Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

He awakens into darkness, the darkness at the dead of night- but it is also the dread darkness of the soul that has plagued him for thirteen weeks, thirteen months, it's impossible now to say.

What he can say for certain is that he has been on the run for thirteen weeks, but his assignment had begun thirteen months ago. He joined the Agency, propelled not so much by patriotism or an overweening itch to rub shoulders with danger-the two main motivations of his compatriots-but by the death of his wife. Immediately upon her death he had felt an overwhelming urge to hurl himself into the dark and, at times, seedy labyrinth in which she had dwelled for a decade before he had discovered that she did not go off to work in the manner of other people.

And now, here he is, twenty-three years after they had taken their vows, sitting in the dark, waiting for death to come.

It is hot in the room what with all the piles of magazines he's amassed, ragged and torn, beautiful as pink-cheeked children. Joints cracking, he rises, pads over to the air conditioner, moving like a wader through surf of his own making. It wheezes pathetically when he turns it on, which isn't all that surprising since even five minutes later nothing but hot air emerges from its filthy grille. Not that Buenos Aires is a Third World city, far from it. There are plenty of posh hotels whose rooms are at this moment bathed in cool, dry air, but this isn't one of them. It has a name, this hotel, but he's already forgotten it.

In the tiny bathroom, full of drips and creeping water bugs the size of his thumb, he splashes lukewarm water on his face. Cold is hot and hot is cold; does anything work right in this hellhole? He wants to take a shower, but the bottom is filled with more magazines, stacked like little castles in the sand. They comfort him, somehow, these magazine constructs, and he turns away, a sudden realization taking hold.

Curiously, it is in this hellhole that he feels most comfortable. Over the last thirteen weeks he has been in countless hotels in countless cities on three continents-this is his third, after North America and Europe. The difference, besides going from winter to summer, is this: here in this miserable, crumbling back alley of Buenos Aires, death breathes just around the corner. It has been relentlessly stalking him for thirteen weeks, and now it is closer than it has ever been, so close the stench of it is horrific, like the reek of a rabid dog or an old man with crumbling teeth.

The closer death comes, the calmer he becomes, that's the irony of his situation. Though, as he stares at his pallid face with its sunken eyes and raw cheekbones, he acknowledges that it very well may not be the situation at all.

He stares for a moment at the pad of his forefinger. On it is imprinted part of a familiar photograph-from one of the magazine pages, or from his life? He shrugs, uses the forefinger to pull down his lower lids one at a time. His eyes look like pebbles, black and perfectly opaque, as if there is no light, no spark, no intelligence behind them. He is-who is he today? Max Brandt, the same as he was yesterday and the day before that. Max Brandt, Essen businessman, may have checked into this dump, but it was Harold Moss, recently divorced tourist, who had come through security at Ezeiza International Airport. Moss and Brandt don't look much alike, one is stoop-shouldered with slightly buck teeth and a facile grin, the other stands ramrod straight and strides down the street with confidence and a certain joie de vivre. Gait is more important than the face in these matters. Faces tend to blur in people's memories, but the manner in which someone walks remains.

He stares at himself and feels as if he is looking at a painting or a mannequin. He is Harold Moss and Max Brandt, their skins are wrapped around him, in him, through him, helping to obliterate whatever was there before he had conjured them up. His facade, his exoskeleton, his armor is complete. He is no one, nothing, less-far less-than a cipher. No one glancing at him on the street could possibly guess that he is a clandestine agent- save for the enemy against whom he has labored tirelessly and assiduously for thirteen years, and possibly longer, the enemy who is no longer fooled by his periodic shedding of one persona for another, expert though it is, the enemy who is now curled on his doorstep, having finally run him to ground.

He returns to the rumpled bed, flicking off more water bugs. They like to gather in the warm indentations his body makes, no doubt feeding on the microscopic flaking of skin he leaves behind in sleep, like fevered nightmares sloughed off by the unconscious mind. He moves the bugs out of necessity only; really he has no innate quarrel with them the way most people do. Live and let live is his motto.

His harsh laugh sends them scattering to the four shadowed corners of the room. Some disappear behind the closed wooden jalousie that covers the window. They have all too quickly come to know him, and they have no desire to be eaten alive. Flopping down on the thin mattress in a star position, he gazes up at the constellations of cracks in the plaster ceiling that at one time long ago must have been painted blue. They seem to change position every time he takes this survey, but he knows this cannot be true.

