Free Extraordinary by David Gilmour

table and bloodstains on the wall?’
    â€œHe seemed perplexed by the question, and I realized that something had shut down in him. That his fine intelligence had dimmed, and, I suspected, dimmed irretrievably. It was hard to admit it, but I wasn’t sitting in a restaurant with a skeletal young man whose wit used to make even the police do a double take. I was having dinner instead with a common, dull-witted television watcher. A
chronic
television watcher. Getting high, watching television, breaking into cars, getting high, watching television. That was it. That was his whole life.”
    â€œYou must have grown to loathe him.”
    â€œNo, no, I never did. Not for long, anyway. I couldn’t help feeling that there was a magic key out there, that if I could just find it and put it in the lock, the door would open and everything would change.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œMothers are fools for their sons. I let him move in. I couldn’t leave him wandering the streets—I was afraid he’d get killed. He had known intuitively which nerves to pluck, especially that business about sending him home from Mexico. He camped out on my couch, making up his bed in the morning. For a while it worked. Chloe went to school; I took a Spanish course. I was hoping one day maybe I could go back to Mexico—somewhere else, though. Puerto Vallarta, maybe. Gay towns are always the safest towns in foreign countries. I’d spent most of my money, so I was living on a disability pension.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you go back to making your wall hangings?”
    She looked at the winking whale, at the red seagulls drifting over the lagoon. “I tried, but somehow the air had just gone out of it. I couldn’t do the drawing or the cutting. I’d have had to hire someone to do it, and that seemed like paying someone to collect stamps for you. But we were making out fine.”
    She went on. “It was a temporary arrangement with Kyle, but it gave me something for which I was hungry: it gave me
him,
his company. He had been such a bright, perceptive little boy, so clever about his friends, his parents, even himself. How to put it? It was so sad. He belonged to that group, that maddening group of people who are capable of unsparing self-analysis but incapable of controlling the same impulses they talk so brilliantly about. But I loved him, and I kept waiting for him to happen on the right key for the right lock. And for a while, it looked like he just might.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œHe joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Got a terrific sponsor—a middle-aged businessman who phoned him every night. He got a job in a warehouse. Marek got it for him. He did it for me, yes, but he believed in the magic key too. Except his was a bit different. His was the brutality of hard work. That Eastern European thing. And for a long time, maybe six months,it worked.
    â€œKyle got himself another girlfriend. Japanese this time. Women always liked him. It was a blessing and a curse. They always wanted to save him. Including his mother. All of us believing in the magic key. One month went by; three months; six months. I could feel a belt loosening around my chest. And then, one summer morning on the way to work, he walked by a neighbourhood bar—I even remember the name, the Moonstone—and he went in.
    â€œHe must have walked by that bar, God, I don’t know, a hundred times? But that day he went in. They were just setting up. He put money down on the bar and asked for a beer. The bartender asked him what he wanted. Kyle said, ‘You choose something.’ Unusual request. That’s why later, when the guy talked to the police, he remembered Kyle.”
    A door opened just down the corridor from Sally’s apartment. Music briefly issued onto the flowered carpet. “Come on,” a young woman’s voice said, “this was
your
idea, now come
on.
” A dog collar rattled by the door,