18

SO WHAT happened is that Cassandra and I sat in the back of the car like bumps on a log and watched Bob Lyons kill a man. I always knew he was nuts, right? And I knew he was cranked on crystal, right? But I thought all he was only going to do was the exact same thing I would have done under the circumstances—scare the bejesus out of Peter and try to get some of his bread back. And RIGHT UP TO THE VERY MOMENT when Peter was running up that alley, I’d been thinking, well shit, Lyons, you’re really doing it up right this time, yeah, you’ve really put that kid through some changes. But then Lyons is pointing that gun out the open door of the car, and holding down his right hand with his left so the recoil won’t haul him off target, and blazing away, and from that little glimpse I got of it, those goddamned Magnum slugs tore Peter to shit. The sound of that fucking cannon going off is incredible. Lyons looks at me and giggles. I swear to God, he giggles. And he says in that high squeaky voice, “Oh, WOW, Tommy, WHAT A RUSH!” and he throws the gun down on the floor of the car, reaches over and slams the door, puts it in gear, and away we go.

Cassandra and I don’t say a word. And Susie—yeah, she was there to see it too—well, she ain’t said a word recently and she’s not about to start now. And what the hell was there to say? He’s just brought us along to SEE IT, right? He whips us back over to his place where I’d parked the camper, and we get out, and he says, “Well, Tommy, you dumb fuck, catch you in a day or two,” and he slaps Susie on the ass to get her moving forward and walks away leaving Cassandra and me standing there on the sidewalk looking at each other.

Cass says, “We’re accessories, aren’t we?”

“Homicide law is not something I’m checked out on. But, yeah, I guess we are.”

“I didn’t think he was going to do it.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“He’s really crazy, isn’t he?”

“Hasn’t had a sane moment recently.”

And we both just stand there. “Now what?” she says.

“Fuck if I know.”

So we go back to the Shooting Gallery. Well, there’s one thing to be said for the war effort—you learn to grab your Zs when you can. So after staring at the ceiling for awhile, I finally drift off. When I achieve consciousness again, Cassandra’s gone, and that gives me that old iron-in-the-guts feeling. I go downstairs and make a pot of coffee, and I look out the window and detect the fact that the van’s gone. Oh, Jesus, I’m thinking, where’s she headed? Back to West Virginia? I just hope to God she can drive.

She turns up about an hour later. She walks in and hands me the keys. “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t think you’d mind. I just wanted to make sure Zoë got her ass out of town.” And she goes up to our room and starts stuffing her shit in her suitcase. “You going someplace?” I say.

“I think I got the message, Tommy. Took me a while, but it’s finally sunk in. I’m going to go crash with Imhoff.” That just blows my mind. Imhoff? That’s motherfucking ridiculous. I tell her it’s HER ass she should be getting out of town. I’m heading back to Hubbard, does she want to come with me? She says, “Thanks, man. That’s nice of you, but that’s not what’s happening.”

I say, “You are fucking nuts.”

She says, “Yeah, that’s probably true, but it’s my life, isn’t it?”

“But Imhoff? Jesus. What the fuck are you thinking?”

“In a crazy kind of way, he feels safe to me,” she says.

Well, that just sounded totally bananas to me, and we kicked it around for a while, but we were both of us still kind of in shock, you know what I mean? Finally she says, “Are you going to take me to Imhoff’s or am I going to have to take a cab?”

I say, “Fuck you, bitch. Take a cab,” but eventually I gave in and drove her over there.

I wasn’t thinking straight. All I knew is I had to keep in motion, so I kept on going straight to Terry’s. Like I’d made a deal with her—well, sort of made a deal. Anyhow, I thought MAYBE I’d made a deal. I walk in the door, and the first thing she says to me is, “Ethan’s back.”

Yeah, I could see his shit laying around. “Where’s he now?”

She shrugs. “I’d be the last to know.”

So I lay it on her—“OK, sweet stuff, this is the HOUR OF DECISION. A few hairy things have been coming down lately, and I’m moving on. Like the song says, the sun ain’t going to set on me. You coming with me?”

“Oh, fuck.” She falls onto a chair. I fall onto a chair. “Shit,” she says, “what about Cassandra?”

“That’s been over a long time. You know that. I told you that.”

We sit there awhile. Eventually I say, “Look, honey, I’m kind of running on a tight schedule.”

She says, “Give me a couple hours. I’ll meet you at your place.”

Well, it was more than a couple hours. She calls me up that night and tells me things have got kind of complicated on her and she’ll be over THE NEXT DAY.

Maybe junkies have a sixth sense for heat, I don’t know, or maybe it was THE COSMIC FORCES. I was getting just as paranoid as John—like, you know, anything could mean anything. But remember before how the word went out that our place was where IT WAS HAPPENING? Well, now the word went out that our place was DEFINITELY NOT COOL, and then they were all gone, just that quick—Garvin and Lorraine and every other lame weirdo who’d been crashing there. Fuck, it was OMINOUS. The narks weren’t parked across the street anymore, and—this is crazy—I wished they were. I kept looking out the window, waiting for them to turn up, but they never did.

So eventually Terry arrives. She hasn’t got her shit with her. Like she ain’t about to leave yet, she’s got to TALK ABOUT IT. We get a quick fuck in, and then we TALK ABOUT IT. Can she get a job out there? What kind of job am I going to get? You can’t really deal dope in rural North Dakota, can you? Do we have a place to stay? What the fuck did I mean, WITH MY PARENTS? What kind of set-up was that, man? Didn’t that seem kind of off-the-wall? What were they going to think, me turning up with this weird girl from Boston? And on and on and on we go. Eventually I say, “Hey, Terry, just remain with Ethan, OK? He may be an asshole, but at least he’s your asshole.”

“It was an illusion,” she says, “the whole thing with Ethan.”

I’m trying to be patient with this shit. “Look, babyshake, I don’t give a shit if it was illusion or not illusion. YOU’VE JUST GOT TO DECIDE ONE WAY OR THE OTHER.”

Ethan’s gone back to New Hampshire. She’s supposed to join him in a day or two. They’ve given notice on their apartment. Yeah, they’re moving out for good, and she just can’t do it. No fucking way. She told Ethan OVER AND OVER AGAIN that she wants to keep the apartment, like maintain a base in the city, but he ain’t hearing it. “Great,” I say. “It’s a SIGN from the COSMIC FORCES. Get in the fucking camper, and let’s make our break.”

No, we can’t do that. We ain’t done TALKING ABOUT IT. Things have got to be CLEAR IN HER HEAD. So more time goes by while we’re TALKING ABOUT IT. Then one night it’s like, I don’t know, maybe four in the morning, and Terry and me are asleep at the Shooting Gallery. Like I wasn’t about to crash at Ethan’s place. But anyhow, it’s the dead of night, and I wake up the minute I hear the car door slam out front, and I’m laying there in the dark listening to the footsteps come banging up our front steps. Shit, I’m thinking, it’s Ethan. The bitch has been lying to me, and he’s not in New Hampshire after all. Now why the fuck didn’t I fix the lock on the front door? But one thing for sure, he’s not going to catch me like a sitting duck in bed with Terry. So I jump straight out of bed in one leap and land on all fours in the middle of the floor, and that wakes Terry up and she says, “Tom? What’s happening? What’s happening?” And I go, “Shhhh!” because it’s obvious what’s happening if you listen.

