Dr. Kyle Broflovski, PhD, waited at a table in his favorite restaurant. His frizzy red hair was cropped short, and his large brown eyes looked like they should have been behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. They weren't, though. He shivered and pulled his sage-grey coat around him. It was so chilly today.

Brooklyn was his favorite borough, but the greatest diner he'd ever been to was a little hole-in- the-wall in Manhattan. Actually, it was a bit like that café, Monk's Café, from Seinfeld. Kyle hadn't started watching that show until he was twelve, though. When he was eight, precocious as he was, he was still rutted in the mire of jokes about flatulence.

We got up to some crazy things, Kyle thought. Those kids he had hung out with back in that little mountain town, South Park...he was still in touch with Stanley Marsh, his old buddy, but not Cartman. At age 17, Cartman had declared, "I'm getting out of this hicktown!" and bought a one-way plane ticket to L.A. Reportedly, he had made it there all right, but was not in the film industry. Rather, he had made it big with the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation.

And Kenny...poor Kenny. Kyle still hadn't recovered from the trauma of losing Ken McCormick, who supplied the best dirty one-liners in town from behind his muffling orange parka's hood. No one had known just

how Kenny had died...they had found his head (still inside the hood) 100 yards away from his left foot. The town coroner had been stumped. "I'll be damned," the man had said, scratching his head. "The McCormick kid is blond. Get in here, Dave, I owe you fifty bucks."

It had been doubly sad, Kyle mused, considering Kenny's previous, miraculous recovery from a degenerative muscular disease...

Kyle broke out of his reverie as the waitress came to take his order. "I'll have a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich," he said in a slightly affected Brooklyn accent. God, how hard he wanted to blend into this culture. He felt like he'd belonged here all his life.

The waitress nodded, scribbling his order in chickenscratch upon a tablet of recycled paper. She departed, leaving Kyle to his thoughts once more.

Kyle was rather glad he had thought of Stan; he thought maybe he'd send him a Chanukah card. When they went to college, they had exchanged humorous greeting cards for a while, some utterly pointless. Kyle had once opened a pitch-black envelope to find a card inside which began, in a gentle curly font, "My sincere condolences..."

Now, to everyone's relief, Stan was a mail carrier who resided in Wisconsin. It seemed as though the loser who had showed up so many years ago, claiming to be Stan's future self, was just an elaborate hoax, a normal guy with dark brown hair and a red and blue winter hat.

Not a bad profession for the guy, Kyle had thought when he had learned of Stan's career path. Civil service suits him. And, as Stan had said, "I want to serve my country, but I don't want to get killed."

Kyle pulled out his palm pilot and jotted efficiently here and there with the stylus, writing in Graffiti, "send card to stan."

It was at this point that the coffee should have arrived, but it everyone knows that it takes longer than that to percolate a cup of coffee. So Kyle passed the time by thinking about Franz Kafka's novel The Trial. Kyle's dissertation had been on Franz Kafka, after all. He worked part-time at a bookstore and a coffeehouse. Kyle would never have guessed he had a mind for literary analysis, but there you were. In fact, Kyle's mother had been shocked when he had announced his career path.

"Why can't you be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a scientist, or something?" she had demanded shrilly. "You've always been at the head of your class; you're too smart to be wasting your life working in some bookstore!" Gerald had not been as vehement as his wife, but still apprehensive about how good of a decision Kyle was making. However, once Kyle had explained that the thing he truly most wanted to be in his life was a literary scholar, they understood and supported him.

The coffee arrived. Kyle found himself admiring the waitress' curly red hair. There weren't enough redheads, he concluded. Then he rebuked himself for thinking of another woman. He was very scrupulous in that way. There was no one for him but Laura.

They rented an apartment together in Brooklyn. She was a medical resident who liked to paint pictures of the intricacies of the viscera in her spare time. She had laughed so hard when he told her he was from a mountain town in Colorado. That was long ago, when they had met at a book signing.

"South Park, Colorado?" she had said blankly. "Never heard of it."

"Yeah, neither have I," Kyle quipped. He removed a crumpled photo from his wallet as proof that South Park existed. The picture was quite old; there were white cracks on its surface, where it had been bent. In the foreground was a sign made of wooden planks, which read "South Park" in ornate lettering; in the background was a scenic backdrop of snow-clad pines and, beyond, the sweep of Rockies.

Laura had peered at the third-grader in the green flap-hat, orange jacket and lime-green mittens. "It's hard to tell with that hat on, but is that you?" Kyle nodded wordlessly, slightly embarrassed. He took the initiative and began introducing the others.

"This is Stan," he said, pointing to the kid in the brown jacket. "He was my best friend back in South Park." His finger slid to the very fat child dressed in aqua, yellow and red. "Cartman. Eric Cartman. Most obnoxious bastard in the world...but, I miss him somehow."

"Where is he now?" Laura had asked, concerned.

Kyle shook his head. "Dunno...picking up garbage somewhere in L.A." Seeing the look on Laura's face, he added hurriedly, "His mom was a hermaphrodite, he had gender issues, and he made fun of me a lot. He did horrible things, many and varied…some very difficult to stomach. Don't worry about him."

Laura's green eyes had moved on to the boy in the orange parka who was somehow perched on top of the sign. He was waving happily like the others. "Who's that?" she asked, with a laugh in her voice. Kyle swallowed. Nervously, he shut one eye and massaged it with his finger.

"That's Kenny. He's dead," he said shortly.