The Brooklyn Rail

A number of years ago, a friend and I were discussing mediums and the paranormal, topics she had long been researching and writing about for mainstream publications including the New York Times. Her theory was that the information source psychics claim to have access to is akin to a stream, and their ability to dip into these streams is what differentiates them from those of us who can’t see what’s coming.

I think often of this conversation, finding it, perversely or not, to be a comfort, as if more of us might one day be able to access these streams and stop at least a few of the maelstroms darkening the horizon. Whether or not Kurt Baumeister, author of the rollicking new novel Twilight of the Gods, is aware of it, he seems to have a medium’s skill of seeing past the fog of the present into the future, which he accesses through, ironically, a clear view of the past.

Twilight of the Gods is Baumeister’s second novel and is alternately a comedy, an action caper, a highly prescient political allegory, and an examination of the beleaguered human condition through a speculative lens. As is probably apparent, there’s a lot going on here, and in the last third of the book in particular, I especially found myself wondering if the author had somehow tapped into the future, as Nostradamus purportedly did through his use of a brass tripod and a bowl of water.

Loki, the Norse god of mischief and evil, is Twilight of the Gods’ protagonist, and he has landed in present-day Boston after wandering the universe for centuries post-expulsion from Valhalla by Odin, the All-father. We meet the god of mischief as he mingles with humans, keeps a wary but fond eye on his housemates, the fractious Giants, and attends Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings. Soon he is unwillingly drawn back into the fold and embroiled in Odin’s and his Norse brethren’s deadly political brinkmanship. His powers much diminished—only his shrewd mind and shape-shifting skills at his disposal—Loki must figure out how to stop an assassination plot targeting Germany’s Social Democratic candidate for chancellor. If he fails, the far-right party will install its fascist candidate and all hell will break loose on earth.

The following interview was primarily conducted via email.

Christine Sneed (Rail): References to history, especially World War II, abound in Twilight of the Gods, and Hitler plays a major role in Norse god Odin’s ill-fated machinations to restore Norse mythology as our planet’s primary religion (and reinstate himself as its almighty figurehead). I know you studied at Emerson College for your MFA in fiction, but were you a history major as an undergraduate? How much research did you do while writing this novel?

Kurt Baumeister: I’ve always been interested in history and politics, and I was sort of a history major at one point. For a while, as a freshman, I considered Medieval Studies, but my father put an end to Kurt’s Tour of the Dark Ages quickly, I think, when I tried to get him to sign off on a section of Old Norse for fall of my sophomore year.

I switched over to pre-law/poli-sci briefly, but I was too busy partying to make much of a go of that and was asked to return home and “take a break,” by the university I was attending. Ultimately, I decided not to go back there—or, more accurately put, my dad decided I wasn’t going back—so, I wound up finishing my undergrad close to home, where my parents could keep an eye on me.

Anyway, drumroll, please… My ultimate undergraduate major was… accounting. Again, thanks, Dad. And I mean that, sort of. He wanted me to be able to get a job after school, and it was probably for the best that I studied accounting because I was, in fact, able to get a job after school. And I did progress in the corporate world: from accounting to finance and ultimately corporate strategy, but the longer I worked in business, the more soul-crushing I found it, up to the point that I just needed to chuck it and take my chances as a writer. I guess I really don’t like being told what to do, and business isn’t the place for people who are bad at taking orders.

Rail: Loki, your first-person narrator, mentions at different points in the novel that the PR messaging for him is all wrong. Namely, he’s not the evil trickster. He does come across more as a lovable goofball than as a scheming psychopath (that’s Odin…). He’s been trying to help rather than hinder humanity for centuries now—what first drew you to him, and was he always your narrator?

Baumeister: There’s a lot of misdirection going on in this book. Which you might expect, since according to mythology, Loki is the god of lies, and he’s certainly set up as the protagonist of this book, but I’d say there’s a bit of authorial misdirection going on here as well, or if not misdirection, compartmentalization and dislocation.

To get really Freudian about it, you might comment on the fact there’s an author named Kurt, a character named Kurt who’s an author, and a first-person narrator who’s the god of lies. And, still being Freudian, you might think of one as ego, one as superego, and one as id, though different people might have differing opinions on which of those three is which. I might even have differing opinions as to which is which, depending on mood and time of day.

