Free The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour Page A

“It wouldn’t make any sense if I told you.”
    I said, “My heart is racing. I’m not going to have a heart attack, am I?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Should I go to the hospital?”
    “It’s a glorious day,” he said. “You shouldn’t be like this. You hold on too tight.”
    “Just tell me,” I said, “please, do I have anything to worry about? Am I going to die from this stuff?”
    Turning his pale blue eyes toward me, he said, “You will if you don’t pray with me.” And then he did the most extraordinary thing. He stripped off his clothes, his shirt, his pants, his underwear, and began a series of obscene somersaults, like a maggot rolling in the dandelions under the bright summer sunlight. It was clear that my childhood friend had gone completely insane.
    Kneeling as though in church, he clamped his hands together and began to pray. “Our Father, Which art in heaven—”
    “What does TCP stand for?” I shouted.
    “Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come . . .”
    “Justin! TCP! What does it mean !”
    He came to a halt. His eyes settled on me again, shattered prisms in a sweaty face. “You should never have fucked her,” he said, almost with regret, as if to say, It’s too bad all this has to happen to you, but you asked for it.
    Then he started back to the house, stark naked, carrying his clothes. “You should never have fucked her,” he repeated, not looking back. And in a moment he was gone—into his car and down the driveway, a plume of dust rising behind him. The hum of cicadas rose and fell in the yellow fields.
    I went back inside the farmhouse and lay down in the white bedroom. Time passed. The room cooled off; the sky darkened; I got up to go to the bathroom; I drank three glasses of water from a toothbrush glass; I looked out the window; across the dark fields, the city glowed like an icebox.
    I was just drifting off, that very second between sleep and wakefulness when your thoughts seem to forget whose they are and, like a herd of frightened deer, take off in their own direction. The sound of a car door slamming woke me up; there were voices and the musical notes of a wind instrument. When I looked out the window, I saw this: a stocky man in a beret tootling on a flute while Justin danced clumsily, like a bear, in the driveway.
    I came out onto the porch.
    “I want to introduce you to somebody,” Justin said.
    The man in the beret removed the flute from his full red lips. It was the man I’d seen in the strip club. There was a sudden knocking at my heart. Some people’s eyes you know not to look into for too long.
    “Duane Hickok,” Justin said.
    I shook hands with him, avoiding his eyes, frightened that he might smell fear on me, like a dog can. I can’t say why he scared me except I sensed that he was capable of a kind of violence the borders of which went well beyond my experience, beyond even my occasional four-in-the-morning revenge fantasies. A man who could kick you in the mouth without an elevation in his pulse. Moreover, I suspected, or rather intuited at an animal level, that you could never be entirely sure what would set it off; a remark, a look, a gesture of “disrespect,” you wouldn’t know it until he was on you.
    I stepped back inside the house and gestured privately to Justin. “You can’t let that man in the house,” I whispered.
    Pale, his breath metallic, Justin rounded his eyes with parent-pleasing surprise. “Why not?”
    I don’t think I replied, but I felt something fall inside me. I went back into my bedroom, packed up War and Peace along with my toothbrush, leaving behind Justin’s self-published book of “poetry” (so exuberantly accepted the night before), and soon after started down the darkening driveway, the sound of stones crunching under my motorcycle. Justin, his brow guiltily furrowed, stood on the porch stairs, his hand raised in farewell. (Where had I seen that gesture? Yes, right. The Great Gatsby .)
    I stopped at the