William’s ruthless probity in matters relating to the environment was his undoing. He would pull a dirty bottle out of your trash bin and then tell you about the cumulative effect of all the bottles that could be recycled and instead sit in landfills, and what that meant for various forms of wildlife, while he stood at the sink and carefully rinsed the bottle for recycling. People seldom minded, though, since William was about six foot four with incredibly broad shoulders, naturally pronounced musculature, and lips the color of plums. He kind of made you go gaga when you looked at him, even if you didn’t have any interest in sleeping with him.

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The woman standing by me at the casket says, “He looks at peace,” then dabs the corners of her eyes with a small handkerchief. “So sad, only nineteen. Sad.” She moves away shaking her head. “Sad, sad, sad.”

At peace? The boy looks dead to me. You know, waxy, lips a little blue, but she tagged it. Sad. Yeah. Real sad. A kid OD’ing on heroin won’t leave anybody happy.

I’m in the Heavenly Bliss Parlor of Sexton Funeral Home in Macon, Georgia. It’s a big room, about the size, both ways, of six lanes wide in a bowling alley. There’s a dozen or more people standing around in clumps of two or three, talking low, and Merry’s not one of them. Where the hell is she?

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The Prefect’s Concubine was the most beautiful woman in the province. Everyone knew that.

The Concubine was also a nudist. Everyone and his uncle knew that. Few, however, cared about the reason: that her birth tribe believed nakedness was the only way to experience one’s own wholeness.

The Prefect had two and exactly two classifiable emotions: doting fondness for the Concubine and avid jealousy against the rest of the world. So, he let her walk nude in the palace gardens, which extended into the public park, but promised 90 lashes and expulsion for anyone who so much as glimpsed her. Remember, this was near the very edge of civilization, so expulsion was quite serious and often fatal.

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One morning I’m sitting in the booth at my favorite café; it’s my favorite because no one ever notices me there and I can sip my coffee for hours and hours. There is a woman at the counter; she’s talking to the waiter about a dream she had. I usually hate to hear people’s dreams because they aren’t meant for me, but this woman has a beautiful voice. It is how a bell ringing in some temple on a mountain would sound, if you were climbing toward the temple and knew it was still a long way off. In the dream she was a shark in the ocean. She was always swimming to stay alive; swimming just to keep breathing. One day she comes across a shipwreck, there is a man tied to the mast of the ship and he is drowning. So, the shark woman swims up to him and bites the ropes. His body spins up to the surface and he gasps for air. He makes it back to land and tells everyone that a shark saved him. She just keeps swimming.

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Smother me with a pillow in my sleep, Reese says.

Reese’s blinds are broken and his apartment is too cold. We’re out of beer and it’s twenty past midnight and we’re trying to figure out how we’d kill each other if such an occasion arose. It’s not a suicide pact, just a way to determine the depth of our friendship. Murder is so personal; you don’t know how much someone really loves you until they’ve admitted how they would end your life.

Murdering Reese would involve something sweet, something more gentle than leaving him flailing for his last breaths. Antifreeze, I say. In your Diet Coke. You’ll hardly notice the taste.

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He’s not the TV character Jim Bob on The Waltons.

He’s not the musician Jim Bob Morrison.

He’s not Jim Bob Cooter—the offensive coordinator for the Denver Broncos.

No, this Jim Bob is a family man—a (good) husband, father, servant of God. This Jim Bob’s specialty is not in entertainment or professional sports, though he is a coordinator. He has to be. Jim Bob’s the father of nineteen children. Nineteen. As of October 2013, he’s aiming for twenty. That’s a lot of coordinating. CEO of the family. Nineteen names to remember.

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A friend called a week ago and asked if I was looking for work. In Hollywood, we’re always looking for work. I’m a personal assistant to the stars, and I’m real good—like Meryl Streep at Oscar time good. They say I’m discreet and subservient; stars like that.

So my pal calls up and tells me there’s this up and coming British star on his way over for a movie premiere. The film is huge, the kind that makes back its budget in a night, and this Brit plays the bad guy. He’s never been to Hollywood. He needs someone who knows the right barbers, tailors, call girls …

That’s where I come in: David Baron, assistant to the stars.

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It took less than six months for my luck to run out and like a worm under a rock, I was found. Joel. That big brutal fuck. Quite likely the last person I wanted to see. With his fallen prince face and mouth like an open sewer. A smoldering ghost of ruin and violence. Joel and I’d had good times and bad times but our friendship kind of petered off when he went to jail for hassling some young girls, an event that I’d heard he blamed me for on account of I was there when it started and was in a unique position to stop it or join in and instead chose to walk away. Apparently he thought I ought to’ve gone to jail, too. He’s probably right.

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Just the other day, on my way home from meeting Sheila at our hotel room for what would be the last time, I spotted a street vendor with all manner of colorful Mylar balloons dancing above his head. I purchased one that was pink with a big smiley face on it and dragged it across the remaining blocks, up my apartment steps, and into my living room where Tasha sat playing with one of those wooden toys with the wires and beads on it—a maze we called it.

“Hey, Baby Girl,” I said as I paraded the balloon in front of her until she looked up at me and smiled with one of those smiles I had not seen from anyone else in so long.

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Beneath a moon sliced cleanly in half, Jason reread the note—his suicide note—and then crumpled it up. He stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter and squatted on his haunches. He pushed the note through a sewer grate. The note fell, but got caught in the spiky branches of a seedling growing sideways out of a crack. He found a stick and knocked the note free and it fell again, all the way. Now it would end up in San Francisco Bay, where he hoped to end up. He stood. He pushed his shoulder-length hair behind his ears. He looked skyward, at the halved moon, at the stars, and, across the bay from where he stood in Berkeley, the twinkly San Francisco skyline.

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They wanted me to comment on the fire, to tell the reporter what things my family had saved and how deeply I was affected. There was a cameraman and a man holding a microphone, a woman with a clipboard, and the reporter. I had seen her on channel six a few times.

We were miles from our home, but I could smell everything burning.

I looked toward the community center, where the kids played on the rocks. I could see smoke in the distance, burning pine. Helicopters buzzed.

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Margaret Morri met the devil in person just once. It was in a standalone barrack, partially hidden beside an oddly lush and vibrant copse of trees, where the ground was blanketed by leaves that were ovate, serrated, blackened by age. And though the trees bore ripe fruit, enormous thundercloud plums, their skins fissuring and gurgling thickly with honey, the crows and ants of Gila River wanted no part of them. The red plums swelled, their sugar broke free and ran down, darkening the sand.

The barrack stood at the very edge of the northwest block, the furthest point from a guard tower, and was where Margaret went to collect petrified leaves, bones, pebbles, berries, seed pods, the scooped-out carapaces of beetles.

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