27 FUN IS STUPID

Jared here, one year later…

… lock up your daughters. And your smutty magazines. And your sofa, for God's sake, because you never know, I may go and hump it like a Great Dane. Har bar. Listen to my friends and you'd think I was the world's biggest perv. Right. And take a look at them now, will you—one year later: useless sacks of dung they are, slumped around Karen's fireplace watching an endless string of videos, the floor clogged with Kleenex boxes and margarine tubs overflowing with diamonds and emeralds, rings and gold bullion—a parody of wealth.

Between tapes what do they do? They have money fights, lobbing and tossing Krugerrands, rubies and thousand-dollar bills at each other; at other times they make paper airplanes from prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and shoot them into the fireplace.

During one particularly long lull between videos, I, Jared, slip to the side of the house and turn off the Honda gas generator Linus has rigged up. The power dies and triggers a clump of groans amid the clan. It's at this point I choose to appear outside the window—across the lawn—a ball of white light. Wendy is the first to see me and she calls my name.

"Jared?"

"What's that, Wendy?" Megan asks.

"It's Jared. Look. He's back."

All eyes gaze rapt while I gavotte across the lawn in my old football uniform, the brown and whites.

In the silence I glow like a deep-sea creature, like a pale moon, and I flow several feet above the ground, and then scoot through the one unsmashed pane of the glass patio doors as though catching a fumbled ball. I walk across the room as though on an airport conveyor belt and out the other wall. Hamilton runs out to the car port but I'm not there.

Wendy lights candles and a few moments later I enter the room from the ceiling, stopping with my feet above the fireplace, where I introduce myself:

"Hey guys. It's me—Jared. Fucking A—I'm so happy to see all of you."

"Jared?" Karen says.

"Hi, Karen. Hello everybody."

"Jared, what are you? Where are you? Are you ofokay?" asks Richard.

"I'm a ghost and I guess I'm blissed out, Richard. I'm high on life. It's the Hotel California. Yessiree."

"What are you doing here?" Megan asks, recognizing me from my old high school yearbook photo.

"I'm here to help you out," I say as I begin to dissolve through the floor.

"Wait!" Wendy shouts. "Don't go!"

I'm halfway through the floor: "Man, this floor feels good.""You can feel the floor?" Linus asks.

"What's heaven like?" Richard asks

"What happens when you die?" Pam asks.

"Show us a miracle, big boy" Hamilton says.

Only my head lies above the floor: "Oof!—you should try this sometime. This floor beats Cheryl Anderson any day of the week."

"Jared!" Karen's shout is urgent.

"All of you," I say, "—you're birds born without wings; you're bees who pollinate cut flowers. Don't pee yourselves. I'll return soon. Let's get weird."

It's the next day and Richard is growing impatient with Hamilton and Pam, dawdling as the two step out of the minivan, wobbly and silly.

"You go first, Barbara Hutton."

"No wayyyy, Mr. Hefner. You first."

"Pals call me Hef."

"Listen you two freaks, can we just step to it?"

Before them is a wide, faded tar piazza strewn with skeletons, cars parked at odd angles, and rusted shopping carts. Beyond this is the faded and ratty looking Save-On supermarket. Its glass doors are like gums without dentures.

"Ooh. Miss Thing needs a drinky."

"Hamilton—I mean Hef—let's get in and out as quickly as we can."

"Okay, okay, Richard. Don't cack your nappies."

"Richard," Karen says, "I'm going to stay out in the van. You three go in. I need some sun."

"You want anything special, Kare?"

"Yeah, cotton balls … a hot oil treatment … some licorice if it's still any good."

"Gotcha."

Karen sits alone in the minivan's front seat, sifting through CD's and enjoying a freakish heat wave warming the remains of the city. I, Jared, become manifest."Hi, Karen."

"Jared! Where are you?"

"Out here." She swivels to see me standing outside the door atop a rusted shopping cart on its side. I'm hard to see during the day—like gas flames against a blue sky.

"Jared, what's the deal here? I've got a thousand questions I want to ask you."

"Ask away, Karen. You look good. How are you feeling?"

"Crappy. But my arms are getting pretty strong. My legs—they're kind of going downhill now. They're deteriorating. I can only barely walk around the house and stuff. What about you—do ghosts have pain? I mean, do you hurt?"

"Not the way you do."

"No. I imagine not." She changes gears: "So cough up the truth, Jared, because I'm really mad at you or whoever did this to me. You deep-freezed me for seventeen years and left me with a puppet body. And who smashed in the patio door last year when everything started falling apart?"

"Actually, that was me at the door."

"You?"

"Apologies, Kare. I screwed up—it was my first time back here. I was going to give a you a speech. I decided not to—I was^too embarrassed about wrecking the door. It was just like the night I walked into Brian Alwin's parents' patio door in tenth grade. Duh. I went and helped Wendy instead. She got lost in the forest coming here from the dam.

"You scared the crap out of me."

"Hey—it won't happen again. I've got good control of it now—my astral presence, I mean." I do a double flip there and land atop the rusted shopping cart. "Sexy or what?"

" Ooh baby baby. Shit, Jared, tell me, what exactly is the point of everything that's happened? And why did / go into a coma? I can't explain anything. So maybe you can. Everybody treats me like I know the answers and that I won't tell them out of spite. I hate it."

"Well, Karen, you—how shall I say this—you accidentally opened certain doors. You were taking all those diet pills and starving your-self. Your brain did somersaults; you saw things; you caught a glimpse of things to come."

"For that I lost my youth? And for that matter, how come I was the one selected for coma duty? Huh? Did I ask? Who decided?"

"Mellow out, Kare—I mean, if you remember the note you gave Richard, you yourself wanted to sleep for 'a thousand years,' and avoid the future. You chose this, not me or anybody else. Worse things could have happened. I mean, you could have died completely. You could have had brain death."

"So why am I awake now instead of sleeping another nine-hundred-eighty-three years?"

"You woke up from your coma because you'd be able to see the present through the eyes of the past. Without you there'd be no one to see the world as it turned out in contrast to your expectations. Your testimony was needed. Your testament."

"Jared, nothing ever turns out the way it was intended. Just look at me." Karen looks at her legs and grimaces. "Oh, God. This is so bizarre. This is not what I was expecting life to be like. Hey wait— Jared—how come it's you here and not anybody else? I want to see my parents."

"I can't swing that, Kare. I'm your Official Dead Person. I'm the only person any of you knew who died when you were young. Because of this I register in your heads as the, umm, the deadest."

"The deadest? What a crock."

"Karen, forget about that for a second. Tell me—I have to ask you this: What is the main thing you noticed—the major difference between the world you left and the world you woke up into?"

Karen exhales heavily, as though she's having a massage and her tension is dissolving. She looks into the Save-On's dark interior and says, "Alack."

"A lack?"

"Yes. A lack of convictions—of beliefs, of wisdom, or even of good old badness. No sorrow; no nothing. People—the people I knew when I came back they only, well, existed. It was so sad. I couldn't allow myself to tell them.""What's so wrong with that—just existing, I mean?"

"I'm not sure, Jared. Animals and plants exist and we envy them that. But in people it just doesn't look good. I didn't like it when I came out of the coma and I still don't like it—even with just the few of us remaining here."

"And?"

"God, Jared—you're relentless. I know. Tell you what—you tell me who you slept with and I'll answer more of your questions."

"Karen, I dunno "

"Stacey Klaasen?"

"Okay, yeah."

"Jennifer Banks?"

"Yeah."

"Jennifer Banks's younger sister?"

"Guilty."

"I knew you two did it."

"No shit, Sherlock."

"Annabel Freed?"

"Yes."

"Dee-Ann Walsh."

"Yup."

"God, Jared—we should have come and hosed you down like a mink in heat. Who didn't you make it with?"

"Pam."

"I could have guessed that."

"Wendy."

"I knewww that."

"I was going to meet her after the football game. It was in the cards. And now you have to answer more of my questions."

"Fair n'uff."

"You were talking about what was different about people when you woke up. Spill."

"All right already. Let's see. Give me a second." She scratches her chin while a wild animal screams within the Save-On. "I know— I remember when I first woke up how people kept on trying to impressme with how efficient the world had become. What a weird thing to brag about, eh? Efficiency. I mean, what's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?"

I egg her on. "For example?"

Karen pulls a blanket around herself, speaking as she moves. "I thought back in 1979 that in the future the world would—evolve. I thought that we would make the world cleaner and safer and smarter, and that people would become smarter and wiser and kinder as a result of all the changes."

"And … ?"

"People didn't evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn't smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what's the opposite of progressed?"

"In this case, devolved."

"People devolved. Hey, Jared—how come you know so many words now?"

"How to best explain … there's a certain aspect of the afterworld that's like English class and you're not allowed to skip. Anyway, forget that. You were talking about devolution."

"Yes. Megan—my daughter—she didn't even believe in the future before the world ended. She thought the future was death and crime and lawlessness. And as soon as the future actually did end, she took it in stride. She had a daughter, Jane, born blind and brain defective— probably because of all the crap in the air these days—and she simply assumed that's the way life should be. Actually, nobody believed in the future: Richard, Wendy—it's like they expected the end."

"How?" My body temporarily flares orange with anticipation.

"Drugs. Pam and Ham did smack—still do—or whatever they can find that's still fresh after one year because the notion of forty more years of time was, and continues to be, too much for them. Wendy lost herself in grueling routine. Linus apparently went away for years trying to figure out the meaning of life and he never found it and so he curled up inside himself and became dusty and slightly bitter. Megan had the baby born blind and with mental problems and sonow Megan's gone slightly autistic as a result. And Richard—Richard drank and placed all his hope in me. He thinks I don't know, but I do. You have to remember, Jared, I wasn't supposed to ever wake up. Richard could have spent his life mooning away about me and never have to deal with real life."

"All good points. But a bit harsh, wouldn't you say?"

"Jared, use your brain—look at me. I'm a monster. I'm like some UFO woman that Linus or Hamilton cooked up for TV movies. I gave up my body just so I could learn that the modern world was becoming sort of pointless and empty? A crappy trade."

"Okay, but answer me this: Would you have believed in the emptiness of the world if you'd eased into the world slowly, buying into its principles one crumb at a time the way your friends did?"

She sighs. "No. Probably not. Are you happy now? Can I have my body back?" Karen grabs Pam's cigarettes from the dashboard, lights one up, and then coughs.

"You smoke?" I ask.

"You jock. Yes, I'm smoking again as of now. Ooh. My head's dizzy. Hey—how's God?"

"Aw, Karen—don't be flippant. It doesn't suit you. This isn't social studies class."

"Oops—careless and stupid. But, how are you? I mean, you're dead. I don't want to be flippant. I'm really curious. Who wouldn't be?"

"Don't worry about me. I'm totally cool. But I am worried about you and the rest of the crew, though."

"Us? Forget us. We're losers. Who'd worry about us? Go find some winners and worry about them."

"Don't say that, Karen. It's just not true. It just isn't." Karen stares at me as though I've made a lame joke. "I have to go now—into the Save-On."

"Well I'm not going anywhere with these chopstick legs of mine. I feel like one of those glass birds that dips its beak into a glass of water. By the way, if you go in to see the others, Hamilton and Pam are going to drive you nuts.They spend their days shooting up and watching biography videos about the Duchess of Windsor, Studio 54, and Hollywood stars. They're losing themselves back in time. They talk all crazy."

"I can handle it."

"Hey Jared, you haven't answered many of my questions. Don't go. Quick, tell me, what's the deal? What happens next? Ten more years of this? Twenty? Thirty?"

"I can't answer that, Karen. You know how the deal works."

"You do know something then."

"Come here, Karen—open the door." Karen opens the door. "Swing out your legs," I command, and she does. "Here—" I approach Karen and kneel before her. I kiss both her shins and then rise. "Stand up," I say, and Karen, coltish and unsure, steps down onto the parking lot. "Run," I say.

And she runs—around the van and then around the lot, whooping with joy. Her legs are whole again.

"I love you, Jared," she says, to which I reply, in words she can't hear because she is now so far away, "I love you, too."

28 THE FUTURE IS

Inside the blackened supermarket, scores of animals, birds, and insects have made the building their home. Shit of all types splotches the floor, as do tussles of feathers, fur, bones, and soil. Squirrels and raccoons have reduced the cereal aisle to fiber while the meat department's offerings have been entirely looted by wildlife. The smell of rot, a year later, is ebbing away, masked by the smell of shampoos and cosmetics fallen to the floor in a small earthquake six months prior. Birds rustle in the ceiling while down below flashlights carried by Richard, Hamilton, and Pam klieg their way across the store's floor. The trio daintily minuet above the muck and locate the pharmacy in the middle of the store. A white-smocked Leaker sits at the counter—a beef jerky skeleton.

