He shuts the door, he sits again, she sits on his lap, he flips the station, he holds on to her tightly, he looks at the tattoo on her a.s.s. He presses the side of his face to her back. She's in excellent shape, every muscle and tendon hard and well defined in her flesh that is only memory.

Sleep comes the way it has come since the attack. It comes like a rock to the head. It comes like a voice under the metal welded to the skull. It comes like murder. You can't prepare for it. You can't get comfortable first. You can't make room for it in your life. It descends and owns you.

THE KID WAKES up and it's morning. Reporters are at the door, calling his name. He goes to the window and pulls the curtains aside. The group is suddenly lively, active, like a gathering of pigeons that have spotted a cat. They call to him. They wave. They're like a mob of j.a.panese tourists. They aim cameras at the window. The prettiest journalists preen. They try to draw him out with their moist lips, their heated gazes, the arcs of their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and a.s.ses.

The kid knows he is only news because he is alive.

The girl is there with some of the other girls, girls just like her, that Ricky tortured and killed. Some of the boys have come along too, lost, mostly forgotten, unwanted, uninteresting. They all look the same, the same as the kid did five years ago. They're young, soft, without much character to their faces. No worry lines, no gray, cheeks buffed to a healthy, rosy glow, a golden hue, bursting with life and stupidity. They fill the room, smiling, laughing, like this is a frat house and they're preparing for a kegger.

The dead boys and dead girls reminisce. The kid wonders if any of them have any burning messages they want to pa.s.s on to friends or family. Or for the world to know before Ricky finally goes down. He turns and faces them but they're dancing now. They're playing a song that was popular a few years back. The girl moves up behind him, gets close, puts her lips to the back of his neck, reaches around him and grinds slowly. Ricky has things to say about dancing. Ricky has things to say about everything.

She reaches down. She tries to rouse the kid. The others are doing their thing. The song plays on and on. He wants to smash the CD player, the MP3 player, the iPod, but he doesn't own any of that. They've brought the music with them from the darkness, from the past, from the place where you go when you do not go all the way away. The pretty reporters bend their knees a little and sway. The girl becomes more grabby. She's not holding on to the kid so much as she's holding on to life. Whatever life she can still get her hands on.

The others moan. The others say what they need to say. They keep trying to make their peace but can't quite do it. There's no peace left to be made. They're angry that the kid is friendly with Ricky at all. They're angry he made it. They hound him the way they've hounded him for years. They cl.u.s.ter. They breathe his air. They try to peel up the metal plates and lie down under them, inside his blood and bone. They want him to give voice. They're keenly aware of the reporters out front. They have messages for their parents. They have messages for Ricky.

The reporters are getting a little more aggressive now. They press the doorbell. They knock. They call the kid's name. They peer in the windows. They shout out large amounts of money.

"Twenty thousand for an interview?" one of the dead boys says. It's an impressive number, even after you've been croaked. It only serves to infuriate the dead boys and girls. If they had lived, they would've taken the money. If they had lived, they would be eager to tell their stories. If they had lived, and it was the kid's ghost that was annoying them, they would listen, they would help him however they could, they would pay more attention.

"You do like having us around, don't you?" the girl asks.

The answer is no, but he can't tell them that, especially since they're already inside him, in his marrow, in the marrow of his mind. They're as welded to him as the plates to his skull, as Ricky. He wants them gone, but he doesn't know what he would do without them. The thought of losing Ricky fills him with a sense of dread he doesn't understand on any level. He doesn't know what the h.e.l.l he's going to do when Ricky dies. He fears Ricky's voice will leave with his life, and the kid will be left with nothing but these other dead.

"Thirty thousand?" the dead boy says, repeating a number hurled from outside. "What would you do with thirty thousand bucks?"

The kid thinks of what he might have said six or seven years ago to that kind of offer. He would've done what with the cash? Sailed around the world? Visited exotic locales? Bought a cabin on the beach? He'd always wanted to travel, used to dream about it, plot it, graph it, chart it, map it with the girl. Indochina, Burma, Egypt, Brazil, Pago Pago. There's still time, he imagines, except there isn't, and there never was.

