Left of the Dial

by Paul Witcover

 

The summer my mother died, I spent more time in Reston, the northern Virginia community where I grew up, than I had since college. My mother still lived there, in the townhouse she'd bought after her divorce from my father. Although I was thirty-eight, with college and graduate school long behind me, it felt like summer vacation, a break between semesters. A period of waiting—in which days and weeks blurred together, giving the illusion of timelessness so familiar from childhood—for an interrupted life to resume. Not only mine, but my mother's, for she was determined to beat her disease, acute myelogenous leukemia, or AML, and I had enough experience of her willpower to fully believe she would do it.

The sense of in-betweenness was enhanced by the fact that I'd recently lost my job as a content provider for one of the Internet start-ups ubiquitous at the time. Fortunately, unlike many who wound up with nothing when the bottom fell out of the boom, I received a modest severance package—enough to finance a few months of back-and-forthing from my apartment in New York to my mother's place. I would stay for a week or ten days, visiting her in the hospital or caring for her at home after the completion of what became a series of failed chemo treatments, then jump on the train back to Manhattan. After a while, it came to seem that I was living in a house whose rooms were not physically contiguous: one in New York, two in Virginia (the hospital and the townhouse), and one on board whatever train I traveled by. I began to feel like I was leaving bits and pieces of myself behind in those rooms, ghostly remnants that languished, half-forgotten, until I reclaimed them like checked baggage. My sister, Ellen, who lives in Richmond with her family, was usually able to drive up to Reston when I couldn't be there. Despite the divorce, my dad chipped in, too. But he was remarried, with a new family, and had responsibilities of his own. Besides, my mother didn't like feeling beholden to him. So it was mostly down to me; in the circumstances, losing my job turned out to be a blessing.

My days in Reston followed a comforting routine. I got up early, worked for a few hours on a novel I was trying to write (a satirical dot-com exposé, since abandoned), then went for a run along the bike paths before the heat and humidity grew too punishing. The bike paths of Reston are famous in the D.C. area: more than fifty-five miles of paved and unpaved trails snaking through thick woods and along rushing creeks while skirting baseball and soccer fields, playgrounds, highways, parking lots, and people's backyards. In the summer, when the foliage is at its fullest, it can seem like you are miles from human habitation … except for the stream of joggers, bikers, dog-walkers, and Roller-bladers. I varied my route each day, always aiming for about five miles. I had picked up a map of the paths, without which I would have become hopelessly lost; the network had branched and tangled considerably since I'd moved to New York. Even with the map, there were times I lost my way in its mazy meanderings.


 

Built around a man-made lake, there was little about Reston that was not artificial … including, or so it seemed to me after we moved there in 1976, when I was eleven, the people. Especially the adults. There was a kind of Stepford utopianism about them; they saw themselves as pioneers in the brave new world of daily commuting beyond the D.C. beltway. Like my parents, they were liberal, highly educated, ambitious, and so determined to enjoy the cornucopian amenities of Reston—swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, shopping centers, affairs—that they did not merely pursue happiness: they stalked it. My father wore the same grim grin whether pushing a lawnmower or pulling a golf cart. It didn't occur to me then, nor would it for many years, that it wasn't happiness he was seeking, but escape, not pursuing but fleeing what pursued him: what, in one form or another, pursues us all.

As my friends and I entered the wilds of adolescence, we viewed our parents with cynicism, seeing them as ridiculous, deluded, hypocritical. Reston held no wonders for us. We hadn't asked to be brought here. To be brought up here. Trapped between playground sandboxes and senior citizen centers, there was nothing for us to do, nowhere to go. We were bored.

Some of us turned to drugs and sex … more like our parents than we knew. There was always a house with absent or uncaring adults; if not, once the sun went down, the bike paths opened to us like ley-lines leading to another country, a shadowy, lamp-lit land of adventure and refuge. Or were themselves that land. I smoked my first cigarette there, squatting troll-like under a wooden bridge as a creek burbled by the toes of my Converse All-Stars. I gulped down my first cans of Stroh's like some bitter magic brew, toked on my first joint, wriggled my hand for the first time down the front of a squirming girl's tight bluejeans (her name is long gone, but the perfume of her sex clings to my memory, and always will).

Being back in Reston, running each morning along some of the same paths, brought these and other memories to the surface, sprinkled with the pixie-dust of nostalgia. It seemed to me that I'd been happier in those days than I'd ever realized—happier, in some ways, than in all the years since … though I wouldn't have lived through them again for anything. My parents were still together then, my mother was healthy, and I didn't have to worry about finding a job. Life was simpler, events less consequential. Of course, my experience was altogether different at the time, with the import of every thought and action magnified and distorted out of all proportion through the paranoiac lens of teenage hormones.


 

After breakfast, my mother would lay back in her hospital bed, or I would help her to the living room couch, her bones birdlike, her blood count so decimated that her white skin bloomed with bruises, a neutropenic garden. Settled in, she closed her eyes, and I read to her from the papers until she fell asleep. When she woke, we would go for a walk around the neighborhood or up and down the halls of the hospital ward; her doctors had impressed the value of daily exercise upon her. She remained an early riser; often, I would arrive at the hospital in the morning to find her already up and about, trudging stolidly down a corridor in her ill-fitting green gown, hospital-issue slippers, and the dark blue headkerchief she wore to cover what she called her "fifty-thousand dollar haircut," pushing Sisyphus-like the wheeled tree of her intravenous medications. I was in awe of these exertions, my heart torn with pride and anguish at the sight of that failing body driven by a will as fierce and indomitable as ever.

Our lunchtime routine was similar, except I read to her then from her favorite magazines, New Scientist and The New Yorker, or from a collection of essays by Stephen Jay Gould; she was fascinated by the biology of her disease, the Darwinian battleground her body had become. The leukemia had started with an error in just a single cell—one her immune system, for reasons the doctors couldn't explain, had been unable to weed out. Free to reproduce, the cell had spread its genetic flaw with astonishing speed, a blitzkrieg in the blood. But for all her interest in the microscopic war being waged within her, my mother was not detached from the world. She followed current events with her customary keen interest and sharp-humored cynicism, engaged her doctors and nurses in political as well as biological discussions. She remained involved in the lives of her children and grandchildren. If there was a tennis match on TV, she watched it, cheering on her favorite players and cursing their villainous opponents.

She was used to being independent, and it was painful to see how humiliating it was for her to have to place herself in the hands of strangers. With family it was even worse; to be cared for by her children seemed to go against the natural order of things … though she knew, of course, that the very opposite was true. Still, at seventy-two, she didn't feel ready to accept that role-reversal. Until the sudden onset of the AML, she'd been in perfect health. She bowed to the reality of her situation but was determined not to let its indignities—and they were many, both small and large, physical and otherwise—diminish her own dignity.

Even so, she apologized to me more than once for, as she saw it, thrusting me prematurely into the role of caretaker, forcing me to put my life on hold just when, jobless, I could least afford it. I didn't see it that way; it wasn't her fault she'd gotten sick. Nor, I told her, did I feel put upon. Thanks to my severance pay and unemployment insurance, I had enough money to tide me over until she was back on her feet, and with the Internet, I could look for a new job just as easily from Reston as from New York. All true. All utterly beside the point.

"You're a good son," she said, patting my hand, "but I know this is tedious for you. You need to get out a little, have some fun. Look up your old friends. I'm sure Eric would be glad to hear from you. And Lisa."

I said I would, but in fact, I had no intention of doing so. It had been years since I'd seen or spoken to Eric or Lisa, though I wondered what had become of them, whether they'd escaped from Reston like me or were still there. I could have easily found out, of course. Looked up their names in the phone book or searched on the Internet, but I'd burned those bridges, and there was no sense in looking back.


 

We got Lisa.

She appeared suddenly one day a week after the start of sophomore year. Her parents had moved to Reston from South Korea, where her father, who worked for the State Department ("You mean CIA," said Eric smugly when she disclosed this factoid; "Whatever," she replied, rolling her eyes), had been posted to the embassy. Not only did Lisa play D&D—which is how we met; she noticed the Dungeon Master's Guide I carried around with me everywhere and introduced herself—her comic collection put ours to shame, and she opened our eyes to the strangely retro yet undeniably cool and sexy world of Japanese anime: Speed Racer on, well, speed.

Plus, she was hot. Willowy and tall, with creamy skin, ice-blue eyes, and short, spiky black hair streaked (at first) with pink, blue, and pale, metallic green. Her fingernails, and very often her lips, were painted black. She favored short skirts and fishnet stockings and Doc Martens, wore a battered old leather jacket even in September, rolled her own cigarettes, and carried a perpetually disintegrating backpack covered with patches and buttons of bands, a surprising number of which we'd never heard or even heard of before: Spaceman 3, the Residents, Hawkwind. Surprising because, thanks to WHFS, a local left-of-the-dial radio station, we prided ourselves on being ahead of the curve when it came to cutting-edge or just plain weird music. Needless to say, the three of us fell in love with her immediately.

Friendships have foundered in less stormy seas. And for the next few months, as we strove against each other for the prize of Lisa's affections, it seemed like that would be the fate of ours. Real malice crept into the casually obscene insults we'd always traded as surrogate terms of affection, and we found ourselves remembering a host of old injuries and resentments that had somehow kept their sting, or even sharpened it, across months and years. We were sullen, tense, edgy. We never spoke openly of the true cause of our contention; instead, every day became a minefield it was impossible to cross, however carefully we stepped, without triggering an explosion. We exchanged shouts, shoves, and even, on a few memorable occasions, punches. None of us wanted any of this, but (as we later discovered, comparing notes) we felt helpless to break free of the destructive pattern, swept toward disaster by a force outside ourselves. Was Lisa the cause of our misery or its cure? We scarcely knew or cared; we were too far gone for that. Only in her defense would we band together willingly, the three of us staunchly denying the malicious rumors that sprang up around her, as they did around any new kid in school: how Lisa had put out for the football team, how she was really a lez, that sort of thing.

It all came to a head one Saturday afternoon in December. We were playing D&D in the moldy-smelling basement of Craig's house (our usual spot, thanks to his parents' benign neglect), when an argument erupted between Eric and me over a roll of the dice. This was, of course, merely the pretext for another display of testosterone-fueled chest-thumping. We stood up, shouting across the table. Craig was quick to join the fray. It was nothing Lisa hadn't witnessed a hundred times before, rolling her eyes and waiting for the storm to pass. But now, suddenly, she'd had enough.

She slammed her palm down hard on the table, sending dice flying and knocking over the screen of books from behind which, like a priest in a confessional, I carried out my dungeon-masterly duties. "I am so sick of this shit!"

"Jeez, Lis," said Eric. "Take a chill pill, why don't you!"

"This isn't fun anymore," she persisted. "You guys are always fighting. You don't even know why, do you?"

"Sure I do." Eric blinked. "Dweeber rolled a six-sided die when it says right there in the fucking DMG to roll an eight-sided!"

"I can roll whatever the fuck I want, whenever the fuck I want," I responded. "I'm the fucking dungeon master!"