The footsteps are banging right up the stairs bigger than hell, and I swear my whole body is tingling and all the hairs on the back of my neck are standing straight up. I grab a chair so if he’s got some kind of weapon, I can bash his brains out. Then I hear this idiotic voice talking away, “Hey, Tommy? You up here, man? Ready or not, here I come.” And WHAM, right through the door, and right into the middle of the room, walking full tilt like he’s planning on making New York by morning, it’s Lyons.

Then, FLASH, the ceiling light is on and I’m so cranked I gobble up the scene with my eyeballs in about two seconds flat. There’s Terry, naked as a jaybird, and she’s just flicked the light on, and she’s grabbed a dress off the floor and she’s holding it in one hand, and she’s aimed out the door. Like before you could say boo she’d be gone, right behind Lyons’ back, and down the stairs. But she sees who it is, and she’s frozen. I guess she was expecting Ethan too. And there I am on the other side of the room, just as naked as she is, and I’m holding the chair all set to catch him on the side of the head. And Lyons is dressed up in a suit and tie, and he’s carrying an attaché case in one hand, and he drops it on the floor, like immediately. Across his other hand he’s got a raincoat draped, and he whips around so that his hand is pointed at my stomach. He’s just laughing and talking away—“Shit, Tommy, hope I didn’t interrupt you or anything like that, hee, hee, hee! I would have called first, but I didn’t really have time. Funniest goddamn little things just keep happening to me these days. What the hell you doing swinging chairs in the middle of the night, Tommy?”

“Lyons,” I say, “you don’t know how close you came to getting your head staved in.” And I put the chair down.

Lyons makes a shrugging motion so the raincoat falls on the floor, and there’s that .44 Magnum pointed at my stomach. “Good thing you got good reflexes, Tommy,” he says, “because I got good reflexes, if you know what I mean.”

I hear a gasp from Terry. He turns to her, still giggling, and she’s nailed to the spot, the dress in her hand kind of useless trailing on the floor, and she’s staring at him. She’s never laid eyes on Lyons before, and God knows who she thinks he is. He uncocks that fucking cannon and lays it down on the raincoat and spreads his hands, saying to her, “You can get back in bed, honeybun. Me and Tom’s asshole buddies from way back.”

“Who the fuck you think you are, man?” I say to him. “Wyatt Earp?”

“Didn’t know who was going to be in here,” he says. “Shit, ANYBODY could have been in here. Well, Tommy boy, where should I put this? In the back of the closet all right?”

“Put what?”

He jerks his head at the attaché case. It’s exactly like the one those two dudes were carrying—you know, the cops or whoever the fuck they were coming out of his apartment.

“What’s happening, Bob?” I say.

“Oh well, man, you know how it is, what with the this and the that, if you follow me. More than likely I’ll call you in a day or two and tell you where to take it. But if I don’t, then I guess you’d better go stick it in a bus-terminal locker or some damn thing. Maybe you could give it to your BANKER to keep for you,” and he laughs like he’s just said the funniest thing in the world.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say.

“Yeah, man, anywhere, man. It’ll be cool for a while. Don’t sweat the small stuff, right? Funniest damn things keep happening to me. That little bitch sold me out. Shit, who can you trust these days?” He goes off laughing again.

“What little bitch?” I say.

“Susie. Yeah, man, she’s singing grand opera. Yeah, she’s sung her an aria or two by now and she’s working her way up to the grand finale. So the long and the short of it, my friend, is we ain’t looking too good at the moment.”

He pats me on the cheek and says, “I love you like a brother.” He picks up his gun and drapes his raincoat over it. Terry’s still standing by the door, frozen. As he goes by her, he pats her on the pussy. “Nice,” he says, “very nice.” He winks at me and goes trotting off down the stairs. We hear his car door slam and we hear him drive away.

“Who the fuck was that?” Terry says.

“Oh Jesus. His name’s Bob Lyons.”

“What’s in that goddamned thing?”

“You think I know?”

“What did you take it for?”

“What the shit is this, twenty questions?”

So we go ring-around-the-rosy with that one for a while, and then she says, “Fuck, Tom, this is just too weird. I can’t deal with this shit. You never told me you were into THIS KIND OF WEIRD SHIT. What else you been LYING TO ME ABOUT? Fuck you, man, take me home.”

So right in the middle of the night I drive her back to her place. I don’t know if Ethan’s there or not, and I don’t care.

What’s going down now? I’d figured Susie for a doormat, but maybe I’d figured her wrong. I couldn’t help thinking, hey, Susie, good for you. But if she’s singing some interesting songs, just what would those songs be about? “Yeah, there were four of us in the car when he shot that dude. There was Bob and me and that tall guy named Tom . . . No, I don’t know his last name, but he’s got a big mop of fuzzy hair. I think he and Bob did a lot of deals together. They used to go in the bedroom and shut the door and rap for hours, man. Bob fronted him a lot of grass. And there was Tom’s girlfriend in the car. She’s got a weird name . . . Oh, yeah, it’s CASSANDRA.”

Was I just being paranoid? Like just how much could a terrified fucked-up little teenage speed freak remember? But maybe Lyons would catch up to her, who knows? And that might mean another body in Roxbury. But he wouldn’t do THAT, would he? Oh, yeah, I’m thinking, sure he would.

So eventually the sun comes up the way it tends to do once a day, and I call up Terry. God knows why, but I figured I owed her that much. The phone rings a few times and Ethan answers. I put on this voice like nothing could possibly be wrong with anything anywhere ever, and I say, “Hey, old buddy, what’s happening?”

There’s this long pause. Then he goes, “Tom. Yeah. Shit. But it’s OK, man. Yeah, it’s OK. I’m glad you called. Yeah. Real glad. That’s good. Like you and me got some heavy rapping to do, man.”

I’m thinking, oh, fuck, she’s told him. I say, “Oh, yeah? Sounds good to me. Why don’t I fall by tonight?”

Sounds good to him too, he says, and I hang up and I’m thinking, yeah, Ethan, right. I’m going to rap with you about Terry? What do you think I am, fucking nuts?

• • •

I’M STILL trying to figure out WHAT IT ALL MEANS. For starters, how did Lyons KNOW that Susie was singing grand opera? Unless he was just fucking with my head or it was all fantasyland shit. Well, let’s just say she really did make her break—how did she do it? Chances are pretty good she didn’t say, “Hey, Bob, it’s been groovy, but I’m splitting now. Oh, and by the way, I’m headed for the nearest police station.” Nope, the way you leave a guy like Lyons is you go out for a can of beans and you don’t bother to come back. So who told him she went to the cops? Most likely a cop told him. Why? Well, here’s one way it could have gone down. He gets picked up for something, but they don’t hold him, and when he’s walking out the door, they say, “We’re going to be seeing you again real soon, Bob. Your chickie is singing like a canary.” And then they watch him to see where he goes. That one did not fill me with joy.

