We were being loud. We had been laughing and carrying on for hours. I had been the dealer all night because Lonnie said he liked my style, whatever that meant. Lonnie was winning most of the hands. It was some kind of luck. We got to the point to where we were cheering him on. Then she said she had been reading from the Bhagavad Gita.

“From what?”

She turned and looked right at Lonnie. She said, “You have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We all thought that this was a hell of a thing to say to someone dying of a brain tumor. She repeated this. She said, “You have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We all folded our hands because we felt he deserved to win after hearing something like that. The cards came spinning in, as if falling from a tree. Some slid right off the table and some missed the table altogether. Some were flung so hard they slid across the tile and out of the room. Lonnie didn’t like this, I could tell, us folding like that. He said he was not some kind of charity. He took the chips anyway. He slid them one at a time into his hands like he was going to perform a magic trick with them. Then his wife clarified. She said, “At least, you’ve destroyed my world. You’ve completely destroyed it.”

Lonnie didn’t seem upset over this. He only nodded. Lonnie had made a comment to this effect before. This probably wasn’t the first time she’d said it to him either. Lonnie did this shrug he always did, the one where he brought his shoulders all the way up to his ears so that he looked like a turtle trying to hide. She said it was a very famous line. Then she repeated the damned line again. It made the rest of us want to get right up and leave. Lonnie tried to clarify for her. He said that his wife was getting the ultimate raw deal over his brain tumor. He said they had both waited until late in life to get married, and now he was going to bite the bit after only a year of wedded bliss. He said they were so in love, too. He had been saying that they were like a poem, whatever that meant, like something Shakespeare would write about, or at the very least they were like one of Rod Stewart’s better songs. We could never tell if the Rod Stewart thing was a joke or not.

Lonnie’s wife got up from the table. She went over to the buffet and made two plates. She fixed each of them a drink. He waved to her and mouthed that he would be over to eat in a few minutes. I dealt. Lonnie continued to win hands.

He kept winning and telling us that he’d had good luck like this pretty much his entire life. He said he had the “touch gene.” We all got what he meant by that because we’d all seen it like this before with him one time or another: it meant he was pretty much good at anything he touched. It meant he won most bets on horse racing and most hands in Texas Hold ‘Em and that you always wanted him on your team for pick-up basketball. It meant you did not want to play twenty bucks a hole in a round of golf with Lonnie. Someone spoke up, said he had the best jump shot for a fat man ever. Then I spoke up. I bore witness to these things as though I were testifying to miracles or baptisms or something. But I only ended up sounding like I was trying to make Lonnie feel better, like I was really kissing his ass instead of telling the truth about these things over the years.

“I’ve always had good luck with absolutely everything,” Lonnie kept saying. Then he would point to his wife and say, “Except this.” He kept saying it over and over, hand after hand. A few guys left, saying that they had to be up early in the morning and that they’d get a hold of Lonnie in a few days to see if there was anything they could do. Lonnie kept saying, “Don’t put me off too long.”

Lonnie told me that exact thing late in the night, when it was only the three of us remaining at the place. He told me not to wait too long before I gave him a call after that night. He said the doctors said there was only one month left. He said they told him to take a vacation trip. He said it made him want to kill the doctor right then and there. “I eyed these scissors in a little jar on his desk when he told me that. I almost ran it through his eyes.” I laughed at this. It was very funny at the time, since by then I was slobbering drunk. Lonnie said it came off as a smart-ass thing to hear from a doctor. “The doctor said, ‘Take a cruise or go to a resort because you don’t have long.’ But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a good idea.” He pointed over to the collections jar by the door. It was sitting on a stool, an old sweet tea jug with painter’s tape across the front and the word Donations written on the tape in black marker. He said they were going to take that money and go to the Bahamas with it. I went over right then and emptied out my wallet into it and Lonnie repeated that I didn’t have to do that. I was hoping he would come over and reach in and give it back because I was flat broke at the time. I put in a couple of tens and some ones. I even dropped in my pocket change, which was only some copper and a nickel. I came back over and sat by Lonnie. His wife was asleep by all the food. She had started to put it away but had fallen asleep right next to the buffet. He talked more about the trip they were planning. He said he was nervous about dying on foreign soil. He said it would be a real fiasco for her if that happened. He said he was going to try and not die while he was down there. He said he had been doubling-up on his vitamins. I couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not. I laughed anyway. We both laughed. We laughed like crazy people. We tried to make our laughter reach the outside. It was like we were trying to make the building fall over with our noise.

