The odor in the hallway was probably imaginary, but if so, Michael’s imagination was getting pretty strong. Had a mouse died under the file shelving? Such things happened. Little bitty mouse, great big stink. Michael stopped at the water cooler, his thirst reduced by the thought, but what the hell, he came for a drink. He would drink.

 Delia, thin, tight, blonde with enrapturing grey eyes, turned the corner ahead of  him. So really he could not see her eyes, but he never saw any segment of “grey-eyed Athena” without picturing them, piercing, questioning, yet oddly distanced. Sometimes she would str-r-e-e-etch the perfect clear skin of her arms. It would bring him close to a shiver. 

She slipped into her office like dawn fleeing. He tried to dredge up an excuse to stop at her doorway, ask her some inane question, but knew he needed no excuse. She was always ready to engage, with her gentle, open smile.

He was smitten. He enjoyed being smitten but was properly wary of his smittenness.

“What’s that?” he asked, nodding at the sandwich unwrapped in her lap.

“Pimento and cream cheese.” Her smile took in the sandwich, the office and, bless the Lord, him.

“Seems kind of… old lady.”

She laughed a short bark. Her grey eyes dissolved the upper half of his body. “Oh. My aunt did eat them. These are from the deli. On 20th Street.”

“Oh yeah,” and Michael had run out of things to say. Things he could use to stay his return to a desk cluttered with trivia. He started to turn from the doorway.

“Are you going to the reception?” she asked as she bit her straight white teeth into the bread and cheese and his faltering heart.

“That? I don’t know. Uh, I wonder why they call them receptions? Nobody receives anything.”

“Adulation.”

“I suppose. And I guess… I’ll go.”

She snapped a light salute. “Good. I’ll have somebody to talk to.”

He floated a few inches off the floor on the short walk to his office but descended when  he remembered that she could talk to anyone. She blended, skimmed in perfect harmony with whichever group she joined. Publicity was her stated function, but she spread far wider, writing speeches for company dinners, editing the customer magazine, effortlessly weaving the corporate image within and without the company. She branded the outfit as smartly as any cowboy.

Michael’s official title was Relational Economist. He could never clearly describe what he did, because he wasn’t certain what he was doing. He saw himself as a glorified flunky, tossed whatever bits of jetsam no one else wanted. He had reached his Peter Principle level of incompetence and would be promoted no further, despite his age and “experience.” That nebulous experience would not provide him a better job elsewhere. 

He lived with his wife in an uncertain bond, not unhappy but hardly loving, continually questioning the why and how of who they were to each other. Her name was Desiree, but she did not desire him and he did not desire her (settled and accepting, a female sofa). The acceptance gap between them brought up a niggling guilt in Michael, but in Desiree it went unchallenged, perhaps not worth notice.

She should notice. Shouldn’t she? 

The chatter and rattle of the evening TV news did nothing to settle Michael’s confusion. He should be reading the New York Times, receiving the almost caressing wrinkle of its pages, but tonight he felt he could hardly hold it upright. Desiree preferred the buffoonishly over-coiffed female news anchor (anchorette? certainly not anchorite) with the pasted-on smile and mis-emphasis on minor syllables. That night, the woman revved up her ersatz excitement to burble over two murders, related by the gruesome manners of the victims being dispatched. The on-scene cameras showed white sheets covering possible human shapes.

Michael filled the marital gap with mild fantasies about every halfway decent woman he had continuing contact with. He had done so for 18 years of semi-equilibrium. But Delia was something different. Her sweetness bit into him. He had no idea if she was tied to anyone in her personal life. She never spoke of current private matters, though she mentioned past adventures that included “we,” without suggesting who “we” might be.

Was he in love, in lust, in lost hope? His memory transported Delia back through his years with the company, to days long before she had arrived – quiet, secure, lovely. He could so easily have always known her, her sandwiches, her taste in sleeveless blouses that accentuated her slim yet muscular arms.

He knew he was a sad, aging fuck, but at least he had his fantasies: Delia in pointed hat, stirring a cauldron, with grey delight at his presence as she passed a bowl filled with the remnants of her late lunch that she shared as though it was his ordained right. It smelled… interesting. Yes, interesting. He dipped his spoon and raised it. He felt blessed.

