We have been launched into the world again, Barney, Bob, Claire and myself, the Whale-man. Barney is legally mine (I am even required to get him his rabies shot within the next forty-eight hours), the erstwhile Babboo Nass Fazoo is now my ward, if you can believe it (I’m taking him down for a shot, too, just to be on the safe side), and Claire is my betrothed.

Claire is taciturn, still upset. The few words she does speak are directed towards Barney, murmured canine praise, “Nice poochie,” and that sort of thing. Barney keeps up his end of the conversation with a few strident yawps. The most loquacious of us is my ward Bob, who produces a steady stream, murky water sluicing down a sewer.

Finally Claire pipes up. “That was frigging brilliant.”

“I am sorry about our misunderstanding.”

“Our misunderstanding when you said that I had no business telling people they could come into our house, like I hadn’t been living there, like I was just some bimbo you brought in to do your cooking and give you blow-jobs?”

The little fuzzball cackles lasciviously.

“Do you mind?” I demand. “We are trying to work out our problems in a civil and mature manner—” Agh. The poor Whale-man, beached upon the shores of adulthood.

“Des!”

Oh, peachy. Just what I need.

“Des, hang a minute, dude!”

I spin about, brandish the fatty dukes. “Go away, unless you care to tussle again.”

“Des …” Farley O’Keefe shakes the tiny head wearily. “Would you mind explaining what is going on?”

He hasn’t changed one bit, except that his handlebar moustache is longer by a half-inch on either side. His T-shirt advertises a resort in Cancun and he wears Bermuda shorts that are bunched in about the waist, although his thighs threaten to rend the garment to tatters.

“There’s no talking to him, Farls,” says Claire, that Benedict Arnold.

“You know, Des, I didn’t mind when you fired me for no good reason,”—Farley has assumed his tone of parental forbearance—“but what did bother me is the fact that you haven’t called, you haven’t returned my calls, I have even written to you—”

“Learnt to write, have you?”

“Des!” he screams. “Tell me why you’re so mad at me!”

“I beg your pardon?” I bridle with indignation.

“We used to be friends, Desmond. We used to talk, we used to laugh, then all of a sudden, I get the can, you lock yourself up in your house, Fay starts calling me in tears …”

“Do not,” I launch a finger into his puss for emphasis, “allow her name to vault through your lips.”

“Why not?” he demands.

Whooo, what I wouldn’t give for a little shot, a little drinky-poo. We’re near liquor-store heaven, what’s stopping me from merely wheeling around and storming off? Nothing. Let’s do it then. And who has chosen to join me? I steal quick peeks to either side. Not a one of them. Fine. Good.

“Just tell me,” screams Farley, “why I shouldn’t mention my own sister’s name?!”

I haul monies out of my pockets, I intend to purchase several demijohns of rotgut whiskey.

“She told me what happened with Danny!”

I am dropping to my knees, the mangled heart turns the valve and the eyes weep. “Christ!” I bellow.

“It didn’t mean anything to her!” persists Farley.

I’m even willing to buy that, although she certainly enjoyed it, slobbering over Stud E. Baker’s prong. Perhaps it did mean nothing to her, but it meant something to Daniel.

“Christ.” It is but a whimper, He is not coming, He has had much better invitations.

I will now admit that when I came home that day it was Fay and my brother I stumbled in upon. I knew it was somebody’s brother, Fay’s brother Nathan adopted the name Farley O’Keefe, who could blame me for getting confused? Now I’ve got it straight—it was my own brother. Fay immediately began wailing, the tears tumbled upon breasts that were heaving with torment. “Forgive me!” she screamed, but forgiveness was not an option, it clearly states AVAILABLE ONLY TO HUMAN BEINGS. Danny started pulling on his greasy jeans, he struggled into a torn undershirt, he rammed the Confederate Army cap over his curls. Stud E. Baker lit a cigarette and as the smoke snaked around his head he stared into my eyes. Finally Daniel nodded. “That should do the trick,” he muttered and left my house.

But it didn’t, did it? Danny had miscalculated. He was much more certain when, some months later, he drove the Porsche through the guardrail.

Look what is there on the sidewalk before me. Toes, dainty toes, toes that have been nibbled by trout in crystal clear springwater. Feet that have caressed verdure, the feet that foothills were named after. A hand touches the top of my head. “Get up, Desmond,” she whispers.

My disordered and defeated heart squeezes with the little it has left.

I believe I once mentioned to you that I have been in hospitals. You may have guessed that it was not my physical well-being the doctors were concerned with. I had a visitor then, and although the import of his words was lost on me, foggy and counter-drugged as I was, they return to me now. “Desmond,” he said, in an enfeebled voice. Certainly his voice was enfeebled, this was a man who had been tortured within an inch of his life and starved to his current weight of maybe sixty-four pounds. I lay there in a kind of half-sleep, with no true purchase on reality.

“What is that?” I heard the good professor ask. The nurse responded with the name of some drug, one that even I had never heard of. “Don’t give him that,” snarled the little man. “Doctor’s orders,” she insisted. “What do you think I am, bubbie, a refrigerator repairman? I am this boy’s personal physician, and I say no more drugs.” Professor Ginzburg’s Ph.D. was in nuclear physics, but given the way I’d been abusing my body, that more than qualified him to look after me. The nurse left.

“Des,” the professor said, “I want you to get up and take a look around. A good, hard look. Without drugs, without booze. I want you to look at everything. And then, if you decide you still don’t like it, I’ll help you. I mean, I’ll help you, you know, to leave. I’ve seen ugliness, I couldn’t even make the words come out of my mouth, that’s how bad it was. But I’ve also seen naked ladies. I’ve heard the music of Mozart. I’ve caught a fish, must have weighed forty-seven pounds. Me and my friend Karl Oberheim once slept on a hill, and the stars were so close you could reach out and pick them like berries.”

I sent up a barrage of spurious snoring.

“Get up, Desmond,” he said.

“Get up, Desmond.”

“Christ.”

I lumber skyward, no big deal, plants do it all the time.

“Well,” I say, “let’s go home.”