"Lord, I am sick of these things," Hamilton says, draping the corpse with a spare smock. "I, Hef, last of the Famous International Playboys have no time for rot. Agnelli, Niarchos, the Prince of Wales—all gone now. I alone must keep up their grand tradition. Voulez-vous un Cadillac car? I live solely for nightclubs, hooch, and rides on the Concorde."

"Hamilton, f'Chrissake, shut up," Richard says. "Did you bring the awl and hammer?"

"Presto."

"Thank you."

Richard and Pam prod and jimmy a locked cupboard storing untold pharmaceutical gems. After some expert elbow grease, it flies open, causing plastic tubs to tumble onto the floor.

" Brush me, Daddy-O!"

"Just give me the rucksack, Hef," Richard says as a shadow runs across his feet. "Squirrel alert."

"Oh look! Look—it's so sweet," Pam says. "We can take it to Babe Paley's place in Bermuda for dinner."

"It's Jamaica, dear. Who's on the guest list?"

"Twiggy. The Sex Pistols. Jackson Pollock. Linda Evangelista."

"You two are driving me up the fucking wall with your fantasies," says Richard.

"If having a fantasy is a crime, I stand guilty as accused." Hamilton makes a big huffy sniff of the air and then quickly regrets it.

Richard ignores this. "Aye yi yi. Oh, look—bingo!—two thousand Vicodins." Something screams and scampers across the store down Aisle 3. "Oh, man, this place is a creep show. Let's grab and scram. Hamilton, go get a shopping cart for the loot."

"Roger." In the greeting card section, Hamilton finds an abandoned cart. It squeaks and rubs across the sludgy floor. Richard and Pam pile the pharmaceuticals into the cart.

"Oh, Christ. Karen wants some cotton balls and a hot oil treatment. Where are they?" "Next aisle over."The trio walks slowly through the store's cobwebbed, stinky carcass, and the farther away they get from the front, the blacker it gets. They pass two Leakers along the way, but of course, after all this time they are casual about such a sight. Slowly, slowly they move when suddenly they bump into three raccoons who hiss and try to escape, scaling a Matterhorn of soggy paper towels. "Oh shit…"

"Do I hear Karen calling us from outside?"

Koonk-koonk.

The lights in the ceiling pulse into operation, scorching brighter than daylight—the light all the more painful for its unexpectedness, illuminating the store and casting all of the wildlife into shrieks of panic, revealing the extent of devastation.

My friends scream and look up above, where they see me, Jared, in the rafters. "It's me," I say, and I tell them, "I've come back to you to bring you light."

"You prick," Hamilton bellows, "—the light almost blinded us!"

"Whoopsy daisy, guys. I was trying to put on a light show for you. It fell kinda flat. See you later this afternoon."

"Light show?" Pam says.

"He's technically sixteen, Pam," adds Hamilton.

"Oh yeah," she muses, "He's younger than Karen."

Wendy is hesitantly meandering through the browning forest behind her house, armed with a twelve-gauge rifle should feral dogs attack. Her hair is washed and styled in a manner considered fetching by 1997, and, for that matter, 1978, standards and beneath her thick beige raincoat clings a saucy frilled lingerie getup fetched earlier that morning from a Marine Drive naughty shop. She's calling me: "Jared? Jared?" She's worried I won't hear her call—or that I won't respond—but I do.

"Hey, Wendy." I appear a stone's throw away, floating in the air, golden and light, weaving my way between the tall dwindling stands of firs and hemlocks on this steep canyon slope. I arrive and stand before her.

"You came.""Fuckin' right, I did. How ya doing, Wendy? We never got our date, did we?" A silence passes between us. I let her be the one to break it.

"I've missed you. You helped me that horrible night last year when everything was falling apart—and then you went… away. Why?"

"I knew I'd be back."

She slowly walks nearer to me. "What's it like to be dead, Jared? I don't mean to be blunt, but I'm frightened and I'm also a doctor. In school and later at the hospital I looked at every corpse and I wondered the same thing: Dead—what next? And then the world shut down and all I saw—all I continue to see—are dead bodies. It's all we see down here—dead bodies. We have a 'clean zone' around the houses, but everywhere else is one big pauper's grave."

"Death isn't death, Wendy—blackness forever—if that's what you mean. But it's not my place to say anything more to you beyond that. It's a big deal. I have to be quiet."

"What about heaven?"

"Okay, sure. I give you that."

Standing almost in front of me, she says, "Were you scared in the hospital? I visited you all those times. I brought you all those cookies I baked myself. You were sweet. And your eyes were far away. You never lost your beauty—even at the end when I think you maybe lost your hope."

"I was too young to be really afraid of death. But my cancer was my Great Experience, and I don't begrudge it."

"Bullshit."

"Okay, you're right. I was scared shitless. What else was I supposed to do? Everyone kept descending on me and kept making all these brave little faces and handing me muffins and teddy bears. No matter how scared you get you have to make that same brave little face back in return. It's like, the law."

"Jared—did you ever … you know, think about me?" Her arms are crossed protectively.

"Yeah. You know I did. We missed our date—I never showed you my candy.""Were you in love with Cheryl Anderson?"

"Wha—Cheryl Anderson?"

"Don't look so surprised. She had a big mouth."

"Hmmm. We liked each other a lot. But it wasn't love, no. I was a jock so everybody thought I had to be a sex machine—and so I became one. It was great. It's different now totally different."

"How?"

"I'm no longer incarnate. But I can still—you know, get it on. In my own way."

She begins to whimper: "Jared, can you please just take me away? Please? Put me in your arms and drive me to the sun. I'm so lonely. And I can't kill myself, even though I think about it all the time. There's no point to the world now. It just erodes and becomes chaotic and poisoned. Look at the trees around us. Brown. Probably radiation from a North Korean reactor gone wrong. Or Chinese. Or Ukrainian. Or … Just take me away, damnit! You're a ghost, Jared. Prove it."

"I can't take you away, Wen. But I can make the loneliness leave you."

"No—I don't want that. I want to leave."

"Just imagine, Wendy," I say. "a world without loneliness. Every trial would become bearable, wouldn't it?"

She thinks this over. She's smart and she sees the truth. "Yes." She sniffles. "You're right. You win the Brownie badge. But why do we have to get lonely? It's so awful. It's so—wait—" Wendy's composure returns somewhat. She wipes her eye and her voice becomes still. "You're not going to take me away—are you?"

"Nope. I would if I could, but I can't. You know that, Wendy."

She sits on a fallen stump to collect her breath, her mind racing so quickly it almost seizes up. She takes several deep gulps, calms down, and then looks across the ferns and moss at me, a sixteen-year-old dead boy. As she does this, her raincoat opens slightly, exposing her lingerie beneath. She sniggers and takes the jacket off completely, revealing her pale thick body. "Ta da! Hey Jared, welcome to the new me. Doesn't this getup make me lovable? Huh?""You're a part of the world, Wendy, as much as daisies, glaciers, earthquake faults and mallard ducks. You were meant to exist. You've gotta believe me. You're lovable .. . and you're hot! You look so good."

"Could you love me, Jared?"

"Which way?"

"Any way that stops me from being lonely."

Her skin is goosebumped, her nipples are rigid. "Oh man, could I—"

"I'm here."

And so I remove the bulk of my spectral football outfit—cleats and pads and shirt—but I leave my shoulder pads on.

"Your shoulders," she says.

I walk toward her: "Just shush, Wen. Feel me walking through you."

"Shhhh—quiet, Jared."

"Oh, fucking A, man, this is great. Man, this is even better than Karen's floor." Wendy giggles and her voice drains. "Oh, Wendy—I don't get to do this all too often these days. Oh!"

I stand there inside her body while a flock of crows caws in the treetops, and then I pass through her and it's as if I'm receiving answers to questions I'd asked long ago—the same sense of being suspended in a moment of truth. As I look back, she is frozen with pleasure, eyeballs skyward and white. Her senses are still locked inside another realm.

I put my football togs back on and float in front of her, watching over her for a few minutes as her mind and body thaw. She looks at me and asks, "That's as good as it gets, isn't it?"

"Yep."

"I've been thinking of this since 1978."

"It was a powerful dream. You were great."

"You're going to leave now, aren't you?"

"I'm not leaving you, but I do have to cut out. And also—"

"Shhh. Let me guess—-I'm pregnant now, aren't I?"

"Yep. How'd you know that?"

"It's this skill I have. I can always tell when a woman's pregnant." She pauses, her mind dreamy. "Thanks, Jared."I float upward, up into the canopy of trees and into the sky. "Good-bye, Wendy."

Jane is papoosed onto Megan's back as she motorcycles slowly through the ghostly suburb, ever vigilant for fallen trees, angry dogs, or freak weather bursts.

I look into Megan's mind and I am fascinated by the things I see. Megan, being a teenager, had the least formed personality of the group as the world shut itself down, and she is also the least affected by everything. She drives over a crunchy skeleton on Stevens Drive as though it were merely a fallen branch; lighting a cigarette, she throws the lit match into the nearest house, not even sticking around to watch it burn.

It's a sunny day and the air is clear—a rare day when the world doesn't smell like a tire fire, the endless reeking fumes that cross over the Pacific from China.

In the middle of driving down Stevens to Rabbit Lane, Megan endures a pang of loneliness so real and so strong that I can only compare it to a tornado or lightning. It dawns on her that she has never visited Jenny Tyrell's house in all the past year. She doesn't know what she will find there, but she knows she has to go.

Megan's hair is now long and falls to the side of her head like a bird lowering its wings as she pulls into the driveway of Jenny Tyrell's house. Its lawn, like all lawns, has turned into a scraggly meadow; the Christmas decorations have faded after a year of neglect; the shingles have begun to snaggletooth; the cars in the driveway are coated in dust, and the tires have gone flat—a fairly good indicator that there'll be Leakers inside the house, and indeed there are—Mr. and Mrs. Tyrell, mummified and serene on the living room floor surrounded by books of family photos, Mrs. Tyrell's wedding dress, a wine bottle, and two glasses. No odors.

"Yo! Mr. and Mrs. Tyrell—" Megan gives the parents a fond gaze.

"Came to check out Jenny's stuff. She's over at the mall in Lynn

Valley. Mind if I go upstairs? Thanks. Oh look, Janie—Jenny's room is a pigsty like always."Megan unstraps a googling Jane and puts her on Jenny's bed. The room hasn't changed much; the door was closed, so there's little dust. Makeup and clothes are scattered about. There's a photo of Megan, Jenny, and the old gang on the grass hockey team; ski boots; several Alanis Morrisette posters on the wall; and on the desk a diary— Megan had no idea Jenny kept a diary. "Move over, Jane—we're going to be here a little while." Her eyes moisten; her heart explodes.

September 28, 1997

Who does Megan think she is? Just because she's dating an older guy she thinks she's Mrs. Hot Shit. His name is Skitter and it's not like he's a big catch or something. He's got nice legs and he's buff, but he's so crude and he dresses like a metal-head and a druggie. Please give me a ten-foot pole.

Won our grass hockey game today. 5 to 3 against Hillside and I got a goal. We rock!

"Jenny, you cow. You were jealous from the word 'go,' and you know it. You tried to worm your way into everything me and Skitter did. Skitter's nickname for you was 'The Remora Fish.' I pitied you."

October 13, 1997

Megan got dumped by Skitter, but she tries to make it sound like she left him. As IF. She's really far away in her head these days, so it's no wonder she got the boot. I think it's because of that loser school she goes to—the school for losers down in North Van. I'm going to try and think of a way to call Skitter without looking like a slut. Maybe I'll call and ask him where I can score some hash. I've still got his number.

"Now this is really too much. Way too much. I left him, thank you. Because he was a cheating tightwad bastard and I ended up buying everything he asked for and I realized he just uses women-even having high school girls pay for his own cigarettes." Megan finds herself missing Jenny dreadfully.November 2, 1997

Wow! Megan's mother came out of her coma. Wow!!! She's been in it as long as I've known Megan, which is my whole life, which is a pretty long time. It was in the papers and on TV and everywhere, but Megan's family won't let anybody take pictures so they keep showing that creepy high school photo Megan's dad keeps in the den. I guess this means Megan is going to be ignored even more by her family. Ha HA. Now she'll know how it feels to be left out in the cold like me. I tried to call, but the phone was busy all day.

Later on I went with Skitter to one of his friends, but they weren't there so he pried open the door and we made out for 3 hours and it was really sexy being in somebody else's house.

"Jenny, you are so crude. You take my mom's waking up and twist it into something about you. You had nothing to do with it, and as for Skitter and other people's houses, he was a real perv and went out of his way to do it in cool places like the changing room at Le Chateau, which, I have to admit, was a real turn-on."

