In the first month of getting to know Edward, the grating of my mixed emotions of curiosity and caution gave me an electrical energy that poured me into the outdoor pool at the aquatic center where I swam more and more each day. It was early July now and Edward and I had walked together several times.

This time was a Sunday morning, and I was sitting on a different bench, a semi-circular one of stone close to the lake whose water was placid and smooth. Edward stood, poking his cigarette into the air as if getting ready to make a point.

"I've been thinking about it, Gwen. I want to tell you everything but I'm protecting you. I don't want you to get involved. It's messy."

"You can tell me anything," I said.

"It's better this way. Trust me." He paused. "You have to know it's on my mind all the time. I'm being dragged through so much shit. You have no idea how hard it is for me to be around you. I mean, I can't act like a normal person and pretend that I'm not getting screwed over every day by a psychopath."

"Have you ever been arrested before?" I asked.

"It wasn't all bad," he said without answering the question. "Once the cops brought me home when I was only five. I'd gotten lost in the crowd at the county carnival because I wandered off to look at the freak show. Ever read Something Wicked This Way Comes?"

I nodded. "Ray Bradbury. A genius. Creepy story."

"Ever read 'The Hunger Artist'?"

"The guy who caged himself at the carnival."

"Exactly. So you know what I mean. So I wandered over there to see the freak show. I guess even then I identified with the freaks. My parents couldn't find me apparently and got the cops looking for me. It took them hours. It was a big crowded place, so the cops told my parents to go home and wait and they'd keep looking. That's the time in a kid's life when parents say that cops are your friends and you believe it. The ride in the squad car was awesome. They played the siren and put on the light show and all that just because I was actually starting to bawl."

I laughed. "I would've by then, too."

"Thanks for the walk, Gwen. You're terrific."

"Yeah, sure," I said.

"What?" he asked when I didn't move.

"I was just thinking about Kafka and Bradbury. They were so different but their characters had that same alienating quality. It's just that with Kafka, the alienated ones were the protagonists and with Bradbury, they were the antagonists."

"That's good, Gwen. Astute. I didn't doubt your intelligence for a minute."

"I'm just wondering something," I said.

"Speak," he told me. "You can ask me anything."

"Which one are you?"

Edward took a step back. He took a moment longer to regain his composure then said, "I would say, 'It depends on who you feed,' but after everything I've been through, I'd say, 'It depends on who's doing the feeding.'"

"And who is that?"

"I can't tell you. It's too dangerous. I probably told you too much already."

"What do you mean?"

"The ex. Everything's in her hands. She has all the power and she'll go after you, too, if she knew about you."

"Okay, Edward," I said with a sigh. "Okay." I stood up.

"I've lost thirty pounds since the first arrest when she kicked me out for good. I don't want to frighten you, Gwen."

"That doesn't make a lot of sense. What did you do that made her kick you out?"

"Not me. Her. She turned me in for something I didn't do."

"What was that?"

"That's the dangerous part. If you knew, you'd be complicit. If she knew about you, you'd be implicated and you don't want that."

Instead of telling me more about the trouble he found himself in, he focused his stories on the more distant past, before he came to West Lake, before he met his ex-girlfriend, before his mother sold his condo.

"So what about you?" he asked me.

"What about me?"

"You read, you write, you a therapist in the public schools with summers off. Nice life."

"It's good, yeah."

"Do you know what it's like to not have a good life?"

"Sure. People don't make their lives out of nothing. They make them because they have something, either already good and they keep it that way, or already bad until they make it good. Or not make it good."

He puffed on a cigarette and said, "The upstarts in the world know how to do it right. Where's your family? You from around here?"

"Upstate New York," I said.

"Why'd you come down here?"

"It was horribly dreary. High unemployment. At least at the time. I was glad to leave. Going back to school was the only plan to get myself out. I was in a community college then went to a four-year school, then came down here."

Everything I said was true but I was vague about names and places in order to protect myself. I don't know why this discernment mattered except that Edward was always so secretive so I thought I should be cautious, too.

"So you're educated. What have you read?"

"Too much to list," I said. "What have you read?"

"Kerouac. He's my Jesus. The itinerate writer, always moving, always spewing. But Burroughs. He's my God. He's absolute God."

I laughed and said, "Ever see Naked Lunch, the movie about Burroughs? It's hilarious. A cockroach is crawling up the door frame and because he and his wife have just gotten high on arsenic, all Judy Davis, who plays his wife, has to do is open her mouth and exhale as if she were steaming a cold window with her breath, and the roach falls down dead. Hilarious!"

Edward didn't laugh. He said, "It wasn't arsenic. It was pyrethrum. It's what they used to kill roaches. He called it 'bug powder.' They free-based it like heroin."

His knowledge of drugs didn't surprise me. His diatribes often ended with a point about marijuana, how it should be legal, how hemp couldn't be grown in the U.S. but we could buy hemp products, how unfair that was.

This particular Sunday morning wasn't any different. He was taking a break from his other part-time job at the movie theater. On Sundays the theater was rented to a pentacostal African group, and while they were praising a different god, Edward took walks and had invited me to join him.

"You know, all the hemp the U.S. buys comes out of Canada," he said, beginning with the hemp again. The Canadian government grows its own hemp then exports it down here. The founding fathers, for Christ's sake, grew hemp and the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp. Check my facts. You'll see."

"I don't care about hemp," I said, interrupting him.

"We all could use a little of it. It's a sustainable resource. Clothing, plastics. Now growing it is outlawed in the U.S. just because the Feds are afraid somebody might smoke a little weed."