"He's going crazy again," a dead girl, not his dead girl, says. He can't handle the dreams and hopes he once found refuge in. They cause nothing but pain now. The metal plates are heating up as if someone is standing there with a blowtorch, burning him. He twists and writhes on the couch, the music still playing. The kid falls to the floor, manages to get to his knees, his feet, crosses the room, opens the front door. He's ready to scream at the mob to leave him alone.

Except only the prettiest of the pretty journalists is standing there now. Time has pa.s.sed. He checks his watch. It's late. It's getting late. Ricky's due to take his shot soon. The kid has to move if he's going to get to the prison in time.

The girl says, "She isn't so pretty."

But the pretty reporter is. She's beautiful. She's lovely. She's alive. She holds herself in a way that exploits all her natural charms, all the curves and the br.i.m.m.i.n.g self-confidence. This is a woman who has handled herself well and overcome great odds. She's vanquished her foes and resorted to whatever tactics she needed to resort to for that moment. She carries her guilt perfectly, as if she's not carrying any guilt at all. She says another number.

"Fifty thousand."

Kid likes her voice. It's a mellifluous voice, but it has grit, substance, personality. He likes watching her lips. He likes the way she moves toward him, saying his name with some endearment, as if she's been waiting for him at the train station for a long time and has just spotted him. He imagines her there, on the platform, waving to him. He shuts his eyes. She's spurring his dreams again. The metal continues heating, red-hot, white-hot.

He tries to tell her to stop.

He tries to wave her away from him.

He tries to find Ricky's voice in his mind to calm him, center him. The pretty reporter is close, with a mike in her hand, a cameraman appearing from nowhere, from everywhere. The cameraman says, "We're rolling."

The reporter asks, "Concerning Ricky Benjamin Price, have you forgiven him for what he's done to you?"

The kid wants to say that at the moment he's not as angry with Ricky as he is with her. Ricky kills dreams; she's igniting them, she's burning him. The kid has to shut her up. He lunges and presses his mouth to hers while she lets out a squeal of surprise and maybe l.u.s.t. Who knows. He can't tell. It doesn't matter. He tastes her. He smells her. He breathes her in. She's alive. That matters.

The cameraman goes maybe two-fifty, a big bruiser carrying big hardware, none of that compact machinery the small guys run around with when they're after a story. Nah, he's got the serious stuff, the old-school camera like a boulder on his shoulder. The bruiser catches a nice close-up of the kiss for maybe a three-count before he goes, "Heeyy-"

The kid wants to explain to her. You don't know what you've done. You don't know what you're doing. You need to run. You have to run. Go. Go.

The girl says, "She's not going to go."

And somehow the pretty lady senses what he's saying to her. Maybe he's saying it aloud although he can't hear himself. He can't hear all that much over what's going on in his head. He wants the fifty large now, in cash, thinking that maybe he can pay somebody off at the prison to stay the execution. It's late, it's too late, but he has to try.

The reporter slaps him. She tags him nicely. It's not exactly a slap, more of a punch, and it hurts, catches him flush under the left ear in the ganglia of nerves there. The plates clang together. His head lights up even more.

The girl, his girl, his dead girl, goes, "Whoa."

The dead boys and girls want to explain themselves. They're dictating laundry lists of people they want to say something to on camera. Mothers and fathers, little sisters, brothers, cousins, loved ones of every stripe. They've got advice to share, secrets that need to be revealed. They bark, they plead, they demand. They want their turn at saying last words. Making amends, giving confession.

The reporter says, "I'm sorry. I . . . I'm sorry . . . please . . . let's just-"

The kid launches himself, full of Ricky's whispers. He backhands the reporter, drops her hard. It's one of Ricky's signature moves. All the dead girls gasp, remembering. The cameraman says again, "Heeyy-"

The kid slips his hands in under the camera, eases it off the guy's shoulder, helping him, doing him a favor. The guy goes to one knee at the side of the pretty reporter. He's in love with her, he's got to be in love with her. Who could work beside her, stare at her, see her every day, and not be in love with her?

