“I thought I could draw, like, a big wolf standing on a pile of bones. I sketched it out. Here, let me show you.”

He got out his notebook and it was exactly like he explained, a big wolf on a pile of bones, but it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel the same.

“I just . . . I don’t want to do another one,” I finally said, after he pointed to the wolf, like I hadn’t seen it, like I didn’t realize that the figure on top of the bones was a big fucking wolf.

“You don’t ever want to make anything else?” he said, and I could feel him slipping away from me a little, and I needed to pull him back.

“I want to make stuff forever, for as long as I live. But I want our poster to be the only one we make. It’s special. It’s the first one we made. It’s perfect, right? It’s perfect. It has our blood on it.”

“We could bleed on this,” he said, pointing to the wolf again.

“Do you know what I mean, Zeke?” I asked, and the whole world depended on what he said. I got one of the copies of our poster, and I held it out for him. “This is what the world gets. If we do more, lots of different designs, new words, we’ll lose it. It just goes away. It’s like . . . I don’t know . . . ordinary. Do you know what I mean?”

He looked at the poster, and I watched as his lips formed the words that I had written. He smiled. And then he nodded and looked up at me.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. Okay. Just this. Only this.”

“Only this,” I said, and we walked into the garage, over to the copier, to make more.

Seven