#

Earlier in the evening Lonnie had been talking about what it was like to get the news from the doctor. We were taking a break between hands. We went out to the back of the recreation center to smoke some cigars I’d bought. I lied that they were Cubans but no one called me on it. Someone asked him what it felt like to get news like that. Lonnie said it was a hell of a thing to hear. He said it was like a reverse prison sentence, which for some reason I seemed to understand more than anyone. I nodded more than anyone.

Lonnie told us that they said the follow up MRI showed that the tumor had returned. “The doctor was pretty matter of fact. He just put it out there. Said I had a month. We’ll see,” Lonnie said. He said he was going to get some steroids from a guy at the gym. He said he was going to start doing a massive amount and he was even going to start working out again. He thought this would help him live a little longer. Someone pointed out that the doctors would probably prescribe it for him instead of buying it from some ‘roider at the gym. “Let your insurance pay for it,” someone said. Lonnie explained that he was already on regular doses of Prednisone but that he thought he could get something more extreme from someone at the gym. “Something for horses,” he said. Someone said something about medicinal pot. Someone asked Lonnie to score some of that synthetic weed for the group. “It could be a new side job for you, Lonnie,” someone said. We all laughed. It was pretty funny to us. Lonnie said his next get-together would feature a bowl of medical marijuana instead of a fruit tray.

#

Even earlier in the night his wife said that they were going to try and get pregnant before the end of the month. Lonnie confirmed this. He said he didn’t care that the doctors had warned against this. They said there was potential that the child could get leukemia from Lonnie’s radioactive semen.

I actually started laughing when I heard this. I’d had too much to drink even by that point. I said I would come up with a comic book about that and dedicate it to him. I said I would start drawing again just for that reason. I said he had been my inspiration. His wife got up and left once Lonnie started laughing with me. Lonnie gave his comic book character a name: The Glowing Lizard, or something. He said it could be akin to The Green Lantern. He explained that the lizard part was a euphemism for his cock and that the glowing part was a reference to its radioactivity. I told him we could probably put our heads together and come up with something better. That touched a nerve with him. Of all things, that comment touched a nerve. He started running his fingers over the wounds behind his ear and down toward his neck. He turned his head to show me. Right above his ear was a long and angled wound that zagged from the back of his neck to near his forehead. It crossed with another in the opposite direction which began at his temple and reached up toward the back of his head. It looked like a crack looks in a sidewalk; it looked like he had survived some sort of vicious blow to the head. There were staples. “They put in these cuts and cracked it open right here,” he said. He pointed to where the X intersected. “They videotaped it because some med students are going to study it at the University of Oklahoma. I watched it. My head was blooming,” he said.

“Another reason to root for the Sooners,” I said. I was drunk.

“You’ve never been a Sooner fan,” Lonnie said. I looked closer at his head. He leaned in. At one point I was so close I could have kissed it. He leaned back and said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

“What’s that?” I said. I was curious because I hadn’t been thinking anything at all. “It looks too much like a swastika.” I hadn’t been thinking that. He tipped his head to a certain angle and then I could see it. It really did. It looked just like a swastika at the right tilt.

“It doesn’t look bad,” I said, a lie.

“Yes it does,” he said. “Yes it does. I look like a fucking Frankenstein. And now people are going to think I’m some kind of white supremacist if my hat blows off. They’re going to think I’m some kind of Hitler lover, some kind of Nazi. I hate Nazis,” he said. “I used to date a black girl in high school. And a couple of Jewish girls, too. From far away this looks like a tattoo. And it doesn’t help that I’m bald like a skinhead.”

“You can’t help that.”

“Folks don’t know that.” I could tell that this was something he wanted to get off his chest. He felt better, I think, after a minute. “Those doctors did a number on me by carving me like this. How hard is it to just make two straight cuts? Like an X? Is it a practical joke?” It did kind of look that way. Like a practical joke, I mean. Or a fuck-up, like they had made the cut and were getting ready to crack his head open and then said Oh shit, do you see what that looks like? Oops. I told him it might be grounds for a lawsuit. He said I could be the star witness. He said, “If my wife doesn’t cremate me then promise me that you’ll have them bury me in my ball cap. Promise me.” He waved his KU cap around in case I misunderstood.

“Okay,” I said. I told him I wasn’t sure that I carried the kind of clout to ensure what he was wearing when he was interned. I said that that was probably out of my jurisdiction. I really sounded like a lawyer. He called me a prick. He told me that this was one of his dying wishes so that gave me enough jurisdiction.

