A waiter passed bearing a tray laden with plates of bar food—burgers, Buffalo chicken wings, French fries—as well as dishes piled high with meat so raw trickles of blood ran through its folds. That gave me a quick shiver. Out for dinner on our anniversary last year, Lana and I sat beside a living/dead couple locked in an all-out nuclear armageddon of a lover’s quarrel. The man broke up with his dead girlfriend then and there. The second he renounced his love for her, Lana, I, and everyone else in the dining room tensed like cows outside a steakhouse. The dead woman overturned the table, lunged at her boyfriend, missed, and then whirled and came at me, mouth wide, teeth bared, snarling, lips frothing with putrid spittle and remnants of merlot. All her self-control and sense of identity erad