She was almost twenty years his junior.

At breakfast, Desiree handed him a slice of seven-grain bread slathered with cream cheese. She reached across the coffee table, her arm bare. The skin was mottled and puckered with the creep of aging. And where were the pimentos?

“This is Philthy,”

Michael presented a short, chubby young man to Delia.

“Phil… thy?”

“He does that,” said the companion. “Grotesque naming of people. It’s all in good humor. I think.”

“In your case, Philthy, not in all.”

“Well, I’ll take what I can get.”

“Then I’m pleased to meet you,” said Delia extending her wondrous hand. “Though I’m sure I would be just as much or little pleased if you were named Simon Bolivar.”

“That South American guy?” Maybe Philthy was smitten. It was hard to tell with him. Michael couldn’t imagine anyone not smitten with Delia. His eyes lingered on her hand, not with lust, but with an incipient question. What was the question?

On the way back to Michael’s office, Philthy rambled on about cooking. He was obsessed with making small, often French dishes that never came out quite right. “She’s lovely,” he said in a quiet change of pace.

“Yes.”

“You hardly ever see skin like that,” as though discussing a prize cow.

That was the question! Her skin.

On one stop at her office door she had told him about an accident, something in the mountains (she climbed, of course) that had laid her up for days or weeks. Something physical that should have left scars. But there were no scars on those arms or hands. But they could have been covered at the time. But when she had described the accident, something indicated exposure. But her face was clear of abrasions or anything else negative. Oh, why didn’t he know more about her, know any way to find out more about her?

He considered what Desiree lacked. She lacked scars. He wished she had scars.

He felt lightheaded at the reception. Maybe he’d picked up the flu everyone in the office talked about incessantly, like an imported delicacy that gave you gas.

 Delia wore a grey knit suit, an eerily close match to her eyes. Tonight those eyes… a witch stared from them, an emanation of frost and incipient malevolence. Christ, what? He must be getting that flu. His palms were clammy, he swallowed excess saliva, and a hot band constricted his forehead. He had to look away, but those altered eyes magnetized him. What was she saying to him? He could not comprehend it, why she was saying it, why she was saying it to him. The greyness flowed from her eyes into the weave of the cardigan hanging over the grey suit. She was shorter than usual, inches shorter. Did she usually wear heels? He didn’t know her feet. She mouthed a tight phrase that didn’t sound like her or anyone he could believe in, then turned away. She wasn’t there when he tried to search her out. His stomach roiled.

Michael wished Desiree was a witch. He wished she were almost anything but her presence in the world, draining like oil from a crankcase.

In the open, on a city sidewalk, a heavy smell, a diffuse mist of evil. He stopped at the entrance to a side street, criss-crossed with yellow police tape. He had seen it on the damned TV news – a third murder. Serial killer, serial killer, serial killer. How that Bambi anchorette enjoyed the aura of violent death. But nothing in the street explained the odor, no dumpster, no decaying body. Antiseptic, if anything. 

Two blocks further along he stepped into a low-slung cube of neoclassical masonry that clutched a blop of small lecture rooms the company set aside for corporate outreach. There was not the slightest use to him in this particular groan-and-drone foisted on him, but here he was. He sat in the fifth row of the terraced seats, his gaze flowing down to the six chairs set in a semi-circle for those running the “discussion” that he knew would morph into a one-person lecture with five nodding heads mouthing occasional innocuous comments.

“That’s life,” he muttered, but it didn’t feel like life. It felt like yet another form of death. 

Two levels below him, the grey cashmere sweater. He felt attracted but uncomfortable. She must have arrived before him. Had she seem him enter? No indication – until, as though on cue, she turned her body slightly, her head slightly more and smiled up at him, unleashing a pheromonic tsunami. He nodded, attempted a wave, something shaky in his hand motion. 

The formulaic gabble lasted 45 minutes, a random concatenation of business-speak that told him nothing he hadn’t known, reinforced nothing he had known. For the break, a side table stood laden with pitchers of something innocuous to drink, stiff bits of good-for-you carbohydrates, and cardiac-inducing slabs of cheddar.

No sense in his trotting down there. But Delia picked carefully at the uninspiring array, partially filled a paper plate, and headed up to his row.