I know, I know… A singsong lullaby to himself. What do I know? Something, anything, who can say with the fissures appearing inside his head?

It never fails, the color blue makes him think of Lily. The azure sky under which they picnicked when they were dating, the aquamarine-and-white surf through which he swam, following her out to the deep water. There were bluebirds in the old sycamore that dominated the front yard of their house in Maryland, and there was a time, early on in their marriage, when Lily cultivated bluebells in her spare moments. She liked to wear blue, as well-powder-blue sleeveless blouses in summer, navy cardigans in autumn, cobalt parkas in winter, denim work shirts in the spring, with the sleeves half-rolled revealing, after snows and cruel biting winds, the beautiful bare flesh of her forearms.

Lily with her hard, lean body and bright cornflower-blue eyes. She rode horses like a man but made love like a woman. In the privacy of their bedroom, she was soft, her voice gooey enough to get him to do anything gladly. He was the only one to see this side of her-not even their son, Christopher, had an inkling. He was acutely, almost painfully aware of the nature of her gift to him, but then his love for her ran so deep and strong that the first moment he had seen her take the stage for an audition at college he had been struck by a bolt of physical pain that had nearly felled him.

He was in the theater arts program then, learning the ins and outs of makeup design. Within a week, he would be painting her face for the stage, making her look older so that she could better fit the role she had won at the audition. She was a fine actress, even then, raw and untrained, for she had been born with the mind and the heart to recite lines as if they were her own thoughts and feelings.

He loved his work. The characters he created were for him more real than the actors themselves, whom he found vain and boring. When he was required to simulate blood or wounds he found novel ways of execution, for he dreamed of the violence that had caused these traumas, lived it, imagined it in such vivid detail that he never failed to win accolades from the faculty directors who over the four years came and went like clockwork.

Applying makeup to Lily was akin to making love to her. He felt strongly that he was transforming her not only outside but inside as well. She was, through him, becoming another person, an unknown quantity. At those times he felt a peculiar form of intimacy that was transcendent. He felt as if he was killing her, only to have her splendidly resurrected when she made her appearance on stage.

At first, she hadn't seemed interested in him, or at least she had contrived to remain aloof. That was her reputation, he had learned. More than one of his friends and acquaintances had counseled him to steer clear of her. Perversely, their warnings had only served to make him want her more. Desire was like a flood-tide inside him, threatening to sweep him away.

"You want me, you may think you want me," she had said to him in those early days, "but I know what you want."

She had startled him, but like everything she said or did, hidden inside the shock of her words was the truth: she had been interested enough in him to do the research. She did not strike him as the kind of person to waste her time on things that didn't matter to her. He was right. Six months after graduation they were engaged.

By that time, he had switched from makeup to set design, wanting to re-create reality in the largest sense possible. He had become bored by the tiny tasks involved in remaking faces. He required a bigger canvas for his imagination. In his widely hailed designs could be detected not only symbols from the playwrights' work, but for every major character. It was as if he had imagined each character, carefully hiding the most potent part of him somewhere in plain sight.

A year after that, they had a June wedding. It was beautiful- or, rather, Lily was beautiful in her shimmering satin gown with ephemeral tulle sleeves. There was, however, a flaw that marred the perfection. During the reception, he had gone to relieve himself and, upon returning, had seen Lily in close conversation with his cousin, Will. What enraged him beyond all reason was Will's hand rested on Lily's bare forearm. The white tulle of her sleeve had been drawn back like the intimate curtain in a boudoir, revealing that which should not be caressed by any outsider. It was unthinkable.

It took the best man and three of the ushers to wrench him off his cousin, whose face was by then a bloody pulp. Will couldn't even stand on his own, a fact that created a fierce elation in him as he was bound backward across the dance floor.

The band had been playing "We Are Family," and now they resumed, the first several bars as shaky as Will.

He stands spread-legged in front of the laboring air conditioner, which he is quite certain has had no Freon in it for years. At least the air, hot as it is, is moving. Lurid neon colors seep through the blades of the jalousie despite his best efforts to smother the outside world. There is a pool in the concrete courtyard below, or at any rate he thinks there is, remembering a blue-black oval he passed upon his arrival several days-or is it weeks?-ago. He could, he thinks, go down to the courtyard and fling his sweating body into the water. But perhaps that, too, is lukewarm like the water out of the faucet and he would sweat all the more with his exertions. In any case, he knows he will not take the chance. He is in his bunker now, the final resting place from which he has challenged his enemies to take him feetfirst.