"Jesus Christ," Lisa said, shaking her head and leaning back in her chair. "It isn't about dice, okay? You idiots are fighting over me."

Nervous laughter was the best we could manage.

"I thought maybe boys would be different back in the States. But you're just the same. Your heads are so filled up with romantic bullshit that you let your dicks do your thinking for you."

"What is with you today?" Eric demanded. "That time of the month or something?"

"Fuck you, Eric," she said coolly.

"So, what are you saying?" I asked. "Are you dropping out of the game?"

"You know, that's all sex is, really," she said. "A game. It's not some big, serious deal all full of love and tragedy and suffering. It's not about happy ever after or till death do us part or any of that crap. At least, it doesn't have to be."

I sat down. I felt like she'd punched me in the gut. "What they're saying about you at school," I said. "It's true, isn't it?"

She shrugged. "Maybe. Some of it. I don't pay attention to what people say."

Eric sat down with a groan. "Fuck me!"

"What?" Craig's wide-eyed gaze bounced between the three of us. "You mean …? Are you saying …?"

"I've been with some boys, if that's what you're asking," Lisa said without a trace of shame. "They wanted it, and so did I. It's no big deal. Like I said, a game."

Eric began to chuckle softly, while Craig actually burst into tears.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, grow up," I said, biting back my own tears.

Lisa shot me a glare and moved to his side, putting her arm around his heaving shoulders. "I'm sorry it hurts, Craigy," she said.

"Why?" he asked, turning up his lumpish, tear-streaked face. "Why them and not us?"

"It's easier that way," Lisa said. "I don't give a shit about them, and they don't give a shit about me. No misunderstandings. I care about you guys. I didn't want to come between you. I didn't want to hurt you."

"But you are between us," Eric pointed out, dark eyes glittering. "You have hurt us."

She had no answer for that.

"Look," I said. "Let's just forget it and get back to D&D, okay? It's none of our business anyway."

"I don't feel like playing anymore today," sniffled Craig, and since it was his house, that was that. We went our separate ways without bothering to schedule our next gaming session. I think we were all wondering if there was even going to be a next gaming session.

But there was, of course, and many more after that. Things had changed, though. Eric, Craig, and I were no longer at each other's throats. We looked at Lisa differently now. It was as though a glamour had been dispelled, revealing her to be more like us than our clouded senses had been able to perceive, subject to the same desires … if less inhibited in satisfying them. For Eric and me, the liberating effects of this disenchantment extended beyond Lisa to girls who had always seemed out of our league. I realized suddenly, with the force of a revelation, that whatever barriers existed between me and these girls were largely in my own mind, of my own making, as if I had needed to put them safely out of reach. Now I began to find girlfriends, as did Eric; not right away, but gradually, over the following months. Some of them even joined us in D&D sessions, but they never cracked the core of our clique; they were like comets whose orbits carried them close for a time, only to escape our gravity in the end. Nor did we try to hold them. We had adopted Lisa's philosophy of sex divorced from love, sex as game, and it had set us free. Not that every girl I went out with slept with me, or even most of them (this was, after all, still high school!), but the possibility was always there, or so it seemed, just as every hitter who steps up to the plate envisions a home run no matter how many times he's struck out. And a surprising number of the girls I went out with—surprising to me, anyway—turned out to be as relieved as I was to dispense with all that love business. We enjoyed each other without jealousy, without expectations. We were using each other, of course. But at least we weren't lying to each other about it. It didn't occur to me until much later, after college, that this was itself a kind of lie.

Perhaps the strangest, or at any rate most unexpected, result of that December afternoon was that Lisa and Craig became an item, joined (as the high-school saying went) at the hip. His tears had melted something in her heart, and she had abandoned her hedonistic philosophy even as Eric and I became its adherents. As for Craig, he had achieved his heart's desire and couldn't have been happier. There were times, even in the midst of my own happiness, that I found myself envying him. What he had with her. But I felt sorry for him, too, as though in advance, wondering how long Lisa would be satisfied, and what would happen on the day she was not.


 

There with my mom in her hospital room, waiting at her bedside as death drew near, confident and unhurried in his approach, a huntsman whose prey had run itself out, I felt that fear crawling over me so intensely—though I knew he hadn't come for me, not yet—that it was all I could do not to bolt, leaving her to face him alone. Of course, in a sense she was alone; we all are. But it was precisely because of that fundamental, irreducible aloneness, hers and mine, that I was determined not to desert her. To bring what comfort I could by my presence, the sound of my voice, the touch of my hand. Even if there was no way to tell for sure that she knew I was there. I believed that she knew. It was a kind of faith, the most I was capable of. And talking to her, reading her favorite poems aloud, stroking her warm, waxy skin, dribbling water into her mouth with a straw or moistening her lips with a sponge, studying her face (her features sometimes as innocently expressive as a sleeping infant's, other times so ancient and wizened that it seemed I was not looking at my mother any longer, but at some eternal archetype of motherhood shining through translucent skin and bone), brought me comfort and gave me strength enough to face her death, which was also a foretaste of my own.

In the end, it was a case of the cure being as deadly as the disease. My mother's battered system began to break down under the onslaught of chemo. There was damage to her heart and lungs. Her kidneys were failing. And the AML, following the last, ineffective treatment, had come roaring back stronger than ever. Literally overnight, her options narrowed from more chemo and various phase-2 clinical trials to a choice of where she preferred to die: at home or in the hospital. She chose the latter—more, she admitted, for our sakes, my sister's and mine, than her own, wanting to shield us from any small household disasters, such as a broken bone in a fall, that might add immeasurably to whatever burden of grief and guilt we would carry through the rest of our lives. Her mother, recovering at home from surgery, had died following a fall, so she was especially sensitive to this possibility. Ellen and I knew our limits, and we did not argue … which only added to the burden my mother wished to spare us. But not even a mother's love can spare her children every burden. Isn't love itself a burden, however willingly we bear it?

As we drove up to the hospital for the last time, my mother—hunched in the front seat, where Ellen and I had, with difficulty, maneuvered her and strapped her in—said in a voice as reduced as the rest of her, "Back to where my journey started." I thought at first that she was referring to the AML, for it was to this hospital that she'd driven herself months before when she thought she'd contracted pneumonia, only to learn from emergency room physicians that her disease was far more dire, that by rights she should have been incapable of driving herself anywhere in her condition, and that if she'd delayed coming in by even an hour, it would have been too late. Later I wondered if she hadn't meant the whole course of her life, birth to death, a transit from one hospital room to another.

That was the longest sentence she spoke until she died. The doctors said it could happen at any time, but she continued to surprise them, holding on for another ten days. But the power of speech ebbed rapidly from this articulate, well-read woman, a former English teacher and professional editor who delighted in the play of language. By the second day, she could reply only in monosyllables to our questions. Are you comfortable? Would you like some water? Do you need to use the commode? Are you in pain? Her replies slipped over the threshold of coherent speech, into grunts and moans and sighs that for a while still communicated intent and desire. Then that threshold, too, was crossed and left behind, and she entered a country of silence.

My mother's accelerating deterioration was painful to watch, all the more so because she was conscious of it. At least it seemed that way to me. The knowledge was there in her eyes, which at various times glittered with a cold, hard, gemlike fear, or melted with compassion and love, or flashed with anger at her inability to make herself understood … or at our inability to understand her.

It was there, too, in the language of her body. In the naked expressions that flitted across her features. And in her restless, repetitive, and sometimes violently agitated movements. There most of all, and most heartbreakingly of all. She would kick her way free of her sheets, pluck at her hospital gown as though trying to remove it, slip her wasted arms out of the sleeves or pull with fierce determination but scant strength at her collar. She would raise her hands to touch the slim, transparent tubes carrying oxygen to her nostrils, seeming to remember, forget, and remember again what they were and why they were there all in the space of moments. She explored her features with her fingertips like a blind woman puzzling out the mystery of a strangely familiar face. And over and over, for hours, days, at a stretch, like a zoo animal caught in some behavioral cul-de-sac of instinct, she would hoist herself into a half-sitting position, grasping one-handed and with all her strength the raised side-bar of the bed, and hold herself there until her arm, her whole body, shook with the effort of continuing the motion, swinging her legs around, pushing herself to her feet, standing, walking out of the room, out of the hospital, leaving her sickness behind and returning to the life she knew, picking up right where she'd left off on that spring morning, months ago, when she'd driven herself to the emergency room. But however far she progressed down this path in her mind, her body would at last sink slowly back onto the mattress and pillows, where, exhausted but undefeated, she would rest for a time, gathering herself for the next attempt.

Were these efforts indicative of pain and suffering? The nurses and doctors couldn't say, but advised morphine anyway, just to be on the safe side, and to smooth away her evident distress. But Ellen and I were wary of acting to ease our distress, not hers. It was torture to watch my mother's futile struggles, knowing they were foredoomed. But who could say what purpose they served for her? Perhaps what seemed futile to us, young and healthy as we were, was crucial to her, an experience we had no right to rob her of. Besides, she had made it crystal clear over the years that she didn't want to spend her last days in a drugged fog, bound body and mind in a pharmaceutical straitjacket. As long as there was no obvious pain, we would not permit morphine. This proved an unpopular, indeed incomprehensible, decision to the hospital staff, and I think they saw us as deluded or even cruel. But at this point in the long march of my mother's illness, the path that Ellen and I were on diverged from that of the doctors and nurses. Once we had been united in our desire for a cure. Now their goal had shifted to a peaceful death, in comfort and dignity … as they defined those terms. But as guardians of my mother's ever-dwindling autonomy, we had to take her wishes into account, as best we understood them, and balance those wishes against the medical advice we were getting. If they didn't like our decisions … too bad. As for my mother, her path had taken her ahead of us all. Soon she would cross the final threshold and pass beyond the reach of any decisions we had the power to make.

For days her eyelids sank lower and lower as though heavy with drowsiness, until at last they closed for good, leaking gummy tears as if her body were sealing itself shut, becoming a cocoon. But behind those fleshy screens, thin as rice paper, her eyes rolled and darted, responding to our voices, the sounds we made, or to memories, dreams, visions. Again, the doctors couldn't say how conscious she was. All they could tell us was that hearing was the last sense to go. And so, as her struggles weakened and finally stopped, her body lying still at last (and how precious those struggles seemed to us then, how we mourned their passing; for every new stage in my mother's journey, because it brought her that much closer to its end, and took her that much farther away from us, filled us with a kind of nostalgia for what had gone before, no matter how awful it had been, and they were all uniquely awful), I began to talk to her as I hadn't before.