“Mind if I sit here?” as she shimmied between the tight rows, stopping two seats to his right. 

“Yeah. Sure, of course.”

“How bad would you rate this one?”

“On a scale of 1 to 10? Minus 2.”

He thought she was going to take the seat she was standing in front of, leaving a vacancy between them. No, she slipped over and dropped cleanly into the seat next to him, laid her hand on the shared hand-rest. God how he wanted to lay his hand on that hand. For a moment, he thought he saw his left hand hover above hers, but it lay in quiet repose under his right, just back from his knees. Whew!

Michael sweated through the next quarter hour of god-knows-what, thinking thoughts a married man should not think. He thought them with passion, but pushed the passion – an unwanted guest bearing demanding news – aside.

Was she the most beautiful woman he had ever seen? No, he had seen more beautiful women (where? when?). Was she the most desirable? Possibly that, but only because of his innate desire, not from anything she put forth. He desired, he resisted the desire, but did not desire the resistance.

It was finally over (the “discussion,” not the desire). He had to get away before his hand descended.

She pushed upright. “I hope they won’t feel the need to do this for another month at least.”

“Or ever again.”

“You would think if they planned these things they could come up with a mildly relevant program.”

“We think alike.” What a goddam stupid thing to say.

She smiled an oddly sideways smile. “Oh, I don’t know. I think there may be many ways in which we do not think at all alike.”

Michael felt diminished, almost emasculated.

There seemed no pattern to the killings that had come to occupy the talk of the city. Nothing ethnic (two white, one Black, one Asian) or obviously sexual (three men, one woman), all past sunset but ranging into the pre-dawn hours, in different parts of town – scattered like human-sized dust motes. No reprobates or prostitutes, yet no one obviously well-to-do. Just people, anyone you might meet anywhere.

Michael said as much as he leaned into Delia’s doorway

“I know,” she said. “Do you think it could be deliberate?”

“Deliberate? What?”

“To make it impossible to find a motive, to follow a trail or predict the next… depredation.”

“Just to kill?”

Delia laid her delicious arms across her desk. “Haven’t you just done things now and then that seem to make little or no sense, that just plop out of your mind? Something inside says, do this, you don’t know what the something is – and you may not know what it’s really trying to tell you, but you do it.”

Had he done things like that, unplanned, erratic, brought on by unrecognized prompting? Probably, but now lost in the fuzz of recollection. What if he thought like a serial killer? To know the mind… He could make a good detective, possibly, if he could figure such things out. If you want to see how something works, there are better options that becoming an ersatz serial killer. Yet he found himself drawn to the death locations, spread across the city, places deserted or ignored at night.

He would check them out.

He did check them out. One was along the river, where they had cleared the decaying warehouses and installed pleasant stone seats (too ass-chilling most nights) where you could gaze across the river at the decaying warehouses on the other side. A white man in his mid-30s had been knifed. Probably first in the back, the reports said, then his stomach slit open. Left there, sitting. Michael was put off – disappointed? – that no blood stains remained. Which was the right bench? There were others.

Leave it.

The woman, Asian, country not specified, had been leaning against a lamppost – a utility pole with light attached – lampposts were hardly the thing these days – when her throat was cut. How could they determine she was leaning? She had been discovered in a fallen heap. A bit of editorial excess. Michael was on the right block, but again, which pole? It had rained since, so the blood would wash away. Had it rained the night she was killed, leaning?

The Black man, in his late 60s, had been found around the corner from a Chinese restaurant, him and his takeout order, garroted with what the police suggested was a piano wire. It could have been a guitar string, but guitar strings are shorter, probably wouldn’t have done the job. Some kind of wire that bit deep. Why had this one been lumped together with the knifings? Not the same MO. Someone was convinced it was linked, and the convincer or convincers had convinced the media who had convinced the listeners and watchers and readers.

The other white male victim’s place was the one he’d stumbled across, early on. 

Michael had had enough of his obsession and learned nothing useful. What would “useful” have been if he had found it?

Go home, spend the night with Desiree. What decent husband spends his evenings tracking down death?

