I knew of Cole. I thought about what it meant that he had a friend who cared that much about him. Cole could not have ever been terrible through and through, if someone cared this much about him from his past life. Or maybe he was just so great before he got terrible that he had a friend that rode that through to the other side. It sort of changed the way I thought about Cole, and sort of didn’t. “Getting there.”
There was a pause, and then Jeremy said, “And Victor?”
I didn’t say anything at all. Neither did Jeremy. Koenig turned the radio on, the volume down, and began to tune it.
Jeremy said, “They both died a long time ago. I was there to see it. You ever watched a friend die in his own skin? Ahh. Well, you can only raise so many of the dead. Getting there.” It took me a second to realize that he was repeating my answer from before. “I’ll take that. Tell him to listen to Vilkas, if you would. He changed my life. I won’t forget that.”
“I never said I knew where he was,” I said.
“I know it,” Jeremy replied. “I won’t forget that, either.”
The phone went quiet in my hand. I met Sam’s eyes. The almost-summer sun was bright on his face and turned his eyes shockingly, eerily yellow. For half a second, I wondered if his parents would have tried to kill a brown-eyed boy, a blue-eyed boy. Any son that didn’t have wolf’s eyes already.
“Call Cole,” Sam said.
I dialed Beck’s house. The phone rang and rang, and just as I was about to give up, the phone clicked, and a second later, “Da?”
“Cole,” I said, “turn on the radio.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
• COLE •
When I started everything, and by everything, I mean life, suicide was a joke. If I have to ride in that car with you, I’ll slash my wrists with a butter knife. It was as real as a unicorn. No, less real than that. It was as real as the explosion around an animated coyote. A hundred thousand people threaten to kill themselves every day and make a hundred thousand other people laugh, because like a cartoon, it’s funny and meaningless. Gone even before you turn off the TV.
Then it was a disease. Something other people got, if they lived someplace dirty enough to get the infection under their nails. It was not a pleasant dinner table conversation, Cole, and like the flu, it only killed the weak. If you’d been exposed, you didn’t talk about it. Wouldn’t want to put other people off their feed.
It wasn’t until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like It is a possibility I will download this album because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance, but possibility in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.
Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.
I looked good when I sang the end.
It took NARKOTIKA to make suicide a goal. A reward for services rendered. By the time they knew how to say NARKOTIKA in Russia, Japan, and Iowa, everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I’d scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.
I had thought I had come to Minnesota to die.
At two fifteen in the afternoon, Rick Vilkas had just finished his first commercial break. He was a music god who’d had us play live on his show and then asked me to sign a poster for his wife, who he said would only make love to our song “Sinking Ship (Going Down).” I’d written Rock the boat under my picture and signed my name. Rick Vilkas’s on-air persona was confidant, best friend over beer, passing along a secret in a low voice with an elbow in