I didn't have the time or energy to go and confront Viktor as to why he‟d told Jodi the whole thing about Sarah Bilkworth. I hoped he'd thought he was helping, or had a slip of the mind and tongue so colossal he didn't even know what he was saying when he had blurted out the worst thing he could have said in the entire world.

It was over.

The whole stupid man quest that I'd been desperately trying to piece together was over. I'd completed only one of the tasks, and that had been the easiest one. Months of effort, everyone I knew and loved all but hated me, and I had planted a stupid damn tree.

I had failed.

Miserably.

I stumbled home from Jodi's house, clutching my nose and dripping blood periodically on to the ground. She really had punched me very hard, and every time a drop of blood leaked out, I fondly remembered our first date when we'd defended each other against the prostitutes.

That was a long time ago.

As I approached my own front door, there was no car in the driveway. No one was playing outside, and there was a sense of calm coming from the house. Even in our very darkest days last year it was never this quiet around the house. Everyone must have been out. I went inside, and called everyone's names. No one answered. It was such a rarity to be in my house alone that I had trouble believing it.

The message machine was blinking a one over and over again. I pressed the play button, and the machine told me in its dulcet tones that we did indeed have one message. The tape rewound itself, and clicked a few times in preparation of telling me what that message was. There was a piercing beep, and the message started playing.

"Hello, Will," said the voice of my boss, Mr. Shaw, also known as Jodi's dad. He didn't sound very happy. "Will, I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go. There is no longer a position available for you here at the restaurant. Goodbye."

The machine clicked off.

I couldn't say that I was surprised. I'd half expected it to happen right after I asked Jodi to have a kid with me. The Shaw family looked after its own, which is why it would have been very cool to be a part of that family later on, but that was no longer really an option.

I got very angry. This wasn't the way it was supposed to happen. Every step was so carefully planned out, and I really believed I had thought of everything. The tree was planted, Jodi was supposed to have said yes and we were supposed to be well on our way to having a child, the money from the job was supposed to pay for my trip to Spain so I could go fight a bull, and then after all that I would finish my book, but all of that had gone straight to hell.

I couldn't be in the house any more. I felt trapped and stupid, so I ran outside into the middle of our yard. I looked up at the sky. What was he thinking up there? Was he even up there? Does anyone go up, or is it more of a lateral shift to the left and you just sort of hover around on Earth for the rest of eternity? I didn't know, and the only ones that did know were already there.

"I did all this for you, Dad," I said. "All of it to show you that I could be a man, too."

It sounded strange as I said it. Like a lie. I didn't believe myself. I hadn't done it all for him. He was dead, what did he care? He probably wasn't even paying attention right then. If I was a ghost or spirit capable of going anywhere or seeing anything, I wasn't about to hang around and listen to my failure of a son whinge on about his shortcomings.

"They needed me to do this," I explained to the wisp of cloud that I was pretending was my dead father.

It was a fat little pouffe of cloud, complete with dimples and an odd long tendril of vapour drifting away behind it. My dad's head had kind of resembled the cloud near the end. He had let his hair grow long so he looked like a cross between Jerry Garcia and a homeless person.

"If I hadn't tried, the family would fall apart," I said.

But they hadn't. They'd banded together, and were spending more time together than they had before Dad died.

I was the only one truly falling apart.

I was alone in my quest, and always had been.

I'd had help from the insanity known as Viktor, and Jodi had been nothing if not supportive, but the real truth was that I was the only one who'd ever needed proof that I could be a man. The others didn't care. I might as well have been dust to them.

"Then I'm going to finish this my way," I said in my best Batman voice. It added balls to the situation.

From the beginning of the Hemingway quest, one challenge had stood before me towering above the others. I didn't know why I'd thought that having a son was going to be such a piece of cake, but for some reason fighting a bull was a gauntlet laid down before me by Ernest Hemingway himself. I could almost see his moustachioed face, his hands cradling a drink, and all the while a cigar pluming away inside his beard as he took off a glove and slapped me across the face with it. He had a deep voice, and all of a sudden he was my dad.

"Fight the bull, son," he said. "Finish fighting."

I only knew of one bull in town.

The farmer's name was Ted Clement, and he insisted that everyone call him Farmer Ted. I wondered if Farmer really counted as a title, but he was a nice enough man and drove the school bus for the elementary school. I didn't mind calling him Farmer Ted whenever I saw him. He was very proud of his bull, and took good care of the beast. I'd only ever seen the bull once, and that was from a long way away. It certainly seemed like a fairly big animal, but I had to get up close and personal to fight it.

I had to get to Farmer Ted's land.

I hopped on my sister's purple bike, mainly because I'd busted mine all up from riding it over too much rough terrain a couple of years ago, and rode the few kilometers down our little dirt road towards Farmer Ted's place.