Cameraman asks, "Are you okay?"

"What happened?" she says, a dab of blood leaking from her lower lip.

"You didn't have to hit her!" the girl goes.

But of course he did. Everyone knows that. They realize what else is inside with them. They know the truth.

In the kid's hands the camera comes to life. The screen lights up. He sees himself in it even though the lens isn't pointed at him. His other self seems to be trying to get his attention, tell him something meaningful and necessary. He tries to figure it out but can't. He lifts the huge old camera over his head and brings it down on the sweet spot of the cameraman's skull with an enormous crunch. Gla.s.s shatters. Plastic shatters. Bone shatters. Metal shrieks. The guy's eyes bulge but stop short of popping out. The reporter screams. A few of the dead girls scream. Two dead boys scream. It's a h.e.l.l of a chorus. The kid might be screaming too. So might the other version of himself, whoever and whatever that is. Ricky laughs.

It's a familiar story-.

There's just a little left to do. He does it quickly, efficiently, the way Ricky used to when he was pressed for time. He cleans up. He stashes and dashes. He kills and chills. He checks for nosy neighbors. He hops in his car and floors it to the prison.

CROWD CONTROL IS nonexistent. Everybody's got a cause to preserve and Ricky's at the heart of it all. The girl's parents have been out here for days, unnecessarily. Their faces are badly sunburned. He can see that in the prison lights. Her father's bald head shines red as the a.s.shole of the sun. Her mother's face is full of glee, as if finally there will be justice for their daughter, at last she'll be able to rest in peace.

The girl says, "Idiots."

That's not the worst thing she's ever called them. She hated them when she was alive and she feels even more anger toward them now.

More reporters are waiting in the wings. The witnesses of the execution are sequestered off to the side. They're penned in, like cattle. The protesters and protesters of the protesters all shout at one another. They don't consider this a solemn moment. They can't see the ritual of it all. The reporters shout out their questions and tug at sleeves and ask the most cloying questions. They should all be allowed to come along inside. They should all show the world what it's like for Ricky Benjamin Price to meet his doom. It's such an awful scenario that the kid groans just thinking about it. The father of one of the other dead girls stands shoulder to shoulder with the kid and sort of props him up. He's an ex-marine. He's very into showing the world that he will not be bowed. He stares straight ahead. The bulls unlock the gates and march the witnesses in.

They enter the little viewing room. They take their seats. The girl's parents sit on either side of him. Her mother murmurs and coos and tsks. Her father does what the ex-marine did, puts a hard shoulder to him, presses him, holds him up.

The girl says, "He used to do that to me in church all the time."

There's curtains across the viewing window. They part slowly, like the curtains rising on a stage. Act I, Scene I. Ricky enters, in the middle of a seven-man procession. He's talking, of course he's talking. The priest is praying. The warden is giving the speech about how Ricky's been decreed to die at the appointed hour for the crimes he's committed. The bulls drag him to the X-table and strap him down. There's a doctor to stick the needle in. The machine that delivers the poison is practically transparent. You can see all the instrumentality within. You can see the lethal fluids. You can see the depressors. You can see the mechanics of the thing. It is, in its own way, a parallel to what Ricky did to the girls. The way he explained everything he was going to do, the way he showed them each instrument beforehand and displayed the function of their own organs. He left their eyes for last.

The mothers and fathers and other family members can't contain themselves. There are curses, prayers, vicious barking outcries of fury and pain. Some of them turn away from the window. Some of them angle in. Ricky turns his head and meets the kid's eyes.

The girl says, "He's ugly. He's always been ugly, but he's gotten uglier."

Kid knows the reason for Ricky's ugliness. It's his fault. Greater corruptions have been piled upon Ricky's flesh and soul because of the kid's actions. Ricky is uglier today than he was yesterday because there are more murders to add to his catalog of corruption. The kid is now Dorian Gray and Ricky is the portrait.

The dead boys and girls say, "It's getting hot in here."

