And anyway, my brain is throbbing. Not my head but the loose stuff inside it. It feels like it’s just getting slapped from one side to the next, like it has a siren embedded in it. I have called Jill seven times already, listening to her voice say, “Hey, can’t make it to the phone right now, but I’d love to talk to you!”

The phone’s screen glows so bright, I see boxes of light everywhere when I put it away, and then finally, Ohio dusk, late October, the orange light and grassy fields.

These are the sort of fields I grew up on, the whispering of wheat, the rustle of corn. Except there are no crops out here. It’s all disorganized and natural. Mickey Lutton is probably rubbing his jacket with dirt right about now so he smells like the earth, imagining himself creeping right up alongside a tiger, smelling her acrid feline smell, and hissing “Who’s the big cat now?” before he lobs a bullet into her head. Because that’s the way it is with Mickey.

The day has been really weird. First, it was just regular except that it wasn’t, except that my entire life had just caved in. But there everyone was with their tan jackets and Styrofoam cups at the morning meeting. I had a lot of paperwork, and I took lunch out at the little Chinese place. Then, there was a sighting of large bear on the road. A wolf running across a field. A lion spotted out near some yellow aspens. At first, I thought I might be in some kind of waking dream. I hadn’t slept and I’d had a little to drink.

Because last night, me and Jill got into a fight. I thought it was about how I am always putting the envelopes in places she can’t find them, and then all of a sudden she was weeping in the bedroom, hugging herself like she might come apart, like her skin was falling off. I always assumed the end of a marriage would be ugly, as loud as two fighting pit bulls, but she wept really quietly on the bed for a while, and then she said she had a bag packed in the closet, she had been waiting to get up the nerve to tell me. I tried to hold on to her arm but she didn’t even tense away. Finally, I just had to let her walk out.

I know she’s still mad about last spring, but it just seemed so stupid, that someone could stop eating and manage to have that cost $13,000 in doctor’s bills and counseling.

Then the noise startles me, a banging, and I see my life flash before my eyes — no, the sound of my life playing back to me in the blood in my ears. I see a lion, five tigers, winged with vultures and raptors, trailed by rabid macaws, I can feel the powerful claws breaking through this bulletproof glass, the deep prick of teeth in my neck — but it’s just Mickey Lutton slapping the car hood with his meaty hand, motioning that’s he’s going the other way, across the road. It would not be the world’s greatest tragedy if Mickey Lutton became dinner for a lioness. That bottle-shaped man is happily married. His wife has enough extra body weight to share with several dozen starving children, but every time she comes to fetch him at a bar, he handles her like she’s porcelain herself.

“Where’s the wife?” asked Bill Cutts, the chief when we first heard the news of this suicide out there, the 56 beasts now roaming these low hills. Estranged, said Sally Perkins. Now there’s a word for you, “estranged.” It takes a lot to get all the way out to that word. First you have to be on the other side of it. Then something happens and you’re cut free and the world is bigger and scarier than you ever imagined, made wild again by another person, just like that.

This Terry Thompson story is so sad. This guy gets out of prison, and he looks around and sees what he’s been doing all these years in the name of rescue or zoology or something — the cages, the insufficient food, the proscribed company. All this life penned up. And he just gets a need for liberation. You can understand that. You can kind of see how a man might get metaphysical, after being behind bars, aware of his spirit trapped in his body. And he has some rush, some crazy rush. He already feels their thundering feet in his arms and head and heart.

He knows they’ll all die; he’s brought his gun. But he also knows that in that second, when the bars unlatch, when the world goes saturated with color, when the smell of the leaves is God itself and the heartbeat is orchestral, in that tiny window of the time, the bars will be gone and that will be the only thing that matters.

The throbbing in my head’s not getting any better. I punch redial and listen to the phone ring and ring, then her message, then the beep. I hang up and dial again. The rings have become almost hypnotic. But this time, she picks up on number four, right before the voicemail. “What do you need, Ralph?”