Ted's land stretched far and wide. He had hundreds of acres divided into several parcels, and different crops grew on each parcel. I was searching for the bull parcel. Ted kept the bull separate from the cows for most of the year because he didn't want the bull going around humping all the cows every day. There was apparently a good time of year for the bull to do his thing, and I was glad that this wasn't that time of year. If cows had protective tendencies and I started winning the fight against the bull, I didn't want hundreds of girl cows trying to kick my ass to get me away from their man. Girl cows weren't exactly lightweights.

Miles and miles of barbed wire separated each of Farmer Ted's land parcels. It looked like something out of a World War II movie, but instead of trying to break out of the prison camps, I was trying to break in.

The paddock, which I called it because I felt increasingly like I was about to fight the Tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park, was at the very far end of Farmer Ted's land at the top of a steep hill. I shifted the bike's gears down so I could pedal up the hill. My leg muscles weren't nearly strong enough to hit the hill in high gear.

I got to the top, winded and sweaty. I hopped off the bike and tossed it into the ditch. A very slow trickle of water flowed down the hill through the ditch, so I ducked down and drank a few handfuls to cool down from the intense bike ride. There was no sense going into the battle of my life without all of my faculties. I didn't have that many faculties to begin with, so I needed all the help I could get.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and suddenly felt very cowboyish and manly. Unfortunately I was wearing my mum's aquamarine Hall and Oates shirt from their 1983 world tour, so the effect was diminished as I strode to the fence to find my Goliath.

It didn't take long to find him.

Placidly chewing a mouthful of grass in the middle of the rolling field was the biggest bull I had ever seen. Looking at him standing there with an incredibly stupid look on his face, I wondered what Hemingway found so manly about fighting these creatures. The bull didn't look threatening at all. He looked like he was just enjoying some food. I thought how mad I would be if someone came along and tried to get something started with me in the middle of lunch.

"Come on, Will," I muttered. "Those are cop-out thoughts....you can do this..."

I closed my eyes and stared out at the bull. It hadn't even noticed me yet. He was a velvety midnight black, and the only flash of colour I saw on him was his pink slab of a tongue flopping in and out of his mouth as he worked the grass around. His horns were shining and glinting in the sun, and Farmer Ted hadn't whittled the points down. They were long, curved spears that could pierce me clean through without even trying. I hadn't counted on that. I was all but positive that bulls had to have their horns carved down, but at the back of my head I remembered Viktor telling me some rumour about Farmer Ted not wanting to whittle down the points because it made the bull more vulnerable to predators. Any predator that went after that bull, points or no points, deserved to get gored for attempting to take down a meal the size of a pickup truck.

I had to go through with it. I'd come this far, and had failed so hard with the baby task that it was fitting that the bullfighting task was being made extra challenging as punishment for failure. Maybe if I did this and defeated the bull, I could go back home with my head held high. I could tell the girls I could take care of them now. Connor could look up to me and follow in my footsteps without feeling like he was being taken down a losing path. Viktor and I could joke about the time that I fought a bull and killed the hell out of it. His dad might even start to look at me like I was worth Viktor's time.

I forced my arm to reach out and grab the barbed wire to launch myself over the fence and leap into the paddock with the bull. A jolt of intense pain shot through my hand and arm as I jumped over the fence and landed in the field. I thought I had grabbed one of the barbs by mistake, but when I tried to peel my hand away to check the injury, I couldn't let go of the fence. Another jolt rippled through my whole body this time. It hurt more this time, and even more the third time. I still couldn't let go of the fence, but I started to piece together what must have been going on.

I was firmly attached by the hand to an electric fence.

"Are you serious?" I bellowed. "Are you kidding me?"

I reefed on my hand, jerking it back and forth as hard as I could with no result. The fence responded with two or three nice, cozy shocks. I wondered how long it would take for the fence to cook me from the inside. I'd watched this stupid 'World's Most Horrifying Videos' show a while back where a little kid had gone out to check a microphone on a wet stage and had basically frozen on the spot as countless volts of electricity pulsed through his tiny body. That video kept playing over and over again in my head. I didn't think the fence had as many volts going through it as a soundstage, but I still wanted to get out of there as soon as I could.

I tried pulling on the fence itself this time, leaning away from it as far as I could. My body was at a forty-five degree angle to the grass below before the fence recoiled and yanked me back to standing. I bounced back so hard my other arm slammed into the fence and got a long, angry scratch all the way down it from one of the barbs. Things just kept getting better. I bellowed in anger.

That wasn't a good idea.

The bull finally noticed me. A thrashing, screaming simian man-beast stuck to a barbed-wire fence was bound to get anyone's attention. His huge, bulbous ugly head swung in my direction, and he blinked two or three times to bat some midges out of his eyes. There were pulsating clouds of midges floating all over Farmer Ted's fields, but a massive concentration of them seemed to be centering in on the bull. His tail would lazily swat at the bugs every few minutes or so, and did little but scatter them for a couple of seconds. If it were me being bombarded by the midges, I would have been eaten alive before I'd been able to hop over the fence. The bull's hide was so thick, I doubted if he even knew that the midges were there.

For a moment, I thought a look was all I was going to get. I should have known that I was not destined to be that lucky.

