t have to be when you were his size, but—

“The Tenderloin?” Charlie suggested.

“Don’t make me smack you. Neither of us wants that, do we, Mr. Asher?”

Charlie shook his head. “I’ve seen the ravens,” Charlie said, “but I haven’t heard any voices. What voices?”

“They talk to you when you’re on the street. Sometimes you’ll hear a voice coming out of a heating vent, a downspout, sometimes a storm drain. It’s them, all right. Female voices, taunting. I’ve gone years without hearing them, I’ll almost forget, then I’ll be going to pick up a vessel, and one will call to me. I used to phone the other merchants, ask them if they’d done something, but we stopped that right away.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s part of what we think brings them up. We’re not supposed to have any contact. It took us a while to figure that out. I had only found six of the merchants in the city back then, and we were having lunch once a week, talking about what we knew, comparing notes—that’s when we saw the first of the shades. In fact, just to be safe, this will be the last time that you and I have contact.” Mr. Fresh shrugged again and began to untie Charlie’s bonds, thinking: It all changed that day at the hospital. This guy has changed everything, and I’m sending him out like a lamb to the slaughter—or maybe he’s the one to do the slaughtering. This guy might be the one—

“Wait, I don’t know anything,” Charlie pleaded. “You can’t just send me out to do this without more background. What about my daughter? How do I know who to sell the souls to?” He was panicked and trying to ask all the questions before he was set free. “What are the numbers after the names? Do you get the names like that? How long do I have to do this before I can retire. Why are you always dressed in mint green?” As Mr. Fresh untied one ankle, Charlie was trying to tie the other back to the chair.

“My name,” said Mr. Fresh.

“Pardon?” Charlie stopped tying himself up.

“I dress in mint green because of my first name. It’s Minty.”

Charlie completely forgot what he was worried about. “Minty? Your name is Minty Fresh?”

Charlie appeared to be trying to stifle a sneeze, but then snorted an explosive laugh. Then ducked.

9 THE DRAGON, THE BEAR, AND THE FISH

In the hallway of the third floor of Charlie’s building, a meeting was going on between the great powers of Asia: Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Korjev. Mrs. Ling, by holding Sophie, had the strategic advantage, while Mrs. Korjev, who was fully twice the size of Mrs. Ling, possessed the threat of massive retaliatory force. What they had in common, besides being widows and immigrants, was a deep love for little Sophie, a precarious grasp on the English language, and a passionate lack of confidence in Charlie Asher’s ability to raise his daughter alone.

“He is angry when he leave today. Like bear,” said Mrs. Korjev, who was possessed of an atavistic compulsion toward ursine simile.

“He say no poke,” said Mrs. Ling, who limited herself to English verbs in the present tense only, as a devotion to her Chan Buddhist beliefs, or so she claimed. “Who give poke to baby?”

“Pork is good for child. Make her grow strong,” said Mrs. Korjev, who then quickly added, “like bear.”

“He say it turn her into shih tzu. Shih tzu is dog. What kind father think little girl turn into dog?” Mrs. Ling was especially protective of little girls, as she had grown up in a province of China where each morning a man with a cart came around to collect the bodies of baby girls who had been born during the night and hurled into the street. She was lucky that her own mother had spirited her away to the fields and refused to come home until the new daughter was accepted as part of the family.

“Not shih tzu,” corrected Mrs. Korjev. “Shiksa.”

“Okay, shiksa. Dog is dog,” said Mrs. Ling. “Is irresponsible.” Not once was the letter r heard in Mrs. Ling’s pronunciation of irresponsible.

“Is Yiddish word for not a Jew girl. Rachel is Jew, you know.” Mrs. Korjev, unlike most of the Russian immigrants left in the neighborhood, was not a Jew. Her people had come from the steppes of Russia, and she was, in fact, descended from Cossacks—not generally considered a Hebrew-friendly race. She atoned for the sins of her ancestors by being ferociously protective (not unlike a mother bear) of Rachel, and now Sophie.

“The flowers need water today,” said Mrs. Korjev.

At the end of the hallway was a large bay window that looked out on the building across the street and a window box full of red geraniums. On afternoons, the two great Asian powers would stand in the hallway, admire the flowers, talk of the cost of things, and complain about the increasing discomfort of their shoes. Neither dared start her own window box of geraniums, lest it appear that she had stolen the idea from across the street, and in the process set off an escalating window-box competition that could ultimately end in bloodshed. They agreed, tacitly, to admire—but not covet—the red flowers.