Still, focusing on Loki, there’s a lot of me in his voice and the way he sees America and the world, probably a lot in his life story that mirrors mine; though of course it’s all heavily refracted. I mean, I’m not a god, clearly, but based on the way this is going, it sounds like I have a bit of a god complex, not as if that should be coming as a surprise at this point.

Rail: The sibling rivalry between Loki and his brother Thor is violent and psychologically corrosive, and Odin, their father, the Norse god and “All-father,” plays them off each other in order to serve his own purposes. These dynamics struck me as particularly poignant—if gods can only rarely manage to be virtuous, do you think this is why humans aren’t either? I.e. is this the moral conundrum that informs Twilight of the Gods?

Baumeister: That’s an interesting question. I suppose the fundamental take here, on gods, is that they’re created by humans, but that there’s a symbiotic relationship, that they sort of feed off each other. We create gods of good and evil to exhibit our extremes, knowing all the while that we ourselves aren’t purely good or evil. I think part of the book’s point is that virtue and salvation have to lie within, that much of humanity’s battle with itself over extremism comes from the search for something outside us to order our disordered realities, make it easier for us to live day-to-day.

Rail: Odin and Reinhold Vekk, along with Hitler, are a triumvirate of malefaction in the novel, but Loki is the character everyone blames for all the evil on earth, in Valhalla, and in the Nine Realms (of Norse mythology). This struck me as the same kind of doublespeak and hypocrisy that led to WWII and is holding strong during our current age of misinformation and fake news. Would you comment on this?

Baumeister: Oh, there’s quite a bit of lying and doublespeak going on in this book and our world, for that matter, not the least of it coming from our current “Dear Leader.” I like to think we should expect better from our leaders, but should we from the god of lies, even if that role is completely or partially fabricated? Philosophically speaking, can something and its opposite simultaneously be true? Could the Loki of Twilight of the Gods, for example, be simultaneously lying and telling the truth?

But there’s something else going on here, and I think that’s what you’re getting at with this question. To me, the most tragic use of political doublespeak in history came from Hitler’s Big Lie that the Jews were at the heart of Germany’s problems as a nation. The Hitler of Twilight of the Gods even goes so far as to call Loki a Jew early in the book, so I hope the textual linkage will be clear to readers.

Community is central to humans, but othering is community’s dark twin, a side effect of the “unity” generated by extremist political and religious ideologies. If we look at everything from the tribal faiths of the Middle East to the Old World’s wars of religion, spawned by those same tribal faiths and, of course, the extreme nationalism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we see othering as a driving force. That’s a common tactic in the authoritarian playbook. You turn the world, or the nation, or whatever you’re trying to control into two opposing camps: one with you, one against you. Then you proceed to dehumanize, even demonize, the side that’s not with you, to make them the problem so you can distract your supporters, convince them to focus on the perceived enemy rather than the real problems. Trump’s use of this tactic in the 2024 campaign was particularly pervasive.

Rail: You’re a longtime fan of Martin Amis’s work, and the brio and playful language that characterizes this book called to mind some of Amis’s own wordplay. Were there specific Amis books that inspired Twilight of the Gods? Along with Norse mythology and Dungeons & Dragons, what other texts and cultural artifacts inspired you?

Baumeister: I am a fan of Martin Amis’s writing, particularly the work I read when I was in graduate school. Back then, I took multiple spins through my favorite of his, London Fields, along with The Information and Dead Babies (an early title I appreciate for its obsession with form). Vladimir Nabokov was important, particularly Lolita and Pale Fire. Don DeLillo is another favorite, notably White Noise and The Names. And I was indeed guilty of playing way too much D&D as a kid. If there’d been majors at my high school, Dungeons & Dragons would have been mine, minors in truancy and smoking weed.

I’ve read multiple versions of the Norse myths, not in Old Norse, though, just translations. Most useful was probably The Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley-Holland. And I’m familiar with Marvel’s supervillain Loki in everything from the Thor comic book and cartoon show from the 1960s, to the recent movies and live action TV show. How could I not be? I wouldn’t say Marvel’s Loki was something I drew on, though, more something I consciously avoided. The same is true of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I did read the book a few years ago, long after I started working on Twilight of the Gods, and I watched a season or so of the show. Ian McShane is one of my favorite actors.