As soon as she'd gone back into the hospital, Ellen and I, along with her husband, Greg, had divvied up each twenty-four-hour period into four-hour shifts, so that one of us was always with her. As the days wore on, and this grueling schedule began to wear us down, our father took a shift as well. We rotated the schedule so that no one had the same shifts twice in a row. We slept when we could, sometimes at my mother's house, sometimes in the hospital. We left the orderly rhythms of daily life behind, the regimented structure of seconds, minutes, and hours that we humans have laid over the wilderness of time to make ourselves feel at home there, safe and civilized, the future predictable, the past conveniently labeled, the present visible on our wrists, captured in the circular sweeping of a second hand, the morphing of one gray number into the next. All of that is a kind of grid, a prison so comfortable and internalized that, most of the time, like the beating of our heart, we never even know it's there. But it's possible to slip through the grid, exist for a while outside it. Drugs can do it, and illness, and sex. Religion. Art. Any number of things. And that's just what happened to us. At least, it felt that way to me, as if I were standing on the fringes of an ancient, untamed forest, into which my mother had wandered, and where I longed to follow but dared not for fear of becoming lost myself, unable to find my way back to the warm and well-lit village still close behind me.

So I talked to her from the fringes. Told her I loved her. Reminisced about vacations we'd taken, experiences we'd shared, people we'd known: friends, relatives. All the sad and funny landmarks of our lives. And spoke of the future, too: my dreams of making it as a writer, of finding a woman to cherish and share the rest of my life with, of bringing children into the world, grandkids she would never know but who, I promised, would know and love her through all that I would tell them. Most of all, I read to her. Shakespeare's sonnets and soliloquies from his plays. The poems of Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, Auden, Eliot. Stories by Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Joyce. I felt that these old, well-loved friends might bring more comfort to her now than anything else I could tell her, that the combination of their words and my voice could still reach her, give her something useful to cling to, like a flashlight she could hold as she followed her lonely path.

The intravenous tubes were removed from her arms. The clip feeding oxygen to her nostrils was replaced by a clear plastic mask covering her nose and mouth. Her breathing grew labored, arrhythmic, interspersed with microseconds in which it ceased all together, or seemed to—a pause that lasted just a fraction of a beat longer than normal between breaths, as though some mechanism were resetting itself. Her motions stilled. Her pulse fluttered visibly beneath the lily-white stem of her throat, mesmerizing in its fragility, a butterfly's shadow. I dropped my voice to a whisper, afraid of startling it away, though I knew there was nothing I could do to hold it there.

And then it was as if the butterfly shifted position, partially obstructing her windpipe in its efforts to lap up every last drop of nectar. I listened for a while before it occurred to me that I was hearing her death rattle, that old literary cliché proved true, like so many of them. I called in the nurse, who verified my fears; when she had gone, I phoned the others. Minutes later, Ellen and Greg arrived from my mother's house. My father showed up shortly thereafter. Then my mother left us. It appeared as simple as deciding not to breathe. A burden laid down after seventy-two years. Was this a power everyone possessed, a choice we could make at any time, if we only knew it? Later, Ellen told me she had felt my mother's spirit depart in a great whoosh, like a vacuum imploding, but I felt nothing like that, only a gentle absence, as if the butterfly had taken wing while I blinked, leaving behind an empty husk that bore a striking resemblance to my mother, but was not her, was not anyone anymore. A doctor came to verify time of death; nurses descended; this was their place now, their time. We left them to their ancient ablutions.

I saw the body once more, two days later at the funeral home. This was a legal requirement, to ensure that no mix-up had taken place at the hospital morgue and we did not bury a stranger. And yet, I thought, as I looked at the painted, doll-like features, the arms stiffly arranged over the drab brown dress that Ellen had picked out, the hands cupped one atop the other, positioned as I had never seen them in life, the hands of a modest churchgoer posing for a formal portrait, that was exactly what we were doing.

I was reentering the world of normal time. It was to be a gradual process, a slow and painful awakening … or a slipping back into sleep, depending on your point of view. Perhaps it has not yet fully stopped; perhaps it never will. It had commenced when I glanced at the clock in the hospital room at the moment of her death and saw the second hand jerking steadily forward; until then, my mother had been drawing away from us with a similar fitful motion; now it was we who were being carried farther and farther away … though again, depending on your point of view, drawing nearer to her, too. I felt both at once, a dizzying sense of in-betweenness that lingered through the sweltering, mid-August funeral two days later and the open house we held at the Reston townhouse immediately afterward.


 

Everything was as she'd left it—the furniture, paintings, photographs, books all in their accustomed places … Yet they were different, existentially askew, like Christmas ornaments displayed out of season. Some were drained of significance, emptied by my mother's death and become mere objects, while others were like emotional mirrors, reflecting back everything I felt in distorted ways, so that they seemed to be aware of her absence, and to share my mourning, or to blame me.

Finally, I had to get out. I got in her car, a Toyota Corolla, and drove, the windows down, the muggy night air buffeting my skin, drying my cheeks. I had no destination in mind; I didn't want to be around other people; even the sight of other cars, the flash of their headlights on the winding, darkened streets, was intrusive. I found myself in our old Hunters Woods neighborhood, near the house where I'd grown up, which my parents had sold after the divorce. I drove past; the lights were blazing; other lives filled it now. Just so would my mother's possessions find new owners, new uses; we treasure our things, but they are not faithful to us.

I turned in the cul-de-sac at the end of Fowlers Lane, made my way back up Whip Road, and hung a right on Steeplechase Drive. I continued past the elementary school, where I had attended sixth grade, across Colts Neck Road, and past Paddock Lane, where Craig's parents' house had been. I wondered if they were still there, but I didn't make the turn; instead, I stayed on Steeplechase for a quarter-mile or so, until it ended in a tree-fringed cul-de-sac. There were no houses here, no cars, just empty parking spaces beneath overhanging boughs. I stopped the car, turned off the engine and the headlights, took a deep breath.

Tall trees shook their shaggy limbs in a breeze that carried the tang of chlorine. The asphalt sparkled in the false moonlight of surrounding street lamps. I felt like climbing the chain-link fence, stripping off my clothes, and jumping naked into the swimming pool beyond. I thought of all the times that Craig and Eric and Lisa and I had done exactly that, drunk and stoned after a late-night game at Craig's house, daring the cops to catch us, which they never did. But that fence looked higher now; I doubted I could scale it with the ease I remembered. And even if I did, even if I went up and over as easily as a squirrel, what would have changed when I came down on the other side? Who was I trying to kid? Suddenly I felt old, thirty-eight going on sixty, and sad past all weeping.

I started the car, switched on the headlights, made the slow turn past the padlocked tennis courts and the entrance to the pool. Then, impulsively, in a kind of fuck you to my own timidity, as if the ghost of my younger self, disgusted, had risen up to grab the wheel, I swerved right, inching the car around the yellow concrete posts that stood sentinel to this section of the bike paths just as they had twenty years ago. It was a near thing; branches scraped one side of the car while on the other the rearview mirror slid perilously by one post. Then I was through.

I laughed, pumped my fist in the air. I tapped the gas pedal and crawled the car forward into the compact green and brown tunnel carved out of the woods and the night by the beams of my headlights. The silence was tangible, profound, spooky. The air had acquired a mythic density, as though I'd crossed into a fairyland of dreams and nostalgia. I breathed it in like a drug. Driving the bike paths by night had always been an eerie experience, like exploring the bottom of an uncanny ocean, the trees moving their limbs languidly, seaweed drifting in lazy temporal tides, quantum currents, elves and orcs and aliens and other creatures from D&D and movies and all the fantasy and science fiction I'd read seeming to spill from my perfervid imagination into the world, every ordinary object, natural or man-made—a tree, a wooden foot bridge, a lamp post—drenched in a rime of enchantment, a precipitate that only appeared in conditions such as these. Now all of that was present again, as if it had been waiting patiently all these years for me to submerge myself once more, but the familiar atmosphere of heightened perception was further glossed with memories of nights like this from twenty summers ago, memories that had themselves acquired a mythic patina with time.


 

I do know that it was sometime during the summer after our graduation from high school that the practice began. We were eager to escape the nominal control of our parents but also loath to leave this part of our lives behind, conflicting aims that made the summer seem endless at one moment, evanescent the next. We were anxious, impatient, a little bit afraid. We longed for the experiences of college but wondered if those experiences would lead us away from each other, though we never talked about that possibility, or anyway Eric and I never did. Craig and Lisa may have discussed it among themselves; in fact, I'm sure they did, but they kept their discussions private.

The bike paths proved the perfect remedy for what ailed us. We couldn't wait for the sun to set. We would stoke up on pot and beer, cram into someone's car, and head off to explore this fanciful new realm we had so unexpectedly, fortuitously, discovered. I think we must have driven every mile of the paths, mapping them as we went, cranking tapes or HFS on the stereo, as if we were still playing Dungeons & Dragons. We saw animals that were rarely glimpsed by day, our headlights drawing them like moths: possum, raccoons, deer, foxes, once even a coyote, or what looked like one. The usual rules of engagement did not apply; the animals did not flee from our approach; instead, they seemed as fascinated by us as we were by them, regarding us with eyes that glowed like moonstones.

We became experts in navigating our vehicles through tight squeezes and sharp turns, experts, too, in dodging the cops who soon began to stalk us. Their cruisers were too wide to fit onto most of the paths, but they knew every exit and entrance, often lying in wait for us, their lights off, and we had our share of narrow escapes. By the end of the summer, we were stopping well back from any potential exit and reconnoitering on foot, creeping along like commandos, though I doubt commandos ever had to worry about giving themselves away by giggling. I guess we should have taken them more seriously, but to us, the whole thing was a cartoon cat-and-mouse game, part of the fantasy world of the bike paths, and not the most important part, either. Anyway, they never caught us.

The exhilaration of those nights came back to me now. I turned on the radio, stumbled across a station at the extreme left of the dial playing what a New York friend of mine called "the New Oldies" (that is, tunes from the eighties; as for HFS, it had long since been assimilated into the Borglike empire of conservative talk radio), and began to drive slowly, staying under five miles an hour. If I'd had a joint, I would have smoked it. Not that I needed one: I already felt high. My body recalled the route better than my mind did; I found myself making turns without hesitation, by instinct instead of memory, even after I'd passed beyond any landmark of bridge, playground, or lamp post that looked remotely familiar in the headlights and I knew I'd entered a new section of the paths. New to me, anyway; the network had expanded considerably since I'd last driven it. Occasionally I saw the lights of houses winking through the trees, but I had no idea where I was. Nor did I care. Being lost suited my mood perfectly.

At one point, a fat possum wandered onto the path ahead of me. It trundled along, in no hurry, showing no inclination to skedaddle. Every so often it turned its ratty face back at me as if in annoyance, its eyes splashes of emerald fire. What? it seemed to be asking. Are you still here? It looked so self-important that I had to laugh. I followed it until, with one final backward glance, it veered off into the woods and was gone. I continued on, knowing that sooner or later I was bound to emerge onto a street that would take me home, but in no hurry to get there. I would have been happy to keep driving forever, spiraling deeper and deeper into the interstitial spaces of Reston and never coming out again.