Mrs. Korjev liked the very redness of them. She had always been angry that the Communists had co-opted that color, for otherwise it would have evoked an unbridled happiness in her. Then again, the Russian soul, conditioned by a thousand years of angst, really wasn’t equipped for unbridled happiness, so it was probably for the best.

Mrs. Ling was also taken with the red of the geraniums, for in her cosmology that color represented good fortune, prosperity, and long life. The very gates of the temples were painted that same color red, and so the red flowers represented one of the many paths to wu—eternity, enlightenment—essentially, the universe in a flower. She also thought that they would taste pretty good in soup.

Sophie had only recently discovered color, and the red splashes against the gray shiplap was enough to put a toothless smile on her little face.

So the three were staring into the joy of red flowers when the black bird hit the window, throwing a great spiderweb crack around it. But rather than fall away, the bird seemed to leak into the very crack, and spread, like black ink, across the window and in, onto the walls of the hallway.

And the great powers of Asia fled to the stairway.

Charlie was rubbing his left wrist where the plastic bag had been tied around it. “What, did your mother name you after a mouthwash ad?”

Mr. Fresh, looking somewhat vulnerable for a man of his size, said, “Toothpaste, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know,” Charlie said. “You could have changed it, right?”

“Mr. Asher, you can resist who you are for only so long. Finally you decide to just go with fate. For me that has involved being black, being seven feet tall—yet not in the NBA—being named Minty Fresh, and being recruited as a Death Merchant.” He raised an eyebrow as if accusing Charlie. “I have learned to accept and embrace all of those things.”

“I thought you were going to say gay,” Charlie said.

“What? A man doesn’t have to be gay to dress in mint green.”

Charlie considered Mr. Fresh’s mint-green suit—made from seersucker and entirely too light for the season—and felt a strange affinity for the refreshingly-named Death Merchant. Although he didn’t know it, Charlie was recognizing the signs of another Beta Male. (Of course there are gay Betas: the Beta Male boyfriend is highly prized in the gay community because you can teach him how to dress yet you can remain relatively certain that he will never develop a fashion sense or be more fabulous than you.) Charlie said, “I suppose you’re right, Mr. Fresh. I’m sorry if I made assumptions. My apologies.”

“That’s okay,” said Mr. Fresh. “But you really should go.”

“No, I still don’t understand, how do I know who the souls go to? I mean, after this happened, there were all kinds of soul vessels in my store I hadn’t even known about. How do I know I didn’t sell them to someone who already had one? What if someone has a set?”

“That can’t happen. At least as far as we know. Look, you’ll just know. Take my word for it. When people are ready to receive the soul, they get it. Have you ever studied any of the Eastern religions?”

“I live in Chinatown,” said Charlie, and although that was technically kinda-sorta true, he knew how to say exactly three things in Mandarin: Good day; light starch, please; and I am an ignorant white devil, all taught to him by Mrs. Ling. He believed the last to translate to “top of the morning to you.”

“Let me rephrase that, then,” said Mr. Fresh. “Have you ever studied any of the Eastern religions?”

“Oh, Eastern religions,” Charlie said, pretending he had just misinterpreted the question before. “Just Discovery Channel stuff—you know, Buddha, Shiva, Gandalf—the biggies.”

“You understand the concept of karma? How unresolved lessons are re-presented to you in another life.”

“Yes, of course. Duh.” Charlie rolled his eyes.

“Well, think of yourself as a soul reassignment agent. We are agents of karma.”

“Secret agents,” Charlie said wistfully.

“Well, I hope it goes without saying,” said Mr. Fresh, “that you can’t tell anyone what you are, so yes, I suppose we are secret agents of karma. We hold a soul until a person is ready to receive it.”

Charlie shook his head as if trying to clear water from his ears. “So if someone walks into my store and buys a soul vessel, until then they’ve been going through life without a soul? That’s awful.”

“Really?” said Minty Fresh. “Do you know if you have a soul?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’m me.” Charlie tapped his chest. “Here I am.”

“That’s just a personality,” said Minty, “and barely one. You could be an empty vessel, and you’d never know the difference. You may not have reached a point in life where you are ready to receive your soul.”

“Huh?”

“Your soul may be more evolved than you are right now. If a kid fails tenth grade, do you make him repeat grades K through nine?”

“No, I guess not.”

“No, you just make him start over at the beginning of tenth grade. Well, it’s the same with souls. They only ascend. A person gets a soul when they can carry it to the next level, when they are ready to learn the next lesson.”

“So if I sell one of those glowing objects to someone, they’ve been going through life without a soul?”