And it is, inside the kid's head, where the fear and the frustration are building, and the migraine is buzzing and almost blinding him, his vision red and black, vibrating him into new universes. Sweat pours off his face and he keeps drawing the back of his hand under his chin, across his throat, the same way the girl would do to him when they were at the beach and he'd sweat this same way in the sun.

But they're not talking about the room, not talking about this room. They're talking about their room, in the room between the metal and the brain.

"You've waited a long time for this," the girl's father says. "Enjoy it."

Ricky tells him to kill the man. It's easily done. Sitting here, this close, Ricky whispers how many ways he could do it. He ticks them off. One, two, three . . . he gets to nineteen. There are more, but he's made his point, and the point has calmed the kid down a bit. The dead boys and girls see their folks and their siblings and cry out for them, try to reach out to them. The kid has trouble holding his hands down on his knees.

The warden asks Ricky if he has anything to say. Ricky always has something to say. Ricky says and says and says. He says so much that the warden has to cut him off. The witnesses are all moaning and sobbing again. The ex-marine is cursing. The girl's father is sort of growling deep in his throat. Her mother tries to take the kid's hand and he shakes her off, gently. To touch him like that is to destroy yourself.

She tries again and receives an electric shock. The spark arcs like something out of Frankenstein's lab. It leaps. It's bright blue and buzzes. It snaps against her wrist like it wants to ride her bloodstream up to her heart. There's a small dot of black where the flesh is burned. She sucks wind through her teeth but that's all. The girl's father glances over and sniffs. The smell of burned flesh is pungent in the small viewing room. The kid imagines this is what the viewing room for the electric chair must smell like.

Ricky mouths words to the kid, specifically for him. They're words of love, which make it all the worse.

The girl says, "That disgusting freak."

The other dead boys and girls are offended too. Ricky never showed them any love or mercy, but that's because they didn't survive. Ricky doesn't have any use for the dying or the dead. He doesn't even have any use for himself anymore.

Originally, Ricky asked that he be dissected alive on television. It was a suggestion that made everybody go f.u.c.king nuts. The human rights groups, the prison boards, the anti-capital-punishment people, the pro-capital-punishment people, the cannibals, the s.a.d.i.s.ts, the voyeurs, the other serial killers, f.u.c.king everybody.

The warden signals a go.

The first plunger depresses. It's supposed to paralyze Ricky. It doesn't. The contents of the needle makes him smile even more broadly.

Someone in the viewing room goes, "My G.o.d."

Others echo the statement. "G.o.d. My G.o.d. Oh G.o.d."

The second plunger depresses. Ricky begins to laugh. He's still talking, of course, he's always talking. Kid flashes on the pregnant woman and wonders if she's in or out of labor yet. He wonders if Ricky's going to come back in some newborn. He wonders if Ricky is going to shake things up in h.e.l.l.

The third plunger depresses and Ricky's body bucks a little, something that's supposed to be impossible. His muscles strain. He looks like he's trying to rise. The witnesses do the gasping thing again. They moan again. The women duck their heads like they don't want Ricky noticing them. The men stare on.

More sparks fly from the kid's fingers. Small arcs but they're traveling, moving from person to person, chair to chair, forward toward the window gla.s.s. The blue light bops and weaves along, touching them all. Maybe it belongs to Ricky. Maybe it belongs to G.o.d.

The ex-marine goes, "What the f.u.c.k?"

Ricky relaxes and shuts his eyes. His chin slowly lowers to the side. It's a pose of innocence, an awful caricature. He looks content, at peace. At last he shuts up. At least here he shuts up. In the kid's head he's still whispering, thankfully. Ricky croons while the doc puts a stethoscope to Ricky's chest, then moves it to his wrist, then moves it again to his throat. The doc says Ricky's dead. The warden repeats it. The witnesses give a sigh of relief, and there's a few chuckles and sobs of happiness. The dead boys' and girls' names are invoked. Parents claim their children will rest easier now. Parents claim justice has been served. Parents claim they will sleep better now that the monster is dead. Parents don't know what the f.u.c.k they're talking about.

