BALDY THE DUMMY said, “Let’s try this, boys and girls: sit up in bed for a minute, okay?”
“Yeah,” said Bob.
“Not you, Bob. I’m talking to my vast unseen listening audience, out there in the dark. Are you sitting up, boys and girls?”
“Yeah,” I whispered, not loudly enough to wake Albertine.
“Now close your eyes and hold your hands out in front of you, with your palms up, as if you were holding a couple of melons and trying to decide which one is heavier. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“But instead of a melon, in your left hand you’ve got your life. Feel the heft of it?”
“Yeah.”
“In your right hand, we’re going to put somebody else’s life, and you are going to be the person living that life, and in that life you are just thinking about what to make for dinner when a cop shows up at the door and says, ‘I got news for you. No need to set so many places at the table, because your eight-year-old girl — ’
“And you say, ‘Are you sure you mean my little girl, the one I put my hopes in, the one who eats far more pizza than is good for her — ’
“And the cop says, ‘Yes, that one, that one was just killed by a shot to the forehead from one of her little eight-year-old friends while they were watching a bootleg videotape of the movie Shot to Hell and playing with a small pistol so that they could act out their favorite scenes.’
“Her last words were, ‘Go ahead and shoot me — I won’t die.’”
A few seconds of dead air, then, “Now, boys and girls, weigh the life in your left hand against the one in your right. If yours is as bad as that, you can get into Baldy’s Catalog of Human Misery! You deserve an entry all your own in Baldy’s catalog. Apply now! No waiting!” He drew on his cigarette. “But if it ain’t that bad,” he said in a lower tone, “then it ain’t that bad, so roll the rock in front of the cave and pull the covers over your head and tuck yourself into a little ball and sleep well. Rest assured that things could be very much worse.”
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