During the week before the Nakamura job I spend a lot of time stumbling around in a haze of confusion. I am a heartbroken mutterer, a starer-through-windows-dumbly, a stunned tear zombie. When I’m not drinking and dosing, I’m at the firing range. When I’m not drinking and dosing or at the firing range I am sitting with my journal, trying to get out some ink. There’s nothing I can say that will make anything comprehensible. It is a failure of language itself. Nothing, not one nibstroke, means what I thought it meant. None of the characters look like letters; they look like poorly drawn games of hangman. I try to pronounce the words “Charlie is gone”—I think that’s what I wrote—but it doesn’t make sense, not one syllable, not one phoneme.

Honesty? Not what I thought it meant.

Trust? Must have it confused with some homophone I didn’t know existed.

Loyalty? Not even close. Never knew it.

Love? Bzzz. So sorry. Try again.

After a few false starts, I pry open the door to the freezer and stare down its inhabitants. All the brides and grooms are standing where I left them last, even Chester Wellington III, as if nothing has changed for them. But it has. They still have a certain aura, but it is decaying. They are no longer smug; they are angry and desperate, as if they know they are losing their power. They are no longer the voodoo figures that haunt both freezer and subconscious.

Now they are just the plastic idols of dead gods.

I remove all the cakes, spread them on the table like poker chips, grasp each figure by the chest, where the heart should be, and yank. Hard. They come off easily, though, easier than I thought they would,60 and it doesn’t take long to divorce each cake from its couple. It is exhilarating, but it is also terrifying. In the garbage can it looks like a Holocaust scene, all those bodies piled on each other. And each tier of cake looks tortured, too: from every place where I removed a bride or groom there is now a gaping woundlike hole in the icing.

But it does not stop me from doing what I must do.

I cry into the holes I’ve made—planting strange seeds to grow a mysterious fruit—and then, as if performing a tribal ritual by which one hopes to assimilate the powers of a vanquished foe, I eat all the cakes. Every one of them. Every last goddamn crumb.