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Charlie and I nodded. Terri and I had seen him in concert the first year we were dating, back when we still did fun things like that (these days, as we got a little older, we were happy to stay home and play a game of Uno ).
    “Well,” the man continued, “you know how he was up for the Nobel Peace Prize, on account of stopping the violence in L.A., right? He was giving a speech on TV. All the cable news stations were carrying it. He vanished live, on camera.”
    “Seriously?” Charlie asked.
    The man raised his right hand. “Swear to God. Disappeared in mid fucking sentence. Fucking aliens beamed him up or something, just like everybody else. People are going nuts. Everything’s in chaos.”
    “Alien abduction,” Charlie said. “You really believe that?”
    “You got a better explanation?”
    None of us did, and the man stumbled away. We watched him stop and bum a cigarette off another man, and tell him the same story.
    “So,” Charlie said. “Prosper Johnson is among the missing. That’s too bad.”
    “I hate that rap shit,” Frank muttered. “Bunch a black guys singing about how much money they got, and how many bitches they got and this gun and that gun.”
    Charlie threw a pebble over the guardrail. “It’s not just ‘black guys.’ There are plenty of white rappers.”
    “What’s your point?”
    “Well, no offense, Frank, but that’s kind of a racist statement.”
    Frank scowled. “How is that racist?”
    “You’re implying that all black people rap. That’s like saying all Asians are good at math, or that all gay men watch Will and Grace . It’s a stereotype. I’m gay, and I hate that fucking show.”
    “I ain’t a racist.”
    “You work in construction, right?”
    Frank nodded.
    “You mean to tell me you and your buddies never stood around on the site and told jokes about queers?”
    “Don’t start with that politically-correct bullshit. Talk about stereotypes—you think all construction workers stand around and make fun of gay people and whistle at women? You think we’re all just a bunch of ignorant, uneducated rednecks?”
    Charlie opened his mouth to respond, but Frank cut him off and continued.
    “You ever tell a Polack joke?”
    Charlie shrugged, then reluctantly nodded.
    “So I could call you a racist, too, then. You’re making a joke—a stereotype—about how stupid my ancestors are supposed to be. Well, I ain’t stupid and I ain’t a racist. All I did was state a fact. Most rappers are black. That’s where it started, right?”
    Charlie turned to me and changed the subject. “How far is it to Shrewsbury, you think?”
    I took my tie off and wrapped it around my head for a sweatband. “About thirty more miles.”
    “And how far have we gone?”
    “One mile.”
    “Shit.” He stood up. “At this rate, it’ll be morning before we get home. We’d better keep moving.”
    I tried calling Terri again, but there was still no service, not even when we passed directly beneath a cell phone tower.
    We stayed on the side of the road, trying to keep a steady pace. The tension eased between Charlie and Frank. We made small talk. Frank talked about his job, and we told him about ours. Then we came to a bridge. The guardrail forced us into traffic, and we walked between the cars. People leaned back in their seats with the windows rolled down, or lounged on the hoods. Some asked for news, or for help finding a companion, but we had time for neither.
    As we passed the Shawan Road exit, I looked to my right at the shopping center, light rail station, hotel and convention center. People milled about in the parking lots. Cars moved on the streets, albeit slowly. The traffic lights at the bottom of the exit ramp still worked and, for the most part, drivers obeyed them. On the surface, things looked surprisingly normal, but I knew it was an illusion. I wondered how many people had vanished in the darkness of the movie theatre, or from the swimming pool at the hotel, or sitting on