In November 1998 the Iridium Communications company launched sixty-six satellites into orbit. The company had ultimately intended to launch seventy-seven of these satellites to complete the network; the name Iridium was derived from the element with the atomic weight of seventy-seven. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, the result of internal mismanagement coupled with an insufficient demand for its satellite phones. Although the Iridium global satellite communications network provided constant worldwide coverage, the phones were unwieldy and expensive, and were quickly pushed out of the market by the advent of roaming contracts between terrestrially based cellular providers who offered smaller phones with cheaper coverage plans. The Iridium network was dormant, and plans to de-orbit the satellites were drawn in 2000. However, the satellites were rescued by the company’s most powerful customer, the Pentagon, which saw potential for defense applications. The sixty-six satellites remain in orbit, and today are used extensively by military intelligence. These sixty-six satellites were designed with massive panel-shaped antennae, and the mirrorlike reflectivity of their material causes intense satellite flares. If the geometry between the satellite, the sun, and the terrestrial observer aligns just right, a brilliant flare of light appears, lasting several seconds. This flare appears as a dim dot of light moving slowly across the sky, becoming brighter as the satellite moves into alignment with the observer and peaking in a flash of about –9.5 in apparent magnitude^I before quickly fading away. The phenomena of Iridium satellite flares occur often, due to the large number of satellites, and, due to the regularity of the satellites’ patterns of orbit, at rigidly predictable times. These satellite flares will continue until the satellites are decommissioned, or until orbital decay eventually drags them back down to Earth.

•  •  •

There was something Caleb Quinn used to do every afternoon, when they were the only two kids who got off the school bus at their stop. Maggie was seven and Caleb Quinn was nine, and two years’ difference was nearly a third of a lifetime then. When the school bus had gone, engine grumbling, gaskets hissing, a cloud of diesel vapors left behind and a hundred hands fluttering from the half-open windows, just Caleb and Maggie standing alone on the grass at three thirty in the afternoon, Caleb would tackle her, effortlessly, pin her wrists to the ground, sit on her chest, and spit on her face.

He would dredge up a glob of snot from the back of his throat with these exaggerated sucking noises, mix it with his spit, let it dribble out, coil it onto her face in a long string. He liked to get it in her eyes and her hair. He spat on her until there was a thick sparkling sheen all over her face. Sometimes he’d drink a can of Hawaiian Punch on the way home so his spit would be pink, sticky, viscous. Maggie lashed her head from side to side, shrieked, struggled under him. He would only get bored and stop when Maggie quit struggling and resigned herself to being spat on. Eventually, he realized that just the anticipation of the first drop of spit was the worst part of it for her—that’s when she squirmed the most. After that, the daily torture changed: First, he would tackle her, pin her wrists to the ground, and sit on her chest; then he’d summon up a frothy mouthful of spit in his cheeks and just let it ooze out between his lips, slowly extending it farther and farther down without letting go of it, and then, when the head of the strand dangled a half inch above her cheek and Maggie was wincing, burying her head into the ground trying to wiggle away from it, he would slurp it back up like a yo-yo, chew on it some more, swish it around in his cheeks, and repeat; back and forth, closer and closer, until he could no longer abstain from the pleasure of seeing it slopped on her face. Maggie began to carry a hand towel in her backpack to clean herself up with before he let her walk home, so her mother wouldn’t see her like this when she got home from school.

•  •  •

Much later, in high school, Maggie fell in love with Caleb. They moved in together, much happened, and a year later she left him. A year after that, Maggie married Kelly Callahan, and soon after she gave birth to their son, Gabriel. One night, when Kelly was at work, Caleb Quinn came over.

•  •  •

Johanna was eighty-four years old and still lived in the tall, narrow house her late husband had built when they married and moved to Colorado sixty years earlier. He was a good builder but an amateur designer, and his do-it-yourself approach resulted in some strange architectural quirks. The double doors at the end of the second-story hallway opened onto a twenty-foot drop where he’d intended to build an upper deck. The second floor was accessible not by a staircase, but by a pneumatic, pedal-operated, wrought-iron elevator, which is why Johanna kept a rope ladder upstairs, in case it ever broke and she got stuck up there. The ghosts of her late husband’s hands were all over everything. Most of the people Johanna had known well in her life were dead.

Johanna was having problems with language. Words were leaving her. Simple verbs and nouns mysteriously vanishing from her vocabulary. They were moving out of her brain and leaving their empty shapes behind, like the pale outlines of pieces of furniture that have been sold or given away. She occasionally found herself wondering how to communicate actions like “listen,” “eat,” “give,” or grasping to recall the words for objects like tables, spoons, or garbage cans, as if these things were so unremarkable that people had never bothered to waste time thinking of names for them. She was losing information. It was as if her brain was a wall from which every day someone was carefully removing a few bricks, slowly weakening the integrity of the structure.

She was alone in her house, situated at the intersection of two unpaved county roads, by a lake, a power plant, a line of railroad tracks, and an empty field of brown grass. An aluminum Christmas tree stood in the living room year round. A few years before he died, her husband had bought a telescope, which he had set up on a tripod inside the glass doors to nowhere at the end of the second-story hallway. Her phone rang routinely once a week on Sunday afternoons when her son called from Houston. The call usually came at about three o’clock, sometimes up to fifteen minutes past or fifteen minutes before the hour. She would wait until the middle of the third or fourth ring to answer it and say: “Hello?” And she would be answered by the disembodied voice of her son in the receiver, tunneling through wires or quivering along a system of strings or tubes or however it got from there to here, and she’d have a conversation with it.

Her son, who lived in Houston, would usually visit twice a year. She still drove herself to the grocery store in town and cooked her own meals.

There was also an oak grandfather clock with a brass pendulum, and it still kept time. Johanna’s hearing was still good enough to predict when the clock would strike, from anywhere in the house, by the subtle ratcheting noise it made when it reared itself to bong out the count of the hour. There was a lot of silence in the house.

She read the Bible. One day, reading the Book of Ezekiel, she began to think about the following passage:

I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. . . . In the midst of the living creatures there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures darted back and forth like flashes of lightning. Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel upon the earth beside each living creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each had the appearance of a wheel inside a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and their rims were full of eyes all around.

She began to wonder if Ezekiel had been visited by aliens. She told this to her son one day over the phone. She read the passage aloud to him, and then told him about her theory that Ezekiel had been witness to some fantastic display of extraterrestrial technology and had (only somewhat) misinterpreted it as a vision of God. Her son tried to change the subject.

Also at around this time she saw a new light in the sky at night. She had been looking in the right place at just the right time. She was standing on her front porch, looking at a spectacular vault of sky above, haunted with ribbons of starsmoke. At first it was only a speck of light. It traveled slowly across the sky in a smooth, shallow arc, gathering gradually in brightness until it became a blazing white flash, and then the bright light, though still moving in the same direction and at the same speed, began to fade away until it disappeared.

Johanna drove to the library and checked out books about astronomy.

Now Johanna spent each night awake until very late, looking through the telescope at the end of the second-story hallway, aimed at the sky through the glass doors to nowhere. She began to see more of these lights in the sky. She recorded their patterns, penciling her documentations in legal pads, with brief descriptions of what she saw, the date, the exact time of its occurrence, and its position in the firmament—its azimuth, its distance from both zenith and nadir.

She became increasingly convinced that these lights in the night sky were of extraterrestrial origin. Johanna spotted at least four of these unexplained lights per week, sometimes more. But the weekly four occurred with religious regularity. Johanna detected a pattern, or perhaps it was a small part of a larger pattern. She hoped it was part of a larger pattern, as there was much that remained a mystery, but she felt she was beginning to piece it together. In her mind the disparate threads were beginning to form a network.

The lights usually happened in the early evening, just after sunset. Every Tuesday the light would arrive at eight o’clock, almost on the dot, appearing directly south, about 30º above the nadir and 150º below the zenith: She would look at the southern sky through her telescope, listen for the subtle ratcheting noise of the grandfather clock rearing itself to strike eight times, and as soon as she heard the first strike of the clock, the light would appear in the sky. The next one came three days later, on Friday at 7:51 P.M., at the exact same altitude but about 10º west of the previous light. The next came the next day, in precisely the same heavenly position, at 7:45 P.M. The final light in the pattern appeared at the same altitude, but 15º east of Saturday’s, on Sunday evening at 7:53. The pattern repeated this way, week after week, without fail or fluctuation.

Every time she saw the light in the sky, she felt something moving inside herself, in her blood, her lungs, her organs, a feeling that was not quite terror and not awe and not humility, and not a feeling that she was catching sight of something of sublime beauty, but a feeling that combined elements of all these, a feeling that must have been something akin to what early human beings felt millions of years ago when they looked up at the spectacular vault of sky above them, haunted with ribbons of starsmoke, and had no idea who they were or where they were or how big was the universe.

Johanna felt she was listening in on something.

•  •  •

First, foremost, Kelly’s truck: what a dilapidated hunk of shit it was, how it shuddered and moaned and coughed and wheezed and didn’t start half the time.

Kelly Callahan was a friend of mine, and so was Maggie. Caleb Quinn I knew, but I’d never have called him a friend. Jackson Reno I knew only peripherally. We all grew up together; we had all gone to school together. And just by a weird coincidence I knew Fred Hoffman, too. I’d briefly worked for him once, painting houses. Fred sort of fired me or I sort of quit, depending on who you ask, though even now he still calls me up once in a while and asks if I want to subcontract a job for him. His niece, Lana, I never met, but Fred showed me a picture of her once, which I thought was odd at the time, but it makes more sense to me now. That’s how I stand with regard to everyone involved in this story, which is why, although I’m not in it, I’m not in the worst position to tell it.

But the truck.

It was a 1987 Ford F-150 that his father had given him, with a spiderweb crack in the windshield and rust-eaten paint, though it had been white. And as for the vehicle’s problems, its many ailments, its many electrical and mechanical idiosyncrasies: The windshield wipers didn’t work, the headlights went dim if the radio was on, none of the gauges on the dash were reliable, the engine was prone to overheating, and it was furthermore in dire need of new brakes, tires, transmission, air filter, fan belt, spark plugs, and an oil change, and the tank was forever low on gas. This last problem would have been ameliorable enough if not for Kelly’s bigger problem, the real problem, the umbrella problem, the arch-problem from which all other problems germinate: money. Kelly’s lack of it, specifically.

The truck is important because Kelly needed it for work. Kelly was working two jobs at the time. The first, his day job, was doing construction, and he worked with his friend Jackson Reno. Except for the foreman they were the only two white guys on the crew, and this was in Colorado, where nobody’s unionized, and even then Kelly only got the job in the first place because the foreman was a friend of his dad’s. Kelly hooked Jackson up with a job on the crew; Jackson had just gotten out of jail for dealing cocaine and nobody wanted to give him a job. Jackson was still on probation and was trying to save enough money to get out of his grandmother’s basement. Jackson had sky-blue eyes and his face somehow always seemed to have four days’ stubble on it. He dressed every day in ripped-up low-riding cargo shorts that came down to his ankles, a wifebeater, and a Raiders cap he always wore cocked half-sideways on his head, and had arms covered in bad tattoos. On his right bicep he had a tattoo of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell. All the fingers on his right hand were the same length and had no fingernails, from once when he was building one of those kit cabins in the mountains and a log slammed down on his hand and set with the tips of his fingers under it, and once those things set, you can’t move them; the foreman had to shoot him up with morphine and rip his hand out. He once told me it was “cauliflowering” before they even got him in the car.

Kelly’s second job was driving around in the middle of the night delivering newspapers. That was what he really needed the truck for. Kelly got up around eleven at night to go to work. He’d do his paper route and get home at six in the morning, then go out again to his other job. He had to get that second job because his wife had just had the baby and Maggie couldn’t work, and they were desperate for money. He was constantly trying to keep the bank account in the black. It hovered always at just about zero, and if it went under then he’d get zinged with all these Kafkaesque fees for not having any money. Kelly Callahan spent about a third of his income on bank fees. Kelly had red hair, red-red Irishman’s hair, and he’d recently grown a beard. He usually wore cowboy boots and a grubby Colorado Avalanche cap. He was in pretty good shape, but he was thin and small, five foot six or so. Maggie had gotten fat. She had an eyebrow piercing and wore too much makeup, all that dark shit around her eyes making her look like a raccoon. Sometimes I would see Caleb’s car parked outside their trailer when I drove by. I never told Kelly about it. Caleb Quinn and Maggie had dated in high school, if that’s the word for it—they were the sort of high school couple that ditched class to go get high and screw in the bushes behind the tennis courts. They both dropped out of school and moved into an apartment together by the lake behind where the KMart used to be. They were doing a lot of drugs, and I’ve heard (admittedly, like, thirdhand, but I believe it) that Caleb was beating her. She left him, moved back in with her mom, and later got together with Kelly. She got pregnant and they decided to get married. Maggie and Kelly had been married for a little under a year. Gabriel, their kid, was about five months old when all this happened. They were living in that trailer park out by where 50 and 227 come together. Kelly was twenty-one years old and Maggie was twenty. I think Caleb and Jackson were twenty-two and twenty-three, maybe? I can’t remember exactly.