The radio station was really amazing, playing all kinds of obscure and semi-obscure bands without commercial interruption, just like HFS in its glory days. Martha and the Muffins. Romeo Void. The Minutemen. Lene Lovich. Holly Beth Vincent. Joy Division. I heard them all that night, as well as stuff by the usual suspects: the Replacements; Siouxsie and the Banshees; Gang of Four; Talking Heads; Billy Idol; Bowie; U2. I began to spin out a fantasy that I'd traveled through time, the twists and turns of the paths driving me backward to the eighties. I kept waiting for the DJ to come on, half-expecting that I'd hear Weasel or Damien or one of the other old HFS hands, but no one ever did. I figured I must have caught the beginning of an hour's block of music. Unfortunately, the reception was spotty, and the station kept fading out, until at last it slipped off the edge of the dial into a sea of static and did not return. But the static seemed to hold a buried music of its own, spacey and alluring, if only I could surrender to it, as if there were a whole other spectrum of stations there to the left, beyond the reach of conventional radios.

It was right about then that I saw an approaching headlight. My first thought was that it was the cops, that they'd finally taken to patrolling the paths by bike or motorcycle like they should have been doing twenty years ago. Backing up was out of the question; where was I going to back up to? Nor was there any convenient side path down which I could duck. Besides, my lights were on, as visible to him as his were to me. I was as good as busted. I pulled as far over to the side as I could, letting the branches scrape the sides and windows of the car, and waited.

As it turned out, it was neither bike nor motorcycle, but a car with a broken headlight. Not a cop, then, just somebody out for a late-night drive, same as me. Still, the appearance of another vehicle had shattered the spell of the paths, and I felt foolish to have come here, a middle-aged guy trying to recapture his youth, trying to escape the reality of his mother's death. The oncoming glare was blinding, and I waited nervously for the car to reach me, wondering whether it would stop or pass by. I didn't want trouble; I just wanted to go home. The swirl of static from the radio was suddenly annoying, and I stabbed it off as the car slowed and pulled to a stop beside me, an old Dodge Dart. The driver's side window was down, and even before it drew even I heard the hiss of static from inside like a shivery wind blowing through the trees. Then I was staring at a face I hadn't expected to ever see again.

"Jesus," I said. "Lisa, is that you?"

She took the cigarette from her lips and exhaled, cool as ever, acting unsurprised, as if she'd been expecting me. "Hi, Johnny. Been a long time." Blue-gray smoke drifted between us like static made visible.

I laughed, all at once aware how much I'd missed her, how glad I was to see her after all this time; it wasn't that I'd forgotten the reasons why I'd avoided her, but suddenly they didn't matter so much anymore. "Jesus, Lis, you haven't changed a bit! What are you doing here?"

"That's a trick question, right?" She raised a ring-pierced eyebrow, took another drag on her cig. "Look, I'll go down a ways and turn around, then you can follow me home, okay? We'll talk there. Catch up and shit."

"That'd be great."

She pulled away without another word. In less than five minutes, she was back, motioning with one hand for me to follow as she glided by. I pulled in behind her and let her lead me out of the maze.


 

All the way back to her place, I was thinking about the last time I'd seen her. It was right before I'd split for New York, the summer after we graduated from college.

The summer Craig died.

As usual, we'd come home that summer and slipped back into our high-school way of life. Drinking, drugs, D&D. I'd been seeing someone at William & Mary, but we'd broken up before graduation, her choice, and I was glad of any excuse to numb the pain I was feeling and to avoid thinking about my responsibility for what had happened … which, put briefly, was that my philosophy of high-school hedonism hadn't gone over too well in college, at least not after the first few semesters, and it was only now, a little too late, that I was being forced to admit it. Or was it too late? My ex-girlfriend, Donna, had gone to New York, and the notion of following her was percolating in the back of my mind, not yet something I considered seriously, more of a romantic fantasy. Plus, that was the summer my folks finally split up, and while I welcomed the step (long overdue, as far as Ellen and I were concerned), it only made my life more unsettled just when I needed all the stability I could get.

Hung up on my problems, I didn't pay much attention to the others. Because I didn't want to admit that I had changed, neither did I care to admit the possibility that my friends, too, might be different. But of course they were. How could they not be? After four years of college, we had all changed. We didn't fit comfortably into our old friendship anymore. The roles that had once come naturally were forced, artificial. Maybe they always had been. It wouldn't have taken much to shatter the complacent illusion of timelessness with which we were deceiving ourselves. Anything at all might have done it.

If I'd been less self-absorbed, perhaps I would have seen it coming. Done or said something in time to make a difference. I've wondered about that a lot. But I didn't notice a goddamn thing. Late one night I got a call from Eric; Craig was in the hospital. Apparently, he'd tried to hang himself in the woods. The limb of the tree he'd chosen had snapped, and he'd somehow managed to crawl out of the woods to the side of Glade Drive, dragging the fucking branch behind him the whole way. There he'd lain, unconscious, until he was found by passing motorists. By the time I got to the hospital, he was dead.

It was big news for a while. Everybody blamed drugs and rock and roll: the autopsy found pot in his system, and he'd actually been wearing a Walkman when he'd hung himself. Even D&D got dragged in, as though he'd been possessed by demons summoned up at a roll of the dice. His parents were devastated and angry; they believed we'd corrupted Craig, Lisa especially, whom they'd never liked, and they made it clear we would not be welcome at his funeral. We stayed away out of respect for their grieving (he was their only child), but that same night we visited the gravesite for a service of our own, sneaking on to the moonlit cemetery grounds … the same cemetery where, years later, I would see my mother buried. We sat beside the freshly turned earth and sickly sweet, already-wilting flowers and passed around a joint and, after pouring out a libation, a bottle of Virginia Gentleman bourbon. No one said a word. Lisa wept quietly, steadily, and Eric scowled into the night, his body hunched as if in expectation of another blow. By then they'd told me the real story.

It seemed they'd been fucking behind Craig's back for pretty much the whole last year of school. It had, Eric told me, just happened. They'd never meant for it to continue so long, and they'd never meant to hurt Craig. But things got out of hand. They got careless and slipped up, and about a week ago he'd apparently seen enough to make him realize what was going on, and how long it had been going on. At least, that's what he'd written in a note to Lisa (the existence of which she kept from the cops and his parents; she didn't even offer to show it to me, nor did I ask to see it). Lisa said that he'd believed she didn't love him anymore, that she wanted to be with Eric now. And so, like a gentleman, he'd stepped aside. That was, she said, her voice half-angry, half-incredulous, really how he saw it. Or how he'd written it, anyway.

"Like offing himself was some big act of chivalry," snarled Eric from the driver's seat. We were in his car, heading to the cemetery. For once, no music was playing. He thumped the wheel with the palm of his hand. "Asshole! He didn't even talk to us! Didn't give us a chance to explain …"

"What if he had?" I asked after a moment from the back. "Did you still love him, Lis? Did you want to be with him?"

"I don't know what I wanted," she said, half-turned to me, features sunk in shadow. "Not this. Never this."

I could feel Eric's gaze in the rearview mirror, his eyes boring into me as if I'd accused her of murder, accused them both. But I felt too guilty myself just then to cast any stones. "Poor Craig. When I think of him all alone, crawling through the woods …"

"Fuck!" Eric exclaimed. "Will you shut the fuck up?" And he jammed a tape into the stereo and cranked the volume.


 

And now, here I was, following Lisa home. I'm not ordinarily superstitious, but I felt that something beyond mere chance was at work, that my mom had taken a hand in our meeting, bringing us together like she'd always wanted … though for what purpose, I didn't know. Corny as it sounds, I sensed her gazing down on me. I felt surrounded and protected by her love, felt it shining all around me like the headlights of another car, and for the first time in days, I found myself thinking of her without pain. Why, I haven't lost anything, I remember thinking in surprise. She's still right here.


 

"Jeez, it's good to see you, Lis." I studied her in the light of the street lamps. She wore cut-off jeans and a black Hello Kitty T-shirt that left her midriff bare. A tattoo of a blue and silver lightning bolt or thorn circlet ran around her left arm. Her hair was long now, pure, glistening black, and there were new piercings (nose; eyebrow; belly-button) and a hint of crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she looked no more than five or six years older than the last time I'd seen her. If I hadn't known better, I would have guessed her to be in her mid-twenties, tops, instead of more than ten years older: my age. "You look fucking great."

She gave me a crooked, incongruously shy smile, one I'd seen a million times before but until that instant had forgotten about completely. It floored me, that smile. "It's good to see you, too," she said.

I knew that I looked every bit of my age, and then some. I had lost some hair and put on some weight. And I'd stopped wearing an earring years ago. Silence descended as we sized each other up. I had so many questions, I didn't know where to begin.

"Come on." She took me by the hand and led me into the apartment building, to the elevator, which opened its doors as soon as she pressed the call button. We stepped on. "We live on the third floor," she told me.

"We?"

"Eric and me." She flashed that shy, crooked smile again. How could I have forgotten that smile?

"So you guys stayed together," I said. "I always wondered. Married?"

She laughed. "Not hardly."

"How is he?"

"He was diagnosed with MS a few years back."

"Shit. That really sucks."

The elevator stopped. The doors slid open.

She lowered her voice. "He doesn't like people to make a big deal out of it. He's in remission now. Uses a cane, has a bit of a tremor, but that's about it. I mean, he's not crippled or anything."

"That's good to hear. I don't know much about MS. How did …?"

"Nobody knows how you get it," she said. "One more thing. Seeing you is going to be a surprise, and he doesn't like surprises much anymore. He likes things predictable, safe. So at first he might come across a little harsh."

"Maybe I should wait out here while you talk to him."

"Do you mind?"

"Of course not."

"I'll just be a minute. Believe me, he'll be glad to see you."

By then we had reached the door. From behind it I heard the thump of heavy bass. She opened the door with her key and slid inside. "I'm home," she called above the music, which I recognized as the first song off the Talking Heads' Fear of Music LP, whose name I could never remember. "I, Zebra," or something like that. Over her shoulder, I glimpsed a paperback-filled bookcase and, hanging at an angle from one corner of the ceiling, the black rectangle of a stereo speaker; then the door closed, though not before I smelled the unmistakable odor of pot.

I leaned back against the wall with a sigh, suddenly aware how worn-out I was. It had been a long day, and now it was late, after midnight. And I had a reservation on the ten o'clock train to New York the next morning.

The volume of the music swelled as the door swung inward. I straightened as a face I recognized with difficulty as Eric's poked into the hall. "Fuck, look who's back! Get the fuck in here, Dweeber!"

I laughed; it had been a long time since I'd been called that … although, when your last name is Weber, you get used to it pretty quick, and deep down inside you never really stop expecting to hear it. "Hey, Eric." I put out my hand; he clasped it with his own, pulling me through the door and into the apartment before releasing me. "Sorry to come by so late."

"Fuck, you call this late?" He stumped past me, leaning heavily on a cane of polished blond wood. "Come on in and have a beer."

I followed him into the living room. I didn't know if the MS was to blame, but he looked to be around two hundred pounds, which, for a guy who stood about five-seven, with a bad leg, was serious baggage. His face and cheeks were puffy behind a scraggly brown beard, and when we'd shaken, I'd noticed that his hand was swollen, though his grip was firm enough. He wore jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. He smelled of sweat.

"Make yourself at home," he said, and let himself fall with a satisfied grunt into a well-used leather recliner.