“That’s my theory,” said Minty Fresh. “I’ve read a lot on this subject over the years. Texts from every culture and religion, and this explains it better than anything else I can come up with.”

“Then it’s not all in the book you sent.”

“That’s just the practical instructions. There’s no explanations. It’s Dick-and-Jane simple. It says to get a calendar and put it next to your bed and the names will come to you. It doesn’t tell you how you will find them, or what the object is, just that you have to find them. Get a day planner. That’s what I use.”

“But what about the number? When I would find a name written next to the bed, there was always a number next to it.”

Mr. Fresh nodded and grinned a little sheepishly. “That’s how many days you’ll have to retrieve the soul vessel.”

“You mean it’s how long before the person dies? I don’t want to know that.”

“No, not how long before the person dies, how long you have to retrieve the vessel, how many days are left. I’ve been looking at this for a long time, and the number is never above forty-nine. I thought that might be significant, so I started looking for it in literature about death and dying. Forty-nine days just happens to be the number of days of bardo, the term used in the Tibetan Book of the Dead for the transition between life and death. Somehow, we Death Merchants are the medium for moving these souls, but we have to get there within the forty-nine days, that’s my theory, anyway. Don’t be surprised sometimes if the person has been dead for weeks before you get his name. You still have the number of days left in bardo to get the soul vessel.”

“And if I don’t make it in time?” Charlie asked.

Minty Fresh shook his head dolefully. “Shades, ravens, dark shit rising from the Underworld—who knows? Thing is, you have to find it in time. And you will.”

“How, if there’s no address or instructions, like ‘it’s under the mat.’”

“Sometimes—most of the time, in fact—they come to you. Circumstances line up.”

Charlie thought about the stunning redhead bringing him the silver cigarette case. “You said sometimes?”

Fresh shrugged. “Sometimes you have to really search, find the person, go to their house—once I even hired a detective to help me find someone, but that started to bring the voices. You can tell if you’re getting close by checking to see if people notice you.”

“But I have to make a living. I have a kid—”

“You’ll do that, too, Charlie. The money comes as part of the job. You’ll see.”

Charlie did see. He had seen already: the Mainheart estate clothing—he’d make tens of thousands on it if he got it.

“Now you have to go,” said Minty Fresh. He held out his hand to shake and a grin cut his face like a crescent moon in the night sky. Charlie took the tall man’s hand, his own hand disappearing into the Death Merchant’s grip.

“I’m still sure I have questions. Can I call you?”

“No,” said the mint one.

“Okay, then, I’m going now,” Charlie said, not really moving. “Completely at the mercy of forces of the Underworld and stuff.”

“You take care,” said Minty Fresh.

“No idea what the hell I’m doing,” Charlie went on, taking tentative baby steps toward the door. “The weight of all of humanity on my shoulders.”

“Yeah, make sure you stretch in the morning,” said the big man.

“By the way,” Charlie said, out of rhythm with his whining, “are you gay?”

“What I am,” said Minty Fresh, “is alone. Completely and entirely.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry I smacked you in the head.”

Charlie nodded, grabbed his sword-cane from behind the counter, and walked out of Fresh Music into an overcast San Francisco day.

Well, he wasn’t exactly Death, but he wasn’t Santa’s helper, either. It didn’t really matter that no one would believe him even if he told them. Death Merchant seemed a little dire, but he liked the idea of being a secret agent. An agent of KARMA—Karma Assessment Reassignment Murder and Ass—okay, he could work on the acronym later, but a secret agent nevertheless.

Actually, although he didn’t know it, Charlie was well suited to be a secret agent. Because they function below the radar, Beta Males make excellent spies. Not the “James Bond, Aston Martin with missiles, boning the beautiful Russian rocket scientist on an ermineskin bedspread” sort of spy—more the “bad comb-over, deep-cover bureaucrat fishing coffee-sodden documents out of a Dumpster” spy. His overt nonthreateningness allows him access to places and people that are closed to the Alpha Male, wearing his testosterone on his sleeve. The Beta male can, in fact, be dangerous, not so much in the “Jet Li entire body is a deadly weapon” way but more in the “drunk on the riding mower making a Luke Skywalker assault on the toolshed” sort of way.

So, as Charlie headed for the streetcar stop on Market Street, he mentally tried on his new persona as a secret agent, and was feeling pretty good about it, when, as he passed a storm drain, he heard a female voice whisper harshly, “We’ll get the little one. You’ll see, fresh Meat. We’ll have her soon.”

As soon as Charlie walked into his store from the alley, Lily bolted into the back room to meet him.