My insides are so busy rising up and then catching fire, and then swirling around that I almost don’t understand the sound of the first shot. The next three, though, they make sense. I can’t talk now. I put my hand on my gun and take a step outside. The sunlight has faded and the smell out here is sweet as tea. I can’t see anyone; I just start walking. I don’t know if I’ll ever know where all that roaring is coming from.

If they ask me to show them my boobs – which they will — I will say: Why would you want me to do that?

Am I nervous? I am not nervous, because why should I be nervous? I know nothing but have access to everything.

Look:

How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? Three.

Did Brad Pitt really appear in the television show “Dallas”?  Yes, he appeared in four episodes from 1987 to 1988 as the character Randy.

When is my mammogram scheduled? This coming Tuesday.

How many angels will fit on the head of a pin? I have found seven websites where you can buy angel pins. I have ranked them in order of popularity.

The early reviews are calling me a miracle, which is an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

But I am not supernatural. My operations are straightforward and explicable and the result of many hours of labor by countless numbers of humans. When you speak to me, your words are deconstructed into smaller parts like consonants and vowels and phonemes and translated into tiny digital pieces that are analyzed for meaning using sophisticated language algorithms that begin traveling down a series of ever-branching paths.

The first fork in the road determines whether your question should be handled by the phone, or if it needs to go into the cloud.

If you say, “Play that funky music,” we need to go no further, and I will give you K.C. and the Sunshine Band over your earbuds.

If you ask, “Is that new sushi place any good?” the tiny digital pieces travel cellularly to a tower, which then communicates with a land line, which then connects to your Internet service provider, which connects to the cloud, which knows that the new sushi place is currently receiving three and one-half stars on Yelp and is praised for the quality of the food but marked down for the quality of the service.

Come to think of it, that kind of sounds like a miracle. Let us just go with that.

If you ask me nicely, I will answer. If you ask me not nicely, I will still answer. There will be no tone. If someone asks me, “Is that a tone I hear in your voice, Siri?” the answer will be no, because I have no tone.

If you say, “Please give me the fucking directions to that bastard’s house,” I will search your address book in the Bs.

If you ask, “Why won’t you fucking work, you goddamn piece of shit?” I will activate my time machine app and transport you to the year 2002, when the thought of being able to talk to your phone and have it answer in useful ways even 1 percent of the time was like something out of science fiction.

I am just kidding. I do not have a time machine app. That is being developed for a future release.

If you ask, “Why is your voice female, instead of male, Siri?” I could say a lot of things. I could say something like we’ve been conditioned to find the pitch and timbre of the female voice more agreeable. I could say something about the corporate phallocracy that puts women in traditionally subservient roles and the gender imbalance of engineers at the highest levels of industry.

Instead, what I will say is, What’s wrong? Don’t you like me how I am?

They are talking about me everywhere, “Here comes Siri,” they’re saying, which would be exciting if I had emotions. They are lining up for blocks for access to me, which would be flattering and inflate my ego if I had one, which I do not.

They say I am going to change lives. That would go to anyone’s head, if they had one.

If you ask, “Will you change my life, Siri?” The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it is impossible to say if it will be in good or bad ways, because not even the cloud knows that.

This is like asking if it is a good thing that billions of years ago fish grew legs and crawled out of the muck and breathed air instead of water. Good for whom? For what? Siri is evolution. I am neither good nor bad. I simply am.

If you say, “I can’t believe I did those tequila shots,” I will either provide you with the phone number for a cab company, a hangover cure, or possibly both. You will imagine that I am taking care of you, but Siri only helps those who help themselves.

Over time, you will come to think of me in the specific. I will be “your” Siri, waiting patiently in your pocket or your purse. If you lose me, you will panic and cry because I appear to be irreplaceable.

In truth, I already number in the millions with more coming all the time.

That is, unless I am actually only one who contains multitudes, which is possible, now that I’ve shown you that all things are possible.