And what decent husband invites the object of his other obsession home to take tea with his wife? Not just tea (for him and Delia, coffee for Desiree), but rich store-bought desserts, a late-afternoon squat of the three of them in Michael and Desiree’s living room, tastefully decorated with art and items in which Michael had no interest. He tried his best not to ogle Delia, may have succeeded but knew he was on the edge of something that could become emotionally destabilizing. At the same time knowing Delia had no romantic interest in him.

The difference was not just age but inclination. Whatever floated her boat was not a late-40s male with few distinguishing characteristics. But why the hell did he also see himself the same way?

“You visited some of the… sites? Of the murders?” Delia looked startled. Repulsed?

“It’s fascinating, however horrible. What’s it about, to do that kind of thing? Assuming it’s one person.”

“No copycats?”

“They don’t think so. They say.”

“Well, they say a lot of things.”

“Too much and not enough.”

She raised her index finger for emphasis. “I think I passed by one of the… places. The one by the river? With the benches?”

“Yes. That. You can’t even sit down these days.”

It would be hard to design a more inane conversation.

“It might make an interesting afternoon jaunt, take in the morbid sights.”

An invitation? He dared not consider it.

She left with a delightful wave of the hand. It was the first time she had entered his doorway and settled herself, rather than he standing and blocking hers.

Something lay on the chair where she had been sitting. What the devil? A sliver of stone, like you might skip across a stream, but bound with light string or heavy thread. No, some plant fiber, still damp. Did it fall out of her purse? She wasn’t carrying a purse. A pocket? He should take it to her.

Later. It wasn’t something she’d want immediately. 

He needed a stamp. He could ask her for a stamp. Not at her desk, dammit.

Staccato phrases falling from his brain like tears leaking down his neck. Tears on my neck. He opened her desk drawer. Isn’t this where she would have a stamp if she had a stamp to spare? Four pencils and three sturdy ballpoint pens in the front trough. He counted them before it registered that he was counting them. No stamps. He pushed a few papers aside. Under then, behind them, more small bits of stuff bound together, unlikelihoods brought into proximity. Talismans? Talismen? What plural? Who makes talismans from chunks of trash? Who makes talismans anyway?

“Did you find what you were looking for?” her voice not accusatory, faintly amused, perhaps quizzical.

“A stamp. I was looking for.”

“They’re in the top side drawer. The price is going up again. The postal service isn’t a ‘service’ anymore. They should change the name.”

“The United States Postal Ripoff.”

“Right!” A high woodland trill, He took a stamp from the designated drawer and reached his hand into his pocket. She waved away his offering. “No need. I’m not totally broke. I haven’t found enough things to spend money on. Yet. I haven’t seen your friend again.”

“Philthy? I don’t see him that much either.” Once, he could hold decent conversations, he was sure of it.

“I bet an evening at the theater would do us all good. That new Tom Stoppard sounds particularly fun. You and your wife and me? What do you think?”

“Umm… Desiree, uh, isn’t that big on theater. Live theater. I could ask her.”

“Good. I like to write little plays, you saw, didn’t you, the skit I did for the year-end?

“That was yours?” Of course he knew it was hers.

“It isn’t part of my official duties, I just do it for the hell of it. It takes the edge off… everything else.”

Another killing, another white male, so possibly a trend? He tried to avoid the TV news for “details.” Better to spend the evenings reading Dickens and Trollope (Trollope had loathed Dickens). The life of 19th century London, low and high, a relief from today’s news, though the low of London sounded about the same as the low and medium of today.

“Didn’t you know him?” Desiree asked, pointing at the TV, which she kept on low because the sound bored into Michael.

“What? Who?”

“The one who was killed. This one.”

“I don’t know who got killed.”

“You had a ridiculous name for him.”

Michael laid his Kindle on his knee.

“Like dirt or something.”

He looked at the screen. Good god, it couldn’t be. Philthy. “Turn it up.”

A knife again, the right kidney probably the first stab, then his back through to his heart. Michael said something enraged, stricken. Why the kidney? A stray memory of Jack the Ripper. Desiree laid her hand on his arm but did not take her eyes from the screen. 

Desiree had had no interest in seeing the play. She disliked Stoppard. “That Hamlet thing, an insult to Shakespeare. When you can’t write well you make fun of a genius.”

“I don’t think it was meant that way.”

“What other way is there to mean a joke?”

