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  My voice is harsh, and Emily is as contrite as a whipped puppy. “You’re not mad at me, are you, Charlie?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, “I’m not mad. Just promise me you won’t do any damage, okay?”

  Her voice quivers with relief. “I promise. And Charlie D, when you’re ready to accept your destiny with me, your shoes are ready. I washed all six pairs on gentle cycle, and I put them out in the sun to dry. Every day, I sprinkle them with baby powder to keep them fresh.”

  The image of Emily kneeling to powder my shoes stabs me. I fear these moments. Our listeners are loyal. They would do anything for me. They offer up their lives, believing I have the answers. Every morning I wake up thinking that this is the day they’ll discover the truth. I’m a broken man and a fake. I need to shut out these thoughts when I’m on the air. I’m relieved when Nova tells me our next caller is another regular—Podcast Pete. With Podcast Pete on the line, it’s impossible to think about anything.

  When I was a kid, my father, in an attempt to turn me into the kind of son he could be proud of, took me to a place that had a batting cage and a pitching machine. That pitching machine was merciless. I tried swinging at the pitched balls, but I never connected. I tried catching them, but they stung my hand. Finally, I just stood aside and let the pitching machine hurl balls toward me, rat-a-tat-tat, until my time was up. I never did learn how to hit a ball. I never did become the kind of son my father could be proud of. But I did learn how to handle high-octane callers like Podcast Pete. You just have to stand aside and let ’em rip.

  Tonight Pete is flying. “Enemies, enemies, enemies,” he says. “We’re surrounded by enemies, Charlie.”

  I find my soothing voice. “Chill,” I say. “You’re scaring the horses. You’re sounding a little—uh—caffeinated. How many Jolts have you had today, Pete?”

  “I lost count. It’s immaterial. I have to stay awake. Sleep is for the weak. I’ve got to stay on top of it. Twitter. Facebook. MSN—got to check with my friends. And I’ve got my podcast discussion pages—some real ugliness brewing on the discussion page about our show, Charlie D. A lot of people out there don’t appreciate your sense of humor—we’ve got a fight on our hands.”

  “My granny used to tell me ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but virtual names will never hurt me.’ Let it go, Pete.”

  “I can’t. Charlie, you’re an outsider, an outlaw. You don’t live by the rules. You’re a visionary, and visionaries have to be protected.”

  Nova and I have always shrugged Pete off, but her face on the other side of the glass is solemn. Through my earphones, I hear her voice. “Push him.”

  I nod. “So, Pete, who do you think I have to be protected against?”

  His words are an avalanche. “Against the ones who are trying to keep you from realizing your vision. They’re out there. They’re everywhere. Charlie, I download every episode of your show. I fall asleep—well, something like sleep—listening to you on my iPod, over and over. Ideas come into my mind. When I get up, I know I have to clear the way for you.”

  The words form themselves. “Clearing the way wouldn’t mean hurting anybody, would it, Pete?”

  Tense, Nova leans forward against her desk.

  Pete sighs heavily, and when he speaks his voice is lifeless. He’s starting to crash. “Sometimes in the middle of the night, I open my eyes and my heart is pounding—like it’s gonna pop out of my chest…and eat someone… you know…like in Alien. I think of all the people I have to fight—and I get scared. Then I remember what you told me John Wayne said.”

  He falls silent. On radio, dead air is the enemy. “John Wayne?” I say.

  Pete doesn’t respond, and Nova and I exchange glances. After nine years we know how to read one another’s signals. Pete has tanked. Ready or not, we have to move to the next caller, but Pete surprises us. It’s an effort for him to speak, but he’s back. “It was when I told you that some days I can’t face leaving my room,” he says. “You reminded me that John Wayne said ‘Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.’”

  For the second time tonight I’m stabbed by the knowledge that for a lot of our listeners, I’m life support. I can’t be that anymore. It’s tough to keep my voice from breaking. “Pete, you don’t have to fight my battles,” I say.