The spark reaches the machine. The machine schitzes out and the depressors depress, repress, compress, unpress, drawing blood up through the needles and into the tubes that had contained the poisons. The IVs in Ricky's arm slurp his blood up. You can see it leaving his body and entering the machine. The pressure in the syringes goes haywire. The needles crack. The tubes burst. Ricky's blood jets against the window as powerfully as a cut throat spurting arterial spray.

There's something beautiful in the designs made by his painted blood. Everybody's screaming. The dead boys and girls are laughing. They find it exciting, and it is. They recognize art in the making. Their parents scramble. The bulls are going wild inside the chamber. The priest is praying. The warden is shouting. Ricky's dead body is dancing. Adolf is still adolfing. The machine is on fire.

The girl says, "You just had to ruin it for everybody."

Maybe she's right. The kid must've wanted this. The only reason things like this happen is because he wants them to happen, needs for them to happen, or else Ricky does. But Ricky's finished now, except for what he's saying, except for what he's going to be saying forever now from the other side of the endless spanless darkness of infinite dimensions.

"You're getting turned on," she says.

She paws at him. She feels him. She likes when he gets aroused, whether it's by her touch or her memory or her death or someone else's. The blood makes her hot. She's hot there beneath the heated metal. The next migraine hits and he thrusts his hands against the sides of his head and lets out a squeal of agony that brings the whole room to a silence. They all look at him. Some stare into his eyes. Some stare at his scars. Some show mercy. Some look at him pitifully. Some hate him because he seemed to be friends with Ricky. The girl's mother smooths the back of his hair down. It feels like she's hacking at him with a hatchet.

"Don't you dare murder my mother," the girl says, which surprises him, since before her death she'd been talking about how much she wanted to get away from this woman, how stupid she was, what a pain in the a.s.s she was. Now she sounds protective, almost loving. Quite a switch after all this time. Even dead people can change.

He bolts. It's allowed. It's acceptable. What else are you going to do? Some of them talk about the future, some of them talk about the past. Some of them have become friends in their shared tragedy. Some of them discuss having dinner together. Some of them want to go get a drink.

The kid rushes for the door. A bull stops him like he's making a prison break. The screw's beefy arm is held out in front of him like a semaph.o.r.e. The kid grabs hold of the wrist, whirls, and flips the guy over his back. The bull lets out a cry, then another. They're loud enough to get into the little room. The warden looks. The other bulls look. Ricky's corpse looks.

The kid makes his way out into the hall and vomits. The bulls sniff at him like it's their problem, like they'll have to mop it up now, not some lifer who's been wielding the same mop for the last thirty-five years. The kid begs, "Let me out," but it takes forever. They have to escort him, they have to call ahead to get all the gates and doors open. They drag him off like he's a condemned prisoner, which he is, sort of. These p.r.i.c.ks, these people, they all have to put pressure on, they all have to squeeze him.

Outside he flails against a railing and gasps, sucking air. The crowd cheers, like it was him who'd pushed the b.u.t.ton, pulled the lever, punched Ricky's ticket. He could've, perhaps he should've, and now he stumbles down the walk. He tries to read the signs that are being pushed his way. Pa.s.sages from the Bible, literary quotes about the diminishment of mankind, pro-death-penalty vitriol, remember Sally, remember Robert, remember Timothy, remember Janet. He doesn't remember any of them. Someone hands him a baby, a real baby, a live baby, a goo-goo baby girl, like he's supposed to bless the child, or maybe murder it. Who hands a complete stranger a baby? The child goes, "Da da da da da da da da." Singsongy, kinda with a salsa beat to it.

The girl says, "That yours? You that f.u.c.king kid's da da? Were you cheating on me?"

He's not the kid's da da. He hands the baby back, not to the same person, but a different stranger. There he answered his own question. Who hands a complete stranger a baby? He does. Da da that.

