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leg.
    The body rouses.
    “They’re gonna be pissed if they catch you down there.”
    The thin man wants to keep it as neutral as possible, not be seen as a cop or do anything to make an enemy if they’ve got to spend another half week together at sea.
    The legs bend, then the body starts to rise in the dark between the cold metal containers. In an unintentionally synchronized fashion, the thin man raises the flashlight, illuminating the tall figure wearing a long black peacoat and sporting a beard in full blossom.
    “I fell asleep,” the bearded man says. He sounds surprised.
    It’s not Bryan, the thin man realizes, not anyone he recognizes. Jesus, a friggin’ stowaway. Even as he thinks it, he’s transfixed by the beard. As much as it is full and wild, it looks deliberate, like something that would’ve been fashionable in some distant biblical era.
    As neutrally as possible, the thin man says: “Come on with me. We have hot showers upstairs.” He wants to get this guy to the captain without a fuss, keep things simple.
    The bearded man looks behind him, into the near-black crevice between the containers. He makes out the outlines of the backpack, the tattered brand-name knockoff bearing an otherworldly treasure, given him in a wordless exchange in an alley in Morocco. He was surprised that so much divine power and truth could be so light.
    He turns back to find the flashlight upturned at his face. The bearded man closes his eyes, listens for other voices or footsteps. Hears none. He looks at the rail standing before him, a pasty, Earthy shell of flesh and bones. But a human being, a spark of life.
    The bearded man mutters something.
    “I can’t understand you. Bring your things. You can take them with you upstairs.”
    The bearded man takes a slow breath, processing the inevitability of the logic, the undeniable rationale. After years of modest duty, he has been summoned, like his brethren, for divine purpose. It can only be that there is a gravest threat. As a Guardian of the City, he cannot doubt. His is a life of faith. He must act with purpose. Without reservation.
    There is a flash of movement and the thin man feels himself turned, lifted. He feels intense pressure on his neck. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me.
    The flashlight drops to the floor.
    “I said: ‘God forgive me.’”

C HAPTER 6
    A S JEREMY STANDS in the Richmond fog, he knows that what he’s telling himself he’s doing and what he’s doing are two different things. He’s telling himself that he’s come to the Last Cup, the rarest of all-night cafés in San Francisco, a city in which the eateries tend to close by ten, infuriating East Coast visitors and giving them a justifiable feeling of superiority. Here, Jeremy tells himself, he’ll run some diagnostics on the conflict algorithm.
    It is true that Jeremy has spent more than one night lingering over a bottomless coffee at the Last Cup, working through a manic muse or dozing in a beanbag chair by the piano. It is also true that he has generally done so after a fight with Emily, who happens to live one block away from the Last Cup.
    He’s standing in front of her flat, not admitting to himself that the real reason he’s here—not the café—is to connect somehow with Emily, even just to peek into her window. Jeremy’s reality is spinning off its hinges and Emily’s always the touchstone. She used to tell him he was the same to her. She’d concede that his antagonism, his snipes and counterpunches, while antisocial, often spoke deep truths others would notspeak. And she, unlike others, didn’t get threatened by them.
    Her puke-green flat, so painted by an intransigent landlord, one of innumerable stubborn men who seem to surround her, stands between flats packed with large Chinese families. Jeremy points out to Emily that he has never had a single verbal altercation with the Chins and the Chus and Emily points out that that’s because the families speak no