December 26, 1997

Megan and I are friends again, and to show it she invited me to a party down at Lois's and I got to see KAREN for the first time close-up. She was so scary looking—like she was anorexic to the point of death and it's so sick to think of Richard and her making it. Ick-o-rama. Maybe Richard'll wait a few months until she puts some meat on. She looked at me like she knew my secrets or something. She's just really really creepy.

Returned most of my Christmas presents today. I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I could really use the cash to buy the tool kit Skitter keeps talking about. His birthday's next week.

"I'm not even going to dignify your comments about my sacred mother by replying to your adolescent filth. And as for Skitter, hey, itlooks like you're falling into his 'buy-me-something-or-I-leave-you' act. Sucker."

December 27, 1997

Bought Skitter's tool kit, but it was so expensive I nearly freaked out and I had to go sit and hyperventilate for fifteen minutes afterward in the Subway sandwich place and then I ate too much.

"The Remora" and her Mom and Lois were on TV and they looked way better than they do in real life, and Megan looked like such a goody-two-shoes and you never would have known to look at her that she did Warren and Brent on the SAME NIGHT last year at the Burnside Park party.

"That does it, Jenny—you are no longer my friend. One of the best days of my life, and then you go and hang out with me the next day as if you hadn't put all this crap into your diary!" She pauses and breathes. "I miss you."

A wall glows golden, and then I appear from within a mirror.

"Oh," Megan says, "it's you."

"Such a warm reception, Megan. Do you get many visitors from the dead every day?"

"Go away. You're probably not even a real ghost. You're probably something cheesy way down the food chain, like a sprite or a wisp."

"Me? A sprite? I think not."

"Go away. Go say 'boo' to people, Casper."

"What did I ever do to bug you so much?"

"If you're such a big ghost, why don't you take me away from this slag heap of a world and on to someplace better?"

"Because I personally can't do that."

"Just as I thought. You're a sprite. Go twinkle somewhere else. Don't bug me, transparent loser."

"Whoa, man! What's with this angry little stance? Don't you want to see a miracle or something?"

"I've had enough miracles for one lifetime, thank you."

I change subjects: "Your baby's pretty. How old?"

"Six months."

"Why did you name her Jane?"

"Jane seemed like the name of somebody who never has a damaged life. Janes are always calm, cool, and up to date."

"Nice eyes."

"They're Skitter's eyes—crazy eyes. They're blind. Hamilton said that looking at Janie's eyes was like looking at a full moon and then realizing that it's just one day short of being truly full. That was before we figured out she was blind."

"Hamilton's been saying stuff like that since kindergarten. I knew him and your father my whole life."

"You at least had some friends. I don't even have one anymore. I miss Jenny real bad." She hands me a wad of Jenny's CD's and says, "Want a CD collection? Lots of dance mixes."

"No thanks."

"Go away."

"What's wrong, Megan?"

"I said go away."

"Are you lonely?"

"No!"

"You can tell me if you are. Do you miss Jenny?"

"That treacherous scag bag?"

"Yes, that treacherous scag bag."

Megan stays silent for a minute and I give her all the time she needs. "I miss her. I'm lonely. I want to change the subject."

"To what?"

"I dunno. You choose."

"Fair enough. Let me ask you a small question: Tell me, what is it like to be living in the world the way it is now?"

"That's a small question?"

"Well, it's a good question. Give it a shot."

"You sprites just never quit. Okay. Let me think." She doses Jenny's diary and leans back against the wall, Jane on the bed by her side. "The world right now—gee, Jared, it's one party after another.Funzies. Ooh. I'm having so much fun it hurts." She feigns stitches. "What do you think, bozo? Every day is like Sunday. Nothing ever happens. We watch videos. Read a few books. Cook food that comes out of boxes or cans. No fresh food. The phone never rings. Nothing ever happens. No mail. The sky stinks—when everybody died, they left the reactors and factories running. It's amazing we're still even here."

"Were you surprised when the world ended?"

Megan pulls her body up into a more comfortable position on the bed. "Yes. No. No—I wasn't. It was kind of like the whole world went into a coma. I'm used to that. I'm not saying that to make you pity me. It's just the truth." She lights one of Jenny's year-old cigarettes. "Still tastes menthol fresh. Did you ever smoke?"

"Me? No. I was a jock."

"You're kind of cute. Did you ever make it with anybody?"

"Here and there. Why are you curious?"

"There's kind of a cute guy shortage down here."

I come closer and see Megan more clearly: pink windburnt skin, eye whites clear as ringing chimes. "Do you ever—" I say, not finishing the sentence.

"Wait," Megan says, "Are you hitting on me?"

"Me? What?" I've been caught.

"You are! I don't believe this—I'm being hit on by the dead." Jane squawks; Megan gives her a bottle of formula and a yanks small cotton bunny from the pack. "Look, Mr. Ghost…"

"Jared."

"Whatever. This isn't the time or place. I'm flattered, but no. I prefer real meat."

"lean take a hint."

Megan folds up Jenny's diary with a snap, then looks at me. "So how come we were abandoned here? Why us?"

"There's a reason."

"Which «?"

"Oh, God. I can't tell you right now." "You're pulling a Karen. Stupid sprite.""Oh, grow up."

" You, a sixteen-year-old telling me to grow up. Ha. So then tell me this—is there anybody else left down here besides us? Karen said there wasn't, but I'm not so sure."

"Karen's only allowed a few facts, but those she has are always true."

"I was right! Linus kept on trying to ham-radio weird places like oil rigs in the middle of the Indian Ocean and scientists at the South Pole. Now he owes me a bucket of Krugerrands."

"A bucket of gold?"

"It's a joke really. There's so much gold it's silly. We huck it off of bridges. We have money fights. Money's over."

"I guess so."

"Hey, Jared, what's heaven like?"

"Heaven? Heaven's like the world at its finest. It's all natural—no buildings. It's built of stars and roots and mud and flesh and snakes and birds. It's built of clouds and stones and rivers and lava. But it's not a building. It's greater than the material world."

"Well. Isn't that something. Do people get lonely there?"

"No."

"Then it really is heaven." We're quiet for a second as I stand close to her. "Sorry I can't take up your offer, Stud Boy. It's not like I get many others."

"I know." I slap my forehead: "Hey—I need to go now. I liked speaking with you."

"No. Don't go—you're somebody new."

"Here," I say. "Hold Jane out to me."

"Why?"

"You'll see." Her arms are like a set rat trap ready to spring back in case I do something weird, which I don't. I breathe gently into each of Jane's eyes and then I touch my tongue to the space between her eyes. I am the first thing she sees on Earth. "Your kid is whole. She's more than whole—she's a genius; she'll be wise. And you are now her servant."

Speechless, Megan watches as I shrink into nothing and disappear.

29 INFINITY IS ARTIFICIAL

There are things I miss about Earth. I loved the way my mother made a pork roast and I loved getting up in the mornings super early and being the first to see the sun, jogging around the neighborhood in nothing more than terry underwear knowing that everybody else was sleeping. Once in summer 1978 I ran my daily jog naked and if anybody saw me, they never phoned the cops. Even more than sex, that solitary jog remains my most potent body memory of Earth—the air and the sun and the pads of my feet landing on Rabbit Lane. What else? Oh, there was an owl that lived in the tree behind the house. Its roost was bang outside my window and each night around sunset it came out and swooped its long floppy wings—like an Afghan hound's ears. It used to fly into Karen's yard on the hill below mine and catch mice. I used to watch Mrs. McNeil feed it meat scraps but she never saw me, but I know for sure Mrs. McNeil was watching me quite clearly the summer afternoon before eleventh grade when I was mowing the back lawn in my red Speedo. Saucy old broad! I popped a rod and I know she noticed it.

Regrets? I have no regrets about life. I didn't live long enough to make a mess of it. But then I never really had any pictures in my head of adulthood. Had I made it that far I probably would have floundered like the rest of the gang.

I've been watching my friends over the past year or so—ever since Karen woke up. Karen can't remember, but she was with me for much of the time she was in her coma. She receives her 'extra' information in the same way I do—in fits and snatches that make no sense at the time, filled with maddeningly blank stretches.

The technicalities of my visits are strict. My current appearances are only allowed to be brief—I'm allowed only X amount of time to visit the old crew and in these brief stretches I have specific goals that have to be met.

Goals—that word sounds like I'm crew chief at McDonald's or something. But you know, every second of our life we're reaching goals of some sort. Every single second of our lives we're crossing a finish line of some sort, with heaven's roaring cheers surrounding us as we win our way forward. Our smallest acts—crossing a street, peeling an apple, giving Miss January the one-hand salute—are as though we are ripping an Olympic ribbon to thunderous applause. The universe wants us to win. The universe makes sure we're winning even when we lose. I wish that I could have run naked through the streets every moment of my life.

But I think I'm ahead of myself now. Now I have to go see Linus, up on the highest point of the mountain suburb where one can see far over the curved ends of the Earth, the United States and over to the Olympic Peninsula. The sky is clear as a lens. To the east stands Mount Baker a hundred miles away—an American Fuji: solid as lead, white as light.

Linus is thinking about me, and he's thinking about time—about death, infinity, survival, and those questions he sought answers toback when he was so young. He was the only one of us who ever asked questions bigger than where the night's party was scheduled to take place. I've always respected his opinion.

He's sitting on the warm hood of his Humvee, which is parked at the top of the driveway of the film shoot location from a year ago. The film trucks and trailers are still parked on the street. The silent city, pocked with burns and sores and rashes, is spread below him.

In the midst of this serenity comes a surflike roar and then a catastrophic bang. An image flashes through his mind: his drunken father slamming the dinner table with a fist. The ground booms and Mount Baker in the east erupts with a fire pole of lava shooting up into gray, cabbagey Nagasaki ash clouds. A shock wave ripples across the land and throws Linus onto the ground with another boom. The glass in nearby houses shatters.

"Oh, man—"

The spectacle is gorgeous and voluptuous and sad. Sad in that so few people will ever even see it or know about it. Linus isn't even sure if an erupting volcano counts as news. "News" no longer exists, and Mount Baker might just as well have erupted on Jupiter. This is the point when I appear.

"Hey, Linus."

"Jared—hey!—I mean, look at that! I mean—oh man, I sound like a cretin, but look at that volcano."

"I know. It's cool. So beautiful it almost hurts."

Mount Baker stops shooting lava, but continues blowing staggering plumes of ash and steam that are now melting ever so slightly in the easterly winds, off toward Alberta, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas. Linus is torn between watching the eruption and speaking with me. "Jared! Man, I missed you so badly." Linus tries to hug me, but he ends up hugging himself around his chest. "Jared—let me look at you." I hover above the ground, shining and radiant as always. "You look so young, Jared. Like a puppy, so young."

"You were this puppy-young once, too."

"It was a long time ago." "Yeah."Linus looks me over more. "You missed so much that happened in the world after you died. Did you see any of it?"

"Enough, I guess. I've been busy, kinda."

"We threw your ashes out into the ocean. Your dad chartered a sailboat. The day was clear like today. We said prayers on the boat."

"I was there."

"Yeah. It was beautiful. Your parents were so nice." Linus scans the plume again. "We never got used to your dying, you know. Richard especially. And then Karen went into the coma and I think it wrecked Richard's life. I guess there must be a connection between you and Karen. I mean, here you are now."

"Here I am."

"Can you tell me what that connection is? I mean, between you and Karen and the rest of the world going away."

"Blunt or what! Okay, Linus—I'm going to be telling you things soon enough, but not right now, okay?"

"Jeez—you and Karen. Why does everything need to be so mysterious? Me, I've tried to make sense of everything over the past year and haven't been able to descramble it at all."

"It's not anything you might expect. By the way, what has the past year been like for you?"

"Scary. Lonely. And quiet! So amazingly quiet. I keep on waiting for people to emerge around a corner or to see plane fly or a moving car. But I never do. I'm still not used to it yet."

"From what I can see, the group of you are handling the situation calmly."

"Let's just thank the drugs for that, thank you. And the videos. And the booze and the canned goods. In some ways it feels as though the world is still the same. At the start, I used to think we'd all feel as if we were waiting to die. Instead it feels as if we're simply waiting— for what I don't know. Waiting for you? I miss so many things about the old world—the way the city used to light the clouds from below, making them all liquid pearly blue. I miss the smell of sushi. And electricity. Fridges. Shopping. New ideas. Oh—I'm married now, too, to Wendy. And I was working in TV.""Yeah, I know about all that."

"Sometimes we all used to feel like a creepy Neil Simon play. Hamilton tried to think of a title and show tunes to go with it. His best title was Five Losers."

"Hamilton—always the witty fellow."

"He's so wacky."

"A real nut."

"He slays me. He really slays me." Linus gathers his breath and looks out at the volcano. He sighs, then says, "Jared, tell me something: Is time over?"

"Huh? Meaning what?"

"I've been thinking about this so much. When I say time I mean history, or … I think it's human to confuse history with time."

