Straight Man

come true,” I tell her. “Jail was easy enough, but how to get into the hospital had me stumped.”
    The large man with the diagrammed face is still there, immobile.
    “I think you’re about to go back to sleep,” Lily says.
    I think she’s right, as usual. I can feel my eyes closing. Maybe I’ll be reunited with my donkey, finish the game, and make good on my promise to give the poor beast his freedom, though none of this seems quite as appealing as it did before. Now that I’ve awakened, the dream emotion, once powerfully felt, too closely resembles my father’s sorrow at the thought of having once wronged Charles Dickens. And speakingof fathers, I motion to Lily to come closer so I can whisper to her. “Is that Angelo out there?”
    She nods sadly. “We’re going to have a houseguest for a while.”
    “That’s okay,” I whisper. “Don’t worry about it. Welcome home.”
    As I drift back into sleep, I can’t help thinking that it’s a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It’s as close as we get to God in this life, and we reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes, for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.
    “So what’s he doing sending his brother, is what I want to know,” Angelo explains. “Like I’m supposed to know this seven-foot-tall Negro is Raschid’s brother? Angelo, the goddamn mind reader. I mean, here’s a kid who looks like he’s got all he can do to read the headline of the goddamn paper he’s delivering—but me?—I’m supposed to be able to read his mind. I’m supposed to know this seven-foot-tall Negro and his two eight-foot-tall pals mean me no harm. Here they are on my stoop, giving me the look, right? I’ve never seen them before, and I don’t know them from a bag of assholes, but I’m very polite. I explain how it’s my policy not to give money to strangers, whether or not they happen to be giant Negroes. I tell them my paper boy’s name is Raschid, and whether he has a brother or not I myself have no fucking idea. Again, I’m no mind reader. I tell them if Raschid has mononucleosis like they say, I’m sorry. I like Raschid. He’s a nice, polite Negro boy. One of the few. He don’t go around giving white people the look. When he gets better, he can come by my house any time he wants and I’ll pay him what I owe him. But I don’t give money to giant Negroes I’ve never seen before and that’s that. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it is. And I don’t really care if they happen to be holding Raschid’s collection book. This they could have taken off his body for all I know. It’s always the nice, polite Negro boys that get it in the neck. You don’t believe me, watch the news. See ’em come filing out of church, all dressed up and wanting to know why some Negro kid had to be shot down crossing the street when all he was was an honor rollstudent who sang in the church choir. Like the rest of us are supposed to have an explanation for why things happen to these people. But they’re right. It’s the polite ones that get it in the neck every time. That much I do know. That much I’ve figured out.”
    It’s eight-thirty in the morning. I’ve slept through the night, and Phil Watson’s confident prediction has come to pass. I don’t feel nearly as good as I felt coming off the triumph of my donkey basketball game and the news that my blood work has come back negative. No tumor. The painkillers I’ve been given have worn off, though I have a prescription for Tylenol 3s in my pocket. I refused one at the hospital, and I regret it now, listening to Angelo explain why he was in jail and had to be bailed out by my wife, who is driving the three of us out to Allegheny Wells. As soon as I get home I’m going to have to pop a pill and look for Occam, who’s gone missing. I should have believed Paul Rourke when he told me he’d seen the dog in a neighbor’s garden, but I didn’t. How he got out of the house is a mystery, but my guess is that some member of the media, not believing that I wasn’t home, and finding a door unlocked, must have poked his head inside to call my name. My sincere hope is that this person got a good groining.
    The other mystery is why our money was required to get