Maybe he also just likes to come in here and be with the little guy.

Maybe we have that much in common.

I do not ask the little guy about Eiger and we don’t talk about coffee this time we just—

We don’t talk about anything at all for an hour. We just stand there and do things in the quiet of the shop.

And then I leave and he does not say goodbye.

—

I see Volodya across the street just going into a shop. It is a hat shop. I run across the road and nearly get hit by a car. There is a lot of honking and shouting in Swiss. Swiss is a great language to be pissed off in.

I get to the hat shop and go inside but of course it is not Volodya it is a fat man from Sion.

I nearly kill him for having the nerve to be a fat man from Sion and not my friend.

I cry a bit instead. I sit down to cry on a bench and I see something so I duck my head. There’s a noise like ZVOVVvv above my head and something lodges halfway through a metal sign pointing the way to the Bärengraben: a metal marble the size of a human eye.

I look across the road and I see Evil Hansel with a heavyweight fisherman’s catapult. With the right projectile these things are lethal up to forty feet but they look sort of scampish. Scampish such that a small boy might carry one without getting arrested and such.

Evil Hansel looks at me and shrugs. He doesn’t even reload. His face barely registers anything at all.

We stand there and look at one another across the road for a while. Then a bus comes and he’s gone.

I slightly like this kid.

I mean he stabbed me while his grandfather shot my friend. It’s not like we could ever be friends.

But Volodya was right man this country has interesting people in it. People and stuff I guess.

I go back to the pig farm and I wait for Doc to notice I am there. Rex has disarmed the door and now it looks kinda sad. It is a murder door with no murder left in it.

—

“Hi door.”

LOOM

“Hi door my name is Jack how are you today?”

LOOM

“I hear you man but there has to be something that you want like something that you can’t get just with the opening and the closing.”

LOOM

LOOM

LOOM

“Yep I guess in the end that is really just your whole thing isn’t it?”

LOOM

“That and the killing—”

“So if I just—”

“If you were activated and I reached out and—”

ZzzzzZZZ-CLICK

“Wow. Yep.”

CLICKACLICKACLICK

“I feel ya big guy.”

LOOM CLICKACLICKCLICK

“Yeah let it all out that’s right—”

“Price?”

“Hi Doc.”

“Price are you talking to the door?”

“No?”

“Mr. Friday called it’s time to go.”

“Go where?”