"That's for sure."

"No, listen. Other animals don't have time—they're simply part of the universe. But people—we get time and history. What if the world had continued on? Try to imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner of the year 3056, or postage stamps with spatulas on them because we ran out of anything else to put on stamps. Imagine the Miss Universe winner in the year 22,788. You can't. Your brain can't do it. And now there aren't any people. Without people, the universe is simply the universe. Time doesn't matter."

"Linus, you spent years roaming the continent looking for all sorts of answers, didn't you?"

"I did. In Las Vegas especially. It was a shithole, but it gave me space to think. And you're not answering my question, Jared."

"I will. Did you reach any conclusions in Las Vegas?"

"No. Not really. I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough—I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this past year I've still been waiting for the same big cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened—except you're here and instead of feeling cosmic, it simply feels like we're cutting gym class and coming up here for a butt. Your arrival seems somehowappropriate; I wish I could feel more awe. I wish you could be here all the time. We're so bloody lonely."

Another smaller rumble tickles the ground and we can see lava flows treacling down Mount Baker's slope. Linus wants to blurt words so I let him: "Jared, I know God can come at any moment in any form. I know we always have to be on the alert. And I know that day and night are the same to God. And I know that God never changes. But all I ever wanted was just a clue. When do we die, Jared?"

"Whoa! Linus—it's not that easy. I don't have that kind of exact answer."

"Nobody ever seems to dish out the real answers."

There's a strangely uncomfortable pause, and I try and switch moods: "Look at Mount Baker," I say. "Remember that ski weekend there when we trashed the transmission in Gordon Streith's Cortina?"

"I kept the gear-shift knob as a souvenir."

The lava now burns gullies through the mountain's glaciers and steam rises as high as a satellite. Linus feels calm and his voice becomes gentle: "I guess this is what the continent looked like to the pioneers back when they first came here, eh Jared? A land untouched by time or history. They must have felt as though they were walking headlong into eternity, eager to chop it down and carve it and convert it from heaven into earth. Don't you think so?"

"Yeah. The pioneers—they believed in something. They knew the land was holy. The New World was the last thing on Earth that could be given to humankind: two continents spanning the poles of Earth— continents as clean and green and milky blue as the First Day. The New World was built to make mankind surrender."

"But we didn't," Linus says.

"No, we didn't."

"But time, Jared—is it over? You never said."

Linus knows he's on to something, but I'm unable to give him an answer. "Not quite yet."

"Again, nobody has full answers. Where's everybody else now— the people who fell asleep? What are we supposed to be doing now?""Linus—buddy—I'm not trying to dick you around. There's a reason for everything."

"Always these eternal mysteries," says Linus. "I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this exposure to every conceivable aspect of life—wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age."

"Wait a second, Linus." I approach him and place my hands on top of his head, making his body jiggle like a motel bed. I say, "There." Linus goes rigid, grows limp, and then swoons to the pavement; I've shown him a glimpse of heaven. "You'll be blind for a while now," I tell him. "A week or so."

Linus is silent, then mumbles, "I've seen all I've ever needed to see."

"Good-bye, Linus." With these words I pull backward, up into the sky, smaller smaller smaller into a blink of light, like a star that shines in the day.

"Well, Hef, I grant you that these seats are comfy, but not nearly as comfy as being dragooned through the grottoes of Fez on a litter carried by four of Doris Duke's seven-foot Nubians."

"Babs, you sassy vixen—make me jealous."

"Shush, Hef—I need to make a transatlantic phone call to the Peppermint Lounge. 'Pardonez moi—est-ce-que je peut parle avec Monsieur Halston?'"

"Sure—call Halston. Last week / had lunch with the Princess Eugenie, Joe Namath, and Oleg Cassini. Lobster Thermador, Cherries Jubilee, and Crepes Suzette. Ha!"

"You tire me, Hef. Please leave."

Hamilton and Pam lounge on the front seat of an unsold Mercedes 450 SE inside the dusty dealership showroom on Marine Drive. The car doors are shut, the tires are flat, and on the seat between the two sits a trove of bric-a-brac connected to their drug use as well as cartons of cigarettes and stray unopened tequila bottles. I appear outside the front window, hovering in the middle of the pane. I glow.Pam shivers. "Umm—honey—I think maybe you should look out the window."

Hamilton is weighing various cones of powder and says, "I'm busy, Babs. I'm hiding my stash of dental-grade cocaine inside Gianni Agnelli's leather ski boots."

"Hey goofball—look up!" I shout; Hamilton turns and I shatter the showroom window and float above the shards through the now-open air toward their car.

"Ucking-fay it-shay," Pam says.

"Oh man, it's Jared."

I lower myself down onto the dealership's floor and then walk across the showroom and into the engine so that my body is half inside the car. "Hi, Pam. Hi, Hamilton."

"Um—hi, Jared," Pam says. The two feel slightly silly being surrounded by so much contraband. Pam giggles.

"Jared—buddy. This is so Bewitched."

"No, Hamilton, it's real life. What are you guys doing inside the car here?"

"We wanted to smell the interior. We miss the smell of new things," Pam says with further titters. "There's nothing new anymore. Everything just gets older and older and more worn down. One of these days there'll be nothing new-smelling left in the world. So we're taking whatever newness we can get." She looks at the dashboard. "Older older older." She lapses into a child's song.

"Old old old," Hamilton adds. "Everything's old. We'd kill for a new newspaper, a freshly mowed lawn, or a fresh coat of paint on something. By the way, great light show this morning at the Save-On. It was like you lifted a rock and everything underneath scurried to burrow into the crap underneath."

They're high and not responding soberly. "Tell me, where else have you been today?" I ask.

"Just you come and have a look." Hamilton and Pam slither out of the car and we go to their pickup truck outside the building. The bed is filled with gems, gold coins, cutlery, jewelry, and other treasures."We raided the safe-deposit boxes at the Toronto Dominion Bank in Park Royal," Hamilton says.

"It's not as treasure-ish as you might think," adds Pam. "There were things like locks of hair, Dear John letters, fishing trophies, blue ribbons, keys, garter belts—not pricey stuff. More like stuff you'd expect to find left over after a garage sale."

"Oh—here's a strange one …" Hamilton says, lifting a plaster casting of a large phallus. On its bottom is felt-penned a date, November 4, 1979, and no other information.

"Must have been a good day for somebody," I say as Pam starts pouring handfuls of diamonds back and forth between her hands and the occasional stray tinkles down onto the pavement, clicking like a camera's shutter. She tosses the diamonds onto the center pile, one at a time. "Pear-shaped, suncrest, radiant, marquise, baguette, my little best friends." She looks toward me: "You're real, Jared, aren't you— it's not just the drugs?"

"I'm real. I'm like a biology test come back to haunt you."

"Oh, wow," Hamilton says.

"Oh wow? I come back to life and all you can say is, 'Oh wow?"

"Jared," Hamilton says, "Mellow out. I seem to remember you were the one who had fourteen people toking their brains out inside your parents' Winnebago the night Elvis died."

"Exposing hypocrisy in itself doesn't make you a moral person," I say.

"Huh?" Pam says.

"Oh, don't be so thick, Pamela," Hamilton says. "He never did have a sense of humor. Jocks never do. Listen to what Jared's say-ing … "

"Don't so-thick me, Heffy-Weffy. I'm the one who cracked the safe today."

"Hurt me, hurt me—"

"Oh Lord. You guys want a miracle to make you go 'oh wow' for real?"

"Deal us in, big boy," Hamilton says.

"Very well." I approach them and tap them each on the head."You touch us on the head? That's a miracle? Jared, I—" Pam stops, touches her cheeks, and looks at her body. Hamilton puts his hands to his ears and then falls down on his knees. "No. No. Oh, my. It's—it's real, isn't it, Jared?" Pam asks.

"It's real."

The two go silent; Hamilton crawls across the pavement and lowers his head to the ground, inspecting the dust.

Pam bursts into tears and grabs Hamilton's shoulders and tries to lift him up. Hamilton looks both lost and found at the same time. "Is it what I think it is?" he asks.

"Yes."

He moans. "You mean—we're clean?"

"Yes, you are clean. Your addictions are gone. No withdrawal. No pangs. Nothing." The two unclasp and then come over to me and try to touch me, but as with Linus earlier on that day, they end up batting each other's arms. After this, they stand and do leg squats and stretches and run around the parking lot and spin and look at the cellophane sky.

"It is a miracle. I can think! I'm clear! So clear! I haven't been this clear since—ever. The six wives of Henry VIII! The Fibonacci number sequence! How to make a smooth nonlumpy cream sauce …"

"It's so clean!" Hamilton echoes. "My head inside is clean as a lake! Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon; August, 1969—American talk show host, Merv Griffin launches his late-night CBS show in direct competition with Johnny Carson. Opening night guests include Woody Allen and Heddy Lamarr, but scheduled athlete Joe Namath is a no-show."

"Oh Hamilton—look at the world!"

"It's …"

"Yes …"

The two fall silent; their bodies slacken as though they've realized a friend has betrayed them. Sitting down on the truck's lowered tailgate, they swat diamonds from underneath their bottoms and sit limp.

"Well, well—here we are," Pam says."Clean," Hamilton says. "And I don't feel like getting high. You?"

"No," replies Pam. "I like being inside my own skin again." A seagull shrieks above them and they look up. "There's still birds," Pam says.

"But no people."

"No people. The world's over, isn't it, Jared?"

"Pretty well."

"You're real, aren't you?"

"Yep."

Silence falls where in other days traffic would have hummed and honked. "This is life, then, isn't it? I mean, this is it."

"Basically."

Hamilton and Pam hold hands. Pam says, "What do we do now, Jared? Is this it forever—silence? It's so quiet down here. Lonely. You're the ghost. You're the expert."

"Your brains are as tender and fresh as a baby bird's. Walk home. Enjoy your clarity. Go romp in a hot tub. You count; you were meant to exist. I'll be seeing you again."

And with this I vanish.

30 EVERYTHING IS BRAND-NEW

Richard was my best friend growing up, although we did grow apart over the years. He was one of the people I missed most when I died, so I'm kinda choked to see him again. But there are severe limits on how much I'm allowed to reveal to the living, so I can't be as gooey with Richard—or the others—as I'd like.

Richard is huffing up Rabbit Lane with a shotgun, so I slide down the hill to meet him. "Hey, Jared—thanks for fixing Karen's legs. That was beautiful."

"It was the least I could do."

"We came home and played splits on the front lawn with a steak knife for an hour. She's just so high on life now. Good trick with the lighting system down at Save-On, too."

"You flatter me shamelessly. Where are you walking to?"

"Out for a stroll before the sun sets to get a good view of Mount Baker. And the weather—it's so beautiful today. It's the end of December and it might as well be June. But then again there could be a snowstorm in three minutes. Weather's random these days."

"So I've heard." I walk alongside Richard.

"Were you alive when Mount St. Helen erupted, Jared?"

"No. Missed it."

"That's right. It was huge. And you missed new wave and alternative rock. Rap. Grunge. Hip-hop. People wore some pretty stupid clothes. Cars got really good, though."

"I didn't miss out on earthly things entirely, Richard. Check this out—I can do the 'Moonwalk.'"

"No way. This I've got to see."

"Just you watch me now …" I slinkily Moonwalk up the road while Richard belly-laughs. "Am I doing something wrong?" I ask.

"The opposite. It's perfect."

"Thank you. I'd like to see you do it."

"Oh please, no."

I float back beside him: "So you see, I'm somewhat up to date." We continue our walk. "Fucking A. The neighborhood's one big mess, don't you think so?"

"I don't think you ever get used to the silence, Jared. Back before the plague or whatever it was, the neighborhood looked almost identical to the way it did the year you died. But now—" We survey dead trees, rangy vines, an occasional charcoal stump where a house once stood, a bird resting on a skeleton's ribcage. Pavement is crumbling and cars are stopped in the strangest places.

We pass a dog's skeleton, bleached clean by sun and acid rains. "Pinball, may he rest in peace. The Williams's Doberman. It tried to attack Wendy, but Hamilton shot him in time. It was only hungry. Poor thing."

"Sad."

"So Jared, tell me: What about when you were dying back in 1979.

What was that like? I've always wondered. I mean, were you scared near the end, when you were dying in the hospital? You seemed socalm—even at the end when all those machines were pumping gorp in and out of you."

"Scared? I was scared shitless. I didn't want to leave Earth. I wanted to see the future—the lives of people I knew. I wanted to see progress— electric cars, pollution controls, the new Talking Heads album. .. . Then my hair fell out and I knew I'd crossed the line. After that I put a good face on it because my parents were falling apart." Richard is lost in thought. "Do you think about death much?" I ask.

"Pretty much all the time. How could I not'? I mean, look at this place."

"And what do you think?"