Rail: A character named Kurt (as you alluded to above), a writer and tax attorney who also leads a Sexaholics Anonymous group, is a friend of Loki’s but also a romantic rival, i.e. they both have their sights on the same woman, Sunshine (a Norn, i.e. a handmaiden to Fate). Although I assume we aren’t supposed to confuse the fictional Kurt with you, the author, there are moments when I can see Kurt’s Kurtness resembling your Kurtness, and this passage struck me as particularly poignant: “Writers, they’re sort of like addicts, y’know? They put themselves through all this pain. And, really, they’re just looking for love and approval, like any addicts.” Were you writing a homage to Philip Roth and his avatar, Nathan Zuckerman?

Baumeister: The book’s Kurt is a sort of funhouse sketch of me, a way to address myself through my fiction, perhaps a way to gain enough relational and emotional distance to see myself more clearly. In some ways I guess the book’s Kurt is better than I am, in other ways, worse; though I suspect people who know me would see him as similar. I can’t claim any conscious homage to Roth, though. The only book I’ve read of his is The Plot Against America, which I did enjoy.

With the Kurt character, I was consciously trying to restrain myself from using him too much. I didn’t want that character or the authorial id (or ego, or superego, or whatever) he represents to dominate the book. That’s one thing I really admire about Martin Amis’s metafiction. It’s soft, as opposed to harder metafiction that seems more intrusive, more interested in the intellectual exercise of experimentation rather than fully integrating the commentary aspect of metafiction into fiction. If you look at some of the authorial characters in Amis’s work (the “actual” Martin Amis of Money and the Mark Asprey [MA] of London Fields), they’re incredibly well subordinated to story and plot.

So, I do hope there’s plenty of narrative distance between the book’s Kurt and its author, most of it, I hope provided by the narrator, Loki, who in how he thinks and feels is probably more of a direct depiction of me. In a lot of ways, Loki’s voice is mine. That’s what I’ve always found attractive about writing in first person, particularly fiction: you get to play a character.

Rail: I had to pause from time to time as I read Twilight of the Gods because so many of the sociopolitical situations and characters in it have direct parallels to the present moment—which you touch on briefly in a preceding response. It’s chilling, Kurt! Would you comment on this? Have you written fiction in the past that inadvertently predicted future events?

Baumeister: I think it’s pretty obvious this book was informed by Trump’s ascension, his victory in the 2016 campaign, and the darkness those events brought to America and the world. Though the question of whether that mistake would be repeated in 2024 isn’t one the book expressly looks at. I hope in its repetition of similar situations, both in terms of the semi-actual history of the twentieth century and an alternate present focused on Germany, we get to the real problem humans have with ideologies and the leaders who push them. So, no, I can’t take credit for predicting anything with Twilight of the Gods. The book is focused on something that’s already happened, though it may, at this moment, be in the process of happening again.

I suppose my last novel, Pax Americana, envisioned the takeover of America by the Christian Right in a way, though it was really just satire based on the reality of the Bush Administration. I guess you could say, and I may even claim in other places to be more prescient with that book than people realized at the time. After all, Trump’s re-ascension owes quite a bit to him packaging himself more overtly as a tool of the Christian Right. Again, though, based on history, it’s no revelation to suggest religion can be a dark force for humans, one I think it’s fair to say we invent in its many forms, and subsequently use to our own ends, primarily to brainwash ourselves and our fellows. The greatest danger comes in our response to that self-inflicted brainwashing.

When Pax Americana came out, in 2017, people were obsessed with Trump, understandably. Dubya was a distant memory at that point—Obama’s character and competence, the things fresh in people’s minds. Perhaps as a result, some critics seemed to suggest I was either responding to Trump, which I absolutely wasn’t in Pax Americana, or not being imaginative enough in my satire since Trump was so far beyond the bounds of what I’d imagined, though that seemed sort of funny to me at the time. Maybe it’s that events and actors always seem more potent in their moment, the present always more powerful than the shadow of the past or the promise of the future. And there’s been a lot of revisionism focused on Dubya since he left office, treating him like some kindly, cozy-writing dentist rather than the truly terrible president who through stupidity, fell intent, or both, killed millions of people, cost America trillions of dollars, and in a lot of ways made Trump possible.

