Sole Survivor

ONE LOST FOREVER

At two-thirty Saturday morning, in Los Angeles, Joe Carpenter woke, clutching a pillow to his chest, calling his lost wife’s name in the darkness. The anguished and haunted quality of his own voice had shaken him from sleep. Dreams fell from him not all at once but in trembling veils, as attic dust falls off rafters when a house rolls with an earthquake.

When he realized that he did not have Michelle in his arms, he held fast to the pillow anyway. He had come out of the dream with the scent of her hair. Now he was afraid that any movement he made would cause that memory to fade and leave him with only the sour smell of his night sweat.

Inevitably, no weight of stillness could hold the memory in all its vividness. The scent of her hair receded like a balloon rising, and soon it was beyond his grasp.

Bereft, he got up and went to the nearest of two windows. His bed, which consisted of nothing but a mattress on the floor, was the only furniture, so he did not have to be concerned about stumbling over obstructions in the gloom.

The studio apartment was one large room with a kitchenette, a closet, and a cramped bathroom, all over a two-car detached garage in upper Laurel Canyon. After selling the house in Studio City, he had brought no furniture with him, because dead men needed no such comforts. He had come here to die.

For ten months he had been paying the rent, waiting for the morning when he would fail to wake.

The window faced the rising canyon wall, the ragged black shapes of evergreens and eucalyptuses. To the west was a fat moon glimpsed through the trees, a silvery promise beyond the bleak urban woods.

He was surprised that he was still not dead after all this time. He was not alive, either. Somewhere between. Halfway in the journey. He had to find an ending, because for him there could never be any going back.

After fetching an icy bottle of beer from the refrigerator in the kitchenette, Joe returned to the mattress. He sat with his back against the wall.

Beer at two-thirty in the morning. A sliding-down life.

He wished that he were capable of drinking himself to death. If he could drift out of this world in a numbing alcoholic haze, he might not care how long his departure required.

Too much booze would irrevocably blur his memories, however, and his memories were as sacred to him as the impression of Christ’s face on the Shroud of Turin was precious to the priests who believed in its authenticity and dedicated their lives to its preservation. He allowed himself only a few beers or glasses of wine at a time.

Other than the faint tree-filtered glimmer of moonlight on the window glass, the only light in the room came from the backlit buttons on the telephone keypad beside the mattress.

He knew only one person to whom he could talk frankly about his despair in the middle of the night — or in broad daylight. Though he was only thirty-seven, his mom and dad were long gone. He had no brothers or sisters. Friends had tried to comfort him after the catastrophe, but he had been too pained to talk about what had happened, and he had kept them at a distance so aggressively that he had offended most of them.

Now he picked up the phone, put it in his lap, and called Michelle’s mother, Beth McKay.

In Virginia, nearly three thousand miles away, she picked up the phone on the first ring. ‘Joe?’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘You know me, dear — early to bed and up before dawn.’

‘Henry?’ he asked, referring to Michelle’s father.

‘Oh, the old beast could sleep through Armageddon,’ she said affectionately.

She was a kind and gentle woman, full of compassion for Joe even as she coped with her own loss. She possessed an uncommon strength.

At the funeral, both Joe and Henry had needed to lean on Beth, and she had been a rock for them. Hours later, however, well after midnight, Joe had discovered her on the patio behind the Studio City house, sitting in a glider in her pyjamas, hunched like an ancient crone, tortured by grief, muffling her sobs in a pillow that she had carried with her from the spare room, trying not to burden her husband or her son — in — law with her own pain.

Joe sat beside her, but she didn’t want her hand held or an arm around her shoulders. She flinched at his touch. Her anguish was so intense that it had scraped her nerves raw, until a murmur of commiseration was like a scream to her, until a loving hand scorched like a branding iron. Reluctant to leave her alone, he had picked up the long-handled net and skimmed the swimming pool: circling the water, scooping gnats and leaves off the black surface at two o’clock in the morning, not even able to see what he was doing, just grimly circling, circling, skimming, skimming, while Beth wept into the pillow, circling and circling until there was nothing to strain from the clear water except the reflections of cold uncaring stars. Eventually, having wrung all the tears from herself, Beth rose from the glider, came to him, and pried the net out of his hands. She had led him upstairs and tucked him in bed as though he were a child, and he had slept deeply for the first time in days.

Now, on the phone with her at a lamentable distance, Joe set aside his half-finished beer. ‘Is it dawn there yet, Beth?’

‘Just a breath ago.’

‘Are you sitting at the kitchen table watching it through the big window? Is the sky pretty?’

‘Still black in the west, indigo overhead, and out to the east, a fan of pink and coral and sapphire like Japanese silk.’

As strong as Beth was, Joe called her regularly not just for the strength she could offer, but because he liked to listen to her talk. The particular timbre of her voice and her soft Virginia accent were the same as Michelle’s had been.

He said, ‘You answered the phone with my name.’

‘Who else would it have been, dear?’

‘Am I the only one who ever calls this early?’

‘Rarely others. But this morning. it could only be you.’

The worst had happened one year ago to the day, changing their lives forever. This was the first anniversary of their loss.

She said, ‘I hope you’re eating better, Joe. Are you still losing weight?’

‘No,’ he lied.

Gradually during the past year, he had become so indifferent to food that three months ago he began dropping weight. He had dropped twenty pounds to date.

‘Is it going to be a hot day there?’ he asked.

‘Stifling hot and humid. There are some clouds, but we’re not supposed to get rain, no relief. The clouds in the east are fringed with gold and full of pink. The sun’s all the way out of bed now.’

‘It doesn’t seem like a year already, does it, Beth?’

‘Mostly not. But sometimes it seems ages ago.’

‘I miss them so much,’ he said. ‘I’m so lost without them.’

‘Oh, Joe. Honey, Henry and I love you. You’re like a son to us. You are a son to us.’

‘I know, and I love you too, very much. But it’s not enough, Beth, it’s not enough.’ He took a deep breath. ‘This year, getting through, it’s been hell. I can’t handle another year like this.’

‘It’ll get better with time.’

‘I’m afraid it won’t. I’m scared. I’m no good alone, Beth.’

‘Have you thought some more about going back to work, Joe?’ Before the accident, he had been a crime reporter at the Los AngelesPost. His days as a journalist were over.

‘I can’t bear the sight of the bodies, Beth.’

He was unable to look upon a victim of a drive-by shooting or a car-jacking, regardless of age or sex, without seeing Michelle or Chrissie or Nina lying bloody and battered before him.

‘You could do other kinds of reporting. You’re a good writer, Joe. Write some human interest stories. You need to be working, doing something that’ll make you feel useful again.’

Instead of answering her, he said, ‘I don’t function alone. I just want to be with Michelle. I want to be with Chrissie and Nina.’

‘Someday you will be,’ she said, for in spite of everything, she remained a woman of faith.

‘I want to be with them now.’ His voice broke, and he paused to put it back together. ‘I’m finished here, but I don’t have the guts to move on.’

‘Don’t talk like that, Joe.’

He didn’t have the courage to end his life, because he had no convictions about what came after this world. He did not truly believe that he would find his wife and daughters again in a realm of light and loving spirits. Lately, when he gazed at a night sky, he Saw only distant stuns in a meaningless void, but he couldn’t bear to voice his doubt, because to do so would be to imply that Michelle’s and the girls’ lives had been meaningless as well.

Beth said, ‘We’re all here for a purpose.’

'They were my purpose. They’re gone.’

'then there’s another purpose you’re meant for. It’s your job now to find it. There’s a reason you’re still here.’

‘No reason,’ he disagreed. ‘Tell me about the sky, Beth.’

After a hesitation, she said, ‘The clouds to the east aren’t gilded any more. The pink is gone too. They’re white clouds, no rain in them, and not dense but like a filigree against the blue.’

He listened to her describe the morning at the other end of the continent. Then they talked about fireflies, which she and Henry had enjoyed watching from their back porch the previous night. Southern California had no fireflies, but Joe remembered them from his boyhood in Pennsylvania. They talked about Henry’s garden, too, in which strawberries were ripening, and in time Joe grew sleepy.

Beth’s last words to him were: ‘It’s full daylight here now. Morning’s going past us and heading your way, Joey. You give it a chance, morning’s going to bring you the reason you need, some purpose, because that’s what the morning does.’

After he hung up, Joe lay on his side, staring at the window, from which the silvery lunar light had faded. The moon had set. He was in the blackest depths of the night.

When he returned to sleep, he dreamed not of any glorious approaching purpose but of an unseen, indefinable, looming menace. Like a great weight falling through the sky above him.

Later Saturday morning, driving to Santa Monica, Joe Carpenter suffered an anxiety attack. His chest tightened, and he was able to draw breath only with effort. When he lifted one hand from the wheel, his fingers quivered like those of a palsied old man.

He was overcome by a sense of falling, as from a great height, as though his Honda had driven off the freeway into an inexplicable and bottomless abyss. The pavement stretched unbroken ahead of him, and the tyres sang against the blacktop, but he could not reason himself back to a perception of stability.

Indeed, the plummeting sensation grew so severe and terrifying that he took his foot off the accelerator and tapped the brake pedal.