  Pete’s reply is a whisper. “What else would I do with my life?” he asks. Then, finally—mercifully—the line goes dead.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My headache is worse. The fingers of pain have moved up my skull to press on my temples. Nova has been watching me carefully. She knows I’m not doing well. As if by magic, her words appear on my computer screen. I flash her a smile and start reading. My voice surprises me. As I read Nova’s script, I sound like a winner— one of those guys who breezes through life with the wind at his back and who takes no prisoners.

  “You’re listening to ‘The World According to Charlie D,’” I say. “Our topic tonight is Erotomania. When we’re in love, we’re all crazy, but some of us take crazy to a whole new level. The Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk had a persistent lover. He sent her a book that was rigged to blow up in her face. And a video of himself putting a gun into his mouth just before he committed suicide. In my opinion, a box of chocolates and a dozen roses would have been cooler. Any thoughts you’d care to share?” I give out our call-in numbers and email address. Then I turn back to the words on the screen. Tonight is not a night for riffing.

  “When it comes to crazy love, no one is immune,” I say. “Even Anne Murray, Canada’s singing sweetheart, had her own sketchy swain. Do you remember the Saskatchewan farmer who believed that when Anne signed a fan photo for him with an O and X, she was declaring her love? Her rural Romeo returned the favor by showing up at her door with a bouquet of flowers and a loaded twenty-two. The Barenaked Ladies honored him with a song. Our lines are open.”

  As the Barenaked Ladies sing “Straw Hat and Old Dirty Hank,” I talk to Nova.

  “Are the cops listening in?”

  “They are indeed,” she says. “In their opinion, we’re two for two. They think both Emo Emily and Podcast Pete have real nut-bar potential. Officers in their hometowns are on their way to question them as we speak.”

  “So we betrayed them,” I say tightly.

  “Charlie, we had no choice.”

  “Damn it, Nova, neither did they. No one chooses to be screwed up. Our listeners had the bad luck to draw losing numbers in the great lottery of life. Now it looks as if they got another lousy number when they called me.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Nova says. “You talk people through crises. You make them laugh. You give them hope. You make sure they have referrals, so they can get the help they need. And more times than I want to think about, you give our listeners your home phone number. You’re there, Charlie, and that’s what matters.”

  Nova’s voice is small and strained. She cares about our listeners, and she believes in our show. Calling the cops flies in the face of the trust she has built with our audience in the nine years we’ve been on the air. “It’s going to be all right,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says, “and some day I’m going to wear size zero jeans. Back on in two seconds, Charlie. You’ll be talking to Rani—long time listener, first-time caller. She’s an archaeologist.”

  “A student of human cultures,” I say. “I wonder what she makes of our rag-tag band of the walking wounded?”

  “Ask her,” Nova says crisply. The tiny light on my microphone base comes to life. I’m back on the air.

  “That was the Barenaked Ladies with ‘Straw Hat and Old Dirty Hank,’” I say. “Our next guest is Rani. Welcome. My producer tells me you’re an archaeologist, Rani. That’s a first for our show.”

  Her laugh is deep and musical. “That surprises me,” she says. “So many of your callers are unexplored ruins. You’re a magnificent ruin yourself, Charlie D. It would be fun excavating you.”

  I relax. The fingers on my templ
es ease their pressure. Rani is going to be a five-star guest. “Fun for me but futile for you,” I say. “I contain no hidden treasures, Rani.”

  “Maybe the wrong women have been doing the digging,” she purrs. “I’m experienced. I know where to look.”

  Through the talkback, Nova groans. I hold up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, Rani,” I say, “you’re making me forget these are public airwaves. Time to focus. Our topic tonight is Erotomania: the belief that another person is secretly in love with you and is sending signals that only you can understand. We’ve just met, but you strike me as a woman over whom a man might fantasize. Am I right?”

  Rani’s chuckle is X-rated. “I’ve had my share of dysfunctional lovers,” she says. “They’re fun until you want them gone—and then it can be challenging.”

  “Did anyone ever take it too far?” I ask.

  She sighs. “Ah. There was one lover who was…inconvenient.”

  “Care to share?”

  “He was another archaeologist,” she says. “We were on a dig at the Giza Necropolis in Egypt.”

