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SunnyJay has decayed over fifteen years. Fat now, bald, food stains on the shirt that stretches across his vast belly. But the black eyes still shine with malicious humor. He is the smartest man I’ve ever known, and I include my father.
    “How you find me, snowflake?”
    “Oh, drop the lingo, SunnyJay. Please.” He is about as down-home as a Jesuit scholar.
    He laughs at me. “By what means did you manage to locate me so quickly after termination of your incarceration, Ms. Jaworski?”
    “You aren’t exactly a secret on the street.” Nor does he intend to be. For twenty years SunnyJay has eluded legal conviction, in an age of sophisticated military surveillance, with two simple stratagems: First, hide in plain sight. Second, keep everything in your head, with no electronic footprint at all. Everybody, including several levels of law enforcement, know where he is and what he does. None of them can prove anything at all in court.
    “Buy me a cup of coffee,” I tell him.
    He leads me about a mile from his house, then another mile, through the slums and ruins of Spokane. No one bothers us. By the time we reach a more-or-less middle-class coffee house, SunnyJay is puffing and sweating. He sinks appreciatively into a chair and looks around as if he’s never been here before. I would bet he hasn’t. The feds can’t bug every place in the entire city, although certainly they try.
    When we have our coffee, I say, “I need something.”
    “We all need love, Catie.”
    “Love, yeah. I need love. Can you find me the right man?” SunnyJay knows exactly what I mean.
    “Depends on what kind of sex you like.”
    I tell him. Do those dark eyes widen a little? It isn’t easy to shock SunnyJay, who’s seen everything. The thought that I might have shocked him is exhilarating.
    “Heavy price for that,” he says.
    “To you?” The trust my grandmother left me has been piling up for me for fifteen years.
    “No. To you.”
    “I know.”
    “You still want love anyway?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re that angry?”
    “About injustice I am, yes – that angry!”
    “Uh, huh. Sure you are. This is all about social injustice.”
    “It –”
    “I’ll do it.”
    I look down, into my coffee cup. There is risk here to SunnyJay, too, and he’s going to take it. I say, “Who was it?”
    He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “My mama.”
    “How?”
    “Stroke. She died on the ground outside the private hospital.”
    “The hospital was behind a HomeWall?”
    “You know it. I was eleven.”
    I don’t ask what had happened to SunnyJay after that. I know. But, on impulse, I ask something else.
    “You ever gone away in your mind? Just eased the pain by picturing someplace where you were really happy and then willing yourself there?”
    SunnyJay’s lip curls. “Transcendental shit. Buddhist meditation. Christian mysticism. Taoist fucking pathways. No, I never do that.”
    “Sorry I asked.” In prison, going away in my mind had saved me. How dare he sneer at it?
    SunnyJay says, “Go to the Hammet Hotel, on Sixth at West Carrington. Live there a while. Maybe love will find you.”
    Two cops walk in, staring hard at SunnyJay. He beams at them as if they are his long-lost friends.
     
     
    I AM THE reason that my father’s company’s walls became domes.
    I gather that the physics to do this – to maintain a force field that curved at the top and then left a gap for air exchange – was very difficult. The air exchange is necessary. Sealed biodomes have never worked for long: without weather, atmosphere separates into layers, soil- and rock-fixed molecules break loose, trees become etiolated and weak-wooded. For four years my father’s company produced energy walls that circled two, ten, twenty, or a maximum of thirty acres. The walls went up around mansions, gated communities, prisons, factories. Then they went up around empty swatches of land and new communities were built inside. Only certain people could buy their way