Horns blared and skidding tyres squealed as traffic adjusted to his sudden deceleration. As cars and trucks swept past the Honda, the drivers glared murderously at Joe or mouthed offensive words, or made obscene gestures. This was greater Los Angeles in an age of change, crackling with the energy of doom, yearning for the Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent trespass on someone else’s turf might result in a thermonuclear response.

His sense of falling did not abate. His stomach turned over as if he were aboard a roller coaster, plunging along a precipitous length of track. Although he was alone in the car, he heard the screams of passengers, faint at first and then louder, not the good-humoured shrieks of thrill seekers at an amusement park, but cries of genuine anguish.

As though from a distance, he listened to himself whispering, ‘No, no, no, no.,

A brief gap in traffic allowed him to angle the Honda off the pavement. The shoulder of the freeway was narrow. He stopped as close as possible to the guardrail, over which lush oleander bushes loomed like a great cresting green tide.

He put the car in park but didn’t switch off the engine. Even though he was sheathed in cold sweat, he needed the chill blasts of air-conditioning to be able to breathe. The pressure on his chest increased. Each stuttering inhalation was a struggle, and each hot exhalation burst from him with an explosive wheeze.

Although the air in the Honda was clear, Joe smelled smoke. He tasted it too: the acrid melange of burning oil, melting plastic, smouldering vinyl, scorched metal.

When he glanced at the dense clusters of leaves and the deep-red flowers of the oleander pressing against the windows on the passenger side, his imagination morphed them into billowing clouds of greasy smoke. The window became a rectangular porthole with rounded corners and thick dual-pane glass.

Joe might have thought he was losing his mind — if he hadn’t suffered similar anxiety attacks during the past year. Although sometimes as much as two weeks passed between episodes, he often endured as many as three in one day, each lasting between ten minutes and half an hour.

He had seen a therapist. The counselling had not helped.

His doctor recommended anti-anxiety medication. He rejected the prescription. He wanted to feel the pain. It was all he had.

Closing his eyes, covering his face with his icy hands, he strove to regain control of himself, but the catastrophe continued to unfold around him. The sense of falling intensified. The smell of smoke thickened. The screams of phantom passengers grew louder.

Everything shook. The floor beneath his feet. The cabin walls. The ceiling. Horrendous rattling and twanging and banging and gong-like clanging accompanied the shaking, shaking, shaking.

'Please,’ he pleaded.

Without opening his eyes, he lowered his hands from his face. They lay fisted at his sides.

After a moment, the small hands of frightened children clutched at his hands, and he held them tightly.

The children were not in the car, of course, but in their seats in the doomed airliner. Joe was flashing back to the crash of Flight 353. For the duration of this seizure, he would be in two places at once:

in the real world of the Honda and in the Nationwide Air 747 as it found its way down from the serenity of the stratosphere, through overcast night sky, into a meadow as unforgiving as iron.

Michelle had been sitting between the kids. Her hands, not Joe’s, were those that Chrissie and Nina gripped in their last long minutes of unimaginable dread.

As the shaking grew worse, the air was filled with projectiles.

Paperback books, laptop computers, pocket calculators, flatware and dishes — because a few passengers had not yet finished dinner when disaster struck — plastic drinking glasses, single-serving bottles of liquor, pencils and pens ricocheted through the cabin.

Coughing because of the smoke, Michelle would have urged the girls to keep their heads down. Heads down. Protect your faces.

Such faces. Beloved faces. Seven-year-old Chrissie had her mother’s high cheekbones and clear green eyes. Joe would never forget the flush of joy that suffused Chrissie’s face when she was taking a ballet lesson, or the squint-eyed concentration with which she approached home plate to take her turn at bat in Little League baseball games. Nina, only four, the pug-nosed munchkin with eyes as blue as sapphires, had a way of crinkling her sweet face in pure delight at the sight of a dog or cat. Animals were drawn to her — and she to them — as though she were the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi, which was not a far-fetched idea when one saw her gazing with wonder and love upon even an ugly garden lizard cupped in her small, careful hands.

Heads down. Protect your faces.

In that advice was hope, the implication that they would all survive and that the worst thing that might happen to them would be a face-disfiguring encounter with a hurtling laptop or broken glass.

The fearsome turbulence increased. The angle of descent grew more severe, pinning Joe to his seat, so that he couldn’t easily bend forward and protect his face.

Maybe the oxygen masks dropped from overhead, or maybe damage to the craft had resulted in a systems failure, with the consequence that masks had not been deployed at every seat. He didn’t know if Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina had been able to breathe or if, choking on the billowing soot, they had struggled futilely to find fresh air.

Smoke surged more thickly through the passenger compartment. The cabin became as claustrophobic as any coal mine deep beneath the surface of the earth.

In the blinding blackdamp, unseen sinuosities of fire uncoiled like snakes. The wrenching terror of the aircraft’s uncontrolled descent was equalled by the terror of not knowing where those flames were or when they might flash with greater vigour through the 747.

As the stress on the airliner increased to all but intolerable levels, thunderous vibrations shuddered through the fuselage. The giant wings thrummed as though they would tear loose. The steel frame groaned like a living beast in mortal agony, and perhaps minor welds broke with sounds as loud and sharp as gunshots. A few rivets sheered off, each with a piercing screeeeek.

To Michelle and Chrissie and little Nina, perhaps it seemed that the plane would disintegrate in flight and that they would be cast into the black sky, be spun away from one another, plummeting in their separate seats to three separate deaths, each abjectly alone at the instant of impact.

The huge 747–400, however, was a marvel of design and a triumph of engineering, brilliantly conceived and soundly constructed. In spite of the mysterious hydraulics failure that rendered the aircraft uncontrollable, the wings did not tear loose, and the fuselage did not disintegrate. Its powerful Pratt and Whitney engines screaming as if in defiance of gravity, Nationwide Flight 353 held together throughout its final descent.

At some point Michelle would have realized that all hope was lost, that they were in a dying plunge. With characteristic courage and selflessness, she would have thought only of the children then, would have concentrated on comforting them, distracting them as much as possible from thoughts of death. No doubt she leaned toward Nina, pulled her close, and in spite of the breath-stealing fumes, spoke into the girl’s ear to be heard above the clamour: it’s okay, baby, we’re together, I love you, hold on to Mommy, I love you, you’re the best little girl who ever was. Shaking down, down, down through the Colorado night, her voice full of emotion but devoid of panic she had surely sought out Chrissie too: it’s all right, I’m with you, honey, hold my hand, I love you so much, I’m so very proud of you, we’re together, it’s all right, we’ll always be together.

In the Honda alongside the freeway, Joe could hear Michelle’s voice almost as if from memory, as though he had been with her as she had comforted the children. He wanted desperately to believe that his daughters had been able to draw upon the strength of the exceptional woman who had been their mother. He needed to know that the last thing the girls heard in this world was Michelle telling them how very precious they were, how cherished.

The airliner met the meadow with such devastating impact that the sound was heard more than twenty miles away in the rural Colorado vastness, stirring hawks and owls and eagles out of trees and into flight, startling weary ranchers from their armchairs and early beds.

In the Honda, Joe Carpenter let out a muffled cry. He doubled over as if he had been struck hard in the chest.

The crash was catastrophic. Flight 353 exploded on impact and tumbled across the meadow, disintegrating into thousands of scorched and twisted fragments, spewing orange gouts of burning jet fuel that set fire to evergreens at the edge of the field. Three hundred and thirty people, including passengers and crew, perished instantly.

Michelle, who had taught Joe Carpenter most of what he knew about love and compassion, was snuffed out in that merciless moment. Chrissie, seven-year-old ballerina and baseball player, would never again pirouette on point or run the bases. And if animals felt the same psychic connection with Nina that she felt with them, then in that chilly Colorado night, the meadows and the wooded hills had been filled with small creatures that cowered miserably in their burrows.

Of his family, Joe Carpenter was the sole survivor.

He had not been with them on Flight 353. Every soul aboard had been hammered into ruin against the anvil of the earth. If he had been with them, then he too would have been identifiable only by his dental records and a printable finger or two.

His flashbacks to the crash were not memories but exhausting fevers of imagination, frequently expressed in dreams and sometimes in anxiety attacks like this one. Racked by guilt because he had not perished with his wife and daughters, Joe tortured himself with these attempts to share the horror that they must have experienced.

Inevitably, his imaginary journeys on the earthbound airplane failed to bring him the healing acceptance for which he longed. Instead, each nightmare and each waking seizure salted his wounds.

He opened his eyes and stared at the traffic speeding past him. If he chose the right moment, he could open the door, step out of the car, walk onto the freeway, and be struck dead by a truck.

He remained safely in the Honda, not because he was afraid to die, but for reasons unclear even to him. Perhaps, for the time being at least, he felt the need to punish himself with more life.

Against the passenger-side windows, the overgrown oleander bushes stirred ceaselessly in the wind from the passing traffic. The friction of the greenery against the glass raised an eerie whispering like lost and forlorn voices.

He was not shaking any more.

The sweat on his face began to dry in the cold air gushing from the dashboard vents.

