When I came to, I was walking past alders and birches beside a stony mountain river. The river wasn't huge like the Fraser, and it wasn't tiny; it was a mountain river that fed into something larger. It was late afternoon and my hands were behind my head. I could hear someone's feet on the rocks behind me. I looked down and remembered being a kid and staring at sand in the Capilano, seeing flecks of mica and being convinced it was gold.

The river looked cold, and was filled with rocks like the one I'd used to kill Mitchell. And the landscape surrounding the river reminded me of the valley forest by the Klaasen family daffodil farm in Agassiz: the creepy sunless forests carpeted with moss that swallows your feet, and mud that sucks up all noise - summerproof and free of birds.

I turned around to look. Yorgo was behind me, and he cracked me between the shoulders with the barrel of a shotgun. It was just the two of us, and we were clearly on a death march. The tarp in the limo's trunk sprang to mind.

I also noted how quickly my childhood muscle memory for walking atop river rock had returned. Yorgo, I could hear, was having some trouble. He probably grew up in a city.

I didn't want to trudge meekly to my fate. To this end I veered ever so slightly toward the wetter, more slippery rocks. It was a simple idea that yielded instant results - I heard Yorgo slip, and as I heard this, I swiveled around and watched him go down hard on the riverbed, his left shinbone snapping like kindling, his weapon clattering off into the water, carried away almost instantly.

I lunged for a river rock and then - time folded over in a Moebius strip - I was once again in the school cafeteria, and there was Mitchell's head, but it was now Yorgo's head, and in my hand was a rock and - suddenly I had the option of murdering again.

I remember after the massacre I heard that people were praying for the killers, and that made me furious. It's a bit too late to pray for them now, wouldn't you think? I was livid for years afterward. Why did those prayers bug me so much - people praying for assassins? I began to wonder if it was because I had so much hate in my own heart; it's a truism that the people we dislike the most in this life are the people who remind us of ourselves. I'd gone through my life with this massive chunk of hate inside me like a block of demolished concrete, complete with rusted and twisted metal radiating from the inside. Perhaps I didn't feel I deserved any prayers. For over a decade in my head it's been Rot in hell, you evil little freaks. No pain is big enough for you, and I wish you were alive so I could blow you up and turn you into a big pile of guts that I could trample all over and douse with gasoline and set on fire.

I never could see how anything good could come from the Delbrook Massacre. Whenever I've heard people saying, "Look how it's brought us all together," I've had to leave the room or switch the channel. What a feeble and pathetic moral. Just look at our world, so migratory - cars and airplanes and jobs here and there: what does it matter if a few of us who happened to be in this one spot at one moment briefly rallied together and held hands and wore ribbons? Next year, half of us will have moved away, and then where's your moral?

After another few years I simply became tired. I kept on asking for a sign and none ever came - and then there I was on a riverbank with Yorgo, holding a river rock above my head.

I dropped the rock onto a nearby boulder. It sent sparks of granite chips into the air and then quickly huddled lost among thousands of similar rocks. I felt like I had committed an antimurder, like I'd created life where none had existed before.

Yorgo said, "You're just weak. You're too frightened to kill me."

I looked at him, his tibia poking into the drape of his slacks. "That may be the case, Yorgo, but it doesn't look to me like you're going anywhere soon. And what - you despise me for not killing you?"

He sneered my way.

"You do, don't you?"

Yorgo spat to his left.

I said, "What a loser. Give me your cell phone."

His hand went to his coat pocket. He removed it, and just as I was about to take it, he tossed it sideways toward the river.

I asked him, "Where are we?"

He looked away.

"I see. You're going to be cute with me. That makes a lot of sense." I looked at the rocks around us. "You know, Yorgo, the easiest thing for me to do would be to build a cairn of river rocks on top of you. It'd take me thirty minutes to do, and it would quite easily keep you in place until this winter's flooding sweeps away both it and your remains."

I could tell Yorgo was catching my drift. I walked up to the riverbank and saw no evidence of roads, paths or people. This was good, in that it decreased the chance of having been seen by a jogger or fisherman. I listened for cars or a highway — none. I came back to him. "I'm not going to do anything, Yorgo. Not for now. I'm going to walk away from here, and when I find a phone I will call one person for you and tell them where you are and that your leg is wrecked."

Yorgo remained quiet.

"Or I can simply leave. So if you want to have even a sliver of hope, you'd best give me a number to call."

I walked away.

"Stop!" Yorgo yelled out a phone number. I found a pen in my pants pocket and wrote it on the flesh at the base of my thumb.

I walked west. As the light entered its final waning, I came upon a field with a few cattle, so I hopped the barbed wire, trudged across the field and made my way on a paved road out toward a highway that glowed in the distance, maybe an hour's walk away. The nighttime summer haze was soaking up the highway's car headlights and street lamps, and it was shooting that light skyward, as brightly as the Las Vegas Strip ever did. The farm buildings were built in the Canadian style; I figured the highway had to be the Trans-Canada, and to judge by the mountains faintly contoured against the night sky, I was still in the Fraser Valley, most likely not too far from the Klaasen family farm.

Like most suburbanites, I'm creeped out by agricultural areas. Every footstep reverberated clearly and I began imagining I was hearing someone else's footsteps. I looked at the darkened fields and unlit sheds and junked cars. The air smelled of manure, and I wondered if I'd see methane will-o'-the-wisps dancing beyond the road. I remembered Grandma Klaasen hectoring Grandpa about devil worshipers stealing their rototiller, about their vanishing pets and about bodies that were always being found in the lakes and streams and ditches of Agassiz. Crimes are never solved in places like this, only discovered. I imagined headlines in the local shopper papers: MAN'S REMAINS WASH UP IN FRASER RIVER DELTA; GIRL GUIDES FIND SKELETON; RUSSIAN MOTHER ASKS LOCALS FOR HELP LOCATING ONLY SON.

My mind raced with thoughts of death. Not only am I going to die sooner rather than later, I am going to die alone and lonely. But then I remembered, so were my father and mother. Considering this further, I realized most people I knew were going to die alone and lonely. Was this life in general, or was it just me? Did I unwittingly send out the sort of signals that attract desperate souls? I looked at the shadows of sleeping cattle and thought, Lucky farm animals. Lucky space aliens. Lucky anything-but-humans, never having to deal with knowing how foul or desperate their own species is.

I remember once at dinner when I was a kid, I sarcastically asked Reg what we'd do if we learned to speak with dolphins. Would we try to convert them? Oddly, he missed my intent. "Dolphins? Dolphins with the whole English language at their command?"

"Sure, Dad. Why not?"

"What a good question."

I was so surprised that he'd taken me seriously, that I became serious in turn. I added, "And we wouldn't even need translators. We could speak with them just as we're speaking with each other here."