OK, here’s another one. He’s got some arrangement with some cops somewhere, and they help him to maintain his ASININE business and he feeds them information and maybe even some coin—which would explain a lot of things. And that one filled me with even less joy than the first one.

Well, I got to thinking about Cassandra. Like maybe Terry had been messing up my mind, but now she was out of the picture, so maybe I could think straight again. And maybe Cassandra could think straight again too. And, yeah, I wanted her to decide to stick with me, but that’s not what mattered. What mattered was, I had to get her ass out of there one way or another. I loaded all my shit into the camper and I drove over to Imhoff ’s. Guess what? Nobody’s home.

I kill time—driving around, catching a meal, having a smoke— and I keep checking back at Imhoff’s. It looks like a lost cause, but once I’ve got an idea in my head, it’s hard for me to shake it. It’s after midnight by then, and I’m parked right across the street when Imhoff pulls up in his old junk Chevy. He and Cass get out, and she’s wearing Lorraine’s clothes.

I’m out of the camper lickety-split, cutting them off at the pass, and they freak right out. Like why is this weird sinister asshole suddenly springing out of the darkness and WHAT DOES HE WANT? “I just want to rap with you a minute,” I say to her.

“So rap,” Imhoff says, and he makes this disgusted little motion at me, like come on in. I don’t want to go into his place. It’s the last thing I want to do. “Suit yourself,” he says, and he goes inside and leaves me and Cass out there on the street.

“Oh, Tommy, what the fuck you doing?” Cass says. “You scared the shit out of us. This is pathetic.”

“Hey, babe,” I say, “I’m not trying to run your life, but there’s some things you ought to know about.” So I lay it on her about Susie and the cops.

“Look,” she says, “do you think the cops are going to bust their asses over some freaked-out little chick? Come on, man, the world is drowning in freaked-out little chicks, and the thing about cops . . . It’s not that they’re stupid. Well, some of them are. But the main thing about cops is they don’t have the time. Like time is money, you heard that one? And life may be long, but the coin is short. So beyond a certain point, they just don’t give a shit.”

“About homicide they give a shit.”

“About another drug deal gone rank, they don’t give a shit. And anyhow, I’m . . . Look, man, Imhoff’s been around forever and he’s still here. He’s a survivor. And safety’s relative, right? But some places are safer than others, and I’m not doing too bad right now. I’m just part of Imhoff’s scene. I’m like invisible, man.”

Invisible? Yeah, right. Standing there under a street light in Lorraine’s plastic miniskirt and Lorraine’s plastic boots. Yeah, and anybody who deals as much smack as Imhoff is bound to get busted eventually. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” I say. “You name it, and we’re gone.”

“Hey, old buddy,” she says, “I love you too, but you’re making this messy when it should be clean.”

“How about West Virginia?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. Hi, Mom, hi, Dad, SURPRISE. It’s me, your fucked-up daughter. You know, the SMART one.”

“Fuck that shit, Cassandra. We’re talking serious now. Why the hell not West Virginia? We could be there tomorrow.”

All of a sudden she’s yelling at me. “My parents? I’m going home AND FUCK UP MY PARENTS? You just don’t get it, do you? I couldn’t do that to my parents. I’m bad news, man. I’m FUCKED. I’m HEAT. I’m goddamned RADIOACTIVE.”

“Look, babyshake.” I’m trying to stay, you know, real calm and collected. “We ain’t got time left for YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT. Very shortly I’m going to be driving away in that camper, and you’re going to be sitting in that camper with me. You got that?”

BANG, real quick she goes DEAD QUIET. She just looks at me with those steel-grey eyes of hers. Like I know something’s going on in her head, but I haven’t got a clue what it is. I’m starting to feel kind of desperate, so I just keep hammering away at her. Like how it’s one big motherfucking country out there. Like how I’ll take her ANYWHERE. Like how she can stick a pin in a map and that’s just fine with me. But there’s one thing for sure, she’s going with me. And she ain’t saying a word.

By then, I’ll try anything. “Come on, break my heart, why don’t you?”

“Aw, Tommy,” she says, “your heart was broken long before you met me.”

• • •

IT WAS too late to be driving anywhere, so I crashed at the Shooting Gallery. I mean, why the hell not? And when I woke up, I’d never felt more alone in my life.

Now to tell you the truth, I hadn’t been thinking much about John Dupre or Raymond Lee or Mister Jones or whoever the hell he was. And on the few occasions when he’d flickered through my head, I’d thought, well, he’s a smart guy, and the writing’s up there on the wall, and he can read it as well as anybody. But now I was having second thoughts, so I fell by, and even out on the street I could hear the goddamned typewriter going. Yeah, he was making them old keys smoke. He’s real surprised to see me. “Jesus, Tom, I thought you were LONG GONE.”

Well, I could have said the same thing to him. And guess what he’s doing? He’s sitting there in Pamela the Great’s place WRITING SOMETHING. No, it’s not an article—not something for Zygote or anything remotely sane like that. He’s not sure what it is, but by God, is it ever heavy.

Why did I still give a shit? Well, I got to admit I’d always had a soft spot for the crazy fucker going all the way back to the days when I first got to Boston and him and me used to drift around town together, sailing under the black flag. And I can see right away that he’s TOTALLY NUTS. Like his eyes are big as saucers, and he hasn’t caught a shave lately, and he’s talking a mile a minute, and . . . Well, you remember how he kept Pamela the Great’s place real nice? Now it was a pigsty. Clothes thrown in the corners, and dirty dishes piled up, and paper everywhere. Like all this fucking paper with writing on it. You see, he’s got this GREAT NEW INSIGHT, and he starts to lay it on me. “No, no, no,” I say. “I really can’t be catching your GREAT NEW INSIGHT right at the moment. Like it’d be pretty much lost on me right at the moment. But have you considered holding off on this shit until you get your ass back to Canada?”

“I don’t want to take it across the border,” he says. It’s not the Canadian side he’s worried about. He doesn’t want to be in the Boston airport carrying anything that might identify him—especially any revolutionary shit. He’s just a day or two away from getting it done, he says, and then he’s going mail it all off to Pamela the Great, and then he’s gone. You see? I always knew that skiddly chick would mess up his mind.

Well, he’s going on about how he’d figured THE RAIDS wouldn’t come down before October, and I’m going, “WHAT RAIDS?” and he tells me all about it. Like they’re going to sweep up the whole damn Left. Like it’s common knowledge. Like he honest-to-God believes that armed Federal agents are going to come kicking through the door and hauling everybody off in the middle of the night. But he’s a smart guy, right? He’s got it figured. They can’t have THE RAIDS until they’ve got themselves one hell of a good excuse, and, yeah, some of them crazy radicals are going to give them one—like the bombs are going to be going off like popcorn—but not before September when the kids are back in school. So that means THE RAIDS will be in October, and he’ll be long gone by then. So he’s safe at the moment. Yeah, they’re watching him, but so what? Paranoia’s got to stop somewhere.