  “Home of the Great Sphinx,” I say.

  “Do you know the riddle of the Sphinx?” Rani asks.

  For the first time that night, I’m in the groove. Talking to Rani is like playing tennis with a pro. “I do,” I say. “Which creature goes on four feet in the morning, on two feet at noon and on three in the evening?”

  “Do you know the answer?”

  Now I’m having fun. “The answer is man,” I say. “He crawls on his hands and feet as a baby, walks on two feet as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Of course, I’m still crawling. I plan to stick with it till I get it right.”

  Rani’s contralto becomes even huskier. “I find the image of a man crawling toward me…appealing. But no reward for you, Charlie D. You had the wrong Sphinx. The Sphinx who posed your riddle was Greek.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Oh yes. If you’d given the wrong answer, the Sphinx would have…”

  I finish her sentence. “Devoured me.”

  “You sound eager,” she says. “My lover at the dig was like you—preferred his sex on the… risky side. When that became a bore, I told him to go away…and he wouldn’t.”

  In the control booth, Nova draws her index finger across her throat. The lines are jammed. She wants me to cut short the fun and games with Rani. I ignore her. I lean into my microphone. “I understand why your lover wouldn’t go away,” I murmur.

  “Do you?” she says. “Then maybe you’ll understand why finally I had no alternative but to seal him in a tomb…with a picture of me…just me and the darkness…This has been delightful, Charlie D. We’ll have to do it again.”

  It appears our tennis match is over. Rani smashed a ball past me, and I didn’t even see it coming. “Wait,” I say. “I’ve got more questions.” But I’m talking to dead air. She’s gone. I glance toward the control booth, but Nova’s on the phone, so I carry on. “O-kay. Looks like Rani went off to dig something—or someone—up,” I say. “The topic tonight is Crazy Love. You heard Rani’s story. She sealed her too-passionate boyfriend in a tomb. How do you handle a lover who won’t take no for an answer? And what if he or she is somebody you’ve never met? Give us a call. To get you in the mood, here’s a song that honors trapped lovers everywhere: Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love.’”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The music starts, and I call Nova on talkback. “That was a trip through bizarro world,” I say. “So was Rani just having a little fun with me, or is she really a man-killer?”

  Nova’s voice is tense. “The police couldn’t trace the call. They think she was probably using one of those cheap phones you can buy at convenience stores.”

  “So my move is to keep charming her on air and hope she’ll call back on a landline.”

  “Or make a personal appearance here at the studio,” Nova says. “And you’re back on air.”

  I give it my all. “Rani, Rani, Rani,” I plead. “Why did you hang up on me? We were just getting to know each other. You enchanted me. You bewitched me. And then—you ditched me. Give me another chance, my seductive student of mysterious cultures. I am a ruin in desperate need of excavation.” For the tenth time that night I tell listeners how they can reach us by phone or email. Then I glance at my monitor and read the name of our next caller. It’s Britney—another regular. She’s young, self-absorbed and sweetly crazy. Britney’s sentences tilt up at the end. It’s as if, before committing herself to an opinion, she has to see which way the winds are blowing. Despite the winds that are battering me tonight, I try to be a gentle breeze for her.

  “Hey, it’s Britney, the devil baby,” I say.

  “Oh, Charlie,” she trills. “You know I’m not the devil baby. I don’t even have any real problems. I just like to hear myself on the radio.”

  “Don’t we all,” I say. “So, Brit, what’s on your mind on this first day of spring?”

  “Orlando Bloom,” she says. “Because I’m, like, no longer addicted to him.”

  “Ah,” I say. “So you’re a recovering Bloomie.”

  She corrects me. “A recovered Bloomie. And I was, like, so into him.” Her words cascade like a waterfall, shining and unstoppable. “I saw every one of his movies nine times—even The Curse of the Black Pearl, and that movie really sucked. When I read on his website that he and the other members of the Fellowship got the elvish word for ‘nine’ tattooed on their wrists, I got the elvish word for ‘nine’ tattooed on my wrist. And my mother just about disowned me because I used my birthday money. It was supposed to go into my college fund—like I’m ever actually going to go to university.