Christopher was born six months after the wedding, but he wasn't a preemie. No, his birth was dead on time. He was a handsome child, with none of the gnomelike qualities many newborns exhibit. He had hair as blond as his mother's and her pink apple-blossom cheeks, but he had his father's musculature and sturdy build and, over the years, would grow into a larger, handsomer version of the man who had made him.

That is how he has always thought of himself in relation to his son, as if Lily was a mere receptacle for his seed, as if her genes had played no role in Christopher's physical or emotional makeup. Jesus, he hopes that is so.

And yet… He thinks of the day when Christopher found one of his early stage sets-a marvelous one-eighth size of colored cardboard, bits of wood and metal he'd done for the last act of Death of a Salesman. Christopher was-let's see-ten or eleven. The boy had plucked his old dog-eared copy off the shelf in his den-studio and had called his parents in to witness his performance. He'd played the part of Biff and he wasn't half-bad. Lily had encouraged him, of course, and for a while he'd taken acting lessons just as she had. But even then Christopher thought for himself. The chaos of acting, the publicness of performance proved too stressful. It was computers that fascinated him; he loved their precision and logic. For his first real project, he created software to change stage sets so that his father could fashion ever more intricate and complicated interiors and exteriors, cleverly mimicking reality in ways never before possible.

It was little wonder that this project-an artistic triumph, though with limited commercial value-led to a closeness with his son he could never have imagined. It was also the reason, he was convinced, that Christopher confided in him, rather than in the male companions his own age.

"They don't understand me, they don't have a clue as to who I am," Christopher told him one day.

And on others, during long walks, he confessed to his father his various love affairs. "They're all doomed, from the start," he said, "because even when I'm with them I can see how it's going to end, and this throws me into an agony of despair."

"Then, why don't you stop?" he had said.

"Because I can't," Christopher replied. "The first blush is transporting, there's no other feeling like it in the world."

He had been startled to discover that Christopher kept tokens of all his affairs-locks of hair, a few beads, an anklet, even the crushed butt of a cigarette on which was imprinted in pink the lips of his former beloved. He accepted this fetishism because he understood it, deeply and completely, but of course he never told Lily.

And then there was the time when he'd found Christopher standing at the open window of his room. It was in the dead of night, when the world was quiet and far away.

"What are you doing?" he asked his son.

"I'm imagining what it would be like to jump."

"Jump?" he had said, not quite understanding yet.

"Killing myself, Dad."

He had come to stand by his son's side. "Why would you want to do that?" "Why do you think?"

Once again, he wasn't alarmed; once again, he understood. He also felt out of sync with the world, estranged and a stranger, sometimes even to himself.

He'd put his hand on Christopher's shoulder and felt as if it were his own shoulder. "Don't concern yourself, son. Everything changes."

"But it won't get better."

"That, no one can say."

Christopher had nodded and, closing the window, had said, "Thanks, Dad. Thanks for not lying to me."

For all its impotence, the air conditioner roars like the jet engines of the plane that brought him here. With the hot stream lifting the hairs on his forearms and chest, he looks down at his bare feet and thinks of death. There is nothing else left to think about, and now he wonders whether there ever was.

When had it become apparent that there was something wrong with Lily? Even though he has racked his brains for months, he hasn't been able to quite pinpoint the moment. Perhaps there was no one moment, perhaps, as in all other things in life his wife's demise was a death by ten thousand cuts. Because, until the very end, she had been the consummate actress. He was uniquely qualified to see her ruse-he who was closest to her, who should not have been able to be objective because she was his wife and his beloved. But she was to him a great, intricate clock, whose every tick, every tock he knew inside and out.

What eventually caught his attention were the tiniest details, so minute that not even Christopher had been aware of them. Only he, who was obsessed by her, who fetishized her-only he knew. But, really, he didn't know-not at first, anyway. But slowly the tendrils of suspicion took hold of him and would not let him go. So he began to pay special attention.

He recalls the time he went into her closet. He always went into her closet to search on his hands and knees for bits of her- a stray nail clipping or a strand of pubic hair. Eyelashes he loved best, not only for their exquisite scimitar shape but because they were something so intimate he could almost feel her heart beating when he held one on the tip of his finger. She existed in that one tiny follicle, as if she were a genie who had been put back into her lamp, to be with him for all time.