I swear to God, it really was like talking to somebody in the asylum. “Well, I’ll tell you what, old buddy,” I say. “I’ve had me a GREAT NEW INSIGHT of my own.” And I laid it on him about everybody in the Shooting Gallery being on CANDID CAMERA, and I reminded him that he’d been known to hang out there on occasion himself. And I told him about Susie singing to the cops, and all the shit I’d been thinking about Lyons, and about me and Cassandra splitting up and her crashing with Imhoff, and about how I was ready to take her anywhere in the whole goddamned universe, but she won’t budge, the goddamn stubborn little bitch.

“What the fuck you mean, with Imhoff?”

“Like Imhoff. That old World War Two junkie.”

“Oh, I know who he is. But shit, she told me she was leaving with you.”

Now it’s my turn to go, “What the fuck?” You see, that morning after the heavy shit went down, that morning when she borrowed the camper and went over to make sure her little sister got her ass out of town—well, she told John she was splitting with me. Yeah, she told him that her and me was headed for North Dakota that afternoon. I’m going, “Where the fuck’s her head?” That’s what John wants to know too. So I’ve got to tell him everything that went down with me and Cassandra—like blow by blow, word for word.

We was spending way too much time on that shit, but eventually the whole sick scene comes down on him like full force, and he goes, “Oh fuck.”

You know, when that dumbass hillbilly got cranked up to full flame, he could step right along. We were out of there in forty-two minutes by my watch, and that’s from a standing start. We lost some of his shit in a dumpster across town so it wouldn’t be hanging around to incriminate him, and of course he had to pack up all his revolutionary papers and mail them to somebody up in Canada, and we stopped by the post office to do that, and then we were on our way to the airport. I was kind of worried about him. He was a mess. Like he’d turned kind of grey, and he was panting like a dog. I asked him if he was going to hold it together.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I’ve done this in my head a million times. I’ll buy my ticket. I’ll sit there and look bored. I’ll buy a magazine. Yeah, I’ll just go through it step by step. Yeah, once I kick into THE PLAN, I’ll be all right.”

So I get him to the airport, and we’re standing by the camper in the you-can-not-park-here zone saying goodbye, and I ask him if he needs any bread, and he says he’s still got a few bills left from Cassandra’s hash deal all the way back a million years ago, and thank God, he remembered to grab that up. Jesus, I can’t believe it. And he’s still got some coin from his last Zygote paycheck, he says, and he hauls out his wallet and starts counting. He says he’s pretty sure he’s got enough for his airfare. Like he hadn’t even thought about it, and that kind of gets to me, you know what I mean? So I roll up some bills into a little tube and shove it in his shirt pocket. And I won’t let him take it back out. Like I don’t want him to see how much it is. Like it’s the rest of the Judas money I got for fingering Peter, but I’m not about to tell him that. He starts to thank me PROFUSELY, and I tell him to can that shit. I tell him to slip me the good word via General Delivery, Hubbard, North Dakota. “Listen, asshole,” I say, “send me a postcard from the Weird Land of Mooses.”

• • •

OK, SO there was my good deed for the day, and what I should have done was start driving west, but that’s not what I did. I’d been telling myself a dozen different stories about Bobby Lyons, and with every single one of them, I always hit a point where it didn’t make the least bit of sense. I kept having the feeling that he was fucking with my head—like somehow or other it was all going to turn out to be just one more big sick joke. Like what with everything coming down on him, where he had to be was deep underground—like the big NOWHERE—but I kept seeing him right back at his place, cranked on crystal, Susie laying on the floor coloring away, the stereo going full tilt, the usual assorted freaks in there, and me walking in and him saying, “Well, Jesus, Tommy, it sure took you long enough.”

I’d had a lot of practice lately checking for tails, so I drove around for maybe an hour, and if there was anybody on me, they was a motherfucking genius. I slipped over to Lyons’ place and parked a couple blocks away, and then I went for a nice stroll. The best I could tell, nobody decided to join me. I peered up at the other buildings, looking for anywhere they could be doing surveillance, and, yeah, there was a few likely spots, but they just looked like ordinary windows—blinds up, even people walking around in some of them. No strange dudes parked on the street or wandering by. Hell, it was the most peaceful ordinary-looking neighborhood you could possibly imagine.

I zipped quick across the street and ran up and rang his bell. I waited. I didn’t hear his voice coming out of the speaker. I thought, come on, Parker, you asshole, of course he’s not going to be there and this is not exactly a safe place for you either.

But something told me to stay put. I sat down on the top step and lit a cigarette. And then this pretty little housewife towing a kid walked right by me and stood there fumbling with her key, and just about the time she got the door open, I jumped up with a big smile and held it for her. I waited until the elevator door shut behind her, and then I walked right in.

I didn’t take the elevator. I ran up all those four flights of stairs. Like I didn’t know why I was going so fast, but when I got to Lyons’ door, I was out of breath. I gave a little tap. And no answer. I gave a good solid knock. And no answer. I still didn’t know why I was doing any of this, but I tried the door, and it was open. I stepped in and said, “Hey, Bob?” but I knew he wasn’t there. A strong harsh smell in the apartment, kind of a metal smell.

It’s in the kitchen. One of the burners on the stove. Electric stove, right? It’s on, bright cherry red. Nothing sitting on it, just the burner glowing away, and the porcelain around the edge starting to turn brown, and the harsh smell coming from that. And there’s six cups sitting there, empty and clean, and a teapot with its lid off, and I look in and it’s full of dry tea, and then there’s the tea kettle, right where somebody’s lifted it off the burner and set it to one side. It’s full of water. Then I think, hey, and I get some toilet paper, and everything I’ve touched, I wipe off. I’m feeling like a damned fool, like I’ve just joined old John in the secret service.

I look in the fridge. Hamburger and milk and beer and some leftover pizza. The milk’s still fresh. And I’ve got to wipe all THAT shit off. And then I recall a little conversation I had with Garvin one night. He was telling me the tricks of the trade, and he said, “No, man, you don’t need to carry nothing with you. Everybody’s got SOCKS.” So I walk into Bob’s bedroom and pick up a pair of socks and pull them over my hands. Then I go back to checking out his apartment. There’s nothing much very strange. Except that six people were about to have tea, and they didn’t. And they’d decided not to pretty damned fast. Then I see that his big mother stereo is gone. It’s so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t see it when I first walked in there.