He was no longer plagued by a sensation of falling. He had reached bottom.

Through the August heat and a thin haze of smog, passing cars and trucks shimmered like mirages, trembling westward toward cleaner air and the cooling sea. Joe waited for a break in traffic and then headed once more for the edge of the continent.

The sand was bone white in the glare of the August sun. Cool and green and rolling came the sea, scattering the tiny shells of dead and dying creatures on the strand.

The beach at Santa Monica was crowded with people tanning, playing games, and eating picnic lunches on blankets and big towels. Although the day was a scorcher farther inland, here it was merely pleasantly warm, with a breeze coming off the Pacific.

A few sunbathers glanced curiously at Joe as he walked north through the coconut-oiled throng, because he was not dressed for the beach. He wore a white T-shirt, tan chinos, and running shoes without socks. He had not come to swim or sunbathe.

As lifeguards watched the swimmers, strolling young women in bikinis watched the lifeguards. Their rhythmic rituals distracted them entirely from the architects of shells cast on the foaming shore near their feet.

Children played in the surf, but Joe could not bear to watch them. Their laughter, shouts, and squeals of delight abraded his nerves and sparked in him an irrational anger.

Carrying a Styrofoam cooler and a towel, he continued north, gazing at the seared hills of Malibu beyond the curve of Santa Monica Bay. At last he found a less populated stretch of sand. He unrolled the towel, sat facing the sea, and took a bottle of beer from its bed of ice in the cooler.

If ocean-view property had been within his means, he would have finished out his life at the water’s edge. The ceaseless susurration of surf, the sun-gilded and moon-silvered relentlessness of incoming breakers, and the smooth liquid curve to the far horizon brought him not any sense of peace, not serenity, but a welcome numbness.

The rhythms of the sea were all he ever expected to know of eternity and of God.

If he drank a few beers and let the therapeutic vistas of the

Pacific wash through him, he might then be calm enough to go to the cemetery. To stand upon the earth that blanketed his wife and his daughters. To touch the stone that bore their names.

This day, of all days, he had an obligation to the dead. Two teenage boys, improbably thin, wearing baggy swim trunks slung low on their narrow hips, ambled along the beach from the north and stopped near Joe’s towel. One wore his long hair in a ponytail, the other in a buzz cut. Both were deeply browned by the sun. They turned to gaze at the ocean, their backs to him, blocking his view.

As Joe was about to ask them to move out of his way, the kid with the ponytail said, ‘You holding anything, man?’

Joe didn’t answer because he thought, at first, that the boy was talking to his buzz-cut friend.

‘You holding anything?’ the kid asked again, still staring at the ocean. ‘Looking to make a score or move some merchandise?’

‘I’ve got nothing but beer,’ Joe said impatiently, tipping up his sunglasses to get a better look at them, ‘and it’s not for sale.’

‘Well,’ said the kid with the buzz cut, ‘if you ain’t a candy store, there’s a couple guys watching sure think you are.’

‘Where?’

‘Don’t look now,’ said the boy with the ponytail. ‘Wait till we get some distance. We been watching them watch you. They stink of cop so bad, I’m surprised you can’t smell ‘em.’

The other said, ‘Fifty feet south, near the lifeguard tower. Two dinks in Hawaiian shirts, look like preachers on vacation.’

‘One’s got binoculars. One’s got a walkie-talkie.’ Bewildered, Joe lowered his sunglasses and said, ‘Thanks.’ ‘Hey,’ said the boy with the ponytail, ‘just doing the friendly thing, man. We hate those self-righteous assholes.’

With nihilistic bitterness that sounded absurd coming from anyone so young, the kid with the buzz cut said, ‘Screw the system.’

As arrogant as young male tigers, the boys continued south along the beach, checking out the girls. Joe had never gotten a good look at their faces.

A few minutes later, when he finished his first beer, he turned, opened the lid of the cooler, put away the empty can, and looked nonchalantly back along the sward. Two men in Hawaiian shirts were standing in the shadow of the lifeguard tower.

The taller of the two, in a predominantly green shirt and white cotton slacks, was studying Joe through a pair of binoculars. Alert to the possibility that he’d been spotted, he calmly turned with the binoculars to the south, as if interested not in Joe but in a group of bikini-clad teenagers.

The shorter man wore a shirt that was mostly red and orange. His tan slacks were rolled at the cuffs. He was barefoot in the sand, holding his shoes and socks in his left hand.

In his right hand, held down at his side, was another object, which might be a small radio or a CD player. It might also be a walkie-talkie.

The tall guy was cancerously tanned, with sun-bleached blond hair, but the smaller man was pale, a stranger to beaches.

Popping the tab on another beer and inhaling the fragrant foamy mist that sprayed from the can, Joe turned to the sea once more.

Although neither of the men looked as if he’d left home this morning with the intention of going to the shore, they appeared no more out of place than Joe did. The kids had said that the watchers stank of cop, but even though he’d been a crime reporter for fourteen years, Joe couldn’t catch the scent.

Anyway, there was no reason for the police to be interested in him. With the murder rate soaring, rape almost as common as romance, and robbery so prevalent that half the populace seemed to be stealing from the other half, the cops would not waste time harassing him for drinking an alcoholic beverage on a public beach.

High on silent pinions, shining white, three sea gulls flew northward from the distant pier, at first paralleling the shoreline. Then they soared over the shimmering bay and wheeled across the sky.

Eventually Joe glanced back toward the lifeguard tower. The two men were no longer there.

He faced the sea again.

Incoming breakers broke, spilling shatters of foam on the sand. He watched the waves as a willing subject might watch a hypnotist’s pendant swinging on a silver chain.

This time, however, the tides did not mesmerize, and he was unable to guide his troubled mind into calmer currents. Like the effect of a planet on its moon, the calendar pulled Joe into its orbit, and he couldn’t stop his thoughts from revolving around the date:

August 15, August 15, August 15. This first anniversary of the crash had an overwhelming gravity that crushed him down into memories of his loss.

When the remains of his wife and children had been conveyed to him, after the investigation of the crash and the meticulous cataloguing of both the organic and inorganic debris, Joe was given only fragments of their bodies. The sealed caskets were the size usually reserved for the burial of infants. He received them as if he were taking possession of the sacred bones of saints nestled in reliquaries.

Although he understood the devastating effects of the airliner’s impact, and though he knew that an unsparing fire had flashed through the debris, how strange it had seemed to Joe that Michelle’s and the girls’ physical remains should be so small. They had been such enormous presences in his life.

Without them, the world seemed to be an alien place. He didn’t feel as if he belonged here until he was at least two hours out of bed. Some days the planet turned twenty-four hours without rotating Joe into an accommodation with life. Clearly this was one of them.

After he finished the second Coors, he put the empty can in the cooler. He wasn’t ready to drive to the cemetery yet, but he needed to visit the nearest public restroom.

Joe rose to his feet, turned, and glimpsed the tall blond guy in the green Hawaiian shirt. The man, without binoculars for the moment, was not south near the lifeguard tower but north, about sixty feet away, sitting alone in the sand. To screen himself from Joe, he had taken a position beyond two young couples on blankets and a Mexican family that had staked their territory with folding chairs and two big yellow-striped beach umbrellas.

Casually Joe scanned the surrounding beach. The shorter of the two possible cops, the one wearing the predominantly red shirt, was not in sight.

The guy in the green shirt studiously avoided looking directly at Joe. He cupped one hand to his right ear, as if were wearing a bad hearing aid and needed to block the music from the sun-bathers’ radios in order to focus on something else that he wanted to hear.

At this distance, Joe could not be certain, but he thought the man’s lips were moving. He appeared to be engaged in a conversation with his missing companion.

Leaving his towel and cooler, Joe walked south toward the public restrooms. He didn’t need to glance back to know that the guy in the green Hawaiian shirt was watching him.

On reconsideration, he decided that getting soused on the sand probably was still against the law, even these days. After all, a society with such an enlightened tolerance of corruption and savagery needed to bear down hard on minor offences to convince itself that it still had standards.

Nearer the pier, the crowds had grown since Joe’s arrival. In the amusement centre, the roller coaster clattered. Riders squealed.

He took off his sunglasses as he entered the busy public restrooms.

The men’s lavatory stank of urine and disinfectant. In the middle of the floor between the toilet stalls and the sinks, a large cockroach, half crushed but still alive, hitched around and around in a circle, having lost all sense of direction and purpose. Everyone avoided it — some with amusement, some with disgust or indifference.

After he had used a urinal, as he washed his hands, Joe studied the other men in the mirror, seeking a conspirator. He settled on a long-haired fourteen-year-old in swim trunks and sandals.

When the boy went to the paper-towel dispenser, Joe followed, took a few towels immediately after him, and said, ‘Outside, there might be a couple of cop types hanging out, waiting for me.’

The boy met his eyes but didn’t say anything, just kept drying his hands on the paper towels.

Joe said, ‘I’ll give you twenty Blicks to reconnoitre for me, then come back and tell me where they are.’

The kid’s eyes were the purple-blue shade of a fresh bruise, and his stare was as direct as a punch. ‘Thirty Blicks.’

