1

Thursday evening, near dusk

Ace Sinclair dons a fleece jacket and Red Sox cap and takes his highball glass and fifth of single malt to the roof deck of his beach house overlooking the sea. Before she died, his wife, Pam, and he followed this same ritual. It provided them serenity, a day’s-end, quiet intimacy. Now it’s just him, the sea, the sky, and the darkening woods. But something from those old times with her hovers like the evening’s last gull over the sunset glow in the slow-breaking waves. It would feel like a betrayal to miss it.

His house faces northeast. A hundred years ago, his grandfather sited it in a cove on Pomeiooc Island off the North Carolina coast, where the seaward shoreline curves briefly eastward, slips around a point, and dips south again. A hiding place, his grandfather used to say, from Atlantic storms, tucked safely into its grove of yaupon and live oak. But for Ace, the main advantage is the line of sight from the deck.

When the sun sets and the ocean darkens, he can turn to face north and watch headlights of cars pop above the crest of the Crowbank Inlet Bridge two miles away. The lights flow toward him down the slope of the bridge and across the long causeway, only to wink out among the shadowy dunes that line the island shore—a ceaseless caravan headed to the hotels and condos crowding beaches to the south. If he drinks enough single malt—at his age it only takes a couple of glasses—the caravan begins to flow as if from the ancient tales his grandmother read to him as a kid, downstairs in this very house. Time swirls and blends. The woods around him, full of night sounds, and the ocean, washing the beach beyond the dunes, become the real world. The rest of his life, trapped in the shaded memories and the old furniture in his house in Raleigh, vanishes.

On nights when the moon is full and the tide is high, he swears he can feel the island move.

He pauses at the railing to pour himself a couple fingers of Scotch, then moves his chair so he can watch the slow-moving headlights. They seem brighter than usual, more urgent, the night settling around them darker than in evenings past. Out there beyond the breakers, a storm is building—or rebuilding—as it bides its time, trying to decide where to hit next after trashing Cuba and much of the Caribbean. Ace heard about it on the morning news; Freya, they call it, after the Norse goddess of love. (What idiot, for God’s sake, thought of that one?) It could go anywhere, the weather guy said. Straight this way, a voice in the back of Ace’s head whispers.

“So typical of you,” Pam would have said. “How did you get to be such a pessimist?”

“I’m a Red Sox fan,” he would answer.

“Calvinism,” she would say. “The alligator in your Scottish gene pool.”

But Freya will probably come to nothing. It’s well into October, and a lot of these late storms peter out or turn and head out to sea.

He settles into the chair, takes a deep breath, and raises his glass for a sip. The now familiar tremor hits his hand and rattles the glass rim against his bottom teeth. He lowers the glass to avoid a slosh onto his chest. Hell, he’s seventy-five—of course he has a few shakes now and then. He shifts the drink to his other hand and tries again. The aromatic warmth swells in his throat as the liquor goes down, that welcome soothing of tissue and easing of mind. Another deep breath, a sigh.

Eighteen, twenty hours, and she will be here—J’nelle Reade—flying from New York to Raleigh, where she will rent a car and drive eastward through the vast coastal plain of North Carolina to Pomeiooc Island, then turn south, and eventually cross the very inlet bridge that feeds that stream of headlights moving toward him now. Except by then, of course, it will be tomorrow afternoon, and if he loosens his mind a bit, lubricates it with enough Scotch, that can still seem very far away, almost receding.

Except that she is not receding, she is coming. And how, exactly, did he get himself into this visit, this, well, situation?

• • •

He and J’nelle have lived a couple of hour’s plane flight from each other most of their lives. Until a few months ago, they had not communicated in decades except for small talk at a few high school reunions in Layton, Alabama, and an email correspondence that flared for a while, then seemed to burn itself out. He’d begun it to express condolences when he heard her husband, Seth, had died. Actually, Seth was only presumed to have died, vanished on a solo motorcycle trip to Alaska. The search went on for months, checking motels and cafes, scouring mountain ravines. It seemed strange to Ace that a guy Seth’s age would take off alone on a long-distance motorcycle trip. And that vanishing, that gone-to-nowhere, Ace imagined, might leave an even deeper hole than that left by certain knowledge of death. Pam had been dead several years by then, and suddenly, the clarity and certainty of that were a comfort.