I sit in the living room, not really thinking, just, I don’t know, trying to pick up the vibe of the place. The fish tanks are bubbling away, the fish are swimming around, and it’s motherfucking QUIET. It’s beginning to get next to me. So I check all the bedrooms. They’re a mess the way they always are, lots of girls’ clothes thrown around, and makeup and shit like that. I check Bob’s bedroom again. The bed’s a mess the way it always is. Bob’s clothes are all over the place the way they always are. So I try the bathroom and something really strange starts to happen to me. I don’t know what to compare it to except maybe hunting when you’re tracking something and you get this funny feeling that tells you to stop and wait. I’m tingling all over. I don’t know how I know it, but I know I’m onto something.

A hell of a long time goes by, and then I realize I’ve been looking out the window down at the garage in the back alley where Lyons keeps his goddamn big pig Lincoln. If you’d climb through the window, you’d be out on the fire escape, and you could take the fire escape right down to the ground. You’d have to hang drop to the bottom, and then you’d be right across from the garage.

I push the bathroom window open. It don’t stick a bit. And I slide out onto the fire escape. No problem at all for somebody who’s fairly agile and not afraid of heights. Then I see the thread. A rough edge on one of the bolts and it’s got a little blue thread stuck on it. Blue-jean material.

I go out the way I came in, and wipe off the doorknob, and around to the back of the building where I can look UP at the fire escape. I’m fucking well CONVINCED that somebody has been down that fire escape. I walk over to the bottom where they’d have to drop down, and it’s dirt, and I see there’s footprints and somebody’s tried to scuff them over.

So it’s all leading to the garage, right? The garage door’s unlocked, and I swing it up, and there’s Lyons. He’s laying on the floor of the garage by the trunk of his car, and the tire iron they’d used on him is laying right there with him. They must have laid him out with the first couple bashes and then kept right on going. To make sure. Or maybe they went nuts. Or maybe just for fun. But they’ve mashed his skull good. He’s laying on his side, and I can see one eye, and it’s open, peering up, and he’s got a little smile on his face, almost like a grin, almost like he’s about to jump up and say, “Well, Tommy, what the fuck’s happening, you simple shit?” His .44 Magnum is laying in front of him.

I don’t know why I did it, because I just wanted to get the fuck out of there, but I bent down and looked close. There was a lot of blood. Like you don’t imagine somebody has that much blood in their HEAD. And I could see his brains mashed up. Yeah, there was some muscle behind that tire iron all right. Somebody waiting for him in the garage. Somebody who knew him well enough to know just when to wait, just where to wait. It was kind of sad, you know what I mean? And I said to Lyons, “Yeah, well, who CAN you trust, old buddy?” And the answer to that one was real simple. NOBODY is who you can trust. Some days you can’t even trust yourself.

I stood there in that garage listening to the traffic. I didn’t really give two shits about Bob Lyons, if you want to know the truth. It felt like a huge load had just dropped off my back. But, dumb fuck that I was, I was still trying to see the PURPOSE in all this, like figure out what it all MEANT.

Then it flashed on me again, something I already knew—how one minute you can be alive, trying to figure out your next move, and the next minute you can cease to exist. That one’s so horrible you can only stay with it in your mind for like maybe a few seconds at a time, but when you try to pull back from it, that’s just chickenshit, because you know what? It’s the only thing that’s real. And that’s when I finally got the big picture. Yeah, standing there in Lyons’ garage, I finally got THE KEY TO THE WHOLE UNIVERSE. What does it all mean? I’ll tell you, buddy, it don’t mean shit. You see, I didn’t have to go to Boston to learn that. I’d already learned that at Ton Son Nhut.

I got the fuck out of there. And you know that attaché case Lyons left at my place? Well, I had it in the camper, and I found myself some nice quiet place to park, and I bashed it open. It was full of plastic bags of white powder. Like it could have been anything. It could have been flour or sugar or talcum powder for all I knew, but I was pretty sure that’s not what it was. And I knew a few places I could go to find out what it was, but I didn’t do that. I drove straight through from Boston to Hubbard, and it’s kind of funny. I don’t know what that shit would have brought on the street. Chances are, I could have been a rich man. But on my way out of town, I threw that shit in the Charles River.

• • •

THE END of the line. Oh, my God, John thought, what have I done? He couldn’t see straight. The whole goddamn airport was burning wasp-yellow—light sizzling with images that wouldn’t make sense, a million droplets of liquid fire breaking out on his back. The real had been transformed into a frying pan. Like acid. Mind-warp. Help. He was fucked, he was losing it, he was as conspicuous as a burning cop car. Shit, anybody could be an agent, those harmless-looking kind of goofy, like on the next bench pretending to be businessmen—they could be agents, that stern middle-aged lady holding her purse firmly on her lap could be an agent. What had he thought he was going to do—sit on his ass a million years and watch the really big show go down, the best show in town? If Tom hadn’t turned up to hit him with the real, he’d be sitting there still, trying to find the perfect words to describe the fragments as they blew by his window.

Function, man, he told himself. You can do it. You’ve only rehearsed this scene like four hundred million times. You know what to do. It doesn’t matter what you’re feeling, all that matters is what you do. Don’t think, just rely on the plan. Take the next step and the next step after.

What had Tom been thinking to give him all that money? Nearly eight hundred bucks, Jesus. OK, so bread was no problem. That was a good start. And he was wearing his I-go-to-Harvard outfit—Harris tweed jacket—but his hair was too long, horribly too long, and it was too late, nothing to do about that. They wouldn’t embrace him with open arms at the border, but they wouldn’t stop him either. He was a Landed Immigrant, and he’d only been out of the country for a short time—right, two weeks at the most. In a minute—or two minutes, or ten minutes—when he could function again, he’d walk over to the Air Canada counter and buy his ticket. He had an hour and a half till the next flight. He would smoke a cigarette. He would find some center, something to hold onto, some way to go on living—to make it through this wasp-yellow moment, and then on to the next, and then on to the one after that, but, oh Jesus, the motherfucking buzz.

Outstripped and late. All the brilliant, glittering, fascinating words blown to shit. Not a goddamned thing to hold onto. Once there’d been a council with millions in it, but he couldn’t hold onto the Movement any longer; it had disintegrated into chaos and violence. Then there’d been a council of two, but he couldn’t hold onto Pamela; she was long gone. He couldn’t even hold onto any hope for change; everything was hopeless. He still had a sullen dedication to waiting the motherfuckers out—being ready for them the next time—but that one was pretty goddamn remote, fairly fucking austere; in fact, that one was absolutely useless. None of his identities were any help either. He was back down to a council of one, and that one was fucked and weird the same as always—split into a million glittering fragments like guppies in a fishbowl. Why bother with anything? But that couldn’t be right. What? He’d learned nothing in two years? Pam had found her Sh’ma Yisrael. Why couldn’t he find his?

Something that basic had to be simple—something so simple he’d known it down in his bones forever, something he’d known for so long he’d almost forgotten it. An hour and a half till flight time. Breathe, he told himself. Count your breaths if you have to—like sitting Zazen. Count to ten and start over. That’s what the plan said to do, and that’s what he was going to do. Just sit there. And find it. He closed his eyes. He breathed. He counted his breaths.