"I don't worry about dying. I figure that I'll just meet up with everybody else in the world wherever they went. But if I'd been you back in high school, I don't think I'd have been able to put as good a face on death as you did. I'd scream and yell and beg for more time, even on this clapped-out hulk of a planet we live on now."

"You like it here?"

"No, but I'm alive."

"Is it enough—being alive?"

"It's what I have."

"Richard, tell me the truth—and you have to tell me the truth, because, um, I'm a heavenly being."

"Shoot, buddy."

"Did you use Karen and me both as an excuse for you not to continue your own life? Did you bail out of life?"

Richard looks hurt, but then makes a dismissive "nah—why not?" gesture. "Sure. I pretty much withdrew, Jared. But I was a good citizen. I put the trash out every Tuesday night. I voted. I had a job."

"Did you feel kinda hollow inside?"

"A bit. I admit it. Does my answer make you happy?"

"Hey man. I need to ask. I need to know how you are."

"But I stopped withdrawing when Karen woke up."

"Fair enough."

"Do we have to discuss this, Jared? Let's talk about the old neighborhood. People. Friends.""I've visited all the others today. You're the last. I saved the best for last, my oldest friend."

"I'm honored, you stud."

We continue walking and cut down into St. James Place and approach my old house, a slightly shambled split-level rancher, baby-blue. On the right hand side there are cinder burns from when the house next door burned down. "The fire was three weeks ago," Richard tells me. "Lightning." We stand at the end of my driveway. "Here's your house. You wanna go inside, Jared?"

"Could we? I've wanted to go in there, but only with somebody else. It'd make me nervous to go in alone."

"You? A ghost? You get nervous over bodies?"

"Yes. So I'm a wuss on this one issue."

"You get used to them. Trust me. Hamilton calls them Leakers."

My old front lawn is knee-high; all of the ornamental shrubs have browned and withered. Green ivy has persisted, overgrowing onto the front door, which is unlocked. It opens silently as Richard tries it. A whoosh of warm air comes out, as does a foul, ammonia-like stink that makes Richard grimace at me: "You still want to go through with this, Jared?"

"Please."

Time has stood still inside. "Oh boy, Richard. It's almost identical to the last day I was here—my final day pass out of the palliative care unit. I wasn't supposed to eat meat, but Dad cut my turkey up into bits the size of peas and said to hell with it. I puked my dinner and then some blood and then the paramedics had to come. My parents and sister were so frightened. It was such a bad scene."

Richard stands in the front area and waits as I float through the house. A new TV here, a microwave oven there, some fridge magnets, but otherwise the house remains as it was when I left it. I approach the staircase, but Richard looks at me. "Are you sure you're okay with this, Jared?"

"I'm fine. As long as you're here. Let's go up."

He walks behind me and we enter my old bedroom, now a sewing room. Then I look in the old bathroom, my sister's room, and finallymy parents' room. "Let me look first," Richard says. I tell him it won't be necessary, but he's adamant. He nudges the brown door open, peeks in, blanches, and then tiptoes out. "Leakers. I guess I have to tell you it's pretty gruesome in there."

"I need to see." I walk in, Richard behind me, and I see my parents' remains mummified into their bedsheets and mattress. "Sorry, man." Richard says.

"It's okay. It's Nature's way." I walk through the room—my photos are on the wall, they never took them down—and I see the hand mold I made in kindergarten. "Where are your own parents, Richard?"

"They're in their Camry at the Douglas Border Crossing. Linus and I made an overnight mission down there last summer and found their car. We were going to bury the remains, but it just wasn't, um, possible." I look around the room some more. "It's darkening outside," Richard says. "I have to go now—to see Mount Baker. You want to come?"

"I want to stay here with my folks a bit more. I wish there was something I could leave you with," I say, "a gift—a small miracle I can perform for you. Is there anything you want or need?"

Richard, now standing in the driveway says, "No. It sounds ridiculous, but I've got everything I need. Are you sure you want to stay here?"

"I'm sure. Good-bye, Richard. Thanks for coming in with me to see my folks."

"It was nothing. Thank you for fixing Karen's legs. When are you coming back again?"

"In two weeks,"

"See you then, buddy."

"Bye, guy."

31 ONE IDEA WIN

I was never a good "talker" when I was young and alive. Usually, a shrug and a smile carried me through most social situations. And to meet girls all I had to do was have a stare-down contest with them and make sure not to blink. It never failed. But now I've got the gift of clarity and directness.

What's clarity like?

Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on a beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth-century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. This is why Richard drank. This is why my old friends used to spend their lives blitzed on everything from cough syrup to crystal meth. Anything to make that sloggy buzz make a retreat.

It's been two weeks since my last visit. The sky is clear but smoky smelling and a fine ash falls from no identifiable source. In the house's kitchen, both Wendy and Pam are playing solitaire on personal computers electrified by the Honda generator. Their hair is dirty. Linus, still partially blind, can't get the water pump fixed—and their voices are raspy from uneven weather and from colds, which still seem to appear even without a population base to spread them. Their bodies are swaddled inside down coats adorned with hundreds of Bulgari jeweled brooches.

"Did Richard say he'd have the heater and the water fixed by the afternoon?" Pam asks, and Wendy says no. "Oh pooh. My hair feels all matted like a wad of Slim Jims. I'm getting a club soda. You want one?"

Wendy declines and strolls onto the patio where Linus is bundled up as though in a Swiss tuberculosis sanitorium. "Hey, Linus, are you sure you're wearing enough white terry robes? You look like Bugs Bunny in Palm Springs."

"Tee hee." Linus is still recovering from a wicked cold garnered from the three-day-long blind walk home from up on the mountain where I gave him pictures of heaven.

"Brrr. It's cold out," Wendy says. "But the sky looks pretty."

"I can tell by the sound of your voice," Linus says, "you're hiding something. Wait—let me guess. Yes, you've checked the Geiger counter, haven't you?"

"Guilty as charged. Chattering like maracas."

"Some surprise."

They Stand silent for a second, then Wendy says, "Jane is starting to reject her food. I'm not feeling so hot, either.""You sound fine," Linus says. "Jared's back tonight. He'll tell us what to do."

From the living room they can hear Hamilton cursing the cold, throwing a Yellow Pages into the fireplace for a meager dollop of heat.

"Oh—look!" Wendy says. "Up there—a bald eagle—still alive. Flying."

"I'll take your word for it. This pesky blindness, you know."

"I mean, it's so large—the big white head, the yellow beak. It's so big I can see the color from here."

"I'll live. I'm going inside now." He has difficulty finding the latch.

Inside the living room, Linus feels his way past Hamilton, asking, "What are you reading?"

"I'm taking my minty fresh new brain out for more test drives. Industry and Empire by Eric Hobsbawm—about the English Industrial Revolution. Also, One More Time by Carol Burnett. The funny lady of television and films remembers her beginnings. The coast-to-coast bestseller that warmed the hearts of millions."

"Well it's cold in here. We should find a smaller house that's easier to heat."

"No. Maybe we can just start putting bits of this house into the fire, and when we run out of this house we can find another big house."

At that moment, Megan's bedroom explodes with a top-forty hit from 1997. "Bloody hell." Hamilton sits bolt upright then stomps down the hall to Megan's door. "Turn down the bloody boom box, Megan. We can't think out here." Megan makes no response, so Hamilton nudges open the door and finds Megan and Jane sitting on the bed where they've stationed themselves for the past two weeks—a landscape of half-used Gerber jars, cigarette butts, CD's, and batteries. Hamilton turns the music down to a low level. Hamilton glowers at Jane, who gawps right back at him. Hamilton has the spooky sensation that Jane is far more aware of the world than any of the others. "Are you coming out for dinner tonight?" Hamilton asks. "It's a

Sunday dinner. A good one."

"Maybe. How do you know it's Sunday?""Wendy's PowerBook."

"Right." Megan turns off the stereo and picks up Jane. The two look out the window onto the driveway, where Richard has parked the car and is carrying cases of tinned foods into the house. "Oh goody-goody," says Megan, "more canned food. No, excuse me—I see a few boxes there, too. Lucky us—such variety." Richard sees Megan and suddenly Megan feels badly for Richard, who is the one person trying hard to maintain civility and comfort during the entire fucked up and crazy year. She calls out the window, "Dad, do you want me to help you with those?"

"They're nearly all in, Sweetie. Thanks anyhow."

Richard places the final box down on the garage floor. Walking into the house, he sees Karen by the small pool, which in the course of a year has converted itself into an enormous science project on algae. "You okay down there?" he asks.

"I'm fine. I went for a small run. Now I'm just taking in the air. It turned warm a few minutes ago."

Richard goes inside and Karen resumes her sentry over the gone-to-seed backyard. The sky is oranging and she is sad because her voices have departed. She can no longer see into the future or even try to explain the unexplainable. She is merely mortal, and a frail mortal, too. But we've all had our hopes returned, she thinks. Jared will know what to do next.

From somewhere in the house comes the sound of rattling paper. It's Linus feeling his way back out to the patio carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes. "It's gotten warm out all of a sudden," he shouts, "let's barbecue, methinks." Within minutes, the ball barbecue is opened, the briquettes lit, the embers are glowing, and spirits are raised.

The darkening sky is becoming a warm, dead Xerox and the winds blow forcefully as though aimed from a hair blower. Yet there is no sound—a warm river flowing over the skin; the amplified sound of the Moon. It is summer in mid-winter.

My old friends are seated on the back patio, toasting marshmal-lows and joking around. They know that my two weeks are up and I'll be returning shortly.

Richard asks Linus, whose eyesight is just now returning, to count how many fingers he's holding up. Karen darts about serving drinks and flaunting her new legs ("Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce"). Hamilton and Pam sit calmly, their facial muscles loose, their crow's-feet vanished. They listen to the voices of the others with the peace of small children. Wendy helps Linus guide his stick near the flames; she is silent about her pregnancy by me, having kept details of our encounter hush-hush. Megan, seated on a faded folding chair, beams as baby Jane gurgles and clicks with her continuing enchantment with the gift of sight, not crying once since her encounter with me. Richard, bearing a marshmallow-clumped trident at his side, is simply pleased to see his friends so jolly.

"I can smell the skins burning," Linus says. "Carbon."

"Isn't it just the prettiest thing?" Pam adds. "Hey, King Neptune— start toasting your prongs."

As I look down at them from the sky, their barbecue is the only speck of light on Earth for hundreds of miles save for the lava that oozes down Mt. Baker's slope and a small forest fire north of Seattle. I become a star in the sky and grow until Megan sees me and says, "Look. I bet that's Jared now."

Seconds later, I appear at the patio's edge and Megan smiles, saying, "Jane, say hello to Jared," making Jane twitter birdishly.

"Are you able to eat, Jared?" asks Karen. "Marshmallows—a bit stale, but they plump the moment they burn."

"Hey, Kare, no food, thanks, no."

"A dance, perhaps?" She sweeps around the patio, her dress twirling and her eyes flashing because she is in love with the world.

"How about some lemonade?" asks Hamilton. "Num num. Made from a powder, of course, but lemony fresh nonetheless."

"Thanks again, but no, Ham." I move a bowl of potato chips and sit down on a stump Karen's father once used as a chopping block.

Linus, semi-blind, holds up his glass in my general direction and says,"A toast to Jared." The others join in with a cloud of hear-hear's. "Our miracle man."

I blush. Wendy, who's heavily dolled herself up for the night, sugars moonily, "Helloooo, Jared."

"Hey, Wen, looking good." And then there's a pause as in the old days when we made bonfires down at Ambleside beach, a bonfire's flames with embers hypnotic and silencing. "Guys—I need to speak with you all," I say, and I receive seven smiling faces in return—eight, now that Jane, as well as Linus, has vision. "Please listen."

The fire spits as insects kamikaze inward.

"It's hard for me. It's hard stuff. It's about all of you."

"Us?" Karen asks.

"Yup. All of you. And just because I'm able to speak more clearly than when I was alive doesn't mean I feel any more comfortable doing it. Cut me some slack. I'm here to speak to you about transforming your lives and yourselves. Making choices and changing who you are."

32 SUPER POWER

"You've all been wondering why it was only the eight of you who remained to see the world's end. It's because you've all been given a great gift, but a confusing one, too."

"Confusing? Duh," Karen says.

"Gift?" Hamilton doesn't believe me.

"Uh-huh. You've all been allowed to see what your lives would be like in the absence of the world."

Silence while everybody bites their lips.

"This is like that Christmas movie," Pam says, "The one they used to play too many times each December and it kind of wore you down by the eighteenth showing. You know: what the world would have been like without you."

"Sort of, Pam," I say, "but backwards. I've been watching over the bunch of you ever since Karen woke up, to see how different you'd be without the world."

