me. One of them laughed and said, That’s all right, Cale, you’re on our side now, right? Then the keys felt like the proverbial silver in my fingers, one piece for each day of a month that fell short—by virtue of what silver buys—of a redemptive foreverness, forevermoreness.

I am thirty-eight, thirty-nine. I look in a mirror and it tells me I’m fifty, fifty-five. My hair is the same color it has been since I was seventeen but my beard is white and my eyes are red. How did I get so damned tired. When I was young I despised those who gave up so easily, I couldn’t imagine anyone could ever feel that old and that tired. In a musicless tower above an empty waterworld I grieve for what I felt and how much I felt it. Once I supposed I recognized my own voice when I spoke to strangers; it was something to know your own voice, to know it as well when you finished speaking as when you began. How is it I’m so old now I don’t know my voice anymore. How is it I’m so exhausted by what I once believed that the things I love affront me with the effort to love them. Prison was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity died immediately, without protest.

I went walking that night, the day they gave me possibly important keys to possibly important rooms. I took the radio with me as well as the keys, zigzagging the streets eastward past Broadway. The city became deader and deader until I reached the quarter before the canal, where I found the rare sights and sounds of a half dozen bars going and guys laughing; I realized I’d been in L.A. a month and not heard anyone laugh. I didn’t go in any of the bars but instead to the boat landing where I caught a boat going down canal. All this way no cops followed me, there was none of the usual company. A big mistake on their part, I thought. Let down your guard once and those like myself who are genuinely depraved will rush to betray a trust: they can’t betray it fast enough. The canal would come out on the coast near San Bernardino and then the boat would drift down to Riverside. If I were still alive the day after tomorrow I might then get another boat and slip into port somewhere near the Yuma-Sonora annex. On the deck of the boat this night I felt the last of me fading away. I was barely aware of the land gliding by or the cold of the wind, or of voices around me talking about the pirates hiding in the Downey coves waiting to take cargo of value. I had possibly important keys in a coat pocket, I had contraband radio in the other. I might cast one or both overboard. I might or might not remove them from my pockets before doing so.

The water beneath me in the dark, it was gray and windowless too as we continued sailing out of the city. I just stood with my back to the broken bitter skyline fumbling with this stuff in my pocket, keys in one hand and the radio in the other, wondering which it was going to be. Clouds soared by overhead like the evil black birds in the streets at noon, and then there was nothing but the moon, mammoth and skull white, laughing light all over the boat and the riverbanks. The voices around me stopped; I felt stricken by the stillness. No one else was in sight. I can go now, I thought. The banks were bare and distant for about fifty yards up canal until the bend ahead, where a small beach jutted outward. I stood watching the approaching bend and pulled the small radio from my pocket; I turned it on for a moment and then off. I looked to the right and left and behind me on deck, and the boat reached the bend and began to steer southward, out into larger water, leaving Los Angeles behind once and for all. On the jutting beach were two people.

One was sitting or kneeling in the sand. He was motionless and silent, facing away from me, and he held his hands behind his back. The other was standing before him as silent and motionless as he; with one hand she touched his head, as though she was running her fingers through his hair. Her face was as clearly visible to me as his was not. She looked very young; I doubted she was all of twenty. She wore a plain dress, and in the bright moonlight it had no color but pale. As the boat turned southward it came closer to shore, and at one point I could see her eyes though she wasn’t looking directly at me. She didn’t seem aware of the boat at all. Against the embankment behind her, white in the light of the moon, her black hair was like a cloud of gunpowder, which framed her brown face; she looked Latin or Mediterranean. I kept expecting her to acknowledge the boat but the boat had cut its engines. I kept expecting her to look my way, but she touched the head of the other man. In the moment I saw her I stopped grieving for my losses. It seemed impossible to see her eyes from the boat or to know her face that well. I despised the guy at her feet; I would have told at that moment any lethal joke that would have hanged him too.

He turned to look at me.

As his face shifted into the light of the moon there was another light, a flash that went off between his face and my own. It was soundless and instantaneous, and as it dimmed I expected I would get

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