Then he started talking about The Resurrection. He said, “Just in case there is a Judgment Day I don’t want God confusing me with some kind of Nazi and sending me off to hell with that bunch. I want to have my ball cap on just in case.” He told me not to forget. He said it was very important to him. He told me to write it down when I got home so that it wouldn’t slip my mind. I told him I would.

#

Later on he told me that he wasn’t crazy about getting his wife pregnant. He said he was doing it anyway, though. “She needs it,” he said. He said he had a hard time keeping it up and that he had come across some impotence pills and was taking a mouthful of them every night. “I might die from an overdose of those first,” he said. He said those pills didn’t work too well for him. He said that was one reason why he wanted to take more steroids. He said he thought that the extra testosterone might help somehow.

He told me this: “I don’t think I have enough bullets to get her pregnant anyway. That’s probably good.” Then he told me about San Francisco. I already knew about San Fran, but I didn’t say anything. I figured his memory probably wasn’t so good anymore, so I didn’t mind if he repeated some things. He told me that in San Francisco they had taken live cells from his brain tumor and made a vaccine for it. He said it was experimental and controversial. He said he was afraid he had toxic sperm from this, too. He said he hoped he wouldn’t get her pregnant so that she wouldn’t have to go through this again.

I said the odds had to be against that. “At least two to one,” I said. “At least.”

Lonnie said that that was probably the most reassuring thing I’d said all night.

“Thanks,” I said.

#

Lonnie was the dealer at his table when everyone showed up. At first there were dozens of us. Maybe even a hundred. “Look at all these people,” Lonnie said. He kept saying he didn’t realize he had so many friends. We’d set up the room with card tables wall to wall. They were all full. It was like the fucking World Series of Poker. As Lonnie won hands he kept saying that everyone here should throw in a hundred bucks into one big pot and we could have a tournament. Winner take all, he said. I said that was a good idea and some of the other guys looked at me like I was a kiss-ass. Lonnie kept winning. “I could do this forever,” he said.

Lonnie had been planning this for a few weeks. A few days after the doctors had given him a month to live he’d called me and asked me to help set this up. He said he wanted to see everyone before it was all over. He said he wanted a good time. So I got together with Lonnie’s wife and we came up with a poster. We wrote that it was going to be a winter barbeque at the recreation center down by the square, across from the police station, and we wrote that there would be poker and free food. We asked everyone to bring their own beers and not to forget cameras. We showed the flier to Lonnie. He liked it at first. He especially liked the idea of posing in pictures for everyone. “I’ll be a celebrity,” he’d said.

But when it came down to it he didn’t pose for very many. That night he kept saying his legs hurt or he didn’t want to leave the table, and one time he said that the flash from the camera might trigger a seizure because he had stopped taking his Dilatin. As the event got closer he started calling it his pre-funeral. I had been on the phone with him when he first called it that. He said it would be his warm-up act, a new kind of event, a chance for people to interact with the corpse.

When people started rolling in that night Lonnie stood at the door and shook hands with everyone as they came in. He said, “Welcome to my pre-funeral.” I was the only one who laughed when he said it to me. Lonnie laughed with me. People were looking. They couldn’t figure out why we were laughing.

Lonnie kept dealing and he kept winning. He had been drinking some and his wife kept coming over and telling him to go easy. He called her a Mother Hen but he didn’t mean anything by it. He wasn’t being hateful. She brought over coffee after he’d finish a can or a bottle and his joke was to pull out his flask — a flask I’d given him back years ago for being in my wedding, one he’d claimed years ago that he’d thrown away when he sobered up — and pour whiskey into the coffee.

After the night was over he told me he only was finishing half the beers and that the flask had been full of tea. He said he quit the beers after three because his heart began to race and he thought he’d kick off right there. He said that that would be a grand finale to his pre-funeral, but that he didn’t want the grand finale to happen just yet. Lonnie’s wife gave him the evil eye about drinking. He kept asking what the point was of staying sober now. Everyone else would shrug. His wife came over again and reminded him that the pain meds were narcotics. He asked the table if anyone wanted to buy some if he didn’t use them all. There were no takers. I thought of raising my hand out of sympathy.

