Daryl's best friend in the summer was Eugene. Eugene's hair was so blond it was white. He had white eyebrows and white eyelashes, and his hair stuck up in crazy directions. Eugene liked to pretend the trailer park was a factory that made evil robots. He and Daryl would sabotage the production, chased around by evil robot protectors.

Eugene's neighbor wore a greasy lab coat so everybody called him Doc. He wore old expensive cowboy boots. He drank clear vodka out of small tupperware containers. His wife, who had left him a few years before Daryl was born, used to sell tupperware. It took about three months for the vodka to eat through the tupperware. Doc would throw the damaged containers onto the rocky grass by the front door and get a new one from a secret supply which never ran out. As the years passed they accumulated, sheltered by the cement steps by the door. They were microwave proof and didn't melt in the heat or warp under the snow. Eugene would pretend they were robot parts. When Doc was pacing around the trailer park, Eugene and Daryl would smash at the tupperware with sticks. They would keep smashing until Doc circled back, talking to his absent wife and spilling vodka onto his lab coat. He would see Daryl and Eugene; then he would scream you sonsofbitches and lunge for them. Sometimes Doc threw rocks. Sometimes he would cry and sometimes he would threaten to get his shotgun. He would curse and then he always went back the cement steps and finished the vodka. He would say Margie--Margie, with different inflections no one understood.

Doc died unconscious in the hospital after his liver shut down. The county came to clean out his trailer, discarding the tupperware. There were about two hundred suicide notes on his wall by the time he died. He exhausted all of his possible last words. No one knew which ones he liked the best. Ten of Doc's suicide notes: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) All the different deaths he imagined for himself bloomed like fractals on the trailer wall. His sentences slid around all his possible deaths and the ciphers embedded in each of them. He played out all his possible ends.