Anyway, on the night of August 19, the night before the night in question, Kelly got up at about 11:00 P.M. Maggie was still up watching TV. He kissed her good-bye and left. The truck started and he drove to work.

•  •  •

Kelly figured if he turned off the engine the probability it would start again was about sixty percent. Every time he turned the key in the ignition he prayed he would hear the sound of the engine catching and vomiting to life and not grurr-rurr-rurr-nglk!—(silence). When he was at work, rubber banding and stacking the newspapers, he’d leave the truck’s engine on while it sat in the parking lot. It leeched gas mileage leaving the truck running, but he couldn’t afford to have it die on him at work, or worse, have it die in the middle of his route while he was getting gas, and he couldn’t afford to have it fixed and he couldn’t afford the time to fix it and sure as fuck couldn’t afford a new car. After taxes, rent, food, gas for the truck, bills, cigarettes for himself and Maggie, diapers for the kid, and other necessary shit, there was pretty much nothing left. It was a good month if he could save more than twenty bucks. It was a bad month if the bank started charging him fees as this paradoxical punishment for not having any goddamn money, and all of a sudden, having done everything right, bills paid, no letters from collection agencies, no letters threatening to turn off the water, no outstanding debts, no drugs, no bounced checks, not much money in-pocket but not quite zero, and hey!—next day we’re a hundred bucks in debt with a week till the next paycheck. Kelly wondered if having a bank account at all was costing them more than if he’d just cash all his paychecks at the liquor store and put all the money in a fucking coffee can but Maggie was against this financial plan, as she found it low-class.

And Kelly was tired. So what do you do every day, Kelly? You wake up at eleven at night and see your wife and kid for fifteen minutes, get in the truck, turn the ignition and pray it starts, if it doesn’t, call work, grovel, tell them you’ll be late, if it does, drive to work, a half hour up 227, pull into the lot of this converted airplane hangar with a concrete floor and corrugated aluminum walls, remember to leave the engine running, clock in, drink coffee, get one of those orange hand trucks, wait for the rig to deliver the papers from the printer, dump a stack of newspapers on the hand truck, wheel it over to the workstation, pull out a newspaper, fold it once horizontally and twice vertically, snap a rubber band on it, slip it in an orange plastic sleeve and repeat, repeat, repeat: Repeat 358 times, load them all back on the hand truck, wheel them out to the truck, put as many as will fit in the cab in the cab and the rest in the bed, all the newspapers in plastic sleeves slipping and sliding around in the truck bed like a bunch of just-caught fish in a net, refill your coffee mug with burnt-ass office coffee one more time, light the first cigarette, and drive around the suburbs of Longmont, Colorado, all night throwing newspapers out the window into people’s driveways, and if you do it fast you can get home at like five thirty, six at the latest, park the truck on the gravel outside the trailer, say a little prayer for the engine and kill it, eat something, peanut butter sandwich, get into bed with your wife and child, don’t wake her up, just lie there next to her and wish you’d slept, worry about money, try not to worry about money, don’t take your shoes off so you don’t fall asleep and miss work, then at six thirty microwave some more coffee, pack a meal in a brown paper bag, shake yourself awake and light another cigarette, watch the rising sun and wait outside on the gravel for Jackson to swing by in his Chrysler LeBaron and pick you up to take you to your other job, where you and Jackson and six Mexican guys build dream homes for people who buy organic produce and do yoga and sit at computers in air-conditioned offices and go to lunch at Chili’s, Applebee’s, at TGI Fridays, and who refer to theirs as “real” jobs, then go home at four thirty, so fucking tired you feel dead on your feet, see your wife and child for as long as you can manage to stay up, watch some TV, have a beer or seven, go to bed, sleep for five hours, and get ready to do it again.

Everything went as usual that night. As usual, Born Again Steve at the workstation next to his tried to give him religious pamphlets. As usual, quotes from the Book of Revelation. As usual, the oceans turned to blood and the sun was blotted out of the sky, and as usual, the riders wore breastplates the color of gleaming fire and the heads of the horses were like lions’ heads and fire and smoke and sulfur issued from their mouths and a third of mankind was killed by the fire and smoke and sulfur issuing from their mouths. As usual, Kelly told Born Again Steve to fuck off. As usual, Born Again Steve clucked his tongue at him like, whatever, it’s your own damnation. As usual, Kelly finished half his route and parked his truck without turning it off at his special spot. His special spot was in the gravel parking lot of Centennial Park, over on top of the hill by the lake and the power plant right off Lookout Road. There’s an old cannon there with a plaque on it commemorating the site of a battle that happened in the 1870s when the National Guard slaughtered a bunch of Indians. Kelly sat on the hood of the truck and lit a cigarette and looked at the stars.

As he was looking at the sky, he saw a tiny object, a glint, like a little moving star, scrolling across the sky. The tiny prick of light traveled in a smooth, shallow arc, gradually gathering in brightness until it became a bright white flash, and then the bright light, though still moving in the same direction and at the same speed, began to fade, until it disappeared from the sky.

What had he seen? A strange light in the night sky, appearing, flashing, disappearing. He wasn’t alarmed. It could be a plane or something, something explainable, something man-made, but Kelly hoped it was a UFO. In the strictest sense, that’s exactly what it was, right?—an Unidentified Flying Object. He imagined a time in human history, a time that wasn’t that long ago, before a third of the stars had been erased from the night, before the sky was crisscrossed with the trajectories of blinking jets, when the night was clear, dark, primeval, and mysterious new lights in it were harbingers of wars and plagues or of the supernatural nativities of prophets, portents of disaster or salvation. It made him think about that ocean of blackness, going on and on and out forever. He thought about the word forever. He thought about the fact that he was going to die. He remembered a thought he had once when he was a child, when he was lying in bed with strep throat, and he was feverish, swollen, sticky with sweat, so sick that for a moment he wished he would die, and in his head he sent a prayer up to God, to make him die. Then he immediately had second thoughts and wanted to take it back and so he sent up another prayer telling Him to ignore the first and hoped He would understand. Because the thought of death had made him think this: If we believe in God and be good and so on when we’re alive, then we get to have eternal life after we die. Now imagine what eternal life would be like. It made him shudder. He determined that the idea of eternal life was much more terrifying than death. He realized that a material, biological death was not necessarily something to be afraid of, but rather, when checked against the terror of infinity, a comfort.

Kelly got back in his truck and finished his paper route. The sunrise as he was driving home was a good one that morning. The sky looked like it had been sprayed with fire and the faces of the mountains were glowing as if lit from within. The road shrieked under his tires as he pulled onto the deserted interstate and far ahead a flurry of birds burst over the highway and farther still the highway tapered out into a thin band of silver on the horizon. He picked up a hitchhiker on his way back. He found him sitting on his backpack on the shoulder of the interstate with his thumb out. A skinny man with a walrus mustache who slurped coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Trinkets of coffee clung to the wires of his mustache every time he took a sip. He said he was traveling because he was wanted for larceny in Wyoming and he was headed to Mexico. Kelly wished him luck, dropped him off on the exit ramp, and went home. He hadn’t put any gas in the tank because the only money he had was some loose change clicking around on the dash and buying $1.36 worth of gas was hardly worth it, and because there’d been a couple of state troopers at the gas station who might have said something about Kelly filling up the tank without cutting the engine. The needle of the fuel gauge jittered right above zero. He parked the truck on the gravel outside the trailer, said a quick prayer for the engine, and turned it off. There was a guy living next door who raised dogs for fighting and kept three pit bulls all chained to the same post outside, and as always, when he pulled up they went crazy barking, scrambling all over each other and looking like one giant crazy dog with three heads. It was almost six in the morning. If the rig from the printer hadn’t been late he would have been home half an hour ago. The door was unlocked. Inside the lights were off and the blinds shut to the sunrise, narrow orange bands of light striped across the room, and Maggie was sitting upright on the couch, in sweatpants and a T-shirt, feet bare, Gabriel asleep in her lap. The TV was on. The sound was muted and the picture was on snow.

“You’re up early,” he said.

She looked at him dully. She was mad. About what?

Kelly had been drinking coffee all night and needed to piss. He dumped his jean jacket in a chair and went to the bathroom. His urine hit the middle of the water with a violent sound, then he remembered Gabriel was asleep right in the other room and he redirected the stream to the side of the bowl to silence it. His piss smelled thickly ammoniac and was cloudy, so dark it was almost orange. Urine infection. Dehydration, too much coffee. Zip up, splash water on hands and face. Soap, scrub some of the newspaper ink from blackened palms, water. The ink from the newspapers spiraled down the drain in marbly black threads. His eyes were murky, ringed with wrinkles of gray skin, the whites dark with blood.

When he came out of the bathroom Maggie was still sitting there on the edge of the couch. She had something stuck up her nose, a twist of toilet paper crammed into one nostril to dam a nosebleed.

Kelly said: “What’s wrong.”

“Caleb Quinn come over when you was at work,” she said.

“Caleb Quinn? What did—”

He could feel the anger coming inside him, starting in his stomach and racing up his throat.

“What did he want?”

She didn’t look at him. She was watching the agitated crackle of static on the TV. It wasn’t quite snow. There was some kind of image buried in it. Silent, fuzzy figures moved like shadows behind a curtain of noise.

Her voice was a decibel above a whisper, and she looked like she was conscious of being watched as she said:

“He raped me.”

After he’d calmed down enough and the baby had quit crying and had gone back to sleep, Kelly sat down with her on the couch.

They sat there together, watching the figures moving behind the static on the TV, not saying anything, Gabriel asleep on Maggie’s lap. Kelly tried to hold her hand, but she didn’t want him to. He tried to put his arm around her, but she flinched, she didn’t want to be touched at all.

At a quarter to seven they heard the dogs barking outside.

Jackson Reno had pulled his car up on the gravel outside, and they heard him sink his palm into the horn of his green Chrysler LeBaron three times, probably guessing that Kelly had fallen asleep. Kelly had to go to work.

•  •  •

Fred wet the seam of the joint he’d just rolled, double-sealed it with an index finger, and presented it to Lana.

“This,” he said, holding it the way one would hold up an interesting archaeological artifact for schoolchildren to see, “is a joint rolled with the inveterate craftsmanship of a dude who lived through the sixties.”

Lana smiled and accepted it, almost over-casually, Fred thought, like not making too big a deal about this new illicit wickedness between them, as if to say there was nothing wrong with sharing an illegal marijuana cigarette such as this with her uncle, though it was obvious the wrongness of it thrilled her.

“Do not, I repeat, do not, tell your mother about what we’re gonna do here,” he said. “She wouldn’t get it. This is not porn—this is art. I don’t think she would get it. I don’t think she would understand the difference.”

“What is the difference between pornography and art, Fred?”

“That’s a time-old question of aesthetics and the answer has to do with your, uh, philosophical outlook, but what I say to that question is very little actually when it comes down to it. But still. Bottom line, don’t tell your mother.”

“Yeah, no duh,” said Lana. “She wouldn’t get it.”

They were sitting at Fred’s kitchen table under a jittery fluorescent tube full of dead bugs, looking at books of nude photography. Fred had just dropped the needle on an album of Alan Lomax field recordings; the antique recording warbled and crackled with static, and Lead Belly sang:

Brady, Brady, Brady, you know you done wrong

busting in the room when the game was going on

Lana extended her neck out with the joint between her lips and Fred lit it for her with the feeble blue sputter of a Zippo that was running out of fuel, clacked it shut with his thumb, and set it on the table. This is what was on the table: the lighter; some empty beer bottles; two orange Fiestaware plates, on which were forks, knives, and crumbs of toasted hot dog buns and spaghetti; a brown glass ashtray Fred had stolen from a Best Western in Utah, containing the ashes and butts of the cigarettes they’d smoked; several books of art photography they’d been looking at together; some matte prints and proof sheets of Fred’s own photographs. The table itself Fred had made out of tree stumps and a slab of concrete he had painted pink and decorated with Mexican Talavera tiles. Every spring he hauled the bastard thing out to the sidewalk art fairs in Denver, Boulder, Aspen, Durango, Santa Fe, Taos—along with his paintings, framed prints of his art photographs, and the other unwieldy pieces of furniture he’d made and painted with kaleidoscopic patterns, turquoise, green, neon pink, diamonds, suns, crescent moons, lizards, cacti, jaguars, dog-headed snakes, Aztec gods—and he would sit under his designated tent in a lawn chair with a cigarette and a beer and an ice-cream cone and hope for customers, and if none bit he just watched the passersby, which was entertainment enough if the weather had warmed up and all the skirts and flip-flops and bikini tops had finally come out of hibernation. Occasionally he actually sold something. Fred also photographed weddings and did high school yearbook shots, if the parents didn’t take a look at Fred and decide not to drop their kids off with him (which happened), and in the summers he painted houses to supplement his income. Still, Fred Hoffman was perennially broke. He leased (not to own) this aluminum-sided fifties ranch, and had illegally converted the fallout shelter into a darkroom, where he spent a lot of time under red lights, breathing in the noxious miasmata of fixer, developer, and stop bath. Working with paint and photochemicals compounded perhaps with too much acid in the sixties (mostly the seventies, to be honest) had given Fred some nerve damage, and though he felt his wits were still intact, sometimes his words couldn’t quite slide through the electrical conduits from brain to mouth syntactically unscathed—they got bogged down somewhere along the way, always arriving late and in the wrong order. He also found himself talking in a slow, nasal, pained-sounding voice; his lungs straining to push air through a smoke-hoarsened throat. And at some point in the last ten years he’d gotten really fat.

Fred wanted to shoot nudes—atmospheric close-ups of milky hips and legs and torsos and breasts, black-and-white shots with very narrow depths of field, pale dunes of skin sloping into the distance like mystical desert landscapes, or maybe something like David Hamilton, delicate-boned girls splashing around in streams, wringing hair, sighing, perched lithely on logs like forest nymphs out of some titillating Greek myth. He was thinking about starting a Web site, though Fred wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, he only knew that he apparently hadn’t been paying attention at the precise cultural moment when everything suddenly turned into w-w-w-dot-whatever-the-fuck-dot-com. Any technology more cutting edge than the eight-track was as good as voodoo to him. But cell phones, computers . . . technology was the thing now. Somehow technology was supposed to save us all. The future was promising and bright. It was the summer of 2001.

Fred had met Lana in Troy, New York, at his mother’s funeral, when his scattered and estranged family got back together for the first time since they were kids. At the reception Mom was lying supine in a glittery electric-blue casket with a plush white interior, looking like she had passed out in the backseat of a ’57 Caddy. Fred said they should have buried her facedown so when the Rapture comes and Jesus floats down from heaven to raise the dead she’ll wake up and start digging in the wrong direction and we won’t have to ever see her again, unless she eventually resurfaces somewhere in China with fingers clawed to the knucklebones, hacking up lungfuls of dirt . . . Fred’s sisters didn’t think it was funny when he said that. Lana had been fourteen years old at the time and had recently gone all mall punk, with a silver bauble flashing on the curl of her nostril and her pretty little head totally befouled with this psychotic haircut, her hair shaved to the skull except for a Kool-Aid–green shock in front that dangled to the corner of her mouth, and she had a disgusting habit of chewing on it. Her mother—one of Fred’s older sisters—said she was “in a difficult phase.” Lana was doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, listening to the Buzzcocks, dressing like a hooker, and mutilating herself with safety pins. Her mother simply didn’t understand. Fred understood.

During that week, Lana and Fred would sit across from each other at dinner and exchange looks of exaggerated boredom while everybody else blithered about property values, retirement plans, PTO meetings, interest rates. Greasy, fat, bearded, long-haired Fred generally went ignored, and Lana was usually discussed by the adults (while she was present) in the third person. Lana would rearrange the food on her plate in pecks and scrapes with her silverware, makeup-blackened eyes full of murder, responding to anything asked of her as if the question were absurd. Sometimes in the course of the conversation Fred would open his mouth and attempt to contribute in some way, and when he finished talking, everybody else just sort of stared at him for a moment, and then, after a few ticks, somebody changed the subject, and people started talking again. Lana warmed to Fred.

Fred told Lana about painting backdrops in Hollywood, about his stint as a playwright in New York, about the punk scene in the East Village, about how he’d tended bar at CBGB for a while, about how he once went to live on a commune in New Mexico in the seventies but they kicked him out after three days because his stupid dog was chasing all the fucking sheep.

Lana told Fred her parents were pricks. Fred had to agree. After everybody had gone home, Lana and Fred exchanged a couple of letters, and Fred sent her some mix tapes—stuff like Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, (early) Sonic Youth, the Replacements, Gang of Four, Orange Juice, Josef K, The Teardrop Explodes. Meanwhile, Lana grew her hair back, washed out the dye, and quit mutilating herself with safety pins, although (as far as her mother was concerned) she still dressed like a hooker, and now that Fred was sending her the mix tapes she was listening to nastier music than ever. She was sixteen. She was still “in a difficult phase”—or maybe she was in another one.

Lana’s family lived in some godawful cardboard-cutout suburb in Southern California. She saved up for a plane ticket, and now, two years after Fred’s mother’s funeral, Lana and Fred were sitting in Fred’s kitchen together, smoking pot and talking about photography and listening to Lead Belly.

Lana gave Fred the joint, scooted back her stool, and crossed the room. Fred watched her walk: Her jeans were rolled up to her calves and her feet were bare, a flaking spot of red nail polish on each toenail. The bone-yellow linoleum of the kitchen floor made sticky noises under her feet and the rotten floorboards yowled as she walked. She yanked open the refrigerator, an old mint-green Frigidaire that looked like a sci-fi robot. The refrigerator hum kicked on and beer bottles jingled in the side door.

“Want another beer?”

“Fuck it, hon,” Fred said, wheezed, emitting a burst of smoke with each word. “Uno mas cerveza, señorita. Pero uno, solamente uno.”

“Your Spanish sucks, Fred.” Lana gripped the necks of the beers with three fingers. “Are you a lightweight?”

“I’m driving, hon. They’ll be more beer when we get back. You’d better keep a rein on yourself there. I don’t want you getting all sloppy drunk on me here, man, I mean, this isn’t operating like, heavy machinery here, but it does require a little, uh, cognizance.”

“I don’t think that’s the right word. Cognizance means like, knowledge. Competence?”

They’d been talking about photography. Lana said she used to want to be a poet, but now she wanted to be a photographer. They were going to shoot photographs. Fred was going to take the photos; Lana was going to model.

She set the beers on Fred’s table, took the joint from him, took the smoke deep into her lungs, let it churn there a moment, exhaled from her nostrils. Lana wedged open one of the beers with a plastic lighter, handed it to Fred, and did the same with hers. She swigged the beer, squinting. She had a tendency to squint. In the last year and a half she’d grown into her body more. Her shirt hung limp on her thin shoulders, no bra, the shadows of her nipples showing through the fabric.

They flipped through the photography books, pausing for a long time on each glossy page to soak up the image, talking about the photographs. They talked some more, a bottle of whiskey came out, they did a shot together and talked about the Delta blues. They were going to cover her body in silver paint, drive out to the woods, and do light paintings. Fred’s plan was to set up the camera on the tripod in a dark place and take shots with very long exposure times, and Lana in her silver body paint was going to flit around in front of the camera like a forest nymph and Fred would shine the flashlight on her and turn it off, burning her ghostlike image into the celluloid.

The Alan Lomax recordings ended, and they moved into the living room, where the turntable was, and started rifling through the record collection that covered all four walls of the room from floor to ceiling. As Lana flipped through records, Fred mentioned Tommy Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Son House. Fred mentioned Blind Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Gary Davis, Blind Lemon Jefferson. Fred mentioned Lightnin’ Hopkins, Pink Anderson, Leroy Carr. On the turntable, Robert Johnson sang:

If I had possession over judgment day

Lord, the little woman I’m lovin’ wouldn’t have no right to pray

“Is this song about the end of the world?” said Lana, the bottle of Wild Turkey in her hand. She was sixteen. Fred was forty-nine.

Fred spoke to Lana about what Federico García Lorca called duende: an untranslatable word for the ineffable graveyard mysticism of only the truly great flamenco music: irrationality, earthiness, a dash of the diabolical, and a heightened awareness of death. That duende, he said, is present in these blues songs in a visceral and immediate way. All truly great music has it, he said—that skull and crossbones, that eros-thanatos, that love of darkness that infuses the sound and sentiment behind the downbeat, the minor key, the doomsday lyrics, making them so lush and so dangerously alive: a heightened awareness of death.

•  •  •

So next day we’re at work and Kelly’s telling me this bullshit about how he wants to “kill” Caleb Quinn. Kelly’s pissed, I mean pissed the fuck off, and on top of all that he aint got no sleep cause he works his other bullshit job at night throwing newspapers in people’s driveways and I’m sittin here thinkin he’s gone all psycho on me here and I’m all like, hold on, slow down, motherfucker. What? No. I already told you. The thing is, Kelly don’t understand women. A bitch is the only thing in the world that loves you more the worse you treat her. That’s like the first fucking thing about understanding female psychology, and I don’t know why but Kelly never got it. Kelly, that motherfucker is whipped. Kelly thinks he saved Maggie from a bad life, like Caleb is the bad-guy cowboy and he’s the good-guy cowboy and Maggie’s the bitch tied to the tracks in her panties and dun-dun-dah!, here comes Kelly on a white horse. He don’t understand the bitch’d rather have a bad-guy cowboy in a black hat to come around and fuck the shit out of her than a good-guy cowboy to save her. That’s the first fucking thing about like, human psychology, period. Nobody really wants to get saved, right? But whatever, she don’t respect his ass and Kelly hates that she sits around all day getting fat and toking up with the kid in there. And I’m all like, what the fuck did you expect, dog? You marry a bitch and of course she’s gonna get fat. But he don’t even know about half the shit she does. Like, case in point. That skank calls me up on my cell some night when Kelly’s gone throwing his stupid-ass newspapers and she asks me if I got any coke I wanna sell her. I say, no, fuck you, not only do I not have coke, I aint ever going to now cause I just got out of motherfucking jail, if they catch me doing anything while I’m still on probation they’ll fuck me in the ass ten times worse, and furthermore, you stupid cunt, I know for a fact Kelly don’t like you snorting yay or tweaking or whatever the fuck else you’re doing and you got some fucking brass calling me up like this knowing how tight me and Kelly is, and I aint gonna tell him about it this time, but you stop this shit or I’m gonna talk some sense into Kelly and let him know the full extent of the female parasite he’s got hanging off his ass while he’s out there busting it working two goddamn jobs to make rent, you understand? And Maggie, she’s all crying and shit, like, sorry, sorry, sorry, and she starts saying something else and I just hang up on the bitch, click. And that’s the difference between me and Kelly. But that aint Kelly’s main problem. Sure as hell it aint his main problem right now. Huh? Yeah. Yeah. No, like I fucking told you, I’ve known Kelly Callahan since we were this fucking tall, dude. Jesus. Whatever, dog. Okay, yeah. So we’re at work, right, and Kelly’s all telling me this bullshit about how he wants to kill Caleb Quinn, and he don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, right? Cause Caleb Quinn, it’s not like I’d call him a bud but I know him, right, and Caleb, he’s a big motherfucker, like six three or some shit and three hunnerd pounds. And Kelly’s just this little dude, and now he thinks all a sudden he can take Caleb, like he’s the Incredible Hulk or some shit and just getting pissed off is gonna turn him into this big scary green-ass monster? But Kelly’s good, man. He’s good people, you know? He gave me some help when I was in a bad situation and hooked me up with this job when I got out of jail for drug shit—which was a bunch of bullshit anyway—and nobody wanted to hire my ass, so I owe him one, right? And Kelly, I say to Kelly, the time to return the favor is now, and my favor to you is this. First of all I’m gonna be the one to cool off your fuckin’ head, dog, cause you’re dead tired and crazy pissed and you have lost your brain, so first thing you need is a friend with some rational motherfucking faculties here. Second thing you need is a second, cause there aint no way in fuck you’re gonna take that bigass motherfucker by your littleass self. Third thing you need is a plan, cause this like take-him-out-and-whack-him Godfather-type shit you’re talking about is simply not enough. So we’re at McDonald’s on lunch, right, and we’re talking, just brainstorming, understand, and I say look, dog, I know Caleb Quinn. I used to be tight with Caleb way back, known him since we were this tall. So I go meet up with Caleb, I say to Kelly, I go meet up with him and I bring him to you. Don’t ask me how, I’m gonna figure that out. I have my ways, dog, don’t worry about it. I take him up to the park, right? Centennial Park, with the cannon on top of the hill where they killed all those Indians or some shit? We take his car so he feels chill with it. We drive up to the park, and that’s where you’re gonna be at, and you’ve got a baseball bat or something. Go get yourself one a them Louisville Sluggers. There’s this trail there, right, and the trail goes down a hill, around the bend? You know what I’m talkin about? You be waiting right there around that bend, so you can get the drop on his ass. I aint even gonna touch his ass unless you miss or something and you need my help, but I don’t want to cause this is your thing, right? So don’t miss, but if you do, just in case I got your ass, trust me. So that’s the plan, right? And I say to Kelly, you better be out on that trail with a bat or some shit by nine o’clock tonight, and you just sit your ass down and wait. I’ll take care of the rest. I say nine cause that’s when the sun goes down, cause it’s summer. It might take me all night to get him out there cause I don’t know how long it’s gonna take me to find him, so be ready just in case, is what I tell him. If I got him with me I’m gonna try to call your cell before we get over there so you can get ready, but I’m warning you I might not get a chance to call, so don’t expect it, just be ready anyway. And don’t, I repeat, don’t go busting nobody’s skull by accident cause you’re a jumpy motherfucker right now and you think they’re Caleb. I’m gonna keep him talkin, and you know his voice, right, and you know my voice, so that’s how you’re gonna know we’re coming. And I’m gonna make damn sure he’s walking in front a me so I aint the one that gets whacked by mistake. Main thing is, keep your fucking cool, Kelly. And then Kelly asks me if I can try and get Caleb out to the park by eleven so he can still get to work throwing newspapers, and I think that shit’s so fuckin funny I just laugh, but then he’s all like, I’m serious, dog, I can’t miss work. So I just say yeah, whatever, I’m gonna try and get him up there by eleven so you can beat his ass and still get to work. But here’s what I want you to do now, I say to Kelly. Huh? Yeah, we’re still at McDonald’s here. I say, go tell the boss you’re sick, you got to go home right now. You gotta go home cause the most important thing you gotta do now is get you some fucking sleep, dog. Rest up, cause you’re gonna need your energy, and you’re all nodding and shit right now, I can tell you’re tired. So Kelly says yeah, OK I’m gonna go home and get some sleep. We go back to work and he tells the boss he’s sick as a dog, and the boss is like, yeah, whatev, Kelly, you look like shit, go home. So he clocks out and I drive his ass home and drop him off. And we’re outside his house and all these dogs in the yard next door are going crazy barking and Kelly’s getting out of the car and I say, Kelly, promise me you get you some sleep. I don’t care fuckall what that bitch has got to say to you when you get in there, just tell her shut the fuck up, I got to get some sleep so I can think straight, you understand? And he says yeah, he promises me, but I can’t hardly hear his quietass voice cause of all them crazy dogs barking. So I get back to work and everybody is looking at me all like suspicious, cause they understand some kind of shit is up but they don’t know what, but I just say fuck all y’all, and I clam the fuck up and I don’t say a goddamn thing to nobody the whole rest of the day, except for shit like, hey, gimme that hammer. The end of the day comes and there’s this little bit of shit with the boss wanting me to work overtime cause with a man down that afternoon we didn’t get where we was supposed to, but I just say no, man, I got a date, can’t stay, sorry. I go back to my gramma’s house, say whatup and kiss her cheek and shit and I go downstairs and wash up and change clothes. I get in my good clothes which was a mistake cause they got all fucked up with blood later but that’s the least of my problems now. When I leave the house, all I got on me is a shirt and jeans and boots, forty bucks in my pocket, my phone and a pack of smokes. I take the bus downtown, eat a sandwich at Papa Jose’s and then I go to the Scumdowner and walk up to the bar and order a beer. There aint nobody in there at first cause it’s early, but more people start coming in and I just hang back and shoot some pool. And sooner or later I see this guy I know, Braden Boomsma. I know he knows Caleb. So I see this motherfucker from my past life and I just go up and say hey dog, whatup, and he says I hear you got out a jail a couple months back, and I say yeah, it’s good to be back. And then I say, hey, dog, you ever seen Caleb Quinn round here no more? Whatever happened to that dog? And he’s all like, naw, dog, I guess that just means you aint been to the Scumdowner much lately cause he still comes in here all the time. He’s working some job fixing swimming pools now. He gets off work about seven and he comes in here about a half hour later. He stick around all night? I say. He says, yeah, he stays a couple hours sometimes, sometimes he’s here till last call. It’s like six thirty now, and I know Kelly aint gonna be out there at the park with a bat till like two, three hours, so I gotta keep busy. I bet Braden a beer on a round of pool, and I’m winning till I knock in the eight ball, so I go up to the bar to buy his ass a beer and buy my ass one too, and when I get back from the bar who the fuck is standing there at the pool table as Braden’s racking the balls? I aint seen this motherfucker in two years, and I never did much like that motherfucker much anyway so it aint like I been seeking his ass out since I been out of jail. Sure enough he’s wearing these ugly yellowass boots that he cleans pools in or whatever. And here I am, I’m standin here with two beers full up to the rims in both my hands and I’m all trying not to spill and shit and still for some reason I can’t take my eyes off these big yellow boots he got on. And Caleb Quinn says, hey, whatup dog, like we’re buds. I put down the beers and we shake, and when me and his hands are doing the whole slap-squeeze thing I feel he’s still got a real good arm, and I note this duly. So then I’m all like, I aint seen your ass in like two years, what you been up to, just some bullshit like at. And we’re talking, and the conversation’s just about shit we used to do, all the girls we used to know. Just a bunch of inconsequential bullshit. And we’re shooting pool and shit and talking. But I’m keeping my eyes on the clock the whole time, waiting for it to get close to nine. Caleb’s loosenin up and drinking, and I’m drinking too, but I’m trying not to drink too much cause I gotta hold on to my wits. But I get an idea on my own, which is I keep on betting him beers on pool games, and at this point it’s just me and Caleb and the pool table cause Boomsma is over at the bar trying to chat up the one girl in the room, and she aint even that hot. And here I am, I keep on losing and losing, cause I’m throwin the games. I keep on sinking the eight ball and shit, playing like shit on purpose. So I let him win and win, and I keep going like, shit, dog, it aint my night, and Caleb, this greedy motherfucker can’t turn down free booze, especially if he feels like he won it off me. So I been going over to the bar and buying his ass beer after beer and then shot after shot when he switches to whiskey, and don’t get me wrong, Caleb’s a big dude and he’s a drunk anyway, so it takes a lot to get him good and shithoused but he gets there alright. And it’s like, not even nine yet, but here’s Caleb, and he thinks we’ve been having a grand old fuckin time and I guess he’s right, and here I am about to take a shot, and I’m lookin at the cue ball and the cue’s slidin in and outta my fingers like a dick in a pussy and that’s when I look up all sly and I see Caleb standing there like he’s ten sheets to the wind, and I see him put down his beer on the edge of a table, but he like half misses the table and the glass falls, and I don’t even remember if it broke or not all I remember is he tried to put his beer down and missed the fuckin table. And that is when I unload the plan on him. And it works like a motherfuckin charm, at least the first part does. I make my voice all quiet so he’s gotta lean in to hear me, and I look around the room like I’m being all like conspiratorial and I say, you still into yay? He leans back and he’s all like, yeah, every now and then, like he’s trying to play it cool, but he don’t have a very good poker face. See now this is the thing, Quinn (I say to Caleb). My old connection calls me up the other day and says check out all this shit we got. At first I say, naw, dog, I can’t get into that shit no more, I’m still on probation. And then he tells me how much and what price, and I freak out, right? Soon as he tells me what he’s selling this shit for I’m all like, the fuck? cause at first I don’t believe him, I think he’s shittin me, but I say, I gotta see this shit, so I meet up with him and take a look at it and sure enough he aint shittin me. Shit is fucking gold, man. And I’m broke as a joke right now cause ever since I got out of jail I been trying to go straight. If I sold this shit off for even like half what it’s worth I’m gonna be in good shape, I think. I cannot turn this shit down, so I throw down and buy it all off him right then and there for half a grand. And then I go home, and the next day I get a surprise visit from my probation officer. She didn’t search the place or nothing, she’s just like checkin up on me to make sure I got a job and shit, which I do, but she scares the fuckin shit out of me, right? I’m all standin there and she’s talkin to me and the whole time I’m all like shakin in my boots cause alls I can think about is all that yay all rolled up in a sock in my closet, and I’m trying to stay cool, and I do, and she goes away, but soon as she’s gone I’m having some extremeass second thoughts about my little purchasing decision yesterday. You know what caveat emptor means? Caleb goes, what? I go, it means don’t go round buying a shitload of coke when you’re on probation and you got some bitch from the fuckin government coming round at randomass intervals checking up on your ass. So, I say to Caleb, that all happened yesterday. So now I realize how much I fucked up. I bought all this yay, and I realize now, I been in jail for damn near two years, and in that time all my contacts dried up. I don’t hardly know nobody in town no more. I don’t know who the fuck to sell it to. And for obvious reasons I aint about to try to sell it to some dog I don’t know all that well. And that, Caleb, is what brings me to my unhappy conclusion. I have got to get rid of this shit ASAP, and I figure if I can’t turn a profit on it I might as well sell it for what I paid for it just to get rid of it, which is a fuckin steal considering the quality of this shit. So. You interested? And then he lets a couple seconds go by, like he’s all busy thinking it over, like he don’t want to make it look like his pussy’s already all wet over it, but I can see in them little pig eyes of his he’s already made his decision. Yeah, he says, yeah, I’m interested. Good, I say. And then we talk details and he says he’ll give me the five hunnerd I say I paid for it, which is the best offer I got for a bunch of coke that don’t even exist. He says today’s my lucky day cause today was payday and he’s got the cash on him right now if I got the shit on me. I say good for you, but I don’t have the shit on me. My whole unfortunate legal situation’s made me real paranoid about this kind of shit, and I went and hid it in the woods. He goes, what the fuck? I go, I know, it sounds crazy, dog, but I wanted that shit the fuck out of my house. I put it in a fuckin coffee can and hid it a little ways off a trail in Centennial Park. You know up on that hill off Lookout Road? It’s like five-ten minutes from here? He agrees, says yeah, yeah, says he knows it. So I say, you got wheels? I drove the company van down here after work, he says, cause I got the van till close and they aint got no way of knowing what I do with it after. Okay, good, I say. What? Yeah, yeah, we’re still at the Downer. I dunno, nine? Nine fifteen? Yeah no. Yeah. Now Caleb Quinn’s shithoused, yeah, but I figure he’s a pretty good drunk driver from years of practice so I guess he’s still basically good to drive. We’re only going one way, anyway, I think. So he goes off to piss and I call Kelly on his cell, but it aint on, which kinda scares me a little cause he’s supposed to pick up. What? Yeah, I guess it was like about nine thirty, almost ten at that point. Last time I looked at a clock it was nine, don’t know where the fuck a whole hour went. I start leaving a message for Kelly but then I stop and put down the phone cause I see Caleb come out of the bathroom. Now I’m thinking if Kelly pussies out on me or some shit and it turns out he aint there when we get there what the fuck am I gonna do if we get out there in the bushes and I aint got nothing to show him? That thought makes me start to sweat a little, so now I gotta work out a Plan B if Kelly flakes. Caleb comes back, says, aright, let’s go. First he wants to peace out with Boomsma though, but I don’t want nobody being able to say for sure he saw me leave the bar with Caleb that night, and I tell him so, and he agrees, but he don’t know the real reason why, he just thinks I’m being all paranoid about the coke and shit. So I swear him to secrecy and then I go up to Boomsma and smack him on the back and say, so long, and he aint really paying much attention anyway cause he’s still tryin to chat up the one girl in the bar even though she’s not that hot, and I just get the fuck out of there and go wait outside for Caleb. Five minutes later he comes out, too, but before he does I try calling Kelly’s cell again and again it just rings and rings. I’m thinking if Kelly pussies out on me I guess I’m just gonna have to say, aw, shit, man, it aint here, some little bird must of took it, but I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to act that good to bullshit that bad. We go get in his company van, which is like this pool cleaning van with all these nets and pool equipment and shit on top of it and this picture of a mermaid on the side of it holding a pool net. The mermaid’s got nice tits. We go. I’m sitting there tryin to think, and in my head I’m all like, stay rational, dog, and there’s all this alcohol swimmin around in my brain cause I fucked up a little and wound up drinking a little too much. I try and see what pocket he kept his keys in, cause now I’m thinking if this here company van’s in the parking lot next morning it’s not so good, right? And I’m also thinking if he sees I aint got shit on me and I took his ass all the way outta town for nothing, he’s gonna get real suspicious, and I aint got a getaway car or nothing, and don’t get me wrong, I’m plenty confident with just my fists, but this here motherfucker is stacked like a fuckin wall and if he lands a punch on me in the right place it’s gonna mean lights the fuck out for me. So all of a sudden I got a lot a shit on my plate and I’m sittin shotgun in this pool cleaning van and we’re driving around and Caleb’s all swerving around on the road and shit, and that’s when my cell goes off. Who the fuck is at? says Caleb. The fuck is it to you? I say. I say, it’s my gramma. That was a lie. Of course it’s Kelly, calling me back way the fuck too late. I turn down the volume on the phone way way low so Caleb can’t hear and then I answer the cell and I make my voice go up like three registers like I’m talking to my gramma. I go like, Hi, Gramma! What the fuck? says Kelly on the other line. Oh shit, I’m thinking. How fuckin dumb can you get? And I’m like, oh, I’m just out and about, Gramma. I’m coming home soon, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about me. The fuck are you talking about? says Kelly. I aint your gramma. We been sittin here in the goddamn dark waiting for your ass. Good, good, I think. And I say, okay, love you too, Gramma! Be home soon! Remember to take your medicine when you go to bed, OK? OK. Love you too. And I hang up. Then I says to Caleb (and we’re almost at the park now), I turn to Caleb and say, hell, I gotta say it. I love the shit out of my gramma. She practically raised me, cause I was born when my ma was fifteen, and when I was a kid she split and never came back, last thing we heard she was shacked up with some asshole in Tucson. Yeah, yeah, says Caleb, like he’s all chill now. Gramma, he says, aint at the shit. Hells yeah, I say. But in my head now I’m feeling totally chill about one old thing but I’m freaking the fuck out about one new thing. I feel chill now I know Kelly’s gonna be there alright, cause we’re about to be there in about five minutes. But then I’m thinking: The fuck’s he mean, we?

