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always be Dexter the Monster, human-appearing, but walking through life with one foot always in perpetual Darkness. And I am also not able to feel Real Human Emotions. This is a fact, and it cannot change either. I do not feel. I am not capable.
    So what were these terrible
things
surging through me, smashing at the tight slick walls that held Me in perfect cold indifference? This stomach-twisting dread, the sensation of everything around me and in me being diseased, dead, rotten, and empty? What could they possibly be? They certainly
felt
like Feelings.
    You were never really my brother.
    Barely, only just almost, I could understand Deborah’s decision not to help me. Her career was everything to her, and I really was, after all, all she said I was and feared I would be again. I was and I would be, undeniably, unchangeably, and eagerly. It made a certain sense for her to think that way, and while I could never endorse it as a plan of action, I could at least comprehend the mental process that had led her there.
    But this, the other, the utter rejection of our entire jointly led life, the complete denial of family ties, stretching back through the years to Mom and the house in the Grove and even including Saint Harry and His Plan—to take thirty-some years of actual existence and fling it away like roadkill—
    —and then to throw it in my face, not once but
twice,
in a cold, uncompromising, and, it must be said, a
cruel
manner…this I could not understand. This went so far beyond mere self-preservation, so deeply into the surreal realm of Human Emotional Wickedness, a kingdom that was forever closed to someone like me—the Emotion part, I mean—that I could not begin to fathom it. I could not even imagine a set of circumstances that would lead me to deny Deborah in such a complete, absolute, and unbending way. It was unthinkable, no matter how I thought of it.
    You were never really my brother.
    That sentence of death still rang in my ears at lights-out that night.
    —
    It was still there the next morning at four-thirty when my loud, bright, and unnecessary wake-up call sounded. I did not need to be awakened. I had not slept. I had not performed any other higher functions of any kind, either. I had, in fact, done no more than lie on my bunk and listen to the endlessly repeating loop of Deborah’s voice casting me out of my entire life and into eternal all-alone darkness.
    Breakfast came, delivered with cheerful invisible competence through the slot in my door. I am almost sure I ate it, since the tray was empty when I put it back through the slot. But I could not say what I had eaten. It might have been anything: baked frog vomit, deep-fried possum nostrils, human fingers, anything at all. I would not have noticed.
    But things change. No matter how hard we fight it, nothing stays as it is. All things, as you may have noticed, must change, and even end. At some point, even the greatest misery begins to fade. Life, or what passes for life, plods on in its own unending weary footsteps, and somehow we plod along with it, if we stay lucky. Eventually, other little thoughts began to trickle into the Pit of Despair where I lay and, it must be said, where I wallowed. It was this very act of wallowing, of starting to enjoy my suffering a little too much, that finally brought me back to something resembling awareness. I became aware that I had started my own repeating loop, in perfect harmony to Deborah’s hard words. It was a simple melody, a sprightly version of the well-known old tune “Pity Me.” And when I was at last alert to the fact that I was doing that, I became self-conscious and, from there, conscious.
    And so at last, just before a delightful lunch of Strange Brown Meat Sandwich was delivered, Dexter arose from the dead. I sat up, stood, and performed a few stretching motions. Then, still aware of the utterly miserable and friendless wretch that I was, I began to think. My justly famous brain was the very last