Suddenly, he launched his bulk in a slow, plodding fashion towards my horrified body. The plod turned into a walk, the walk into a jog, and the bull's speed kept picking up as he charged towards me. I looked into his eyes, and saw nothing but raw instinct. I was an annoyance that had entered his land, and he was going to deal with me in the way he deemed appropriate.

I was about to be pulverized. I couldn't tell if the buzz I was feeling rip around my nerves and skin was from the fence or from the triple shot of adrenaline that had just been pumped into my blood. I reefed and reefed on the fence, ripping it back and forth until my arms were covered in bloody scratches. The ground shook as the bull got closer and closer to me, and I could hear him grunting and huffing as he picked up his speed. He let out a great bellow of his own, a roar to bulls and bovine everywhere, telling them that this was one human that wasn't about to get the better of a bull this day.

It was down to a matter of metres. I turned to face the bull, ready for his charge.

This was my bullfight.

This was my test.

It was all or nothing now.

I would live or die as a man after this moment.

Electricity pounded through my veins as the fence worked its ceaseless defensive magic, keeping me lashed to it as another victim for it and the bull. I stared in his eyes, and he stared back. He found some extra reserve of speed, and charged at me with his full weight.

Pain... pain like I'd never known and would never know again exploded through me like I'd eaten a bowlful of fire. The bull ploughed through me, broke through the fence and kept running. My hand was stuck to the side of the fence that was still connected to the power, so I kept getting zapped and was still unable to let go. It was a cruel little reminder that I had failed so miserably at everything every time the juice twitched through my bones. I collapsed in a heap, unable to see, unable to move, unable to breathe.

Unable to be.

I was going to die.

I'm at that damned party again. The music is off. No one is talking. They're all standing perfectly still. I can move around them freely. The house is bigger. It's massive. Room after room full of people; no one moving. They're all staring straight ahead, eyes blank and faces slack. I hear something moving upstairs. It's very far away, and is nothing but the tiniest of sounds. 

I navigate around the frozen humans, careful not to bump into anyone in case I knock them over and send them toppling to their demise over the stair railing. The sound gets louder and louder. I recognize some faces as I climb higher. Kids from school. People I never talk to, people whose names I don't know. I look up, and the staircase stretches on forever. Every step is occupied by a foot, a bum, or some other body part of someone who at one point or another had been involved in an aspect of my life, even if it was the most minuscule of aspects. The guy three steps above me commented on my choice of pop at a store once upon a time, and the girl right beside me had laughed heartily in my face when I'd gotten an erection at a dance.

I see Viktor about ten steps up. It's odd to see his face not moving for once. He's usually so animated in his features that to see them all relaxed for probably the first time since I've known him is disconcerting. I don't like it. I want him to talk to me, to tell me what the hell went on with Jodi. He doesn't move. I want to punch him, then hug him because I need him to wake up and be there for me. I climb past him and give him the slightest of nudges. He hits the wall and rebounds violently, spinning three times in the air as he flies over the railing and races toward the floor so very far below. I watch in horror as he disappears out of sight into the darkness. 

Voices echo around the halls, bouncing off the stairs and resounding from every direction. They're my sisters' voices. All three of them are whispering the same thing over and over again, an unintelligible chanting that's so quiet it could just as easily be someone breathing. The voices are ahead of me, and then somewhere over my right shoulder. They're behind me and then soaring far above me. I wish I knew what they were saying. The whole house is soon full of the voices, and they grow louder and louder until the cacophony pounds into my brain like an ocean trying to drain out of a pinhole. I stop climbing the stairs and hold my head with my hands. I can't tell one voice from another, and they just sound like one shrieking din now. My hands feel wet, so I pull them away from my ears for just a second. They're covered in blood, and after a moment of desperation, I realize that the blood is leaking from my poor ears. Someone takes my hands. The hands that are holding mine are much smaller, much younger hands. I look up into what would be the face of my brother, I think, if the person in front of me had a face.

"You shouldn't be scared," says the figure. "Not anymore."

He lets my hands go, and they are clean of blood. He suddenly jumps over the railing and plunges into the abyss. I watch him fall, and stand there staring down into the pitch dark of below, just breathing for a second. Breathing and thinking. 

I am finally at the top of the stairs. The top landing of the stairs has a long, low hung ceiling, and right in front of me is a chair. It's the same chair my dad was sitting in during the dream where he'd asked me what I'd wanted. There's a piece of paper folded up nicely right where someone's bum would normally go. I pick it up and unfold it.

It's a note.

'Dear Will,' it reads. 'He's gone. You lost him. He is dead because of you.'

I sit down in the chair. It's well-worn and still very, very comfortable. The orange upholstery has seen better days. A hole in the left arm of the chair reveals the puffy white stuffing within. I reach into the hole and pull out a few bits of the stuffing subconsciously. As I pull it out, it disappears like steam. I keep picking and picking until there's no chair left, and I'm just sitting on the ground.

"No," I say. "I won't accept that."

"Accept what?"

"It wasn't my fault."

Silence.

"It wasn't my fault."