So he’d been surprised a month ago when, out of the blue, she emailed what she called a “quick check-in” that wasn’t quick at all but more an internal review of her life that he’d heard only fragments of before in their previous emails about Seth: her college career (floundering at first but stellar by the end), a tour in the Peace Corps, grad school, then more Peace Corps (apparently something of a big shot, running programs in various countries), similar work for the State Department, unspecified work for a couple of international businesses (unnamed), and presently part-time consulting work (also unspecified).

He let her talk through several email exchanges and experienced a familiar feeling from their high school days of serving as an audience for a one person show. Then abruptly she switched gears. “So, how are you?” she asked. “What’s happening in your life?” The overture was one of those unexpected breezes that tickles you awake, reveals how stifling the air is around you, and hints of something you have unwittingly let slip away.

They had been sweethearts at Oneonta High School in Layton, back in the late ’50s, early ’60s, right after he, named Hamlet Horatio Sinclair by his literary parents, got the nickname “Ace” for striking out a blind kid in a summer-league baseball game.

The kid’s dad stood behind the home plate umpire and yelled a number at the kid for how high the pitch was coming: one, two, three (feet), etc., and zero for a no-swing ball, and now! for when to cut loose. Ace got the kid on a full count. It was one of his few strikeouts.

“You some kind of ace!” his good-ole-boy coach said when Ace walked back to the dugout, then gave him a teasing push with his meaty fist. The name stuck with teammates, classmates, eventually everybody except his family. Ace felt a little guilty about the strike-out until the blind kid, Felix White, got into Princeton on a full scholarship and Ace barely made the waiting list.

At the time, J’nelle said she liked the nickname. He wondered sometimes whether she was teasing too—about how good she thought he was at making out, or maybe at how not-so-good. After he left his old haunts for college and law school in Chapel Hill and became a lawyer in Raleigh, the name came in handy: “ace in the courtroom.” Nice ring to it, and certainly better than Ham or Horatio. And most of the time, he earned it.

He and J’nelle had been each other’s first true love. They parted ways when she graduated a year ahead of him and went away to college. Basically, she just moved on. It knocked him for a loop, but he eventually staggered free of his teenage trance and into the fluorescent-lit certainty that all the world lay before him and all he had to do was reach out and grab his dreams as they drifted his way.

He shies from that image of himself as a loopy, out-of-it kid every time he senses it sauntering toward him around a corner. He takes a sip of Scotch. Beyond the dunes, waves land with a slow, muffled thunder.

So that had been it with him and J’nelle until his fiftieth Oneonta High reunion eight years ago. She attended because of all the friends she had in his class. He was in a daze then too: it was the first time he’d gone anywhere since Pam died. And there J’nelle was, standing with Seth and some other people across a lawn at the reunion picnic. He did not expect her to be there—she had not been on the list of possible attendees—and at first glance, from a side angle, he assumed it was someone else. But something about the way her wine glass swung between her thumb and index finger between sips and the way her hair moved when she turned her head told him it could be no one else. She had on a sundress that revealed the top half of her back. The lean muscles of the champion swimmer she’d been still lay on her shoulders, and when she raised her arm to drink, the ridge of her shoulder blade slipped smoothly under her lightly tanned skin. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight years old. Jesus. The memories came flooding back of those times in high school when she wore a swimsuit or evening dress or when her blouse was unbuttoned and her bra undone in the back seat of his ’55 Ford, his hands nervously searching, sometimes racing over her, his breath sucked and held, his brain whirling in wonder at the bounty coming his way.

At the reunion, he tried to bring the feeling of her skin and flesh back to his fingertips, but an ache came instead, not to his fingertips, but to his chest. The longing in it measured every millimeter of distance between him and that sunlit back across the reunion lawn.

And then a couple of years later, he heard about Seth’s disappearance and sent the email of condolence. It took her some months to respond. That began a sporadic email conversation about nothing much and veered into questions of loss and how to deal with it and then into the nature of sadness. An intimation of mutuality crept in that caught him by surprise. It was like awakening in a dark room, hearing a match strike, and watching familiar fingers hold it to a candle. Their exchanges began to tiptoe as if they each sensed the presence of things still lost in the shadows. He found it strange that talking about grief and sadness could morph into such feelings of joy when he opened his email account and saw a new message from her.

Maybe she sensed his eagerness, and it scared her. Maybe she had enough grief of her own and decided she did not need to hear about his. Anyway, her responses became less frequent until finally they stopped. She was moving on. Again.