Joe could not remember having been able to look so boldly and challengingly into an adult’s eyes when he himself had been fourteen. Approached by a stranger with an offer like this, he would have shaken his head and left quickly.

‘Fifteen now and fifteen when I come back,’ said the kid.

Wadding his paper towels and tossing them in the trash can, Joe said, ‘Ten now, twenty when you come back.’

‘Deal.’

As he took his wallet from his pocket, Joe said, ‘One is about six two, tan, blond, in a green Hawaiian shirt. The other is maybe five ten, brown hair, balding, pale, in a red and orange Hawaiian.’

The kid took the ten-dollar bill without breaking eye contact. ‘Maybe this is jive, there’s nobody like that outside, and when I come back, you want me to go into one of those stalls with you to get the other twenty.’

Joe was embarrassed, not for being suspected of paedophilia but for the kid, who had grown up in a time and a place that required him to be so knowledgeable and street smart at such a young age. ‘No jive.’

“Cause I don’t jump that way.’

‘Understood.’

At least a few of the men present must have heard the exchange, but none appeared to be interested. This was a live and let live age.

As the kid turned to leave, Joe said, ‘They won’t be waiting right outside, easy to spot. They’ll be at a distance, where they can see the place but aren’t easily seen themselves.’

Without responding, the boy went to the door, sandals clacking against the floor tiles.

‘You take my ten Blicks and don’t come back,’ Joe warned, ‘I’ll find you and kick your ass.’

‘Yeah, right,’ the kid said scornfully, and then he was gone.

Returning to one of the rust-stained sinks, Joe washed his hands again so he wouldn’t appear to be loitering.

Three men in their twenties had gathered to watch the crippled cockroach, which was still chasing itself around one small portion of the lavatory floor. The beetle’s track was a circle twelve inches in diameter. It twitched brokenly along that circumference with such insectile single-mindedness that the men, hands full of dollar bills, were placing bets on how fast it would complete each lap.

Bending over the sink, Joe splashed handfuls of cold water in his face. The astringent taste and smell of chlorine was in the water, but any sense of cleanliness that it provided was more than countered by a stale, briny stink wafting out of the open drain.

The building wasn’t well ventilated. The still air was hotter than the day outside, reeking of urine and sweat and disinfectant, so noxiously thick that breathing it was beginning to sicken him.

The kid seemed to be taking a long time.

Joe splashed more water in his face and then studied his beaded, dripping reflection in the streaked mirror. In spite of his tan and the new pinkness from the sun that he had absorbed in the past hour, he didn’t look healthy. His eyes were grey, as they had been all his life. Once, however, it had been the bright grey of polished iron or wet indulines; now it was the soft dead grey of ashes, and the whites were bloodshot.

A fourth man had joined the cockroach handicappers. He was in his mid-fifties, thirty years older than the other three but trying to be one of them by matching their enthusiasm for pointless cruelty and sophomoric humour. The gamblers had become an obstruction to the restroom traffic. They were getting rowdy, laughing at the spasmodic progress of the insect, urging it on as though it were a thoroughbred pounding across turf toward a finish line. ‘Go, go, go, go, go!’ They noisily debated whether its pair of quivering antenna were part of its guidance system or the instruments with which it detected the scents of food and other roaches eager to copulate.

Striving to block out the voices of the raucous group, Joe searched his ashen eyes in the mirror, wondering what his motives had been when he sent the boy to scope out the men in the Hawaiian shirts. If they were conducting a surveillance, they must have mistaken him for someone else. They would realize their error soon, and he would never see them again. There was no good reason to confront them or to gather intelligence about them.

He had come to the beach to prepare himself for the visit to the graveyard. He needed to submit himself to the ancient rhythms of the eternal sea, which wore at him as waves wore at rock, smoothing the sharp edges of anxiety in his mind, polishing away the splinters in his heart. The sea delivered the message that life was nothing more than meaningless mechanics and cold tidal forces, a bleak message of hopelessness that was tranquillising precisely because it was brutally humbling. He also needed another beer or even two to further numb his senses, so the lesson of the sea would remain with him as he crossed the city to the cemetery.

He didn’t need distractions. He didn’t need action. He didn’t need mystery. For him, life had lost all mystery the same night that it had lost all meaning, in a silent Colorado meadow blasted with sudden thunder and fire.

Sandals slapping on the tiles, the boy returned to collect the remaining twenty of his thirty dollars. ‘Didn’t see any big guy in a green shirt, but the other one’s out there, sure enough, getting a sunburn on his bald spot.’

Behind Joe, some of the gamblers whooped in triumph. Others groaned as the dying cockroach completed another circuit either a few seconds quicker or slower than its time for the previous lap.

Curious, the boy craned his neck to see what was happening.

‘Where?’ Joe asked, withdrawing a twenty from his wallet.

Still trying to see between the bodies of the circled gamblers, the boy said, ‘There’s a palm tree, a couple of folding tables in the sand where this geeky bunch of Korean guys are playing chess, maybe sixty-eighty feet down the beach from here.’

Although high frosted windows let in hard white sunshine and grimy fluorescent tubes shed bluish light overhead, the air seemed yellow, like an acidic mist.

‘Look at me,’ Joe said.

Distracted by the cockroach races, the boy said, ‘Huh?’

‘Look at me.’

Surprised by the quiet fury in Joe’s voice, the kid briefly met his gaze. Then those troubling eyes, the colour of contusions, refocused on the twenty-dollar bill.

‘The guy you saw was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt?’ Joe asked.

‘Other colours in it, but mostly red and orange, yeah.’

‘What pants was he wearing?’

‘Pants?’

‘To keep you honest, I didn’t tell you what else he was wearing. So if you saw him, now you tell me.’

‘Hey, man, I don’t know. Was he wearing shorts or trunks or pants — how am I supposed to know?’

‘You tell me.’

‘White? Tan? I’m not sure. Didn’t know I was supposed to do a damn fashion report. He was just standing there, you know, looking out of place, holding his shoes in one hand, socks rolled up in them.’

It was the same man whom Joe had seen with the walkie-talkie near the lifeguard station.

From the gamblers came noisy encouragements to the cockroach, laughter, curses, shouted offers of odds, the making of bets. They were so loud now that their voices echoed harshly off the concrete-block walls and seemed to reverberate in the mirrors with such force that Joe half expected those silvery surfaces to disintegrate.

‘Was he actually watching the Koreans play chess or pretending?’ Joe asked.

‘He was watching this place and talking to the cream pies.’

‘Cream pies?’

‘Couple of stone-gorgeous bitches in thong bikinis. Man, you should see the redhead bitch in the green thong. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a twelve. Bring you all the way to attention, man.’

‘He was coming on to them?’

‘Don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,’ said the kid. ‘Loser like him, neither of those bitches will give him a shot.’

‘Don’t call them bitches,’ Joe said.

What?’

‘They’re women.’

In the kid’s angry eyes, something flickered like visions of switchblades. ‘Hey, who the hell are you — the Pope?’

The acidic yellow air seemed to thicken, and Joe imagined that he could feel it eating away his skin.

The swirling sound of flushing toilets inspired a spiralling sensation in his stomach. He struggled to repress sudden nausea.

To the boy, he said, ‘Describe the women.’

With more challenge in his stare than ever, the kid said, ‘Totally stacked. Especially the redhead. But the brunette is just about as nice. I’d crawl on broken glass to get a whack at her, even if she is deaf.’

‘Deaf?’

‘Must be deaf or something,’ said the boy. ‘She was putting a hearing aid kind of thing in her ear, taking it out and putting it in like she couldn’t get it to fit right. Real sweet-looking bitch.’

Even though he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than the boy, Joe wanted to seize the kid by the throat and choke him. Choke him until he promised never to use that word again without thinking. Until he understood how hateful it was and how it soiled him when he used it as casually as a conjunction.

Joe was frightened by the barely throttled violence of his reaction: teeth clenched, arteries throbbing in neck and temples, field of vision abruptly constricted by a blood-dark pressure at the periphery. His nausea grew worse, and he took a deep breath, another, calming himself.

Evidently, the boy saw something in Joe’s eyes that gave him pause. He became less confrontational, turning his gaze once more to the shouting gamblers. ‘Give me the twenty. I earned it.’

Joe didn’t relinquish the bill. ‘Where’s your dad?’

‘Say what?’

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Where are they?’

‘They got their own lives.’

Joe’s anger sagged into despair. ‘What’s your name, kid?’

‘What do you need to know for? You think I’m a baby, can’t come to the beach alone? Screw you, I go where I want.’

‘You go where you want, but you don’t have anywhere to be.’

The kid made eye contact again. In his bruised stare was a glimpse of hurt and loneliness so deep Joe was shocked that anyone should have descended to it by the tender age of fourteen. ‘Anywhere to be? What’s that supposed to mean?’

Joe sensed that they had made a connection, that a door had opened unexpectedly for him and for this troubled boy, and that both of their futures could be changed for the better if he could just understand where they might be able to go after they crossed that threshold. But his own life was as hollow — his store of philosophy as empty — as any abandoned shell washed up on the nearby shore. He had no belief to share, no wisdom to impart, no hope to offer, insufficient substance to sustain himself let alone another.

