The place had been full of Halloweeners all evening, kids with bags of candy and adults dressed for parties, and the tables and floor were in continual disarray with left-behind goodies and magic wands and Michael Myers masks.
       Strictly speaking, I was a delivery driver tonight, but things were so busy that most of us were doing multiple jobs. Deliveries were light for some reason, and I was cutting up onions in the prep area of the kitchen. About three feet from me, Benjy, another driver, was stirring sauce in a 20-quart stock pot, chewing a big wad of watermelon bubble gum from a plastic pumpkin of goodies left behind at a booth out front. The dough was being worked by Dawn, a perky high school senior with what looked like a boatload of latent hostility; I'd never seen anybody beat the hell out of pizza dough the way she did. The general manager said hers was the best crust dough he'd come across outside New York City, where it was, I supposed, likewise tortured into submission. Ellie Johnson, tonight's Corporate Associate––abbreviated Corp. Ass. on all in-store employee advisory memos—which was a fancy title for shift manager, hated gum and had already threatened to fire the next person she caught chewing it, saying it was a hygiene issue. Nobody understood that, but Benjy particularly tended to chew with his mouth open, so maybe the rule had been implemented with him in mind. Corporal Ass seemed to think her main mission as an eight-dollar-an-hour shift leader was to make and enforce lots of ad hoc rules that came and went with her hair color.
       I was thirteen credit hours from my Philosophy degree at Ohio State and needed another two grand to float the spring semester that would put me over the top. I'd managed the last three and a half years with the GI Bill and part-time jobs and no student loans, and I was damned if I was going to change that now, so I was making deliveries for Visson's Pizzeria in my 14-year-old Escort four nights week. There hadn't been much driving tonight, so I was a floater, right now kitchen help.
       We heard the hard clicks on the tile outside the doors to the front and turned our heads in unison. Corporal Ass's wedge heels. Dawn, the pizza cook, looked down at the high school ring on her finger, a major no-no that eclipsed even gum chewing. I scooped the onions off the countertop and onto the prescribed cutting board, watching the doors, and when I looked back the offending ring was gone from Dawn's finger and she was beaming with the innocence of a freshly laid egg. I shot my glance to Benjy, who was hunched intently over the pot; he was in profile to me, but I could still see half of a worried, tight-jawed look on his face, which I took to be the expression of somebody who had just swallowed a too-big wad of gum that was now inching its slow and uncomfortable way from throat to stomach.
       The clicks stopped just outside the doors, and, after a few seconds' silence, they started again and gradually faded away.
       "Damn it!" Benjy swore. Dawn grinned and retrieved her ring from under her hair net.
       C.J., who was putting orders together, said, "Delivery in ten, Kelly."
       I could have kissed him. By the time I got back somebody else would have been drafted to my job in the back and I'd probably be sweeping up out front, away from the heat and the bitter smell of oregano.
       Ten minutes later, Dawn pulled the pizza out and boxed it, Benjy scooped out a cup of sauce from the pot for the breadsticks, C.J. put it all together and shoved it into the delivery pouch, and I was gone.
 
       Tips usually ran a couple bucks, but the delivery was to a house at the affluent end of South Hills, so the tip was hard to figure. Wealthy people tended toward the extreme; they either tipped very generously or very cheaply, with no middle ground. I kept a good thought as I reached out for the doorbell. Before I touched it the door opened and a low-twenties kid almost ran into me as he stepped onto the porch. Shocks of his hair protruded wildly in all directions, and his clothes were disheveled but clean. He didn't look like someone about to get into a Lexus, but I'd seen enough of the indulged children of the rich to know about chic grunge.
       He eventually blew out his breath, smiled, and said, "Man, you scared the hell out of me."
       I gave him the generic delivery smile and said back, "Visson delivery. Large works with breadsticks. Seventeen-fifty."
       "That's me. I didn't have any beer, so I was hoping I could get to the Stop-A-Minute on the corner before you got here. C'mon in and I'll get you your money."
       One of Corporal Ass's rules, a good one, was not to go inside houses. "We're not allowed––"
       "Oh, hell, it's twenty degrees out here. Get in here and stay warm."
