A fine circular firing squad indeed. Everybody looking at each other, shameface to shameface. The usual sordid assortment of sorries, enough mangled lives and cyanide dreams to fill a De Sade dream novel, and we all just stared at each other for the longest goddamn time.

There was this guy – he had on a suit that was just way too big for him, and there was a Kool dangling from his lips while he talked. He looked like Peter Lorre or something. Big eyes, little body. Lean. Tattooed. He’d seen things. Things with wings and claws and a void in their eyes. Things that came from someplace most people didn’t know about. His voice sounded like a straight razor slashing through velvet.

“We are all afraid,” he said. “We are all imperfect and so is everyone. But we have to own this, we have no choice, because our imperfections are the most unspeakable.”

There was a fat man two seats down from me. He was crying into his beard.

“My name is Hal Lofton,” rasped the little man in the big suit. “And I am a pedophile.”