"I really don't want a lecture today."

He quickly sat down. "Wow, you really cut me down just now."

"It's Sunday morning. I'm still half asleep. You wanted to go for a walk. If I wanted a lecture I'd go to church."

I didn't really mean that. There was nothing wrong with church, and sermons weren't always lectures. But I thought it was something he'd understand.

"Gwen," he said, "I misjudged you. You let me ramble on then cut me short."

He was silent, and I couldn't think of anything to say. I worried I had offended him.

He said, "I actually admire you for that. It's about time you stood up to people, even if it's me."

He was a man knocked down, and I sometimes forgot that he was wounded. Talking to him was like talking to a sick person with a constitution that couldn't be salved by words but by the presence of a friendlier spirit. I calmed myself by breathing deeply.

"Thanks," I managed to say. I stood up to walk back home.

He said, "You know I've had a hard time. There's a death watch out for me and my crazy ex-girlfriend made it happen. She keeps having my car towed because I don't move it every three days."

"Death watch?" I asked, turning around. "What do you mean?"

"People think I'm going to off myself because of the stress from everything that's happened."

"Do you think you would?"

"No, but as long as they don't know that, I'm okay. They won't come after me. They're just keeping an eye on me. We really shouldn't even be seen together."

I thought he was talking nonsense and didn't believe a word he said. "I'm sure I'll be fine. I haven't done anything but befriend you."

"You've been a better friend to me than I've been to you," he said softly.

I thought so, too, and questioned my walking with him on a Sunday morning, hearing this sad tale and being lectured on the benefits of pot. But I was known for my patience learned from eight years of working with troubled children. Edward was another troubled child.

"I killed somebody once," he said abruptly.

"What?"

My chest tightened, and the tingling of my facial nerves told me that being with this man was all wrong. But part of me thought he was only conjuring drama. I didn't know what to do, so I remained there, speechless, looking out over the lake and watching the geese land and take off as he spoke.

"He was a friend of mine. Dying from cancer. He was lying in bed, languishing from chemo treatments and morphine. He said he was better off dead than going through all of that anguish. He begged me to hand him his morphine. I said, 'How many do you want?' He said, 'All of it. I can't take this pain anymore.' I handed him the bottle but he was too weak to open it. So I unscrewed the lid and poured the pills into my hand. Not his hand even though he wanted me to. My hand. Fifteen of them.

"His hand was outstretched, but I thought he should take the pills by his own free will. It was his last intentional act. All I did was hold out my hand with the pills cupped in my palm, and he took them, three at a time. I counted-five times he reached for my hand. I killed him to put him out of his misery."

I said when he was through, "I need to get back now."

"Oh, sure. We can go." He spoke so casually, as if he hadn't just told me he had killed someone.

I walked quickly. He first followed me then caught up with me.

"What? Did that freak you out?"

"You just told me you killed someone. How do you expect me to react?" I wanted to run and forget I'd ever met him.

"I was just telling you my subjective experience. Everything's subjective. Euthanasia is a big deal these days. It isn't a secret."

The gut desire to run made me remember the time I had just finished seeing the movie "La Jetee" by Chris Marker at the National Gallery. The movie was so perfect, so jolting at its end, that when it was over, I ran all the way to my car. It changed my life and Edward was changing it again, the way I viewed friendship and loyalty. How much to give up, how much to take.

"It's wrong," I said, still striding deliberately.

"I thought you'd think that," he said.

I didn't want a debate but was goaded by his outrageous story. Was he fabricating drama or was he the psychopath? At this point I couldn't tell. My pity for him had vanished. I didn't say anything for a long time. My shins began to hurt from splints because I wasn't used to walking so quickly but I kept walking anyway.

When we got out of the woods and into the parking lot, I veered left. It was my chance to bolt, but I couldn't let it go. He had me. He seemed to always know what would get the better of me, make me react.

I turned and said, "What if there is something more that the person needs to experience before dying?"

He said, "They have only misery to look forward to. With cases like my friend, all they have to look forward to is more pain and an ugly death."

"I'd like to know what someone goes through between rationally making up their mind to kill themselves and actually dying. There must be something or dying wouldn't be as it is." I had no idea what I was saying. He had killed someone, so I asked him. "What became of it, Edward? What good did it do?"

"He died in peace. That's what they told me. I didn't actually watch him die."

"You said you killed him."

"I was telling you about my subjective experience."

"Is that the reason your ex-girlfriend has it in for you?"

"Ah, no. My friend died back in Boston before I moved to Portland."

It occurred to me that if he really had killed his friend, he would have been charged with murder and wouldn't be standing in front me now. The thought eased my fear.

"And what became of you?" I asked.

"Nothing became of me," he said. "The doctors were complicit in the whole affair. They often give dying patients higher doses of morphine or some other drug. They know the patient who wants to end his suffering will take it. It's what they do. Doctors, patients. It's no secret. It's the only way to die with dignity."

This was no answer to what drove me to suffer him as quietly as I did to learn the story of how he had fallen and of his fear of being found out. I'd never known anyone like Edward. And I'd never before felt my curiosity and my morals so forcibly grating against each other.

We parted without saying good bye. I hiked up the hill alone, my breathing labored by the exercise of walking, and thought about what could have been a lie. When I got home, I researched it, euthanasia and doctors turning a blind eye to their involvement in patients' taking their own lives. I didn't want to believe it, but it was all true. I thought of Flannery O'Connor's phrase: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd."