“What are you writing?” William asked.
“You can’t read in dreams,” Tommy said. “If you read more, you’d know that.”
William opened his eyes. Something wiggled in front of his face. Scritch scritch scritch. He blinked away the remnants of the dream and focused on the true source of the noise: Christina’s finger was curved like an inchworm, digging into her scalp. Scritch scritch scritch.
“Christina,” he whispered. She didn’t stir. Very gently, he took her wrist, pulled her hand away from the side of her head, and rested it on the cushion of the chamber. Then he extricated one tingly arm from its awkward position beneath her neck and pushed himself out of the shroud without waking her up. His vision distorted, stretching the chamber’s window into a concave slab of elongated glass before his head poked free of the hypersleep skin.
The car was parked. Bright sunlight streamed in. Squinting against the glare, he slid to a shroud-free section and planted his feet on the floor. Melissa and Daniel slept apart on the other side of the bench. Their shrouds appeared to William as lumps of finely wrought chain mail glittering darkly, drawing in light and shadow, reflecting it back in patterned scales.
He gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust, then raised his head to the window. Outside, the earth was carpeted in purple wildflowers swaying lazily, combed by the hint of a breeze. A few scattered patches grew taller than their neighbors to culminate in ivory petals open to the sky like clusters of tiny satellite dishes. From where Otto was parked, a dirt path wound down through the sloping field to a ravine, where a row of scraggly sagebrush clung to the edge. Across the ravine’s expanse, William could just barely make out the very top of sandstone bluffs, stacked wafers of tan rocks. Above all, he recognized the sky. It stretched from Mexico to the Great Plains, blotted with the roiling cloud masses he and Tommy had long ago identified as Imperial Star Destroyers. Today there was an entire fleet in battle formation.
The unspoiled beauty of the landscape annoyed him. A red-dicked hawk or some other precious endangered bird wheeled across the ravine. William looked down at the floor.
“I said I wanted to sleep through Texas, you fuck.”
He sat alone on the edge of the bluff where the sun scorched the rocks and sagebrush thinned to anemic sprouts. A hundred feet below, the Llano River meandered placidly along. His skateboard was at his left hand, the Ovation acoustic at his right. This was the precise location of the famous Mackler Family Photo from what turned out to be the last Mackler Family Vacation, in which Tommy gave the guitar an epic one-handed hoist above his head and leered at the camera like a debauched rocker. Tommy was more at home doing impressions of Robert Smith from the Cure or Morrissey from the Smiths, but he could bust out a credible Mick Jagger/Robert Plant archetype when called upon. William watched that gorgeous whatever-bird alight upon a sandstone ledge and recalled his critique of Tommy’s ridiculous British accent.
You sound like a fancy turtle.
I have no idea what that is.
He glanced back, up past the flowers to where the silver car glinted in the sun. It looked peaceful and still, but he wondered how long he’d have before somebody woke up, wandered down the path, and asked him why they’d stopped here; if they should go through Daniel’s bags to see what else he’d been hiding; if Christina was his official girlfriend now; if he thought Daniel and Melissa had a chance of getting back together.
The whatever-bird got sick of the ledge and plunged into the ravine.
Why the hell had they stopped here? William simmered with impatience. He truly did not care about Texas Hill Country.
“You missed the mark with this one, Otto,” he said. The underbrush rustled.
It occurred to him that he ought to back up about thirty feet and skate off the top of the bluff, guitar in hand, strumming a massive E minor (the best chord he knew) at the precise moment the canyon yawned beneath his wheels. This thought arrived casually and half formed, like a craving for Italian food without a specific desire for chicken Parm or spaghetti Bolognese, and fleshed itself out in his mind until he couldn’t deny its unbearable awesomeness. His pulse leaped in the veins of his neck, and his knee bounced against hot shale. It was a safe bet that in the history of mankind, nobody had ever strummed an E minor in that precise place in the empty sky. He stood up. The air between the ravine was a vacuum waiting to be filled with a chord that would ring out forever. The Ovation didn’t have a strap, so he would have to hold on tight. A yellow pick was wedged high up the neck in the G B E strings.
A dissonant melody chimed from his pocket, along with a frantic buzzing. He wriggled his phone out. Dr. Diaz’s office filled the screen. The doctor smiled as he doodled on the legal pad balanced on his knee. “What are you doing, William?”
“I’m gonna skate off this cliff and play guitar in the air before I fall into the river.”
“Have you seen any birds in Kentucky?”
“I’m in Texas.”
“Magnificent! Have you seen any birds?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen some birds.”
“I think you will want to be very careful of them when you skate, as you wouldn’t want to hit any Tony Hawks.”
“I swear to God I’m gonna smash you against the rocks.”
Dr. Diaz leaned forward in his chair. “That joke incorporated contextual references.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say. It sucked. You suck.”
“You believe that occupants should be saved, and yet you want to die.”
William held the phone closer to his face, as if that
