“Stu?” Perion said.

“Fran, show me that other plate again! Quick! Quick!”

“Can you take it out?” Glen asked. “Jesus, East Texas, do you really think you can?”

Harold was gone. He had left the party early, holding one hand cupped over his mouth. He had been standing in a small grove of trees to the east, his back to them, for the last fifteen minutes. Now he turned back, his large round face hopeful.

“I don’t know,” Stu said, “but I might. I just might.”

He stared at the color plate Fran was showing him. He was wearing blood up to his elbows, like scarlet evening gloves.

“Stu?” Perion said.

“It’s self-containing above and below,” Stu whispered. His eyes glittered fantastically. “The appendix. It’s its own little unit. It… wipe my forehead, Frannie, Jesus, I’m sweating like a fucking pig… thanks… God, I don’t want to cut his doins any worse than I have to… that’s his everfucking intestines… but Christ, I gotta. I gotta.”

“Stu?” Perion said.

“Give me the scissors, Glen. No—not those. The small pair.”

“Stu.”

He looked at her at last.

“You don’t need to.” Her voice was calm, soft. “He’s dead.”

Stu looked at her, his narrowed eyes slowly widening.

She nodded. “Almost two minutes ago. But thank you. Thank you for trying.”

Stu looked at her for a long time. “You’re sure?” he whispered at last.

She nodded again. Tears were spilling silently down her face.

Stu turned away from them, dropping the small scalpel he had been holding, and put his hands over his eyes in a gesture of utter despair. Glen had already gotten up and walked off, not looking back, his shoulders hunched, as if from a blow.

Frannie put her arms around Stu and hugged him.

“That’s that,” he said. He said it over and over again, speaking in a slow and toneless way that frightened her. “That’s that. All over. That’s that. That’s that.”

“You did the best you could,” she said, and hugged him even tighter, as if he might fly away.

“That’s that,” he said again, with dull finality.

Frannie hugged him. Despite all her thoughts of the last three and a half weeks, despite her “crushable crush,” she had not made a single overt move. She had been almost painfully careful not to show the way she felt. The situation with Harold was just too much on a hair trigger. And she was not showing the true way she felt about Stu even now, not really. It was not a lover’s hug she was bestowing on him. It was simply one survivor clinging to another. Stu seemed to understand this. His hands came up to her shoulders and pressed them firmly, leaving bloody handprints on her khaki shirt, marking her in a way which seemed to make them partners in some unhappy crime. Somewhere a jay cawed harshly, and closer at hand Perion began to weep.

Harold Lauder, who did not know the difference between the hugs survivors and lovers may bestow on each other, gazed at Frannie and Stu with dawning suspicion and fear. After a long moment he crashed furiously off into the brush and didn’t come back until long after supper.

She woke up early the next morning. Someone was shaking her. I’ll open my eyes and it’ll be Glen or Harold, she thought sleepily. We’re going to go through it again, and we’ll keep going through it until we get it right. Those who do not learn from history—

But it was Stu. And it was already daylight of a sort; creeping dawn, muffled in early mist like fresh gold wrapped in thin cotton. The others were sleeping humps.

“What is it?” she asked, sitting up. “Is something wrong?”

“I was dreaming again,” he said. “Not the old woman, the… the other one. The dark man. I was scared, so I…”

“Stop it,” she said, frightened by the look on his face. “Say what you mean, please.”

“It’s Perion. The Veronal. She got the Veronal out of Glen’s pack.”

She hissed in breath.

“Oh boy,” Stu said brokenly. “She’s dead, Frannie. Oh Lord, ain’t this some mess.”

She tried to speak and found she could not.

“I guess I’ve got to wake the other two up,” Stu said in an absent sort of way. He rubbed at his cheek, which was sandpapery with beard. Fran could still remember how it had felt against her own cheek yesterday, when she had hugged him. He turned back to her, bewildered. “When does it end?”

She said softly: “I don’t think it ever will.”

Their eyes locked in the early dawn.

From Fran Goldsmith’s Diary

July 12, 1990

We’re camped just west of Guilderland (NY) tonight, have finally made it onto the Big Highway, Route 80/90. The excitement of meeting Mark and Perion (don’t you think that’s a pretty name? I do) yesterday afternoon has more or less abated. They have agreed to throw in with us… in fact, they made the suggestion before any of us could.

Not that I’m sure Harold would have offered. You know how he is. And he was a little put off (I think Glen was, too) by all the hardware they were carrying, including semiautomatic rifles (two). But mostly Harold just had to have his little song and dance… he has to register his presence, you know.

I guess I have filled up pages and pages with THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAROLD, and if you don’t know him by now, you never will. Underneath his swagger and all those pompous pronouncements, there is a very insecure little boy. He can’t really believe that things have changed. Part of him—quite a large part, I think—has to go on believing that all his high school tormentors are going to rise out of their graves one fine day and start shooting spitballs at him again or maybe calling him Whack-Off Lauder, as Amy said they used to do. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him (and maybe me too) if we hadn’t hooked up back in Ogunquit. I’m part of his old life, I was best friends with his sister once upon a time, and so on and so on. What sums up my weird relationship with Harold is this: strange as it may seem, knowing what I know now, I would probably pick Harold to be friends with instead of Amy, who was mostly dizzy about boys with nice cars and clothes from Sweetie’s, and who was (God forgive me for saying Cruddy Things about the Dead but it’s true) a real Ogunquit Snob, the way only a year-round townie can be one. Harold is, in his own weird way, sort of cool. When he’s not concentrating all his mental energies on being an asshole, that is. But, you see, Harold could never believe that anyone could think he was cool. Part of him has such a huge investment in being square. He is determined to carry all of his problems right along with him into this not-so-brave new world. He might as well have them packed right inside his knapsack along with those chocolate Payday candy bars he likes to eat.

Oh Harold, jeez, I just don’t know.

Things to Remember: The Gillette parrot. “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.” The walking Kool-Aid pitcher that used to say, “Oh… YEAAAAHHH! ” “O.B. Tampons… created by a woman gynecologist.” Converse All-Stars. Night of the Living Dead. Brrrr! That last one hits too close to home. I quit.

July 14, 1990

We had a very long and very sober talk about these dreams today at lunch, stopping much longer than we should have, probably. We’re just north of Batavia, New York, by the way.

Yesterday, Harold very diffidently (for him) suggested we start stocking up on Veronal and hitting ourselves with very light doses to see if we couldn’t “disrupt the dream-cycle,” as he put it. I went along with the idea so no one would start to wonder if something might be wrong with me, but I plan to palm my dose because I don’t know what it might do to the Lone Ranger (I hope he’s Lone; I’m not sure I could face twins).

With the Veronal proposal adopted, Mark had a comment. “You know,” he sez, “things like this really don’t bear too much thinking about. The next thing you know, we’ll all be thinking we’re Moses or Joseph, getting telephone calls from God.”