He went back to living the myth of himself as an old widowed lawyer nursing what was left of his life.

That had been six years ago, and now this latest, out-of-the-blue overture, and he was tiptoeing again. He answered politely, trying not to overdo things, all the while asking himself, Overdo what? until it became clear that it was not the glimpse of J’nelle’s bare back at the reunion that affected him so much; it was the awakened memories of their long-lost past, and the sense that there were things unsaid, unresolved. The sensation was ghostlike, came and went, darting in and out of shadows, but quickly and with such dexterity that it seemed startlingly alive.

Old dreams, old memories, all gone, he had cautioned himself, and steered the email conversation back to catch-up mode. She had a daughter named Anna, about whom she did not seem to want to say much. She was downsizing her life. She had just sold her lake house in Maine, letting go of the last property she and Seth had bought together.

“Sorry you had to let it go,” he wrote. “That seems to be the name of the game now. I’m in constant turmoil over what to do about my old family beach house on the North Carolina coast.”

She had heard about his beach house in high school, but never visited it, and wanted to know about its history, his grandfather’s vision for it, its architectural design. The house was one story, he told her, cypress clapboard, white with green shutters, wraparound porches, and front steps that split into two flights on their way down—was all he could tell her.

“Low Country,” she said.

“Pam and I added a deck on top of the roof to give us a better view.”

“What would your grandfather think of that?”

“About the same thing he would think of a profanity at the dinner table. Anyway, you’re welcome to use the house anytime you like, though I’m guessing it’s a bit below what you are used to.”

She let the subject drop until several emails later when he made the offer again, and out of politeness, he assumed, she asked more about it.

“Pomeiooc Island,” he wrote, “maybe a bit too far south for you, now that you’ve become a sophisticated Yankee. Nothing fancy. Near what used to be an old fishing town, a bit back from the beach, window AC units that work off and on, so I go mostly in the winter and fall.”

“It matches how I remember you.”

“Like an old house?”

“No, I mean the ‘nothing fancy’ part and, ‘a bit back from the beach’—authentic with a touch of shyness. Good place to retreat.”

“Yeah, if you like peace and quiet and don’t need a good restaurant.”

“I don’t need a good restaurant. And I like peace and quiet.”

“That’s funny. I don’t remember you as a peace-and-quiet sort of person.”

“Maybe you just didn’t notice.”

There was always a feeling when he was with her in high school—especially when they were alone—of another J’nelle inside her he could not see. He recalled a time when she sat across the car seat from him at a carhop drive-in in downtown Layton, a faraway look in her eyes. One of those sad, dreamy songs was on the radio—Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” or Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely.” Without looking at him, she said, “Take me home!” just like that. And he tried to move close, and she said, “No! Now, please!”

So he took her home, and he drove away with the feeling that a mystery, still in the shape of her, sat next to him in the car.

As the emails continued, he noticed in his voice a tone he didn’t like, from those high school days, long ago. It wasn’t desperation, but there was a running-to-catch-up quality about it in which his upper body seemed to lean dangerously forward of his feet. He thought he was done with it.

In early September, a few months after their latest email correspondence began, she flew to Europe for three weeks to do some consulting work in Paris and a cruise around the Iberian Peninsula. She went silent, and the silence haunted the empty spaces around him. His thoughts began to email amongst themselves: Was she meeting some guy in Paris? Was she alone on the cruise? It was none of his business, and why did he care? His brain composed fictional emails to her that came in sudden bursts. He scoffed at them, then caught himself revising furiously. Those old memories of dances, kisses, shadowy parking lots, and unbuttoned blouses rose in his dreams like red-winged blackbirds whirring out of a reed-choked marsh—their bright red and yellow epaulets flashing against their own blackness and a wintery sky that seemed to be his life.

In his sleep, he ached to reach for them, but he could not make his arms move.

After such a dream, he would awake and lie in the darkness—his fists clenched under the sheet, a calf twitching to cramp, and stare at the ceiling lit by the aquamarine numbers on his clock radio. This was crazy—these imaginary, compulsively worked-over emails, these seductive dreams that dragged him out of his settled past and across the tramped-over landscape of his life. The woman he had been emailing was not the girl who stirred those dreams. She wasn’t even the older woman whose smooth muscled back he’d admired at the reunion eight years before. He had no idea who she was. He did not even know whether the details she had revealed in her emails were true or just what she wanted him to hear.

