Life Expectancy

uncle."
        "And you're my brother," he said to me. "But where were you for the past nine years when the justice system crucified me? Just like Pontius Pilate, you washed your hands of me."
        The irrationality of his accusation and the delusional grandeur implied by his comparison of himself to Christ allowed no response.
        "Another thing that's all wrong with the black-people idea," he said,
        "is a black man's semen ought to be black if a white man's is white.
        But it's white, too. I know, I've seen enough porno."
        There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.
        Lorrie attempted to persevere: "Sooner than later, anaphylactic shock will kill Annie. We can't risk it again. We're in a corner now. She's literally got only…"
        Her voice broke.
        I finished for her, "Annie's literally got only a couple days."
        Putting it into words, I felt a garrote of dread cinch my heart and could not for a moment inhale.
        "So it always comes down to good old Punchinello," my brother said.
        "The greatest clown in all history will be Punchinello Beezo. Except I wasn't. But, oh, the greatest aerialist of his age will be Punchinello Beezo! Except I was not allowed to be. No one will ever have avenged his mother's death as Punchinello will! Except I didn't get away with the money and had my testicles cut off. Now again-only Punchinello of all the people in the world, only Punchinello can save little Annie Tock-whose name rightly should be Annie Beezo, by the way-only Punchinello! But in the end she'll die anyway because this is, like all the other times, just a setup for the rug to be pulled out from under me."
        His speech had devastated Lorrie. She rose from her chair and turned away from him, stood trembling uncontrollably.
        All I could say to him was "Please."
        "Go away," he told me. "Go home. When the little bitch dies, bury her in the Baptist cemetery beside the nameless baby whose life you stole."
        When we stepped out of the conference room and into the hall, Charlene Coleman knew the awful truth the moment she saw our faces. She opened her arms to Lorrie, and Lorrie fell into them, and held tightly to her, weeping.
        I wished that I could turn back time while remembering all that had happened in the past half hour, and go at him again with greater finesse.
        Of course I knew another session with him would not achieve anything more than the one just ended, as neither would ten sessions, a hundred.
        Talking to him was talking to the whirlwind, words wasted as surely as cease-and-desist commands shouted into a monsoon.
        I knew that I had not failed Annie, that coming here had been a hopeless gamble from the start. Nonetheless, I felt that I had failed her, and I found myself in a despair so enervating that I didn't think I had the strength to walk back to the parking lot.
        "The photo," Lorrie suddenly remembered. "The rotten bastard has Annie's photo."
        She didn't need to elaborate. I understood why the skin around her eyes turned livid, why her mouth tightened with revulsion.
        I couldn't bear the thought of him alone in his cell with my Annie's photo, drinking her in with his eyes and slaking his thirst for cruelty with the thought of her painful death.
        Bursting back into the conference room, I found him with the guard, who was about to unshackle him from the table.
        Reaching out to him, I said, "That photo belongs to us."
        He hesitated, held it toward me, at arm's length, but would not release it when I tried to take it from him.
        "What about the cards?" he asked.
        "What cards?"
        "On my birthday and at Christmas."
        "Yeah, right."
        "Real Hallmark. Our deal."
        "We don't have any deal, you son of a bitch."
        His face flushed. "Don't call my mother names."
        He was serious. We had been here before.
        The anger receded from him, and he said, "But I forgot… she's your mother, too, isn't she?"
        "No. My mother's at home in Snow Village, painting an iguana."
        "Does this mean no candy money, either?"
        "And no Cheez Doodles."
        He seemed genuinely surprised at my attitude. "What about the