Forever Odd

passed up a shot like that?”
        “No,” he admitted. “But being a virgin at twenty-one makes me the king of losers.”
        “No way I’m gonna start calling you Your Highness . Anyway, a hundred years ago, guys like you and me would be called gentlemen. Funny what a big difference a century makes.”
        “You?” he said. “Don’t try to tell me you are a member of the club. I’m inexperienced but I’m not naive.”
        “Believe what you want,” I said, sawing the bonds at his left ankle, “but I’m a member in good standing.”
        Danny knew that Stormy and I had been an item since we were sixteen, in high school. He didn’t know that we’d never made love.
        As a child, she had been molested by an adoptive father. For a long time, she’d felt unclean.
        She wanted to wait for marriage before we did the deed because she felt that by delaying our gratification, we would be purifying her past. She was determined that those bad memories of abuse would not haunt her in our bed.
        Stormy had said sex between us should feel clean and right and wonderful. She wanted it to be sacred; and it would have been.
        Then she died, and we never experienced that one bliss together, which was all right, because we experienced so many others. We packed a lifetime into four years.
        Danny Jessup didn’t need to hear any details. They are my most private memories, and precious to me.
        Without looking up from his left ankle, I said, “Phone sex?”
        After a hesitation, he said, “I wanted to know what it was like to talk about it, you know, with a girl. A girl who didn’t know what I look like.”
        I took longer cutting the tape than was required, keeping my head down, giving him time.
        He said, “I have some money of my own.” He designs web sites. “I pay the bills for my phone. Dad didn’t see the nine-hundred-number charges.”
        Having freed his ankle, I busied myself cleaning the tape-gummed blade of the knife on my jeans. I couldn’t cut the bonds around his chest because the same loops held the bomb level and in place.
        “For a couple minutes,” he continued, “it was exciting. But then pretty soon it seemed gross. Ugly.” His voice quavered. “You probably think I’m a pervert.”
        “I think you’re human. I like that in a friend.”
        He took a deep breath and went on: “It seemed gross… and then stupid. So I asked the girl, could we just talk, not about sex, about other things, anything. She said sure, that was all right.”
        Phone-sex services charge by the minute. Danny could have held forth for hours about the qualities of various laundry soaps, and she would have pretended to be enthralled.
        “We chatted half an hour, just about things we like and don’t like-you know, books, movies, food. It was wonderful, Odd. I can’t explain how wonderful it was, the glow I got from it. It was just… it was so nice.”
        I wouldn’t have thought that the word nice could break my heart, but it almost did.
        “That particular service will let you make an appointment with a girl you like. I mean for another conversation.”
        “This was Datura.”
        “Yes. The second time I talked to her, I found out she has this real fascination with the supernatural, ghosts and stuff.”
        I folded shut the knife and returned it to my backpack.
        “She’s read like a thousand books on the subject, visited lots of haunted houses. She’s into all kinds of paranormal phenomena.”
        I went around behind his chair and knelt on the floor.
        “What’re you doing?” he asked nervously.
        “Nothing. Relax. I’m just studying the situation. Tell me about Datura.”
        “This is the hardest part, Odd.”
        “I know. It’s okay.”
        His voice grew even softer: “Well… the third time I called her, pretty much the only thing we talked about was supernatural stuff- from the Bermuda Triangle to spontaneous human combustion to the ghosts that supposedly haunt the White House. I don’t know… I don’t know why I wanted so bad to impress her.”
        I am no expert on bomb-making. I had encountered only one other in my life-the previous August, in the same incident that involved the mall shootings.
        “I mean,” Danny said, “she was just this girl who talked filthy to men for money. But it was important to me that she liked me, maybe even thought I was