I surveyed my options. The room was a cluttered mess. A leather couch strewn with paperbacks, magazines, and comic books; a couple of wooden chairs with clothes draped over their backs; a glass coffee table covered with CDs, albums, more books, comics, and magazines, beer and soda bottles and cans, two overflowing ashtrays, computer and video game boxes, and a cherry-red plastic bong. Along one wall was a desk with a PC on it; the monitor was on, a screensaver endlessly generating the fractal patterns of a Mandelbrot set. Set against the opposite wall, as though in obedience to a law of techno-feng shui, was a TV; Letterman was on, sans sound. There were three bookcases, all stuffed full, one holding the stereo and hundreds of CDs. A few framed photographs hung on the walls, along with a reproduction of Starry Night and a large map prickling with colored pins. Curtains were pulled shut over the windows. As for the floor, it was basically a legless table with a carpet on top.

"Go on," Eric urged, tilting back in the recliner; swollen, filthy feet levered up into view, and I looked away. A side table at his elbow held a second bong, this one blue, and a remote. He picked up the latter, thumbed it repeatedly, and the volume of the music dwindled slightly. "Sit your ass down."

I cleared a space on the couch and sat. Lisa, meanwhile, entered the room carrying three bottles of Rolling Rock beer. She handed one to Eric and one to me. I thanked her, and she sat beside me on the couch, raising her bottle in a toast.

"To old times."

"Old times," Eric and I chorused, and drank.

"Lis says she ran into you on the paths," Eric said.

"Yeah," I said. "Old times, right?"

"Are not fucking forgotten," he said. "Not around here, that's for fucking sure."

I didn't know what to make of that, so I had another swallow of beer.

"Back for a visit, Dweeber?"

"Not exactly." I told them about my mother.

"Shit," said Eric. "Leukemia, huh? That sucks, man. How the hell'd she get that?"

"No one knows."

He grunted. "Fucking doctors don't know shit, man."

Lisa slipped her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. "I'm sorry, Johnny. She was a good lady. I liked her."

"Thanks," I said. "She was."

"I used to see her every once in a while," Lisa went on. "Not to talk or anything. Just in passing. You know, in the Giant or whatnot. We'd wave, say hi. I always thought about asking how you were."

"She asked about you guys a lot," I said. "She wanted me to look you up."

"Well, now you have," said Eric.

I couldn't tell if that was sarcasm or not, so I simply nodded, drank more beer. No one had mentioned Craig yet, but he was right there with us, his absence filling the room. I thought I would finish the bottle and split.

"So, how long are you staying?" Lisa asked, offering me a cigarette from her pack.

I shook my head no. "I'm heading back to New York tomorrow."

Eric's laugh was a sharp, ugly bark. "Figures."

"Eric, please," Lisa began, lighting a cig.

"No," said Eric. "I mean, listen to this fucking guy. Dude disappears for what, seventeen years, then when he finally does show his face again, and not because he decides to look up his old buds after all this time, but because he gets his ass busted on the bike paths and has no choice, he can't wait to get out of town! What's the problem, Dweeber? Don't like hanging out with murderers?"

I could only stare. Had Eric been storing up all this vitriol for seventeen years? It was like a switch had been thrown, transforming him into a red-faced, spittle-spraying lunatic.

"Eric—"

"Shut up, Lis! Well, Dweeber? I'm waiting for your answer."

I set the bottle down on the glass coffee table. My heart was pounding. "It's not like that, Eric. It never has been, and you should know it."

"Yeah? How should I fucking know it? Not from you. You made your feelings fucking plain as day, taking off like you did, leaving us behind to, to …" He spluttered, gesturing with his beer, as if whatever he was trying to say was summed up perfectly by the cluttered room around us, the overflowing ashtrays, the mindlessly cycling loop of the screensaver on the computer monitor, the tightly drawn curtains, the piles of books and magazines on the carpet, David Byrne's yelping, growling voice on the stereo, the smell of stale beer and bongwater.

"I'm sorry you feel that way." I got to my feet. "I guess I'd better be going."

"Going?" Eric blinked in surprise.

"You obviously don't want me here." I turned to Lisa. "It was good to see you again, Lis."

"I'm sorry, Johnny," she said. She looked angry and mortified at once.

"Shit, man," said Eric. "Don't get your fucking panties in a wad! Nobody said anything about not wanting you here. Fuck! You always were too sensitive for your own good, Dweeber!"

"Yeah, well, fuck you, Eric," I said, and started for the door.

"Don't let him go, Lis," Eric directed. "Go after him, for Christ's sake. He's not gonna fucking walk out on us again, goddamn it. Do you hear me?"

That stopped me. I was at the door, but I turned around. "Is that really how you see it, Eric? I walked out on you?"

"Well, you did, didn't you? A week after they put Craig in the ground, you were gone. I mean, you didn't even wait long enough for those pot seeds we planted to sprout!"

"Did they?" I asked.

"You bet your ass they did!" he affirmed with pride, and his face glowed as he thumped one armrest of the recliner with an open palm and let loose with a string of wheezy chuckles.

Lisa, still sitting on the couch, the cigarette held between the fingers of her drooping hand, its tip pointing toward the ceiling, smiled. "His parents were not pleased."

Eric nodded. "Man, that's the understatement of the century! They had cops crawling everywhere. You would have thought we'd desecrated the tomb of a saint instead of a guy who was like the biggest head in Reston at the time. Of course, they never knew it was us."

"Oh, they knew," said Lisa. "They just couldn't prove it."

"Same difference," said Eric. "Shit." He was breathing heavily, almost gasping. It was alarming to witness; there was a stroke somewhere in his not-too-distant future.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

He waved away my concern. "Nothing a bong hit won't cure."

I glanced at Lisa, but she only shrugged. I figured she saw this sort of thing a lot.

"Come on, Dweeber," he wheezed, prepping the blue bong for action. "Stay. At least finish your fucking beer."

I sighed. "All right." And returned to the couch. "You know, you guys could have left the same as I did."

Eric shook his head vigorously as he sucked in a lungful of pot smoke.

"Why not?"

He gestured to Lis, who sighed. "It's hard to explain," she said.

"Fuck if it is!" said Eric, smoke exploding from his lips.

"Let me do this my way," said Lisa.

"Whatever."

I looked from one to the other. "Jesus, you sure you two aren't married?"

"Funny, Dweeber." He had packed another hit into the bong, and he now extended it to me. "You still toke, don't you?"

I hesitated; for the first time, I noticed the tremor that Lisa had mentioned.

"You're not gonna catch MS, if that's what you're thinking."

I took the bong. "Jesus, Eric! I know that." I picked up Lisa's lighter from the coffee table and lit the bowl, drawing the hot, harsh smoke deep into my lungs. I rarely smoked pot anymore, an occasional drag from a joint at parties, and it had been a long time since I'd last used a bong. Something akin to what occurred in the seconds following the Big Bang began to take place in my chest. I started hacking like a neophyte.

Eric giggled delightedly.

But if my lungs had forgotten how to expand with the intake of pot, my brain still remembered. "Wow," I said, when I could talk again. "Good shit."

"Eric grows it himself," Lisa said, taking the bong from me and passing it back to him. "This strain goes back to those seeds we planted at the grave."

"Wow," was all I could say.

"Yeah, we managed to save some of the plants," Eric said. "Transplanted 'em."

Tina Weymouth's bass line was wrapping itself around the drift of smoke from Lisa's cigarette. Or maybe it was the other way around. I closed my eyes for a second, or what seemed like a second, and it was as if seventeen years had fallen away, and I was sitting in the gloomy basement of Craig's parents' house waiting to start a game of D&D.

"So, tell him, Lis," came Eric's voice.

I opened my eyes. There was a beer in my hand, so I took a drink.

"Why were you on the bike paths tonight?" she asked.

I shrugged. "It wasn't anything I planned. I was just driving around." I found myself speaking slowly; the words had an unfamiliar feel in my mouth, like they'd changed shape slightly and no longer fit as they once had. "I ended up down by the Hunters Woods swimming pool. We used to sneak in, remember? Anyway, that's where I got on the paths. Got lost after about five minutes! But I didn't care, you know? I mean, shit, I buried my mom today." I realized that I was about to start blubbering, and suddenly Lisa was handing me a bunch of Kleenex.

"Had to," Eric drawled in imitation of the voice of W. C. Fields, and I knew exactly what he was going to say, the line from My Little Chickadee, a movie we'd watched a million times on video, along with everything from the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges, and while on the one hand it was wildly inappropriate and insensitive, on the other it was perfect, and so I joined him in completing the quote: "She died."

Then we were cackling like idiots. Lisa shook her head and smiled her lopsided smile.

I wiped my eyes with the Kleenex. "Man, I found this kickass station on the radio when I was driving the paths! Way down to the left of the dial. Played all these cool tunes from back in the day. I kept waiting for a DJ to come on, but it faded out before anyone did. You guys know that station?"

They were looking at me like they couldn't believe their ears.

"What?" I said.

"You heard it?" Lisa asked.

"Yeah, I heard it. What's the big deal?"

"You remember what you heard?" Eric asked in turn. He was rummaging around through a stack of papers on the floor beside the recliner.

"Just that it was a lot of great shit I hadn't heard in years."

He pulled out a crumpled and stained sheet of paper and passed it over to me. "Any of this ring a bell?"

It was a handwritten list of songs. I was pretty sure that I'd heard most of them on the radio. And even in the same order. "What's this?" I asked, looking up. "The playlist? Are you guys running some kind of pirate radio station or something?"

"Yeah, it's the playlist, all right," Eric said. "Craig's playlist. This was the shit he was listening to on his Walkman when he fucking did the deed."

"No way." I looked from one to the other; their faces were dead serious.

"You can listen to the goddam tape yourself if you want," said Eric. "I managed to grab it at the hospital, when things were so confused. Before his folks went psycho on us."

"A few months after that, Eric and me started hearing the station," Lisa said. "It was freaky. I mean, it only happened on the bike paths, and only when we were there at night, and only if it was one or both of us. If there was anybody else in the car, we could never pick it up."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.

"Shit, you'd split by then," Eric said. "Anyway, we never figured you'd hear it, too. Nobody else could. Just Lis and me. We figured he was, you know, haunting us."

Lisa picked up the story. "We tried all sorts of shit to get in touch with his ghost or spirit or whatever you want to call it. Trying to find out what he wanted. Trying to make him go away. Seances, Santería, exorcism. Nothing worked."

"That's when I thought, what if we found the source? I mean, we were picking it up on the radio, right? So it had to be broadcasting from somewhere." Eric heaved ponderously to his feet, the recliner squealing in protest, and lumbered across the room to the map I'd seen earlier, hanging on the wall, covered with different-colored pins. "C'mere, Dweeber. Take a look at this."

I joined him. I wasn't sure how to take all this. If Craig could reach out from beyond the grave, what was to stop my mom from doing it? The idea creeped me out, but at the same time, there was nothing I wanted more than some concrete, unmistakable sign that she still existed, that she was watching over me, that she forgave me for all the times I'd caused her pain or disappointment, that, in those last horrible days, when she'd been buried alive within the coffin of her body, unable to communicate, she hadn't been suffering, or, if she had, that she didn't blame me for it, for withholding the morphine the doctors had wanted to give. Earlier, it's true, as I'd followed Lisa out of the paths, it had seemed to me that I'd felt her presence, but now that seemed no more than the product of wishful thinking and a grieving, guilty heart.