He won eight of the first nine hands. He won four in a row after losing the ninth hand. “Check that man’s sleeves,” someone said. One of the other guys came over and started checking under the table for cards taped underneath. He was only teasing. I kidded that it looked like he was trying to give Lonnie a blow job from under the table — sticking his head down there like that. Lonnie pushed him away.  “Fuck you. Fuck all of you fuckers,” Lonnie said, and then he stood. He stood like he was ready to take a fight out into the parking lot. He stood like someone had just called his mother a whore. His body straightened and tensed so that there wasn’t one bend to him. He was straight, and still. He was looking right at me. Just eleven days later, at his funeral, his urn was at the front of the room and I was imagining him doing this exact pose inside there. Lonnie stood like that for a time, quiet and still, some of us wondering if he had just gone catatonic, if we should call someone, if this were a dire symptom of his disease, if a coma was next. His next move was to grab the cards from the middle of the table and throw them at me.

“You deal,” he said, “since everyone thinks I’m a liar.”

I had to pick some of the cards up off of the floor. I even had to walk clear across the room for some.

When I came back I passed them out with the easy flicks of my fingers. I bragged about being a good piano player in my younger days. I tried a few jokes to cut down some on the tension at the table. I even made Lonnie the butt of one of my jokes: see, Lonnie had broken a bone in his hand and his pinky knuckle a few weeks before because he had gotten light-headed and fell down a flight of three stairs. It looked worse than it was. He said it didn’t hurt. He said that was probably because he was pretty doped up all the time. He opted not to go for a cast. And it still looked pretty bad that night. His finger was crooked and the base of his hand had some swelling. There were still some strawberry burns on his palm from where he’d slid on the concrete. It caught your eye every time he held up his cards. I dealt the first hand and pointed at Lon’s hand. I said, “I’d hate to see what the other guy’s cock looks like.”

Lonnie won. It had been a long hand with a big pot and Lonnie had won on a measly pair of fours.

That was when he first started going on about luck. He said this tumor must be some kind of penance for having good luck like this all his life. He said he was trying to remember if he’d ever sold his soul for good luck and was wondering if the bill was now coming due. He said that it felt that way. I told him not to worry. I said selling your soul would be pretty hard to forget. He said he hoped he didn’t lose any memories from the surgeries. He hoped they didn’t take a bunch of memories from him. He was just sure that there were a slew of memories that had gone away. He just knew it, that there were whole worlds that had been lost to him.

I see Lon around town sometimes. I have told a few people about this. The response is always the same: “He’s fucking dead.” Sometimes this is followed up with a question. “Are you mental?” I am careful of who I tell. Some of our old friends have gotten really pissed when I say that I have seen Lon out and about.

But a few understand what I mean. There’s a group of us at work who pretend that instead of being dead Lon has simply quit his job. We make up new stories about how he told the boss to shove it and walked out one day. Some of these stories are pretty funny. We tell them less and less but most times they are still good for a laugh or two in the lunch room. We even speculate as to where he ended up. I have suggested he is selling cars out in California. Most of us agree that he would have liked to take blondes with big bombs out for test drives. So that is where we have placed him.

Lon’s wife sees him, too. I was reluctant to mention this to her. But I just came out with it one day. I told her I see him at stoplights from time to time. I saw him at the supermarket once. Just the other day I saw him in the crowd at a college football game.

“Are you being serious?” she said. I was waiting for her to tear into me. I was expecting to be called an asshole or else for her to at least suggest that I am a few cards shy of a full deck, this is something Lonnie used to say about me all the time.

“Yes,” I said.

“I see him, too.” She said she has even gotten phone calls from Lonnie but she can never make out what he is saying on the other end. She said it is impossible because she was standing there when he was cremated. She watched him go into the incinerator. She said she thought she was going crazy or that she had at least picked up a psychic ability. She had been reading a lot about ESP lately.

I can’t stop thinking about Lonnie. I have even dreamed about him. And in my dreams he looks bad. His eyes are black spots and he is much heavier than he ever was in life. He has hair in my dreams but it is only growing up out of his scar. He wears a shirt that is way too big, like a dress, and his mouth moves but I can’t hear what he is saying. I have talked to his wife about this. She doesn’t like these images. She says she doesn’t dream of him but knows he’s in a better place. She has even given me photographs of him. In one, he holds a catfish he’d noodled down at the Ozarks, and another is from their wedding with the entire family surrounding him. He looks so happy. I have taped these to the headboard of my bed. I always give them a glance right before I go to sleep.