Oh, the ways.

Michael decided this Tom Stoppard didn’t measure up to “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” – but what sort of judge of theater was he? He hadn’t told Desiree he would be going with Delia, but he hadn’t said he was going alone either, so technically not quite a lie.

“Philthy,” he said as they walked the street after the show. They both tended to sway while walking, Delia to the left, Michael to the right, their shoulders bumping lightly. 

“Filthy?”

“The guy I brought in, introduced you to. He was… murdered.”

Delia put her hand on his forearm. “That’s horrible! Oh.”

“It was… it seemed to be the serial killer.”

She pulled to a stop. “What a strange thing. Isn’t it? That it would be someone we know.”

“It’s unlikely, yeah, but, I don’t know it’s strange. It’s a coincidence.” They were half way to the bus stop. “Do you want to get something? Ice cream, or I don’t know what, some treat.”

“This evening is a treat. Let’s extend it.” She took his arm, fully.

They shared a huge slice of cake and tea at a quiet, almost sad shop. Outside again, Delia asked, “Mind of we just walk around awhile, I’m not quite ready to slip off home.”

Michael followed her implied nudges, right, left, right again, no clear idea where he was or where they were going. She seemed to know the city far better than he did.

As they turned their fourth or fifth corner, something clicked. He held his hand out like a crossing guard.

“Wait.”

“What is it?”

“This… it’s one of the killings, one of the places. I was here.” 

“Oh good.” She smiled at him in the late summer twilight.

“What’s good about it?”

“You told me about coming but I thought maybe you wouldn’t recognize it. Again.”

“You brought us here… deliberately?”

She shuffled in place. “I was naughty, I admit it. I really wanted to ask you…while we’re here… why do you think serial killers kill?”

“That’s why we’re here? For questions and answers?”

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“I can’t wrap my mind around the whole idea, that people just kill. It’s a mental aberration, grotesque.”

“Always?” She poked his upper arm to start him moving again.

“Normal people don’t hunt other people and kill them, one after the other.”

“They should collect them in groups?”

“It isn’t funny. For god’s sake – Phil.”

“No – I wasn’t trying to make light of it. It’s just that there can surely be different reasons for any human activity, depending on the person performing it.”

Michael nodded. “Of course, but killing people, it’s not within your usual range of… you know what I mean.”

“Watch where you’re stepping, a dog has preceded you.”

“A large dog.” He skirted the canine gift. “You’re getting at something. What? what are you saying?”

“That there can be, let’s say, types of serial killers. With different motivations, leading to different approaches and results.”

“Results. Gah. List some of these types.”

“Suppose someone had a deep-seated wrong done to them, early on or, a continuing form of abuse. He might hold a grudge that eats further into him, fills his entire mind, overwhelms him so that finally he… not cracks so much as excludes all other considerations, thinks only of revenge, so he tracks down his vile enemies and exterminates them, one after another. Maybe quickly, more likely over a longer period, keeping the most abhorred for last so that they’ll know he will be coming and suffer, waiting, the way he, the killer, suffered in the past.”

 Micheal watched the sidewalk as they moved along. “Is that really – I guess it’s a form of serial killing. It is, but not what I was…”

“That’s what I mean, the difference in motivations but with similar results.”

“But it’s not the same – not random victims.”

She laughed lightly. “OK, think of this changeup: You have a warped outlook about a kind of person, a class of persons, could be race, age, gender, sexual proclivity – I’ve always liked that phrase – a whole class of persons who you don’t see as individuals but representatives of a group you hate simply for their existence. So you see one of them walking the sidewalk and you beat this person to death. In one sense it’s focused on a group, in another it’s random – killing anyone who happens to fit the limiting definition.”

“You sound like a psychology textbook.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to –” 

“A well-informed and clear-thinking textbook.”

“That’s good?”

“That’s good.” And dammit, he was holding her hand. And dammit, she was letting him.

His turn: “The sexual sadists are obvious, they take up too much of the foreground, especially in movies. Their choice of sexual object may be focused in part – whores, gay-bar attendees, children – or random slice and dice. And the wholesale loonies who think the entire world is against them. Fully random.”

He scratched his head with his free hand. “Are we talking in circles?”