"Like you noticed yourself," Eric said, "the station fades in and out. It's a weak signal. So Lisa and me started tracking it."

"That's what you were doing tonight," I said to Lisa as she walked over to stand beside Eric and slipped an arm around his ample waist.

"We were both out there chasing it," she said. "Eric just got home first."

"We bought ourselves a couple of walkie-talkies and started driving around the paths at night, noting down where it got stronger, where it got weaker, where it faded out altogether."

"And the times, too," Lisa added. "I mean, it only happened at night, and only between certain hours."

"Which turned out to be no earlier than around ten-twenty, and no later than a little before midnight. In case you were wondering, that's when they figure he strung himself up and when he was found by the side of the road."

The map was thumbtacked to the wall. It was fairly large, a square about three feet to a side. It showed all the roads, parks, lakes, developments, and bike paths of Reston. It was bounded by Leesburg Pike to the north, the Fairfax County Parkway to the west, Lawyers Road to the south, and Hunter Mill Road to the east. Within those borders were clustered hundreds of pushpins with different-colored heads. From a distance, the thing had resembled a pointillist abstraction. Up close, no pattern of colors leaped out at me, but it was clear that most of the pins were in and around the same area I'd driven earlier, which made sense, as much as any of this did, because it was close to Craig's parents' house, near the woods where he'd hung himself, though no one knew the exact spot, since he'd managed to crawl out to Glade Drive.

"And this is why you've stayed in Reston all these years?" I asked. "Chasing a fucking ghost?"

"I think he needs us," Lisa said. "I think Craigy is stuck or something. He needs our help to move on. To find peace. And we owe him that, Johnny. You know we do."

"The problem is," said Eric, "two people isn't enough. Lis and me have never been able to get a fix on the source. We've come close, I think, following the signal when it's at its clearest and strongest, but it always fades out before we can home in. With three people, though, I bet we can do it. We can triangulate on the motherfucker!"

"And then what?" I asked. "What do you expect to find out there, Eric?"

"An answer, that's what." He gave me a cold-eyed, challenging look. "So, what do you say, Dweeber? Are you in? I've got an extra walkie-talkie you can use."

"I told you," I said. "I've got to be back in New York tomorrow. I've got my ticket and everything."

"Don't be a pussy," Eric said. "Your mom just died, okay? You can take an extra day off work or whatever. Nobody's going to deny you that."

"Please, Johnny," said Lisa.

"Don't beg for his help," Eric snapped.

The truth was, my own words had shamed me more than Eric ever could. "I think the two of you are out of your fucking minds," I said. "But I'll do it."

"Good man, Dweeber," said Eric, and gave my shoulder a hearty thump as Lisa leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Come by around ten; that'll give us enough time to get high first."

"Does that help?" I asked, genuinely curious.

Eric winked. "It don't hurt."


 

Back at my mom's, I dragged my ass to bed and fell asleep at once, waking late the next morning with a dry mouth and a pervasive lethargy that kept me in bed for another hour. By then, it was too late to make my train, even if I'd wanted to. I got up, drank a cup of coffee, ate some cereal, did my stretches, and went for my usual run along the bike paths.

As I jogged, sweating out the poisons of the night, I began to regret my decision to help Lisa and Eric. The firmness of the path beneath my feet was a rebuke to everything they'd told me, everything I'd experienced, or thought I'd experienced. In the brilliant light of day, so much of it seemed improbable, foolish. I had no doubt that something deeply weird was going on, but their explanation for it, to say nothing of their proposed remedy, struck me as equally weird, if not more so. I told myself that I could still leave, catch a later train. But by the time I'd finished my run and showered, I knew that I wasn't going anywhere. I wanted to find that station again. Prove to myself that it really existed. Or that it didn't. But one way or the other, I had to know.


 

"C'mon in, Dweeber." Eric's voice issued from inside. "It's open!"

I found the two of them exactly where I'd left them: Eric sprawled in the recliner, Lisa seated on the couch. With the drapes drawn, a miasma of pot and tobacco smoke drifting through the air, and Fear of Music playing on the stereo, I could almost believe that I'd circled back in time, entering the apartment just seconds after I'd closed the door behind me the night before. Only the fact that they were dressed differently dispelled the illusion.

"Jesus," I said. "This place reeks of dope. Aren't you worried about the neighbors?"

"Hell, they're my best customers," said Eric. "The whole fucking floor is nothing but heads. Relax, Dweeber." He held up the blue bong. "Have a toke."

"Thanks, but I'll pass. Whatever happens tonight, I want a clear head."

"Shit, my head's so clear, it's fucking transparent," laughed Eric, and Lisa laughed along with him, then asked me if I wanted a beer.

"Thanks, Lis. Don't get up; I'll get it myself. Where's the kitchen?"

"Straight on back."

"Bring me one, too," said Eric.

"How about you, Lis?"

"I'm fine."

To my surprise, the kitchen was immaculate. There were two refrigerators, one normal-sized, the other a mini, like the fridge I'd had in my college dorm room. Instinct steered me there, and sure enough, it was filled with bottles of Rolling Rock. I pulled out two, twisted off the caps, and returned to the living room, where I handed one of the bottles to Eric.

"My man!"

"You're in a good mood," I commented after a swallow of ice-cold beer.

"Fuckin'-A," he agreed. "Tonight's the night. I feel it."

"Don't get your hopes up too high, Eric," Lisa cautioned.

"Are you kidding? With Johnny here, we can't miss."

I didn't share his confidence. I wasn't even sure what I wanted to happen. "Shouldn't we get going?"

"That's the spirit," said Eric with a grin. "Lis, give the man his walkie-talkie."

Lisa rose from the couch and handed me a black device slightly larger than a cell-phone. She demonstrated its use, then led me over to the map. "We'll each enter the paths from a different point," she said, indicating them to me with the antenna of her own walkie-talkie, like a commando explaining a mission. "You'll use the same entrance you did last night, by the pool. I'll get on near where they found him, on Glade. Eric's going to come in from the east, from over by Steeplechase. Tune in to the station and follow it as best you can; if it starts to fade out, backtrack and go in a different direction until it comes in stronger."

"We'll use the walkie-talkies to stay in touch," Eric said. "Now, here's the thing, Dweeber. The bike paths don't go everywhere, right?"

I nodded. I'd been wondering about this.

"But check it out: the walkie-talkies can pick up the FM band. So once we've driven as far as we can, we ditch our cars and start walking into the woods, converging on ground fucking zero." His eyes glittered with enthusiasm. "Just keep the station strong and steady, and it'll guide us right where we want to go."

"Aren't you guys afraid of what we might find there?" I asked.

"Fuck, no," said Eric. "I know what I'm gonna find."

"What's that?"

"Redemption, Dweeber," he said in a voice that sent a chill down my spine, as if he were defining that word in a very different way from any dictionary I knew. "Sweet, fucking redemption."


 

I kept the car radio on as I drove to the swimming pool, the tuner all the way over to the left. There was no sign of the station, or, for that matter, of any station at all, but the hiss of static no longer seemed empty. Perhaps it was just my own anticipation, but once again, as had happened last night after I'd lost the station for the final time, I thought I detected a hint—or something even less substantial than that, call it a premonition—of musical structure buried deep in the swirling wash of white noise. I began to think of that noise as a kind of spooky camouflage, a surface deception not unlike the protective coloring of an insect, beneath or behind which a presence lurked. I couldn't help but reflect that such strategies of disguise, in nature, frequently concealed a predatory intent. I decided it was a good thing I'd turned down that bong hit. I was paranoid enough already.

As before, the cul-de-sac fronting the swimming pool and tennis courts was deserted. I pulled the car to a stop under a streetlamp and contacted Lisa and Eric on the walkie-talkie. "I'm in position," I said, feeling ridiculous, like a kid playing at Mission: Impossible.

"You're supposed to say 'over' when you're finished talking, Dweeber," Eric's voice crackled condescendingly.

"Fuck you, Eric," I said. "Over."

Lisa entered the conversation. "I'm ready, over."

"All right," said Eric. "Let's do it, over."

I coaxed the car past the guard post and onto the bike path. The hairs at the back of my neck stood to attention as the music I'd heard the previous night came ghosting out of the static. It was like the car had passed through an invisible veil. A shiver ran through me, vaguely electrical, a tingling that reminded me of Halloween haunted houses I'd navigated as a boy, in which threads dangling from the ceiling had trailed across my face and arms like the strands of spider's webs. The sensation was so strong that I actually raised a hand to brush them from my face. Of course, there was nothing there.

"Shit," I said, and took a deep breath. Had I felt this same creepy caress last night? I couldn't remember for sure, but I didn't think so. I squeezed the steering wheel tightly and let the music draw me on.

For the next hour or so, I chased the signal along the bike paths. I drove at a crawl, stopping frequently to back up, retrace my route, take a bypassed turning. All the while, the music flitted in and out of existence, coming through loud and clear one minute, disintegrating into static the next, then, when I thought I'd lost it altogether, reappearing suddenly, until it seemed to me that there was a playful intelligence at work. Billy Idol. The Au Pairs. Devo. Gary Numan. I didn't sense any maliciousness to it, any intent to cause harm, but it was frightening nonetheless, a game of hide-and-seek or blindman's bluff that was leading inexorably, although not directly, to a place where neither I nor any living being belonged. At least, that's how it felt to me as I drove, ears alert to the slightest change in reception, skin crawling with the imminence of the uncanny. The meandering nature of the pursuit seemed an indication of the difficulty of the journey, as if we were threading a labyrinth that extended through more than the four dimensions of space and time. The bike path was nothing more than an analogy of this N-dimensional maze, a flat and simple shadow. Blondie. Television. The Ramones. X. Even the songs seemed encoded with a significance beyond themselves, beyond their nostalgic potency, which was itself a kind of magic. But this was a more powerful magic, darkly brooding, primal. Not for one second did I forget that I was listening to the soundtrack of a suicide. My imagination persisted in picturing the acts that corresponded to the music, the ungainly dance of death whose steps Craig had executed in the dark of the night, alone, so many years ago. I saw him picking his way through the woods by flashlight in search of a suitable tree, a length of rope coiled in his backpack. I saw him stop, shine the light upward, then, satisfied, shrug out of the pack. I saw him open it, remove the rope, the noose already knotted, and clamber with it up into the branches of the tree, where he made it fast. I saw him sit then and smoke a final joint, his head bobbing to the music coming through his headphones, the same music I was now hearing, but though I tried to glimpse the expression on his face, I couldn't do it. His features were lost in the darkness.

The voices of Eric and Lisa grounded me, and we kept up an almost-constant chatter over the walkie-talkies, each of us, I think, dependent on that contact. I certainly was. I would have broken without it, turned tail and fled. I came near to doing just that a dozen times. And I sensed the same was true of them. If one of us had bolted, the others would have followed, our resolve crumbling like sand. Strangely enough, it was my awareness of the precariousness of our efforts, how quickly and easily we could fall away from the task we'd set ourselves, that enabled me to go on. It wasn't any strength I possessed, but an acute apprehension of my weakness.

