“It wasn’t bad,” I said.
“What?”
“Your picture.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
“So... Yeah.”
There was another pause.
“I guess we’ve seen each other naked now,” I said.
He was quiet. But the air felt charged with something suddenly. I didn’t want it to be, but I couldn’t make it stop. We didn’t say anything for ten seconds or so. Then I asked the first thing that came to mind.
“How did he do it?”
Another silence. I heard Daniel breathing on the phone.
“Pills,” he said finally. “The ones he hadn’t been taking. You didn’t know?”
“No. Not the details. I never really tried to find out.”
I closed my eyes.
“They tried to pump his stomach,” he said, “but it was too late. He was unconscious in the bathroom in our hall and the RA couldn’t bring him back.”
I lay my head down on my father’s desk.
“Did you have any idea?” I asked. “That he was capable of that?”
“I don’t know. If I didn’t live with him, I never would have suspected anything. I knew he wasn’t going to class,and eventually I found out he wasn’t taking his meds. But right when I was really starting to get worried, he seemed to get better. I thought he was getting back to normal. The only sign was the park thing.”
“Park thing?”
Daniel took a deep breath.
“It’s kind of a whole long story.”
“Tell me,” I said.
Another breath.
“We were on one of our walks,” he said. “Even when he wasn’t feeling great, he still wanted to walk. And on this day, he said he wanted to go to the Public Gardens. He used to go there with his family on vacation when he was a kid.Make Way for Ducklingsand all that. So we walked across the bridge from campus. There had been a lot of rain lately, and I remember the Charles River was really high. We stopped to watch it from the bridge, and the current seemed so much faster than usual.
“There were no boats out even though it was sunny. Jonah was in a decent mood, and he was telling me about the history of the Charles, how it used to be so full of sewage that people who fell in had to get tetanus shots. I wasn’t really listening to him, though. I was watching his face to see if it looked more like the Jonah I knew. And there wassomething there. His eyes seemed to have more life to them.
“We walked into the gardens, and I followed Jonah to the Lagoon Bridge. The Swan Boats weren’t going yet, but they were parked against the banks. We sat down on a bench near one of the weeping willows. Jonah had been talking a lot, but suddenly he got really quiet. And I noticed he was distracted, looking at something on the other side of the lagoon.
“Somehow I had missed it, but almost directly across from us there was this homeless guy sitting there, dressed in multiple layers of sweaters and suit coats. I couldn’t see his face because he had a hood pulled tight over his head. But I could see a gray beard spilling over his chest. And he was surrounded on all sides by these giant blue translucent garbage bags full of white stuff. He must have had six or seven of these bags, each one full to bursting.
“After he got settled, he opened one up and reached his hand inside. Then he brought it out and threw a fistful of the white stuff in the air. It rained down in clumps onto the water and the grass surrounding him. And suddenly, it was like a signal had been sent to every bird in the park at once. They all descended on the same spot like vultures.
“It was bread, of course, the white stuff. Wonder Bread. And once he started flinging it, he didn’t stop. Sometimeshe shredded the slices with his hands. Sometimes he chucked them whole. Soon, we couldn’t even see him anymore for all the dive-bombing birds. Ducks. Pigeons. Seagulls. Crows. It was a battle royal, which was ridiculous because it was clear he was never going to run out of bread. He had enough to feed every bird in the park until they were stuffed. He was the god of bread.