       I shrugged and stepped in. As I turned to shut the door it hit me––why would he need to get money if he were on his way to the Stop-A-Minute? Wouldn't he have to have money on him to do that? The epiphany was a little late; a flash went off inside my head, just one beautiful exploding star that faded quickly to black.
       As my awareness came back, a pressing pain rose at the crown of my head , as if I were balancing a sack of concrete on it. The room was a big one. I was on a sofa, with a glass coffee table between me and the guy who'd answered the door. He was standing, looking at me and eating a breadstick, dripping sauce onto what was undoubtedly a very expensive carpet. Beyond him, in a French-looking wood chair, a middle-aged, balding man with glasses who I hadn't met yet sat. Christmasy green tape with designs on it kept his mouth shut and secured his arms to those of the chair. I leaned forward and was surprised to find that I wasn't tied up at all.
       "Don't move any more," he cautioned. I didn't. He looked nervous, and he had a gun pointed at me, which I thought was a bad mix. Still, we weren't dead. If a couple more people showed up, we'd have enough for pinochle, but he hadn't shot either one of us yet. That was hopeful. That meant he had misgivings about doing something nasty to us.
       "Damn it!" he said to himself as much as to us. He turned his head to the old man and said, "You weren't supposed to be here tonight. Every Wednesday you play cards at the house two blocks over. Every Wednesday for three months, and tonight you don't. You come back a half hour later." He swung back to me. "And he orders a frigging pizza on the way home! Now I've got two people who know what I look like. Sonofa––"
       He bit off his own words and started pacing back and forth the length of the big coffee table, running his free hand roughly through his hair as if that might shake loose a solution to his dilemma. The dilemma, of course, was whether to shoot us and get rid of people who could identify him or just take off and wonder from now on if one of us would see him sometime. He didn't want to shoot us if he didn't have to. That was good. But he didn't seem to be able to work it out to where he didn't have to. That was bad.
       "You know," I said, "except for the clothes, you're about as average as a person can be. A description won't do the cops much good. You can just walk out of here and get away clean." I had no idea whether that was true or not. I was just talking. I figured the longer I could keep him talking, the longer he was put off from canceling us, the less likely he would be to do it. I didn't know if that was true or not either. I tried to think of some way to keep him talking.
       He stopped, dipped a new breadstick in the sauce, and looked at me as if I'd farted at a funeral. "Man, shut up. Jesus––"
       "We can't give the cops much to go on except Mr. Average, and we won't even remember what you look like in a couple days. But in another way, it wouldn't do much good to do something with us because even if you do there are a million little things that can get you, so why worry about it."
       He swallowed the bite and shoved the gun toward me. "What?!" He spat the word at me. I saw that maybe I'd made a mistake, but it was too late to change horses. I tried to wet my mouth with my tongue, but it was dry as dust.
       "See, I think most of our life is ruled by random occurrences, little nothing things that cause other things to happen, that we don't have any control of." I looked at his cigarette pack on the coffee table, only two or three gone. "Maybe you stopped somewhere for some cigarettes to calm your nerves on the way over here and maybe if you hadn't done that you'd have been gone before he came back home. All of the little random things, the things we think are completely unimportant. But what if they're not? You ever heard of chaos theory?" I asked, trying to sound offhand. It was one of my philosophy professor's pet topics, and I had no idea whatsoever why it was coming out of my mouth now except that I'd been thinking about it all day since class and my brain seemed to be stuck on it.
       "Mother—" He was so rattled he could only get half the word out before pointing the gun, straight-armed, at my stomach. I was sure he was going to shoot me then. Instead, he sat on the edge of the table, dipped the breadstick again, and said, "You're a college boy, ain't you?"
       I shrugged and nodded.
       "And you're telling me that every time I blow my nose or throw a butt on the grass I'm changing the world? Criminy…." He shook his head dismissively and took another bite. His hand was shaking.
       "Why not?" I said quickly. "We think those things are meaningless, but what if they're not? What if everything means something?"
       "'What if ahverytheng means something?'" he mocked my words with a put-on of a snooty accent. "You college punks make me laugh. Think you're so cool, talking shit, head up your ass. Big brain, delivering pizzas."
