lining of one pocket showing. They no longer looked to him as if someone was going to pick them up. They looked like relics.
He thought: If I had a gun, I would kill myself now.
He stood on the raft.
The sun went down.
Three hours later, the moon came up.
Not long after that, the loons began to scream.
Not long after that, Randy turned and looked at the black thing on the water. He could not kill himself, but perhaps the thing could fix it so there was no pain; perhaps that was what the colors were for.
(do you do you do you love)
He looked for it and it was there, floating, riding the waves.
“Sing with me,” Randy croaked. “I can root for the Yankees from the bleachers ... I don’t have to worry ’bout teachers ... I’m so glad that school is out ... I am gonna ... sing and shout.”
The colors began to form and twist. This time Randy did not look away.
He whispered, “Do you love?”
Somewhere, far across the empty lake, a loon screamed.
Word Processor of the Gods
At first glance it looked like a Wang word processor—it had a Wang keyboard and a Wang casing. It was only on second glance that Richard Hagstrom saw that the casing had been split open (and not gently, either; it looked to him as if the job had been done with a hacksaw blade) to admit a slightly larger IBM cathode tube. The archive discs which had come with this odd mongrel were not floppy at all; they were as hard as the 45’s Richard had listened to as a kid.
“What in the name of God is that?” Lina asked as he and Mr. Nordhoff lugged it over to his study piece by piece. Mr. Nordhoff had lived next door to Richard Hagstrom’s brother’s family ... Roger, Belinda, and their boy, Jonathan.
“Something Jon built,” Richard said. “Meant for me to have it, Mr. Nordhoff says. It looks like a word processor.”
“Oh yeah,” Nordhoff said. He would not see his sixties again and he was badly out of breath. “That’s what he said it was, the poor kid ... think we could set it down for a minute, Mr. Hagstrom? I’m pooped.”
“You bet,” Richard said, and then called to his son, Seth, who was tooling odd, atonal chords out of his Fender guitar downstairs—the room Richard had envisioned as a “family room” when he had first paneled it had become his son’s “rehearsal hall” instead.
“Seth!” he yelled. “Come give us a hand!”
Downstairs, Seth just went on warping chords out of the Fender. Richard looked at Mr. Nordhoff and shrugged, ashamed and unable to hide it. Nordhoff shrugged back as if to say Kids! Who expects anything better from them these days? Except they both knew that Jon—poor doomed Jon Hagstrom, his crazy brother’s son—had been better.
“You were good to help me with this,” Richard said.
Nordhoff shrugged. “What else has an old man got to do with his time? And I guess it was the least I could do for Jonny. He used to cut my lawn gratis, do you know that? I wanted to pay him, but the kid wouldn’t take it. He was quite a boy.” Nordhoff was still out of breath. “Do you think I could have a glass of water, Mr. Hagstrom?”
“You bet.” He got it himself when his wife didn’t move from the kitchen table, where she was reading a bodice-ripper paperback and eating a Twinkie. “Seth!” he yelled again. “Come on up here and help us, okay?”
But Seth just went on playing muffled and rather sour bar chords on the Fender for which Richard was still paying.
He invited Nordhoff to stay for supper, but Nordhoff refused politely. Richard nodded, embarrassed again but perhaps hiding it a little better this time. What’s a nice guy like you doing with a family like that? his friend Bernie Epstein had asked him once, and Richard had only been able to shake his head, feeling the same dull embarrassment he was feeling now. He was a nice guy. And yet somehow this was what he had come out with—an overweight, sullen wife who felt cheated out of the good things in life, who felt that she had backed the losing horse (but who would never come right out and say so), and an uncommunicative fifteen-year-old son who was doing marginal work in the same school where Richard taught ... a son who played weird chords on the guitar morning, noon and night (mostly