Oh, fuck, what if it didn’t work? Mind rattling away, the tiny rat: “You can never trade in any moment in the real for any other moment—never, never, never.” Fuck that shit. He could see the sad old Ohio River rolling in front of his closed eyes. Watching his father die—no words for it. His father’s last words—“I can’t breathe.” You couldn’t get any more simple than that. So breathe now while you can, animal that will die, and the dim pulse in his ears—deeper than any random flurry or distracting hum or nasty buzz of the airport— was his own heartbeat.

So fucking scared he could hear it back of his ears, a rhythm like running, first one foot and then the other—that pulse, deep thrust out, kick back of the veins, the twin beat that was music before there was music. The sun, reflected on the river, burned behind his eyelids, heating the retinae—the world a red haze, dizzying. No way he could miss it—the vivid irritability of living tissue. He would never be here again, exactly as he was, exactly at this moment—sitting in the Boston airport with his eyes shut, breathing, with this particular set of images in his mind, remembering the light.

So fucking scared. “Come on, Alice, sit by me.” Washing carrots in water burning with light—Pamela, naked, and the glass of the windows, the pinks and greys, the lovely blend of emptiness and object, her pale skin filigreed with tracery blue. Glowing with light, and that ancient, monotonous drone of locusts in the trees that says, “Almost school time, almost school time.” Grease and mayonnaise on the plates, small pools giving back sun; the plates are glowing, light on the bubbles in the sink full of dishes, light on their faces. Sweating, the kitchen vivid with heat, the sun everywhere—on the oak table, the silver candelabra, the marble top of the antique sideboard, the crystal in its display case, the threadbare Oriental rug on the floor, the massive wing-back chair. This light would be as brief as a suspended teardrop, and he didn’t want to miss any of it—the golden light pouring through the open window, and the blue-black edge where the light had to start all over again.

Beginning in darkness, emerging in a metallic grisaille, a swelling of cool light along the edges of buildings. A slow but steady crescendo of smoky blue—dove-grey here, steel-grey there. Like a scrim was being drawn away, and the firm shapes of things were emerging, objects pushing back into reality, the wires tightening, the world reassembling itself. He’d got what he’d wanted, and he felt the impact of it shiver through him. Soon he would have everything he needed to make a world.

John opened his eyes. Now he could see the airport—clearly, usefully—and everything was different. He was in that ticklish crossover when everything is suspended, but soon the wires that defined the real would be yanked back into place, so he didn’t have much time—certainly no time for bullshit. Yeah, what was basic was simple—something he’d never lost and never would lose, something he kept with him all the time. It was everything he knew without knowing how he knew it—an emptiness—and what he knew then was more real than any of their theories. Yeah, it was better than any of their theories. When you’re at the end of the line, you’ve got to start over again. What matters is what happens between people, and love is simply love. He bought two tickets for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Minotti on the last flight out for Toronto.

• • •

IT WAS one of those brilliant wine-sap New England afternoons in early September when the clarity of the light is almost too much to bear. John used the cab ride from the airport back into downtown Boston to work out his new plan, to go over it, to make it into the new instruction manual that he would follow mindlessly, one idiotically simple step at a time. Dodging the Washington Street shoppers, he walked into the first large glitzy barber shop he saw. “Make me look like a Harvard boy.”

The barber had that raw belligerent Boston accent—maybe Dorchester—that John had come to loathe. “Look, buddy, I’m a barber not a sociologist. Just tell me how short you want it.”

“There,” John said, pointing at a picture on the wall—a trendy young man who could have been an advertising executive or an aspiring Hollywood bit player. It was the first time scissors had touched John’s hair since 1966. He didn’t come out looking exactly like a Harvard boy, but, as Tom would have said, it was close enough for government work. Amazing, he thought, hair actually has weight.

He didn’t have a lot of time to fuck around. He went into Filene’s, strode quickly through the women’s wear department, looking at the mannequins. Saw an image that was exactly what he wanted. Checked out the salesgirls until he found one who looked right. “My sister’s about your size,” he told her. “I want to buy that whole outfit. Yeah, everything . . . even the purse.”

OK, buddy, he told himself, just keep moving it along here. No time to wallow in commodity fetishism, just buy all the goddamn accessories to match the image—pantyhose, underwear, a couple bras. He asked the girl at the cosmetics counter, “What’s in at the moment?” Bought lipstick, mascara, and blush. He couldn’t think of anything more, and time was chewing his ass.

On the street again, loaded down with his shopping bags and his own knapsack, he scanned the passing cabs, looking for a young driver with lots of hair. Gave that one up pretty quick and flagged down the first one that looked even remotely likely. Threw his shit into the back seat. The man turned to look at him. Mid-forties, maybe, his face marked with acne, old eyes that had seen it all—a stereotype out of a Raymond Chandler novel. So what would Phillip Marlowe do? John took out his wallet, peeled off a twenty and offered it. “I’ll double your fare if you don’t remember this trip.”

The cabbie didn’t look the least bit surprised. “Sure,” he said. “Let me book off.”

At Imhoff’s, John said to the cabbie, “Wait for me. Like wait, OK? It may take a while.”

John hammered the door. Nothing. He checked his watch. Fuck, what if they weren’t home? Footsteps, the door swung open. Imhoff: “Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee.” Inside, everything had ground to a halt; it was any time at all—no time—the blinds drawn, the yellowed shade of a brass floor lamp casting a piss-yellow circle in the corner. John was assaulted by the standard-issue stench of cigarettes and grass. It took his eyes a moment to adjust. Five or six heaps that turned out to be people, all of them heavy on the nod. Imhoff galumphed back to an overstuffed chair by the stereo. John wasn’t ready for this shit. Felt the sting of adrenaline, the need to move. There was no sign of Cassandra.

Imhoff speaking—low rumble—gave it up. But in a moment had another shot at it, “Reefer?” Codfish hand flopping, pointing toward the table and a baggie of dope.

“Thanks,” John said. “Later.” He watched Imhoff subside into his overstuffed chair, nod off.

John found Cassandra right where he’d thought she’d be—in Imhoff’s bedroom. She was sprawled diagonally across the bed, face up. She could have been asleep or dead or a waxworks figure. His heart hit a double thud; he knelt to listen for her heart—his ear on her chest. Found the beat, slow and steady, solid as a rock. “Cass,” he said. No reaction. He put his fingers to her lips to feel her breath.

She was wearing one of Lorraine’s sleazy minidresses, floral on black, and tight black boots, old-fashioned ones with thin heels. Her eye makeup was smudged into gooey black circles. The dress was hiked up to her hips, her black pantyhose ripped at the crotch and full of runs. “Cass,” he said. Again, nothing. He turned her arms over and found tracks on the left one. Not much. But at least twice. Like the small discreet dots left after the doctor does a blood test. “Oh, baby,” he said, “you’re looking good.”

