She’s just testing the waters of goodness when what you want, man, is to get all sticky with the death and smear it over you like grape jam, the chorus sang.

The docs at the hospital had prescribed doses of Thorazine (that classic old-time voice killer) along with the usual cocktail of lithium and all that. He spurned that stuff. He did his gig with those drugs and then let them go to the wayside. Too much planning, charting. Too many time obligations. Each day you had to pop the dose on cue. One didn’t want to keep appointments with Dixie cups and rattling pills—like the tails of snakes.

He yanked the device from the old coot, kicked him in the shoulder, and fondled it, a shivering gerbil of compact machinery. When he held it up to his own throat, letting the vibration go through his voice box, the chorus slipped beneath the buzz and dissolved into the empty hiss of the air-conditioned air coming through vents, and the silence of the man on the carpeting.

He took the razor device into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and let it clatter onto the cold white floor.

Back out in the room Janet cowered on the bed, hands over her face, bowed before the situation, muttering softly, this is ill, she said, the guy can’t even talk, the guy’s got a fucking fucked throat, nudging the man who lay on the floor, quivering softly; his thighs extended out of pale blue boxer shorts; the muscles inside seemed to be going crazy, spasms of tension. He was trying to speak, making the best of the situation, doing what he could by way of twisting his mouth into an assortment of shapes. But all that came out was an airless huffing sound. Behind Jimmy’s earlobes one of the choir members sang: You’re no lip-reader. You with your own deformed mouth (he had a slight harelip) that would be hard-pressed to make a natural-sounding word; you who have forsaken and been forsaken.

Afeather weight. He was all skin and the frail hollow bones of a bird, tiny ribs beneath papery skin. Jimmy folded him up, not bothering to lift him off the carpet, and pulled him to the doorway so he could watch, because that’s what you did, make the poor soul watch when you did shit, Jimmy figured. Expand the misery of the world by spreading it around; double your pain. Triple it. Help it build upon itself. He raised his boot up high over the buzzing device, which shivered on the tile floor. He held it there. He waited. He wanted something, a grunt, a small sigh. Raised boot heel, all potential havoc, two feet over the device. The old man moved, started to jump for it, but before he could get there—just a finger around the base of the thing—Jimmy stomped down and felt the glorious crack of the shell, aluminum-coated plastic with rubber nubs. He ground his heel into the mess of parts.