“I have to ask you a few questions. Your age?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Married?”

“Engaged.”

“Where do you work?”

“I train boxers.”

He chuckled. “The fighters or the dogs?”

I made a choice. “The dogs.”

“Ever been in trouble with the law?”

“No.”

I wondered when he was going to ask me a question to which I wasn’t going to lie.

“Are you the exclusive author of your essay?”

“Yes.” I marveled at my ability to answer truthfully with the same barefaced sincerity as I’d displayed on my five previous whoppers.

He explained the judging process to me, made me sign a document promising not to sue, gave me a coupon for a frozen pie, and left. I watched from the window as he walked back to his car, got in it, and sat. He picked up a clipboard from the passenger’s seat, gave it a befuddled examination, and then again elongated his neck as he looked out the windshield toward my apartment and back to the clipboard. I’ve only seen comedians do double takes, but here was one occurring in real life. He got out of his car, once again checking the clipboard against the street numbers. He came up my steps, shuffled in front of my apartment, and rapped a couple of times. I opened the door and saw on his face an expression of bewilderment, as though he had stepped into his shoes in the morning and they were size seventeen.

“I’m sorry,” he said, checking his clipboard. “I… I… does Lenny Burns live here?”

We just hung there staring at each other. Thank God my eventual response justified the eternity that elapsed before I spoke.

“Dead,” I said. “Dead!” My voiced raised. “Dead at twenty-eight!” I cracked out a half sob, drawing on the same intensity of belief I had employed when I wrote the name “Lenny Burns” on the essay. For dramatic effect, I reeled backward onto the sofa. Could my experience with the Crime Show, I thought, have given me the skills of Pacino?

Gunther stood in the doorway. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Mr. Burns lived here?”

“He was a cousin; my third cousin removed from my stepmother’s side, but we were like this. You can’t imagine how sudden… everybody in the building loved him.” My sincere belief in what I was saying made me choke up.

“He was a finalist, too… just like you,” said Gunther.

“Oh my God, the irony!” I cried. “We entered together. Lenny loved the idea that he might be typical, and once he got that into his head, he wanted to be the most typical. He would have loved to have been a finalist. Why couldn’t you have come yesterday, before he passed?”

In the hallway Philipa came by and heard me keening inside. She saw the door wide open and the distressed posture of Gunther Frisk.

She called in to us, “What’s the matter?”

“It’s Lenny,” said Gunther, trying to be helpful. “Lenny died.”

Philipa’s face was so blank, so unresponsive, that it was possible to interpret her expression as sudden, catastrophic, morbid shock. I rose and pulled her in, holding her face against my shoulder in comfort. Also so she couldn’t talk. I said to Gunther, “Could you excuse us?” He muttered an apology, acknowledging that he might have just blurted out private information that would have been better delivered by a priest. “I will contact you,” he said as he backpedaled out of my apartment.

It was a shimmering Southern California day, and the light poured into the Rite Aid through its plate glass windows the size of panel trucks. The merchandise inside broke the light like a million prisms. Candy bars, laid out like organ keys, glistened in their foil wrappers. Tiers of detergent boxes bore concentric circles of vibrating color. The tiny selection of pots and pans reflected elongated sideshow images. Green rubber gloves dangled from metal racks like a Duchamp, and behind it all was Zandy’s yellow hair, which moved like a sun, rising and setting over the horizon of ointments and salves.

I had actual purchases to make at the pharmacy and it was just luck that I fell into the correct rotation that allowed Zandy to wait on me. I was buying sixteen Chap Sticks. This was not a compulsion; this was practical. Ten go in a drawer, and I place the other six around the apartment for handy access. I handed her the cash and she might as well have called me by name, as she referenced every prescription drug I ever took.

“Still taking the Inderal?” she asked.

I had tried Inderal for a while to keep my heart from racing; I was off it now. “Not much,” I said.

“How’d you like Valium?”

“Left me kind of groggy.”

“You stopped your Prozac.”

“Don’t need it anymore.”

“Got a thing for Chap Stick, huh?”

She could have been on a data-gathering mission, or she could have been flirting with me. I couldn’t tell which. But it was profoundly intimate for her to know what drugs were flowing through my own personal veins. If a waitress were asking me these questions I would definitely consider it a come-on.

Up close Zandy failed in the perfection department, which made me like her more. The button of her nose was askew, as though someone had dialed it to three. Her skin, though, was so dewy and fresh I couldn’t quite turn to go. I picked up my sack of Chap Sticks, and she said, “Don’t forget your change,” and then she added a wonderful thing: She said, “See ya.” I had to stay there a second and take her in before I was able to unstick my gummy feet from the floor.

It was nearing two and I wondered if Clarissa was going to show up this time. There was no reason to think that she wouldn’t, as she had slipped a handwritten note under the door earlier in the week with a sincere but formal apology, promising we would resume the following week at our usual time. I assumed that this was the standard apology that one learns in chapter 15 of the therapist’s handbook: Don’t give out too much personal information. But the idea of the dispassionate shrink slinking up the patient’s stairs and secreting a note under the doorjamb probably wouldn’t go down well with whatever board would review such things. Still, Clarissa was only a student and allowed to act like one.

Friday at two o’clock-precisely when the second hand fell on neither side of twelve-Clarissa knocked, pushing open the door that I had purposely left ajar. She said, “I’m so sorry.” Clarissa was an apology champion. “Are you all right?” I asked, probing for information I already knew but wanted her to tell me. “Oh yes,” she said, “I couldn’t get a…” She was about to say “baby-sitter” and then realized it would reveal too much and she changed mid-sentence to “I got tied up and there was no way to reach you.”

“Would you like something to drink?” I offered.

“Do you have a Red Bull?”

Red Bull is a potent caffeine-infused soft drink that turns grown men into resonating vibraphones. Drinking a Red Bull is more impressive to me than drinking a bottle of Scotch. Several years ago after my first Red Bull-which was also my last-I got in marksman position on the living room floor, opened a pack of playing cards, and repeatedly dealt myself poker hands. I computed that good hands came in bunches; that one full house in a shuffle implies a possibility of more full houses. And lousy hands in a shuffle only create the possibility of more lousy hands. So Red Bull was not allowed in my house, only because this little episode lasted nine hours. Clarissa’s request for the caffeine recharge indicated to me that she was going to have to be bucked up if she was going to make it through my session.

“I don’t have any Red Bull but I know who might,” I said.

I excused myself to go to Brian and Philipa’s amid protestations of “you don’t have to” from Clarissa. I peered into her apartment and saw Brian flaked out on the sofa, his jaw hanging open like a drawbridge. I didn’t have the heart to wake him. I came back to see that Clarissa had settled into the easy chair and was staring at the floor. She was wearing a prim pink blouse that made her look so wholesome it was as if Norman Rockwell had painted a pinup. She had a bloom on her cheeks that lied about her real age. Her face had gentle angles, one rosy thing sloping into the next, and it suggested none of the hardness she must have experienced. It seemed as though she were determined to stay innocent, to hang back even though life was dragging her painfully forward. And all my conjecture bore out because she looked up at me and tried to say, “And how are you?” She choked it out but couldn’t continue. She looked down again and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.