She felt him lean in to her, felt the aura of his warmth as if she held his beating heart in her hands.

"I want to share something with you, Alli. I have absolute faith in what I'm doing. Beyond that, I'm a patriot. This country has lost its way. There's a shadow over democracy, Alli, and its name is god-the Christian god in whose name so many ethnic people have been attacked, decimated, or destroyed: the Aztecs, the Inca, the Jews of Spain, the caliphs of Constantinople and Trebizond, the Chinese, blacks, our own American Indians. Sinners all, right?"

She could hear his breathing, like the bellows fanning a fire, expelling a hard emotion with each word. This emotion was familiar to her; she understood it without being able to define it. And she felt Emma close beside her, whispering in the nighttime dorm room in Langley Fields, so far away now, so very far. She began to weep again, silently-for Emma, absolutely, but also for her own fractured self, for the life she had been forced to live, for everything she had missed: friends, laughter, goofing around, being silly. Being herself, whatever that might be. That thought brought yet more tears and a weight in her chest she could scarcely bear.

Through it all, Kray remained silent, holding her hands in the dark, keeping contact. She was unspeakably grateful for the silence, the human contact.

"For more than a decade," he said when her tears had at last subsided and her breathing returned to normal, "there has been a conspiracy to hijack democracy. It's only in the last eight years that it's crawled into the light. Under the guise of knowing what's best for America, a cabal of right-wing fanatics has made a pact with religious fundamentalists whose fervent wish is for a pure and Christian America. This alliance is a new twist on what Eisenhower ominously called the military-industrial complex. He feared it would take over the running of the country, and those fears were realized. Big Oil runs America, Big Oil determines our foreign policy. If the Middle East wasn't filled with oil, we wouldn't care one bit about who kills who there. We wouldn't even know what a Sunni is, let alone why he wants to kill his Shiite neighbor.

"But now the religious right has forced itself into the mix, now we have a president who believes he's doing the work of god. But I and millions like me all over the world don't believe god exists. Then whose work is the president doing?"

Alli listened to him with all her senses. She felt taut as a drumhead, taken out of herself, given the privilege to emerge from her own body, to hover like a ghost above the human proceedings below. And with this sensation came a feeling of energy, and of power.

"You and me, Alli, we're being trampled by this religious stampede masquerading as a democratic government. How many times does this president have to say that he doesn't care what the people or the Congress think, he knows what's best for us, he knows what's right? He means his god knows, but his god doesn't exist. His morality is a delusion invented by the so-called righteous to bolster their claim that every decision they make is right, that all criticism directed at them comes from a radical left-wing element. They've tried to make an unswerving belief in god synonymous with patriotism, a healthy skepticism in god synonymous with treason. We have to fight this false morality; we have to stop it before its infection goes too far."

With one last squeeze, he let go of her hands. "Now you know me. I haven't said any of this to another living human being."

He stood up; she felt his presence receding. She wanted to cry out for him to stay, but she knew she mustn't. She'd learned her lesson.

"I want to trust you, Alli. That's my most fervent wish. But you've still got to prove yourself worthy of trust." His voice was growing fainter. "I believe you can do it. I have faith in you."

JACK NEVER went home again. But he is afraid that his father will try to find him, that he will use the authorities to drag Jack back to the room with the stoplight blinking outside the window, hostage to the creaks and groans of his father's nighttime footsteps. He knows he needs to disappear.

Where do you go when you disappear off the grid the authorities have constructed? Back in the day, you joined the army; before that, if you had a romantic soul, it was the Foreign Legion. But those gilded days have been long drained to black-and-white. Off the grid for Jack means staying with Gus.

Gus owns the Hi-Line, a pawnshop on Kansas Avenue, where the sidewalk is sticky with spent body fluids, and at any time of the year a dank and gritty wind rattles folding gates on dilapidated storefronts.

Jack shows up outside the gated storefront at 7 A.M. the day after the incident at the All Around Town bakery and waits there until Gus arrives.

Gus shows no surprise whatsoever. "Huh, white boy develop a taste for grits." He unlocks the gate, rolls it up. "I mightta known."

"I'm not going home." Jack follows Gus into the Hi-Line, a long, narrow space with glass cases to the right, a wall of mirror to the left. It's impossible to do anything in the Hi-Line, even pick your nose, without Gus seeing it. "I want to work for you."

Gus turns on the fluorescent lights, then the air conditioner, which begins to rumble like an arthritic pensioner.

"Well, I mightta said no, despite what Reverend Taske tol' me." More lights come on at the rear of the store. "Huh, he thinks he knows everything 'cause he's got a direct pipeline t'God." Now the lights in the glass cases flicker once before illuminating the pawned goods. "I made some calls after I dropped you off yesterday. Now I gotta better line on Cyril."

Gus steps behind the line of counters, checks the till, puts in a stack of bills. He looks up, an expression of mild surprise on his face. "My name's Augustus Turlington the Third, no lie. My name alone would get me into any country club in America. Until they see my black-ass face, that is." He grunts. "So what a you doin on the customer's side a the counter, anyways? You never gonna learn the business from there."

THE HI–LINE is habituated by tattooed bail-bondsmen, furtive pornographers, rough-and-tumble Colombians, burly pimps, sallow-faced pushers, and beat cops on the take preceded into the fluorescent-lit shop by their bellies.

At first, Jack's job is simply to follow Gus's orders, or so it seems to his clients. But what Jack is really doing is observing them, in the way only he can, absorbing the nature of the up-front business deals.

"I want you familiar with what I do here," Gus says that first morning. "I want you familiar with the folks who run in an' outta here on a reg'lar basis, got me?"

GUS LIVES in a large house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the Maryland border. Improbably, it's surrounded by trees and thick shrubs. Jack has his own room on the top floor. When he looks out his windows, he imagines he's in a tree house, all leafy bower, safely green. There is a bird's nest dotted with bits of fluff and droppings in the crook of a branch, as empty now as it was full in the spring. In the mornings, the green bower is spangled gold; at night, it's frosted by a silvery glitter. Except for the birds and, in August, the cicadas, it's quiet.

Sometimes, though, Jack hears music. There is a part of him that quails deep inside, but it's the music itself-slow, sad, resigned even in its seething anger that draws him. Gradually, he conquers his inner fear enough to creep downstairs. Now he hears the male voice, deep, richer, more burnished than James Brown's. He sits down on the bottom riser, arms clasped around his bony knees, rocking slightly to the rhythm. For an hour or more, he is inundated by the river of sorrow, soaking up sounds that seep into his bones, that in their sadness seem to lift him up on a golden chariot, transport him over the gummy rooftops, the blinking traffic lights, the blaring horns, screeching brakes, the drunken shouts, into a realm of pure bliss.