Rollie waited for Ivan to stop coughing.

Ivan sputtered for a minute, then grabbed his root beer off the filthy coffee table, took a sip, smiled, and continued, talking loud enough to be heard of the noisy music. "OK, so, the scenario is... aliens arrive and they say to you that you're worth saving, but most of humanity is doomed. What do you do?"

He had to compress his reply because Steve had turned up the terrible music again. "How is the planet doomed?"

Rollie saw how Ivan's face showed Rollie was missing the point. Story of Rollie's life, pretty much.

Rollie wondered why Ivan and Steve always came up with these ridiculous scenarios to ask him.

In the next lull in the noise, Ivan replied "It's whatever you want it to be. The point is to imagine the situation."

Rollie glanced at Steve, who was sitting on the couch next to Ivan. Sometimes he can get one of them to explain what the other means. And they never minded how his brain

Steve looked back at Rollie and yelled, "Told y'all this album was amazing! Right?"

Rollie yelled back. "I can't understand them! What are they singing about?"

Rollie watched as Steve said a bunch of stuff, none of it comprehensible. Then suddenly the song stopped while Steve was yelling, and the last words he yelled were "always better when you can't understand their lyrics!"

Ivan got up and walked to the stereo and the cardboard boxes spilling out CDs and tapes on the floor.

Steve continued at a quieter volume. "if you actually hear the words, they're usually pretty awful, or even if they're not bad, they maybe aren't about something you're going through at the moment."

Ivan called from over by the stereo. "But for real, Rollie, what do you do?"

Rollie watched Ivan's iguana slowly creep down the tree branch out from under the heat lamp. This was the first time it had moved in maybe hours. The iguana moved down the branch, down to the floor, where Ivan had spread out newspapers and a bowl of various fresh vegetables. Today, Ivan had chopped up asparagus, sliced up carrots, and arranged them on top of a bed of freeze-dried crickets and mealworms in a ceramic dish.

Rollie said, "Does it matter if they're aliens? Could they be just regular people? And instead of the whole planet blowing up, maybe they're just saying that if I want to, I can go with them, and then have a completely different life? Like in poker, when you get an ace, and you ask for four new cards?"

Rollie watched the iguana eat the salad Ivan had prepared for him. "I don't know what I'd do! I might end up like Agamemnon over there... pet for some aliens..."

"Agamemnon is happy!" Ivan replied, almost defensively.