#

I have been getting headaches lately. I’ve never had headaches like these. They have been coming on more and more frequently. The Internet says it’s a bad sign if headaches are at their worst in the morning. I haven’t been to the doctor about them but I have called my ex. She was always good about talking some sense into me over these types of things. She says I’m a hypochondriac. She says I need to see a counselor because I’m not dealing well with my grief over Lonnie. “What if there is something wrong? What if it’s environmental? We worked together. What if there is some kind of geographical anomaly?” I ask. She says I read the last thing off of the computer. She tells me to stay off the computer. She says I might need some help. She says, “And I’m not just saying that. Not like I used to tell you back when we were splitting up. I’m not being mean. I’m serious. You may need to go and talk to someone. There’s nothing wrong with that.” I tell her I’m not slack-jawed. I haven’t turned into some kind of fag. She says I’ve always been hard to talk to.

I tell stories about him. I can’t help it. He just comes up sometimes. I’ll bring him up at work but no one really wants to talk about him there anymore. Some guys even walk away as I talk, and sometimes this makes me mad. I tell them I just won’t repeat any stories about them after they die. They defend themselves. They say I’m a downer. They say they don’t want their days ruined.

I like to tell stories about the gambling benders he used to go on. He always used to say that he’d traded one addiction for another. His wife would agree. She encouraged the gambling. “As long as he’s not drinking,” she’d say. She would keep tabs on their cash and give him an allowance on which to gamble. A couple hundred bucks a month, if I remember right, which sounds like a lot, and is. “But it’s not a thousand bucks a month,” his wife would say, which sounded like a good enough point.

I was with him at some of these games. They were always at some house I’d never been to or some pool hall or some warehouse office. One time we played with a bunch of Vietnamese in a tenement over near Columbus Park. We played with quarters, dimes and pennies. He cleaned them out. He kept talking as though they didn’t understand English. He kept saying they were no smarter than spider monkeys. “These poor fuckers,” Lonnie kept saying. It seemed to me they understood. Lon didn’t care. I always asked him how he found out about these games and he said that you just had to be in the know.

He’d come into work after being up all night. And he’d have more energy than the rest of us. He’d be bouncing around and kidding the guys about this and that and we’d ask him if he’d taken on a cocaine addiction. The running joke was that we’d keep an eye on him for open sores to see if he had started doing methamphetamines. We called him a bull. His nickname, for a while, was Belushi. This was a good nickname because he kind of resembled John Belushi and also because it seemed there would one day be news that he’d stayed up three days in a row and overdosed on something or another. I defended him on this last part. I said he’d been sober for years. We’d gone through sobriety together.

Lon would have a lull through the day after these all-nighters. He’d crave a nap and get moody, but by the evening he always bragged about getting his second wind. On the way out he’d say, “There’s a game tonight. Now I kind of wish I hadn’t told my wife I’d have a spaghetti dinner with her tonight. I’m getting my second wind.”

It made some of us feel better when he started coming in late to work on a regular basis. He wasn’t the Boy Wonder after all. He was finally tired like the rest of us.

Our boss didn’t seem to mind Lonnie’s tardiness, which caused some jealousy. Lonnie would come in, his uniform ragged, his hair uncombed. He always wore this comb-over to hide his bald spot and when it wasn’t combed he would have a drape of long hair down his left side and shorter hair on the right. It hung down his face all the way past his ear, like a curtain, and we all called it the side-mullet. He always laughed at that.

He’d come in late and we’d take bets on the quarter hour he’d show up. I won a lot. Lonnie would come in and say he’d overslept. Soon his eyes started to sink deep into his head, like a person dying of dehydration. We’d tell him his lifestyle was catching up with him. “You can’t act like you’re twenty when you’re almost forty,” our boss would say. We’d agree. We’d tell him he looked like shit and that he needed to tone it down a little. “My head,” he’d mumble from time to time. I’d ask him what was wrong and he’d say his head was pounding and his ears were ringing. I’d tell him it was because he wasn’t getting enough sodium. I started picking up sports drinks at the gas station on the way in some mornings. I’d have them in the break room fridge for him when he came stumbling in. I would fill his thermos with cold water and leave it at his work station so it would be waiting for him when we got there.

#

I talk to his wife on the phone a lot. Sometimes I go over there. Their neighbors probably think we are having an affair. We have slept together a few times but there is certainly no affair going on. My ex says it’s a bad way for us to deal with our grief. She says it’s more proof that I need to talk to someone. I tell her part of the reason we’re divorced is because she’s a know-it-all.