At last, we reached the point that Eric had predicted, where we had to abandon our cars and enter the woods on foot, tracking the station by walkie-talkie. Lisa had given me a flashlight, and now, even more than before, I found myself picturing Craig's last moments. I saw them so clearly that it was as if I were reliving them, retracing his steps exactly. I saw him stub out the joint, slip the noose around his neck, careful not to disturb his headphones, and cinch it tight as a tie. I saw him climb shakily to his feet, one hand on the trunk of the tree to steady himself as he prepared to step off the branch. A cold sweat poured off my skin as the beam of my flashlight probed and darted, populating the woods with shadowy witnesses to my stumbling progress, dark shapes that clustered at the edges of my vision, slinking from tree to tree.

The crack of a gunshot split the night. I stopped dead still, my lungs, my heart, paralyzed with terror, as the echoes faded. Only then did I notice that I'd lost the station. Static was pouring from the walkie-talkie. I fumblingly switched from FM to broadcast. "Did you guys hear that?"

"Fuck yes," came Eric's voice.

"I've lost the station," came Lisa's panicky voice a second later.

Then I heard a sound that froze the blood in my veins. It was a low, protracted, inhuman moaning, as of some helpless animal suffering the ravages of fear as much as pain, alone and baffled somewhere in the dark nearby. I think I must have known right away, deep down, what I was hearing, but it wasn't until Eric's shout reached me in disjointed stereo, over the walkie-talkie and through the air, that I consciously realized the import of the ghastly sound.

"Shit! It's Craig! Get the fuck over here!"

Haltingly, as though emerging from shock, I began to crash through the woods toward Eric's voice.

"Oh my god! Oh my god!" Lisa's cries mingled with Eric's shouts and the steady moaning that I knew was coming, impossibly, from Craig. Not a ghost returned to haunt us, but the flesh-and-blood original.

"Oh fuck!"

"Oh god!"

"Can you hear me, Craig? Can you hear me, buddy?"

"Oh god, Craigy!"

I saw the frenzied strobing of their flashlights up ahead. I picked out the shapes of my friends in the crisscrossing beams and, huddled on the ground between them, a dark shape reminiscent of a huge tortoise.

"Cut the rope, Eric! Cut it!"

"I'm fucking trying! Shit! Dweeber, get your ass over here!"

Instead, I came to a stop, struck by a sudden thought. Or not even that, more like an intuition. I switched the walkie-talkie back to FM and sent the glowing display of pale blue numbers climbing.

"Dweeber!"

There it was, as I'd somehow known it would be: 98.1, WHFS. The whiny voice of Weasel rambling on about nothing, or everything, in one of his drugged-out, late-night monologues.

"Get his feet, Eric! We've got to carry him out of here!"

"Careful, Lis! Dweeber, we need you!"

But I was already moving away from them, heading for my car. I didn't understand how or why we had traveled seventeen years back in time, to the moment of Craig's suicide, but I didn't doubt that, whether by magic or mechanism or miracle, we had done exactly that. Nor could I guess how long we might remain here, what rules governed our presence, and whether, through ignorance, I might hasten—or prevent—our return to the present. Perhaps by separating myself from the others, I was running the risk of stranding myself, or them. Perhaps we would remain trapped here, or wander the bike paths forever, seeking a way back that no longer existed. But I didn't care about any of that.

"Dweeber!" Eric shouted hoarsely. "Where the fuck are you going?"

"My mom," I yelled back, crashing headlong through the woods.

"Get back here, you asshole! Don't you run out on us again!"

I ignored him. Here in this place, this time, my mother was still alive, and the thought that I could see her again drove out every other consideration.


 

The walkie-talkie lay on the seat beside me. I picked it up as I drove and tried to raise Eric and Lisa. But whether I was out of range, or they were too busy with Craig, or angry with me, to answer, my attempts were unsuccessful. I felt guilty for leaving them, but I still didn't see what choice I'd had. I told myself that if it had been Eric's mom, or Lisa's, they would have done the same thing. But at the same time, I wondered what it was that I hoped to accomplish. What could I say to my mother now that would have any meaning to her? She wouldn't even recognize me, this stranger claiming to be her son … or, if she did recognize me, how could it not freak her out?

By then, I was turning onto Fowlers Lane. The HFS signal was holding strong and steady. There was our old car in the driveway: the ugly and ungainly red Oldsmobile Omega that I'd taken out on the paths dozens of times, the car I'd learned to drive with. I pulled past the driveway and stopped. I killed the lights and turned off the engine, though I left the radio on, the volume low.

Just as before, the lights of the house were blazing. But I knew that everything else had changed since my visit hours earlier … or, rather, years later. Inside that house were not strangers, but family. My mother, miraculously alive again. And my father—or, no, I remembered; they had just separated, and he had moved out, into an apartment in D.C. But Ellen was there. And me.

What would happen if I confronted myself? I knew all the sci-fi paradoxes, the weird temporal loops and knots that writers had devised over the years. But this was real. This was my life, my past. And, I was beginning to suspect, my future.

I got out of the car and crept close to the house, coming up through the narrow strip of woods that stood between the back of the house and our neighbor's yard. From the shelter of the trees, I could see through the sliding glass door that opened onto the back porch from the empty kitchen. I could also see one of the windows of my bedroom on the second floor, the light on behind a creamy white curtain. Against that backlit scrim a dark silhouette suddenly appeared, drifting like a filmy ghost, and I felt a rush of sheer, atavistic horror that would have sent me scrambling back the way I'd come if my legs hadn't simultaneously turned into limp noodles. I clung to a tree trunk, heart hammering, my jaw clenched against the unreasoning scream that was trying to claw its way out of my throat, as I watched my younger self, or his shadow, move back and forth behind the window. There was nothing extraordinary in those movements, nothing unusual at all, yet to me they seemed invested with superluminal significance, and I felt an unmistakable sense of trespass, as if I, a mere mortal, had stumbled into a god's private bower.

And yet it was not my past self that was the god here. How could it be? No, if my presence was offensive to some immortal power, what could that power be but time? I felt that I'd made a grave mistake in coming here, in deserting Eric and Lisa, leaving them to assist Craig by themselves while I chased after what was, it suddenly seemed, nothing more than a memory … or something even less than that: a delusion borne of pain and denial. Oh, how I wished then that I'd stayed with them, helped them to get Craig to the hospital! I moaned in misery, for I realized then, without understanding why or how, that a rare choice had been offered to me there in the woods, and I believed that I had chosen foolishly, selfishly, taken the wrong path, and it was too late now, too late forever, to undo the result of that choice, whatever it might be, or come to be. The humid air around me, the scents and sounds of the Virginia night, seemed to recognize the wrongness of my presence and to recoil from it.

I'd told myself that I'd come running here to see my mother, but there was more to it than that. I'd also been running from what lay on the ground, under the trees, that horrible tortoise shape. I hadn't wanted to face it, to face Craig, for to do so would mean acknowledging my part in his death. To see that knowledge reflected in Craig's eyes had been more than I could take.

Craig had never seen them together. He hadn't had to. I'd told him about Eric and Lisa. And I hadn't even known it was true. It was a spiteful aside, a taunt I flung at him because I was jealous, miserable over my smash-up with Donna. She'd caught me cheating once too often, and now I threw my own failing in Craig's too-trusting face, wanting to hurt him for no better reason than that he was happy and content, while I was not. And it was even worse than that, because what really rankled me, and had for years, deep down, was that Lisa had chosen him over me. So I stabbed at him with my crude lie, never dreaming that it would open his eyes to the truth.

Or was that, too, a lie? Had I known somehow, on some instinctive, unconscious level, that Eric and Lisa were involved? I'd always wondered if Craig had told Lisa what I'd said, written it in his last note to her. She never gave me any cause to believe that he had, but I couldn't be sure. And even if he hadn't, even if she didn't know, I knew, and that had been enough to make her presence, and Eric's, unendurable.

I'd never told anyone what I'd done. Not even my mother, at the very end, when I'd wanted more than anything to confess my secret to her— not to receive her forgiveness, but just to share the burden with another soul. But I'd been too ashamed. Too afraid. I'd picked up a book of poems or stories instead, and read to her, telling myself what a good son I was being. That I was keeping quiet for her sake, so as not to add to her distress. The cowardice and hypocrisy of these rationalizations appalled me now, and I grew convinced that my silence had in fact deprived her of something precious, something that, far from adding to the pain and confusion of her last days, would have eased them, or at least made them easier to bear. And what's more, would have done the same for me. But it was too late now. For both of us.

A phone rang inside the house. The ringing went on, urgent, strident, and I think I must have known right away what it portended. I watched with mounting dread, sinking little by little to the brittle leaves and twigs covering the ground, as an attractive middle-aged woman in a ridiculous green pantsuit stepped into the kitchen, framed by the sliding door, and picked up the receiver.

It was, of course, my mother.

This was the choice I'd made. It was for this moment that I'd come. But I hadn't guessed that it would prove so awful a sight, so cruel in its immediacy and its distance, for now that I saw her, a healthy woman still in her prime, with no suspicion of the betrayal that lay quiescent in her cells, I didn't feel in any way that I'd recaptured her. Not for a moment did I feel reunited with her, as if I'd stolen her back from the dead or come to visit her among the shades. No, this woman was not the mother I'd lost. She was a stranger to me. And I was a stranger to her. There was nothing I could do or say that would help her avoid what waited patiently in her future. No confession I could make to her, no forgiveness I could ask or offer. Nothing. I felt like a ghost. Like I was the one who had died. I slid to the ground.

My mother put one hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and shouted my name in a voice that carried through the glass door, shrill with emotion. Even from a distance I could see how the blood had drained from her face.

The shadow behind the curtain of my bedroom window vanished.

I wanted to look away then. I tried to turn my head, avert my gaze, but I didn't have the strength. Or perhaps, deep down, I needed to see myself as I had been on that long-ago night, the night when my casual betrayal reached its terrible fruition … although, had I been able to think clearly, I would have realized that things had already departed from how they'd been, for if this was the call from the hospital—and given my mother's reaction, I had no doubt that it was—then it was coming far earlier than had originally been the case. But I wasn't thinking clearly. Wasn't thinking at all.

What entered the kitchen to take the phone from my mother wasn't me. That is, it didn't look anything like my younger self, or like anyone at all. It was less solid and substantial even than the shadow I'd watched moving back and forth behind the curtain. It was an amorphous grey blur with a vaguely human shape, as if it were composed of many separate, overlapping selves, none of which truly or fully existed, a kind of coalescent cloud of potential mes. Yet as it held the phone to its "ear," it began to grow sharper in outline and detail, and I knew that with every passing second it was turning into a single self, the many fusing into one. Or perhaps not fusing but falling away, alternate versions of myself, possible futures, competing in some Darwinian struggle for survival, from which only one could emerge supreme. And would that newly constituted self lead, in turn, to me? Once it had, but was that still true? Or was I superfluous now, superseded, extinct?

