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figure out where the horizon was, remembering how he walked backward into the waves with his father on that last St. John the Baptist Day. Almost twenty years since he’d seen the ocean. He’d forgotten how small and unimportant it could make him feel, like he was just an infinitesimal mote floating across the surface of some great all-seeing eyeball. How very little this moment of freedom mattered in the scheme of things. He used to try to delude himself that God had a game plan for him, a design that would gradually reveal itself and somehow justify everything he’d been through. But here was a reminder that God was busy. God was probably numbering the waves and naming the clouds. God was thinking just as much about a rock crab in the Atlantic or a soap bubble in Cairo. God was thinking about bacterial infections in Peru and dung beetles in Africa, about weather patterns over the Pacific Rim and tire treads coming off beside the Taconic Parkway. God didn’t have time to worry about inmate number 01H5446 in the New York State correctional system.
     
    And so Hoolian screamed into the wind. A bitter shout-out that said, I’m still here, to the moon, the stars, the Wonder Wheel, the foaming surf, the Terminal Hotel, the Hasids on the subway, the empty cell he left behind upstate, the screws, the lifers, the hacks and he-shes, the highest courts, the lowest snakes, the shades of his mother and his father, the unborn children of his wasted seed, and, yes, the Great Clockwinder himself. By all rights, a sound like that should have pushed back the waves and left dead kelp all up and down the shoreline.
     
    But when it was done, the ocean was still there, gathering up stones and scattering them back randomly, making a sound like tepid applause.
     
     

    3
     
     
     
    JUST BEFORE LABOR DAY rolled around, Francis realized it was taking twice as long as it should have to find his car keys. So Tuesday morning, he finally broke down and made it to the doctor’s appointment he’d been putting off since before Christmas last year.
     
    He stepped into the little white room, took off the baseball cap with the X on the front—a souvenir from that Spike Lee movie he’d worked security on years ago—and rested his chin on a metal ledge. He found himself staring through a right eye lens into something that looked like a hollowed-out TV set but somehow under the circumstances felt more like a confessional. On a concave wall at the rear, four tiny white lights appeared in diamond formation under a glaring yellow beacon.
     
    The technician, a young mirthless Russian blonde with a big jaw, put a clicker in his hand. “There will be flashes of light around the target, bright and dim,” she said with an accent that made him want to call Amnesty International. “Every time you see one, you squeeze the trigger. Try to keep your eye steady.”
     
    “No problem.”
     
    But as soon as the visual field test began, he found himself tensing up and getting all sweaty-palmed. Some of the flashes were as clear as muzzle fire in a black alley. Others were just faint ghostly wisps, so far off to the side that he had to ask himself twice if he’d actually seen them.
     
    “Don’t just squeeze the trigger,” she commanded. “Concentrate.”
     
    He tried to bear down. It had been more than a year since he’d qualified for his gun, and his reflexes weren’t what they used to be. The firearms people were calling every few weeks now, wondering when he was going to make it back up to the range at Rodman’s Neck. Light sparked and danced in the far upper-right corner of his eye. He squeezed the trigger a half-second late, and knew that in an actual gunfight he would have been dead by now.
     
    “ Horasho, the doctor will speak with you.” The tech pushed a button to print out the results. It sounded like she’d said, “Horror show,” but then he remembered that it was the Russian word for good.
     
    “Well, you scored very well on fixation levels,” Dr. Friedan said