“Have you seen Laird?” Beverly asked, sidling up to him and grabbing a glass of champagne in the process.

“I thought he was with you.”

“He was, but then I started asking the best man about Rex, and when I turned around, he was gone.”

“I’m not looking for both him and Rex,” Clayton replied. “We should have agreed on a place to meet in case we got separated, like at an amusement park. If nothing else, see you in front of the Tower of Terror at four o’clock.”

“It’s not as though it matters,” said Bev. “The wedding party didn’t have the foggiest clue about Rex. He isn’t here.”

“Maybe he is here,” Clay replied. “Maybe he hit it off with the maid of honor and is getting lucky behind some bushes.”

“Rex isn’t like that,” quoth Bev.

“He’s a teenage male,” Clayton said. “He’s like that. Maybe he’s fucking your mom.”

“Go to hell.” Beverly shotgunned a second glass of champagne. Holy balls, she sure was touchy today.

“By the way, you and Lare gonna make it official?”

“Oh please,” said Bev. “There isn’t a woman left in the universe who can get Laird’s broken Bunsen burner fired up again.”

“Want to wait for him at the car and smoke?”

“Yeah, I say we bail before the insincere toasts.”

Bread-crumbing tobacco as they walked away from the white wedding tent down the hill to the parking lot, Clayton rolled them a sloppy J. They arrived pleasantly stoned to Bev’s Volkswagen, where Laird was slumped in the driver’s seat, his public television science expert forehead resting forlornly on the steering wheel. He had not, as Clayton hypothesized, had a myocardial infarction, but rather was asleep, roasting in the sun.

Laird Hunt guffawed to himself that if you ever came to doubt the outcome of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the sadistic behavior of test subjects when given power over others, you’d only have to look at the immediate family of the man marrying Jenny Barnes. Talk about bona fide dyed-in-the-wool pricks. They were probably still gloating among themselves for taking massive multimillion-dollar bonuses during the subprime mortgage crisis. There was something especially grotesque in the backward tilt of their heads as they slurped oysters from the raw bar. It made Laird’s stomach turn. He hadn’t undertaken this journey of self-discovery in order to spy on smug rich people enjoying aphrodisiacs. The Jabs were the scions of the one percent, but they were the kids these blowhards were ashamed of, the dirty little secrets they didn’t want their investment cohorts to know about, so Laird didn’t mind them. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to suffer through the simpering celebrations of run-of-the-mill one percenters. The next time he caught someone posing for another cheesy smartphone picture, he’d venture on a stroll toward the lighthouse. Couldn’t a single soul, besides the hired photographer, capture the moment with a regular camera? It wasn’t as if weddings served as anything other than a distraction from entropy, from the fact that we’re screwed. Do you like sticking it in your attractive wife? Do you like your sprinkler system? Do you like having a working pancreas? Too bad, because all that can change faster than you can say “Book of Job.”