He was one of the lost, and the lost cannot lead.

The moment passed, and the kid plucked the twenty-dollar bill out of Joe’s hand. His expression was more of a sneer than a smile when he mockingly repeated Joe’s words, “They’re women.” Backing away, he said, ‘You get them hot, they’re all just bitches.’

‘And are we all just dogs?’ Joe asked, but the kid slipped out of the lavatory before he could hear the question.

Although Joe had washed his hands twice, he felt dirty.

He turned to the sinks again, but he could not easily reach them. Six men were now gathered immediately around the cockroach, and a few others were hanging back, watching.

The crowded lavatory was sweltering, Joe was streaming sweat, and the yellow air burned in his nostrils, corroded his lungs with each inhalation, stung his eyes. It was condensing on the mirrors, blurring the reflections of the agitated men until they seemed not to be creatures of flesh and blood but tortured spirits glimpsed through an abattoir window, wet with sulphurous steam, in the deepest kingdom of the damned. The fevered gamblers shouted at the roach, shaking fistfuls of dollars at it. Their voices blended into a single shrill ululation, seemingly senseless, a mad gibbering that rose in intensity and pitch until it sounded, to Joe, like a crystal-shattering squeal, piercing to the centre of his brain and setting off dangerous vibrations in the core of him.

He pushed between two of the men and stamped on the crippled cockroach, killing it.

In the instant of stunned silence that followed his intrusion, Joe turned away from the men, shaking, shaking, the shattering sound still tremulant in his memory, still vibrating in his bones. He headed toward the exit, eager to get out of there before he exploded.

As one, the gamblers broke the paralytic grip of their surprise. They shouted angrily, as righteous in their outrage as churchgoers might be outraged at a filthy and drunken denizen of the streets who staggered into their service to sag against the chancel rail and vomit on the sanctuary floor.

One of the men, with a face as sun red as a slab of greasy ham, heat-cracked lips peeled back from snuff-stained teeth, seized Joe by one arm and spun him around. ‘What the shit you think you’re doing, pal?’

‘Let go of me.’

‘I was winning money here, pal.’

The stranger’s hand was damp on Joe’s arm, dirty fingernails blunt but digging in to secure the slippery grip.

‘Let go.’

‘I was winning money here,’ the guy repeated. His mouth twisted into such a wrathful grimace that his chapped lips split, and threads of blood unravelled from the cracks.

Grabbing the angry gambler by the wrist, Joe bent one of the dirty fingers back to break the bastard’s grip. Even as the guy’s eyes widened with surprise and alarm, even as he started to cry out in pain, Joe wrenched his arm up behind his back, twisted him around, and ran him forward, giving him the bum’s rush, face first into the closed door of a toilet stall.

Joe had thought his strange rage had been vented earlier, as he had talked to the teenage boy, leaving only despair, but here it was again, disproportionate to the offence that seemed to have caused it, as hot and explosive as ever. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, why these men’s callousness mattered to him, but before he quite realized the enormity of his overreaction, he battered the door with the guy’s face, battered it again, and then a third time.

The rage didn’t dissipate, but with the blood-dark pressure constricting his field of vision, filled with a primitive frenzy that leaped through him like a thousand monkeys skirling through a jungle of trees and vines, Joe was nevertheless able to recognize that he was out of control. He let go of the gambler, and the man fell to the floor, in front of the toilet stall.

Shuddering with anger and with fear of his anger, Joe moved backward until the sinks prevented him from going any farther.

The other men in the lavatory had eased away from him. All were silent.

On the floor, the gambler lay on his back in scattered one and five-dollar bills, his winnings. His chin was bearded with blood from his cracked lips. He pressed one hand to the left side of his face, which had taken the impact with the door. ‘It was just a cockroach, Christ’s sake, just a lousy cockroach.’

Joe tried to say that he was sorry. He couldn’t speak.

‘You almost broke my nose. You could’ve broke my nose. For a cockroach? Broke my nose for a cockroach?’

Sorry not for what he had done to this man, who had no doubt done worse to others, but sorry for himself, sorry for the miserable walking wreckage that he had become and for the dishonour that his inexcusable behaviour brought to the memory of his wife and daughters, Joe nonetheless remained unable to express any regret. Choking on self-loathing as much as on the fetid air, he walked out of the reeking building into an ocean breeze that didn’t refresh, a world as foul as the lavatory behind him.

In spite of the sun, he was shivering, because a cold coil of remorse was unwinding in his chest.

Halfway back to his beach towel and his cooler of beer, all but oblivious of the sunning multitudes through which he weaved, he remembered the pale-faced man in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt. He didn’t halt, didn’t even look back, but slogged onward through the sand.

He was no longer interested in learning who was conducting a surveillance of him — if that was what they were doing. He couldn’t imagine why he had ever been intrigued by them. If they were police, they were bumblers, having mistaken him for someone else. They were not genuinely part of his life. He wouldn’t even have noticed them if the kid with the ponytail hadn’t drawn his attention to them. Soon they would realize their mistake and find their real quarry. In the meantime, to hell with them.

More people were gravitating to the portion of the beach where Joe had established camp. He considered packing and leaving, but he wasn’t ready to go to the cemetery. The incident in the lavatory had opened the stopcock on his supply of adrenaline, cancelling the effects of the lulling surf and the two beers that he had drunk.

Therefore, onto the beach towel again, one hand into the cooler, extracting not a beer but a half-moon of ice, pressing the ice to his forehead, he gazed out to sea. The grey-green chop seemed to be an infinite array of turning gears in a vast mechanism, and across it, bright silver flickers of sunlight jittered like electric current across a power grid. Waves approached and receded as monotonously as connecting rods pumping back and forth in an engine. The sea was a perpetually labouring machine with no purpose but the continuation of its own existence, romanticized and cherished by countless poets but incapable of knowing human passion, pain, and promise.

He believed that he must learn to accept the cold mechanics of Creation, because it made no sense to rail at a mindless machine. After all, a clock could not be held responsible for the too-swift passage of time. A loom could not be blamed for weaving the cloth that later was sewn into an executioner’s hood. He hoped that if he came to terms with the mechanistic indifference of the universe, with the meaningless nature of life and death, he would find peace.

Such acceptance would be cold comfort, indeed, and deadening to the heart. But all he wanted now was an end to anguish, nights without nightmares, and release from the need to care.

Two newcomers arrived and spread a white beach blanket on the sand about twenty feet north of him. One was a stunning redhead in a green thong bikini skimpy enough to make a stripper blush. The other was a brunette, nearly as attractive as her friend.

The redhead wore her hair in a short, pixie cut. The brunette’s hair was long, the better to conceal the communications device that she was no doubt wearing in one ear.

For women in their twenties, they were too giggly and girlish, high-spirited enough to call attention to themselves even if they had not been stunning. They lazily oiled themselves with tanning lotion, took turns greasing each other’s back, touching with languorous pleasure, as if they were in the opening scene of an adult video, drawing the interest of every heterosexual male on the beach.

The strategy was clear. No one would suspect that he was under surveillance by operatives who concealed so little of themselves and concealed themselves so poorly. They were meant to be as unlikely as the men in the Hawaiian shirts had been obvious. But for thirty dollars’ worth of reconnaissance and the libidinous observations of a horny fourteen-year-old, their strategy would have been effective.

With long tan legs and deep cleavage and tight round rumps, maybe they were also meant to engage Joe’s interest and seduce him into conversation with them. If this was part of their assignment, they failed. Their charms didn’t affect him.

During the past year, any erotic image or thought had the power to stir him only for a moment, whereupon he was overcome by poignant memories of Michelle, her precious body and her wholesome enthusiasm for pleasure. Inevitably, he thought also of the terrible long fall from stars to Colorado, the smoke, the fire, then death. Desire dissolved quickly in the solvent of loss.

These two women distracted Joe only to the extent that he was annoyed about their incompetent misidentification of him. He considered approaching them to inform them of their mistake, just to be rid of them. After the violence in the lavatory, however, the prospect of confrontation made him uneasy. He was drained of anger now, but he no longer trusted his self-control.

One year to the day.

Memories and gravestones.

He would get through it.

Surf broke, gathered the foamy fragments of itself, stole away, and broke again. In the patient study of that endless breaking, Joe Carpenter gradually grew calm.

Half an hour later, without the benefit of another beer, he was ready to visit the cemetery.

He shook the sand out of his towel. He folded the towel in half lengthwise, rolled it tight, and picked up the cooler.

As silken as the sea breeze, as buttery as sunlight, the lithe young women in the thong bikinis pretended to be enthralled by the monosyllabic repartee of two steroid-thickened suitors, the latest in a string of beach-boy Casanovas to take their shot.

The direction of his gaze masked by his sunglasses, Joe could see that the beauties’ interest in the beefcake was pretence. They were not wearing sunglasses, and while they chattered and laughed and encouraged their admirers, they glanced surreptitiously at Joe.

He walked away and did not look back.

As he took some of the beach with him in his shoes, so he strove to take the indifference of the ocean with him in his heart.

Nevertheless, he could not help but wonder what police agency could boast such astonishingly beautiful women on its force. He had known some female cops who were as lovely and sexy as any movie star, but the redhead and her friend exceeded even celluloid standards.