I wrote a piece about this for The Weeklings many years back called “Beware the Ides of Trump.” No, the title doesn’t exactly make sense, but it’s sorta catchy. Anyway, the point of the piece was really the echoing effects of history, both long-term and short. I likened Trump and Bush, respectively, to Julius Caesar and Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix aka “Sulla” (the slightly lesser would-be dictator that presaged Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic). Written before Trump took office, the piece was an attempted warning, for all the good it did. There’s that history again. It just won’t leave us alone, will it?

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Excerpt from Twilight of the Gods

Midnight by the time I’m inside. I find Surtur and Thyrm racked-out on one of the black leather sectionals in my cathedral-ceilinged great room, staring at the sprawling wall screen as it flickers in greens and whites and blues. Ever the elemental homebodies, a fire whispers in the stone hearth beyond. Sure, I had it put in. The giants insisted. Stones from Norway, remnants of castles long fallen, it reminds them of Jotenheim I guess. It reminds them of their, of our, eternal home.

A word on the giants before we go any further. They’re not. Giants, I mean, not anymore. Sure, I still call them giants out of deference—those guys were kings once upon a time, they’re owed some respect—but when they fell, they changed. We all did, but the giants more than most, more even than black-skinned me. The giants shrank…a lot, so much that they became, well…little people. You know, dwarves.

Their stubby, blue-jeaned legs and pudgy, work-booted feet up on the coffee table, the guys are drinking Bombay Sapphire martinis and smoking Don Carlos #4 maduros. They look like a pair of construction workers who just hit the numbers.

“Loki,” I hear, in near chorus.

Fenris perks his head up, peers over the back of the couch. Sighting me, he leaps to the floor, rushes up for a quick game of Sniff-and-Slobber, collar jangling as he moves.

“I see you let yourselves in,” I say, giving Fen a couple pats and moving towards the sofa. “Do I even need to ask whether you used your keys?”

Bashful smiles from both. If they weren’t so cute, I don’t know what I’d do. Give them a stern talking to? Box their ears? To bed with no dinner?

“You guys realize every time you do that there’s a chance someone will call the cops?”

“Yeah, but you’d just get us sprung. Like you always do,” Surtur replies.

“You’re so sure?”

“Or we’d get ourselves sprung. Same difference.”

Not that I really care. It’s good for the giants to keep their skills fresh. After all, you never know what’s going to go down and when. Take this situation with Sunshine/Sabrina. Who knows the who/what/where/which/when/why of it? That was true when I was a god, and it’s true now that I’m a semi- or demi- or whatever I am.

I plonk down in the couch’s big middle section. Fen follows, settles in next to me, and lolls his head in my lap, stares at me upside down, waiting to be petted. As I scratch the silvered fur on his chin, I realize what the giants have been watching, and I want to get up, walk back out the door and keep going until I hit, oh, Tahiti or so.

That’s right: It’s MSNBC International. The Germanic babble submerged beneath simultaneous interpretation and studio talking heads can mean only one thing: the German Chancellor’s election everyone is obsessed with, the campaign to replace Merkel. It’s basically down to former NATO general Greta Bruder, the so-called German Washington, and her opponent, neo-fascist businessman Reinhold Vekk.

Yes, you’d have thought they’d outlaw fascism in Germany after what happened with the Nazis. You’d have thought they’d outlaw fascism everywhere after what happened with the Nazis. Apparently, they haven’t.

Vekk is ahead by a mile. But everyone over here, everyone in America, is still hoping somehow Bruder can pull it out. It’s terrible to see an ally go so wrong—heart-breaking and terrifying in equal measures. I hate to think what it would be like to see a country as powerful as America go that way.

I think back to the war at times like this. I think about how you came through that. It wasn’t nearly as clean as your documentaries make it seem. Hitler could have won. Perhaps even would have won had he kept his crazy in check and left Stalin alone. But he didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, in spite of all Odin’s help.

Hel walks in, clocks the TV, and squints. “What’s ’The German Washington’ up to today?”

Petite and olive-complected with jet black hair, high cheekbones, and a big mouth (in more ways than one), Hel has one of those lineless, cherubic faces—now that she’s got an actual face—that’s a constant source of bemusement for her, consternation for me, and confusion for the rest of the material world.

Her favorite act is to cop the persona of an ambiguously aged twen-teen-something. Hair in a perky ponytail, smirk ever on, Hel walks the world ironically chain-smoking Gauloises and seriocomically chain-quoting Joan Didion. Her shtick routinely leaves bystanders wondering whether I’m beleaguered dad, deplorable cradle-robber, or some hitherto unexposed (sorry…) super-perverse admixture of the two. Honestly, it can be He-…oh, never mind…

“Immigration crisis,” Thyrm replies.

