“Tell me about something you’ve done. Something bad.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. What’s the strangest job you’ve ever had?”

“That’s a tough one. I’ve done all kinds of things. I painted boats, I made signs, I’ve been a bartender.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. To me, strange is relative. The strangest job I’ve ever done is easy, but I’ve done so much else, you know?”

“So what was the strangest job you’ve ever done?”

“I was a pharmacy technician.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ve been to a pharmacy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“There are two kinds of people behind the counter at a pharmacy. The pharmacists and the other people. The technicians are the other people. We count pills, mostly. Counted, I should say.”

“That’s all you did?”

“Sure. It was a job. It got routine. I mean, I got to handle narcotics and say things like pentoxifiline and valproic acid, but it wasn’t that exciting. My first manager was really cool but his replacement was a bitch.”

“Did you ever take anything?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Pain killers.”

“I took muscle relaxers, mostly. They were small and nobody noticed. The thing you have to remember about pharmacies, though, is that most of the pills in there are either laxatives or anti-psychotics. My joke was always that the job is nothing but shits and giggles.”

“That’s bad.”

“Well, you asked about bad.”

“And you never answered me.”

“Why did you want to know?”

“No reason, really. I’m just interested in the bad things that people do. I’m interested in the interactions surrounding guilt and remorse.”

“Aren’t those the same thing?”

“They’re related, certainly.”

“Fair enough.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means that I did something bad. If you want to hear about it.”

“Please.”

“When I first started working as a pharm tech, I think I killed someone.”

“Seriously?”

“I was filling scripts in bulk, which means that I was doing something like two hundred a day. The names of the drugs are very similar and, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s very easy to send out the wrong thing. During the first week, I made one mistake and it came back on the fax machine. The next day, that same patient was dead.”

“Wow.”

“I don’t know that it was me, but it was a very big coincidence.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. The patient was in a nursing home. Patients died there all the time. All I did was put in the wrong drug.”

“That’s it?”

“You were expecting more?”

“Do you feel guilty?”

“Sort of. But I don’t know that it was my fault. It’s just a guess, really. The product of an overactive imagination.”

“A guilty imagination.”

“Possibly. I have a good work ethic and I don’t like screwing up.”

“Were you good?”

“I was one of the best.”

“Why did you quit?”

“My manager was a bitch and the money sucked. I couldn’t keep doing my job at the same level of performance for such a shitty paycheck.”

“I can get behind that.”

“Doesn’t matter now because all that's behind me now.”