She shook her head determinedly. “No, we’re going right where I want to go, by judicious zigs and zags.”

“I mean verbally, logically.”

“Oh, that.” She stopped and raised their joint hands to point. “See where we are?”

“No. I don’t know where this is.”

“And you think you watch the news.”

“What?”

“This is where Phil was killed.”

“I did see the news but no photos of… the place. Wait – you said you didn’t know about Phil.”

“That was a bit of a fib. Just let it go. Here’s what I really do want to get to. There’s another type of killer – we’ll say serial killer, though I don’t like the term in this case – who’s filling a clouded need, reaching for something… undefinable. They try to move toward an end but may not know either what the end is or when they have reached it. They keep killing to get closer to that end. But does the end continually recede, or was there no end, just a pointless obsession they’ve given a spurious meaning?”

“That’s, I don’t know, a level of philosophical abstraction –”

“Internal abstraction. Within the killer.”

“Yes, well. How did we get into this?”

She swung his arm and released a long sigh. “I’m trying to explain how this has worked out, and why Phil was a mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“Don’t interrupt, OK? This kind of killer thinks they are moving in a direction – as I said – but it can get frustrating when the end, if that was really what they thought it would be, seems to come no closer. So far, it’s all been random. Victims here and there, no way connected, and that was essential, because you needed to move around, to feint, to see what other direction, random direction, you might take to move closer to… oh, I want to say the ‘goal,’ but I mean seeing how far you can take yourself, to prove yourself capable of an ideal state of understanding your limits,. But when it isn’t working you take a side trip – temporarily abandon the widespread, random search and decide to pick a known victim, a temporary fallback that might break the chain or… form a more useful link. The chain of failure, the sense of assumed failure. Picking someone well-known is obviously too chancy, so someone known to you. But it turns out that throws the whole scheme, the original scheme, awry. It looked like a good idea, but it’s a bad choice.” Still holding his hand, she faced him, intense, reaming his eyes with hers. “That’s why Philthy Phil was wrong. It ruined the progress and made no useful difference.”

“You…?”

“I learned two things: Don’t change your pattern – instead, work it through more carefully, thoughtfully. And second, though there’s no ‘proper’ way, still you must complete it – no matter what. You have to find what’s possible, what you can achieve, even when you make a mistake like Phil. Carry through, that’s the thing, finish what you started even if you’ve gone astray. Giving up is too sad to contemplate.”

“Joking about you’re the… It’s shit.”

She shook his hand, violently. “I’m trying to explain.”

“You killed Phil? And garroted an adult male?”

“He was old and not much taller than me and skinny. It said that on your news for goodness sake. Once the wire was around his neck and twisted…”

“This makes no sense.Stop it.”

“That’s because you have too many predispositions. For me it makes perfect sense. It did’t work out the way I’d hoped, but things often don’t. But I can complete it. In a different way.”

Michael tried to pry his hand free of hers but it was held with surprising strength. 

“You wouldn’t tell me this… if it’s true –”

“Of course it’s true! Why would I lie about something so important?” She swung their interlocked hands again. “You can help me, but I doubt you would agree easily.”

“Help you kill people?”

Delia laughed. “Just one. Well, two in a sense, but one doesn’t really count. In a sense.”

“You killing people – I don’t believe that for a minute, but that you’d… pull a prank like this. It’s disgusting nonsense.”

She swiveled to face him again. “It is not nonsense, that’s a terrible thing to say. I’ll show you.” She reached into her shoulder bag with her free hand, pulled at something that clattered and before it could register on him she had their clenched hands handcuffed together.

“What?”

“Does this seem like a joke?”

“Take these fucking things off.”

“I like you. I liked you immediately. There was never anything sexual in my feeling, and that was a relief. You’re fun to be around, most times, to talk to. I can’t explain what it was I thought I could find in the… eliminations, just that I knew there was something else, something bigger that went to an unexplored place. Area. But I didn’t find it. I already said that. I still think it’s there to find, but I guess I’m not the one to find it. But even so – I’m repeating myself, that’s annoying – I must complete it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, you’re silly.” An open, accepting smile enveloped her wonderful face. Her hand dipped again into her shoulder bag.

