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tell us Smith kept saying how much he hated life. We get all that squared away without any kinks and I’ll chalk this up as case closed,” he says, but he doesn’t believe it because his gut is telling him differently, and mine is telling me differently too. Things are never that easy. Not even a simple suicide.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The man who saved Kelly Summers from Dwight Smith knows two things. The first is that the name he’s come up with for himself is a good one. It’s the type of name the media would give him if they knew the way his mind worked. It’s the Five Minute Man. It has a ring to it. Over the last few years the city has had the Christchurch Carver, the Burial Killer, the Gran Reaper, even Melissa X. Every one of them a psychopath, a killer. The Five Minute Man is a superhero. People love superheroes. He used to love superheroes back when he knew how.
    The second thing he knows is that later today the medical examiner will make the determination Dwight Smith was dead before being put on those train tracks. And that’s a problem. He’s bought them some time. Twenty-four, perhaps forty-eight hours, if the ME is backed up, in which to come up with a way to keep the police from suspecting Kelly Summers. And that’s assuming Summers behaves the way he told her to behave when they interview her today—which he thinks they will. She just has to stick with the script—and he believes she will. After all, she’s the one who killed Smith. She’s the one who has the most to lose. She’ll be fine—he knows it, because last night she experienced something she’s dreamed about for five years: revenge.
    Last night sparked something inside him that was lost. He’s spent the last few months sitting in his lounge watching the sun climb one wall and descend the other. He’s been tracking the progression of a spider who’s building a life in one of the corners. Days pass where all he does is eat and sleep. Some days his wife drops by, but most days she doesn’t, and on the days she does she doesn’t bring the kids because he isn’t their dad anymore, not really. The sameway he isn’t her husband or even himself. He knows there’s more to life—only he doesn’t care. His wife and children are part of the old life, and in that life hadn’t he been happy? Working long hours, mowing lawns, taking his daughter to ballet practice, changing his son’s diapers, paying the mortgage and taking out the trash—that was life. Looking back, he doesn’t know if that made him happy, all he knows is that his new life makes it all feel irrelevant. He doesn’t miss his family. He knows he should. He should miss them a lot. The truth is he doesn’t care. That’s the thing—the Old Him would have rebelled against the person he has become, would have fought and screamed to be heard, he would have gone to every doctor in the country to put things right, and if they couldn’t then he would have searched the world. But the Old Him has gone, replaced by the New Him, and the New Him is all about acceptance. This is what he is. This is life. And that’s fine. The New Him wasn’t going to search for the Old Him. He skipped the first four stages of grief.
    The New Him would slowly die in front of a TV he never turned on, on a couch he didn’t like or dislike, in a house he didn’t like or dislike, watching a spider that he had named Warren munching on the occasional unlucky fly. He isn’t bored. When he shopped, he bought instant meals that could be heated in a microwave. The Old Him would have picked out foods he enjoyed, foods based on flavors and textures and scents and the fun of cooking and the memories those tastes and smells evoked. The New Him can’t taste the difference. Chicken, ice cream, rice, tomatoes—there is only one flavor now. The doctor said there wasn’t anything they could do about that. But he didn’t care. Food was fuel. He ate it to live. And to be honest, he didn’t care if he lived. Or died.