“What he wanted, most of all, was for somebody, anybody, to tell him that someday it would be alright. It did not even really have to be someday in the near future, so long as he could eventually have the knowledge, plain, clear and simple, that the terrible, gaping Will cut-out shape in his life would one day be filled, and that soon strangers, terrible and awkward in their horrified, sympathetic incoherence, would stop having to shuffle around him so as to avoid looking too hard at the clumsy, ill-repaired holes in his heart and in his throat, where Will had used to reside, first as a persistent, throbbing on-setter of crazed cardiac activity, and then as a dangerously real dream, constantly swelling upwards at inopportune conversational moments, before having wrenched himself out, with typical, irritating abruptness, via an oozing gunshot wound to the left temple.”