He'd made a light box of mahogany with beveled edges and mitred corners into which he put an 8x10 photo he'd taken of her on their honeymoon. Her eyes looked dewy and, behind the halo of her hair spread the fronds of Balinese palms, slightly out of focus, looking like Tjak, the Balinese bird with a human face. Behind this photo, he placed the ephemera he periodically collected from her closet, and some of them tended to cast unidentifiable shadows across her face.

That day, however, he found something else, a tiny scrap of paper with a mark on it. He thought it must be a bit of writing, though it wasn't English or for that matter any language that used Roman letters. The mark looked like a rune to him, something ancient and therefore unknowable. Thus his suspicions, having been previously awakened, were aroused.

In some ways, she was too perfect, and in light of his suspicions, her absolute perfection proved the deepest fissure in her simulation. In all ways, she was the perfect wife and mother. She cooked gourmet dinners, provided him with astonishingly imaginative sex, was always there for Christopher when he was ill or low, was so kind to his girlfriends that many of them kept in touch with her long after their liaisons with him had ended. She never complained when her husband went away on business trips and was grateful for the same treatment when she went away on her business trips.

The facade was complete, and life went on precisely as it should have. But nothing in life is perfect and, as Christopher was quick to understand, happiness is as ephemeral as a cherry blossom. In fact, it is his own opinion that happiness is illusory.

Take, for instance, the sex. While it had been true that in college he'd left a string of girlfriends behind him, his serial affairs were not at all motivated by sex, to which he had been indifferent. No, he'd been looking for something. At first, he hadn't known what it was, he only knew that each girl in her own way had disappointed him. Later on, it occurred to him that he was looking for a shadow, a kind of twin to himself, who possessed the qualities he himself longed for but did not have.

Lily had performed on him the most elaborate erotic rituals. It was not surprising that he came to enjoy them, then to actually crave them, but his burgeoning desire bound him to her, and this bitter revelation plunged him into despair.

As soon as he was able to see through the mirage of happiness everything changed. Lily, as it transpired, worked for the Agency, not Fieldstone Real Estate or, latterly, March & Masson Public Relations. Or, rather, she did work at the offices of Fieldstone and, latterly, March & Masson, but both entities were owned and operated by the Agency, stage sets as artfully aping reality as any of the ones he had designed.

There is a scratching at the hotel-room door, and he turns, facing his fate as if it were the lens of a camera. Let them come, his enemies, he is ready for them now, for if they break in they will find Harold Moss or Max Brandt. It will be of no moment to him and a bitter disappointment to them. He himself is gone, dissolved like candle wax beneath a flame.

Where was he? Oh, yes, Lily. Of course, Lily. His beginning and his end.

"I know what you want from me," she had said at the outset of their relationship, and she was right, she could see through to the hollow core of him. In fact, he is convinced this is why she married him. Since his core was hollow, she could fashion him into her ideal lover. She could turn him inside out and it wouldn't matter, because there'd been nothing there to begin with.

Years later, he had said to her, "What is it you want from me?"

It was night and they were in bed, naked and sweaty from their acrobatic exertions. She was still on top, reluctant to dismount. The night was still, as it always was when they made love, as if it had ceased to exist.

"I should have thought that was obvious. I love you."

A lie, but not, perhaps, the first one she'd told him, which might have been, "Don't look at me like that, it gives me the creeps," or then again, while he was making her up, while he was killing her, "You're nothing to me. I don't care whether you live or die." And then, reborn on stage, she had glanced into the wings at the precise spot where she knew he stood for each performance and had smiled at his shadow.

Actors were, of course, adept at creating their own reality, but lying, well, that was another matter entirely. It seems to him now, standing on the furthest shore of his life, in the stifling heat of summertime when it should be winter, that Lily became addicted to lying as others become addicted to heroin or cocaine. He suspected she had got high from lying-no, not suspected, knew, because in molding him she had given herself away, and he had known her as deeply and profoundly as she had known him.

Perhaps, in the end, this is how she had come undone-not her lying to him, but the nature of her lies. And when the lies had altered, subtly but definitely, he had known. He'd followed her on one of her business trips and had seen her put something in a painted birdhouse affixed to a crooked wooden post out in the Maryland countryside. She'd left, but he'd stayed to watch. Twenty minutes later, a car had pulled up and a man got out. The man went straight to the birdhouse and when he'd pulled out whatever it was Lily had left for him, he depressed the trigger of his digital camera at 10X zoom.

