"Hurry up with that jug," Kenny Rice said, "or give it back if you ain't gonna drink any. You can't take it with you to California."

Joshua took a quick sip and handed the quart bottle back to his friend. He shivered a little as the cold liquid coursed through his system.

"To heck with California, tell me some more about Brenda. Did you touch her boobies, really?" Kenny took a slow drink and considered an answer. "Did you?" Joshua asked again.

"Natch," Kenny answered, feigning indifference.

"What'd they feel like?"

"Good. Good and firm. Warm. Soft, too."

"Oooh."

"I had her naked from the waist up."

"No kiddin'?"

"No kiddin'."

Joshua thought about that. It made him tingle to picture Brenda's beautiful breasts, naked and waiting to be touched. It made his crotch ache to even consider such a prospect. He let out a big sigh. For several minutes then he and Kenny were silent, Kenny keeping the beer and the two of them looking up at the star-filled sky or peering across and down the hill from where they stood at the vague outline of the university football stadium looming in the darkness like some frozen monolithic being. Joshua felt a funny mood begin to slip over him; he tried vainly to think of Brenda Lowery's breasts but couldn't maintain the needed concentration.

"Here," Kenny said, his voice sounding distant as he offered Joshua the beer. Joshua squinted to see his friend in the dark. "Here, take it. Take a shot."

"Yeah," Joshua said, wishing Kenny might want to talk some more about Brenda. He took a drink, bigger than he had expected and almost coughed as his mouth and throat filled with the bitter liquid. He grimaced and handed the bottle back to Kenny.

"Good, huh?" Kenny said.

"Yeah," Joshua whispered, "great."

"You suppose there's life up there, somewhere?" Kenny said after another brief lull. "You know, other beings?"

Kenny's questions struck Joshua as if out of the blue. His head jerked clownishly and he made a false start step as if he was trying to regain his equilibrium after nearly falling. He was glad Kenny couldn't see his reaction in the dark.

"What'd you say that for?" he asked plaintively.

"Huh?"

"How come?"

"I don't know. Just wonderin'. It seems to me like there'd have to be, you know. Look up there at all the stars. Look up at that."

Joshua did and saw that the sky hung down over them like a huge light-dotted black cover. There was something scary about that sky to him and though he couldn't say what it was he knew he didn't want to think about it.

"Do you think there's anything?" Kenny asked again. He handed Joshua the beer.

"No," Joshua said defiantly, then mumbled, "I knew . . I don't know. Maybe. Yes. Maybe."

His attention was drawn back by the sky. Looking up at the far off cold of the stars chilled him, made his stomach hurt like he might have to go to the bathroom. He didn't feel very good. He felt scared. He felt like he was in some kind of tunnel. He gripped the beer bottle tightly in his hand.

"Do you believe in God?" he heard himself ask Kenny.

"Sure," Kenny said. "Don't you?"

Joshua looked at the stars again. There were so many of them. In a rush he felt their magnitude and the unmeasurable immensity of the universe.

"God," he said, "Oh, Jesus, God."

"What?" Kenny said. "What did you say?"

"How can there be a God, Kenny?" Joshua said, almost pleading. "There can't be one. I mean, how can there be? Something would have had to have made Him, too, wouldn't it? So there can't be one. It would have had to go on forever like that. It couldn't happen."

"God always was and always will be, damn it, Josh," Kenny said. "Didn't you learn anything in Sunday School?"

"But where'd He come from? Something can't come from nothing. Did He make Himself?"

"I don't know, jeez."

"Don't you think of these things?"

"No. I don't want to. I got better things to think about, like girls."

"Do you think things go on forever?"

"Of course."

"They don't end?"

"How could they?"

"How can they? Everything ends. Stops. Dies."

"Not in eternal life."

"Even that has to end. Nothing can last forever. It must end. Oh, Jesus."

In the darkness, Kenny tried to make out Joshua's features. He couldn't figure out what was going on with his friend. He didn't usually act this way, talk this way.

"Say, Josh," he said, "what's buggin' you anyway?"

"Oh, God," Joshua groaned, "it don't make no sense. How can anything exist. Nothing makes sense. It's all gonna end sometime. Everything. Everything. It had to start and it has to end. But . . . none of it's possible. Jesus Christ."

He felt now the cosmic inevitability of the end of all things and this message seemed to belong to and be transmitted by the icy stars twinkling in the vast blackness overhead. When he looked up again it was not the lights of a magnificent, symbolic and hopeful existence that he saw, but the malevolent signaling of an indifferent, inhumane force waiting only for the opportunity to engulf him in its existence-ending void. Mortality was a trap.

