A skinny guy pokes his head inside, blocking the raw sunlight. He’s got a beat-up plastic bottle in one hand, sloshing with tobacco juice. He spits in it, eyes wide and searching.

“Howdy ho,” he calls. “Jim? Ya here?”

It’s Lyle Crosby. The laughing cowboy. The last person I want to see. But I’m in a bad spot right now and can’t be too choosy about the company I keep.

Lyle’s eyes travel to my spot on the living room floor. He surprises me and cracks a gap-toothed smile, then laughs out loud. Steps inside and closes the door behind him.

“Damn, buddy. You in here fooling with yourself? Don’t be embarrassed. Half the amp teenagers end up like this at one time or another. A little bit of self-experimentation never hurt anybody, except when it did.”

Lyle chuckles at his own joke. Then he saunters around the manufactured room, his shark-black eyes mechanically taking in the wood-paneled walls and mangy La-Z-Boy recliner and particleboard bookshelves half filled with dog-eared Westerns and thick, yellowed histories of World War II.

“I’m always telling Jim he needs a wife. Look at this place. No woman I know would put up with this crap.”

Lyle grabs a Reader’s Digest from the coffee table and riffles the pages with the ball of his thumb. He tosses the digest on a stack of other magazines. They collapse in a waterfall, brittle pages slapping the floor next to my face.

He snorts at the spitty snow angels I’ve been making.

“Okay. Where’s your tools, buddy?” asks Lyle.

All I can do is breathe loudly through my teeth.

“Huh,” says Lyle. He studies the area around me, thoughtfully adjusting the pod of tobacco wedged in his mouth. Eyeing me, he sucks in his bottom lip and carefully dribbles spit into the plastic bottle.

“Starting to worry me,” he says.

With the toe of his boot, he nudges me over onto my back. My arms and face are scraped up and bruised, but Lyle doesn’t seem to notice or care. Those obsidian flakes in his face are trained on what I’m still holding in my left hand.

Lyle gets very still. An unrecognizable emotion ripples across his sweat-slicked forehead. Concern. Or maybe anger. He spits again into his bottle, slow.

“That a fact?” he asks, staring pointedly at the streaks of dried blood on my temple. “Used a fuckin’ ice pick? Damn, Jack. I guess you’re not fooling around, huh? You trying to kill yourself?”

Not exactly.

I look up at him, focused on keeping my eyes wide open, round, and imploring. Yeah, my spit-smudged face says. Yeah, I was shit-faced drunk and alone and I was angry. I thought if I turned on the Zenith I could walk outside and kick the living crap out of a guy named Billy. But it didn’t work and I messed it up bad and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I take it back, okay?

A hint of ozone sneaks into my next gulp of air. Shit. It’s been years since my last one, but you never forget the feeling of a seizure coming on. In the seconds just before, it’s easy to get fixated on little things. And this one feels like a real grand mal because I can’t seem to tear my eyes away from the glint of that vodka bottle under the couch.

“I get it,” says Lyle. “Couldn’t take it no more?”

The trapped animal whimper comes out of me again and I can sense the storm gathering inside, feel the churning thunderclouds overhead sucking all the oxygen out of the air. I allow the panic into my eyes and wrench them up to meet Lyle’s dark face. In the universal language of pain I’m chanting, Please help me. Please, please, please, oh please, don’t let another one hit me.

“People been talking about you around the park. Kind of was looking forward to meeting you, actually. Course, I didn’t think you were a coward at the time.”

He spits tobacco, this time on the floor.

“Life is tough though, huh? And for an amp, life is even tougher. Maybe you just couldn’t stand it no more. Working minimum wage. Got no lady. No respect. So I’ll venture to guess, and this is just conjecture here, but from the evidence … I’m supposing you’d had yourself enough. It came on down to a logical conclusion: Life as an amp ain’t worth living.”

Lyle stoops over and sets the bottle of spit and tobacco down next to my head. Then he casually grabs a handful of my hair in his left hand. He pulls my head off the floor, groaning theatrically like he’s tired. Then he pulls harder, tugs my head up, painfully, so we’re face-to-face.

“Know what, buddy?” he asks.

Lyle studies my half-lidded eyes. I can smell the tobacco on his breath mingling with the stinging flakes of metal that signal the coming storm. The creases of dirt in his tatted-up neck stand out like fault lines, pecked by tattooed crow beaks and clouded with feathers. I can just make out the silhouetted nub of the implant on the side of his head.

“I find that conclusion to be personally offensive.”

And he decks me. Just sends down a right cross and bats it out of the park. A knuckle catches me on the eye, and I can feel the socket filling with blood.

My head hits the ground like a dropped watermelon. A pathetic whining sound warbles out of my throat. When I push my eyes open, I can see the crumbs and dirt on the floor mixing with my slobber. A spattering of fat bright droplets of my blood sit on the floor, mutely reflecting a square of window light from some place up high that I can’t turn my head to see.

Jim was right. Lyle is crazy. But being punched in the face is nothing compared to the electrical frenzy that’s about to slam into my brain like a Martian cyclone.

“You wanna die?” Lyle asks me, real soft.

I can’t tell whether it’s a question or an offer.

Lyle looks at the door. At first I think he’s going to leave me here, but then he spins back around, and the hardened leather tip of a cowboy boot connects in the pit of my stomach. My body bounces in the air like so much rubber. No, no, no. I’m wailing with my eyes, but who can see? The first tremors of the seizure jitter through my limbs like aftershocks.

“No problem,” mutters Lyle. And the boot comes again, harder this time.

“Unless maybe you do want to live?” asks Lyle. He circles around, methodically kicking: legs, arms, back. He avoids my head.

“Do you wanna live?”

Air hisses from between my lips. I’m empty except for the pain. Lighter than nothing. Never felt this way before. I fold myself up into my head and swim with the air down the black river of my throat. Up and out and over the teeth and tongue. With all the mental will I can muster, I reach down and tug on the dead meat of my tongue. I grab my molars and bend my jaw closed, and slowly but surely my voice comes. It’s almost inaudible but somehow Lyle hears.

“Yes.”

Lyle stops kicking. I listen to his heavy breathing and the sick trickle of tobacco juice and spit oozing into the plastic bottle. Then something lands next to my face with a thwap. Through a blur of tears I see a scabby brown satchel the size of a wallet.

“That’s all you had to say, brother,” says Lyle. “That’s all you had to say.”

I barely hear him. The storm is here. Thunderclouds burst and I feel ice-cold pinpricks of rain erupt all over my body. My limbs curl and I scream through clenched teeth. I’m lashed to a tree in a vicious storm that’s shredding me from the inside out.

Lyle’s dirty boots creak faintly as he squats next to me. But that’s part of another world now. He can kick me to death and I’ll never feel it, because he could never hurt me as bad as I’m hurting myself.

Somewhere far away, the laughing cowboy speaks to me. But my brain is broken. The sounds swell and ebb through my head like ripples on a pond, meaningless. And then, nothing.

The storm dissipates. My tree wafts gently in the wind. And then my tree is gone and I’m back on the linoleum, smelling the ripe manure on Lyle’s boots. Above my head, his skinny arms move in precise jerks, tattoos flashing, a blurred confusion of flying, fighting crows. One of them has a flaming torch grasped in its claws.