"Smoking now?"

"Might as well. Always wondered what it was like."

"What is it like?"

He chuckled. "Addictive."

"There you go."

I bummed a cigarette from him and smoked for the first time in twenty years and got the nicotine dizzies. I felt like a schoolgirl. When you conspire with someone like Reg, you feel as if you're committing one serious transgression.

Soon enough the conversation turned to Reg's sorrow about his lost boys - Kent the minor deity and his awful senseless death, and then Jason, but after three months there's simply no new ground to cover. I had the feeling that what we were discussing tonight is almost exactly what we'll be discussing in a decade.

Reg became morose. "I just don't understand - the most wretched people in this world prosper, while the innocent and the devout get only suffering."

"Reg, you can spend all night - and the rest of your life, for that matter - looking for some little equation that makes it all equate, but I don't think that equation exists. The world is the world. All you can change is the way you deal with what's thrown your way."

Reg sloshed around the last bit of wine in his glass, then knocked it back. "But it's hard."

"It is, Reg."

He looked so damn sad. Jason quite resembles his father; I almost wonder if they'd be analogs of each other, but tonight there was something new in his face. "Reg . . . ?"

"Yes, Heather."

"Do you ever have doubts about . . . the things you believe in?"

He looked up from his glass. "If you'd asked me that a decade ago, I'd have turned purple and cast you out of my house - or whatever house we were in. I'd have seen you as a corrupting influence. I'd have scorned you. But here I am now, and all I can do is say yes, which doesn't even burn or sting. I feel so heavy, I feel like barbells. I feel like I just want to melt into the planet, like a boulder in a swamp, and be done with everything."

"Reg, I'm going to tell you a story, okay?"

"A story? Sure. What about?"

I couldn't believe I was saying the words, but here I was. "About something stupid and crazy I did last week. I haven't told anyone about it, and if I don't tell someone I'm going to explode. Will you listen?"

"You always listen to me."

I twiddled a noodle coated with cold Parmesan cheese, and said, "Last week I phoned Chris, down in California."

"He's a good boy."

"He is."

"Why did you call?"

"I wanted to - needed to - ask him a favor."

"What was it?"

"I asked him to give me the names and addresses of the people who made the closest match to Jason in the facial profiling index."

"And?"

"And . . . there was this one guy who lives in South Carolina, named Terry, who's about seventy-five years old, and then there was this other guy, Paul, who lives down in Beaverton, Oregon, near Portland. A suburb."

"Go on."

"Well, it turns out this Paul guy has a long but minor record - a few stolen cars - and he got caught fencing memory chips in northern California."

"You went down there to meet him, didn't you?"

Oh, Heather, you knew it wouldn't be a good thing.

I drove down 1-5 to Beaverton, an eight-hour trip in migraine-white sun, my sunglasses forgotten back on the kitchen counter. In Washington state my body started to unravel: my elbows began crusting with eczema just north of Seattle; by the time I reached Olympia, I felt as if my arms were caked in dried mud. I cried most of the way down - I wasn't a pretty picture. People who drove past me and saw me at the wheel must have said to themselves, Boy, sometimes life is rough, and they'd be glad they weren't me.

I found a chain motel on the outskirts of Portland and spent an hour in a scratchy-bottomed bathtub, listening to teenagers party one room over. I was trying to rinse the road trip out of my body, as well as build up the courage to go knocking on this Paul guy's door. I was expecting him to inhabit a mobile home that listed on three wheels, with a one-eyed pit bull and a girlfriend armed with a baseball bat and incisors loaded with vinegar - and this was pretty close. I mean, what was I thinking? I'm just this broad who comes out of nowhere, who knocks on this guy's flaking red-painted front door in the dead-yellow-lawn part of town at 9:45 at night. When the door opened, I was struck dumb, because there before me was Jason - but not Jason - hair too dark, maybe a few years older, and with bigger eyebrows, but it seemed like his essence was there.

"Uh, can I help you? Ma'am?"

I sniffled. I hadn't planned for this moment, and the resemblance to Jason stopped me cold, even though it was the reason for my mission.

He said, "Okay. I know what this is. You're Alex's cupcake looking to get his leaf blower back. Well, tell that cheap bastard that until I see my cooler chest and all the beer that was in it, he's not gonna see his leaf blower." Paul's voice was higher than Jason's; no similarity there.

"I -"

"Huh? What?"

"I don't know anybody named Alex."

"Okay, then, lady, who are you? Because I've got Jurassic Park III on pause, and if I start watching it again right now, I'll have just enough time to finish before Sheila gets back from Tae Bo."

"I'm Heather."

Paul looked back at the TV and zapped it off with the remote.

"Heather, do I know you or something? Wait - are you Sheila's crazy half-sister? Just what I need. She said you were in Texas for good."

I couldn't speak, because I was looking at Jason hidden somewhere not far beneath Paul's bone structure.

He said, "So what's the score here? I stopped dealing years ago, so don't even try me there. And if you're here for money, you're at the wrong place."

"I'm not here for anything, Paul. I'm not."

"Yeah. Right."

"No - " I hadn't given this part any real thought, or rather, I'd assumed it would be magic and not need any planning.

"I'm waiting."

I said, "My boyfriend's been missing for three months now, and I don't know what I'm going to do, I miss him so much, and I'm so desperate, and I was able to tap into the government's database of criminal faces, so I did, and I found yours, because you're the one closest to him, and I came down here to - " I lost it here.

"You what?"

I was crying and looking at the ground where the dead yellow lawn met the concrete. "I came here to see if you were like him."

"Are you out of your tree, lady?"

"I'm not 'lady.' My name is Heather."

"Heather, are you out of your tree?"

I was choking and even more of a mess.

"Heather, sit down. Jesus."

I sat down. He leaned against the railing and lit up a cigarette the same way Jason did. "You can really do that -just go into a computer and find the person who looks like you?"

I honked my nose. "Welcome to the future. Yes. You can."

"Whoa.'" He spent a moment obviously contemplating the social ramifications of analogs. I was realizing what a mistake this had been.

"So," he said, "do I?"

"Do you what?"

"Look like him. Your boyfriend."

My body, drained of stress, went limp. I was already driving back up the coast in my head. "Yeah. Pretty much. Not quite twins, but with different hair, three months of dieting, and some tweezers, you could pull it off."

"Huh."

"I should go."

"No. Don't. I'll get you a beer."

"I'm driving."

"So?"

I didn't argue. Paul went into the house and brought me back a can of something and opened it for me. Chivalry. To be honest, I wanted to see his face again. He'd had acne as a teenager, he'd spent too much time in the sun, he had twenty extra pounds, and he had a Celtic cross tattooed on his left shoulder, but it was all mesmerizingly Jason-ish.

"He dumped you?"

"No."