What he didn’t need at the moment was any interference. He poked his nose into the living room, saw that the huge dumped sacks weren’t stirring. He ghosted on into the kitchen, went though the cupboards until he found a bowl, filled it with warm water, and carried it back to the bedroom. Got a washcloth, a cake of soap, and a towel. Knelt by the bed and washed Cassandra’s face. If she felt anything, she sure as hell wasn’t showing it. Cleaning around her eyes was a bitch. He twisted the corner of the washcloth into a point, used that to clean her lashes. It was taking forever. Slow, slow, slow, he told himself, do it right.

“What?” he said to her. He was sure that she’d just said something. A word or only a sighing murmur? But nothing now, only her steady breathing.

He’d got her face clean. She could have used a shower, but no way in hell. He stripped her naked, prayed that she’d wake up. Nothing. The inevitable metaphor—a life-sized doll. She was warm, alive, breathing, but gone—the ultimate logic of junk. If anybody did anything to her now, she wouldn’t know it, might never know it, might only stumble upon it later—as something not right, something that hurt. “You’re not lost, Cassandra,” he told her. “It’s the world that’s lost.”

Christ, who would have thought putting a bra on someone would be so fucking difficult? He hauled her up into a sitting position, folded her into his arms. He’d always hated bras, the fiddliness of their hooks. He tore open the package of pantyhose. Now what? Well, start with her toes. Wait a minute. Shouldn’t her panties go on first? Yeah, of course they should. OK, and now the pantyhose—did they have a front and a back? Yup, they came in leg shapes with the feet outlined. He slithered the damn things over her toes and began working up her legs, going back and forth from one leg to the other. Problem at the hips. A goddamn dead weight. He tried rolling her to one side, but that didn’t seem to work. He pulled them as high up as he could in the front, then turned her completely over onto her stomach. Jesus, the things were truly demonic. He tugged and jerked them over her ass, got the waistband into place, and his finger shot straight through the sheer fabric. “Shit.” As he rolled Cassandra back over, he could see the run sailing merrily down her thigh. But he was finally getting some reaction out of her—in a small, thick, fogged-out voice, clearly, “Fuck off.”

“Come on, Sleeping Beauty. Get your act together.” But she was a traveler in a galactic spaceship, an experiment in time suspension.

He’d had it with doll dressing for the moment. Her old blue carry-on bag was in the closet. Her clothes—mainly Lorraine’s clothes—were strewn on the floor. He picked the best of them and started packing. Talk about getting down to basics, she didn’t own much more than Mahatma Gandhi. He put her old worn-out Frye boots at the bottom, then her navy blue sweater. She only had two books, battered paperbacks—Carlos Castaneda and Simone de Beauvoir. He found the ratty purse she’d been carrying—some stupid thing of Lorraine’s—dumped everything out. Checked out her wallet. A five-dollar bill and some change, her Social Security card, her West Virginia driver’s license, her student card from Bennington—expired, of course, but it would still help. He put her wallet into the immaculate brand-new black leather purse from Filene’s, threw in the makeup he’d bought her.

OK, back to the doll. He wrestled the white button-down blouse onto her, did up the buttons, yanked the pleated herringbone skirt up over hips, zipped it and fastened the waistband. Her eyes fluttered open for a moment. “Fuck, man. Fuck you.”

“Hey, great stuff. Consciousness. Just goddamned marvelous. Stand up, OK?” But she wasn’t about to stand up. How the hell was he going to move her?

Well, first things first. He grabbed her carry-on bag, her new purse, and the jacket that went with her new suit, ran with them back down to the cab. Flung them into the back seat. “We’re almost ready,” he heard himself singing out cheerfully. The cabbie didn’t say a word.

John ran back to the bedroom. Cassandra had rolled over onto her side and put a pillow under her head. “Terrific,” John said. “Signs of life. Come on, twinkletoes.”

He rolled her back over, pulled her downward until her legs stuck off the bed, worried her brand-new black pumps onto her feet. He took her hands and pulled. Her body hung back. “Cassandra, for Christ’s sake,” he said. He let go, and she collapsed. He checked his watch. Holy Jesus. How could he have ever thought that this ridiculous hare-brained scheme would work?

He could only imagine carrying her one way—the way the hubby carries his new bride across the threshold in countless old movies. He wrapped his left arm around her back, shoved his right arm under her knees, and picked her up. Fuck, she was heavy. He lurched through the door, pressed his shoulders against the wall to brace himself, and started down the steps—one thick, murderous, deep, impossible step at a time. Sweating, heart slamming, he heard Imhoff’s phlegmy rumble. “Hey, man. What the fuck you doing, man?”

“Just walking her.” Ridiculous. She was a hell of a long way from walking anywhere. The goddamned front door was closed. Panting, he set her down, hoped she might find a spark—just a small hit of juice, survival instinct—hoped that she might stay propped there a few seconds. She slid down the wall, arrived on the floor with her legs splayed. “Fuck,” she said, but her eyes stayed shut.

John jerked the front door open, looked behind him, saw shapes shifting back there in the beatniks’ twilight. “Hey, she’ll be all right,” Imhoff rumbled at him. “Nothing to get hung about. Just on the nod, you dig?”

Dutiful hubby, John picked up his bride again and staggered through the door. The cabbie sat behind his wheel staring up at them as impassively as a toad. John started down the front steps. One of Cassandra’s new pumps fell off and went skittering away—bing, a bing, a bing—down to the sidewalk. John sat down, Cassandra’s body heavy as grief in his arms. This is too fucking hard, he thought. I can’t do it. This is worse than Kafka. This is Groucho Marx in hell.

“Cassandra,” he said directly into her ear. Her eyes opened, regarded him a moment. Not a goddamned thing in them. Closed again.

He stood up with her. His back muscles were burning. He made it down to the cab. The fucking asshole cab driver continued to sit there, motionless. John leaned her against the cab, held her up with one hand, opened the door with the other, wrapped both arms around her waist and inched her inside, fit her in with the luggage. She flopped, lying awkwardly, partially on the seat and partially on her bag. John sprinted back to get her lost pump, saw Imhoff standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs, the light behind him—the wreck of an old sea captain, watching as his ship sinks beneath him. “Mr. Lee,” Imhoff yelled. “Hey, Mr. Lee. Fuck, man. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

John jumped into the back seat of the cab, slammed the door and locked it. “Move.”

The cabbie turned slowly around in his seat. “She smacked out or what?”

“Yeah,” John said. Gripping the handrail, Imhoff was stepping ponderously down the stairs.

“What the fuck do you take me for?” the cabbie said.

“For Christ’s sake,” John said, “I’m taking her home,”

“How do I know that ain’t her home?” pointing up at the house.

Imhoff had arrived to bang on the window of the car with a thick pink fist.

“Come on, man,” John said. “I got to get her the fuck out of here, man.”

The cabbie had all the time in the world. “Holy Mother of God,” he said. He leaned into the back seat to yell directly into Cassandra’s face. “Hey, lady. Hey, lady.”

