Possessed Read Online Free PDF Page A

talked about the stock market and investments. Before long, Bouril, a runner, had Stefan jogging beside him on The Village paths.
    In the evenings, Bouril and Stefan, both single, hung out together, going to dinner or sometimes watching Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Mel Brooks movies. Bouril appreciated the way Stefan dropped lines from Blazing Saddles or Monty Python into conversations. Particularly taken with German director Werner Herzog’s movies, Stefan seemed drawn to his recurring theme of heroes who fought tremendous obstacles. Many of his favorite movies starred leading man Klaus Kinski. Stefan particularly admired the German actor’s dead-eyed grimace, a look he copied, practicing before a mirror, then employing when forced to have his picture taken.
    On another afternoon, Stefan bumped into Ran Holcomb, a CPA who lived in his complex. Soon Holcomb was giving Stefan financial advice and doing his taxes, and Bouril, Stefan, Holcomb, and other friends from The Village sometimes dropped in at happy hours at half a dozen of the nearby restaurants and bars, from the microbrewery Humperdinck’s, where Stefan ate the barbecue and burgers, to a place called Two Rows, where he always ordered fish. After he was pulled over in his car one night when he’d been drinking, Stefan narrowed his restaurants down to those in walking distance of his apartment, so he didn’t have to worry about imbibing and driving. “He was practical,” said a friend. “He liked to drink, and this way it wasn’t a problem.”
    Making something of a game of it, one night on their way home, Stefan with a group of hungry friends walked through the drive-thru at a Wendy’s restaurant, with cars in front of and behind them, laughing as they put in their orders and carried their sacks of burgers home.
    As much fun as Stefan had in Dallas, there were those times around the pool or on their nights out, when the conversations became serious. Many of his friends simply called Stefan “the scientist.” And as Jackie had before them, they felt drawn to him for the conversations, his thoughts on the world. Always reading, he enjoyed discussing theories on life
    While the others gave him a moniker reflecting his profession, Stefan sometimes called himself a nickname based on his beliefs. Like many scientists who are trained to accept as true only what they can see, touch, and calculate, Stefanwas a secular man, an atheist, in his words, “the heathen from Sweden.” While his atheism put him at odds with religious friends he made in Texas, it never became an obstacle. “He always treated our beliefs with respect,” said one such friend. “It wasn’t like he ever told us we were wrong, but rather that he held a different view.”
    One day, the conversation with Bouril turned serious, and Stefan talked about his opinions on life and death. “We’re here for a brief time. So much happens that are accidents. When we can help each other, we should,” he said. Then he went on to voice his concept of death, that when a person dies, they simply stop existing, “as if they’d never been born.”
    While some may have found his viewpoint sad, Stefan saw it simply as the reality of a living organism never intended to live forever.
    At the restaurants, in the bars, Stefan struck up conversations with those seated around him, asking about their jobs and their histories. In the end, the people he invited into his life were those he said were “shooting from the hip,” said a friend. “There were only two things Stefan couldn’t abide, dishonesty and people who judged others more harshly than they judged themselves.”
    While he’d cobbled together a family of sorts out of his Dallas friends, Stefan still ached for a wife and children. Two years after his divorce from Jackie, he hadn’t given up on the prospect of love. As in his career, he used his