Later I realized he believed I was gay, had taken a rather impressive, if premature, position on my sexuality. At the time I thought he was just veering off topic, which I guess he was doing as well.

"Seriously, you can love anybody, and I will love you."

"Thanks, Dad."

"No, really, I mean it."

"I know, Dad."

"Oysters and snails. Ever see that movie?"

"Saw it with you. On TV. But they didn't have that part. You told me about it."

"Spahtakus," he said, "I love you, Spahtakus. Remember? That's what's-his-face."

"Right," I said.

"There's no shame in men loving men," he said. "There's only shame if there's shame. You get me?"

"Sure, Dad."

"I don't go in for all that macho crap," he said. "In fact, even though your mother goes to all those meetings, I'm a better feminist than she is. You want to know why?"

"Why?"

"Because I'm objective. I'm not a woman, so I can see it all very clearly. And they are absolutely right. We are pieces of shit."

"We are?"

"Not you. You're a good boy. I can tell you want to be a bad boy but you don't have it in you. Or maybe Claudia drained it out of you. I shouldn't say that. She's going through a lot of changes. So am I. Change or die, they say. And who, you may ask, are they?"

"Huh?"

"I said, 'Who, you may ask, are they?' "

"Who?" I said.

"Who is who?"

"Who are they?" I said.

"Third base," said my father, laughed.

He loved the old routines, even if he never quite got how they worked. Maybe he liked those movies, the spit takes and predictable trickery, because they gave him occasion to dream, to watch the better movie in his head, or even just browse for an interior state. When you did that without a television, people worried, asked if you'd like to see a professional.

"But who's on first?" I said now, tried to get him going.

"You're a good kid," he said. "It's not your fault."

I thought he meant it wasn't my fault that he didn't love me enough. But he probably meant something else. The phrase "good kid" made me shudder now, especially when I looked at Bernie. I'd spoken those words myself on occasion, knew them for the flail scared fathers wielded to fend off the love of their sons.

I think I understood Roger a little more the night before he died. He looked disappointed on his deathbed, a weak, sweet boy, like Bernie with a fever. Hell, maybe Gabe was right, maybe Roger was morose. Heroic measures had been forsaken. He wouldn't sneak out on this one.

So maybe I wanted all these memories, the sorrows and the hollows. Or maybe I was just programmed to want them, to believe I was composed of them, a failsafe wired into me, to keep me eating and shitting and dwelling on what exactly I wanted in a winter lager and not seeing things very clearly. Some argued that the creation of artificial intelligence amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Consciousness was suffering. Why inflict it on a poor machine? I wasn't one of those people, but only because I believed that AI would someday make good on its promise of astonishing robot sex, if not for us, then for our children.

I was also one of those people who hadn't caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody's cousin's gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.

When it came to locating people, I was still an old-timey search engine man, and now I plugged in the name Todd Wilkes. I wanted to know what he'd done to earn Don Charboneau's everlasting ire. There were more than a dozen articles about this Wilkes. They began a few years back when he'd charmed some politicians at a military hospital in Germany while recovering from bomb burns.

The language of these pieces seemed lifted from the Daily Planet archive. Todd Wilkes was "plucky," the reporters wrote, a "throwback, a happy warrior." Todd Wilkes was a "sharp cookie" from a "hardscrabble town." "He has no time for excuses," went one profile. "He takes the bull of life by the horns," proclaimed another. Todd Wilkes was going places. He was not to be denied. Also, he was sick of the whining from some of his cohort. "Nobody put a gun to our heads and told us to put guns to people's heads," he told a New York daily. "I don't care if you left your legs in Fallujah or Baghdad, you better suck it up. Nobody is going to help you if you don't help yourself. We are warriors. I follow the warrior code."

Most of the reporters had gorged on the bluster. Todd Wilkes was off to college to study government. He was going to be a senator someday. "The sky is the limit!" wrote one columnist.

"Forget the sky," wrote another.

I could see why Don wanted to shoot him, but these pieces had run some time ago. We had no use for Todd Wilkes now. But maybe Don still did. Once you've tasted the hate, it's hard to forsake that unique and heavenly flavor. It was maybe what got Don up in the morning. Surely it wasn't Sasha, or the promise of another day out on the pave-o-mento, the sun stabbing his scrawny neck, the humps swelling up, the girls on all fucking wrong.

Nineteen

The Best Place was one of those establishments that signaled the end of empire, or perhaps the advent of something much better than empire, at least to those who could afford it: spa facility, birthing center, archery gallery, breast milk bank, coffee shop. Who wouldn't want to quaff a latte, or shoot a few quivers, during prodromal labor? If the mother-to-be wasn't up to it, she could email JPEGs of her dilated cervix to her birthing community while her partner got a peel, or whiled away the downtime role-playing Agincourt in the gallery.

We few, we happy few.

There was no sign on the street but Purdy had texted me the building number and the password: "Ashtoreth." Somebody buzzed me into a chrome-sided elevator, and I slid stealth-phallically several floors up, stepped into a light-soaked atrium. The room resembled a rain forest tricked out with designer furniture, or a furniture showroom tricked out like a rain forest. Women, some pregnant, and a few men, milled about in plush robes. Michael Florida stood at a Lucite bar, sipped something beige and foamy.

"There's our guy," he said, waved.

Here comes the kid, I thought, took a stool a few stools over.

Michael Florida winked, flipped a notepad shut.

"Care for a drink?"

"What are you having?" I said, peeked into his frothy highball glass.

"I'm digging on this hind milk smoothie."

"Hind milk?"

Now Michael Florida let me in on the details of this place, the Best Place, the luxurious labor chambers, the bottled breast milk chilled in vaults, the mud baths and neo-Swedish massage and compound bows. Purdy was here with Melinda to screen potential midwives, but he wouldn't be long. There was a meeting with some Chinese bridge loan specialists. It concerned Purdy's new project, something to do with Bible stories and mobile phones. But first Purdy wanted a few minutes with me.

"Bible stories?" I said.

"Better than those midget psalms books, right?" said Michael Florida. "But what do I know? I pick this stuff up in dribs and drabs. I'm just a glorified driver, really. This milk is awesome. And great for the immune system. Mine's pretty compromised. So's yours, I'll bet."