"Could we? I've wanted to go in there, but only with somebody else. It'd make me nervous to go in alone."

"You? A ghost? You get nervous over bodies?"

"Yes. So I'm a wuss on this one issue."

"You get used to them. Trust me. Hamilton calls them Leakers."

My old front lawn is knee-high; all of the ornamental shrubs have browned and withered. Green ivy has persisted, overgrowing onto the front door, which is unlocked. It opens silently as Richard tries it. A whoosh of warm air comes out, as does a foul, ammonia-like stink that makes Richard grimace at me: "You still want to go through with this, Jared?"

"Please."

Time has stood still inside. "Oh boy, Richard. It's almost identical to the last day I was here—my final day pass out of the palliative care unit. I wasn't supposed to eat meat, but Dad cut my turkey up into bits the size of peas and said to hell with it. I puked my dinner and then some blood and then the paramedics had to come. My parents and sister were so frightened. It was such a bad scene."

Richard stands in the front area and waits as I float through the house. A new TV here, a microwave oven there, some fridge magnets, but otherwise the house remains as it was when I left it. I approach the staircase, but Richard looks at me. "Are you sure you're okay with this, Jared?"

"I'm fine. As long as you're here. Let's go up."

He walks behind me and we enter my old bedroom, now a sewing room. Then I look in the old bathroom, my sister's room, and finallymy parents' room. "Let me look first," Richard says. I tell him it won't be necessary, but he's adamant. He nudges the brown door open, peeks in, blanches, and then tiptoes out. "Leakers. I guess I have to tell you it's pretty gruesome in there."

"I need to see." I walk in, Richard behind me, and I see my parents' remains mummified into their bedsheets and mattress. "Sorry, man." Richard says.

"It's okay. It's Nature's way." I walk through the room—my photos are on the wall, they never took them down—and I see the hand mold I made in kindergarten. "Where are your own parents, Richard?"

"They're in their Camry at the Douglas Border Crossing. Linus and I made an overnight mission down there last summer and found their car. We were going to bury the remains, but it just wasn't, um, possible." I look around the room some more. "It's darkening outside," Richard says. "I have to go now—to see Mount Baker. You want to come?"

"I want to stay here with my folks a bit more. I wish there was something I could leave you with," I say, "a gift—a small miracle I can perform for you. Is there anything you want or need?"

Richard, now standing in the driveway says, "No. It sounds ridiculous, but I've got everything I need. Are you sure you want to stay here?"

"I'm sure. Good-bye, Richard. Thanks for coming in with me to see my folks."

"It was nothing. Thank you for fixing Karen's legs. When are you coming back again?"

"In two weeks,"

"See you then, buddy."

"Bye, guy."

31 ONE IDEA WIN

I was never a good "talker" when I was young and alive. Usually, a shrug and a smile carried me through most social situations. And to meet girls all I had to do was have a stare-down contest with them and make sure not to blink. It never failed. But now I've got the gift of clarity and directness.

What's clarity like?

Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on a beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth-century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. This is why Richard drank. This is why my old friends used to spend their lives blitzed on everything from cough syrup to crystal meth. Anything to make that sloggy buzz make a retreat.

It's been two weeks since my last visit. The sky is clear but smoky smelling and a fine ash falls from no identifiable source. In the house's kitchen, both Wendy and Pam are playing solitaire on personal computers electrified by the Honda generator. Their hair is dirty. Linus, still partially blind, can't get the water pump fixed—and their voices are raspy from uneven weather and from colds, which still seem to appear even without a population base to spread them. Their bodies are swaddled inside down coats adorned with hundreds of Bulgari jeweled brooches.

"Did Richard say he'd have the heater and the water fixed by the afternoon?" Pam asks, and Wendy says no. "Oh pooh. My hair feels all matted like a wad of Slim Jims. I'm getting a club soda. You want one?"

Wendy declines and strolls onto the patio where Linus is bundled up as though in a Swiss tuberculosis sanitorium. "Hey, Linus, are you sure you're wearing enough white terry robes? You look like Bugs Bunny in Palm Springs."

"Tee hee." Linus is still recovering from a wicked cold garnered from the three-day-long blind walk home from up on the mountain where I gave him pictures of heaven.

"Brrr. It's cold out," Wendy says. "But the sky looks pretty."

"I can tell by the sound of your voice," Linus says, "you're hiding something. Wait—let me guess. Yes, you've checked the Geiger counter, haven't you?"

"Guilty as charged. Chattering like maracas."

"Some surprise."

They Stand silent for a second, then Wendy says, "Jane is starting to reject her food. I'm not feeling so hot, either.""You sound fine," Linus says. "Jared's back tonight. He'll tell us what to do."

From the living room they can hear Hamilton cursing the cold, throwing a Yellow Pages into the fireplace for a meager dollop of heat.

"Oh—look!" Wendy says. "Up there—a bald eagle—still alive. Flying."

"I'll take your word for it. This pesky blindness, you know."

"I mean, it's so large—the big white head, the yellow beak. It's so big I can see the color from here."

"I'll live. I'm going inside now." He has difficulty finding the latch.

Inside the living room, Linus feels his way past Hamilton, asking, "What are you reading?"

"I'm taking my minty fresh new brain out for more test drives. Industry and Empire by Eric Hobsbawm—about the English Industrial Revolution. Also, One More Time by Carol Burnett. The funny lady of television and films remembers her beginnings. The coast-to-coast bestseller that warmed the hearts of millions."

"Well it's cold in here. We should find a smaller house that's easier to heat."

"No. Maybe we can just start putting bits of this house into the fire, and when we run out of this house we can find another big house."

At that moment, Megan's bedroom explodes with a top-forty hit from 1997. "Bloody hell." Hamilton sits bolt upright then stomps down the hall to Megan's door. "Turn down the bloody boom box, Megan. We can't think out here." Megan makes no response, so Hamilton nudges open the door and finds Megan and Jane sitting on the bed where they've stationed themselves for the past two weeks—a landscape of half-used Gerber jars, cigarette butts, CD's, and batteries. Hamilton turns the music down to a low level. Hamilton glowers at Jane, who gawps right back at him. Hamilton has the spooky sensation that Jane is far more aware of the world than any of the others. "Are you coming out for dinner tonight?" Hamilton asks. "It's a

Sunday dinner. A good one."

"Maybe. How do you know it's Sunday?""Wendy's PowerBook."

"Right." Megan turns off the stereo and picks up Jane. The two look out the window onto the driveway, where Richard has parked the car and is carrying cases of tinned foods into the house. "Oh goody-goody," says Megan, "more canned food. No, excuse me—I see a few boxes there, too. Lucky us—such variety." Richard sees Megan and suddenly Megan feels badly for Richard, who is the one person trying hard to maintain civility and comfort during the entire fucked up and crazy year. She calls out the window, "Dad, do you want me to help you with those?"