Being unmarried twenty-five-year-old guys in the eighteenth century, our options were pretty limited. Footman. Apprentice. Gravedigger. Cooper, whatever that is. Bootblack, whatever that is. Chimneysweep. Farmer. The minute they say town crier, Denny said, "Yeah. Okay. I can do that. Really, I spend half my life crying."

His Highness looks at Denny and says, "Those glasses you're wearing, do you need them?"

"Only to see with," Denny says.

I took the job because there are worse things than working with your best friend.

Sort-of best friend.

Still, you'd think this would be more fun, a fun job with a bunch of Drama Club types and community theater folks. Not this chain gang of throwbacks. These Puritan hypocrites.

If the Ye Old Town Council only knew Mistress Plain, the seamstress, is a needle freak. The miller is cooking crystal meth. The innkeeper deals acid to the busloads of bored teenagers who get dragged here on school field trips. These kids sit in rapt atten­tion watching while Mistress Halloway cards wool and spins it into yarn, the whole time she's lecturing them on sheep repro­duction and eating hashish johnnycake. These people, the potter on methadone, the glassblower on Percodans, and the silversmith popping Vicodins, they've found their niche. The stableboy, hiding his headphones under a tricorner hat, plugged in on Special K and twitching to his own private rave, they're all a bunch of hippie burnouts peddling their agrarian bullshit, but okay, that's just my opinion.

Even Farmer Reldon has his plot of prime weed out behind the corn and the pole beans and junk. Only he calls it hemp.

The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it's too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can't make it in the real world, in real jobs—isn't this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren't the Pilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? For sure, in­stead of just wanting to believe something different about God's love, the losers I work with want to find salvation through com­pulsive behaviors.

Or through little power and humiliation games. Witness His Lord High Charlie behind lace curtains, just some failed drama major. Here, he's the law, watching whoever gets bent over, yank­ing his dog with one white-gloved hand. For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who'd stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.

"Dude," Denny says. "It's my pants, again."

So I pull them back up.

The rain's wet Denny's shirt flat to his skinny back so the bones of his shoulders and the trail of his spine show through, even whiter than the unbleached cotton material. The mud's up around the tops of his wooden clogs and spilling in. Even with my hat on, my coat's getting soaked, and the damp makes my dog and dice all wadded up in the crotch of my wool breeches start to itch. Even the crippled chickens have clucked off to find somewhere dry.

"Dude," Denny says, and sniffs. "For serious, you don't have to stay."

From what I remember about physical diagnosis, Denny's pallor could mean liver tumors.

See also: Leukemia.

See also: Pulmonary edema.

It starts raining harder, from clouds so dark that people start lighting lamps inside. Smoke settles down on us from chim­neys. The tourists will all be in the tavern drinking Australian ale out of pewter mugs made in Indonesia. In the woodwright's shop, the cabinetmaker will be huffing glue out of a paper bag with the blacksmith and the midwife while she talks about fronting the band they dream of putting together but never will.

We're all trapped. Its always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.

In a creepy way, I can see myself standing here for the rest of my life. It's a comfort, me and Denny complaining about the same shit, forever. In recovery, forever. Sure, I'm standing guard, but if you want to get really authentic about it, I'd rather see Denny locked in the stocks than let him get banished and leave me behind.

I'm not so much a good friend as I'm the doctor who wants to adjust your spine every week.

Or the dealer who sells you heroin.

"Parasite" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Denny's wig flops to the ground, again. The words "Eat me" bleeding red in the rain, running pink down behind his cold, blue ears, trickling pink around his eyes and down his cheeks, dripping pink into the mud.

All you can hear is the rain, water falling against puddles, against thatched roofs, against us, erosion.

I'm not so much a good friend as I'm the savior who wants you to worship him forever.

Denny sneezes, again, a long hank of yellowy goob that snakes out of his nose and lands on the wig in the mud, and he says, "Dude, do not put that nasty rug back on my head, okay?" And he sniffs. Then coughs, and his glasses drop off his face into the mess.

Nasal discharge means Rubella.

See also: Whooping cough.

See also: Pneumonia.

His glasses remind me of Dr. Marshall, and I say how there's this new girl in my life, a real doctor, and for serious, worth the effort to bag.

And Denny says, "You still stuck on doing your fourth step? You need any help remembering stuff to write in your note­book?"

The complete and relentless story of my sexual addiction. Oh, yeah, that. Every lame, suck-ass moment.

And I say, "Everything in moderation, dude. Even recovery."

I'm not so much a good friend as I'm the parent who never wants you to really grow up.

And facedown, Denny says, "It helps to remember the first time for everything." He says, "My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich."

The first time for everything. The incomplete inventory of my crimes. Just another incomplete in my life full of incompletes.

And still facedown, blind to everything in the world except the mud, Denny says, "Dude, you still there?"

And I put the rag back around his nose and tell him, "Blow."

Chapter 5

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Whatever lighting the photographer used was harsh and made bad shadows on the cement-block wall behind them. Just a painted wall in somebody's basement. The mon­key looked tired and patchy with mange. The guy was in lousy shape, pale with rolls around his middle, but there he was, relaxed and bent over with his hands braced against his knees and his poochy gut hanging down, his face looking back over his shoulder at the camera, smil­ing away.