It was the terror of ceasing to exist, of seeing my skin degrade into smoke or mist and blow away in the night breezes that finally gave me the strength to tear my gaze away. Breathing raggedly, I examined myself by what little light there was. I seemed solid enough. I lay there gasping, drained of energy and intelligence, for what seemed an endless time before I heard the front door of the house slam and, seconds later, the Oldsmobile's engine roar to life. I glanced back into the kitchen.

My mother stood at the sliding glass door, tears running down her cheeks. This was the first change I consciously recognized; in the past that I remembered, she had driven me to the hospital. But now I became aware of other departures from what had been, changes radiating outward from the first and biggest change of all: that we had found Craig in the woods, long before he'd crawled out to Glade Drive. I realized then that he was going to live. Knew it absolutely, without question, as if that future had already taken precedence over the one I hailed from. But where did that leave me?

My mother seemed to be gazing right at me, though I was sure I couldn't be seen. And yet she did see me. She must have. For she drew back sharply, as if she'd seen a ghost. But then immediately pressed her face closer to the glass, hands cupped around her eyes. Her mouth shaped my name, and though her voice did not penetrate the glass as it had when she'd called my younger self a moment before, I heard it as clearly as I've heard anything in my life. And then, seconds later, her voice cut through the night, sharp and querulous: "Johnny? Is that you?"

But I was already running for the car.


 

HFS was still playing loud and clear as I drove toward the hospital. But by the time I got there, I knew that I couldn't go inside. Craig's parents would be there by now, in addition to my earlier self, whom I still dreaded encountering face-to-face, as if, in close proximity, with no glass door between us, his reality would prove superior to my own, and I would wink out of existence. Besides, there was nothing I could say to them, nothing I could do that would be of any help. Even if I avoided the fate I feared, I would come across as a lunatic, and perhaps a dangerous one. His parents might think me involved in what had happened to Craig, as indeed I was … but not in the way they would imagine: easier to suspect a stranger of attempted murder than to encompass the fact of a son's suicide. It was funny; all the time-travel stories I'd read, all the movies I'd seen, presented the time traveler as someone possessing immense power, a godlike figure able to change the future, the fulcrum of a cosmic balance to be shifted for good or ill. But here in the past, I had no power. Yet was that powerlessness really so different from how I had lived my life in the present, back—or, rather, ahead—in my own time? Drifting from job to job, relationship to relationship, I saw now that nothing had really changed for me since those days in Reston, that my participation in Craig's suicide, and my need to keep it a secret, had curtailed what was possible for me, caused me to reject, again and again, opportunities to grow, to change. I was already trapped in the past long before I came here. I just hadn't realized it.

I pulled into the hospital parking lot, mostly deserted at this hour, and prowled it slowly. I saw the red Oldsmobile at once, and then other cars I recognized: Craig's parents' car, and Eric's car, and Lisa's … not the cars they drove now, but their old cars: their younger selves were also present, holding vigil. But there was no sign of the Eric and Lisa from my time. Neither of their cars was parked here. They had brought Craig to the emergency room and then split. But where had they gone? Back to the future, deserting me as I had deserted them? Or were they still here, waiting for me?

The walkie-talkie lay on the seat beside me, turned off, forgotten. Perhaps they'd been trying to reach me all this time. I grabbed it, switched it on. "Eric, Lis, can you hear me? Over."

There was no reply, only static.

"Come on, guys. I know you can hear me. I'm sorry, okay? Just answer, will you, for god's sake!"

Nothing.

"Fuck!" I threw down the device, feeling a pit of frustration and despair yawn open in my stomach. They had left me. I was alone.

But was I trapped? Could I get back to my proper time in the same way I'd come here, by driving the bike paths? It seemed the only chance, other than parking somewhere and waiting for whatever might happen next. If my mother was behind all this, pulling the strings from somewhere beyond time and space, then surely she wouldn't abandon me. But what if it wasn't her? What if it wasn't my mother's compassionate ghost, but Craig's vindictive one? I shivered. Even more reason not to give up. There was nothing for me here, just a past that no longer belonged to me, people I no longer knew, though my feelings for them were as strong as ever, these familiar strangers who had once been my family, my friends, my self. It tore at me to leave the hospital. I knew I would never see any of them again.

I drove back to the swimming pool and got on the paths there; it seemed important to follow my earlier steps as precisely as possible. Until that moment, the HFS signal had been unwavering. But as I slid past the guard post, the voice of Weasel faltered, static slipping in between his words like grains of sand through the cracks in a seemingly solid wall, and I felt a flicker of hope. Seventeen years from now, there would be no HFS. The station would have vanished into the ether, replaced by talk radio. Perhaps I could use HFS to steer by, letting the weakness, rather than the strength, of its signal dictate my route along the paths, until, in losing it completely, I might find my way home.


 

I started awake to find myself staring into the beam of a flashlight. "Wh-what?"

"Police," growled a gruff male voice, and the light swung away.

"Shit." I rubbed my eyes.

"Sleeping it off?"

I shook my head, groggy. An unctuous voice was oozing softly from the radio. I remembered driving the snaking paths for what had seemed like hours, following a route more convoluted than that which had led me into the past. I remembered seeing the lights of other cars winking through the trees, shining around turns, appearing and disappearing in my rearview mirror like will-o'-the-wisps. I had been convinced that they were all me, or versions of me, all seeking a way back. But I never caught up to any of them, and they never passed me.

And then what? Where was I? When was I?

"Come on, buddy," said the cop, rapping his knuckles sharply on the roof of the car as he trained the flashlight on my features again. "Wakey, wakey."

"All right," I said, annoyed. "I'm awake!"

"Good. Now, turn off the engine."

I did so.

"Step out of the car. Slowly."

I unfastened the seat belt, opened the door, and got out. I saw now that I was back at the swimming pool, in the parking lot. Overhead, the sky was just beginning to lighten. "Sorry, officer," I said, trying to appear nonthreatening, grinning at him all bleary-eyed and apologetic. "I had a rough night."

His laugh was unpleasant. He was young, pink-faced in the flashing red and blue lights that crowned his cruiser. A thin blond mustache gave him the look of a high-school kid trying to pass for a grown-up. I was acutely aware of his gun, and the proximity of his hand thereto. "I can see that," he said.

"My mom passed away … I was having trouble sleeping. I came out for a drive."

He shifted his stance, fitting my words into his threat assessment. "Sorry for your loss, but you can't be sleeping here. Let's see some ID. Slowly."

I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, withdrew my driver's license, and handed it to him. He examined it, his eyes flicking from my picture to me and back again. "You live in New York, Mr. Weber," he said, as if it were a foreign country suspected of terrorist ties.

"That's right," I said. "My mom lives … lived here. I grew up over on Fowlers Lane."

"Is that where you're staying now?"

"No. My mom has a townhouse in Lake Anne."

He nodded. "Let's see the registration on the car, Mr. Weber."

I ducked back into the car, opened the glove compartment, pulled out the registration, and passed it over to him.

"I'm going to call this in," he said. "You sit tight, Mr. Weber."

"Sure."

I watched him walk to his cruiser. Then I turned the radio back on. The carnival-barker's voice of a certain conservative commentator emerged, and I actually laughed, glad for the first time in my life to hear that hypocritical asshole. I'd done it. I was home.

I itched with impatience to be off, but forced myself to wait until the baby-faced cop returned with my license and registration. He handed them through the window. "Everything checks out, Mr. Weber. You can go. Just do me a favor and check into a motel or something next time, okay?"

"There won't be a next time," I told him fervently.

"And I'm sorry again for your loss."

"Thanks, officer." I drove off slowly, into the dawning of the new day. The night was like a vivid dream. Had it really happened? I headed for Lisa and Eric's place.

It wasn't there.

The apartment complex was missing. Where it had stood was a shopping mall.

I sat there for a while in shock. Clearly, the future I'd returned to was not the same one I'd left behind. I drove over to a pay phone and called information. There was no listing under Eric's name. Or Lisa's. With my scalp prickling, I asked for Craig's number. And got it.

It took me some time to summon up the nerve to call.

"Hello?"

I nearly hung up right then. "Lis, is that you?"

"Who is this?"

"It's me, Johnny."

"Johnny?"

"Weber. Johnny Weber."

"Christ, from high school! Shit, man, how are you doing?"

Her words erased a whole history. I didn't know what to say.

"Honey, it's Johnny Weber," she said meanwhile.

I heard Craig's muffled voice, sleepy and annoyed. "At five A.M.?" Then he came on the line. "Hey, Johnny. Long time."

"Hey, Craig. Look, I'm sorry to bother you guys so early …" I groped for an excuse, an explanation. The whole thing was both horribly real and unreal.

"Yeah? What is it, Johnny? Are you okay? You sound like shit."

"Forget it," I said. "I never should have called. I'm sorry."

"Wait," he said. "Don't hang up! Shit, we haven't seen you since … well, you know."

But I didn't. And yet, somehow, I did. Not in my mind, as a memory, but as an ache in my soul. "Since Eric died, you mean."

"Yeah," he said, and sighed.

"Fuck," I said, and before I knew it, I was crying.

"Johnny …?"

"I gotta go," I said. And hung up.

So this was the redemption Eric had spoken of with such fevered intensity. He had blamed himself for Craig's death. And sacrificed his own life somehow to bring him back. A life for a life, so that the books stayed balanced. Or that's how I thought of it, weeping there in the phone booth as the sun came up around me, grieving not just for his death, but for the death of everything and everyone I knew, the time I could never go back to now, that had never even existed. I felt the pain of all this so deeply that I knew it was true, but I didn't understand how it could be true, or why I had been spared.

If indeed I had been spared.

At last I got back in the car and drove off. I was heading home, but the cemetery was on the way, so I pulled off to visit my mom's grave.

I wasn't really surprised to find it gone. I think I was expecting it on some level. Even so, it was a while before the static ebbed from my senses and I could think more or less clearly again.

But it was instinct more than thought that sent me to the hospital. I parked the car and hurried through the emergency room entrance; the main doors weren't open at this early hour, as I knew from previous visits. I pushed the button for the elevator; then, when it didn't come right away, I took the stairs, dashing up them two at a time. But when I reached the landing for the third floor, the cancer ward, I stopped. I didn't want to just come bursting out. I felt foolish, afraid of what I might find. Afraid of what I might not find.

I took a deep breath and opened the door.

A frail and solitary figure was shuffling down the white hallway before me. Even from behind, I recognized my mother. She was holding on to her IV-tree like a wheeled cane as she walked with her typical steadfast bravery and determination. I didn't think then about guilt or forgiveness. Didn't think about prices paid, debts owed, second chances. All my questions fell away, and with them, the need for answers. Nothing mattered but the woman before me.

I came up beside her and took her gently by the arm. She smiled at me and said my name as if she'd known I was there the whole time. As if she'd been expecting me. And perhaps she had. I didn't know anything anymore. As we advanced step by slow step down the aisle, our paths paralleling for at least a little while longer, I couldn't even tell which of us was supporting the other.