He was too old for this bullshit, and by God, he would cut it out: stop the emails, stop the whole deluded thing. If she contacted him after her return from Europe, well, he’d decide then what to do. But for sure he was going to put some brakes on it, slow it down, way down. And then, a quiet exit.

And he had been absolutely sure of that until the day he’d met with his doctor, Don Pearlman, about the battery of tests Pearlman suggested to help diagnose those tremors in his arms and weakness and muscle cramps in his legs. EMG, NCS, MRI, as if the acronyms could somehow hide what the tests were intended to find.

Pearlman leaned back against the examining table, arms crossed, and looked down at him, seated in the ass-grinding, vinyl-coated chair bought by whatever sadist buys doctors’ office furniture. Ah, yes, and that ever-present stethoscope, a black noose down the front of Pearlman’s white smock.

“I’ll have Rob at the front desk call Carolina Radiology Center and schedule a date for you,” Pearlman said. “We can probably get you in next week and have the results shortly thereafter.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Dunno, buddy. Just have to wait and see.”

“You’ve got a pretty good idea though, don’t you?”

“There are at least a dozen possibilities, including nothing—that is to say, that ‘nothing’ we refer to as advancing maturity. Let’s wait till all the evidence is in—isn’t that what you lawyers say?”

“But if you had to bet.”

“Ace, listen to what I’m saying. This is not a betting business. It’s a test-and-wait-and-see business. Then if needed, test some more.”

He rested a hand on Ace’s shoulder. “Stay cool, don’t push things and don’t rush to judgment. We’ll set up the tests. Meanwhile, do something—get out of town to that old place you’ve got at the beach. We’ll try to get you a slot next week and give you a call.”

By the time Ace got home, his landline answering machine flashed red with a message from the radiology center saying he was scheduled to appear in three weeks for a battery of tests that the scheduler ran through so hurriedly he could not pick them up. He started to hit the play-back button, then changed his mind and hit the erase button instead.

Two glasses of wine that night with supper, then a couple fingers of Oban to nurse through the first six innings of a listless outing by the Sox in Fenway until the rain blew in and they brought the tarps out. He pressed the mute button and watched the ground crews at work until the network switched to a playoff game on the West Coast between the Giants and Dodgers. Back in the old days, they were both New York teams—back when he was a kid, back when he was a high school kid and dating J’nelle, or the person he thought he knew as J’nelle.

It was when he got up from the TV and went back to the kitchen counter to pour himself another Scotch that it hit him: this was the day J’nelle was to return to New York from Europe. He froze and stared down at the tumbler of amber liquid with its always mysterious, oily swirl. This was the real test: his first night alone after his session with Pearlman—was he going to go to bed, get drunk, or do something else? What, exactly? He sloshed in a little more Scotch and pulled out his laptop.

“How was the trip?” he typed. “Please drop a line when you get a chance.” His fingers froze in mid-air. No, not quite right: drop the “please.” And maybe, “when you feel like it” instead of “when you get a chance,” or maybe even better: “when you’ve recovered from your trip.”

He swigged a gulp of Scotch.

“Fuck it!” he said and hit “send.”

Silence for two days, then a short note: “I’m still a bit jet-lagged. More later when I’m on my feet.”

“Take your time,” he replied, then announced, “I’m probably headed to my beach house next week to do some reflecting on things,” a phrase he almost gagged on—that running-to-catch-up tone again, that anticipation of a tumble. He hated new age bullshit! But he was even more fed up with his own jacking around, and tacked on another sentence at the end that caught him even more by surprise: “Let me know if you’d be interested in talking by phone.”

“Sure,” she replied the next day. “Just give me some advance notice on when you might call.”

He suggested three possible evenings. She picked the last one. When the time finally came, he fortified himself with another round of wine and Scotch and fought to aim the fat tip of his index finger at the tiny keys on his cell phone in spite of that familiar tremor that he now called the Pearlman Shake.

“Hey,” she said, “I was a little doubtful you’d call. Good to hear your voice.”

“Good to hear yours,” he said. “So, how was the trip?”

In high school she had something close to a photographic memory that sucked up every detail, and when she got excited about something, those details came pouring out, as they did on the phone call. She gave him the tour: Paris restaurants and museums—her favorite, the Musée d’Orsay, and a new discovery, the Musée du quai Branly, with its works from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Then on to Barcelona and the cruise ship—some Norwegian line—and its stops at Valencia, Gibraltar, Lisbon, etc., etc., along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts. Her voice had the same chameleon-like quality of the young J’nelle’s voice that hopscotched back and forth from light to shadow, except that now the tone had a rawness about it, as if chafed by age.

