“It must be tough getting dressed every day.”

“Huh?”

“With those two brains,” I said. “I mean, do they have different tastes in clothes and whatnot? Food?”

He shot me the bird. “I’m serious.”

I held up a hand. “Seriously,” I said, “I sorta know what you’re talking about.”

“Nah.” He waved his hand. “You’re still too green. But you will know. Someday. This second brain, man, it’s a pisser. Say, you meet this person—a potential friend, a lover, what have you—and you want this relationship to work, but your second brain starts working. Even if you don’t want it to. And it sets off alarm bells, instinctual ones, and you know deep in your heart that you can’t trust this person. Your second brain’s picked up on something your regular brain can’t or won’t. Might take you years before you figure out what that something was—maybe it was the way the friend stuttered over a certain word or the way the lover’s eyes lit up when she saw diamonds even though she said she couldn’t care less about money. Maybe it was—Who knows? But it’ll be something. And it’ll be true.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m not speaking God’s truth. Look, I’m just saying, I ever get whacked?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not going to be by some mob ice-man or scumbag drug dealer or somebody I’d smell a mile off. It’s going to be by someone I trust, someone I love. And maybe I’ll go to my grave trusting them. Most of me.” He winked. “But my second brain, I swear it’s a bullshit detector, and it’ll tell me to set up some sort of safeguard against this person, whether the rest of me wants to do it or not. So, that’s it.” He nodded to himself, sat back.

“That’s what?”

“That’s the plan.”

“What plan? You haven’t said a thing that’s made sense in at least twenty minutes.”

“If I ever die, and someone who was close to me comes up to you and says some bullshit about having a message about Fail-Safe, then you know you got to take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way.” He held up his beer. “Drink on it.”

“This doesn’t involve slicing our thumbs with razors and mingling the blood or anything, does it?”

He frowned. “Don’t need that with you. Drink.”

We drank.

“But what if it’s me who sets you up for a hit, Jay?”

He looked at me, one eye squinted shut. “Then I’m screwed, I guess.” And he laughed.