“Those guys are your friends? You should keep better company.”

“So that is two fair warnings, right? Yet here you are, continuing to do what we have asked you not to do.”

I said, “Would it help if I promised—” And in the middle of my sentence was a movement behind me, and then they gave me what I wanted, which was nothing anymore.

24

Most people believe in the illusion of a clear dividing line between the things inside their heads and the things outside, but I had been cleansed of that mass hallucination by a river of lysergic acid diethylamide, among other substances. If I had actually returned to sanity, it was only because the drugs had taught me not to put my faith in what I thought I knew about the world within me, or without.

For example, the fact that I was lying motionless offered no clue about anything. Neither did the fact that I was moving. I had no certainty of either fact, if they were facts. But my return to sanity had involved the habit of describing everything that seemed to be around me, in order to acknowledge my own state of being, whether it was actual or not. So in the situation where I seemed to be, I admitted that there might be darkness, and there might be pain, and there might be some kind of connection between those things and the thing that called itself me. And in admitting that these things might in fact exist in ways that remained independent of each other, it became slowly possible to sort them out.

I most likely moaned. It appeared that I rolled over. I confessed it might be possible that I was me, and I was still alive.

What was this dark around me? I rubbed my face and felt what moistness feels like on the fingers, if feelings might be actual. And yes, a spike of pain when I apparently touched my forehead. An idea came and stayed long enough to let me think about it. That was progress, surely. The idea was this: blood in the eyes might cause darkness. There was logic in the thought, whether logic was logical or not. I willed my hands to wipe my eyes. It seemed to make no difference. If I truly did exist, it seemed I might be blind.

Here we go now, moving. Rolling to one side. Pressing down. Equal and opposite reactions. Science. That’s the ticket.

It seemed I was sitting, and lo and behold, all around me were little pinpoints of light, like stars. Oh no. Not that again. Was I in space again, adrift? But wait, didn’t this mean I was seeing something? Yes. The things that looked like stars. I sat and gazed around and realized it was possible they were stars,

actual stars in a night sky. The universe outside of me was filled with them, so densely packed above, they looked as though God had spilled the sugar. Of course. This was an image of the Milky Way within my head, what it would look like with no city lights to drown it out. And I thought of city lights far below a cliff, and Haley in midair above them. I remembered and then felt great disappointment that remembering was still possible.

Then I heard breathing, and it wasn’t mine.

I looked down—looking now as if what I was seeing was really happening, beginning to believe the things I saw—and I saw more stars a little lower, and much larger. They were yellow, two pairs of them, each pair close together. Then they vanished for a millisecond, gone and back again in the blink of an eye, and a word entered my brain. “Coyotes.” And another word came after that, and it was “move.”

It took about an hour to get back up to the road. Once I reached it, I probably sat there in the dirt another hour, gathering my strength. Then I got myself up on my two legs, and I began to walk. Who knows how long I walked? Certainly not me. I believe I fell a few times, but always I got up. I was getting better at that all the time. Falling. Getting up.

The road ahead of me grew brighter, and I wondered if the sun was rising, but then I realized it was an unnatural quality of light, pale and otherworldly. Then I realized it was headlights. A vehicle coming from behind me. The men who made my disappearing happen, returning to do it right this time. I willed myself to turn toward the downhill side of the road. I willed myself to go down into the darkness. But my feet got tangled as I turned, and I fell on the road, and though I did consider getting up again, and would undoubtedly have done so given enough time, there simply was no time.

The headlights came too close. They stopped. I heard the sound of two doors opening behind the headlights, but staring toward their glare had only left me blind again. One of them approached me from the right. One came from the left. They were flanking me again. I wouldn’t let them take me alive. I would take them with me. Oorah.

They laid hands on me together. They lifted me, and I stood up.

“Are you quite well, sir?” came the voice of one of them, and I knew who it was, and I let them bear my weight, and I said, “Don’t call me ‘sir.’”

“Yes, Mr. Cutter,” said Simon.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Teru.

The doctor at the Hoag Memorial emergency room, where Teru and Simon took me, had a few things to say about how lucky I was. It turned out Medallion and the Other One had sapped me, shot me in the chest three times, and then rolled me down the hill beside the road. To add insult to injury, they had also taken Haley’s Range Rover.

It was the Kevlar vest that saved me, of course. All three slugs had flattened themselves against it. I had three cracked ribs, a goose egg on the back of my head where they had coldcocked me, a bad gash across my forehead near the hairline, and assorted bruises and small cuts from my unconscious tumble down the hillside, although it was hard to tell which of those had come from the beating in Pico-Union and which from the attack in the mountains.

The doctor believed if I had been conscious, I might have broken many other bones, but the flexibility of my limp body had allowed all of my muscles and joints to go with the flow as I fell, so to speak. “I’ve seen this before,” he said, “in people who were sleeping in a car when it got in a wreck. It also explains why drunk drivers usually cause more damage to the other guy than they do to themselves.”

He wanted to hold me for twenty-four hours for observation, because of the risk of a subdural hematoma. I got a private room. It seemed that Simon and Teru hadn’t eaten since lunch, so Teru went out for takeout while Simon remained sitting beside the bed. My head still felt as if someone was in there beating on my brain, but otherwise I felt strangely alert and interested in everything. It was a kind of emotional high I had noticed before, after surviving other near-death experiences.

When Teru left the room, I said, “Can I ask something personal?”

Simon said, “One may always ask.”

“How old are you?”

He didn’t seem surprised at the question. “Let us say that I am older than I feel.”

“Well, you move like you’re in your thirties. Mind telling me what you bench?”

“Bench?”

“Bench press. You know, weight lifting.”

“I understood your reference, Mr. Cutter, but why do you ask?”

“Just making conversation, really.”

“Ah. Well, in answer to your question, about fourteen stone.”

I did the math. Fourteen stone was two hundred and eighty pounds. I said, “How many reps?”

“Two sets of eight, twice a day.”

“What do you do for cardio?”

“Miss Haley allowed me to swim in the early mornings. I have taken the liberty of continuing that regimen since her passing.”