In the parking lot, he half expected the men in the Hawaiian shirts to be watching his Honda. If they had it staked out, their surveillance post was well concealed.

Joe drove out of the lot and turned right on Pacific Coast Highway, checking his rear-view mirror. He was not being followed.

Perhaps they had realized theft error and were frantically looking for the right man.

From Wilshire Boulevard to the San Diego Freeway, north to the Ventura Freeway and then east, he drove out of the cooling influence of the sea breezes into the furnace heat of the San Fernando Valley. In the August glare, these suburbs looked as hot and hard-baked as kiln-fired pottery.

Three hundred acres of low rolling hills and shallow vales and broad lawns comprised the memorial park, a city of the deceased, Los Angeles of the dead, divided into neighbourhoods by gracefully winding service roads. Famous actors and ordinary salesmen were buried here, rock-’n’-roll stars and reporters’ families, side by side in the intimate democracy of death.

Joe drove past two small burial services in progress: cars parked along the curb, ranks of folding chairs set up on the grass, mounds of grave earth covered with soft green tarps. At each site, the mourners sat hunched, stifled in their black dresses and black suits, oppressed by heat as well as by grief and by a sense of their own mortality.

The cemetery included a few elaborate crypts and low-walled family garden plots, but there were no granite forests of vertical monuments and headstones. Some had chosen to entomb the remains of their loved ones in niches in the walls of communal mausoleums. Others preferred the bosom of the earth, where graves were marked only with bronze plaques in flat stone tablets flush with the ground, so as not to disturb the park like setting.

Joe had put Michelle and the girls to rest on a gently rising hillside shaded by a scattering of stone pines and Indian laurels. Squirrels scampered across the grass on milder days than this, and rabbits came out at twilight. He believed that his three treasured women would have preferred this to the hard scape of a mausoleum, where there would not be the sound of wind-stirred trees on breezy evenings.

Far beyond the second of the two burial services, he parked at the curb, switched off the engine, and got out of the Honda. He stood beside the car in the hundred-degree heat, gathering his courage.

When he started up the gentle slope, he didn’t look toward their graves. If he were to see the site from a distance, the approach to it would be daunting, and he would turn back. Even after an entire year, each visit was as disturbing to him as if he had come here to view not their burial plots but their battered bodies in a morgue. Wondering how many years would pass before his pain diminished, he ascended the rise with his head down, eyes on the ground, slump-shouldered in the heat, like an old dray horse following a long-familiar route, going home.

Consequently, he didn’t see the woman at the graves until he was only ten or fifteen feet from her. Surprised, he halted.

She stood just out of the sun, in pine shadows. Her back was half to him. With a Polaroid camera, she was snapping photographs of the flush-set markers.

‘Who’re you?’ he asked.

She didn’t hear him, perhaps because he had spoken softly, perhaps because she was so intent upon her photography.

Stepping closer, he said, ‘What’re you doing?’

Startled, she turned to face him.

Petite but athletic-looking, about five feet two, she had an immediate impact far greater than her size or her appearance could explain, as though she were clothed not merely in blue jeans and a yellow cotton blouse but in some powerful magnetic field that bent the world to her. Skin the shade of milk chocolate. Huge eyes as dark as the silt at the bottom of a cup of Armenian espresso, harder to read than the portents in tea leaves, with a distinct almond shape suggesting a touch of Asian blood in the family line. Hair not Afro-kinky or in cornrows but feather-cut, thick and naturally straight and so glossy black that it almost looked blue, which seemed Asian too. Her bone structure was all out of Africa: smooth broad brow, high cheekbones, finely carved but powerful, proud but beautiful. She was maybe five years older than Joe, in her early forties, but a quality of innocence in her knowing eyes and a faint aspect of childlike vulnerability in her otherwise strong face made her seem younger than he was.

‘Who are you, what’re you doing?’ he repeated.

Lips parted as if to speak, speechless with surprise, she gazed at him as though he were an apparition. She raised one hand to his face and touched his cheek, and Joe did not flinch from her.

At first he thought he saw amazement in her eyes. The extreme tenderness of her touch caused him to look again, and he realized that what he saw was not wonderment but sadness and pity.

‘I’m not ready to talk to you yet.’ Her soft voice was musical

‘Why’re you taking pictures. why pictures of their graves?’

Clutching the camera with two hands, she said, ‘Soon. I’ll be back when it’s time. Don’t despair. You’ll see, like the others.’

An almost supernatural quality to the moment half convinced Joe that she was an apparition, that her touch had been so achingly gentle precisely because it was barely real, an ectoplasmic caress.

The woman herself, however, was too powerfully present to be a ghost or a heatstroke illusion. Diminutive but dynamic. More real than anything in the day. More real than sky and trees and August sun, than granite and bronze. She had such a compelling presence that she seemed to be coming at him though she was standing still, loomed over him though she was ten inches shorter than he. She was more brightly lighted in the pine shadows than he was in the direct glare of the sun.

‘How are you coping?’ she asked.

Disoriented, he answered only by shaking his head.

‘Not well,’ she whispered.

Joe looked past her, down at the granite and bronze markers. As if from very far away, he heard himself say, ‘Lost forever,’ speaking as much about himself as about his wife and daughters.

When he returned his attention to the woman, she was gazing past him, into the distance. As the sound of a racing engine rose, concern crinkled the corners of her eyes and creased her forehead.

Joe turned to see what was troubling her. Along the road that he had travelled, a white Ford van was approaching at a far higher speed than the posted limit.

‘Bastards,’ she said.

When Joe turned to the woman again, she was already running from him, angling across the slope toward the brow of the low hill.

‘Hey, wait,’ he said.

She didn’t pause or look back.

He started after her, but his physical condition wasn’t as good as hers. She seemed to be an experienced runner. After a few steps, Joe halted. Defeated by the suffocating heat, he wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.

Sunlight mirroring the windshield and flaring off the headlight lenses, the white van shot past Joe. It paralleled the woman as she sprinted across the grave rows.

Joe started back down the hill toward his car, not sure what he was going to do. Maybe he should give chase. What the hell was going on here?

Fifty or sixty yards beyond the parked Honda, brakes shrieking, leaving twin smears of rubber on the pavement behind it, the van slid to a stop at the curb. Both front doors flew open, and the men in Hawaiian shirts leaped out. They bolted after the woman.

Surprise halted Joe. He hadn’t been followed from Santa Monica, not by the white van, not by any vehicle. He was sure of that.

Somehow they had known that he would come to the cemetery. And since neither of the men showed any interest in Joe, but went after the woman as if they were attack dogs, they must have been watching him at the beach not because they were interested in him, per se, but because they hoped that she would make contact with him at some point during the day.

The woman was their only quarry.

Hell, they must have been watching his apartment too, must have followed him from there to the beach.

As far as he knew, they had been keeping him under surveillance for days. Maybe weeks. He had been in such a daze of desolation for so long, walking through life like a sleeper drifting through a dream, that he would not have noticed these people slinking at the periphery of his vision.

Who is she, who are they, why was she photographing the graves?

Uphill and at least a hundred yards to the east, the woman fled under the generously spreading boughs of stone pines clustered along the perimeter of the burial grounds, across shaded grass only lightly dappled with sunshine. Her dusky skin blended with the shadows, but her yellow blouse betrayed her.

She was heading toward a particular point on the crest, as if familiar with the terrain. Considering that no cars were parked along this section of the cemetery road, except for Joe’s Honda and the white van, she might have entered the memorial park by that route, on foot.

The men from the van had a lot of ground to make up if they were going to catch her. The tall one in the green shirt seemed in better shape than his partner, and his legs were considerably longer than the woman’s, so he was gaining on her. Nevertheless, the smaller guy didn’t relent even as he fell steadily behind. Sprinting frantically up the long sun-seared slope, stumbling over a grave marker, then over another, regaining his balance, he charged on, as though in an animal frenzy, in a blood fever, gripped by the need to be there when the woman was brought clown.

Beyond the manicured hills of the cemetery were other hills in a natural condition: pale sandy soil, banks of shale, brown grass, stink weed, mesquite, stunted manzanita, tumbleweed, scattered low and gnarled dwarf oaks. Arid ravines led down into the undeveloped land above Griffith Observatory and east of the Los Angeles Zoo, a rattlesnake-infested plot of desert scrub in the heart of the urban sprawl.

If the woman got into the scrub before being caught, and if she knew her way, she could lose her pursuers by zigging and zagging from one narrow declivity to another.

Joe headed toward the abandoned white van. He might be able to learn something from it.

He wanted the woman to escape, though he wasn’t entirely sure why his sympathies were with her.

As far as he knew, she might be a felon with a list of heinous crimes on her rap sheet. She hadn’t looked like a criminal, hadn’t sounded like one. This was Los Angeles, however, where clean-cut young men brutally shot gunned their parents and then, as orphans, tearfully begged the jury to pity them and show mercy. No one was what he seemed.

Yet. the gentleness of her fingertips against his cheek, the sorrow in her eyes, the tenderness in her voice all marked her as a woman of compassion, whether she was a fugitive from the law or not. He could not wish her ill.