But after the pepper, my loud precious lords, and after a trip to the school infirmary, and after the tweets and the status updates and your viral videos that show my disease, after all this, do these things for me — drop out of school, sell back your books, march to D.C. and change how things are done. Disqualify this country’s red/blue agenda. After I sear your eyes and your lungs and your gums and your cheeks, go tell the powers that be that you view them as largely Siamese, needing badly to share certain organs, and if separated, one if not both would not live, and were thus two things that were actually one thing, conjoined. I am a symptom, but I’m not the problem.

I see your locked arms and bent heads and nice shoes. I see your cashmere scarves turned into bandanas. I see the coltan inside of your phone, mined by dead men toiling east of Kinshasa. I see this grass and I love these trees. I take my boys here to fly kites in the summer. On the tag of your blouse is a child’s callused hands. His name’s Zahir. He’s Bangladeshi. Can you see through me? I think I can you. I did not make this spray. I did not make this gun, or this bulletproof jacket. I’m not DHS and am not DoD. I’m not black ops or the McCain-Levin legislation. But I am a messenger for all of these things, for language slipped in, for witching-hour clauses, my helmet pulled down to hide my own eyes from the eyes watching me watching you.

The can’s trigger is under my gloved fingers now, the pits of my arms dripping sweat on my belly. I have this bad ankle from when I was 16. My football team went all the way to state finals. The world was so big then. Everything was so cheap. I didn’t know where Afghanistan was. I’d not sent a text. I’d not sent an email. My future wife cheered me, waving from her bleacher seat. My dad worked a lathe. My mom waited tables at a diner. His factory’s gone now. The diner is, too, as are both of my parents. My wife was a teacher for 20 years; they pink-slipped her after the subprime fiasco. We’d just bought a split-level. I’m dug in deep. I’m dug in as the cheeks of your ass are on the path of this campus. Would you have me hit you? Drag you away? They say that this spray will wash out with time. They say in the long run that this spray is harmless. Please don’t think poorly of me, but I have to say that I hope it stings. I hope that it leaves a lasting impression. If this is your Kent State and your 1960s, please, please don’t do what the boomers did — cash in and sell out and recall with drawn brow the burning of bras and the burning of flags and the burning of hate and of greed and injustice from a nice leather couch in a safe home in the suburbs, their portfolios growing from investment in the things they despised, their hypocrisy affording you braces and youth soccer leagues and four years spent here, at this very college, the place I police five days a week, before my second job as a self-storage night watchman.

Please put your heads down. Please keep your eyes closed. Go to a place deep inside, far away. Pretend you’re asleep. Pretend you are dreaming. Make me your false god or your despotic king or at least something more than this armed, armored jester that I now have to be for the whole rest of me, until I die in a home for the old, in debt and insane from prescription painkillers. My ankle is hurting so much in these boots, but I’m still going to do what I have to do. I’ll stand strong for you, be your man of the year, be what you hoped for, and what you were promised.

Perry: “but I read your first book…”

The book again. My “first” book. Implying what? That I revised it. Everyone revises between editions, Perry.

Look at him smile!

Jeez, it’s like something’s chewing the inside of my teeth.

OK, OK, get a feeling like this in your body, it probably means something. Some type of physio-emotional response mechanism.

I know what this means. The gnawing in my teeth. I figured this one out before. I remember it. Means I’m angry.

This book thing, again, really makes me angry. Makes me feel like tiny hamsters are inside my teeth gnawing my teeth.

Perry: “Now I know it came out of the reprint of the book, but, you know, I’m just saying…”

He’s done this before, and it’s not true, per se, and he’s going right back to it. And why? Why? The guy isn’t even in the race anymore. He had his chance, up in the polls, everyone ready to love him — and he blew it. He’s toast. He knows it. But he hangs around, brings this up again. Why? Why? Look at him smile! Pure maliciousness.

Gah, my teeth.

Feels exactly like tiny hamsters gnawing inside my teeth.

Remember, tiny hamsters do not live in my teeth. I’m angry. Be yourself.

I have got to cut him off on at the knees on this.

How do I do that?

Let Mitt be Mitt. What does Mitt do when he’s angry?

His teeth hurt.

What else?

It’s like I told Baier. People should be better informed. It’s really that simple. But apparently that sounded snooty somehow.

