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What do you think happens to us when we die? Enough questions to drive a man mad.
    She’d been afraid she was going mad. She was depressed. Not fashionably depressed, in the way of some Goth chicks, but clinically. She had been overcome with it in their last couple of months together, didn’t sleep, wept for no reason, forgot to put on her clothes, stared at the TV for hours without bothering to turn it on, answered the phone when it rang but then wouldn’t say anything, just stood there holding it, as if she’d been switched off.
    But before that there’d been summer days in the barn while he rebuilt the Mustang. There’d been John Prine on the radio, the sweet smell of hay baking in the heat, and afternoons filled with her lazy, pointless questions—a never-ending interrogation that was, at turns, tiresome, amusing, and erotic. There’d been her body, tattooed and icy white, with the bony knees and skinny thighs of a long-distance runner. There’d been her breath on his neck.
    “Hey,” Danny said. He reached out, and his fingers grazed Jude’s wrist. At his touch, Jude’s hand sprang open, releasing the phone. “Are you going to be all right?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
    Slowly Jude lifted his gaze. Danny half stood behind his desk. He had lost some of his color, his ginger freckles standing out in high relief against the white of his cheeks.
    Danny had been her friend, in the unthreatening, easygoing, slightly impersonal way he made himself a friend to all of Jude’s girls. He played the role of the urbane, understanding gay pal, someone they could trust to keep their secrets, someone they could vent to and gossip with, someone who provided intimacy without involvement. Someone who would tell them things about Jude that Jude wouldn’t tell them himself.
    Danny’s sister had OD’d on heroin when Danny was just a freshman in college. His mother hanged herself six months later, and Danny hadbeen the one who discovered her. Her body dangled from the single rafter in the pantry, her toes pointed downward, turning in small circles above a kicked-over footstool. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see that the double-barreled blast of the sister and the mother, dying at almost the same time, had wiped out some part of Danny as well, had frozen him at nineteen. Although he didn’t wear black fingernail polish or rings in his lips, in a way Danny’s attraction to Jude wasn’t so different from Georgia’s, or Florida’s, or any of the other girls’. Jude collected them in almost exactly the same way the Pied Piper had collected rats, and children. He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along.
    Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what Florida had done to herself, wanted to spare him. It would be better not to tell him. He wasn’t sure how Danny would take it.
    He told him anyway. “Anna. Anna McDermott. She cut her wrists. The woman I was just talking to is her sister.”
    “Florida?” Danny said. He settled back into his chair. It creaked beneath him. He looked winded. He pressed his hands to his abdomen, then leaned forward slightly, as if his stomach were cramping up. “Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit,” Danny said sweetly. No words had ever sounded less obscene.
    A silence followed. Jude noticed, for the first time, that the radio was on, murmuring softly. Trent Reznor sang that he was ready to give up his empire of dirt. It was funny hearing Nine Inch Nails on the radio just then. Jude had met Florida at a Trent Reznor show, backstage. The fact of her death hit him fresh, all over again, as if he were just realizing it for the first time. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? And then the shock began to coalesce into a sickened resentment. It was so pointless and stupid and self-involved that it was impossible not to hate her a little, not to want to get her on