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burst into the mastermind’s apartment they found the four of them dead from barbiturate overdose, each tucked peacefully into a bed, their personal rant/manifesto/diary on the nightstand beside them.
    The mastermind was a Russian scientist who’d emigrated to the U.S. in 1988. He’d been part of the team commissioned to bury Russia’s secret stockpile of weaponized anthrax, but before doing it he secreted some away. What was his reason for killing six hundred thousand people? He wanted to get back at his wife, who ran off with his protege. There was also an unemployed college professor, an anti-government nut, a Jehovah’s Witness who believed Atlanta was the epicenter of all sin. They’d met at an AA meeting, then going for coffee together after meetings to rant.
    When I’d seen enough I said goodbye to my mom and went for a walk. I hit some baseballs in the Toy Shop Village batting cage, where I’d set up life-sized cutouts of Tina and Little Joe to use as targets. They’d originally been mounted in the facade of the penny arcade. I swung hard, so I hit a lot of weak bouncers, but when I
connected it felt good.
    I didn’t know what I’d expected to feel when the terrorists were found. What I felt was a mixture of disgust and relief. I guess any reason for murdering innocent people was going to seem petty or insane. It was over, though. Case closed. Move along, nothing more to see here. Maybe we could all stop talking about it every minute of every day and try to move on now.

CHAPTER 10
    I heaved a big, fat sigh and poised my pencil over the first panel. Draw something—anything—to get the ball rolling. On the heels of my epic two-strip output two days ago, I was having trouble keeping the momentum going.
    I dropped my pencil onto the Bristol board and went to the window. From my apartment on the second floor of the crumbling drive-in projection/concession building I couldn’t tell what season it was. There were no trees, so no leaves, or lack thereof, to clue me in. As far as the eye could see there was only cyclone fencing, weeds, industrial sprawl, and, across Columbia Avenue, a junk yard. Grandma was getting seventy percent of the revenues from Toy Shop , but she was letting me live in the apartment—which had once been occupied by Toy Shop Village’s manager—for free. When I first took over the strip, that was a good thing because thirty percent of the revenue from a marginally popular comic strip was not much (certainly not enough to stay in the apartment Lorena and I had shared before she died). I had no idea why I was still here. With Wolfie dolls hitting the stores in a few weeks, I could
buy a nice condo in Buckhead and pay cash.
    Maybe my new shrink would help me figure it out.
    If anyone had told me my first visit to a psychiatrist would not center around living through an attack that killed half a million people, or the drowning of my twin sister, or the horrible death of my wife, but my relationship with my mean old shithound of a grandfather, I would not have believed it.
    We’d spent half an hour going over my outbursts, massaging them for significance. The first thing she’d noticed was that they had nothing to do with the anthrax attack, and that surprised her. Evidently the stuff coming up from deep inside me should be rabid, twitching terror.
    She noticed that a lot of them referred to Grandpa, and asked if I had unfinished business with him. I admitted that as Toy Shop got more popular, I felt like more of a fraud for continuing it against his wishes. I told her about the argument we’d had the last time I saw him, how I’d gone to his studio clutching my demo strips, full of hope, how we’d gone back and forth, both of us getting angrier until he finally told me I was a hack.
    â€œJust because you have someone in your family who’s an artist doesn’t make you one,” he’d said.
    I’d told him