“That cop was here again. That guy died. Did you kill him?” To the machine-gun update she added, “Uh, sir?” Then she saluted, curtsied, then did a praying-hands Japanese bow thing.

Charlie was thrown by all of it, coming as it did when he was in a panic about his daughter and had just driven across town like a madman. He was sure the gestures of respect were just some dark cover-up for a favor or a misdeed, or, as often was the case, the teenager was messing with him. So he sat down on one of the high hardwood stools near the desk and said, “Cop? Guy? ’Splain, please. And I didn’t kill anyone.”

Lily took a deep breath. “That cop that was by here the other day came back. Turns out that guy you went up to see in Pacific Heights last week”—she looked at something she had written on her arm in red ink—“Michael Mainheart, killed himself. And he left a note to you. Saying that you were to take his and his wife’s clothes and sell them at the market rate. And then he wrote”—and here she again referred to her ink-stained arm—“‘What about “I just want to die” did you not understand?’” Lily looked up.

“That’s what he said after I gave him CPR the other day,” Charlie said.

“So, did you kill him? Or whatever you call it. You can tell me.” She curtsied again, which disturbed Charlie more than somewhat. He’d long ago defined his relationship with Lily as being built on a strong base of affectionate contempt, and this was throwing everything off.

“No, I did not kill him. What kind of question is that?”

“Did you kill the guy with the cigarette case?”

“No! I never even saw that guy.”

“You realize that I am your trusted minion,” Lily said, this time adding another bow.

“Lily, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing wrong at all, Mr. Asher—uh, Charles. Do you prefer Charles or Charlie?”

“You’re asking now? What else did the cop say?”

“He wanted to talk to you. I guess they found that Mainheart guy dressed in his wife’s clothing. He hadn’t been home from the hospital for an hour before he sent the nurse away, got all cross-dressed up, then took a handful of painkillers.”

Charlie nodded, thinking about how adamant Mainheart had been about having his wife’s clothes out of the house. He was using any way he could to feel close to her, and it wasn’t working. And when wearing her clothes didn’t put him closer, he’d gone after her the only way he knew how, by joining her in death. Charlie understood. If it hadn’t been for Sophie, he might have tried to join Rachel.

“Pretty kinky, huh?” Lily said.

“No!” Charlie barked. “No it’s not, Lily. It’s not like that at all. Don’t even think that. Mr. Mainheart died of grief. It might look like something else, but that’s what it was.”

“Sorry,” Lily said. “You’re the expert.”

Charlie was staring at the floor, trying to put some sense to it all, wondering if his losing the fur coat that was Mrs. Mainheart’s soul vessel meant that the couple would never be together again. Because of him.

“Oh yeah,” Lily added. “Mrs. Ling called down all freaked out and yelling all Chinesey about a black bird smashing the window—”

Charlie was off the stool and taking the stairs two at a time.

“She’s in your apartment,” Lily called after him.

There was an orange slick of TV attorneys floating on the top of the fishbowl when Charlie got to his apartment. The Asian powers were standing in his kitchen, Mrs. Korjev was holding Sophie tight to her chest, and the infant was virtually swimming, trying to escape the giant marshmallowy canyon of protection between the massive Cossack fun bags. Charlie snatched his daughter as she was sinking into the cleavage for the third time and held her tight.

“What happened?” he asked.

There followed a barrage of Chinese and Russian mixed with the odd English word: bird, window, broken, black, and make shit on myself.

“Stop!” Charlie held up a free hand. “Mrs. Ling, what happened?”

Mrs. Ling had recovered from the bird hitting the window and the mad dash down the steps, but she was now showing an uncharacteristic shyness, afraid that Charlie might notice the damp spot in the pocket of her frock where the recently deceased Barnaby Jones lay orangely awaiting introduction to some wonton, green onions, a pinch of five spices, and her soup pot. “Fish is fish,” she said to herself when she squirreled that rascal away. There were, after all, five more dead attorneys in the bowl, who would miss one?

“Oh, nothing,” said Mrs. Ling. “Bird break window and scare us. Not so bad now.”

Charlie looked to Mrs. Korjev. “Where?”

“On our floor. We are talking in hall. Speaking of what is best for Sophie, when boom, bird hits window and black ink run through window. We run here and lock door.” Both the widows had keys to Charlie’s apartment.

“I’ll have it fixed tomorrow,” Charlie said. “But that’s all. Nothing—no one came in?”

“Is third floor, Charlie. No one comes in.”

Charlie looked to the fishbowl. “What happened there?”