  “And I became a Buddhist because Orlando is a Buddhist, and I went green and started recycling everything because Orlando is seriously into caring about the environment. I was like a total Orlando Bloom FREAK!”

  Nova and I exchange smiles. The child Nova is carrying is a girl. Nova believes her daughter will be a Nobel Prize winner. I tell her she’ll probably give birth to the next Britney. The current Britney stops to take a breath, and I see my chance. “So what made you decide to do the Orlando detox?” I ask.

  She sighs theatrically. “Loving him just took too much time. No offence to your Buddhist listeners, Charlie D, but all that meditating really ate up my mall time. And I’m sorry—I believe in recycling and all, but whenever I stirred my compost heap, that smell stayed in my hair for, like, hours.”

  “So how did you kick the habit?” I ask.

  “Purging.”

  I wait for Britney to embroider her story, but she has become a woman of few words. “Purging as in throwing up?” I ask encouragingly.

  “Right,” she says, and she’s back on track. “Doing the technicolor yawn. Spewing. Woofing. Zuking. Blowing chunks.”

  “Got it,” I say. “So how do we purge ourselves of the passions that destroy us?”

  “Condensed milk,” she says. “Charlie D, for a man who’s supposed to have all the answers, there’s a lot you don’t know. Every time I thought of Orlando, I just drank a can of room-temperature condensed milk. By the time I was halfway through the second case of milk, I couldn’t look at Orlando without ralphing, and I’d lost seven pounds.”

  “Impressive,” I say. “No need for a twelve-step program when you can open a can of moo and chug-a-lug. Keep clean, Brit…”

  I glance into the control room. Nova is talking on the phone, but she’s also keying a message on her computer. I look at my screen: Appeal to Rani. Make it good. Then we’ll go to music. Marilyn Manson—“Sweet Dreams.”

  “Hey, Rani,” I say. “Are you purging yourself of me? We were getting along so well and now…silence. What went wrong between us? I need to know. I’m waiting for your call. You’re my fantasy. Here’s Marilyn Manson’s take on the love that doesn’t quit—‘Sweet Dreams.’”

  The music starts, and Nova is on the talkback. “No word from Rani,” she says. “The coward in me h
opes that we won’t hear from her again—that she’s just vanished, crawled back into whatever hellhole she crawled out of. Then I remember Ian Blaise and Marcie Zhang and James Washington, and I want her caught.” I can hear the anger in Nova’s voice. She’s a good and gentle person, but she believes in justice. “I googled the meaning of Rani’s name,” Nova says. “It means ‘queen.’”

  “And Queen Rani gets to decide who lives and who dies,” I say. “Are you doing all right?”

  Nova laughs softly. “As well as can be expected for a woman who’s eight-and-three-quarter months pregnant and waiting for a call from a psychopath.”

  “Somewhere along the line, you must have made a bad life decision,” I say.

  “Actually, I’ve made quite a few bad life decisions,” she says. “But none of them involved you. When it comes to you, Charlie, I have no regrets.”

  Through the glass that separates us, her eyes seek out mine. “Surprised?” she asks.

  “Surprised and speechless,” I say.

  “You’ll think of something.” Nova glances at her computer screen, and her smile fades. “Charlie, take a look at your monitor. There’s an email from someone named S.A. Viour.”

  “S.A. Viour,” I say. “Saviour.”

  “Your Saviour,” Nova says. “Read the note.”

  The message is chilling. They’re burying you, Charlie D. Every night they pile their weakness and loneliness and stupidity on you. They’re suffocating you. But it’s almost over. I’m going to save you. I’m going to kill them all. After the first three, it will be easy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  We’ve had gut-churning moments on the show before. Bomb scares from university kids who threatened to blow up the Lab Building so they wouldn’t have to waste time studying for their finals. Suicide threats from people with pills. People with knives. People with guns. And people who knew how to tie a noose that would do the job. One night we even had a call from a guy lying on the subway tracks who said if we didn’t tell the world what a witch his ex-girlfriend was, he was going to cuddle up with the third rail.