The resulting photos he showed to the people at the Agency, who became immediately agitated.

Then he showed them the scrap of paper he'd found in Lily's closet.

"That's not a rune," they said, their agitation increasing exponentially. "It's Arabic."

He awakens into darkness and a rude snuffling, as if a large and hostile dog is just outside the door. He's off the bed in a shot. When had he drifted off to sleep? He cannot remember and, in any event, it does not matter. Time has crept on, but it is still the dead of night.

Reaching under the pillow, he brushes a water bug off the blued barrel of his semiautomatic pistol. Over the years, it has served him well, this weapon. On its grips is a series of notches, one for each of the people he has shot to death with it. In this way, the dead are always with him, like lovers who have disappointed him. In this way, he can confirm where he has been, how he has reached the place he is now. To anyone else, this train of thought might seem perverse, even illogical, but then he's never been foolish enough to put his faith in logic.

He rechecks the pistol, although there's really no need, his spy-craft is precise, something in which he prides himself. It is fully loaded. He takes out a second clip, puts it in his left pocket, then another for good measure, which he puts in his right pocket.

At that moment, the room is flooded with noise and the door shudders on its hinges. He lunges for the jalousie, pulls it open. The night, fired by a million Buenos Aires lights, comes flooding in, nearly blinding him. He forgets his commitment to remain in the room and flings open the window. Beyond the crumbling concrete ledge is a black metal fire escape, onto which he swings. The noise from inside the room is deafening, and without a backward glance he hurls himself up the metal rungs, climbing breathlessly without pausing for even an instant to take in the high sky, the rearing black mountains. But when he gains the rooftop, the first thing he sees is the spangled ocean running up to spend itself on the wide swath of sand, whose color and curve matches exactly the shape of Lily's eyelash.

He looks around. The landscape he has ascended onto is flat as a bare stage, smelling of creosote and decayed fish. Here and there rise the squat shapes of ventilator housings, but in fact the rooftop is dominated by the skeleton that holds fast the enormous neon sign advertising the hotel: EL PORTAL, the doorway, as if it were a pleasure palace instead of a water-bug-infested hellhole. This he understands completely. It is nothing more than a stage set, a huge construct of brightly colored fantasy trying to mimic reality. But up close, its ugly black ironwork looms like a depressing image of urban sprawl.

Sounds come from below him, chaotic and harsh, and he backs away. Gun at the ready, he finds the nearest of the blocky ventilator housings and crouches down behind it. Anyone who follows him up will come into his sights. At his back the neon sign perks and sizzles, throwing off colored light like a dying star. He sees pigeons wheeling across the lurid sky. Far below him a dog barks, a forlorn sound he somehow comprehends.

All at once, there is movement above the parapet-a shape, a silhouette darker by far than the glittering night, and he squeezes off a shot. The shape, more visible now, resolves itself into a figure. The figure comes at him even as he squeezes off shot after shot. He throws away the empty clip, retreats to another ventilation housing as he slams home the second clip. Immediately, he begins firing again until that clip, too, is empty. Retreating to the crisscross metalwork of the sign stanchion, he reloads with his last clip. Clambering into the nebula of colored lights as if it were the last remnant of his past, he fires, this time knowing the figure will still come on, unwounded, unfazed and undeterred…

He awakens into darkness and a cold sweat, half his mind still paralyzed. In a way, the nightmare seems more real than his present reality. It is certainly more real than anything in his past. The pounding on the door comes as if on cue, as if his nightmare was presentiment. But he puts as little faith in the paranormal as he does in the rational.

No dogs snuffling, instead a human voice from beyond the barrier. He flicks off the safety of his gun and makes his winding way through the blizzard of torn, cut and folded magazine pages (he dare not trample them down!) to a spot just beside the door. He's onto them! He is too clever to stand in front of it, his enemies are all too likely to send a spray of machine-gun bullets through it, having lured him to it with the coaxing voice.

He takes a breath, lets it out slowly and evenly in precisely the same way he will soon squeeze the trigger of his weapon. Then he whips around the upper part of his torso so that he can put his eye to the peephole. He looks out, blinks, looks again, then whips his body back to safety. He hears the voice again-the familiar voice of his son.

