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touch these places, feel the bricks of Notre Dame under your fingertips, smell the Temple Street Night Market in Hong Kong, listen to karaoke in Tokyo. Pick a place and I’ll take you.”
    Thomas looked blankly at me. “No, I wouldn’t want to do that. I like it here just fine. I won’t catch any diseases, or lose my luggage, or end up in a hotel with bedbugs, or get mugged or get sick in a place where I can’t speak the language. And there’s not time.”
    “What do you mean, not time?”
    “There’s not time to get every place in person. I can get it done here faster, get the work done.”
    “Thomas, what work ?”
    “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ll have to check and see if it’s okay to tell you.”
    I let out a long sigh, ran my hand over the top of my head. I was exhausted. I decided to change the subject.
    “You remember Julie McGill? From school?”
    “Yes,” Thomas said. “What about her?”
    “She came to the funeral. She asked about you. Asked me to say hi.”
    Thomas looked at me, expectantly. “Are you going to say it?”
    “What?” Then I got it. “ Hi . If you’d come to the service, she could have said it to you herself.” He didn’t react to that. His refusal to attend was still a sore point with me. “Was she in your class?”
    “No,” he said. “She was a year ahead of me, and a year behind you.” Thomas paused. “She lived at 34 Arbor Street, which is a two-story house with the door in the middle and windows on each side and three windows on the second floor and thehouse is painted green and there’s a chimney on the right side and the mailbox has flowers stenciled on it. She was always nice to me. Is she still pretty?”
    I nodded. “Yeah. Her hair’s still black but it’s short now.”
    “Does she still have a bod?” He asked this without a hint of lasciviousness, like he wanted to know whether she was still driving a Subaru.
    “I would say yes,” I said. “Did you guys…did you have a thing?”
    “A thing?” He really didn’t know.
    “Did you go out?”
    “No,” he said. I could have guessed. Thomas had never had a steady girlfriend, and had only gone on dates a handful of times that I could remember. His odd, inward nature didn’t help, but I was never all that sure he cared about girls to begin with. Back when I was hiding skin mags under the mattress, Thomas was already amassing his huge map collection.
    “But I liked her,” Thomas said. “She rescued me.”
    I cocked my head, trying to recall. “That time, with the Landry twins?”
    Thomas nodded. He’d been walking home from school when Skyler and Stan Landry, a couple of bullies with the combined IQ of a bucket of primer, had blocked his path and taunted him about how he talked to himself in class. They were starting to push him around when Julie McGill showed up.
    “What’d she do?”
    “She yelled at them to leave me alone. Stood between them and me. Called them cowards. And something else.”
    “What else?”
    “Fuckheads.”
    I nodded. “Yeah, I remember.”
    “It was kind of embarrassing, a girl standing up for you,”Thomas said. “But they’d have beat me up good if she hadn’t come by. Is there going to be any dessert?”
    “Huh? Uh, I don’t know. I think I saw the end of a container of ice cream in the freezer there.”
    “Could you bring it up to me? I’ve been down here longer than I planned and I need to get back.” He was already on his feet.
    “Yeah, sure,” I said.
    “I saw something,” Thomas said.
    “What?”
    “I saw something. On the computer. I think it would be okay for you to have a look at it. I don’t think it would violate any security clearance or anything.”
    “What is it?”
    “You should just take a look at it. It would take too long to explain.”
    “Can you give me a hint?” I asked.
    And he said again, “You should take a look at it.” He paused. “When you bring up the ice cream.”

FIVE
    I went up to Thomas’s room five