•  •  •

She took off her shirt and rolled off her jeans and her underwear, and now she was standing naked on a black plastic bag in the middle of the kitchen floor. Seventy-five years before, a man sat in a small white room and sang songs about sex and death and love and murder and the end of the world, and his voice was imprisoned, copied, and pressed onto a vinyl disc that now revolved on a spindle as the stylus tickled over the grooves and resurrected his voice here in Fred’s house.

John the Revelator, tell me who’s that writing?

John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.

Fred was fiddling with a paint sprayer at the kitchen sink. The paint sprayer was a handheld device with a plastic container for the paint that screwed onto a gun-shaped nozzle with an electric cord coming out of it and a tube with a filter that siphoned the paint out of the container and blew it out the nozzle.

Lana had pale skin and sharp hip bones and a tuft of copper-colored hair in her crotch with a trail of tiny hairs leading up to her navel. Her waist was so thin it looked to Fred like he could fit his hands around it and touch his thumbs and middle fingers together, and her rib cage showed. Her skin had that irretrievable glow and smoothness of youth. She was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette and snicking the ashes on the floor with her thumbnail.

Fred had bought some special paint for this project, which was kind of expensive and came not in a can but in a big plastic jug. Fred opened the jug of paint, mixed it, and poured it into the smaller container that screwed onto the paint sprayer. He screwed the container onto the nozzle and washed the silver paint off his hands. The wet paint didn’t look like much, just like thin gray mud.

“You got any allergies to certain chemicals or anything I ought to know about before we put this stuff on you?” said Fred. He was inspecting the side of the plastic jug of paint for a list of ingredients.

“I’m allergic to penicillin.”

“Well, they don’t make paint out of penicillin, Little Miss Louis Pasteur. This shit’s latex-based, no oil or anything, so I think it should be fine.”

“Louis Pasteur wasn’t penicillin, Fred. Louis Pasteur was milk. Like pasteurized milk. Some other guy was penicillin. Fleming. Ian Fleming?”

“No, that’s James Bond.”

“Didn’t that girl die when they painted her gold in the James Bond movie?”

“I take it you’re referring to the iconic cinematic moment in Goldfinger when the Bond girl’s been murdered in bed by being painted gold and asphyxiated because her pores are clogged or something. That, hon, is a myth. You don’t breathe through your fucking pores. The only way you can asphyxiate somebody with paint is to pour it down their throat.”

Fred opened some windows to ventilate the room and pulled the chain to turn on the ceiling fan. He unwound a yellow outdoor-use extension cord and plugged it in across the room. He gave her a bathing cap that he had also bought specially for this project. She put her hair up and scrunched it inside the cap, and edged it up on her forehead as close to her hairline as possible.

“I’m gonna start at the bottom and work my way up.”

Lana swigged her beer and finished her cigarette and handed them to Fred.

“Here, take these,” she said.

Fred set down the paint sprayer and put the cigarette in the ashtray and the beer on the kitchen table, which had been scooted aside to give them more floor space. Fred wheezed and puffed as he moved around the room, knots of long gray hair falling in his face. Lana stood waiting to be painted, in the middle of the floor on a black garbage bag that crinkled and stuck to her feet.

The song in the next room ended, and in the empty moment between songs there was a brief but oppressive silence in which they could hear the click-click-click of the ceiling fan, the pulsing chirrup of crickets outside, and the crinkling sound of the garbage bag under Lana’s feet.

“What do you think?” she said.

“Honey,” said Fred, “I think I’m fat and old and ugly and you’re my sister’s kid.”

The next song started with that stepping down, down, down and then up that all blues songs seem to start with, and Fred pulled the trigger on the paint sprayer. The paint sprayer made a loud whirring noise, as well as the hiss of the paint coming out of the nozzle, and that brief but oppressive silence was thankfully over. Fred had his painting clothes on: shorts, a moth-eaten Denver Broncos T-shirt, pink plastic Kmart flip-flops. His legs were thin and pale. The flesh on his legs looked like the flesh on the underside of a snail and his toenails were long and flaky and the color of tortoiseshell.

Using a paint sprayer is all about maintaining the right rhythm, trigger pressure, and distance from the painted surface to spread the coat evenly. Fred painted her feet and realized he was holding the nozzle too close to her, so he backed away a few inches.

“It tickles,” she said.

He worked his way up her legs and painted her inner thighs and the area between her legs as quickly as possible, and she spread her legs out to facilitate the process. After that Fred began to relax and got absorbed in the work. He went into a trance of narrow concentration, and the more paint he applied to her body, the more of her skin was covered, the more she became an object he was painting, just like a sculpture or a piece of furniture, and he lost himself in the task. She was art, and he was an artist. Fred breathed more evenly, and he forgot himself. He never even touched her.

“Shut your mouth and eyes,” he said.

He painted her face carefully, aiming the spray at such an angle that it wouldn’t get in her nostrils. Her lips quivered. Her eyeballs vibrated under her eyelids.

“Don’t open your eyes or your mouth until the paint is sorta dry,” Fred said.

She consented by nodding.

Fred sprayed on a quick second coat holding the nozzle at a farther distance, covering up the thin spots in the paint. Then he unplugged the extension cord, disassembled the paint sprayer in the kitchen sink, gave everything a quick rinse, and left the parts to soak in a bucket of soapy water. He wound up the extension cord and lit a cigarette. The blades of the ceiling fan chopped up the mist of tobacco smoke and paint particulate hanging in the room. The room was suffused with the heady chemical smell of the wet paint. Lana stood silent and motionless in a Hail Mary pose under the jittery fluorescent kitchen light and the strobing shadows of the fan blades, her head down, tilted, her arms not touching her sides, her legs apart, her fingers not touching, her lips and eyes closed, waiting for the paint to dry. With her eyes closed, Fred could allow himself to look directly at her. In the next room, Robert Johnson was singing about the end of the world.

•  •  •

“Dunno the fuck that was,” said Kelly.

He clacked his cell phone shut. He’d been pacing around trying to find a place where he could get reception. He’d wondered if maybe he hadn’t paid the bill and the phone company had shut it off, or if he had paid the bill and they shut it off anyway. Financial causes and effects were unpredictable to Kelly. The company shut off the phone, or they didn’t shut it off. The bank charged him fees or they didn’t charge him fees. But then he found a place with reception, and there was a message from Jackson wondering why he wasn’t picking up his phone. He called him back and then Jackson said something about his grandma, but Kelly couldn’t quite understand what he was saying, both because the reception was choppy and because what he was saying didn’t make any sense.

“What?” said Maggie.

“He was sayin’ somethin’ about his grandma.”

“He’s probly with Caleb right now and he didn’t want to let him know he was talkin’ to you.”

Kelly felt sick and hot and achy all over his body. He hadn’t slept. Instead he’d fought with Maggie. They both broke some stuff. She cried. The kid cried throughout the duration of the afternoon. The dogs outside were barking.

His stomach was an empty bag twitching with nausea. It was half past ten. The last time he’d slept was about twenty-four hours ago.

“I ain’t slep in twenty-four, twenty-five hours,” said Kelly. “And I ain’t gonna sleep for sum’n like twenty more. I ain’t gonna get to sleep for almost a whole nother day.”

Maggie didn’t say anything.

“ ’Cause I gotta go to work after this, and then I gotta go to work again, so the next time I get to sleep is like, what? a whole goddamn day from now.”

“Please shut up,” said Maggie. “You got a cigarette?”

“We’re outta cigs.”

Kelly had switched from coffee to NoDoz. He’d been popping them like jellybeans all night and now his heart was rattling against his ribs and his hands were shaking like machines that were about to break. He stretched out the fingers on his hand, made a fist, stretched it out, made a fist, just to make sure it’s his, yes, and it’s obeying the commands from his brain, yes, it’s working, yes. They had dropped Gabie off at Kelly’s parents’ house. He handed Gabie to his mom while Maggie waited in the idling truck, and Gabie was squirming in a dirty diaper. He handed her the squiggly little shit-smelling, howling kid and said they were going to see a movie. That’s right, a movie. Date night. Right. Then he went around to the front of the house and borrowed a crowbar and a flashlight from the garage.

Maggie was sitting next to him just a little ways off the trail, on a mound of dirt, on sticks and leaves and rocks. Kelly was holding the crowbar and Maggie was holding the flashlight. They’d been sitting like this for an hour and a half. The night was clear and crisp and warm and they could see a lot of stars. Maggie was playing with the flashlight, clicking it on and off.

“Don’t do that,” said Kelly. She made an ugly face at him and he apologized. “I’m sorry. I mean, they’re gonna see you. Don’t advertise us.”

She stopped playing with the flashlight. They were trying to stay silent, so they could hear them when they approached. Cars and trucks clattered by within earshot along Lookout Road, and occasionally they’d hear the crescendo/diminuendo of a vehicle coming/going up and down the road matched with the movement of the long shadows of trees shifting in the headlights.

Thousands of crickets chirping together made a throbbing rhythm all around them. There must have been a cricket hiding under every leaf. The racket they made was deafening, their incessant krreepa-krreepa-krreepa.

A heavy truck rumbled by on the road, quietly at first, slowly gathering volume, then the sound changed pitch as it passed and sped off down the other side of the hill, and the noise quickly faded.

“You know why they do that?” Kelly whispered. The crowbar was slick with sweat and warm in his palms from his handling it.

“Do what?”

“Change sounds when they go by.”

“No.”

“It’s called the Doppler effect. When a car’s comin’ at you, you hear the noise get louder and louder, and when it goes by, the noise changes from goin’ up to goin’ down. It’s got to do with waves. Same reason why you look at a star in a telescope it looks red ’cause it means it’s moving away, which means the universe is constantly expanding.”

They looked up at the stars.

“The universe is constantly expanding and it’s infinite at the same time,” said Kelly.

“Why do you think I’m stupid?” said Maggie.

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Then why you talkin’ to me like ’at, tellin’ me all this mister science shit like you think I’m a fuckin’ kid?”

“Oh fuck off.”

“Don’t tell me to fuck off.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Quit sayin’ sorry.”

“What the fuck you want me to do?”

“I want you to grow a dick.”

They were silent after that.

Kelly squeezed the crowbar till his knuckles whitened and for a moment he wanted not only to bash Caleb Quinn’s brains out but all the brains of everybody everywhere and then he’d never have to worry about money or other people and he could go to the mountains by himself and just simply live, and maybe catch some fish.

They had been out there long enough that they had become used to the rhythm of the crickets chirping, so they noticed it when the crickets stopped.

There was a piercing flash of light somewhere in the distance, up ahead, in the trees. It was followed by another.

“What’s that?” said Maggie.

“I don’t like it,” said Kelly.

A snake egg started growing in Kelly’s stomach.

There were two more flashes of white light, but they weren’t accompanied by any discernible noise. They were quick, slicing pops of cold, silent light. They were happening pretty far away, maybe two hundred feet into the woods, but it was hard to tell.