Somebody gives him a full pint of Jameson's. The seal's not even broken. He twists the cap off and sucks deeply from the bottle. The liquor hurts his head even more. A couple of the dead kids drink deep, a couple of them go "phphooey, phoo . . . yuck" because they've never had a sip of the hard stuff. It brings things into focus for him, for a second. Which is Janet? Which is Timothy? He shoves his way through toward his car. The journalists are on him again. He wants to explain to them how dangerous it is, what they're doing, where they're standing, pushing him, touching him. He shoves his way past, makes it back to his car. He's no longer news, he should no longer be news. Ricky is dead.

THERE REALLY IS nowhere else for him to go, nothing for him to do, but return to the beach. It's clear and obvious. He walks alone on it. The waves crash, the waves reach. He scans the sand for the rest of his skull, his mind, his life. He lost it all somewhere around here. He sees footprints and thinks of the girl running for her life. The girl thinks of him lying there dying. Ricky thinks of them both, and the others, and a surge of pleasure fills him like a shot of adrenaline directly into the heart. You've got to wonder if he can still be saved, even after the mess with the machine. Some lab a.s.sistant in the morgue stealing Ricky's body out the back and injecting it with bright green liquid, some antideath serum. Somebody's got to be working on it, some other maniac in some other bas.e.m.e.nt.

A storm waits over the water. Perhaps it's been there since the day the kid died, or should've died. Perhaps it's come back to meet him, hovering here for years, waiting. The pain is so great now that the kid drops to his knees as the sand crabs rise and begin to make their way to him. Sparks flash from his fingertips, his eyes, his open mouth.

The girl says, "This is it. This is the end."

Maybe she's right, maybe not. The storm comes closer. Black clouds swirl overhead, vortexes, funnels, sweeping down and bringing up tens of thousands of gallons of water. It gushes around him in the wind. The dead boys are especially impressed. A couple of them liked fishing, dug boating, lived on the water. Lightning blasts down and leaves more strange patterns of bubbling molten clouded gla.s.s the size of Cadillac hoods across the beachfront all around him.

Ricky calls this the divine. Ricky calls this the infernal. Ricky believes in great mythic resonance. It's been there since his early religious upbringing. When he was alive, he was always walking along the beach hoping for tidal waves and hurricanes, as well as scoping victims. Ricky wants the world to burn, the world to drown. He wants to ride high on the next ark. Well, he did, when he was alive.

Ricky paws the dead. Ricky makes moves. He has no need to dismember but he still wants to f.u.c.k, still wants to have some fun. The kid turns and turns again as the lightning crashes down. The thunder is explosive but not as loud as Ricky's voice in his head, not as loud as the dead girls' disgust and the memories of their shrieks. The metal in his head draws the lightning to him. He's the tallest thing on the plain, and he's magnetized. His watch is going nuts. His fillings hurt. His mouth is full of fire.

Someone has got to be nearby. Ricky thinks his thoughts in the kid's dented skull. The kid searches strangers out. He looks for retirees, he scans for young lovers, fishermen, he watches for kids who've come out to drink beer on the beach in wild weather. His hands glow blue and white. His hands can do amazing things.

The sand crabs stare up at him, curious, expectant. He sits and waits for the ocean or the sky to kill him. It would be a proper ending. He thinks he deserves that, at least. Ricky got a proper ending. The girl, in her way, received one. And so did the rest of them. He stands and walks along, the tide rising, the waves swelling, breaking against his knees, the foam exploding against the side of his face. Lightning continues to shear down, thunder like thrown sticks of dynamite.

He moves around an outcropping of rock. He moves around fencing, up and down dunes, slipping past saw gra.s.s. Isolated beach houses come into view. The kid keeps going. He walks up to a gorgeous place, the kind of place he and the girl used to talk about buying one day, the kind of place that it's easy to talk about because everyone talks about places like this, and he knocks on the door with his burning fist.

Ricky enjoys the isolation, the deep loneliness out here, in the storm, on the water, away from the hateful population.

A girl very much like the girl, his girl, his dead girl, like all the dead girls, answers. Ricky's mouth waters. The kid's mouth waters.

She says, "Can I help you?"

The metal in his head clashes together and rings like the loudest church bell in twenty centuries.

It's a familiar story-.