“Four-part plan,” Surtur adds.

“Any good?” Hel asks.

They nod. “Yeah, it’s incredible.”

Hel adds, “Not that it’ll do her any good. We’ve seen this all before, right? Turkey, Poland, France. Vekk is gonna take it, and the Germans are gonna go back to being Nazis.”

Why is Germany doing this to itself again, 20^th century history still so close and clear in the rear-view? I could give you all kinds of explanations about changing demographics, the climate crisis, religion, and wealth concentration—and maybe those things are part of it—but the real problem is it’s hard to tell yourself the truth about yourself.

Sure, it’s easy to see the flaws in others. They practically scream at you, so loud you want to shake people, ask what the fuck they think they’re doing. For some reason, when it’s all about us, like in Germany today, people just don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear about authoritarianism or fascism, toxic nationalism, racism, or antisemitism. And they absolutely don’t want to hear anything about Hitler or Nazis.

They’re convinced they could never fall a second time to that sort of evil; so convinced they lie to the pollsters, so convinced they beat the hell out of reporters when asked why not enough of them lied to the pollsters, so convinced they talk about how bad it is in other countries. France, Britain, even Canada: the Germans think everyone but them is on the verge of falling to fascism. But they’re the ones falling. Oh, yes, Germany is quickly becoming something they spent a century thinking they’d never be again.

“Second thought, can you just turn it off, guys? I’m not in the mood.”

“Sure, I guess,” Surt says, grabbing the remote, tapping Power with something approaching ceremony. When he looks back at me, he’s got that glint in his eye, that spark that’s come to portend drunken nights and skull-fucked mornings. “We’ve actually been waiting for you to get home anyway.”

“Yeah, I’m not up for a night out, guys, not tonight.”

Thyrm smiles. “Ha, no, it’s not that.”

Surtur winks at him and turns to me. “You’re never gonna believe who called.”

“A Norn?”

“A what?”

Sometimes, I forget what the giants and Hel know or, for that matter, don’t. Sometimes, even for me, it’s hard to keep all the lies, truths, and half-truths straight. I was the only one of us who ever lived on Asgard, who ever actually met and interacted with the Norns. And I don’t talk about the bad, old days much at this point. Honestly, I do my best to forget them.

“Never mind.”

“OK—”

“Shh,” Surt says, hitting the remote’s message button. “Let him listen for himself. Go ahead, Loki. Listen.”

“Fine. But, in the meantime, how about one of those for me?” I ask, nodding at Thyrm as the messages queue up.

“Which?” Thyrm asks, gaze sliding from cigar to martini.

“Right,” I reply.

Hel clears her throat and plops down in an armchair to the side of the hearth. She pulls out a Gauloise, lights up, takes a long drag, and exhales. She’s smiling which I know means she already knows who my mystery caller is and that I’m not going to like who my mystery caller is.

Thyrm says, “I thought you didn’t want to go out.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not going to drink and smoke.”

Both giants “meh.” In chorus, they sound like sheep.

Which is when I hear this, “Son! How’ve you been?” It’s Odin—Who else would call me son, right?—He’s completely loaded, slurring liberally.

“Son?” Thyrm chuckles as he hands me my drink.

“Grampy!” says Hel. She sneers. “Fuck you, Grampy!”

Caught in mid-puff, Surt laugh-coughs, pulls the Fuentes from his lips. “How long’s it been since he called you that?” he barks between hacks, like an anthropomorphized seal.

“I know, right?” I drain the glass, hand it back to Thyrm. “Another, barkeep.”

“Coming up.”

I take a Fuentes from the humidor in the center of the table, guillotine the tip, toss the nub in the tray.

“Wait, though, it gets even better. Way better.” This is Surt.

“We need to meet,” Odin adds, sniffling a little near the end.

“We?”

“Just wait,” says Thyrm as he reaches over to pat Fen’s flank.

“By we, I mean the whole family: Frigga, Thor, Heimdall, Baldur…”

“Baldur,” Surtur says, practically spitting this time. “That prancing prick’s got a lot of nerve showing his face.”

“Least he didn’t mention Tyr.”

Fen raises his snout, grumbles. I pat him. Fen relaxes, drops his chin back onto the sofa.