"Christopher?" His voice is eerily thin, cracked from disuse.

"Dad, it's me. Please open the door."

He takes another breath, lets it out, striving to calm his mind. But it's no use, his son is here. Why?

"Dad?"

"Stand away from the door, son."

Risking another look through the peephole, he sees that Christopher has done as he asked. In the peephole's fish-eye lens he can see all of him now. Christopher is dressed in a lightweight linen suit over a white polo shirt. Polished loafers with tassels are on his feet. He looks as if he's just stepped off the plane. "Dad, please let me in."

He wipes sweat off his face. Hand on the chain across the door frame, he pauses. What if his enemies have captured Christopher and are using him against his will? He'll never know, standing on this side of the door. He slides the chain off, unlocks the door and says, "All right, son. Come on in." Then he steps back, waiting.

Christopher comes through the door and, without being asked, shuts it behind him.

"Lock it, son," he says.

Christopher complies.

"What are you doing here?"

"I've come to get you, Dad."

His eyes narrow and his hand grips the gun with more force. "What d'you mean?"

"You killed Mom," Christopher says.

"I had to-"

"You had no orders."

"There was no time. She was a double working for-" "Dad, you're mistaken."

"Certainly not. I saw her put the intelligence-"

"In the birdhouse," Christopher says. "That was you, Dad. You put the intelligence there."

He takes one terrible staggering step backward. "What?" His head has begun to hurt. "No, I-"

"I saw you do it myself. I took pictures-"

"That's a lie!"

Christopher smiles sadly. "We never lie to one another, Dad. Remember?"

His head hurt all the more, a pounding in the veins that cradle his brain. "Yes, I-"

"Dad, you've been ill. You still are." One hand held out in entreaty. "You thought Mom was onto you and you-"

"No, no, I found that scrap of paper with the rune on it!"

"The Arabic letter, Dad. That was yours. You're fluent in Arabic."

"Am I?" He presses his fingertips into his temple. If only his head would stop pounding he might be able to think clearly. But now he is unsure of the last time he's thought clearly. Could Christopher be right?

But then something odd and chilling occurs to him. "Why are you talking like this? You know nothing of your mother and me-of our secret life. You're a designer of computer software."

Christopher's eyes are soft, his smile all the sadder. "You're the software designer. That's why you were recruited to the Agency, that's how you were doubled-on one of your trips to Shanghai or Bangalore, they don't really know where, and right now it's not important. What is important is that you give me the gun so that we can walk out of here together."

A spasm of irrational rage causes him to lift his weapon. "I'm not going anywhere, with you or anyone else."

"Dad, please be reasonable."

"There is no reason in the world!" he shouts. "Reason is an illusion, just like love!"

And as he levels the gun at Christopher, his son whips a snub-nosed Walther PPK from behind his back and shoots him neatly and precisely through the forehead.

Christopher looked down at his father's corpse. At this moment, he was interested in what emotions he would feel. There were none. It was as if his heart had been muffled under so many layers of identity no event, no matter how traumatic, could reach it.

Agency protocol dictated that all evidence of terminations be immediately destroyed. This would be done, of course, his spy-craft was precise, something in which he prided himself.

Looking around, he saw all his father's children, re-created in intricate and loving miniaturized detail from the pages of magazines he'd bought and scrounged from the hotel lobby.

Here was the set for The Merchant of Venice, here the one for A Streetcar Named Desire, there the set for the revival of Carousel, acclaimed for his father's innovative design. All the many shows were represented in miniature, so cleverly fashioned that for a moment Christopher was astonished all over again by his father's genius.

It was in the shower that he came across the set for Death of a Salesman. He stared at it for a moment, lines from Arthur Miller's pen running like an electronic news ribbon through his mind. After an unknown time he reached down. Retreating, he threw it on his father's body. Producing a bottle of lighter fluid bought for just this purpose, he poured it over the mass, soaking the corpse. Then, his back to the door, he threw open the lock and lit a match, watching it arc toward the end of all things.

Everything changes. But it won't get better.

He went out the side door of the hotel into the stinking dawn, the stench of lighter fluid and burning hair masking the reek of human excrement and decay. As he craned his neck, looking for the first gray tendrils of smoke, he decided to create a new legend for himself. When he passed through customs on his way home he would be Biff Loman.

The idea brought a smile to his face, and for that moment he looked just like his dad.