that we passed. By habit I steered away from those radiant pools, along the darker side of the alleyway, even though I could have sailed through each patch of lamplight in less than a second or two, without significant risk to my health.
Xeroderma pigmentosum — XP for those who aren’t able to tie their tongues in knots — is an inherited genetic disorder that I share with an exclusive club of only one thousand other Americans. One of us per 250,000 citizens. XP renders me highly vulnerable to skin and eye cancers caused by exposure to
If I dared to spend just half an hour in summer sun, I would burn severely, though a single searing wouldn’t kill me. The true horror of XP, however, is that even minor exposure to ultraviolet radiation shortens my life, because the effect is cumulative. Years of imperceptible injuries accrete until they manifest as visible lesions, malignancies. Six hundred minutes of exposure, spread one by one over an entire year, will have the same ultimate effect as ten continuous hours on a beach in brightest July. The luminosity of a streetlamp is less dangerous to me than the full ferocity of the sun, but it’s not entirely safe.
Nothing is.
You, with your properly functioning genes, are able routinely to repair the injury to your skin and eyes that you unknowingly suffer every day. Your body, unlike mine, continuously produces enzymes that strip out the damaged segments of nucleotide strands in your cells, replacing them with undamaged DNA.
I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies, and yet I don’t hate you. I don’t resent you for the freedom that you take for granted — although I do envy you.
I don’t hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better-looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper…well, then I could
Rather than rage against XP, I regard it as a blessing. My passage through life is unique.
For one thing, I have a singular familiarity with the night. I know the world between dusk and dawn as no one else can know it, for I am a brother to the owl and the bat and the badger. I am at home in the darkness. This can be a greater advantage than you might think.
Of course, no number of advantages can compensate for the fact that death before the age of consent is not uncommon for those with XP. Survival far into adulthood isn’t a reasonable expectation — at least not without progressive neurological disorders, such as tremors of the head and hands, hearing loss, slurred speech, even mental impairment.
Thus far I have tweaked Death’s cold nose without retribution. I’ve also been spared all the physical infirmities that my physicians have long predicted.
I am twenty-eight years old.
To say that I am living on borrowed time would be not merely a cliche but also an understatement. My entire life has been a heavily mortgaged enterprise.
But so is yours. Eventual foreclosure awaits all of us. More likely than not, I’ll receive my notice before you do, though yours, too, is in the mail.
Nevertheless, until the postman comes, be happy. There is no other rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of precious time.
Now, here, on this cool spring night, past the witching hour but with dawn still far away, chasing my sherlock hound, believing in the miracle of Jimmy Wing’s survival, I cycled along empty alleys and deserted avenues, through a park where Orson did not pause to sniff a single tree, past the high school, onto lower streets. He led me eventually to the Santa Rosita River, which bisects our town from the heights to the bay.
In this part of California, where annual rainfall averages a mere fourteen inches, rivers and streams are parched most of the year. The recent rainy season had been no wetter than usual, and this riverbed was entirely exposed: a broad expanse of powdery silt, pale and slightly lustrous in the lunar light. It was as smooth as a bedsheet except for scattered knots of dark driftwood like sleeping homeless men whose limbs were twisted by nightmares.
In fact, though it was sixty to seventy feet wide, the Santa Rosita looked less like a real river than like a man-made drainage channel or canal. As part of an elaborate federal project to control the flash floods that could swell suddenly out of the steep hills and narrow canyons at the back door of Moonlight Bay, these riverbanks had been raised and stabilized with wide concrete levees from one end of town to the other.
Orson trotted off the street, across a barren strip of land, to the levee.
Following him, I coasted between two signs, sets of which alternated with each other for the entire length of the watercourse. The first declared that public access to the river was restricted and that anti-trespassing ordinances would be enforced. The second, directed at those lawless citizens who were undeterred by the first sign, warned that high water at a storm’s peak could be so powerful and fast-moving that it would overwhelm anyone who dared to venture into it.
In spite of all the warnings, in spite of the obvious turbulence of the treacherous currents and the well- known tragic history of the Santa Rosita, a thrill seeker with a homemade raft or a kayak — or even just a pair of water wings — is swept to his death every few years. In a single winter, not long ago, three drowned.
Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.
Orson stood on the levee, burly head raised, gazing east toward the Pacific Coast Highway and the serried hills beyond. He was stiff with tension, and a thin whine escaped him.
This night, neither water nor anything else moved along the moonlit channel. Not enough of a breeze slipped off the Pacific even to stir a dust ghost from the silt.
I checked the radiant dial of my wristwatch. Worried that every minute might be Jimmy Wing’s last — if, indeed, he was still alive — I nudged Orson: “What is it?”
He didn’t acknowledge my question. Instead, he pricked his ears, sniffed the becalmed night almost daintily, and seemed to be transfixed by emanations of one kind or another from some quarry farther up the arid river.
As usual, I was uncannily attuned to Orson’s mood. Although I possessed only an ordinary nose and mere human senses — but, to be fair to myself, a superior wardrobe and bank account — I could almost detect those same emanations.
Orson and I are closer than dog and man. I am not his master. I am his friend, his brother.
When I said earlier that I am brother to the owl, to the bat, and to the badger, I was speaking figuratively. When I say I’m the brother of this dog, however, I mean to be taken more literally.
Studying the riverbed as it climbed and dwindled into the hills, I asked, “Something spooking you?”
Orson glanced up. In his ebony eyes floated twin reflections of the moon, which at first I mistook for me, but my face is neither that round nor that mysterious.
Nor that pale. I am not an albino. My skin is pigmented, and my complexion somewhat dusky even though the sun has rarely touched me.
Orson snorted, and I didn’t need to understand the language of dogs to interpret his precise meaning. The pooch was telling me that he was insulted by my suggestion that he could be so easily spooked.
Indeed, Orson is even more courageous than most of his kind. During the more than two and a half years that I’ve known him, from puppyhood to the present, I have seen him frightened of only one thing: monkeys.
“Monkeys?” I asked.
He chuffed, which I interpreted as
Not monkeys this time.
Not yet.
Orson trotted to a wide concrete access ramp that descended along the levee wall to the Santa Rosita. In June and July, dump trucks and excavators would use this route when maintenance crews removed a year’s worth of accumulated sediment and debris from below, restoring a flood-preventing depth to the dry watercourse before the next rainy season.
I followed the dog down to the riverbed. On the darkly mottled concrete slope, his black form was no more
