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"Damn woman can't even cook soup."
     
    That night Philip's mother had again reassured her son that Walter Kenan was a good man and that one day things would be different. They were just having bad luck.
     
    "The System," her son said. Philip was nine years old.
     
    His mother smiled down at him.
     
    "I wish—" Philip said. And he stopped. He was not sure what he wished. And then it came to him: “I wish the System would kill him."
     
    "Oh Philip," his mother said. She leaned over and hugged him, and he could hear her labored breathing and smell the perfume she wore and feel the scratchy fabric of her waitress uniform. "You don't really mean that."
     
    But he had meant it. "Now I lay me down to sleep..." he prayed in the darkened room. But when he had finished his petition to his mother's invisible god, he turned to the one of power. He prayed to the System. "Kill him," he hissed. "Please." He prayed to Yog-Sothoth and ancient Cthulhu .
     

     
    #
     

     
    After Philip had been in the hospital a week, AL Bingham came to visit.
     
    “I don't like hospitals," Bingham said. He was wearing a hat, something a gangster in a forties film would have coveted, and a brown rumpled suit. No tie. "My wife went into a hospital for a routine check-up once, and that was the last of her. Doctor calls and says the test is positive, and I say, well that's a relief and he says no, positive isn't good. Negative is good. Positive means they shrink you with chemicals until you are small enough to bury in a shoe box."
     
    "I'm sorry," Philip said.
     
    Bingham waved a hand. "That was a long time ago. I just came to cheer you up. Was that your girlfriend I saw coming out of here?"
     
    Philip said that indeed it was, and that it looked like they might get back together again.
     
    "Hey, congratulations," Bingham said. "It's always good to see young folks resolve their differences. Life is short, et cetera."
     
    "It's not absolutely for sure yet," Philip said.
     
    She wants me to throw out my novel. She wants me to chuck 2000 pages. She wants me to rip my heart out and feed it to the paper shredder.
     
    "I'm sure it will work out," Bingham said. Like many old people, the tone of his voice seemed to add that it would not matter in the long run.
     
    "I got to get back to work," Bingham said. "Old Ralph is losing it. He keeps telling everyone that the typesetting broad will be back next week, when the way I hear it she is still unconscious. Eddie Shanks says our boss is just being optimistic, but I say he is losing it big time. He fired two printers last night, and this morning he hired some guy who doesn't speak
     
    English and spends three-fourths of his time in the bathroom."
     
    The old printer left, and Philip drifted back into fitful sleep.
     
    Well? Amelia had asked.
     
    I don't know. I don't know if I can do it.
     

7.
     

     
    Ralph Pederson always said, "Insurance is / a racket," and, since he did not want his workers to appear to be gullible fools, he did not offer them health insurance until they had been with him two years. Consequently, Ralph's One-Day Résumés had very few employees who actually were insured. Philip, a new employee, was most definitely not insured.
     
    The hospital administration, running a cool
     
    eye over Philip's physical and financial health, decided the former was far better than the latter, and they had Philip on crutches and out the door in five days.
     
    Amelia drove Philip back to his apartment. She drove a small, maroon Honda, zipping through traffic with her usual flat-out, solemn concentration.
     
    The day was overcast with occasional tremors of rain. In Philip's apartment, the pots and pans were full of water and the air had a thick, mildewed flavor of defeat. Fortunately, Philip's stay in the hospital had coincided with mostly clear skies and good weather, the rain arriving late last night. Had it been otherwise, the carpet would have required more than Amelia's industry with towels