From here Odin descends quickly and only marginally comprehensibly into a tearful jag of Old Norse. There’s talk of Valkyries, blood oaths, and maybe even a giant chinchilla. He begs and begs for me to come, like it really is time for Ragnarök, aka the Big R. None of us are sure what exactly he’s saying, but it’s easy enough to tell when it’s over. Once he hits click so do I.

“He’s a mess,” Hel offers.

“Always has been. What should I do?”

Hel: “You have to go see him obviously.”

“I know.”

“Even though it’s probably a trap.”

“I know that, too.”

She nods.

“But I haven’t given you guys the kicker yet.”

“Kicker?” asks Hel.

“Supposedly…I met a Norn tonight.”

Hel: “You mean one of those fate chicks you never let me meet, the ones you fell in love with?”

“Indeed, Hel, that’s precisely who I mean. One of the fate chicks I never let you meet. But there was only one I fell in love with. Her name was Sunshine.”

no one’s impressed with news of the Norn, not even Fen. Which is disappointing. Fen is usually like a plant at a comedy show. He’s a super-sentient support animal. I’d say he might as well be my kid, but he is, technically speaking.

The next day, I have Hel flex her Dark Web chops. Oh, yeah, Hel is the darkest, the web-iest. Is it her “pretend” age, the whole twen-teen thing? Or is it that the Dark Web is like the virtual underworld, her former namesake?

IDK. What I do K is that Hel can hack databases, security cameras, and just about anything else. She can also determine whether this Sabrina/Sunshine is a real human. Once Hel gathers her intel, I’ll send out the giants in disguise, tell them to post up near McMurtry’s and watch for Sunshine.

But there’s one last thing that might help, one more potential data point. I need to call Kurt. Yeah, right, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. But Kurt’s the line, in a sense, between me and Sabrina/Sunshine.

“Gustav,” he answers, a sea of static warring with his voice and the ambient Dad Rock soundtrack. What is he listening to? Dave Matthews? John Mayer? Yeah, he plays guitar, not terribly well. But I’m not Van Halen either. Talk about gods.

“On the move?”

“That bad? You want to call me back later?”

“Nah, I can hear well enough.”

“Sorry, man, this new uPhone sucks. IDK why I even bought it.”

“Send it back.”

“Probably should.” He pauses. “You know, this is actually fortuitous.”

“What is?”

“Your call.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. But you go first.”

“I called to talk to you about Sabrina. I saw you guys leave together last night.”

“You’ve got your eye on her already? Jesus, dude, do you ever stop? I was just giving her a ride home. You should be writing, not chasing women.”

“It’s not like that—”

“Because I was clear, wasn’t I, Gustav? No romance with group members.”

“It’s not that. She just said some really weird stuff to me.”

“Like what?”

“It was personal. But you can’t, like, give me any more background on her, nothing at all? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We’re friends.” He pauses. “Fine. I guess there are a few things I can tell you if it will make you feel better.”

“It will.”

“She’s from the north country.”

“Norway?”

“Maine. Describes herself as a Sunday River snow bunny.”

“And you believed that?”

“I guess.”

“Where’d you find her?”

“Actually, she just called the helpline out of the blue the other night. We talked and I told her she should come to group. That’s about it.”

“How old is she?”

“Too young for you, that’s how old she is.”

“Man, you don’t know the half of it.”

“What?”

“Never mind. So, that’s all she said? She’s a snow bunny form Maine.”

“Listen, buddy, I hate to say it. I mean, I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but besides being what, like a third of your age, she’s completely out of your league.”

“You think she’s in yours?”

“Mine? I mean…”

I sense a ’maybe’ lurking somewhere in Kurt’s conversational substratum. I want to tell him he has no chance, like he just did me. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Fortunately, he bails us both out.

“Whether I do or don’t doesn’t matter. She’s been to group now, and there’ll be no shenanigans. Don’t you have enough problems with all these imported maids anyway?”

I laugh. You guys are so gullible. “True. Alright. Fine. I guess that will have to do. What did you want to ask me?”

“I need some help with my fantasy football lineup again.”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s no money on the line. It’s just a bunch of guys pretending. Come on, man. Just one more time. Help a bro out.”

“The whole lineup?”

“No, just the skill positions.”

“You’re sure there’s no money on this, right?”

“Of course not. Just for fun.”