Behind him came the heavy steps of Mrs. Korjev as she followed him into the bedroom. “Mr. Asher, what is wrong? You run by like burning bear.”

And Charlie, because he was a Beta Male, and there had evolved over millions of years a standard Beta response to things inexplicable, said, “Someone is fucking with me.”

Lily was touching up her nail polish with a black Magic Marker when Stephan, the mailman, came through the shop door.

“’Sup, Darque?” Stephan said, sorting a stack of mail out of his bag. He was forty, short, muscular, and black. He wore wraparound sunglasses, which were almost always pushed back on his head over hair braided in tight cornrows. Lily had mixed feelings about him. She liked him because he called her Darque, short for Darquewillow Elventhing, the name under which she received mail at the shop, but because he was cheerful and seemed to like people, she deeply mistrusted him.

“Need you to sign,” Stephan said, offering her an electronic pad, on which she scribbled Charles Baudelaire with great flourish and without even looking.

Stephan plopped the mail on the counter. “Working alone again? So where is everyone?”

“Ray’s in the Philippines, Charlie’s traumatized.” She sighed. “Weight of the world falls on me—”

“Poor Charlie,” Stephan said. “They say that’s the worst thing you can go through, losing a spouse.”

“Yeah, there’s that, too. Today he’s traumatized because he saw a guy get hit by a bus up on Columbus.”

“Heard about that. He gonna be okay?”

“Well, fuck no, Stephan, he got hit by a bus.” Lily looked up from her nails for the first time.

“I meant Charlie.” Stephan winked, despite her harsh tone.

“Oh, he’s Charlie.”

“How’s the baby?”

“Evidently she leaks noxious substances.” Lily waved the Magic Marker under her nose as if it might mask the smell of ripened baby.

“All good, then,” Stephan smiled. “That’s it for today. You got anything for me?”

“I took in some red vinyl platforms yesterday. Men’s size ten.”

Stephan collected vintage seventies pimp wear. Lily was to be on the lookout for anything that came through the shop.

“How tall?”

“Four inches.”

“Low altitude,” Stephan said, as if that explained everything. “Take care, Darque.”

Lily waved her Magic Marker at him as he left, and started sorting through the mail. There were mostly bills, a couple of flyers, but one thick black envelope that felt like a book or catalog. It was addressed to Charlie Asher “in care of” Asher’s Secondhand and had a postmark from Night’s Plutonian Shore, which evidently was in whatever state started with a U. (Lily found geography not only mind-numbingly boring, but also, in the age of the Internet, irrelevant.)

Was it not addressed to the care of Asher’s Secondhand? Lily reasoned. And was she, Lily Darquewillow Elventhing, not manning the counter, the sole employee—nay—the de facto manager, of said secondhand store? And wasn’t it her right—nay—her responsibility to open this envelope and spare Charlie the irritation of the task? Onward, Elventhing! Your destiny is set, and if it be not destiny, then surely there is plausible deniability, which in the parlance of politics is the same thing.

She drew a jewel-encrusted dagger from under the counter (the stones valued at over seventy-three cents) and slit the envelope, pulled out the book, and fell in love.

The cover was shiny, like a children’s picture book, with a colorful illustration of a grinning skeleton with tiny people impaled on his fingertips, and all of them appeared to be having the time of their lives, as if they were enjoying a carnival ride that just happened to involve having a gaping hole being punched through the chest. It was festive—lots of flowers and candy in primary colors, done in the style of Mexican folk art. The Great Big Book of Death, was the title, spelled out across the top of the cover in cheerful, human femur font letters.

Lily opened the book to the first page, where a note was paper-clipped.

This should explain everything. I’m sorry.

— MF

Lily removed the note and opened the book to the first chapter: “So Now You’re Death: Here’s What You’ll Need.”

And it was all she needed. This was, very possibly, the coolest book she had ever seen. And certainly not anything Charlie would be able to appreciate, especially in his current state of heightened neurosis. She slipped the book into her backpack, then tore the note and the envelope into tiny pieces and buried them at the bottom of the wastebasket.

Jane,” said Charlie, “I am convinced by the events of the last few weeks that nefarious forces or people—unidentified but no less real—are threatening life as we know it, and in fact, may be bent on unraveling the very fabric of our existence.”

“And that’s why I have to eat yellow mustard?” Jane was sitting at Charlie’s breakfast counter eating Little Smokies cocktail sausages out of the package, dipping them in a ramekin of French’s yellow. Baby Sophie was sitting on the counter in her car-seat/bassinet/imperial-storm-trooper-helmet thingy.

Charlie paced the kitchen, marking off his evidentiary points in the air with a sausage as he went. “First, there was the guy in Rachel’s room that mysteriously disappeared from the security tapes.”

“Because he was never there. Look, Sophie likes yellow mustard like you.”

“Second,” Charlie continued, despite his sister’s persistent indifference, “all the stuff in the shop was glowing like it was radioactive. Don’t put that in her mouth.”

“Oh my God, Charlie, Sophie’s straight. Look at her go after that Lil’ Smokie.”

“And third, that Creek guy, got hit by a bus up on Columbus yesterday, I knew his name and he had an umbrella that was glowing red.”

“I’m so disappointed,” said Jane. “I was looking forward to raising her on the all-girls team—giving her the advantages I never had, but look at her work that sausage. This kid is a natural.”

“Get that out of her mouth!”

“Relax, she can’t eat it. She doesn’t even have teeth. And it’s not like there’s a moaning Teletubby on the other end of it. Oh, jeez, it’s going to take major tequila to get that picture out of my head.”

“She can’t have pork, Jane. She’s Jewish! Are you trying to turn my daughter into a shiksa?”

Jane snatched the cocktail sausage out of Sophie’s mouth, and examined it, even as the fiber-optic strand of drool stayed connected to the tiny kid. “I don’t think I can eat these things ever again,” Jane said. “They’ll always conjure visions of my niece blowing a terry-cloth puppet person.”

“Jane!” Charlie grabbed the sausage from her and flung it into the sink.

“What?!”

“Are you listening at all?”

“Yes, yes, you saw some guy get hit by a bus so your fabric is unraveling. So?”

“So, someone is fucking with me?”

“And why is that news, Charlie? You’ve thought someone was fucking with you since you were eight.”

“They have been. Probably. But this time it’s real. It could be real.”

“Hey, these are all-beef Lil’ Smokies. Sophie’s not a shikster after all.”

“Shiksa!”

“Whatever.”

“Jane, you’re not helping with my problem.”

“What problem? You have a problem?”

Charlie’s problem was that the trailing edge of his Beta Male imagination was digging at him like bamboo splinters under the fingernails. While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes—size, strength, speed, good looks—selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastodons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an angry, woolly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows. When Alpha Males set out to conquer neighboring tribes, to count coups and take heads, Beta Males could see in advance that in the event of a victory, the influx of female slaves was going to leave a surplus of mateless women cast out for younger trophy models, with nothing to do but salt down the heads and file the uncounted coups, and some would find solace in the arms of any Beta Male smart enough to survive. In the case of defeat, well, there was that widows thing again. The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.