Then they heard voices of people coming down the trail. They couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Kelly thought he recognized Jackson Reno’s voice. Kelly gripped the crowbar, loosened his grip, tightened it.

“Get the light ready,” Kelly hissed at Maggie.

Maggie snatched up the flashlight and took a few steps back.

Kelly was hot, weak, hungry, nauseated. The egg in his stomach hatched and a snake came out and started swimming around in his guts.

Two people came around the bend in the trail. One of them was wearing heavy yellow rubber boots. He was in front. Jackson was behind him. The one in the yellow boots saw that someone was there. Maggie clicked on the flashlight.

Caleb Quinn winced in the light.

Kelly stepped onto the trail and hit him with the crowbar as hard as he could in the gut. The sound of it was strangely muted, silent: a dull, flat noise of metal smacking flesh. Caleb doubled over, and Kelly jumped back and hit him in the side of the head, on his temple. Caleb pressed a hand to his head and blood came down his face. Kelly tried to get him in the balls, but missed and hit him in the thigh, and Caleb was covering his head and face with his arms as Kelly hit him in the gut again, and when he moved his arms, he hit him again in the head. Caleb fell down, and then Kelly hit him repeatedly all over his body. Kelly flipped the crowbar around and hit him one more time on the side of the head with the uglier end of it, the end with the hook on it, and there was the noise of something audibly breaking and an enormous amount of blood came out of Caleb’s head.

Kelly didn’t realize that Maggie was screaming until she stopped screaming because Jackson had pinned her arms behind her back and slapped a palm over her mouth.

“Kelly, chill,” said Jackson.

Kelly chilled. He looked at Jackson and Maggie. It was dark. Maggie had dropped the flashlight and the beam was pointing uselessly into the grass. She was struggling.

“Let go of her,” said Kelly.

“Why the fuck did you bring the girl, Kelly?”

“Let go of her.”

“This bitch was screaming her goddamn head off. What the fuck were you thinking bringing the bitch along?”

“Let go of her.” Kelly was the one screaming this time.

Jackson let her go. She ran over to Kelly and punched him in the face.

“Fuck,” Kelly said, and dropped the crowbar and covered his face with his hands. His nose and cheek where she’d hit him were tingly and hot. “What the fuck you doing?” he shouted.

“You motherfucker,” she spat. Jackson had her arms pinned again. “You didn’t have to beat him up that bad, you motherfucker.”

They all looked down at Caleb Quinn on the ground and the blood spilling out of his head. Nobody said anything for a while. Caleb was still breathing, but his eyes were vacant.

The crickets started chirping again.

•  •  •

Fred screwed the flashbulb onto his 1967 Leica M3, loaded a roll of film, and took a couple of test shots. He sank a fat finger into the button and listened to the precise and delicately mechanical scissor-snip noise of the shutter opening and closing: Slackit. Slackit. Slackit. Slackit. He turned off the lights to see what she looked like in the dark. Her body glowed with a glittery silver-blue metallic luster. The thatch of pubic hair in her crotch was a brittle nest of shimmering wires, like tinsel. The way the silver paint looked on her skin reminded Fred of Jack Haley’s Tin Man makeup in The Wizard of Oz. Lana opened her eyes, and it was like this wild, haunting effect, these two bright human eyes opening up inside something that didn’t quite look human.

“It feels weird,” said Lana. “I don’t feel naked.”

Fred clacked the shutter, slackit, and triggered a sharp splash of white light from the flashbulb.

“How do you feel?” said Fred.

“Good,” she said, stretching, rolling out the muscles and bones that had gone creaky from standing still too long, just like the Tin Man after he’s been oiled up, regaining familiarity with autonomous locomotion. She examined her paint-caked legs, her arms, ran her hands over her body, this exoskeleton of dried paint.

“Do you want anything before we go? Like a towel, a blanket or something?”

Fred gradually struggled into a ratty leather bomber jacket that had fit him before he got fat. His keys tinkled as he fished them out of a pocket of the jacket.

“No,” she said. Her eyes were alarming, surreal-looking in her head. “I don’t need it. I feel like I have two layers of skin.”

They went out the front door, which Fred didn’t bother to lock behind him: Lana first, then Fred, the squeal and bang of the screen door, no neighbors watching, good, they’re all inside, nestled up in their stupid cocoons watching TV, as one can tell from the undersea glow of the walls behind their living room windows. Lana fastidiously picked her steps across the gravel driveway in her bare feet. The sky above was alive with stars. Somebody’s dog half barked in a false alarm, more of a guffaw than a bark, and then it tinkled its chain and settled back down behind its fence. In a nearby yard there was the rearing-rattlesnake noise of a sprinkler dusting off a sunburned patch of grass: tchitcha-tchitcha-tchitcha-tchitcha-tschhhhhhhhhhhhhh——tcht-tcht-tcht-tcht. It was a comfortably warm summer night with a hint of a coming autumnal chill in it.

Fred unlocked his battered blue ’93 Honda Civic, passenger-side door first and then the driver’s, and carefully squeezed himself under the steering wheel. Fred had taken out the back seats to maximize storage space, and the back of the car was crammed full of paint buckets, cans, brushes, tins of paint thinner, rags, socks, crumpled fast-food bags, petrified fries, Styrofoam cups, various other detritus, cigarette butts, cassette tapes. It didn’t smell good.

“Why is this car so gross?” said Lana.

“Because I’m a slob,” said Fred.

She rolled down the passenger-side window. Fred rolled his window down too, twisted the key in the ignition, and kicked the gas, and the engine grumbled on, then settled into a phlegmatic pant. A second later the stereo flickered on, a little too loud, and Fred turned down the dial. There was a cassette of Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come in the tape deck. Fred turned on the lights and the car sputtered down the gravel driveway before they turned onto a paved road and Fred shifted into higher gear; the engine sighed in relief and the headlights spat dim yellow light onto the road in front of them as they drove along in the night and Ornette’s sax squeaked and whimpered over the rapid skisha-skisha-skisha of the cymbals.

“This is like, nervous music,” said Lana.

“I’ve always thought the tension in this tune comes from that jittery energy in the rhythm section mixed with the threnodic sound of the horns,” said Fred, glad to be talking about music again, where he felt conversationally at home. Fred waited for her to ask what “threnodic” meant; she didn’t.

“This is a very important album,” Fred continued, “but really you gotta get into Bird and Miles and Monk and Trane before you can truly begin to appreciate what Ornette’s doing here. All those guys, Miles and Monk especially, they hated this guy when he came out with this album. They were like, what the fuck is this lunatic doing?”

Fred slipped back into American-musicology-professor mode and discoursed on the emergence of free jazz all the way to the park. He talked about Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders.

“You know what threnodic means?” said Fred finally.

“Yeah. It means like, mournful, right? It’s like a death wail.”

Fred was disappointed.

“Yeah,” he said.

They eased off 227 and onto Lookout Road, went about five minutes up the road and came to the top of a hill, where Fred slowed down to look for the turnoff to get into the park. He found it: There was just one narrow dirt road off the main road that led in and out of the park. The car shuddered over the washboards. They passed a sign nailed to an open gate that read PARK IS OPEN FROM SUNRISE TO SUNSET in red block letters above an illegible scramble of fine print.

“Where are we?”

“This is called Centennial Park,” he said. “Colorado is the Centennial State because they were made into a state in 1876, a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence. This is supposedly the site of some battle where the National Guard slaughtered a bunch of Indians or something.”

Fred pulled into the parking lot, dragged the car to a stop, and crunched up the brake lever. There was a massive cannon, dull green with oxidization, next to the parking lot, with a plaque on it. A half-moon showered light on the faces of the mountains heaving up in front of them to the west and tapering off into the distance to the north and south. Below them in the valley, the lights of civilization curled up the sides of the mountains and dispersed into darkness. A thin worm of railroad tracks coiled around the bottom of the hill, which sloped into fields and woods and a grid of dirt roads. Just below the hill there was an artificial lake and a coal-burning power plant: a tangle of power lines and a squat, ugly building with two char-blackened smokestacks towering from the top of it. The power plant glittered with yellow and green lights that were reflected as cleanly as in a mirror in the lake below.

“It’d be a beautiful view if it weren’t for that fucking power plant,” said Lana, squinting as if she was trying to imagine what the landscape would look like without the smokestacks.

“Yeah,” said Fred. “It’d be dark.”

“I like the dark.”

They stood in the parking lot of the scenic overlook and absorbed the landscape. Fred turned to Lana, who was standing on the gravel with her hands on her hips, her thin, naked, painted body iridescent in the moonlight.

“You cold at all?” he asked.

“No. The paint’s warm. And there’s all the beer and whiskey.”

There was an old white pickup truck with a crack in the windshield parked in the parking lot. Fred pointed at the truck.

“I don’t know if I like that.”

“Maybe somebody just left it here,” said Lana. “It looks like a piece of shit.”

“Well, I don’t see anybody.”

Fred’s camera dangled from a leather strap that cut into the thick flesh of his neck. He got the bag containing the film and his camera equipment out of the car and slung it over his shoulder, stuck the tripod under his arm, its telescoping legs contracted and folded together, and clicked on the flashlight. Fred started plodding down the narrow trail that wound out of the parking lot, down the hill and into the woods. Lana followed. Fred’s pink plastic flip-flops slapped against his heels. Together they scrabbled a little ways down the trail, then turned off of it into the grass and brush. Tall sprays of grass thrashed all around them.

“All right,” said Fred, turning around to Lana. “Let’s take some shots here.”

Fred aimed the camera at her and took a picture with the flash. Slackit. The flashbulb spat a piercing blank field of light at her, and for a fraction of a second her monstrous shadow stretched high up into the trees. The light of the flashbulb bounced off the paint on her skin; it made her shine with false light, the stolen light of a reflective surface—a mirror, a moon, a satellite.

At first it looked like Lana didn’t know what to do with herself. Her skinny adolescent body was positioned in an awkward, unattractive way, her arms cradled against her torso like she wanted something to hold on to.

“What should I do?”

Fred ratcheted back the lever to advance the film, sank a finger into the shutter-release button—flash, slackit.

“Just, uh, I dunno. Do whatever,” he said. “Relax. Pretend you’re a . . . Pretend you’re a wild animal or something.”

As Fred took more pictures Lana appeared to gradually loosen up and get into it. She started to become comfortable with being his model, with being naked, being vulnerable, on display, outside, in a place she’d never been before in her life, with him. She was hopping around, thrashing around in the grass, being a bunny, being a fox, being a deer. Slackit, slackit. Again, Fred was sinking into that trance of concentration that he went into when he was working intently on something, and he began thinking exclusively in images, or how to capture the images. He was thinking about lines, framing, exposures, depths of field, and the distribution of light, and in his mind this stuff pushed away all the thoughts about all the things he hated in the world, and all his problems, and all his troubles: troubles with money, troubles with drugs, not having health insurance, forgetting to pay his bills or brush his teeth or clip his toenails or reregister his car, the government, people who don’t love music or art or any of the other things that make life worth living, being an adult in general.

At some point Lana said: “Look.”

She was pointing up. Fred followed her finger, looked where she was pointing. An object, like a tiny, dim moving star, was scrolling slowly across the sky. The light moved in a shallow arc, gathering in brightness until it became a bright white flash, and then the light, though still moving in the same direction and at the same speed, began to fade, until it disappeared from the sky.

They were still and silent for long enough that the crickets forgot them and started chirping again.

“Whoa!” Fred whispered, awed. “Was that a fucking UFO?”

Lana rolled her eyes.

“No, Fred,” she said. “I think it was like a satellite or something.”

Then they heard someone, someone not too far away, screaming in the dark.

•  •  •

“Jesus, dog, why you gotta go all psycho on the motherfucker,” said Jackson. “I mean you just fucked him up bad, dog. I seen some shit before but I ain’t never seen ’at much blood come out of a motherfucker’s head like ’at.”

Maggie squirmed out of Jackson’s hold, kneeled down on the ground and hugged Caleb Quinn. She was crying. Jackson picked up the flashlight.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here. I can’t fuckin’ believe you brung the bitch with you, dog. You wanna look like a cowboy and shit in front of her? Is that it? Fucking stupid, dog.”

Jackson pointed the flashlight at Kelly, who looked down at himself and saw that his clothes were covered in blood. Maggie was still hugging Caleb, and now she was also covered in blood.

“What time you reckon it is?” said Kelly, trying to sound casual.

Jackson pointed the flashlight at his watch.

“Eleven thirty.”

“Shit. I gotta get to work. I should’ve brung a change of clothes.”

“We gotta get this motherfucker off the trail,” said Jackson.

“Get off him, Maggie,” said Kelly.

