Death commences.

Now.

Oh, this should be so sweet, the remembered warm jumble of Chloe still in my arms and Chloe dead somewhere.

But no, I'm watched by Marla.

In guided meditation, I open my arms to receive my inner child, and the child is Marla smoking her cigarette. No white healing ball of light. Liar. No chakras. Picture your chakras opening as flowers and at the center of each is a slow-motion explosion of sweet light.

Liar.

My chakras stay closed.

When meditation ends, everyone is stretching and twisting their heads and pulling each other to their feet in preparation. Therapeutic physical contact. For the hug, I cross in three steps to stand against Marla who looks up into my face as I watch everyone else for the cue.

Let's all, the cue comes, embrace someone near us.

My arms clamp around Marla.

Pick someone special to you, tonight.

Marla's cigarette hands are pinned to her waist.

Tell this someone how you feel.

Marla doesn't have testicular cancer. Marla doesn't have tuberculosis. She isn't dying. Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophy way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.

The cue comes, share yourself.

So, Marla, how do you like them apples?

Share yourself completely.

So, Marla, get out. Get out. Get out.

Go ahead and cry if you have to.

Marla stares up at me. Her eyes are brown. Her earlobes pucker around earring holes, no earrings. Her chapped lips are frosted with dead skin.

Go ahead and cry.

"You're not dying either," Marla says.

Around us, couples stand sobbing, propped against each other.

"You tell on me," Marla says, "and I'll tell on you."

Then we can split the week, I say. Marla can have bone disease, brain parasites, and tuberculosis. I'll keep testicular cancer, blood parasites, and organic brain dementia.

Marla says, "What about ascending bowel cancers?"

The girl has done her homework.

We'll split bowel cancer. She gets it the first and third Sunday of every month.

"No," Marla says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Marla's eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so 'smarvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we're all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.

No, she wasn't leaving any group.

"Not and go back to the way life felt before," Marla says. "I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact I was breathing. So what if I couldn't get a job in my field."

Then go back to your funeral home, I say.

"Funerals are nothing compared to this," Marla says. "Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have a real experience of death."

Couples around the two of us are drying their tears, sniffing, patting each other on the back and letting go.

We can't both come, I tell her.

"Then don't come."

I need this.

"Then go to funerals."

Everyone else has broken apart and they're joining hands for the closing prayer. I let Marla go.

"How long have you been coming here?"

The closing prayer.

Two years.

A man in the prayer circle takes my hand. A man takes Marla's hand.

These prayers start and usually, my breathing is blown. Oh, bless us. Oh, bless us in our anger and our fear.

"Two years?" Marla tilts her head to whisper.

Oh, bless us and hold us.

Anyone who might've noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back.

Help us and help us.

"Okay," Marla says, "okay, okay, you can have testicular cancer."

Big Bob the big cheesebread crying all over me. Thanks.

Bring us to our destiny. Bring us peace.

"Don't mention it."

This is how I met Marla.

5.

THE SECURITY TASK force guy explained everything to me. force guy explained everything to me.

Baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. The security task force guy, he called baggage handlers Throwers. Modern bombs don't tick. But a suitcase that vibrates, the baggage handlers, the Throwers, have to call the police.

How I came to live with Tyler is because most airlines have this policy about vibrating baggage.

My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts. Two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.

Traveling alarm clock.

Cordless electric razor.

Toothbrush.

Six pair underwear.

Six pair black socks.

It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.

A list of all these things used to hang on the inside of my bedroom door at home.

Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn't open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.

Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and low-voltage track lighting.

Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building.

These things happen.

Everything, including your set of hand-blown green gla.s.s dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture the floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind.

Fifteen floors over the city, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and shattering down on everyone's car.

Me, while I'm heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83 or 455 miles an hour, true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back at Dulles. Nine times out of ten, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. This was my cordless electric razor. The other time, it's a vibrating d.i.l.d.o.

The security task force guy told me this. This was at my destination, without my suitcase, where I was about to cab it home and find my flannel sheets shredded on the ground.

Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a pa.s.senger on arrival that a d.i.l.d.o kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it's even a man. It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a d.i.l.d.o. Use the indefinite article.

A d.i.l.d.o.

Never your d.i.l.d.o.

Never, ever say the d.i.l.d.o accidentally turned itself on.

A d.i.l.d.o activated itself and created an emergency situation that required evacuating your baggage.

Rain was falling when I woke up for my connection in Stapleton.

Rain was falling when I woke up on our final approach to home.

An announcement told us to please take this opportunity to check around our seats for any personal belongings we might have left behind. Then the announcement said my name. Would I please meet with an airline representative waiting at the gate.

I set my watch back three hours, and it was still after midnight.

There was the airline representative at the gate, and there was the security task force guy to say, ha, your electric razor kept your checked baggage at Dulles. The task force guy called the baggage handlers Throwers. Then he called them Rampers. To prove things could be worse, the guy told me at least it wasn't a d.i.l.d.o. Then, maybe because I'm a guy and he's a guy and it's one o'clock in the morning, maybe to make me laugh, the guy said industry slang for flight attendant was s.p.a.ce Waitress. Or Air Mattress. It looked like the guy was wearing a pilot's uniform, white shirt with little epaulets and a blue tie. My luggage had been cleared, he said, and would arrive the next day.

The security guy asked my name and address and phone number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a c.o.c.kpit.

"You can only get one p.r.i.c.k into a condom," he said.

I cabbed home on my last ten bucks.

The local police had been asking a lot of questions, too.

My electric razor, which wasn't a bomb, was still three time zones behind me.

Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters, now.

My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now.

And I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with p.o.r.nography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.

We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.

All that sitting in the bathroom.

The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.

The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.