Mrs. Ling’s eyes went wide. “I have to go. Mah-jongg night at temple.”

“We come in, lock door,” explained Mrs. Korjev. “Fish are fine. Put Sophie in car seat like always we are doing, then go look in hallway for coast to be clear. When Mrs. Ling look back, fish are dead.”

“Not me! Is Russian who see dead fish,” said Mrs. Ling.

“It’s okay,” Charlie said. “Did you see any birds, anything dark in the apartment?”

The two women shook their heads. “Only upstairs,” Mrs. Ling said.

“Let’s go look,” Charlie said, moving Sophie to his hip and picking up his sword-cane. He led the two women to the little elevator, did a quick assessment of Mrs. Korjev’s size versus the cubic footage, and led them up the stairs. When he saw the broken bay window he felt a little weak in the knees. It wasn’t so much the window, it was what was on the roof across the street. Refracted a thousand times in the spiderwebbed safety glass was the shadow of a woman that was cast on the building. He handed the baby to Mrs. Korjev, approached the window, and knocked a hole in the glass to see better. As he did, the shadow slid down the side of the building, across the sidewalk, and into the storm drain next to where a dozen tourists had just disembarked from a cable car. None of them appeared to have seen anything. It was just past one and the sun was casting shadows nearly straight down. He looked back at the two windows.

“Did you see that?”

“You mean break window?” Mrs. Ling said, slowly approaching the window and peering through the hole Charlie had made. “Oh no.”

“What? What?”

Mrs. Ling looked back at Mrs. Korjev. “You are right. Flowers need water.”

Charlie looked through the hole in the window and saw that Mrs. Ling was referring to a window box full of dead, black geraniums.

“Safety bars on all the windows. Tomorrow,” Charlie said.

Not far away, as the crow flies, under Columbus Avenue, in a wide pipe junction where several storm sewers met, Orcus, the Ancient One, paced, bent over like a hunchback, the heavy spikes that jutted from his shoulders scraping the sides of the pipe, throwing off sparks and the smell of smoldering peat.

“You’re going to fuck up your spikes if you keep pacing like that,” said Babd.

She was crouched in one of the smaller pipes to the side, next to her sisters, Nemain and Macha. Except for Nemain, who was beginning to show a gunmetal relief of bird feathers over her body, they were devoid of depth; flat absences of light, absolute black even in the gloom filtering down through the storm grates—shadows, silhouettes, really—the darker ancestors of the modern mud-flap girls. Shades: delicate and female and fierce.

“Sit. Have a snack. What good to take the Above if you look like hell in the end?”

Orcus growled and spun on the Morrigan, the three. “Too long out of the air! Too long.” From the basket on his belt he hooked a human skull on one of his claws, popped it in his mouth, and crunched down on it.

The Morrigan laughed, sounding like wind through the pipes, pleased that he was enjoying their gift. They’d spent much of the day under San Francisco’s graveyards digging out the skulls (Orcus liked them decoffinated) and polishing off the dirt and detritus until they shone like bone china.

“We flew,” said Nemain. She took a moment to admire the blue-black feather shapes on her surface. “Above,” she added unnecessarily. “They are everywhere, like cherries waiting to be stolen.”

“Not stolen,” said Orcus. “You think like a crow. They are ours for the taking.”

“Oh yeah, well, where were you? I got these.” The shade held up William Creek’s umbrella in one hand and the fur jacket she’d ripped away from Charlie Asher in the other. They still glowed red, but were rapidly dimming. “Because of these, I was Above. I flew.” When no one reacted, Nemain added, “Above.”

“I flew, too,” said Babd timidly. “A little.” She was a tad self-conscious that she’d manifested no feather patterns or dimension.

Orcus hung his great head. The Morrigan moved to his side and began stroking the long spikes that had once been wings. “We will all be Above, soon,” said Macha. “This new one doesn’t know what he is doing. He will make it so we can all be Above. Look how far we’ve come—and we are so close now. Two Above in such a short time. This New Meat, this ignorant one, he may be all we need.”

Orcus lifted his bull-like head and grinned, revealing a sawmill of teeth. “They will be like fruit for the picking.”

“See,” said Nemain. “Like I said. Did you know that Above you can see really far? Miles. And the wonderful smells. I never realized how damp and musty it is down here. Is there any reason that we can’t have a window?”

“Shut up!” growled Orcus.

“Jeez, bite my head off, why don’t you.”

“Don’t tease,” said the bullheaded Death. He rose and led the other Deaths, the Morrigan, down the pipe toward the financial district, to the buried Gold Rush ship where they made their home.