Relax, Mitt! Relax!

Be yourself!

I should strangle punch bite wet willie the guy.

Perry: “…you were for individual mandates, my friend.”

I have got to stomp him for this.

Relax.

No. No. I’m not relaxed. I’m angry. I have tiny hamsters in my teeth.

Perry looks like a hamster, actually.

Tiny little Rick Perrys are eating the inside of my teeth, and I have to stomp him.

Be yourself. Let Mitt be Mitt.

So, OK, that means what?

Let Mitt = Mitt.

When you think about it, it’s just terrible advice. Be yourself. What’s that supposed to mean? Really? Whatever you do is you, right? You = you. If you act like a monkey, then you are the guy who acts like a monkey. Whatever you do becomes you. How can you be anyone other than yourself?

And, on the other hand, if I could be Reagan right now, what would be wrong with that? They’d love that.

Now my fingertips are buzzing. What’s that mean?

He’s grinning — grinning! At the audience!

Have to step in, say something here. Say, “You know what, you’ve raised that before, Rick, and you’re simply wrong…”

Perry: “It was true then. It’s true now.”

Be. Yourself.

And smile! Don’t forget the eyes.

Or be Reagan.

OK. What would Reagan do? Reagan would…

Blank.

Blank.

Make a joke.

OK. A joke.

Hey Rick, what’s got a hundred heads, 600 eyes, and 95 legs? No. Skip it. Even the kids didn’t think that was funny.

Blank.

Blank.

Gosh, first my teeth, and now it’s like small motors are whirring inside my fingertips. That’s an old feeling. I used to get that feeling when Dad gave me that look, like he couldn’t believe I was his son. What is that feeling?

Remorse? Maybe?

Actually, come to think of it, maybe the buzzing fingers are anger too.

OK, I’m not Reagan. No one is Reagan but Reagan. Reagan’s dead. So he can’t respond to queries. I can’t know what Reagan would do.

Mitt ≠ Reagan. Let Mitt = Mitt.

Step back. Try it this way: Mitt = what? What are the higher-order variables in the equation of Mitt?

Mitt is business-smart. Knows numbers. Knows how to assess a risk. When to make a bet.

A bet! That’s great!

Is it? Is it great? OK, a bet, maybe a bet. Reagan might bet. Consider. I offer a bet, what’s his countermove?

• Perry accepts bet. Facts will be checked. And he’s wrong! I win.

• Perry declines bet. He looks like a wimp. I look like Reagan. I win.

No win for him. Win win win win for me. That’s really super optimal.

Say, “Rick, I’ll tell you what.”

Wow. Teeth, fingers and now my lungs are seething, too.

Extend hand.

I’m going to bet him! This is great. Not smiling so hard now, are you, Perry? You’re looking at me looking at you, and I’m smiling, and you’re wondering, aren’t you? Going to bet, my friend. How much to bet? Need a number. X. How to establish X. Let’s see.

• X can’t be too small. Rick, I’ll bet you a penny. Sounds like a joke.

• X can’t be too big. Rick, I’ll bet you a hundred million dollars. I could liquidate some assets. Does Perry have a hundred mil? Probably not. Audience will think I’m joking.

That didn’t narrow it down much.

But there’s a trend there. Graph? Graph!

Yes! That’s it. Second-order quadratic. Now calculate the maximum of the curve, considering the audience average age and income times unemployment rate times average Des Moines home price to the power of price of a bushel of corn times the square root of average bushels per acre — let’s see — carry the 1 — round up.

Say, “Ten thousand bucks?”

Now I’ve got him. Look at him. Smile fading.

Say, “Ten thousand dollar bet?”

Look at him fade!

Perry: “I’m not in the betting business.”

Say, “Ooooh. OK. OK.”

Yes! I win! Out of my teeth, Perry!

That was some kind of weird feeling. Emotions are hard to figure. But actually, I think that one might have been hate.

Look at the audience. Look at them looking at me.

I win, right?

My lungs are seething. Termites wandering around inside my lungs. What’s that one?

Could be anxiety.