He put his phone on speaker and treaded water in a thickening broth of French, Spanish, and Portuguese names and places and restaurant menus. Could this stranger, this globe-trotting woman, whose voice buzzed out at him from that nest of microchips and plastic resting in his palm, be a real-life link to those red-winged blackbirds flashing through his dreams? From somewhere deep in the space-age magic of the phone, the word “folly” flashed out at him.

He grabbed at his first chance to interrupt.

“Sounds terrific. Do you do these cruises all by yourself?”

“Usually.”

“I’m impressed.”

Pause. Then another shift in tone, a quick step back to that image of her across the car seat from him in high school. Take me home, please.

“I’ve been taking care of myself for years,” she said.

He recalled a moment in high school when he was a second-string running back and got called into the state championship game when the star got his bell rung. On Ace’s first carry, the quarterback jammed a handoff into his gut. The body parts he had trained so hard to make ready—arms, wrists, and hands—turned to rubber as if they had been waiting for this moment to betray him. He bobbled the ball and lunged forward, reaching, grabbing, even yelling at it, and he can still feel its leathery weight tumble off the tips of his fingers.

“Sure,” he said into the sky blue face of his iPhone, “of course you have.”

He did not hear her sigh, but he sensed it.

“So,” she said, “you’re about to take your own trip.”

“I am?”

“To your beach house—didn’t you say?”

“Oh that—yeah, in a few days. I need to get away. It just sits there waiting.”

“Peace and quiet.”

“Yeah, peace and quiet.”

And once again, that reaching, grabbing feeling as the football slipped away. And why in the fuck couldn’t he stop himself?

“You know,” he said, “you are welcome to use it whenever.”

“Thanks.”

The ball, beyond reach now, off the tips of his fingers, bouncing on the ground toward a diving scrum of players just before his nose and face guard plow into the dirt.

“I mean, you are welcome to come down. I’ll be there for the last part of the week and through the weekend.”

On her end, he heard a small tap or click, a pen perhaps tapping a desk or table, a glass being set on a counter. God forbid, a remote.

“You mean, come down while you’re there?”

“Well yes, if you’d like to.”

More silence, then again the tap, tap.

“Ace, I’m not sure that’s a good idea?”

“I’ve pretty much quit worrying about what’s a good idea.”

For a couple of seconds after that blown hand-off in high school, he lay on his back and stared up at the nighttime sky, hazed over with the stadium lights’ yellow glow, and felt a strange peace with himself, maybe with everything. That had been his chance for gridiron glory, and there he was, there was no going back to do it over. And so the future, well, it would have to be whatever it would have to be.

“I guess I’m surprised, to say the least,” she said, “and I appreciate the offer…”

“Nothing fancy,” he said, “a weekend maybe, or a few days. It’s not that hard to get to. I’m flexible. I can pick you up at the Raleigh airport, and we can drive down together.”

Silence.

“You know, just catch up, get reacquainted. I don’t want to scare you.”

More silence.

“J’nelle—I’m too old for seduction, and it never worked with you anyway. We can just hang out and—what’s that line from the Springsteen song?—‘talk about the old times.’ I assure you, my intentions are honorable.”

She chuckled. “You haven’t turned into one of those creepy old men who prey on helpless old ladies?”

“One thing I’m still sure of: you are not helpless.”

“OK. Look, let me think about this.”

“Email me or give me a call. I’ll do all the planning.”

He knew that whatever her answer, it would come by email and not by phone. And maybe it would not come by either, or by UPS or snail mail or Morse code. And if so, that would be the end of it.

“Sorry I’m so hesitant about this,” she wrote. “Life has been fairly confusing lately, and I’m a bit unsettled. I can come, but not until the weekend. I’ve got to rearrange some things on this end, make airline reservations, and line up a rental car.”

“I’ll pay for all of that,” he said.

“Not on your life.”

• • •

And so here he is on his roof deck on this particular night, watching the stream of headlights.

