bench and most of the weights into the Saturn. I had to go into the office and find a bolt wrench to get the bench apart. Dodge would have kicked my ass if he’d seen me making off with that customer’s stuff, even if he knew the reason, so I couldn’t exactly ask for help. Once I got it back to the house I had to repeat the whole process, carrying it all down to the cellar and reassembling everything. It was possible Dodge would come downstairs at some point and ask why the hell we had a weight bench, but probably he wouldn’t have put together where it came from. Most people’s first reaction when they see you with something new is not to ask where you stole it from. And anyway, I felt justified. If we couldn’t get Elias to leave the house without having a nervous breakdown, I could at least give him something worthwhile to do at home.
While Candy and Jill were cooking supper, I coaxed Eli downstairs. It didn’t take a whole lot to do it; nothing ever changes around there, so even a hint of anything different gets those people all hot and bothered. Once he was standing at the bottom of the stairs he looked straight at the weight bench and said, “You crazy son of a bitch.”
I grinned. “Hey, everybody needs a hobby.”
“You actually went and stole that guy’s equipment.”
“I borrowed it. He hasn’t been back to look in what, five years? He’ll never know it’s missing.”
Elias walked up to it as if it was an unfamiliar dog. Touched the weight I’d already set on the bar, ran a hand along the top of the bench. I said, “Try it.”
He sat down and slid beneath the bar, braced his hands on it and lifted. Three times, up and down, and that wasn’t any small amount of weight, either. “Hoo-ah,” I said. “That’s the spirit. Knew you had it in you.”
“It’s nothing. At Bagram I was lifting twice this much, sets of ten reps, all damn day.” He did two more and then let it rest in the frame. “Guess I’m out of shape, though.”
“We’ll get you back into it. We’re gonna get you laid, buddy.”
He laughed. “Never had a lot of luck with that in Frasier. No reason to think it’ll change now.”
“You don’t know that. Get back in shape and see what happens. Even Jill thought you were pretty hot last fall.”
He’d lifted the barbell again, but shifted his head to glance at me. “Shut up.”
“I’m serious. If Jill thinks so, you know she wasn’t the only one.”
He shook his head and worked through a set of five. “We’ll see about that.”
“How’s the new medicine working out for you?”
“I hate it.”
That was not the expected answer. I said, “Huh?”
“I told Jill the old stuff made me feel like a ghost. Just numb and lethargic. I couldn’t even jack off half the time.” I laughed, but he shot me a reproachful look. “I’m serious. It makes it so you can’t, and if you think that’s funny, you try living like that for six months. Now I’m off that, and they gave me Xanax instead, which is supposed to just stop anxiety. Fine.” He sat up on the bench and shrugged his shoulders around a little to loosen them. “I figured I’d just take it when I needed it. But it doesn’t work like that. It’s like I was standing in a canyon, turned around and saw a wall of water coming toward me. All the stuff I wasn’t feeling while I was on the first drug, it came right at me. The happy, the sad. Loss. Anger. Wanting things.” He rubbed his forearms, the way people do when they’re cold. “It’s too much.”
“But that’s good, though, right? That’s the human experience.”
He chuckled. “Man, fuck the human experience. Don’t even give me that line. Here we are, right? The day I sat on this bench and you sat across from me and told me you’d knocked up Miss Piper, don’t tell me you were all jazzed up about the human experience. You just wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.”
“Yeah. But it worked out. Everything always does.”
“Didn’t work out for that baby.”
I had nothing to say to that. It kind of pissed me off that he said it, even. I shrugged, and when Elias stood up I slid onto the bench. The remark irritated me enough that I figured I could probably