His body knew before his mind could realize. The handcuff on his side hadn’t fully closed, he pulled his hand free and flipped backwards, dropping to the sidewalk. When the bomb in her bag went off, Michael was spattered with a rain of Delia, bits and pieces of Delia. 

Not surprisingly, he was suspected of being the aerial killer – the killer of all of them – until forensics proved that the bomb had originated in her bag, and they could not trace any of its components to him. Or her. Or any other who. The near consensus was that the killer had slipped the lethal device into her bag and detonated it from a distance to signal the grand culmination of the killing spree.

So it did, but Michael never told them it had been Delia. His mind, his appreciative, inquisitive mind still felt linked to hers, to what she might have been, to what, perversely, she somehow was – someone as amazing on the inside as the outside. And after all, she had chosen him for her completion.

He funded a memorial in her honor.

I’m just not spiritual by nature – no soul, no god, no realm beyond the physical – though I believe that physical existence extends in ways we’re not close to understanding.

The true scientist, to my mind, is one who sees the world as generated, operated, and maintained by physical law, and sees this as amazing and wonderful. I find that beautiful in much the same way, I suspect, as those with a more spiritual side see the beauty of the ineffable.

Yes, I’m anti-religion – religion of any sort – but could it be I’m promoting science as a religion? I hope not. I think of science as a continual unfolding – then again, that may be how many religious see their form of the “truth.”

So: All that we encounter in existence can be fully explained by scientific law, there is nothing more, and the final “why” can never be answered only because the final question lies outside what is being questioned, which in this case is all reality. There is no “spiritual” side whatsoever unless you personally define it as such.

If clairvoyance and similar experiences are “real,” then they have a mechanical base. What’s taken as “spiritual” is still subject to the laws of physics as we either know them or will discover them. If there’s something out there that travels from mind to mind, or circumstance to mind, then at some point it will be uncovered, defined, and explained.

I don’t know if you followed the hooha about the discovery of Higgs boson a few years ago, but it filled in a hole in the basic outline of fundamental physics. That is, it was predicted but had escaped every former attempt at discovery. Most reports covering its discovery didn’t mention that it actually proved the existence of the Higgs field, which is supposedly responsible for the existence of mass in matter (I have no real understanding of what that actually means). So might there also be a “spiritual field” that will be discovered and quantified? I don’t think so, personally, but it’s conceivable. 

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What people are willing to pay for makes no sense. Some asshole spent 2.2 million to buy a pair of discontinued Michael Jordan sneakers. Proving, again, that having money is in no way correlated with having brains.

There were hits recently on Roy Lichtenstein for appropriating comic-book art, for which the original inker was paid sub-minimum wage, while Lichtenstein got $65m for his ripoff.

I always did think pop art was a scam, and the idea that Any Warhol got something like $145 million for a piece of his Marilyn Monroe crap – higher than anything paid for a Picasso?

I’m not personally a big Picasso fan (except for his blue period, which almost everyone else pretty much ignores), but he obviously changed the face of art. Warhol copied Campbell’s soup boxes. That didn’t even change the flavor of Campbell’s soup.

But I find it pretty funny that some dumbass Arab sheik payed half a billion for a student copy of Leonardo’s lost (or never completed) Salvator Mundi. All you had to do was look at the hands in the painting. When did Leonardo ever paint such limp, lifeless hands?

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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a drag show (live or online), don’t particularly recall being around any place that held one. 

So my first question: When did drag grow beyond a niche form of entertainment?

Second question: When did drag performers start reading books to kids at story  hours – and why?

I’m not complaining or worried about anyone’s morals, just don’t understand how drag came to move in such directions and seemingly rapidly. Maybe as an analogy to clown shows or minstrel shows or musical comedy? 

But of course the real question is: Why are rightwingers, especially half-assed politicians, scared shitless of drag? Do they really find their own lives so precarious that the mere sight of a man in lingerie and high heels terrifies something deep in their souls?

Poor bastards.

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Odd that I’ve always hated brushing my teeth and almost never floss because flossing somehow disgusts me, yet I’m not much bothered by needles and actively enjoyed being awake while stents were wormed through my veins – a process that would drive most people holy flaming M-A-A-D.

There’s little prediction of and absolutely no “meaning” to the eccentricities that pervade each human life.