"Jesus," he almost cried, "I can't escape. Nothing's possible. It just can't be."

"Goddamn, Josh," Kenny said, "knock it off. You're givin' me the Willie's with all this shit. You dumb head, give the bottle here."

"Nothing," Joshua mumbled.

"Oh, shut up," Kenny said, coming forward in the dark and jerking the bottle out of Joshua's hand. "What's the matter with you anyway? You gettin' weird 'cause you're moving to California or something? Or what?"

"You don't understand. Nothing. Nothing can't be nothing. Or something. It's not possible."

"Oh, shit," Kenny laughed. "Get serious." He walked off into the dark with what was left of his quart of beer. "I thought he wanted to talk about girls. Cripes."

Left alone, Joshua didn't move for several minutes. He felt very different than he had just a quarter of an hour before. His head buzzed and all he wanted was to be free of the logic he felt he could never again escape. None of it made sense anymore. Existence itself seemed totally illogical. It was like a cosmic trap door you fell through. Only it was not funny. Not to Joshua. He felt trapped. Bound. And he hadn't asked for any of it, no one had. He shuddered to think of it. He was consumed by it.

Then just as he was beginning to feel it never would, the mood passed of its own volition. He felt a warmth inside, a sense of relief. His spirits began to lift. He felt exhausted and sat down weakly on the wet grass. This strange moment, so unexpected, so outside his prior experience, had passed. It had left him, gone, for now.

Daring to look up again, he gazed at the panoply of stars above him. They didn't seem quite so cold now. They had taken on a little of their former luster. But not all. Something had been lost. Something he had always felt to be true about them. Something that would never be there again. Something Joshua's young mind told him he'd lost too soon. Something he would never get back.

Joshua wiped the sweat from his forehead and leaned forward slowly to pull his soaked t-shirt away from the back of his chair.

"Ugh," he grunted.

The creaky swamp cooler, mounted ineffectually in the window that faced the afternoon desert sun, barely cooled even a small area of the tiny living room. The radio blared out "A Quarter to Three" and Joshua sweated. And looked out the window at the cool-looking white adobe house on the other side of the street.

He was hoping to see Bonnie Sears. For most of the month he and his mother had lived in the hot little cracker box across from Bonnie, Joshua had settled for occasional voyeuristic glimpses of the tall, well-developed girl watering the lawn or leaving on some chore for her mother. Waiting for peeks at Bonnie and listening non-stop to the Top 40 was all Joshua did in those early tedious days in California.

One of his diversions, while sitting alone in the house sweating as he did every day, was recalling the recent solo trip he had made in the move from Lafayette out to California. He could still vividly picture himself climbing aboard a Trailways bus, worrying about the twenty dollar bill he had tucked, per his mother's instructions, in the bottom of his right shoe. Though he had tried to act grown-up, this being his first long trip alone and all, he knew he must have looked like the world's biggest country bumpkin. Recalling the experience, he knew that if he hadn't looked the part, he had sure acted it. The trip still caused him little shudders of embarrassment from time to time.

All the way to Dallas he had sat alone, feeling awkwardly stupid, concentrating on the fields and small towns that glided by outside his window like a silent motion picture travelogue. In a small, desolate town outside Dallas, however, his naiveté became so transparent that he might as well have taken the twenty out of his shoe and pinned it to the bill of the worn out Yankees baseball hat he wore. In this one horse town, he watched a pretty girl, a beauty queen he speculated, wave good-bye to friends and family and climb aboard. To his surprise and horror, she came straight down the aisle and sat next to him. Too timid to look directly at the girl, Joshua watched her with his peripheral vision, an uncontrollable erection pushing up the front of his pants. They seldom spoke and when she got off at a rest stop in west Texas, Joshua allowed an older Mexican worker to take the girl's seat. When she returned, the beauty queen moved to another seat without a complaint but gave Joshua such a look of disappointment that he felt miserable for hundreds of miles.

After the Mexican man got off, he was replaced by a young Californian, Mr. Party-Party, as Joshua later named him. This guy, a really high strung character, Joshua thought, got his name from endless references to party-partying--an activity Joshua was grateful not to have to admit to anyone he knew nothing about. At some hole in the wall meal stop, the Californian missed getting back on the bus and Joshua celebrated that quirk of time and fate for many pleasantly quiet miles.

