Saving Elijah

your space. You'd even kill me. And I'd kill you."
    "We're not on a boat."
    He eyed me. "But we are. It just depends on how you define your self-interest. Every moment we live, we have to prepare for that one moment when our time comes. Looking forward you have a whole lifetime before you, looking back it's only an instant. And when it comes, there's only one person, wanting to live another day or moment. Then you start looking for the God of Desperation to help you, the atheist in the foxhole with the guns blazing all around. Might as well forget it then. It's too late."
    "Too late for what?"
    "To back the right horse."
    What was he talking about?
    Laughing, he picked up our plates, dumped my pancakes into the garbage, and dropped the plates into the sink with a clatter. He leaned back against the sink.
    "Have you ever seen anyone dead, Dinah?"
    "Jewish people don't have open caskets."
    "At least you don't paint on these masks of peace at funerals, like the Christians do. They had this open casket for my mother, everybody standing around and saying, 'Oh, doesn't she look so nice and peaceful.' Bullshit. The dead's eyes are open and their mouths are open and they've shit their pants. My mother lying there with her hands clasped together, her face all beautiful and peaceful again. Bullshit."
    I got up and tried to put my arms around him. He pulled away.
    "Please," he said. "Spare me. I can take care of myself, always have. You should stop walking around in a fantasy. Case in point, Jay. He doesn't give a shit that I'm with you, he's trying to get in your pants."
    "He isn't."
    "You still haven't told me what he said to you, besides talking about my father—which, I might add, he has no right to do. He doesn't know shit about the bastard."
    "Why do you hate him so much? Because he likes young women?"
    "Not women, Dinah. Girls. I'll tell you what I'll do. You tell me what Jay said that you don't want me to know, and I'll tell you why I hate my father."
    Why couldn't he just talk to me without bargaining for information in return? And why did I continue to tell him? He was like a corkscrew, digging deeper and deeper inside me. "He said you went too far with some girl you met in a bar." As soon as I'd blurted it out, I wanted to take it back.
    He tried to laugh but it came out something between a snort and a cough. "Oh Christ, that! What a pig she was, a real whore."
    I stared. "And what am P"
    He touched my nose. "A virgin can't be a whore, babe."
    "But I'm no longer a virgin."
    He laughed. "Don't be ridiculous. I love you. Best thing that ever happened to me in my whole fucking life."
    I was still stuck on "I love you." "Jay said I should be careful of you."
    Now he did laugh, loudly. "He's trying to get into your pants behind my back, and you should be careful of me?"

    *    *    *

    Jay died. He had a massive stroke early that morning in the hospital. We gathered to cry at the Little Theater, where two D.C. homicide detectives interviewed everyone, confiscated Seth's film. It turned out the camera hadn't been working, and with more than a hundred people in attendance and an open front door, the investigation never turned up a viable suspect. Jay had, for some unknown reason, reacted fatally to the horse tranquilizer and LSD someone had spiked the punch with. At one point, I asked Seth if he was sorry about the things he'd said about Jay. "I'm sorry he's dead," he said. "It doesn't change the fact that he was a shit. Out for himself, just like everyone else. If you weren't so naive—"
    "I'm not naive, just because I don't think everyone is selfish and cruel and evil, the way you do."
    "What I said was people can be evil and cruel, given the right circumstances," Seth said. "If you're going to quote me, get it right."
    "Well, I can't imagine myself doing something I knew was evil." I was thinking about the Milgram Experiment, which I'd just read about in psych class. Subjects were placed in front of a machine and told they could inflict shocks on someone in the next room, and that the purpose of the experiment was to test the efficiency of using pain to increase memory. A huge percentage of people shocked people up to levels where the guy in the next room screamed in apparent pain. Very few refused to participate, even though there was nearly no motive to do so, except wanting to please the experimenter, the authority figure. Now there was a commentary on evil and cruelty, and sadly, it seemed to fit with Seth's