“I simply come as a friend,” Solomon said.

“That’s very nice,” Grelich said. “The murderer returns to weep over the corpse he has made.”

“I don’t quite understand your point,” Solomon said.

“The point is, where were you when I needed a friend? Where were you before I killed myself?”

“Killed yourself? You don’t sound very dead to me.”

“I tried. It’s an accident that I’m alive.”

“So might we all say. But something that is tantamount to an accident can be said never to have happened.”

“Sophistry,” Grelich shouted.

Solomon sat silent for a long moment, and then nodded his head. “I’ll accept that. The fact is, I was not a very good friend. Or rather, I was not a good enough friend at the time you needed one.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Grelich, momentarily uncertain of the line Solomon was taking.

“We are both responsible for what happened,” Solomon said. “You elected yourself a victim, I perforce became a killer. Together we obliterated a life. But we reckoned without God.”

“How do you figure?” Grelich asked.

“We thought we could produce the nothingness of death. But God said, “That’s not how it’s going to be.” And he left us both alive and able to suffer the consequences of the deed we attempted, but didn’t quite bring off.”

“God wouldn’t do that,” Grelich said. “That is, if He existed.”

“He does.”

“What kind of a principle could He make of that?”

“He doesn’t have to make a principle out of it. He is not restricted to His own precedent. He can do what he wants fresh every time. This time it’s for you to suffer, and you deserve it, since God never told you it was all right to suicide.”

Ritchie loved listening to what was going on. He qvelled (a word he would soon learn) to hear the aggressive, intellectual Grelich getting it in the neck from a guy like Solomon, who came on like a religious rapper and really knew how to dish it out.