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Get off him or I’m gonna smack the teeth out of your head, bitch,” said Jackson.

Maggie looked at Kelly. Kelly mumbled something too quiet or unintelligible to hear. Maggie stood up. Her face was wet. She was soaked in Caleb’s blood.

“Pick up that end of him, I’ll get this end,” said Jackson.

Jackson picked him up by the legs and Kelly grabbed his limp arms. They were able to pick him up and move him, but he was heavy. It was kind of like moving a couch. They were forced to look at each other. Jackson’s eyes glowed pale blue in the dark. They struggled to carry him off the path and into the woods. They carried him about twenty feet through the grass and into a dirt clearing where the trees around were thick, and dumped him there. In the process Jackson got a lot of blood on him as well. Maggie remained on the trail with the flashlight and refused to follow them, so they had to do it all in the dark. They walked back to the trail with the tall grass thrashing all around them. Up above, the sky swarmed with stars. When they got back to the trail they saw that the place where they’d been was covered in blood.

“That was some bad shit, Kelly,” said Jackson. “You fucked that dog up real bad. We’re gonna have to lay real low, you understand? I mean I just got done doing time for my drug shit and I’m still on probation, so I can’t be goin’ around being accomplice to no goddamn murder and get sent away till I’m an old man. And you too, dog, you understand?”

“What do you mean murder? He’s not dead.”

Jackson snatched the flashlight out of Maggie’s hands like you’d snatch something dangerous out of the hands of a child.

Maggie was crying again.

“Kelly, you have got to shut up your bitch, dog. I cannot fucking think straight with all this bawling.”

“Please be quiet, Maggie.”

“Please be quiet? ‘Please be’? What the fuck kind of shit is that? ‘Please be quiet.’ If you don’t shut your bitch up I’m gonna have to shut her up.”

“Don’t you fucking touch her.”

“Oh, what, so killer here goes all batshit on some motherfucker with a crowbar and now all of a sudden he thinks he can take me? Fuck you. Don’t insult me, dog.”

Kelly didn’t say anything to that. He reached out to touch Maggie—just to touch her—and she flinched and shivered and flicked her hands like she’d been touched by something so loathsome she’d have to wash herself later, and she walked faster up the trail away from him.

They made it up the hill and back to the gravel parking lot and scenic overlook at the top of the hill without anyone saying anything to anyone else. Kelly’s truck was parked in the far corner of the parking lot under a tree. A pool cleaning van with a mermaid on it holding a pool net was parked in the opposite corner.

“Fuckin’ A,” said Jackson. “I gotta go back down there and get his goddamn keys off him and move his van. Should’ve took the money he said he got on him, too.”

“No. Please no, no, no,” said Kelly. “We ain’t got time for that. We gotta get the fuck outta here. I gotta go home and clean up and get to work. I ain’t slep in twenty-five hours. And I ain’t gonna sleep in like twenty more.”

Then they noticed that there was another car in the parking lot. A little blue Honda Civic. Jackson pointed at it.

“The fuck is that all about?” he said. “That little blue piece a shit wasn’t here when we pulled up in Caleb’s van.”

There were needles of fear under Kelly’s skin.

“I don’t like that,” he said.

“I hate you,” said Maggie.

“Ain’t nobody talkin’ to you,” said Jackson.

Kelly threw the crowbar, which was slick with blood, into the bed of the truck and it landed with the hollow clunk of metal against metal.

Maggie was wearing a dark green hoodie with a kangaroo pocket in it, and was hugging herself with her arms in the pocket. She was refusing to look at him. Jackson stood in the parking lot with his arms akimbo, looking at the little blue car and then at the pool cleaning van.

“Let’s just shut up and get the fuck out of here,” said Kelly. “I do not like that there’s another car here.”

“No shit,” said Jackson. “We should bolt.”

They got in the cab of the truck. Maggie said she didn’t want to sit next to Kelly, so she sat on the passenger side, Kelly drove, and Jackson sat in the middle. If they hurried, there would still be enough time to drop Jackson off at his grandma’s house, go home, wash up, swing by Kelly’s mom’s house to pick up Gabie, drop him and Maggie off at home, and then tear back up the highway to report to work. Kelly’s palms were wet. They were getting blood all over the seats. Maggie sat still with her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead out the windshield.

Kelly jingled the keys out of his jacket pocket, inserted them into the ignition, turned them, and prayed. The motor didn’t come on the first time, or the second time or the third or the fourth time. Then, it did. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. The headlights came on and the engine groaned as Kelly pulsed the accelerator. The radio came on. It was playing “Friends in Low Places.”

I’m not big on social graces

Think I’ll slip on down to the O—asis

Oh, I got friends in low—places.

The song lightened the mood a little. (A little.) Kelly mouthed along to the chorus out of habit.

The truck’s fat, soft tires rocked over the dirt road, bits of gravel popping under the wheels. They crept down the hill toward the stop sign. The red octagon flashed in the headlights and went dark again as they passed it. No cars coming in either direction. Kelly goosed the engine and the truck rolled out onto the main road and died.

The truck died across both lanes of the road, without enough space on either side to drive around it. The first car nearly plowed into them at about fifty miles an hour. Tires screamed, the sulfurous odor of burnt rubber. The driver jammed a fist into the horn. Then another car coming from the other direction did the same thing.

Kelly kept trying the engine, and the engine kept making a chortling noise and then choking off, until it failed to start completely, and then there was just the sound of the starter clicking, and then that stopped too, and now he turned the key in the ignition and absolutely nothing happened.

A line of cars began to stack up around them in both directions. There were four or five cars on either side of them, then six, seven, eight, and then there were two long trails of headlights and winking red brake lights on either side of the truck. Idling motors panted up and down the hill like tired dogs. Horns honked futilely. A few cars peeled out of the line and turned around.

Kelly didn’t want to get out of the truck with all the blood on his clothes. He just kept trying to start the engine. He put the transmission in neutral and tried to coast out of the way, but the truck didn’t move much. It took up a lot of space, and the road here had no shoulder. Jackson and Maggie were talking to him the whole time, but Kelly wasn’t listening to what they were saying. Kelly’s vision seemed almost to be flashing with white light, and all he could hear was a thin, high-pitched, nearly silent whine.

Somebody rolled down a window and shouted, “What the hell’s going on here?”

It was a stupid question, and Kelly didn’t answer it.

Kelly sank his forehead into the wheel and prayed. He silently prayed to God to start his truck. Then he tried the ignition again: silence. The radio came back on, though.

Just wait ’til I finish this glass

Then sweet little lady

I’ll head back to the bar

And you can kiss my ass—

Kelly looked at the lit green displays on the dashboard—radio, heater/AC, speedometer, odometer, check oil light, fuel gauge—and realized what the problem was.

“We’re out of gas,” he said.

Maggie was laughing. Kelly started laughing too.

Jackson slammed a fist into Kelly’s ribs. He wasn’t laughing.

“Ha ha ha ha,” he said. “You fucked us over, Kelly, but you fucked me over most of all. So figure out how you gonna move this goddamn truck or I’monna fucking kill you. You understand me, dog?”

Kelly only kept trying to start the car, hoping that enough gasoline fumes were wafting around in the tank to kick-start the engine, which had happened before. If he could fire up the engine, he could pull out and coast all the way down the hill in neutral to where he knew there was a gas station, or thought there was, maybe. He thought there was a gas station down there.

The red and blue lights of a police cruiser flashed beside them. The police car emitted a truncated hoot from the siren, just a single, short rising-pitch wooop, and they heard a cop get out of his car and shut the door.

The cop’s face materialized in the driver’s-side window. He clicked his knuckles against the driver’s-side door because the window was down.

“Damn thing won’t start,” said Kelly, half laughing, smiling as much as he could. “Hell of a place to break down, in’n it?”

Unsmiling, the cop aimed a flashlight into the car. He was a young cop, his throat thick with dense cords of muscle, eyes taciturn, cheeks scraped smooth. Kelly turned the key in the ignition, listened to the engine not starting, staggered the accelerator with his foot.

Somebody up the hill buried a fist into a horn. Farther down the line there was the snarl of somebody juicing a motorcycle. The cop trained the flashlight on Maggie and Jackson, then at their laps, and saw that all three of them were covered in blood. The cop’s eyes darted to the bed of the truck, where there was the crowbar, and more blood.

Kelly was looking up at the cop, and he could see the exact moment, the slight change of expression on his otherwise emotionless face, when he must have thought something like this: Looks like this is going to be more interesting than I thought.

The cop kept his flashlight on Kelly as he unsnapped his holster and rested his right hand on the handle of his gun.

“Would you please step out of the vehicle, sir.”

Kelly turned to the cop.

“I ain’t slep in twenty-five hours.” Kelly knew it was obvious, it was obvious to everyone from the hideous croak in his voice that he was about to cry. “And I ain’t gonna sleep in twenty more.”

The cop repeated: “Sir, would you please step out of the vehicle.”

•  •  •

Somebody was screaming. Fred and Lana looked at each other. The screaming stopped. There was a long silence. Everything around them was still and dark. Lana and Fred stood ten paces away from each other, still, listening. There was another scream. It was a woman’s voice, screaming in either fear or fury.

“What the fuck is that?” Fred whispered.

Fred and Lana stood there in the grass without moving or speaking. The screaming had stopped, but there were some faraway but audible voices somewhere.

Amid a mumble of things they couldn’t understand, a male voice shouted: “Let go of her.”

Neither of them spoke. Fred and Lana listened to each other’s breathing.

The voices came closer. There were at least two male voices, talking. It sounded like the two men were angry at each other. Or Fred thought so, anyway.

Then they saw, a little ways off, maybe two hundred feet or so, the yellow light of a flashlight traveling along the ground, and they saw the shadows of legs, a few people walking up the path to the parking lot. Fred wasn’t sure how much time had passed.

“Fred?” Lana whispered. “I’m kind of freaked out now.”

Fred shushed her. “Let’s just be quiet and wait for them to go.”

They couldn’t hear what was being said, but the dominant voice was of a man who sounded angry. There was a woman, and it sounded like she was crying. They watched the beam of the flashlight move along the ground, up the path and into the parking lot. The light shut off, and after what felt like a very long time, they finally heard car doors slamming. The white pickup truck in the parking lot. Then somebody trying to start an engine. It took four or five attempts, four or five times the truck made an ugly chattering noise and died before they heard the froom of the engine coming on. Then there was the sound of heavy tires rolling on gravel.

“Huh,” said Fred. “Weird.”

Silence.

“I think we should go,” said Lana. “Actually, yeah. I want to go.”

Silence.

“Actually I want to go right now, Fred.”

“Yeah. Fine, okay,” said Fred. “Okay. Right. Yeah. Let’s go.”

They had trouble finding the path again, though. They had wandered farther into the woods than Fred had thought, and while Lana had been running around in the grass and he was busy taking pictures, it turned out neither of them had been paying much attention to where they were. After walking for a while in the general direction of where they thought the path was, they realized they were in a place neither of them recognized. The trees were closer together here. It didn’t look familiar. Fred was shining the flashlight on the ground as they walked and Lana kept close beside him, behind him. They walked for a while more before they came into a small clearing in the woods where there was a man lying in the dirt in a puddle of blood. There was blood trickling freely from the man’s head. He had spat out some teeth, which were lying next to his head. Fred trained the flashlight on his head, framing it in the annulus of pale yellow light, and they saw that his eyes were open, though one of them was caked in blood and swollen almost shut. He was alive, and awake, and breathing, though there was a sort of gargling noise in the back of his throat as air whistled in and out of it. He was a big guy, tall and thick, probably weighed more than two fifty, could have been three hundred easily. His lower jaw hung open. The man pushed the blood out of the corner of his mouth with his tongue. He tried to speak, but whatever he was trying to say came out unintelligible. He coughed on the effort to force up words and spat some blood. He was wearing yellow rubber boots.

“Can you. Um. Jesus, dude.” Fred cleared his throat. “Can you move?”

The man shook his head, slightly: No.

Fred was kneeling beside the man with the flashlight. He clicked it off and heaved to his feet. He stood the tripod on the ground to rid his arms of it. Fred looked up into the sky. It swarmed with stars.

Fred looked at Lana. She was standing far away from the beaten-up man, eyeing him with terror, and covering her breasts and her crotch with her hands, looking like Eve walking out of Eden. Fred had forgotten about that.

“We have to call nine-one-one,” she said.

“Exactly. That’s a wonderful idea, my dear,” said Fred. “So, just curious, here: What were you doing trespassing in the park in the middle of the night, Fred? Well, you know, Officer, I was just getting my sixteen-year-old niece stoned and drunk and then we came out here to take naked pictures of her. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“This is art.”

