“You knew her?” he asks.
The look on his face is peculiar. It’s not sinister at all. It’s almost eager. And that’s when I realize that he doesn’t know the gory details—and he wants to. I don’t say anything. I refuse him that satisfaction.
“So she did it,” he says. Of course he knows this now. My coming here gave it away. I gave him the satisfaction anyway.
“Because of you. You killed her.”
“How could I have killed her?” he asks. “I never met her. I didn’t even know her name until just now.”
“Maybe you didn’t actually do it with your hands, but you did it. . . . You did it the cowardly way. What was it you said? ‘The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.’” I make air quote marks with my fingers. I have this part planned too. “I’d say the opposite of bravery is you!”
I sound so brave myself when I say it. No sign of the chickenshit I truly am, about to collapse on my jelly legs.
His mouth twists, like he just tasted something a little off. But then he composes himself again, and his smile is two clicks away from benevolent. I hear a high-pitched whine in my ear as sweat breaks out on parts of my body that don’t normally sweat.
He’s looking at me now, running his thumb across his fingers. His nails are neat and trimmed, much better kept than mine, which are ragged from scrubbing sinks and toilets.
“You lost the better part of you,” he says. “That’s what you wrote. It was her. Meg. Your ‘better half.’ And you’re trying to redeem yourself, because she left you out of the decision.”
He has my number. He always has. Even when we were corresponding over a message board, he saw through me. All at once, the folly of my plan, of “catching” him, drains out of me, and so does the remaining strength in my legs. I sink onto the couch. “Fuck you,” I say, because whatever script I came up with is useless now.
Bradford goes on in this almost gentle voice. “Except maybe you don’t mean she was your better half. Maybe she was your other half.” He takes a sip of his drink. “Sometimes we meet people and are so symbiotic with them, it’s as if we are one person, with one mind, one destiny.”
He’s talking to me the way he would on the boards, circular, so it takes a minute to understand what he’s suggesting.
“You’re saying I want to die, like Meg?”
“I’m just repeating your words.”
“No! You’re putting your words into my mouth. You want me to die. Like you wanted Meg to die.”
“How did I ‘want’ Meg to die?” he asks, now making air quotes himself.
“Let’s see: you told her how to get poison. How to write a suicide note. How to keep it from family. How to alert the police. How to erase incriminating emails. You told her not to go on antidepressants. You told her not to keep living.”
“I told no one any of this.”
“You told her all of that! You told me that!”
He stares at me. “Cody. It was Cody, wasn’t it? What exactly did I tell you?”
My mind spins as I try to recall the specifics, but I can’t think of anything except for a collection of stupid quotes.
“Now it’s coming back to me. . . . The sunless planet. That was also you?” he asks.
Yes. That was me.
He sits down, settling in, like he’s about to watch one of his favorite movies.
“I thought that was an interesting way to put it. Would you want to go on living if the sun went out? But, Cody, do you actually know what would happen if the sun died?”
“No.” It comes out a squeak. Like a mouse.
“Within a week, the temperature on Earth would drop to below zero. Within a year, it would fall to minus one hundred. Ice sheets would cover the oceans. Crops, needless to say, would fail. Livestock would die. People who didn’t die of the cold would soon die of starvation. A sunless planet, which is what you called yourself, wasn’t it? It’s already a dead planet. Even if you’re still going through the motions.”
I’m a planet without its sun. I’m already cold and dead. That’s what he’s saying. So I should just make it official.
Except, why then is there this heat traveling its way up my body, like a circuit? Heat. The opposite of cold. The opposite of dead.
There’s a click at the door. And then a kid—zits, backpack, frown—walks in. My first thought is that Bradford lures people here, and this is another one of All_BS’s victims. Only this time, this time I’m here too, and I can save him. It’s not too late.
But then Bradford says, “What are you doing here?”
And the kid says, “Mom says you got the days mixed up again. She was pissed about it.” He sees me then, gives me a questioning look.
“Go to your room, and we’ll discuss it in a second,” he says gruffly.
“Can I use your computer?”
Bradford nods curtly. The kid disappears down a hall. As I watch him go, I can’t help but notice how drab this place is. The wood table with a stack of napkins in the middle. The generic prints hanging on the wall. There’s a chipped bookcase; it’s not full of philosophical tomes but supermarket paperbacks, the kind found in Tricia’s break room. There’s one big book, a reference book called Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, lying sidewise, so I can see all the sticky notes jammed into it. This is where he gets quotes from?
I hear the chime of the computer, and it’s like my brain clicks on.
Crappy condo, shitty job, depressing town. Bradford’s life is a lot like mine. Except that every night, he fires up his computer and plays God.
“You should go now,” Bradford says. The calm, taunting tone has vanished. His voice is icy again, like it was on the phone when someone barged in on him.
From down the hall, his son—who must be what, thirteen, fourteen, not so much younger than me?—calls out, asking for a sandwich.
Bradford’s voice is tight as he promises a turkey and Swiss. He looks at me: “You should go now,” he repeats.
“What would you do if someone did to him what you did to Meg?” I ask. And for a second I picture it. His own turkey- sandwich-eating son, dead. Bradford grieving as the Garcias have grieved.
Bradford stands up, and I know he has seen the scenario I just conjured. As he walks toward me, the vein in his neck bulging, I should be scared. Except I’m not.
Because I don’t want his son to die. It wouldn’t even anything out. It would just be one more dead kid. And somehow, this is the thought that gives me the strength to stand up, to walk past him, and to leave.