"Are you awake yet?" I remember an early morning voice had said to me months and months ago.
     "No," I said. It was a young man's voice.
     "Then I'll call you back later." Just as he said that I realized the voice belonged to Felix.
     Click.
     If I had known that it was going to be the last time I would ever hear his voice again, I would have woken up. Ashes. We all fall down. Someday.
     "I'll call you back later," Felix said. Flowers. Flowers. He never called back.
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     We loved Felix so much. Felix always knew what to do when everyone else was at their end. He was a humanitarian. He always had the hope. He always had the power, and the glory. He always had the nice thing to say, and whenever there was any trouble, he was the one to figure a way out of it. The only thing that made Felix frustrated was when he couldn't settle and argument between two people. He worried about arguments as if life depended on harmony. He gave us harmony.
     Felix once told me that aliens are really us. How did he know that?
     He said, "They are us trying to reach us, and as much as they want to talk and explain things to us, they can't. Or they won't. But when we adjust our attitudes enough and we finally figure out that they are around, then they will expose themselves to us. They will visit us. We will feel as it we are being Born Again. As if we are rapturing..."
     Felix had gone out one night to Thundermountain with his girlfriend. He had brought his guitar along to play with the house band at the club. And before he knew it, he was dancing around the dance floor imitating John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He was sweating and looked like he had a fever.
     There were many other teen spokes models there that evening. And they were all dancing too, although nobody recognized Felix, because he looked much different in person than he did on the infommercial screen.
     He started feeling sick, and his brother and sister took him outside to get some air. And what happened after that was he collapsed in the gutter outside Thundermountain.
     There was a photographer there with a bunch of cameras around his neck but he didn't feel like taking any pictures, because the scene was too shocking.
     The other presenter and spokes models there were hanging on the sidewalk, in front of low-riding Chevrolets with their radios turned up high.
     Felix's sister was sitting on Felix's stomach because he had begun to convulse there in the gutter. And she saw a light go out of his eyes. Slowly his body, which was between her legs, began to go cold. And she knew they were losing him really fast.
     His heart was no longer beating. And his little brother, who was calling the ambulance, and who was checking in on him every few seconds, saw this too, and it was all very horrible, and all very too late for any kind of help.
     And that was it. Jimmy Keene was standing there with his girlfriend, and noticed that Felix's legs were delicately crossed at the ankles, even after all that thrashing around.

     Jimmy says, "I consider ourselves members of a world that includes all the creatures on earth, and those of us who place human beings on the top rung of the ladder above all creatures, well, I have a problem with that. I don't think that we are on the top, if you consider all the messed-up things that humans are capable of...There are other places to be and things to be part of, and it was just Felix's time to go and be a member of that new place."
     Felix had had violent seizures outside a hip Las Vegas club frequented by young presenters, and had fallen into full cardiac arrest in the ambulance that was transporting him to the hospital at one-thirty in the morning. All the tabloid press wanted to know was the drug abuse. Felix was an inexperienced drug user.

Van Sant, Gus. Pink. Bantam, 1998.