Lonnie’s wife and I just sit and talk all hours. We like to tell stories of Lonnie. She likes to hear about what things were like for us when we were kids. I give her dopey little stories about fishing and baseball. I tell her about this Bel-Air we fixed up together when we were in high school. I have even told her about some of his card games, close calls and things he made me promise never to tell her, things involving Italians we were pretty sure were connected and wanted to kill us a few times, guys who wore special anklets placed there by the Feds. I even make things up.

The other night I told her how Lon saved a bum’s life once. We were walking home from work and we’d cut through the Argentine Avenue rail yards. We saw two bums. One bum stabbed the other bum with a piece of rebar. Lonnie was over there quick. I went to pull the steel out of the guy but Lon told me not to. “Don’t move it,” I said he said. We called the police and guarded over him until they got there. I told her Lonnie saved the guy’s life by telling me not to pull it out of there and guarding over him. Lon always knew what to do. My ex says it’s bad that I tell lies like these to her. She says if I do this I should keep it to myself because it makes it sound like I’m trying to get laid. I tell my ex that’s not the case. I tell her that I’m trying to give Lon’s wife more good memories. I always say that a person deserves as many good memories as they can handle.

Lon’s wife tells me things about him, too. We like to sit out on the patio when I visit. She makes coffee and we sip of it out there even though the nights are getting pretty warm. She gives me lots of stories. She ends each story by saying she can’t believe it’s been such and such months that he’s been gone. She says she hasn’t touched his closet. She says his stinky socks are still tucked into his tennis shoes in the way that always used to annoy her. These types of things make me lose it. It puts me to tears fast.

Lon’s wife has asked me to stay over a lot since his kids moved in with their mom. She told me they’ve moved most of their stuff out of their rooms and it makes her house have more echoes. They only come around to get certain things of his from time to time. She says they have the right. She doesn’t give them a hard time because they are only in grade school but it would be nice if they’d stay and visit once in a while. She says she loves them as if they were her own. She hates being alone. So I stay with her. She makes me a bed on the couch.

Just last night she told me a story I’d never heard before. We were up watching Jay Leno together and she told me the story. She went right into it. She said Lonnie died right here on this couch. It made me want to get up but I stayed put. I put my arm around her. “I wish you wouldn’t have told me that,” I said.

“He’s in a better place,” she said.

“I doubt it.” This was not to say that I thought Lon had been cast into the Lake of Fire. It’s just that I don’t believe in all that hocus pocus. I didn’t explain. I didn’t feel like it.

“He’s still alive. Somewhere he’s still alive. I can prove it.” “Please don’t,” I said. I was starting to get into a mood.  She scooted away from me. She pushed herself up and went over to the kitchen table and fished around under a pile of papers and mail and books and brought back a hardcover that looked pretty new. She held it up: Quantum Mechanics or something. “This says there are ripples in time that create alternate realities. Infinite ones. It’s amazing. He’s still alive somewhere…”

I said something to her that I’d heard Lon say to her: “You read too much. Can we just watch Jay?”

She put the book down on the coffee table and sat down in front of me. I put my arm around her waist. My hand rested on her crotch. We watched Leno and fell asleep with the lights on. I woke up to her turning off the lights and coming back over. I dozed again and woke in the middle of the night to her saying something. She repeated it several times until I responded. She kept saying, “He’s in a better place.”

She said he was resting right here for several days before he passed away. She said he couldn’t get comfortable no matter which way he turned or twisted himself. He had been on morphine. A massive amount, she said. So much so that he was hallucinating. He kept telling her that the grass was growing on the wall. “It scared him,” she said.

I pushed myself up.

She said soon it sounded like he was speaking in tongues. She said it was like an old fashioned Pentecostal service. He was screaming out in this kind of gibberish, she said, only it sounded like more than gibberish. She said it sounded like words and sentences, structured and precise, like some language that had been dead a thousand years. Then he started screaming. “If he was awake he was screaming,” she said. “Like a baby,” she said. He would scream as though he was falling from some height. He would scream like he was being tortured. She said he sounded like a P.O.W. or something. He would wake her with his noise. His last few days she didn’t sleep at all, she said. She would just listen. She said, “You know how something can be so cold it’s hot? Do you know what I mean? How something so freezing can burn you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how his screaming was at the end.” I understood. She said he had become hysterical in his screams. She told me it became so loud and so frantic and so high pitched that she couldn’t distinguish it from a laugh or a cry. She said she could still hear it if the room were quiet enough, an echo trapped in some corner of this room that will never go away. She told me to listen for it.

She told me to sit still. She asked if I could hear him laughing.

Mike Wilson lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife and three children.