“Not before any-not for a while, I don’t-okay, look. I didn’t want to get into this because I’m still really vague about it and I have to play some more sessions. But there’s going to be a huge civil war in two years and we’re all going to have to leave and go to, like, Iceland.”

Again, she looked at me. Yet again, I looked back.

“That’s not it,” she said. “Come on, what’s going to happen?”

“If you don’t like that one, then I don’t know.”

“No, I know you’ve been looking in on the future, and you saw something big, but that wasn’t it.”

“Okay, fine-”

“Oh, hell, you found another doomster. Right?”

Better not answer that one, I thought. Don’t answer anything, Jeddiot. Just stay mum, dumb, and schtum and you’ll get out “That’s why you’re not going to die before anybody else, we’re all going to die at the same time, you said there’d be other doomsters someday. And you’ve found out about one and you don’t think you can stop him.”

I shook my head.

“Or else it’s some natural disaster. Right?”

“No,” I said. “No asteroids, no tidal waves, no, no zombies, no lava…”

“Okay, so it’s a nuke. Nuclear war.”

“No, that’s not it,” I said.

“What is it? You gave off a guilty signal just now.”

“It’s-it’s that investment.”

“How many people is it going to affect?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it going to kill more than a hundred people?”

“I-okay, I think so.”

“More than ten thousand?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“Fifty thousand deaths.”

“I’m not answering any more. I’m done. I’m a jerk and that’s it.”

“How big of a jerk?”

I got my eyes detached from hers and swung them around the room. The clock said it was to.

Out in the courtyard, the pool lights had gone out and without the contrast you could make out a hedge of I guess pepper trees beyond it. Over in Neo-Teo, Eos Aimatirodactylos — bloody-fingernailed dawn-was grazing the “east” facets of the roof combs. But somehow, inevitably, my focus gravitated back to her face. Our eyes locked.

She guesses, I thought.

She put the last inch of cigarette in the ashtray but didn’t stub it out.

No. No, she doesn’t. Just chill out. Just sit tight. Chill tight and sit it out. Shill sight tit shite chit…

One second. Two seconds. Was something changed in her expression? I couldn’t look away. Yes, it was. Changing.

As of today I was thirty-eight short years old, and I’d already seen more than enough horrible stuff in my exile here on Planet Retardia, and not just on YouTube, either, all the things you’d pay a lot to be able to unsee, your second-grade class’s gerbils in the act of maternal cannibalism, a tentacle-faced star-nosed mole, that photo of the six-year-old girl walking two steps behind her grandmother toward the gas chamber at Treblinka, a knot of eight dead naked toddlers in a six-month-old mass grave that No Way and I helped dig up in La Sierra when No Way and I were working for the relief corps of the CPRs, the Communities of Populations in Resistance, the unadulterated evil in the gargoyle face of Pope Benedict XVI, the giant toothy lamprey face of the Chunnel drilling machine, a woman in Mexico City with a huge facial tumor that made her head look like giant peeled pomegranate-but this, now, was easily the most horrible thing I’d ever seen, and I knew it was the most horrible thing I ever would see, not a fleshy gross-out or a monument of cruelty or an ugh-eyed monster, but, rather, just the slow, dark dawn of understanding in her eyes. She knew, I could tell that she knew, and that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. And I could tell that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. It was as though there were some kind of pneuma flowing between our eyes, like it feels with lovers orgasming together in bright light, but of course this was the hideous negative of anything loving, she was looking into me and seeing a wasteland of shit, a whole more-than-earth-size planet with diarrhea oceans broken by mountain-islands of stacked dry turds, and in my looking back I was agreeing with that assessment. A sound rose inside her, a rumble under her chest, and metastasized into something like a voice, but a voice that rasped out of some huge, recently dead thing buried in frozen ground:

“WHAT DID YOU DO?”

I noticed that my knees were cracking, and that meant I was standing up, slowly. I backed away from her, toward the big desk.

“I didn’t,” I started to say, “I mean, it’s nothing, it’s the right-”

“WHAT DID YOU DO?”

She bounced up and ducked around in front of me, as small, lissome people can. I jumped left and got the desk between us. Her eyes had an indescribable look-indescribable but not something I’d never seen, because I’d seen it in dying patients in the field hospitals at the CPRs, an expression of horror, horror and hatred and terror, or rather, I think, terror not for her but more, or maybe only, for her child, which is even more primal.

“I want… to… see… Max… grow… up,” she barked.

“Marena, look-”

“How-can-you — k-kill-MAX?”

The forgotten Go clock ticked once. It ticked again. Tick. Tick “Max is Desert Dog,” I said.

“What? What the fuck is that?”

“Nothing, it’s just-”

“Is that… what you call all… call all… those

… people you-”

“No, it’s just, I know it’s the right thing, it won’t hurt, there’s no way to-”

“Don’t even tell me, you fuck, you, you, you… you think you’re going to make that decision-you can’t make that decision, you’re not some like, wise being, you’re just, you’re a loser, you’re a boring windbaggy geek loser, you’re, you think you mean anything to anybody? You don’t know anybody worth knowing, nobody’s heard of you, you’ve never done anything remotely important, you’re-”

On the last syllable of important, she darted to her right. I circled away, clockwise. She stopped, feinted clockwise again in kind of a Texas tango maneuver, and dashed counterclockwise, almost getting me, but I made it to the opposite side, so the French doors were at my back. Somewhere in my churning gray matter I realized something was off, that she wasn’t acting quite the way she would normally, or let’s say “normally,” act faced with this information, that even though tears were almost squirting out of her eyes, she maybe wasn’t yelling so loud as you’d have thought, but I didn’t get the implication. Damn, I thought, I should just attack her and like strangle her or bonk her brains in or something right now. Except I didn’t feel like it. In fact, I bet I’d never felt less like doing anything like that in my life-in fact, I felt like I wanted to hold on to her and shield her while the world vanished so that she and I could float off together like the shades of Paolo and Francesca, out into Earth-free space. God damn it, my other side said, you’re a pussy after all. You’d think that someone who was going to kill everybody later wouldn’t have trouble killing one person, but there’s a difference between someone who kills for fun and someone who kills out of compassion, like, say, a veterinarian, and “You shit, ” Marena said, “I was, I was, I was practically falling in love with you and you were shit. You were worse than shit. You’re what shit would shit if it could shit.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking along those lines.” It was an idiotic thing to say, of course, but I was a long way from thinking clearly, and in fact I had just been thinking how I was one of them, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, DeLanda, and then I was thinking how she was right, that I wasn’t even an accomplished whatever like they all were, I wasn’t a conqueror or a dynasty founder or even a good public speaker, I was the worst of all of them without even being in their league, just a loser who happened to find a way to make everyone else lose along with me, except even that was giving me too much credit because it was making me out to be at least a human being and I wasn’t, I was the opposite of a human being, I was a smear of wriggling little verminettes that had to be immediately wiped off the ass of the universe “How do I stop it?”