“We offhandedly devised many imaginary scenarios during the course of any given day, a habit that began as acerbic banter between two hypersharp intelligences, whose function seemed to be to absorb the venom of normal mundane tensions, anxieties, jealousies, resentments, and nano-betrayals, but gradually transformed into a daily hedge against death, an acknowledgement of our painful ephemerality, and a bid to take the kitchen utensils of mortality out of the hands of happenstance and put them back into our own drawer.”