       He had a point. Professor Kindle was killing me now by remote control with his twaddle about how a butterfly flapping its wings in South America causes typhoons in Malaysia, this causes that, chaos rules. This is it? I thought. This is the best you can do to keep this kid from blowing your brains out? This superior-sounding crap? Shut up! I glanced over at the man in the chair. He'd been listening, and he was looking at me now, wide-eyed, like I'd just stepped out of a spaceship. I imagined him mouthing epithets at me from behind the duck tape across his mouth...you're going to get us killed...if I wasn't tied up I'd shoot you myself.... My own mouth opened again and I went on crazily, channeling the professor's words more-or-less verbatim, wishing he were here saying them so he could be the one to get shot for them. "What if there aren't any random occurrences that don't mean anything? You know, you drop your keys on the sidewalk and you pick them up––a completely unimportant occurrence, right? Just six or seven wasted seconds. But somebody behind you might have had to..." For a moment, I forgot what the professor had said next, and was almost happy about that, but then it came back to me. "...had to step around you on the sidewalk while you did that, maybe put him three seconds off his pace...maybe made him a moment too late to step onto the street in front of a driver who wasn't looking where he was going for that one moment...both of you go on with your lives, oblivious to each other, neither of you aware that he'd be dead if a keyring hadn't slipped out of your hand."
       "I ain't got time for this," he said, and stood up and started walking again. I could feel my heart beating in my ears.
       It's important to keep talking, to keep him talking, about anything, right? I thought to myself.
       I don't know, I answered.
       I don't either.
       I willed my voice not to crack as I kept talking.
       "And how many lives would have been affected by the traffic jam the accident that didn't happen would have caused? This person late for something important and losing a promotion, that person in a bad mood and firing somebody unnecessarily. Then those people would have affected still other people's lives. What if you kept all of those things from happening just by dropping your car keys? What if it's all of the little things that aren't even important enough for us to remember that matter most, that ripple out and touch more lives than we can imagine?"
       And that was basically it. The class bell rang, and I was on my way to physics class and math lab and my part-time job at Visson’s and getting shot in the head because a guy decided not to play poker tonight.
       "When you think about it, shooting us might not mean much at all next to the things that happen just because you took the last seat on a bus." I was on my own now, winging it.
       Now what? He didn't seem like the kind who'd want to discuss quantitative analysis. Crying and begging were both okay with me, but I didn't think they'd do much good with him. From the looks of the man in the chair, they might have already been tried.
       Neither of us said anything for an easy ten seconds. Finally, he said, "Man, I thought I was screwed up."
       The owner of the house wasn't looking at us anymore. His head was down, his eyes closed. Praying, maybe.
       "Look," I said. "You don't want to do this, man. Come on, you don't have to. Come on."
       He sat again and stared at the window for a few seconds, then looked at me vacantly––he had made up his mind. He picked up the nearly empty styrofoam cup of pizza sauce and stood for what I knew was the last time. "If I go back it's hard time and I can't do that. I got no choice."
       He gulped down the last bit of the sauce, then lowered it toward the table top as he raised the gun toward my head with the other trembling hand. I tried to think of what I ought to be thinking about at the last moment of my life; queerly, nothing came to mind.
       He let go of the cup before it touched the coaster, and it toppled over on its side. The free hand went above his breastbone. His chest heaved as the gun moved around randomly, now pointed at my chest, next at my head, then at the window behind me, and finally at the table before it dropped from his hand to the floor. The hand that had been holding it joined its brother; they worked together now, kneading his throat and chest frantically as his face started to go darker. His eyes were fixed on mine with that odd look of hopeless pleading.
       Twenty-five-year-olds don't usually have heart attacks, do they? I thought to myself.
       I don't know.
       I don't either.
       I got up and walked around the table to him. He was weakening, and leaning his shins against the heavy table's edge for support now. He didn't see me. I wasn't even there anymore. There was nothing but the darkness that was folding in on him. I went behind him, put my arms around his chest, wrapped one hand around the balled fist of the other just below his breastbone, and jerked in and up, hard. There was a short retching sound, and then the air hissed out of his mouth and he wheezed as his lungs tried to pull in new air. I let go, and he fell to the floor, gasping in short asthmatic breaths because his bronchials were still constricting. That would pass.
       I bent over and picked up the revolver and looked down at the glass table top where the obstruction had landed. A red-streaked pale green blob about the size of a marble, like a piece of silly putty. Professor Kindle's butterfly.
       Watermelon bubble gum.