Free The Devoted by Eric Shapiro

listen to him, you can listen to me.”
    And that was always the problem with fucking Jed. Put power anywhere near the guy’s head, and it’ll ignite till the whole universe gets charred.
    “I have to go,” I say. “I can’t be talking.”
    “Matthew!” He’s loud. If anyone is out in the room, they most certainly think I’ve got Jed in here. “Hear me now! You called because you wanted help. That is inside of you. You called me back because you wanted help.”
    “Have to go,” I say (truth). “You’re a very, very nice man, Jed.” (lie)
    “And so are you. So are you. You belong in this world. You don’t belong with him. Do I have to mention all the plans you had? You were gonna do good things on this planet, Matthew.”
    If what happens now isn’t hyperventilation, then I hope I never know what the real thing feels like. Only, come on: Did I ever have plans? We were in it for the gush, not for hard results. A guy like Jed was supposed to understand that.
    “Yeah, well,” I say, so weak I could vanish, “the planet’s looking pretty dark, Jed.”
    “Which is why we need y--”
    “Please don’t call me anymore.”
    “Listen to the voicemails!”
    I breathe out a magic carpet of breath. Upon it ride the words “So long, Jed.”
    “No, wait, Matthew--!”
    Black button again.
    Turn off the world.
    Then the faucet, as well. Wanting nothing from out there to be in here.
    ****
    The last time I saw Jed, we were in me and Jolie’s room in the old house. Jolie was in the bathroom, taking a bath. She’d been up all night crying about Victor’s passing. But after the detectives came, she switched from tears to a strange, strained calmness.
    “We’ve got problems,” Jed told me, with his talent for front-loading the obvious.
    “I don’t think so,” I said, resisting. “I think Mrs. Garcia has problems.”
    We called her that ‘cause she was like in her forties. Twice as old as Jolie, if not more.
    We looked at each other. Jed could have been a movie star. Most of us could have. Not Theodore; he always cramped our style.
    I sometimes wondered if The Leader, also handsome, felt a certain competition with Jed. I’m confident in my looks, but any day of the week, I’ll tell you The Leader’s got more than I do. Jed, however: whole different level.
    Jed could make Johnny Depp start slinging poses.
    “She’ll be arrested, that much I can guarantee.” Jed with his smug ex-robber knowledge of the law. “But it’s going to cross-pollinate...”
    And his smug overgrown vocabulary.
    “...between the baby and the rape investigation. You have to wake up, Matthew. There are sixty of us living here. Chicks with four boyfriends who go to sleep with their girlfriends.”
    I laughed. I liked it. The place was fun. Even the chores.
    And I was certain that the fun would not end then.
    Only Jed broke with protocol, and that night in my room, he warned me outright that he was going to. I had no rank – only he and The Leader did – but it was somewhat understood that I was something of a third in charge. Everybody liked and listened to me, and The Leader had a habit of lighting up every time I spoke.
    “I’m gathering as many as possible to leave,” he said.
    I had nothing to say to that. It was pure Jed drama. A grand, manic gesture. He probably pictured himself in a slow-motion exodus, leading them all down the street.
    But half of these people didn’t have jobs. The other half hated the jobs they did have, and had one foot out the office door.
    “You’re undermining what we’ve created here,” I said. “It’s utopic. Don’t force it to end just ‘cause you think utopias are supposed to.”
    Jed’s eyes showed me that he consented to my depth of debate. From day one, he’d dropped lines about utopias being bound to fail. And given what we all understood about the Law of Attraction, he had to at least wonder if he wasn’t willing it to stop working.
    “We had a dead infant carried out of here