A vicious sound, hard and flat, cracked across the cemetery, leaving a brief throbbing wound in the hot stillness. Another crack followed.

The woman had nearly reached the brow of the hill. Visible between the last two bristling pines. Blue jeans. Yellow blouse. Stretching her legs with each stride. Brown arms pumping close to her sides.

The smaller man, in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt, had run wide of his companion, whom he was still trailing, to get a clear line of sight on the woman. He had stopped and raised his arms, holding something in both hands. A handgun. The son of a bitch was shooting at her.

Cops didn’t try to shoot unarmed fugitives in the back. Not righteous cops.

Joe wanted to help her. He couldn’t think of anything to do. If they were cops, he had no right to second-guess them. If they weren’t cops, and even if he could catch up with them, they would probably shoot him down rather than let him interfere.

Crack.

The woman reached the crest.

‘Go,’ Joe urged her in a hoarse whisper. ‘Go.’

He didn’t have a cellular phone in his own car, so he couldn’t call 911. He had carried a mobile unit as a reporter, but these days he seldom called anyone even from his home phone.

The keening crack of another shot pierced the leaden heat. If these men weren’t police officers, they were desperate or crazy, or both, resorting to gunplay in such a public place, even though this part of the cemetery was currently deserted. The sound of the shots would travel, drawing the attention of the maintenance personnel who, merely by closing the formidable iron gate at the entrance to the park, could prevent the gunmen from driving out.

Apparently unhit, the woman disappeared over the top of the hill, into the scrub beyond.

Both of the men in Hawaiian shirts went after her.

Heart knocking so fiercely that his vision blurred with each hard-driven surge of blood, Joe Carpenter sprinted to the white van.

The Ford was not a recreational vehicle but a panelled van of the type commonly used by businesses to make small deliveries. Neither the back nor the side of the vehicle featured the name or logo of any enterprise.

The engine was running. Both front doors stood open.

He ran to the passenger side, skidded in a soggy patch of grass around a leaking sprinkler head, and leaned into the cab, hoping to find a cellular phone. If there was one, it wasn’t in plain sight.

Maybe in the glove box. He popped it open.

Someone in the cargo hold behind the front seats, mistaking Joe for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, said, ‘Did you get Rose?’

Damn.

The glove box contained a few rolls of Lifesavers that spilled onto the floor — and a window envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

By law, every vehicle in California was required to carry a valid registration and proof of insurance.

‘Hey, who the hell are you?’ the guy in the cargo hold demanded.

Clutching the envelope, Joe turned away from the van.

He saw no point in trying to run. This man might be as quick to shout people in the back as were the other two.

With a clatter and a skreeeek of hinges, the single door at the rear of the vehicle was flung open.

Joe walked directly toward the sound. A sledge-faced specimen with Popeye forearms, neck sufficiently thick to support a small car, came around the side of the van, and Joe opted for the surprise of instant and unreasonable aggression, driving one knee hard into his crotch.

Retching, wheezing for air, the guy started to bend forward, and

Joe head-butted him in the face. He hit the ground unconscious, breathing noisily through his open mouth because his broken nose was streaming blood.

Although, as a kid, Joe had been a fighter and something of a troublemaker, he had not raised a fist against anyone since he met and married Michelle. Until today. Now, twice in the past two hours, he had resorted to violence, astonishing himself.

More than astonished, he was sickened by this primitive rage. He had never known such wrath before, not even during his troubled youth, yet here he was struggling to control it again as he had struggled in the public lavatory in Santa Monica. For the past year, the fall of Flight 353 had filled him with terrible despondency and grief, but he was beginning to realize that those feelings were like layers of oil atop another — darker — emotion that he had been denying; what filled the chambers of his heart to the brim was anger.

If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater. But now, given any excuse to vent his fury on people, he had seized the opportunity with disturbing enthusiasm.

Rubbing the top of his head, which hurt from butting the guy in the face, looking down at the unconscious hulk with the bleeding nose, Joe felt a satisfaction that he did not want to feel. A wild glee simultaneously thrilled and repulsed him.

Dressed in a T-shirt promoting the videogame Quake, baggy black pants, and red sneakers, the fallen man appeared to be in his late twenties, at least a decade younger than his two associates. His hands were massive enough to juggle cantaloupes, and a single letter was tattooed on the base phalange of each finger, thumbs excluded, to spell out ANABOLIC, as in anabolic steroid.

This was no stranger to violence.

Nevertheless, although self-defence justified a pre-emptive strike, Joe was disturbed by the savage pleasure he took from such swift brutality.

The guy sure didn’t look like an officer of the law. Regardless of his appearance, he might be a cop, in which case assaulting him ensured serious consequences.

To Joe’s surprise, even the prospect of jail didn’t diminish his twisted satisfaction in the ferocity with which he had acted. He felt half nauseated, half out of his mind — but more alive than he had been in a year.

Exhilarated yet fearful of the moral depths into which this new empowering anger might take him, he glanced in both directions along the cemetery road. There was no oncoming traffic. He knelt beside his victim.

Breath whistled wetly through the man’s throat, and he issued a soft childlike sigh. His eyelids fluttered, but he did not regain consciousness while his pockets were searched.

Joe found nothing but a few coins, a nail clipper, a set of house keys, and a wallet that contained the standard ID and credit cards. The guy’s name was Wallace Morton Blick. He was carrying no police-agency badge or identification. Joe kept only the driver’s license and returned the wallet to the pocket from which he had extracted it.

The two gunmen had not reappeared from the rugged scrub land beyond the cemetery hill. They had scrambled over the crest, after the woman, little more than a minute ago; even if she quickly slipped away from them, they weren’t likely to give up on her and return after only a brief search.

Wondering at his boldness, Joe quickly dragged Wallace Blick away from the rear corner of the white van. He tucked him close to the flank of the vehicle, where he was less likely to be seen by anyone who came along the roadway. He rolled him onto his side so he would not choke on the blood that might be draining from his nasal passages down the back of his throat.

Joe went to the open rear door. He climbed into the back of the van. The low rumble of the idling engine vibrated in the floorboard.

The cramped cargo hold was lined on both sides with electronic communications, eavesdropping, and tracking equipment. A pair of compact command chairs, bolted to the floor, could be swivelled to face the arrayed devices on each side.

Squeezing past the first chair, Joe settled into the second, in front of an active computer. The interior of the van was air-conditioned, but the seat was still warm because Blick had vacated it less than a minute ago.

On the computer screen was a map. The streets had names meant to evoke feelings of peace and tranquillity, and Joe recognized them as the service roads through the cemetery.

A small blinking light on the map drew his attention. It was green, stationary, and located approximately where the van itself was parked.

A second blinking light, this one red and also stationary, was on the same road but some distance behind the van. He was sure that it represented his Honda.

The tracking system no doubt utilized a CD-ROM with exhaustive maps of Los Angeles County and environs, maybe of the entire state of California or of the country coast to coast. A single compact disc had sufficient capacity to contain detailed street maps for all of the contiguous states and Canada.

Someone had fixed a powerful transponder to his car. It emitted a microwave signal that could be followed from quite a distance. The computer utilized surveillance-satellite uplinks to triangulate the signal, then placed the Honda on the map relative to the position of the van, so they could track him without maintaining visual contact.

Leaving Santa Monica, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, Joe had seen no suspicious vehicle in his rear-view mirror. This van had been able to stalk him while streets away or miles behind, out of sight.

As a reporter, he had once gone on a mobile surveillance with federal agents, a group of high-spirited cowboys from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had used a similar but less sophisticated system than this.

Acutely aware that the battered Blick or one of the other two men might trap him here if he delayed too long, Joe swivelled in his chair, surveying the back of the van for some indication of the agency involved in this operation. They were tidy. He couldn’t spot a single clue.

Two publications lay beside the computer station at which Blick had been working: one issue each of Wired, featuring yet another major article about the visionary splendiferousness of Bill Gates, and a magazine aimed at former Special Forces officers who wished to make horizontal career moves from military service into jobs as paid mercenaries. The latter was folded open to an article about belt-Buckle knives sharp enough to eviscerate an adversary or cut through bone. Evidently this was Blick’s reading matter during lulls in the surveillance operation, as when he had been waiting for Joe to grow weary of contemplating the sea from Santa Monica Beach.

Mr. Wallace Blick, of the ANABOLIC tattoo, was a techno geek with an edge.

When Joe climbed out of the van, Slick was groaning but not yet conscious. His legs pumped, a flurry of kicks, as if he were a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, and his cool red sneakers tore divots from the grass.

Neither of the men in Hawaiian shirts had returned from the desert scrub beyond the hill.

Joe hadn’t heard any more gunshots, although the terrain might have muffled them.

He hurried to his car. The door handle was bright with the kiss of the sun, and he hissed with pain when he touched it.

The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. He cranked down the window.

As he started the Honda, he glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw a flatbed truck with board sides approaching from farther east in the cemetery. It was probably a groundskeeper’s vehicle, either coming to investigate the gunfire or engaged in routine maintenance.

