The thing about legends is... sometimes, they're true.

Chapter 23. You can call me Shot. My real name is Paul. What you've read so far is not the whole truth. Much has been changed to protect the innocent... and the guilty. I once read that the only philosophical question that matters is whether or not to commit suicide. I guess that makes me a philosopher. You can say it was my inheritance. She didn't leave a not... just a number. That number followed me from foster home to foster home till college when I met her... I thought she'd help me forget my past’s number. It was a mistake to think I could escape it. I loved her. And I thought she loved me. Until my father's number returned to haunt me. That fucking number... When I circled every 23rd letter of her note... it became clear. The number had gone after me. And now it wanted her. I was right. She was in danger. I just didn't realize the danger was me. What began as a suicide note, turned into something more. Much, much more. "He didn't leave a not... just a number." "not" should be note. Be sure your sin will find you out. - Numbers 32:23
To die there in the street would have been easy. But it wouldn't have been justice, at least not the justice fathers teach their sons about. I'll be sentenced in a week or so. My lawyer says the judge will look kindly upon me for turning myself in. Maybe it's not the happiest of endings, but it's the right one. Some day I'll be up for parole, and we can go on living our lives. It's only a matter of time. Of course, time is just a counting system - numbers with meaning attached to them - isn't it?
There's no such thing as destiny. There are only different choices. Some choices are easy, some aren't. Those are the really important ones, the ones that define us as people.Light is a particle and a wave. This is hard to understand how a thing can be two things at once; but a woman is also both a particle and a wave. She's a wave when you see her reach down to pull a shell from the sea, and you feel her beauty pass through you like electrical current. She's a particle when her hair brushes your face, and her hands push into yours. And a child is also a particle and a wave. He is a wave the sound of his pain shoots through and twists you away from yourself. And he is a particle when a doctor hands you a baby; a small mirror. Women, children and light can be two things at once; a particle, a wave. They ricochet off the hard surfaces and illuminate the corners. Without them it would be far darker. An element loses a particle and becomes unstable. A chain reaction is set in motion. Pulsing waves of desperation in every direction. Perhaps the lost part is clarity or hope. In the fallout, the man-made elements appear- isotopes of fear and anger that cannot be handled safely or buried in the ground. They take the shape of a mushroom cloud started above a desert that circles the globe and shadows us all. The hands on the clock are waving goodbye. It was my grandfather's watch. The dial was painted by hand in America during Word War I. The brides of soldiers seated at long tables dutifully making luminous little sixes and eights to help keep the world free. The eights were particularly hard to make; so the women sucked on the tips of the paintbrushes to bring them to a fine point. One by one, their mouths began to fill with cancer. The radium-based paint they had swallowed bombarded their brains and bones with alpha and beta particles. The women who painted the watch faces sued the US Radium Corporation of West Orange, New Jersey. Had the trial been at night, the breath they used to say goodbye to the world would have glowed like moonlit fog? They were given ten thousand dollars for their lives. I have been thinking about what hurts more: the jar or the pins. And I think I can tell you that it is not the pins. Because the monarch in the jar is already dead when it comes to the pins. At some point things stop hurting; and from inside the jar, with eyes that see in all directions, maybe it is possible to look into the future, well beyond the pins, to where the compass in your head tells you that you need to go. Are you aware of the radiological effects on living organisms? Protons cut through your DNA rewriting your genetic code. The instructions for teeth become the recipe for cancer. Your marrow dies inside your bones taking with it your immune system. The next coughing person will become an infection; the smoke from your cigarette becomes lethal as a bullet. A thousandth of a gram can change a life.
Uranium, Neptunium, Plutonium. They came from space; found their way here by comet and meteorite. No child ever wished this from a star. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl. Problems with half-lives forty-thousand years long. Half a life. Time takes half of us away and comes back later for the rest. We are children and then we are parents. We are long division. Slowly we decay into memory.
In the end, everything decays to lead, number eighty-two on the periodic table. All of the brilliant things born in the center of stars will have turned cold and gray. Everything is moving in that direction. Toward lead. Impossible to stop.