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told me about you?”
    “Yeah.”
    “That part was in a dream I just woke up from. It was a dream about the future.”
    “I’ve had dreams, too,” I said.
    “What kind of dreams?”
    “I think I saw something like that bubble you talked about. The Oz bubble. And there’s something about trees, or things that look like trees. They scare me, and I don’t think that part was a dream. I know it wasn’t. After the accident and I was lying in the street, I saw my dead brother and he was talking to one of them. Do you think it was a Harbinger?”
    “Maybe.”
    I was cold, even inside the duffel coat.
    “Let’s go back,” Adriel Roberts said.
    I put my shoes on and we started back. We came through the dunes and within sight of the cottages. I had an instinct to halt and I obeyed it. Nichole’s mother walked ahead a few paces then stopped and looked around at me.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “There’s something wrong.”
    Her hesitation was significant and almost too brief to be noticed. But I noticed it, all right.
    “What is it?” she said.
    “Did you call them? How would you even know who to call?”
    “He called me,” she said. “But—”
    I ran. Which was fairly idiotic, but there you go. Some kind of dread was upon me, and I wanted to get away. Not knowing my way around Long Beach, I simply struck out at a dead run. I found myself in a landscape of Kozy Kabins, Motor Courts, and various hotels/motels with seafaring themes. At this hour the streets were mostly deserted, and I felt conspicuous as hell.
    A car roared behind me, its headlamps throwing my funhouse shadow capering over the street at the end of impossibly attenuated stick legs. The car drew alongside me, and through the rolled-down passenger window Nichole said, “Get in!”
     
     

chapter three
     
     
    We lived two months in one of those pay-by-the-week motels . This was in Bremerton, a Navy town on the western side of Puget Sound. The red neon VACANCY sign was always on. It developed a short, and for a couple of weeks in October it was an “ANCY” sign, which pretty much described my state of mind.
    We both got jobs. Nichole worked the counter at a Donut Hole franchise and I washed dishes in the kitchen of a roadhouse called The Wild Boar—an occupation I wouldn’t have been surprised to find in the want ads of Hell. Our lives became sub-ordinary and limited. Nichole never mentioned school and neither of us ever mentioned the future. We were Now, and that was all.
    It had been my dad, back in Long Beach.
    There was this waitress at The Wild Boar. She was a tall girl, around thirty years old, with big hair. Really big hair, like a Fourth of July fountain of strawberry blonde curls. You’d have to call her striking. She wore faded blue jeans the way most people wear their own skin. And every pair she owned had an artful rip, usually on the back of a taut thigh, just below her ass. When she bent over the rip opened like a big welcoming smile with a pink panty overbite.
    Darcy. She always said Hi when she brought a tray of beer glasses into my little cubby of steaming stainless steel hell. And it seemed like she always tried to join me when I took my miserable ten minute break on the loading dock.
    At first I lived only for the hours I spent with Nichole in our motel bed, especially after we turned the lights off and didn’t have to notice things like the blind eye of the little black and white TV on the cigarette-scarred dresser, or the assorted water stains on the ceiling that made me think of the room as having some kind of disease that might eventually infect us (of course it already had infected me; I simply didn’t recognize it). But in the dark, in our creaky, narrow bed, it was a world composed only of our skin and our smells and the myriad inarticulate intimacies of our touching. It was the place where there was no place and no Time. But eventually I began to withdraw, experiencing the touching and tenderness on the outside