“I don’t know.”

“It’s Romeo’s song,” he said. “From the opera, in French. It’s beautiful.”

“I don’t know the words, Randy. Especially not in French.”

“L’amour, l’amour… Oui, son ardeur… Is that it?”

“I don’t know, Randy.”

“You try to think of it while I’m in the bathroom, Alex.”

When he disappeared into the bathroom, Jackie finally came over with the new bag of ice.

“What am I gonna do with him?” I said.

“What do you mean?” Jackie said.

“I mean, what am I gonna do? He really wants to find this girl he met in 1971. How crazy is that?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s a moot point. You know you’re gonna help him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you have to,” he said. “You spend your whole life up here sitting in your cabin all by yourself. You don’t even have a television, for God’s sake. You’re so desperate for human contact, you gotta come in here every day and make my life miserable. If a new face comes through that door and asks you for help, you’re gonna do it, no matter what. I’ve seen it before, remember? In fact, you know what? One of these days, an alien spaceship is gonna land out there in the parking lot, and a couple of little green men are gonna come in here and ask you to help them. You know, take you back to their planet so you can help them ward off some other aliens who are trying to invade them or something. And of course you’ll just get your ass kicked again, but it doesn’t matter. Because you’ll go. In two minutes, you’ll be out that door and on that spaceship.”

I just looked at him for a while, with the new bag of ice pressed against my eye. “That’s quite a story, Jackie. Little green men, eh?”

“Yep. Right in that parking lot.”

“And they’ll come ask me for help. They’ll speak English and everything.”

“By the time they get here, yes. That’s why they haven’t landed yet. They’re still studying you. They’ve already picked you out as the biggest sap on the planet Earth. Now they have to learn everything about you before they come get you. Hell, I bet they’ll even have a case of Canadian beer in the spaceship waiting for you.”