Joe could have followed the road to the west end of the memorial park and then looped all the way around to the entrance at the east perimeter, but he was in a hurry and wanted to go directly back the way he had come. Overwhelmed by a feeling that he had stretched his luck too far, he could almost hear a ticking like a time-bomb clock. Pulling away from the curb, he tried to hang a U-turn but couldn’t quite manage it in one clean sweep.

He shifted into reverse and tramped on the accelerator hard enough to make the tyres squeal against the hot pavement. The Honda shot backward. He braked and shifted into drive again.

Tick, tick, tick.

Instinct proved reliable. Just as he accelerated toward the approaching groundskeeper’s truck, the rear window on the driver’s side of the car, immediately behind his head, exploded, spraying glass across the backseat.

He didn’t have to hear the shot to know what had happened.

Glancing to the left, he saw the man in the red Hawaiian shirt, stopped halfway down the hillside, in a shooter’s stance. The guy was as pale as a risen corpse but dressed for a Margarita party.

Someone shouted hoarse, slurred curses. Blick. Crawling away from the van on his hands and knees, dazedly shaking his blocky head, like a pit bull wounded in a dog fight, spraying bloody foam from his mouth: Blick.

Another round slammed into the body of the car with a hard thud followed by a brief trailing twang.

With a rush of hot gibbering wind at the open and the shattered windows, the Honda spirited Joe out of range. He rocketed past the groundskeeper’s truck at such high speed that it swerved to avoid him, though he was not in the least danger of colliding with it.

Past one burial service where black-garbed mourners drifted like forlorn spirits away from the open grave, past another burial service where the grieving huddled on chairs as if prepared to stay forever with whomever they had lost, past an Asian family putting a plate of fruit and cake on a fresh grave, Joe fled. He passed an unusual white church — a steeple atop a Palladian-arch cupola on columns atop a clock tower — which cast a stunted shadow in the early afternoon sun. Past a white Southern Colonial mortuary that blazed like alabaster in the California aridity but begged for bayous. He drove recklessly, with the expectation of relentless pursuit, which didn’t occur. He was also certain that his way would be blocked by the sudden arrival of swarms of police cars, but they still were not in sight when he raced between the open gates and out of the memorial park.

He drove under the Ventura Freeway, escaping into the suburban hive of San Fernando Valley.

At a stoplight, quaking with tension, he watched a procession of a dozen street rods pass through the intersection, driven by the members of a car club on a Saturday outing: an era-perfect ‘41 Buick Roadmaster, a ‘47 Ford Sportsman Woodie with honey-maple panelling and black-cherry maroon paint, a ‘32 Ford Roadster in Art Deco style with full road pants and chrome speedlines. Each of the twelve was a testament to the car as art: chopped, channelled, sectioned, grafted, some on dropped spindles, with custom grilles, reconfigured hoods, frenched headlights, raised and flared wheel wells, handformed fender skirts. Painted, pinstriped, polished passion rolling on rubber.

Watching the street rods, he felt a curious sensation in his chest, a loosening, a stretching, both painful and exhilarating.

A block later he passed a park where, in spite of the heat, a young family — with three laughing children — was playing Frisbee with an exuberant golden retriever.

Heart pounding, Joe slowed the Honda. He almost pulled to the curb to watch.

At a corner, two lovely blond college girls, apparently twins, in white shorts and crisp white blouses, waited to cross the street, holding hands, as cool as spring water in the furnace heat. Mirage girls. Ethereal in the smog-stained concrete landscape. As clean and smooth and radiant as angels.

Past the girls was a massive display of zauschneria alongside a Spanish-style apartment building, laden with gorgeous clusters of tubular scarlet flowers. Michelle had loved zauschneria. She had planted it in the backyard of their Studio City house.

The day had changed. Indefinably but unquestionably changed.

No. No, not the day, not the city. Joe himself had changed, was changing, felt change rolling through him, as irresistible as an ocean tide.

His grief was as great as it had been in the awful loneliness of the night, his despair as deep as he had ever known it, but though he had begun the day sunk in melancholy, yearning for death, he now wanted desperately to live. He needed to live.

The engine that drove this change wasn’t his close brush with death. Being shot at and nearly hit had not opened his eyes to the wonder and beauty of life. Nothing as simple as that.

Anger was the engine of change for him. He was bitterly angry not so much for what he had lost but angry for Michelle’s sake, angry that Michelle had not been able to see the parade of street rods with him, or the masses of red flowers on the zauschneria, or now, here, this colourful riot of purple and red bougainvillea cascading across the roof of a Craftsman-style bungalow. He was furiously, wrenchingly angry that Chrissie and Nina would never play Frisbee with a dog of their own, would never grow up to grace the world with their beauty, would never know the thrill of accomplishment in whatever careers they might have chosen or the joy of a good marriage — or the love of their own children. Rage changed Joe, gnashed at him, bit deep enough to wake him from his long trance of self-pity and despair.

How are you coping? asked the woman photographing the graves.

I’m not ready to talk to you yet, she said.

Soon. I’ll be back soon. When it’s time, she promised, as though she had revelations to make, truths to reveal.

The men in Hawaiian shirts. The computer-nerd thug in the Quake T-shirt. The redhead and the brunette in the thong bikinis. Teams of operatives keeping Joe under surveillance, evidently waiting for the woman to contact him. A van packed solid with satellite-assisted tracking gear, directional microphones, computers, high-resolution cameras. Gunmen willing to shoot him in cold blood because.

Why?

Because they thought the black woman at the graves had told him something he wasn’t supposed to know? Because even being aware of her existence made him dangerous to them? Because they thought he might have come out of their van with enough information to learn their identities and intentions?

Of course he knew almost nothing about them, not who they were or what they wanted with the woman. Nevertheless, he could reach one inescapable conclusion: What he thought he knew about the deaths of his wife and daughters was either wrong or incomplete. Something wasn’t kosher about the story of Nationwide Flight 353.

He didn’t even need journalistic instinct to arrive at this chilling insight. On one level, he had known it from the moment that he saw the woman at the graves. Watching her snap photographs of the plot markers, meeting her compelling eyes, hearing the compassion in her soft voice, racked by the mystery of her words—I’m not ready to talk to you yet—he had known, by virtue of sheer common sense, that something was rotten.

Now, driving through placid Burbank, he seethed with a sense of injustice, treachery. There was a hateful wrongness with the world beyond the mere mechanical cruelty of it. Deception. Deceit. Lies. Conspiracy.

He had argued with himself that being angry with Creation was pointless, that only resignation and indifference offered him relief from his anguish. And he had been right. Raging at the imagined occupant of some celestial throne was wasted effort, as ineffective as throwing stones to extinguish the light of a star.

People, however, were a worthy target of his rage. The people who had concealed or distorted the exact circumstances of the crash of Flight 353.

Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina could never be brought back. Joe’s life could never be made whole again. The wounds in his heart could not be healed. Whatever hidden truth waited to be uncovered, learning it would not give him a future. His life was over, and nothing could ever change that, nothing, but he had a right to know precisely how and exactly why Michelle and Chrissie and Nina had died. He had a sacred obligation to them to learn what had really happened to that doomed 747.

His bitterness was a fulcrum and his rage was a long lever with which he would move the world, the whole damn world, to learn the truth, no matter what damage he caused or whom he destroyed in the process.

On a tree-lined residential street, he pulled to the curb. He switched off the engine and got out of the car. He might not have much time before Blick and the others caught up with him.

The queen palms hung dead-limp and whisperless in the heat, which currently seemed to be as effective an embalming medium as a block of fly-trapping amber.

Joe looked under the hood first, but the transponder wasn’t there. He squatted in front of the car and felt along the underside of the bumper. Nothing.

The clatter of a helicopter swelled in the distance, rapidly growing louder.

Groping blindly inside the front wheel well on the passenger side and then along the rocker panel, Joe found only road dirt and grease. Nothing was concealed inside the rear wheel well, either.

The chopper shot out of the north, passing directly overhead at extremely low altitude, no more than fifty feet above the houses. The long graceful fronds of the queen palms shook and whipped in the downdraft.

Joe looked up, alarmed, wondering if the crew of the chopper was looking for him, but his fear was pure paranoia and unjustified. Southbound, the aircraft roared away across the neighbourhood without a pause.

He hadn’t seen any police seal, no lettering or insignia.

The palms shuddered, shivered, then trembled into stillness once more.

Groping again, Joe found the transponder expansion-clamped to the energy absorber behind the Honda’s rear bumper. With batteries, the entire package was the size of a pack of cigarettes. The signal that it sent was inaudible.

It looked harmless.

He placed the device on the pavement, intending to hammer it to pieces with his tyre iron. When a gardener’s truck approached along the street, hauling a fragrant load of shrub prunings and burlap-bundled grass, he decided to toss the still-functioning transponder among the clippings.

Maybe the bastards would waste some time and manpower following the truck to the dump.

In the car again, on the move, he spotted the helicopter a few miles to the south. It was flying in tight circles. Then hovering. Then flying in circles again.

His fear of it had not been groundless. The craft was either over the cemetery or, more likely, above the desert scrub north of the Griffith Observatory, searching for the fugitive woman.

Their resources were impressive.