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now clearly, and when he was within several feet of her, he stopped. He could see her try to come toward him, but she managed only a kind of rough, jerking motion, and she went in up to her forehead and then lifted her face again, choking and coughing. She managed to say the word once more—“Tristan?”—the last thing she ever said to him. He was perhaps two arm-lengths away, treading water, watching her intently. Because something had happened to her face. The moonlight shone on her directly, and he could see the water in her dark hair and on her cheeks, and her mouth opened and closed in little gasps. Her green eyes were huge, almost glowing. In the black irises, he could see the white crescent of the moon. Very pretty, he thought. He could even love her, maybe, if she looked that way all the time. But then she went under the water, softly, and did not come up again.

    Standing back on the dock, naked under the stars and shivering, he could still see her pretty face almost perfectly, as if it hovered near the moon.

An Intellectual Conversation
    In the truck Russell Harmon slid in his Led Zeppelin CD, hoping that would impress Tristan, who was, after all, even if he was trying to hook up with Kelly Ashton right under Russell’s nose, the coolest guy Russell knew. At least that was what everybody in town seemed to think. Russell skipped tracks to his favorite song and heard the familiar dirge-like opening while he slipped the bindle from his pocket, and he wasn’t sure what the hell instrument those guys were playing, but it sure did sound fucking great.
    “‘Kashmir,’” Tristan said, his head nodding slightly, his lips kind of screwed up to one side. “A classic, of sorts.”
    Of sorts . What the fuck did that mean? Russell unlatched the window to the canopy and felt around back there until he had hold of the mirror. He shook out most of the blow from the bindle and chopped it up with his maxed-out credit card and severed it into two long lines and handed the mirror to Tristan and pulled a ten from his wallet and passed that to Tristan, too, holding everything low and scanning the street and the parking lot for cops.
    Tristan held the mirror on his lap and the bill in his hand and didn’t move. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I’ve never done this before.”

    This confession surprised and pleased Russell. He took a certain pride in introducing people to this, his new hobby, but he hadn’t expected to have the pleasure with Tristan. So now, in an almost avuncular fashion, he instructed Tristan to roll up the bill and hold the mirror up with his knees, take half the line up one nostril and then switch to the other, wipe his finger across the mirror and run it along his gum line when he was through.
    Before Tristan passed the mirror over, Russell had a chance to inspect the world outside the windshield again, and he wasn’t so much looking for cops, he realized, as he was looking for Kelly Ashton, and as a dark-haired woman passed by on the sidewalk his heart did a little hop, skip, and jump, and he wasn’t sure whether that meant he had hoped the woman was Kelly Ashton (it wasn’t) or hoped the woman was not Kelly Ashton. On the one hand, if it were Kelly Ashton leaving the bar, that would mean, first, that she wouldn’t be around to watch him shoot darts against Brice Habersham, and that would be a good thing, he supposed, because he couldn’t quite not think about her as he stood at the line, couldn’t quite not imagine what he looked like to her from her place at the table. But wouldn’t it be nice to have her there if he won? If she understood the significance of his beating Brice Habersham, that is? But he definitely couldn’t beat Brice Habersham if he kept shooting the way he had in the doubles match, with that awful tight feeling in his arms and that constriction in his chest, and maybe Kelly Ashton had been partly responsible for that. And so yes, he thought, a little wave of fear and