"Why us, Jared?" Linus asks. "I mean, why not a syphilitic middle aged rice trader in Lahore, India, with, um, um, a collection of taxi-dermied squirrels." He pauses. "Or a five-year old Nigerian girl who communicates to the world, um, um, only through a green-painted Barbie she found in the alley behind the Finnish Embassy. I mean, why MS?"

"Why you? People never asked that question of Jimmy Stewart's character in It's a Wonderful Life."

"That's the name," Pam says.

"Just go with it," I recommend.

Richard harrumphs.

"You were spying on us?" Megan accuses—these modern kids—-so paranoid.

"Nope. Just watching. And caring. And worrying. And freaking out.

"What was so wrong about our lives that we had to go through the past year?" Linus asks. "At least Jimmy Stewart was having a life crisis. Our lives were going along pretty smoothly, actually."

"Were they?" I ask. "I mean, were they really?"

"Hey, Jared," Hamilton says, "it's not as if you were out there selling Girl Guide Cookies when you were down here. Who are you to watch over any of us and tell us what our lives should or shouldn't be?"

"For starters, Hamster, I'm a ghost, so that gives me a few extra course credits. No, I didn't get to stay on earth for an extra few decades, but I did get to see—oh, good God, Hamilton—what do you want me to have—wings and a halo?"

"For sta—"

Karen interrupts: "Will you testosterone cases clam up? Shush!"

Wendy says, "Jared, I get the impression that we were supposed to have been doing something else down here this past year—and that we've failed some kind of test."

"Yeah," Richard adds. "And what if we had done the right thing,

Jared? What would we have won—a trip to Rome on Sabena

Airlines? A year's supply of Rice-a-Roni? Maybe you haven't noticed, but Earth is a big slag heap these days. There's not much we couldalter even if we wanted. What—we're supposed to start a new race of human beings? A new civilization? Assemble some new Noah's Ark? Build a legacy? We don't even know what we're going to be able to eat in a year or two. Tang? Each other?"

Wendy adds, "Jared, there's radiation here now. And the weather isn't weather anymore. We can't plan for five years when we're unable even to plan for a week."

"Wendy, you're carrying our kid," I say … oops. "What kind of life do you expect him to lead?"

Wendy replies, "Him? You know the gender already? If you know the future, Jared, you ought to have thought of that beforehand."

"Wait wait wait wait wait," Linus says. "You two made it?" Wendy's sigh is a confirmation. "You bastard!" he shouts at me, throwing a patio chair at the spot where he roughly imagines me to be floating. One of the chair's legs knocks over the barbecue's dome and the embers fall onto the ground, missing Richard by inches.

"You pinhead!" Richard shouts, "You could have brained me."

Linus ignores Richard and turns me. "You couldn't even keep it in your pants when your dead, you dumb jock." He swivels toward Wendy. "Very well. Where'd you do it? How'd you do it? Now I know why you've been so moony lately."

"In the canyon. Two weeks ago. It wasn't sex sex," Wendy says, "It was a soul-to-soul thing. I didn't even remove my clothes."

"Don't soul-to-soul me."

"Linus," I say, "Cool down. I simply made her stop feeling lonely."

"Yeah. Sure."

Wendy and I sigh. "Linus—do you want me to make you pregnant, too? It's not impossible. I can arrange it."

Richard is sweeping the embers into a small pile with a stray brick. Linus is confused. He wants to be angry but now he isn't sure what should be the anger's focus. Karen says, "It's not bad like you think,

Linus."

Linus sulks and the group stands silently and looks at me. Surprisingly, it is Richard who breaks the quiet, saying, "Jared's rightto be worrying about us." He puts down his marshmallow trident. "We really don't seem to have any values, any absolutes. We've always maneuvered our values to suit our immediate purposes. There's nothing large in our lives."

Hamilton snaps in, "These past weeks are the first time I've felt good in years, Richard, and you're starting to bring me down. Do we really need to analyze our shortcomings so thoroughly?"

"Yes, I believe we do," Richard says. "Jared's here to ask us to take a look at ourselves, Hamilton. I mean, look at us: Instead of serving a higher purpose we've always been more concerned with developing our 'personalities.' and with being 'free'"

"Richard?" Karen asks.

"Karen, let me say what I feel: This has been on my mind ever since Jared first appeared. I think we've always wanted something noble or holy in our lives, but only on our own terms. You know, our old beefs: The World Wide Web is a bore. There's nothing on TV. That video tape is a drag. Politics are dumb. I want to be innocent again. I need to express the me inside. What are our convictions? If we had any convictions would we even have the guts to follow them?"

Marshmallows broil then slime through the grill and into the embers. Papery carbon husks above are blown away in the breeze like used black cocoons. "It's true," Linus says, and all eyes move to him. I let him speak because he's saying the right things. "Our lives have remained static—even after we've lost everything in the world—shit: the world itself. Isn't that sick? All that we've seen and been through and we watch videos, eat junk food, pop pills, and blow things up."

Hamilton says, "Okay, Helen Keller, get to the point. And if you get any more depressing, I'm rearranging the furniture and not telling you how."

"Hamilton," Richard says, "tell me—have we ever really gotten together and wished for wisdom or faith to come from the world's collapse? No. Instead we got into a tizzy because some Leaker forgot to return the Godfather III tapes to Blockbuster Video the day of the Sleep and now we can't watch it. Have we had the humility to gatherand collectively speak our souls? What evidence have we ever given of inner lives?

Karen perks up: "Of course we have interior lives, Richard. I do. How can we not have one?"

"I didn't say that, Karen. I said we gave no evidence of an interior life. Acts of kindness, evidence of contemplation, devotion, sacrifice. All these things that indicate a world inside us. Instead we set up a demolition derby in the Eaton's parking lot, ransacked the Virgin Superstore, and torched the Home Depot."

"Aren't we holier than thou?" Wendy snipes at Richard, her arms tight around young Zygote Junior inside her stomach.

"Actually, Richard," I say, "the demo derby looked like a lot of fun. And I like the way you spray-painted names on your cars. I thought your 'Losermobile' would win in the end."

"Me, too. I—"

Megan ignores Richard and looks at me: "Jared—stop talking about cars. What are we supposed to do now?" she asks. "How can we change? You arrived saying you would teach us things that would allow us to change. So tell us."

My friends go calm—quiet. "Okay, guys, I think you want me to tell you that the world is a moral place. It is. But you're right to be thinking about your souls—the better parts of you—they're all desperate to climb from your bodies and leave you far behind. You're going to have to lead another life soon; a different life. The choice will be obvious when it arrives. You can get the world back yet."

A salvo of questions follows: "But you didn't tell us how to—" "What do we do to—" "What happens next?" "When do we—?"

"Hold your horses. A few squabbles ago Wendy asked what it was you were supposed to have been doing here this past year. The answer is that you ought to have been squabbling twenty-four hours a day for all of this time—and asked a million questions about why the world became the way it did. If you'd done that, you'd have been returned to the world the way it was and you'd be smarter and wiser,

But you didn't—arson, looting, cocktails, videos, and demo derbies— so now we move to Plan B."The barbecue hisses. "I'll return when the lightning ends. I'll meet you on Cleveland Dam in seven days—at sunset." "What lightning?" Hamilton asks. Lightning cracks; the sky ignites. "That lightning, goof ball."

33 YOUR MESSAGE HERE

When I was alive on Earth I always noticed how events in the night sky had such a powerful capacity to alter human moods. One fall night in the 1970s, I was at a BC Lions football game. Just after sunset and directly over the cheap-seat bleachers to the east, a full moon, amber and veined, pumped itself upward and seemingly hovered over the stadium's edge. At this point, the announcer said, "Ladies and gentlemen—lets have a big round of applause for … the Moonl" and everybody went nuts and the rest of the game felt like a Super Bowl.

Around that same time, I was in a soccer tournament and the team and I had to fly to Manitoba on a red-eye flight. Somewhere over Saskatchewan I looked out the plane's window and saw the aurora borealis spritzing and jitterbugging up to the north—I felt as though

I'd seen God singing along with the radio at a stoplight. We won the tournament. Fuckin' right we did!

And then one night, shortly before I got leukemia, a thinly sliced crescent moon rested high in the south sky over Vancouver; the planet Venus, white and hot, was also in view, and I watched the two bodies veer ever closer until Venus finally hit the unlit portion of the lunar edge. Just before Venus disappeared, it looked as though there was a light directly on the Moon's surface. And shortly afterward, as I said, I got leukemia. So there.

I mention events in the sky to help make sense of lightning and thunder and their profound effects on the soul. My friends have so far endured six days of continual storms and my old neighborhood and its surrounding forest are bursting in flames from untold numbers of lightning strikes. My friends are scrambling madly for cool air and sanctuary, having piled what few things they've been able to save into minivans in which they hightail up the charred stubble of the nearby golf course's pampas.

Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert. There is nothing remaining on this mountain slope save for the foundations of houses, tree roots beneath the soil, and a swirling maze of roads that lead from nowhere to nowhere.

Soon, two miles up the hill, the gang reaches a stone clubhouse surrounded by links of ashes. From within its solid interior they watch the lightning continue unabated, like watching a car crash that never stops, ripping and grinding and chewing and burning for day upon day upon day, sickening and dull.

The night is chilly; the fireplace is stuffed with burning chairs, yet their room feels only slightly warm. Dinner was a few cans of chicken broth and tinned green beans found in the kitchen. Tablecloths and towels are used as bedsheets as a freak Arctic cold front lands upon them pre-dawn. They cluster together like January blue jays roosting inside a stump, and still they wake up freezing. But for the first time in seven days the sky is silent. Across the Capilano Canyon they see the snow-crested mountains of our childhoods reduced to black cinders and stone.The next day is spent driving lazy-8's through the old neighborhood's tangled lariat of roads, seeing only charred stumps, melted patio furniture, and metal globs that were once sportscars. My friends cry and make fruitless attempts at salvage. Wendy finds the skeletons of the two ostriches and hands Linus the femurs. "It's nearly sundown," Karen says. "Let's hit the darn."

Their minivans hairpin down the black streets, the interiors smoky with the scent of itty-bitty salvaged mementos—a pair of Adidas ROM shoes; a Snoopy trophy; a framed photo of Liam Gallagher; a Becel margarine tub full of emeralds and Richard's asbestos astronaut suit.

On Cleveland Dam, they park at the west end and walk to its center, as promised, I hover invisibly above the silent spillway. The reservoir behind the dam is slightly below runoff level and algae within the water has loaned it an otherworldly shamrock sheen. The dam's road is smooth and glistening from a freak rainstorm and is seemingly paved with diamonds.

Quietly, everybody follows Karen onto the dam. For the first time in weeks she hears voices. "It's almost sundown," Karen says, "Kneel."

"I'm not kneeling," Hamilton says.

"Then don't," Richard says, and the group ignores Hamilton and kneels.

Hamilton stands with his arms crossed, watching the group and feeling like Noel Coward at a gauche cocktail party, and then he remembers his past year of madness with Pam, the drugs, the mania, his rebirth as the Last of the Famous International Playboys—Petula Clark, Brasilia, Le Cote Basque, Jackson Pollock, Linda Bird Johnson, and gimlet martinis—the ideas and images of a clean, sophisticated, and plausible future long vanished. My head is now clean, he thinks. My veins are clean, but the world is soiled.

Pam watches him from the corner of her eye. Poor Hamilton— Hamilton who has always felt unsophisticated having grown up so far away from the centers of metropolitan glamour. But Pam knows of the blankness at the core of that world, and she's aware thatthrough her, Hamilton has learned this, too. She thinks back on the past crazy year on drugs and then the miracle of becoming clean. She looks at the city's skeleton through the charred forest. If this is the world, then take it. I hated Milan. I hated catwalks. I bated my face for taking me the places it did. Let the insects fight for the remains. "Hamilton, get over here," she calls.

Hamilton shakes his head. "I can't."

"You knelt at Jared's memorial service, didn't you?" Hamilton nods. "Then you can bloody well kneel here." Hamilton comes, kneels beside Pamela, and looks up at the sky.

Linus clacks together the ostrich femurs and the noise rattles comfortably across the spillway and into the canyon below. Jane squeals and then falls silent.

And so it's here, on this dam, where this group, for the first time since the beginning of their lonely year, align their thoughts on the Great Beyond. This is where I enter. Linus clacks the femurs together: clack clack.

"I'm back." I appear before them, hovering slightly above the spillway.

"Jared!"

"What are we going to do, Jared?" Megan wails.

"Guys—hey—don't freak out. You think you've been forsaken— that the opportunity for holiness is gone, but this isn't true. Time is over; the world is gone.

"You've got just one option left. You blew it this year, but you can make good. As I said, there's still Plan B."

34 STOP BREATHING

I want to squish my friends into my heart, as though they could help me grout a troublesome crack. They wonder, How did life ever come to this? They're not bozos; they know everything's over. They're naked parachutists waiting be pushed out of the plane and into the sky. Such is birth.

A warm sooty wind blows up the dam's face, its dark dead confetti floating through me, then shining. I'm a wall of light. "Guys! Feel the air," I say. "Across your skin. It's like icing sugar. So sweet. And feel the charged wind in your lungs—it does feel like the end of the world, doesn't it? Come on—drag your butts up. Huddle! And while you're at it, look at all the water pouring down the spillway—it's like melted lime Jell-O. And hear the water growl—like a cougar inside an unlocked cage. Oh! And remember that night at Linda Jermyn's party? Remember when we found that TV set in the alley and brought it here and hucked it off the edge." My friends stand up and circle around me as I hover above the commotion.

"Correction, Jare," Hamilton says, "I'm the one who did the actual hucking. If I remember correctly, you and Richard were off on the sidelines sniveling."

"You wish, Hamilton," Richard says. "I sweet talked the RCMP into thinking you'd thrown a half-melted ice swan off the edge. I mean, they saw you throw something. Jared and Pam were horking in the rhododendrons over by the parking lot."

"It was that home-brew of yours, Jared," Pam says. "It was like Liquid Plague. It's the absolute sickest I've ever felt. Even worse than methadone. And you were so sick that night, Jared—so sick that you couldn't even hit on me."

Ping! At this moment a phenomenon in the sky captures my friends' awe and attention—a web of shooting stars now visible through a parting hole in the sky—a crosshatched ceiling of shooting stars as hasn't been seen on Earth since 1703 in the southern part of the African continent.

"Look at the sky," Linus says. "This is so Day of the Triffids."

"Everything's a light show for sixteen-year-olds, isn't it?" Richard says.

Even with all the hoo-haw and thunder of the past week, my friends find wonder and ahhhs in the spectacle. Young Jane reaches up to the sky as though it were a wise and generous person and not merely light. Jane, the planet's newest genius, is counting stars, her brain already advanced beyond mere numbers.

Warm, slightly stinky air, like air pushed forward by a subway car, sweet and full of adventure, whooshes over us. "And here we are all these years later," I say, "at the end of the world and the end of time."

"How fucking ironic," Hamilton says.

"Oh, come on, Hamilton," I say, "get some drama out of this. I mean, all of you noticed how 'time' feels so different here at the world's end—how weird it is to live with no clocks or seasons or rhythms or schedules. And you're all correct, too—time is a totally human idea—without people, time vanishes. Infinity and zero become the same thing.""Gee," Hamilton says.

"Why just before all this happened," I say, pointing out the brightly lit black suburban dust, "nobody we knew had a second of free time remaining. All of it was frittered away on being productive, advancing careers and being all-round efficient. Each new advance made by 'progress' created its own accelerating warping effect that made your lives here on earth feel even smaller and shorter and more crazed. And now … no time at all."

"Hey—" Wendy says.

"What?" I ask.

"Nothing. I just wanted to stop Hamilton from making some cynical crack."

"It's okay, Wendy," I say. "It's nice to think back on old times and be with old friends. I mean, we were all so lucky living when and where we did. There was no Vietnam. Childhood dragged on forever. Gasoline, cars, and potato chips were cheap and plenty. If we wanted to hop a jet to fly anywhere on Earth, we could. We could believe in anything we wanted. Shit—we could wear a San Diego Chicken costume down Marine Drive while carrying a bloody rubber head of Richard Nixon if we wanted—that would have been just fine. And we all went to school. And we weren't in jail. Wow." The stars are suddenly stained pink as a tiny waft of chemical residue from a long exploded Yokohama paint factory passes over.

"I remember running through the neighborhood in little more than a jockstrap. I remember being able to read Life magazine and making up my own mind on politics. I remember being in a car and thinking of a road map of North America and knowing that if I chose, I could drive anywhere. All of that time and all of that tranquillity, freedom and abundance. Amazing. The sweet and effortless nodule of freedom we all shared—it was a fine idea. It was, in its own unglamorous way, the goal of all of human history—the wars, the genius, the madness, the beauty and the grief—it was all to reach ever farther unclouded points on which to stand and view and think and evolve and understand ever farther and farther and, well, farther. Progress is real. Destiny is real. You are real." The pink passes on."And so that's why we're all here tonight—today—whatever day it is: Thursday—six weeks from now—1954—three days ago—one million B.C. It's all the same. I mean, I know you're wondering what was wrong with the way you were living your lives in the first place— what your Jimmy Stewart-esque crisis was—and I know you're wondering why you had to spend the past year the way you did. You say your lives weren't in crisis, but you know deep down they were. I was up there hearing you."

"You nark'ed on us?" Megan asks, ever alert.

Richard darts in, "Megan, drop it, okay?"

The water behind the dam is luminous Day-Glo green. It looks electric. Radioactive. "So, yes, here all of us were, living on the outermost edge of that farthest point. People elsewhere—people who didn't have our Boy-in-the-Bubble lifestyle—they looked at us and our freedoms fought for by others, and these people expected us with our advantages to take mankind to the next level … newer, smarter, innovative ways of thinking and living and being. They looked at us and hoped we could figure out what comes … next."

Wendy sneezes three pistol-crack snorts. "Bless you," I say. "And bless all of you, too." The light in the sky is so bright it's like daylight. "And weren't we blessed, too, with options in life—and didn't we ignore them completely?—like unwanted Christmas gifts hidden in the storeroom. What did life boil down to in the end? … Smokey and the Bandit videos. Instead of finding inspiration and intellectual momentum there was … Ativan. And overwork. And Johnny Walker. And silence. And—I mean, guys, just look at the situation. And it's not as if I was any better. I never looked beyond the tip of my dick."

"Get to a point," Richard says. He knows we're close to an answer.

"This past year—if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people."A thousand years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids stand. One hundred years ago—or even fifty years ago—the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours."

"The pioneers—they conquered the world," Linus says quietly.

"They did, Linus. The New World isn't new anymore. The New World—the Americas—it's over. People don't have dominion over Nature. It's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die—it's all melted together. Death isn't an escape hatch the way it used to be."

"Well fuck me," Hamilton says.

"Your destiny's now big enough to meet your jaded capacity for awe. It's now powerful enough for you to rise to the task of being individuals."

The meteorites disappear and the pulsing white sky goes black as though unplugged. Richard asks me, "Jared, wait a second—wait wait wait. You're going too quickly. Way earlier you said we could return to the world. What did you mean—the world as it was before—all this?"

"Exactamundo, Richard. You can return to the world the way it was—back to the morning of November 1, 1997. There'll have been no Sleep, and your lives will continue, at least in the beginning, as they were."

"Bull." Wendy says.

"I shit you not."

"Jared—are we gonna forget all this past year? the Sleep?" Linus asks. "Will I lose the pictures of heaven you gave me?"

I say, "You'll remember every single thing, Linus: everything that was lost and everything that was gained.""Jane," Megan says, "What about Jane?"

"Jane will be whole."

"My—our—baby . .." puffs Wendy.

"Born," I say. "And Hamilton and Pam, you'll be clean."

Eyes are wide before me—all save for Karen's. Karen has pulled back from the group, biting her finger, sucking in breath, closing her eyes and standing with her arms and legs pulled in as tightly as possible—as though she wished to become a thin line, so thin as to be invisible. The gang doesn't notice this; they're riveted by my words.

"You said that in the beginning our lives will be the same," Wendy says. "I sense there's some kind of deal happening here. We have to change somehow. There's a catch. How will our lives be changed. What's your Plan B?"

35 3 2 1 ZERO

"Plan B is this:

"You're to be different now. Your behavior will be changing. Your thinking is to change. And people will watch these changes in you and they'll come to experience the world in your new manner."

"How?" Richard asks. "How do we change?"

"Richard, tell me this: back in the old world, didn't you often feel as if the only way you could fully truly change yourself in the powerful way you yearned for was to die and then start again from scratch? Didn't you feel as if all of the symbols and ideas fed to you since birth had become worn out like old shoes? Didn't you ache for change but you didn't know how achieve it? And even if you knew how to do it, would you have had the guts to go forth? Didn't you want your cards shuffled a different way?"

"Yeah Sure. But didn't everybody?"

"No. Not always. This feeling is specific to the times we lived in."

"Okay ____ "

"And Richard, haven't you always felt that you live forever on the brink of knowing a great truth? Well, that feeling is true. There is the truth. It does exist."

"Yes. Well, now it's going to be as if you've died and were reincarnated but you stay inside your own body. For all of you. And in your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation — that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it — and you're never to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life.

"This is Plan B.

"Every day for the rest of your lives, all of your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need — the need to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us to beyond ourselves.

"Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.

"Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud — while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you — while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks — outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap.

"Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off of bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question stamped on it — a demand for people to reach a finer place." There's silence. The water's white noise is invisible now. The skyhas cleared and the stars are timidly reappearing, point by point.

"What do we ask?" Wendy says.

"Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs. Ask: When did we become human beings and stop being whatever it was we were before this? Ask: What was the specific change that made us human? Ask: Why do people not particularly care about their ancestors more than three generations back? Ask: Why are we unable to think of any real future beyond, say, a hundred years from now? Ask: How can we begin to think of the future as something enormous before us that also includes us? Ask: Having become human, what is it that we are now doing or creating that will transform us into whatever it is that we are slated to next become?

"Even if it means barking on street corners, that's what you have to do, each time baying louder than before. You must testify. There is no other choice.

"What is destiny? Is there a difference between personal destiny and collective destiny? 'I always knew I was going to be a movie star.' 'I always knew I was meant to murder.' Is Destiny artificial? Is it unique to Man? Where did Destiny come from?

"You're going to be forever homesick, walking through a cold railway station until the end, whispering strange ideas about existence into the ears of children. Your lives will be tinged with urgency, as though rescuing buried men and lassooing drowning horses. You'll be mistaken for crazies. You may well end up foaming at the mouth in a central Canadian drug clinic, Magic-Markering ideas onto your thighs which are bony from scouring the land on foot. Your eyes will always feel as if you've been staring at the sun, your bodies seemingly aching to cool them by staring at the moon. There aren't enough words for 'transform.' You'll invent more."

"We'll go crazy!" Hamilton shouts.

"No. You'll become clearer and clearer."

"No—we'll go totally effing crazy."

"Haven't you always known that, Hamilton? At the base of all of your cynicism across the years, haven't you always known that one day it was going to boil down into hard work? Haven't you?"Hamilton and the rest imagine their new lives.

"And you're going to care about what people think? As if they care! And you know the truth—or at least you'll always be headed in its direction. It doesn't matter how stupid or crazy or extreme you become. There is no other meaning. This is it."

Hamilton closes his eyes and specks of mica dust fall from the sky, making his face glint.

"In your old lives you had nothing to live for. Now you do. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Go clear the land for a new culture—bring your axes, scythes, and guns. I know you have the necessary skills—explosives, medicine, engineering, media knowledge, and the ability to camouflage yourselves. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world—if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order—then you're wasting your day."

The water flowing beneath us and over into the spillway has stopped, but nobody notices. One by one I come face-to-face with my friends.

"Pam, you have hard work ahead of you. Every moment of your life from now is going to be work, and no excuses. It's as though you've have to dig up a massive tree and untie the roots which have been tied into complex knots by dark forces beneath the soil. Could you do that? Are you capable?"

"Yes."

"Hamilton—no more pretending to be a child trapped inside an aging body. No avoiding the enormity and responsibility of being an adult. Could you do that? Are you capable?"

"Yeah."

"Wendy, no excuses: no drugs, no sleeping, no booze, no overworking, no repetition or insulation or efforts to make time disappear. You're in for the long haul. Could you do that? Are you capable?"

"I am. But what about the baby?"

"You may not be able to change the world on your own, but our kid will—as will Jane. You'll be their teachers and then they'll teach you."Linus—the world is not going to end in your lifetime once you return. That form of self-flattery is gone. But too much freedom won't swamp you anymore. Are you ready to change—to join—to become part of what's Next?"

"Yes."

"Megan—if necessary, you're going to need to reject and destroy the remains of history—kill the past—if it hinders truth. Most of the past can only hold back what needs to be done. An astounding weight of history hangs around your shoulders. But in so many ways, it'll be useless to you. Too many things are too new. Rules have to be made up as you go along. Are you ready, along with Jane, to change—to join—to become part of what's Next?"

"Yes."

"And Richard: Will you go undercover? Will you destroy information? Cut wires? Sever links? In an efficient, adult, and professional manner will you dismantle and smash everything that stops questioning? Will you cut your hair? Will you infiltrate systems? You had no trouble thinking of dinosaurs and Ice Ages as prehistoric. Will you have just as little trouble thinking of your new epoch as post-historic?"

"I will."