This is the motherfucking end of the road, John thought. He put his arm around Cassandra’s chest and pulled her upright. “Cassandra?” She opened her eyes.

“Hey, lady, do you want to go with this guy?”

She tilted toward John, gave him a look that was fixed, glassy, and owlish. Then she smiled. “Hey, hero,” she said and let her head fall onto his shoulder.

“OK,” the cabbie said and pulled away.

• • •

“DRINK,” JOHN said and pressed the Styrofoam cup to her lips.

She swallowed. “Too sweet,” she said.

“Sweet’s what you need. Come on, drink.”

“Jesus fuck, man, I’m coming down.”

“Yeah, I know. Drink.”

He fed her coffee and watched the clock. He’d left it as long as he could. “Don’t move,” he said to her. “I’ll be right back.”

Would she simply sit there? Was that possible? He hurried into the men’s room. All those million times when he’d gone over the plan in his head, this was the moment he’d always dreaded, but, yes, he had to do it now and not on the plane. There were many excellent, well-thought-out reasons why he had to do it now and not on the plane. He closed himself into a stall, took out his wallet, tore up the bits of paper that said he was Joseph Alfred Minotti, and flushed them down the toilet. Now he couldn’t change his mind. He’d passed the point of no return. He was an amorphous blob of nothing, a snail without its shell. He had no identity, and he would continue to have no identity until he was on the plane and the plane was in the air. If anything happened before that, he was fucked.

When he got back, Cassandra was still sitting up. Miraculous.

“This is heavy,” he told her. “This is motherfucking serious.”

“Dupre, you’re so full of shit.”

“Can you walk?” he said.

“Fuck, yes, I can walk. Just back off me, man, OK? Jesus, man, I’m coming down.”

A girl’s voice, cheery as all hell, called for boarding. Wait. Don’t get caught up in a crowd of people who might be curious, or friendly, or simply not inclined to mind their own goddamn business—but don’t be the last ones either. He had to steady her, his arm around her waist, but she walked.

“Rough weekend,” he told the stewardess—tried for a conspiratorial grin. He gave Cassandra the window seat, stowed his knapsack and her bag, fastened her seat belt, then his own. The inside of his mouth tasted like shit. Take off, he prayed to the invisible pilot. Cassandra lay back in her seat with her eyes shut, but at least she hadn’t slumped into some conspicuously whacked-out position like a rag doll. A voice came over the PA. When it switched from English to French, Cassandra opened her eyes and stared at him. “You asshole,” she said. The plane taxied down the runway. It sat there for a while—for a hell of a long time, for only a minute or two. It took off.

The no-smoking sign went off. John lit two cigarettes, gave her one. “Where the fuck are we going?” she said.

“Toronto,” he said.

“Great. Motherfucking fabulous. Thanks for giving me some choice in the matter.”

They were high above the clouds, and the last rays of the setting sun struck her full in the face. She turned away from him and stared into that brilliant light.

With the nail file he’d kept in his shirt for precisely that purpose, he cut the thread around the secret pocket on the inside of his knapsack, took out the Landed Immigrant card, his Ontario driver’s license, Social Insurance card, York University student card—all the little rectangles of paper that attested to the fact that he was an utterly credible person named John Dupre. He filled out the customs forms for both himself and Cassandra. They had nothing to declare.

“What the fuck am I wearing?” she said.

“Dig it. You came to Boston in disguise, you’re leaving in disguise.”

“Yeah, right. Fuck me, man. What am I disguised as? Jesus, Dupre, you’ve made me into a goddamn lady.”

She picked up the Filene’s purse, checked out the contents. “I don’t fucking believe this,” she said. “Let me out.”

He got out of his seat. She moved slowly down the aisle, steadying herself on the seat backs. He watched her make it all the way to the can. When she came back, she’d combed her hair, put on a touch of lipstick and mascara and blush—just enough to complete the image created by the stockings, the pumps, and the herringbone suit. “When this is over, Dupre,” she said, “I’m fucking going to murder you.”

• • •

“HAVE YOU been out of the country long, Mr. Dupre?”

“No. A couple weeks.”

The dude at Customs and Immigration was not smiling. He was all business. “How long will you be staying in Toronto?” he asked Cassandra.

“A few days.” Her voice was right, her eyes were right. Everything about her was right—the purse, the shoes, even the way she was standing.

John watched that balding, middle-aged official check her out. No, she wasn’t one of those goddamned pain-in-the-ass American radicals; she was exactly what she looked like—a girl in a herringbone suit, a nice girl, a very pretty girl. “Welcome to Canada, Miss Markapolous.”

Customs didn’t bother to open their bags. They walked through the basement of the airport, up the stairs and outside. The sun had set, leaving behind a clear stripe of indigo.

Cassandra let her bag fall to the sidewalk and turned on him. “OK, Dupre, just what the fuck do you think you’re doing with me?”

“I’m not doing anything with you.”

“You motherfucking kidnapped me, man.”

“Listen, Cass. Dig it. Nobody knows where you are. Like the California pigs . . .”

“Fuck you, man. What the fuck are you going to do with me?”

They had made it. The whole bizarre plan had worked, and it was all too fucking much. He was mad enough to kill her. “I’m not going to do a goddamned thing with you,” he yelled back at her. “Go find another man to live off. Go find another sick fuck to stick needles in your ass. Jesus, Cassandra, you can do anything you damn well please.”

That stopped her.

“Listen.” He wasn’t yelling now. “Nobody knows where you are. Not the California pigs. Not Sweet Charles. Not Zoë. Not your parents. Nobody. And nobody’s going to know unless you tell them. Paranoia’s got to stop somewhere, right? Well, it stops here. You’re out of that sick crazy fucked-up American karma. You’re free and clear, Cassandra. You’re vanished. You’re gone.”

He didn’t know whether she’d got it or not.

“Cassandra,” he said, “you’re in Canada.”

After a moment, she said, “Why?”

“Why what?” But he knew what she was asking. “Don’t you remember what we said to each other? We’re linked. We’re closer than a brother and a sister.”

“But, Jesus, man,” she said, “I was only sixteen.”

“Yeah? So? You were sixteen. Come on, Cassie, did you think I’d forget?”

She inhaled—a sound like an interrupted “Ah.” Her eyes filled, spilled over. She walked away a few steps, pressed one hand over her face, and stood there crying. It didn’t last longer than a few seconds.

“Is this a groovy city?” she asked him.

“It’s a great city.”

“We got any coin?”

“A few bills.”

“Shit, man, then we got no problem. Where we going?”

“My old place in the Annex.”

She shook her head—not in the least saying “no” but, oddly, like shaking off something, a scarf or a hood—a gesture that must have been left over from when she’d had long hair. She wiped the tears off her face.

“Oh, fuck, Dupre,” she said, laughing, “you’re such an asshole. I bet you’ve wanted to see me dressed like this ever since you met me.”

She caught his hand and pulled him forward. Walking quickly, she led him toward the cab that would take them into downtown Toronto.