“This is art, goddamnit. You expect the cops to get that? I can just see it. Oh, I’m sorry, Fred! Here we were gonna book you for supplying drugs and alcohol to a minor, driving drunk, probably, trespassing on government property, and, and, uh, and child pornography! Looks like we can scrap that last charge, boys. We didn’t realize this was just some tasteful erotic art photography you’re doing here.”

“So we should leave him here and not tell anybody?” said Lana.

“Well—” Fred started, and stopped.

“This guy’s head is like, bashed in. He can’t even move. If we leave him here he’ll die. We have to help him.”

At this point the man on the ground tried to say something, but he choked, coughed, spat up a sluice of blood, and was silent. Fred waddled into the middle of the clearing, the flip-flops slapping under his heels. He crossed his arms. He was still holding the flashlight. Fred was thinking. His breathing was pained and heavy. The temperature had dropped a few degrees.

Fred set the flashlight down in the grass, went over to the man on the ground, and grabbed his hands. Fred yanked hard on his arms, trying to move him. The man growled in pain.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Lana said, or more half screamed.

Fred didn’t answer. He yanked on the man’s arms again and succeeded in moving the body an inch or so. The man grunted. A violent convulsion rumbled through him. Fred huffed and blew out some air, looked up at Lana. She looked back at him. Fred sopped his face with the corner of his shirt and blinked a few times.

“Well, princess, you gonna stand there and watch, or help me move him?”

“Move him where?”

“To. The. Fucking. Car,” said Fred.

“What?”

Fred dropped the man’s arms to explain. He spoke slowly and melodically because what he was saying was so obvious. “We’re going to drop him off in front of the door at the hospital and then get the fuck out of there.”

Lana laughed, theatrically.

“That,” she said, “is such a bad idea.”

Fred snorted and picked up the man’s arms again.

“We won’t even be able to drag him up there,” she said. “Look at this guy. He’s fucking huge. There’s no way we’ll get him all the way up that hill.”

“Not by myself we’re not. Come on, princess. I get the hands, you get the feet.”

“No,” she said.

Fred dropped the man’s arms again. He’d only been able to drag the man a few inches, and now he seemed to be in much more pain than when they’d found him. The exertion had left Fred out of breath. He braced himself against a tree.

“Fine,” said Fred, turning to her again. “We go home. We clean up. Wash that shit off you, get some clothes on, then we call the cops and give like an, uh. I dunno. Give an, an anonymous tip or something, I guess. I guess that’s the best thing to do.”

Lana nodded.

“Fine,” she said. “But now we’ve still got to get back to the path.”

“Easy, hon. We just follow this trail of blood.”

Fred had meant it as a joke, except it wasn’t a joke. The man on the ground was gurgling and moving around, trying desperately to say something to them as they left the clearing, Fred carrying the camera and flashlight and the bag full of film and camera equipment, Lana carrying the tripod. Fred held the beam of the flashlight shivering on the ground in front of them. There was so much blood on the stalks of grass, it really was easy to see where those people had come from, and whoever that guy’s assailants were, they apparently had a better sense of direction than Fred, because by following the blood they quickly got back on the trail and started back up the hill. Fred walked sluggishly on the way back, snorting and puffing up the trail in his flip-flops, and Lana stayed close by him. They made it back to the parking lot. The white pickup truck was gone, but now there was another car in the lot. It looked like a service van for a pool cleaning company, with a bunch of equipment strapped to the roof rack and a picture of a mermaid holding a pool net on the side. They didn’t comment on it. They got in the car, and shortly after that Fred was piloting the vehicle back down the hill along the narrow dirt road, and again they were shuddering over the washboards.

Neither of them said anything. The stereo played Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. The tension in the music came from the jittery energy of the rhythm section mixed with that threnodic sound of the horns. Lana curled herself into a fetal ball, her knees squeezed to her chest and her arms wrapped around her ankles. Her face was turned away from Fred, looking out the window.

Fred ended the silence.

“You know,” he said. “I am not happy.”

She didn’t say anything.

As they rounded a curve and approached the turnoff to the main road, Fred saw the flashing red and blue lights of a police car on the trunks of the trees by the roadside. The white pickup truck they had seen in the parking lot was parked across two lanes of traffic, and two long lines of cars, headlights glaring and engines idling, were stacked up bumper to bumper on either side. A man and woman were sitting on a grassy berm to the side of the road with their heads between their knees and their hands cuffed behind their backs. Another man was standing with his legs planted apart and his palms flat against the side of the truck, and a cop was frisking him with one hand and holding a radio to his mouth with the other.

Fred stopped the car.

“What,” Lana said in a sleepy voice. Her eyes blinked open. Had she been asleep?

She looked at him over her shoulder, still curled away from him toward the window.

“You gotta get out of here,” Fred informed her, in a thin voice that was shrill and sick with panic. “You gotta get out of here right now before anybody sees you, those cops are gonna want to talk to me. I can’t have you in here. They’ll throw me in jail if they see you in here like that. Way way way way way too much to explain to the cops. Get out. Please please please get the fuck out of here right now please.”

“What? Where am I gonna go?”

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking— I don’t know, uh—”

The cop seemed to be looking in their direction. Fred cut the headlights, and then the cop was really looking at them.

“Wait,” said Fred. “Wait wait wait wait, okay. I know. I got an idea. Go up there and hide in that cannon. Nobody’ll ever look in there.”

“What?”

“You know the cannon in the parking lot on top of the hill? Commemorating the slaughter of Indians or whatever, hide in there, hide like in the barrel of the cannon, you’re skinny, you’ll fit in there and then I’ll know exactly where to find you when I come back and if they throw me in jail I’ll use my one call to call up my buddy Craig, and he’ll come get you. I’ll tell him where to find you but I don’t think that’ll happen because I’m basically pretty much sober now anyway and I can talk my way out of this, just please please please please get the fuck out right now.”

Lana got out of the car, slammed the door, and ran back up the hill along the dirt road. When she slammed the door the cop down on the road looked up and aimed his flashlight in Fred’s direction. Fred turned the headlights back on and eased the car forward.

•  •  •

She did like the dark. She didn’t make the Platonic mistake of associating the good and the beautiful and the light with the truth. That was saccharine and deceptive, like using a euphemism for something more accurately expressed in grubbier, more direct language, like saying “passed away” instead of “died,” or “make love” or “sleep with” instead of “fuck.” Her parents’ house in California vibrated softly all over with fake sweetness and light. She hated their money, hated their tasteful well-matched furniture, hated their sterile Thanksgivings. After Lana learned the word bourgeois she took enormous pleasure in applying the adjective to her parents. Lana was more interested in darkness and ugliness—the juice of life, the life/death force, the yin/yang, the eros/thanatos, the duende. She wanted to do and to have, in part to do and to have and in part to have done and to have had. She wanted to be a bohemian. Like Baudelaire. She wanted to be bisexual, and maybe commit suicide after doing or creating something brilliant. But at this particular moment she wished she were in her parents’ house in California, taking a tropically steamy shower, sneaking a glass of wine, and blazing through the satellite channels on her parents’ TV. Then she would sneak another glass of wine, smoke a joint, surreptitiously blow the smoke out the bathroom window, light incense, and read the diaries of Anaïs Nin in bed.

Lana had, in fact, found the cannon with the plaque on it again, but the opening of the barrel was so narrow that no one but an infant could have possibly fit in it. And then she had thought she heard somebody coming, so she ran into the woods and immediately proceeded to get lost. She walked through grass and woods, in a part of the country she had never been before; she could not have even located her position within a hundred miles on a map. She was alone. An hour ago, all her blood had been singing with the wildness and wickedness and novelty of everything she was doing. The silver paint on her skin reflected the moonlight. Her body glowed with otherworldly light and darkness yawned all around her.

She walked slowly. Twigs and rocks drove horribly into her bare feet. She walked on the edges of her insteps to minimize their surface area. Maybe because the alcohol was burning out of her system, the air began to feel much colder. Goose bumps prickled her body beneath the paint.

She had no way of telling time, but she guessed that hours were passing. She lay down in the grass. She stared at the ground, curled into herself like a snail, hugged her legs to her chest, flesh against flesh, warmth to warmth. She was exhausted: There was sand in her veins, all her inner machinery slogging along at half its regular rhythm. And she was hungry. She was very hungry, a sucking hollowness clawing at her gut. She didn’t exactly feel drunk, not anymore, but the universe pitched around like a ship in a storm when she shut her eyes. Yes. No. Yes. She was still drunk. She lay on the ground and looked up, imagined that gravity had inexplicably reversed itself, that her back was pressed against the ceiling of the sky and the clouds she saw were sailing over mountaintops six miles below her. She couldn’t lie down anymore; being still nauseated her. She had to stand up and move around. She got up, and all the blood gushed into her brain. She felt acutely conscious of her internal organs sloshing around in her body, everything out of balance and out of time. She might have fallen asleep. She couldn’t tell. The stars had shifted positions, the moon had moved. But it was still dark, and she had nothing to hold on to, mentally or physically, figuratively or literally. She tried to remember what had happened, but only decontextualized blots of memory remained of the night, certain noises, sense perceptions, images with contours inconstant and definitions blurry as if seen under water, a cloud and a tree and a car and a cannon and a hand and an eye and a blast of smoke and a sudden eruption of light and the warbling sound of a man singing songs about sex and death and love and the end of the world seventy-five years ago in a noise field of pops and crunching static, and in her consciousness the memories smeared continuously into dreams about fathers slitting the throats of their children on mountaintops thousands of years ago, and somewhere between waking and sleeping she had a vague thought that there is nothing as elemental as an unexplained light in the sky, or the sound of a voice screaming in the dark.

Then she looked to the north, along the distant ridge of mountains and across the rippling, light-dusted plains, and saw a cloud of fire in the sky. She looked, and saw four spirals of fire, blazing bright and revolving clockwise, like whirlpools of flame. The four spirals of fire hovered high in the sky, and they were moving. They darted from one place to another, and there were flashing white tendrils of electricity in the sky. And she looked below them, and saw four enormous gold machines below the four spirals of fire in the sky. The machines went where the fires went, darting rapidly from one place to another. Each of the machines had the appearance of a wheel inside a wheel. The inner wheel of each machine was perpendicular to the outer wheel, and the outer wheel spun clockwise while the inner wheel spun counterclockwise. The wheels were alive with light, and innumerable human eyes studded the rims of the wheels, and all the eyes looked in different directions, and blinked at different times. Inside each of the four machines was what looked like a living creature. Each of the living creatures had four wings and four faces. The living creatures moved inside the machines, but did not touch the wheels that revolved around them. Wherever the spirals of fire went, the machines went beneath them, and the creatures within went with them. Then everywhere the fields were consumed in fire, and she saw blood running in rivers from the gullies between the mountains. She saw a desert of white ash.

Lana looked around her, and saw that she was standing in a field of tall grass. She looked behind her, and saw the hill: Beyond that was the road. She heard the sound of a truck rumbling down the road and letting off pressure from its gaskets in short, sneezy hisses. To her left she saw the power plant—the squat, ugly building with its two char-black smokestacks. She realized that at some point she must have crossed the railroad tracks, because now she saw that they were behind her. Now the half moon shone big and low above the outline of the mountains. She thought she could see the beginnings of dawn skirting the eastern horizon. Ahead of her, across the field, she saw a row of utility poles, standing along a thin dirt road like a fence of crucifixes, connected by positive parabolas of wire drooping from one to the next. She saw a tall, narrow house at the end of the field where two dirt roads intersected, and there were lights on in a few of its windows. She walked through the field toward the house. The grass thrashed around her. It was still dark when she reached the house. The wooden boards of the front porch felt comfortably flat and hard under her blistered, bare feet. She pushed a button beside the front door and heard the doorbell sound from inside the house. She heard movement inside. After a while, she heard the clunk of a bolt being unlatched, and the door shrieked open on dry hinges.

An old woman peered through the mesh of the screen door at her: She was small and frail, and the texture of the skin of her face looked like crumpled silken paper. She pushed open the screen door and stepped out of the house on tiny white bare feet. The old woman wore a dark blue bathrobe. Her face was the face of someone who has just seen something terrifying, or sublimely beautiful. It was the expression of religious experience. She was breathing heavily and unevenly. Her chest shivered, it seemed her lungs were struggling to draw oxygen. Her hands were shaking.

Lana stood before her in the dark, on the porch. Her body was glowing with an otherworldly light. The woman’s lips quivered. Her eyes were wet. The woman took a step forward and reached out to her with delicate white arms.

---

I. Apparent magnitude is the measure of the brightness of celestial objects. The maximum brightness of Mars is –2.4, a full moon is –12.