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By Root 1288 0

and lists, locks and keys and codes and phones. Every few nights they moved to a new place, within a larger community, most of whom were also moving around. Spencer started calling Frank on his FOG phone to let him know where they would be that night, and Frank started leaving work at more or less the normal time, using a wand Edgardo gave him to see that he was clear, then meeting Spencer in the park, running a frisbee round, then walking somewhere in Northwest to the rendezvous of the night. Once or twice Frank joined the dumpster-diving teams, and was interested to learn that most restaurant dumpsters were now locked shut. But this was to satisfy insurance-company liability concerns more than to keep people from the food, because for every dumpster they visited they had either the key or the combination, provided by kitchen workers who were either sympathetic or living the life themselves. And so they would go into the parking lots and workspaces behind the city’s finest, and set a lookout, and then unlock the dumpster and remove the useful food, which often was set carefully in one corner by the kitchen help, but in any case was obvious.

It wasn’t even that smelly of an operation, Frank learned (although sometimes it was); and then they would hustle off with backpacks full of half-frozen steaks or big bags of lettuce, or potatoes, really almost all the raw materials of the wonderful meals all the restaurants had not made and could preserve no longer, and by the time they got to the meeting house, its kitchen would be powered up by a generator in the backyard, or the fireplace would be ablaze with a big fire, and cooks would be working on a meal that would feed thirty or forty people through the course of the evening.

Frank floated through all this like a jellyfish. He let the tide of humanity shove him along. This way or that. Billow on the current. He was grunioning in the shallows of the city.

Then it came time for the last of Rudra’s major funerals. Frank was surprised to see the date on his watch. Well, that was interesting. Forty-nine days had passed and he hadn’t quite noticed. Now it was the day.

He didn’t know what to do.

He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to admit Rudra was dead, he didn’t want to feel those feelings again. He didn’t want to think that Rudra was alive but in some horrible netherworld, where he was having to negotiate all kinds of terrors in order to get to the start of some putative next life. It was absurd. He didn’t want any of it to be real.

He sat there at his desk in his office, paralyzed by indecision. He could not decide.

A call came on his FOG phone.

It was Nick Quibler. “Frank, are you okay? Did you forget that it’s the day for Rudra’s funeral?”

Nick did not sound accusatory, or worried, or anything. Nick was good at not sounding emotional. Teenage flatness of affect.

“Oh yeah,” he said to the boy, trying to sound normal. “I did forget. Thanks for calling. I’ll be right over. But don’t let them delay anything on my account.”

“I don’t think they could even if they wanted to,” Nick said. “It’s a pretty strict schedule, as far as I can tell.” He had taken an interest in the supposed sequence of events Rudra had been experiencing during these forty-nine days in the bardo, reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and telling Frank too many of the details, all too like one of his video games. Suddenly it all seemed to Frank like a cruel hoax, a giant fiction meant to comfort the bereaved. People who died were dead and gone. Their soul had been in their brains and their brains decomposed and the electrical activity was gone. And then they were gone too, except to the extent they were in other people’s minds.

Well, fair enough. He was going to the funeral now. He had decided. Or Nick had decided.

Suddenly he understood that he had been sitting there about to miss it. He was so incapacitated that he had almost missed a friend’s funeral. Would have missed it, if not for a call from another friend. Before leaving he grabbed up the phone and called up the neurologist’s office. “I have