Nobody notices that I don't speak to Karen. Richard asks me, "Jared—"

"Yes, Richard?"

"What if we don't want to go back? What if we don't mind the way things are? What if we choose to stay here?"

"I was wondering when you'd ask. The answer is, if you want to stay here and continue the life you've been leading, you can. No strings attached. But I want you to think about that for a second." Richard and the others mull this over and the implications of this quickly becomes obvious. "No, I didn't think you'd like that option. You had another question, Richard. …"

"Yeah, Jared—what happens if we go back and we stop asking questions? What happens if we stop looking and asking?"

I look at Karen; everybody's eyes turn to Karen. "Karen—you remember now?" I ask. "Don't you, Karen?""I do."

"What?" Richard shouts. "What are you talking about?"

"I remember now. It's all coming back to me. I can't believe I didn't remember. Richard—Beb … I have to go back into my … coma."

"Oh no—"

"Yeah," she says, "I do. I have to go back," she says.

"What do you mean you're going back? You can't. Stay here. I won't let you."

"It's not your choice to make, Richard—it's mine. And unless I make it, none of you can go anywhere. That's what I saw, Richard. Back in 1979. This. Here. Me—I'm your Plan B."

36 THE END

"Jared, you demented psycho—what gives you any right to do this?" "Richard, buddy, bro—I wish I were psycho, but I'm not. And nei-ther's Karen. I'm not even doing anything, Richard, I mean, you're the ones who need to do the choosing."

Richard is flailing and it's not cool—it reminds me of when we were younger and he never got picked for teams. He says, "What happens if Karen and I—all of us—don't go along with your deal— what then? What if we all like it here and want to stay here? We could build a new society—the planet could be our ark. I've been thinking of this—we've all thought about it at some point during the year. Earth isn't heaven and it isn't hell but it's something."

Karen's breathing is stiff and pumplike, similar to latex lungs I once saw in a high school guidance film on smoking. "Richard, Beb, that's sweet. But it's too late. This was decided a long time ago." She looks toward me. "You can't stop it. It's a done deal. Sacrifices need to be made. This is mine."

Megan breaks the silence: "How do we go back?" she says.

"Megan, at least defend your mother," Richard says.

"Dad, you never listen to me. She's going, okay? She's leaving."

"Megan," I say, "Getting back is easy, a real no-brainer. All you guys have to do is each return to the place you were at the moment Karen woke up—that point in time and space where the world banged off of its old foundations. Just before dawn, November i, I997- Walk to the places where you were at that moment. All of you standing in your correct spots will be like notches on a key in a tumbler—you'll unlock the world—reopen its doors. Megan, I believe you and Jane, then eight cells big, were in the Emergency waiting room with Linus that morning. Wendy was with Pam and Hamilton in Intensive Care. Richard was down there," I say, pointing to the canyon just down around the bend from the dam's spillway.

"Oh excuse me, Glinda, Good Witch of the North," Hamilton interrupts, "You mean all this time we've been marooned on this slag heap all we had to do was go stand around the hospital?"

"No, Hamilton. The offer's only good as of now. C'mon, Karen, it's time to leave."

"But wait, Jared," Richard says. "You didn't fully answer my question—okay, so Karen goes back into her coma. I repeat my question—what happens if we stop questioning—what happens if we stop looking for good questions and good answers?"

"Then you come back here."

"Yeah?"

"And you stay here." I let this sink in. "Ready to go, Karen? It's almost dark out."

"Wait!" Linus shouts, "We've lost something—and I don't know what it is we've gained in the process."

The lights above us dazzle. I say, "Linus, there are three things we cry for in life—things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent. You've got all three this evening."

The lights, dazzle as they will, are silent. "Karen," I repeat, "It's game time.""Go where?" Richard asks, his voice sandpaper dry with desperation. "Now what?"

"Karen needs to walk up the mountain," I say, "and she needs to take Jane with her. When she reaches the top, the world will return and Jane will be born on the same date as before."

Richard says, "Jared, shit, no. You can't—her legs—"

"My legs are fine, Richard. Stop treating me like porcelain. I'm strong. The die's cast." One by one Karen bids good-bye to the others as Richard stands beside her, trying to catch her eyes.

"Pammie—Hamilton: we'll have drinks some day. Okay? With the Duchess of Windsor and Jimi Hendrix—and we'll laugh at this past year. And Pam?—always speak your mind, and Hamilton—always say whatever's truest. Don't be afraid of being kind." Hamilton and Pam look grief stricken. "Please guys—it's for the best. I'll always be dreaming of you and maybe you of me." Hurried hugs, as though a train is leaving, which it is. She moves along: "Wendy—Linus—you know this is true—this is all for the better. And I'm counting on you guys to change the world."

"Karen—"

"This is odd," Karen says, "I feel like I'm an astronaut before takeoff. Maybe you guys can think of it that way. Look at this as glorious and exciting. It's a launch—think of it that way, each of us reaching a new world once again. Megan?" She approaches Megan whose eyes are overflowing into Jane's wool sweater. "You're a good daughter, Megan. You're a smart kid. You're a good mother. You're a good friend. I wouldn't have wanted anybody else to be my kid."

"Mom?"

Karen kisses Jane. "She's beautiful. I'm glad you can know how much I love you."

"She—she goes with you now?"

"Sorry, sweetie. Just for the time being. You'll meet again come September."

"But."

Karen holds Jane and comes to Richard. "Richard—Beb, I'll stilllove you, even in my sleep, and in my dreams I'll—" she pauses. "We never did get married, did we?"

"No. We didn't."

"Well then, in my dreams we'll be married."

"No—"

"Yeah. Yes. Yes, we will." A final kiss. "Bye." She turns to me: "Hey, Jared. I think you made the cut."

I touch my heart and remove a glowing spark from it. I take the spark and place it inside Karen's chest and say, "Touchdown."

Karen turns and walks away from the group, across the dam toward the mountain's base, her body like a doodle on a telephone book. "I'm glad I woke up," she shouts. "The world is so pretty and the future was so interesting. But I'll be awake inside my dreaming. I'll be dreaming of you all. Good night, everyone!"

Then there's silence. I look at those who remain, frozen by the speedy sequence of life and its action. "The rest of you, it's time for you to go. Wendy, Linus and Megan, Ham and Pam—you walk to the hospital. Richard, you walk down into the canyon. Once you reach your places, please sit and stay. Once Karen reaches the apex you will have your world again."

I pause. "Good-bye, men. Good-bye, women. Think of me."

"Good-bye, Jar—"

And then I'm gone, sunk down into the dam's concrete, leaving their lives for the time being. But I have my own secret job. I'm a part of Plan B, too. My job is to stay here on this blank and now empty Earth and traipse its unholy carcass for years and years—decades, even—for as long as Karen remains in her coma. That's the choice I had to make. I'd do it again.

God.

So it looks as if I'll be running the streets here naked for the next fifty years. Reading a bit of porn; watching a few tapes. Tomorrow it may rain spiders or it may rain battery acid—I'll still be here. And no dates for a few decades except for Miss Fist; don't blame me if I crack.

I can see the others now as I feel my own life pulling away fromtheirs. Megan and Linus are sitting in the waiting area as the outside sky flickers hot and white. The hospital lobby is littered with countless leathery skeletons, but neither these bones nor the clanging silence bothers them.

"I still feel pregnant," Megan says. "Jane's still here. Four hours old. She's a clump of cells now, like a basketball, like bread dough— imagine that, Linus."

Down a hallway, something clanks.

"Look at all these people," Linus says. "They'll be real people soon."

Megan's face relaxes. "Funny how used to them we got—Leakers, I mean. I don't think of them as monsters anymore."

"Me neither."

"We're friends now, aren't we, Linus?"

"Yup."

"Are you scared about our new lives?"

"Yup."

"But there's no other choice, is there?"

"I don't think there ever was."

Over in the ruins of the Intensive Care unit, Wendy stands beside both Hamilton and Pam, who are resting on two gurneys They're silent. What is their fate? How will their lives be changed?

"The room's a bit dark," Pam says.

"Do you want more flashlights on?" Hamilton asks, reaching over to swat one of a dozen emergency flashlights placed on their bottoms, shining up into the dusty air at the trolley's end.

"No. It's okay. It doesn't scare me anymore. Darkness, I mean."

"I know what you mean," Hamilton says.

"And look at the beams," Pam says, "The way they cut through the dust. They're like pillars, aren't they? Aren't they, Wendy?"

A catafalque of skeletons encircles the room; Wendy nervously taps steel forceps onto a stainless steel tray and she feels extremely old. "Yeah," she says. "They are."

Karen meanwhile limps and hobbles up the rock mountainside lit by the sky which is committing suicide above. She'll reach the top.The walls of her heart are as thin as rice paper and her breath as frail as dandelion puffs. From there she'll once more leave the waking world.

She speaks out loud to herself, unaware that the others will also hear the words. She looks down from the slope at the burnt forests and the lost suburbs.

"You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where before there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt.

"Life will go on—all of us—crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly. We will forever be crossing the goal line."

Down in the canyon, Richard's heels sink into mud and loam and fungus and mouse holes as he crumbles down the hill. His body falls and lunges the same as always, like the times as a child he carried sockeye salmon sandwiches down to the salmon hatcheries for lunch. The soil is soft and warm, like an old shirt, like moist wedding cake. Focus ahead, Richard: jettison everything. Leap forward. You have a mission.

A bird's trill…

Quartz …

A green leaf …

A bruised knee …

His breath is a small wisp—a thought of a thought of a thought.

On the river he locates the spot where he sat on the rocks that strange November morning. He sits and rests his head on a smooth boulder. He lies there as Karen reaches the apex, where she finds a dusty rock onto which she hoists herself and Jane. The air is cool and scratchy. She breathes in deeply.

Richard resumes his vigil on the rocks under the sky gone insane. He shivers and his legs are numb with cold. Richard gets to thinking—he gets to thinking there must be all of these people everywhere on Earth, eager, no desperate for just the smallest sign that there issomething finer or larger or more miraculous about ourselves than we had supposed. How can I give them a spark? he wonders. How can I hold their hands and pull them all through flames and rock walls and icebergs? With our acts we will shock and captivate them into new ways of thinking.

He hears Karen's voice once one last time; she has climbed the mountain and she says, " You are the future, and the eternity, and the everything. You're indeed what comes next. I'm going now. It's my time to leave. Yes—I can feel myself leaving. You'll change the world. Good-bye, guys."

In London the supermodels wear Prada and the photographers snap their photos. The young princes read their Guinness Book of World Records. In California, meetings are held and salad is picked at. Across the globe hydro dams generate electricity and radio towers send powerful signals out into the heavens advertising Fiat Pandas and creme rinses. Golden lights oscillate wildly. Giant receiving dishes rotate and scour the universe for voices and miracles. And why shouldn't they? The world indeed awakens: The Ginza throbs and businessmen vomit into Suntory whiskey boxes to the giggles of Siberian party girls—the excitement and glamour and seduction of progress—cities shine: cities of gold and tin and lead and birch and Teflon, molybdenum, and diamonds that gleam and gleam and gleam.

Near dawn, Richard feels the tremors—the world resuming. There is an enormous camera flash. He can feel it happening—the world returns.

And suddenly it's almost sunrise. A final flash of light alarms a school of spawning salmon huddled in the water—a maroon, collective brain huddled underneath the rocks. Richard tries to imagine their collective thinking—the one idea they want to put forth.

Richard thinks of his life and his world once more: No, my daughter is not confused and angry and lost on drugs. No, she doesn't hate me for all that I've forgotten or neglected or failed to do for her. No, the woman

I love is not a papery husk of a woman, breathing shallow thimbles ofair as her gray hair crackles and her body turns to leather and bone. My friends are not lonely and tired and dried-up and sad. And I'm not just fooling myself, either. That's all over—we made the trade.

Richard thinks about being alive at this particular juncture in history and he can only marvel—to be alive at this wondrous point—this jumping-off point toward farther reaches. The things he'll see and feel—even the tiny moments like the Moon mural in Karen's old bedroom or satellite weather maps—it's all such a tiny bit of what comes next.

His mind races: Think about all those crazy people you see on the streets. Maybe they aren't crazy at all. Maybe they've seen what we've seen—maybe those people are us.

Us.

You'll soon be seeing us walking down your street, our backs held proud, our eyes dilated with truth and power. We might look like you, but you should know better. We'll draw our line in the sand and force the world to cross our line. Every cell in our body explodes with the truth. We will be kneeling in front of the Safeway, atop out-of-date textbooks whose pages we have chewed out. We'll be begging passersby to see the need to question and question and question and never stop questioning until the world stops spinning. We'll be adults who smash the tired, exhausted system. We'll crawl and chew and dig our way into a radical new world. We will change minds and souls from stone and plastic into linen and gold—that's what I believe. That's what I know.