He removes his baseball cap and lets a breeze off the sound whip the ragged locks of whitening hair that tickle his neck just above his collar top. The stream of car lights crossing the inlet bridge has thinned. The cars move toward him as solitary, slow-moving beacons. Stars are out, showing themselves in that slow, barely noticed way that also seems sudden, and form their ancient patterns in the sky. He thinks of Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach”—the calm sea, the moon lying fair upon the straits, “Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!”

When Pam was alive, she would point out the constellations to him from this very deck, Taurus, Orion, the two Ursas, she knew them all. She was an artist, and something about the patterns of light spoke to her artistic spirit. They were so clear to her, but even as he tried to follow where she was pointing, he had a hard time making them out, and one night it came to him that his problem was not his weaker eyesight but the lack of an instinct. Pam had an internal sextant, a magical tool of her artistic nature that saw the pinpoints of light even before they blinked in the purple darkness. And when she tried to show him what she saw, he always felt small and was unsure how much of that was due to the vastness of the heavens and the magic they offered and how much of it was because of her natural affinity with it all. It was the same with birds and seashells and butterflies and mushrooms. Her inbred knack for knowing them deepened and brightened with age, even as the ruddy hue of her skin, framed by her gray, bowl-cut hair, paled toward the whiteness of death.

She had the same bowl cut as a kid. He saw it in a picture of her on a bureau in her parents’ house. Dressed in khaki pants and high boots that looked way too big, she had just returned from a deer hunt with her father. The way she stood next to him, held onto his paw-like hand, and looked up at him without really looking—you could almost smell the woods on them and picture the scene: Pam trailing behind among giant hardwoods on the way to their deer stand, searching for fall wildflowers and mushrooms. Come on, Pam. Keep your eyes in front of you and watch where you point that gun.

She tried to take him hunting once when she was pregnant with their first child, Eli, and he trailed behind her until he stopped in his tracks and said, “I don’t want to do this.”

She turned and gave him a hug, that same bowl cut pressed against his cheek.

“I don’t want to anymore either,” she said. “Let’s watch birds.”

They walked back to the car and traded guns for binoculars.

Their life together was chock-full, like she was, and then he sat and watched as the morphine dripped in and she faded and faded, until somewhere, in a quiet known only to her, she was gone.

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and turns his empty whiskey glass slowly in his hands. His limbs feel fragile and wobbly with his grief. Beneath him the boards of the deck blur in the light of the moon. She is out there somewhere—in the wooded darkness off the side of the deck, up there in the starry sky. Watching? No. Waiting? No, just there. What does she think of this mess he has gotten himself into?

“Ace, have you thought this through? Be careful, you could get hurt.”

Hopeless romantic, she once called him. “Beneath it all—trial lawyer, war vet, make-believe hard ass—that’s what you are.”

Beneath him he feels the house begin to stir. Always in a full moon, the ghosts are restless. Pam sensed them the first time she came to the house after they were married. Two old maid aunts of his lived in the house for years and died here, as did a widowed uncle, and an infant child of a distant cousin, bitten in the face by a water moccasin. Maybe they anticipate J’nelle’s coming, the invasion by a strange woman. They were all hardcore Presbyterians and would not approve of unchaperoned cohabitation, even for a weekend. And how about the other spirits, the ones who hover in the woods between the house and the main road, guarding the graves of the ancient ones who lived here long before the whites came? Something tells him they know all about J’nelle, and about him as well, knew about this visit even before that last reunion. For them, the invasion came long ago.

He gets to his feet, turns his back on the water, sky, and night sounds, and descends the steps to the front porch and the door that leads to the main room, where he will wash out his glass, put up the bottle, and go to bed. That rocking cradle. That lonely, gray darkness of sleep.

• • •

But tonight the cradle does not rock. Instead, the dreams come—the house dream first, in which he wanders through a multistory house of endless rooms and torturous corridors, searching for something he cannot identify but which seems critically important. He keeps hoping that Pam will come to help him search, but she never shows, and the dream ends with a sudden, unexpected exit into nowhere.

And the jungle dream, in which he is back in Vietnam, and the war is still going on, except that he is not a young soldier, but old like he is now. Crack North Vietnamese units are nearby; rockets, artillery shells, and mortars whack into the jungle. The North Vietnamese attack through the wire and run through the American camp, throwing grenades and firing AK-47s. He tries frantically to get the attention of his superior—some blank-faced, empty-brained martinet who brought him there from the States—but the officer will not listen. And then the searching feeling returns, just as in the other dream about the house, and there is nothing to find, and this time there is no exit.