El Paso, however, was the worst experience of all. During a long layover, he found a place to sit by himself and he put his small bag, complete with a fancy Texas ashtray he'd bought to take to his aunt, safely between his legs. After awhile, an amiable, cleanly dressed man in his mid-forties sat down and struck up a conversation. After a few minutes, the man excused himself to go to the restrooms and asked Joshua to watch his suitcase. Joshua obliged and when the man returned he asked the favor in return. His own business done, Joshua returned to find the friendly man gone. He looked all over the station but neither the man nor the bag was in sight. Eventually he found the bag in a trash can--empty, except for a pack of flat bubble gum and baseball cards he'd picked up before he left Lafayette. The ashtray in the shape of Texas was gone.

"Damn," he said, sheepishly putting the bag under his arm and stalking back to a bench. "Damn."

He was glad nobody he knew was around to see what a fool he'd been. His face had burned with shame and the incident preyed upon him all the rest of the way into New Mexico and Arizona. He debated telling his mother about the incident, but between Yuma and El Centro, his destination, he decided against it, choosing to swallow the humiliation and the loss of the ashtray stoically. He figured he'd try to buy his aunt something else. He didn't know whether she smoked or not anyway.

Now, less than a month later, sitting by himself in the stifling ninety plus degree heat of his living room, the memory of that first big bus ride seemed peculiar to him; real enough, yet somehow bizarre, off-the-wall, oddly distant--distant as everything seemed to be this oppressive summer.

Sometime after the move to Desert View, Joshua had developed a singular obsession. Without warning, an inexplicable, smothering, and nearly debilitating sense of death, of nothingness, and the logical inevitability of both would explode into his consciousness with such an intensity that he would feel he was going to cease to exist--on the spot, at that precise moment. These explosions came to him in powerful rushes, unexpectedly and with almost no warning, and were preceded by an inner "sound" so loud it was as if a freight train were bearing down on him from somewhere inside his own head.

The first one had come on a blazing afternoon like today, when he had stood up, pulling his sweat-sticky t-shirt away from his body, to take the few steps into the kitchen for a cold bottle of Coke. Popping the lid off with a church key, he took a drink and started back towards the living room. And then it suddenly started, a peculiar buzzing sound--now so familiar to him--in his ears, coming slowly, softly at first, then sweeping through his head with a roaring, deafening blast.

"No," he had cried, barely getting his pop onto a nearby table before covering his ears with his hands and still spilling some of the cold liquid on his jeans. "No." Instantly, his vision seemed funneled, tinted yellow, the rest of the world blocked out by the overpowering assault on his senses.

"God," he groaned, "Oh, Jesus." And the sound was followed by a horrendous sense that existence itself was completely, totally illogical, impossible. "I'm trapped," he had cried, "I can't get out. I can't get out. Nothing can be. It's not possible." His head buzzed and he battled to free himself from this unwilled fixation on the absurd unreality yet simultaneous inevitability of both living and dying. None of this can be, he thought in his confusion, it's impossible. Nothing could always have been and always exist. It has to start. It has to end. Even eternity. Nothing can last forever. It has to all go to nothingness. Blackness. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. I don't want this. I don't--.

He stood frozen, unaware of anything outside himself, his stomach cramping, cold stinging sweat forming on his face, for how long he didn't know. Perhaps only two or three minutes, perhaps less. Then, as unexpectedly as the flash had started, it began to lift. He began to come back to the world around him. He felt the first waves of a great surge of well being and relief that he found would always follow these experiences. Grabbing his warming soda, he had stumbled back into the living room and slumped down in front of the radio, which incongruously blared "Raindrops" into the hot air blown uselessly around by the swamp cooler.

"Damn," he had said out loud, the moment fading ever more quickly, "Jesus, what was that? What is happening?"

That had been the first one, since then these episodes had become a regular part of his life, occurring almost daily. The cumulative effect of them had been that Joshua felt much older than his nearly sixteen years and he was frequently moody and withdrawn, steeling himself for the next episode.

On this sweltering afternoon, though, he was able to keep his personal demon at bay and make some sense of these peculiar experiences. The radio was playing "Twilight Time" and Joshua, cautiously probing his own mind, recollected the melancholy this song had induced in him when he had last heard it a few days before. Before, back in Lafayette, the song had simply been a great old hit from the mid-fifties, but during this exhausting summer its haunting melody made him think not of women and love but of dusk and the coming of evening. And it was this he feared: the coming of darkness, blackness, the unconsciousness of sleep and death, the void as he had once heard someone refer to the final loss of awareness. And all of it was represented perfectly by night.

He hated the night now. He hated nothingness; he hated his fear. It was like when he was a young boy and used to wonder where he went when he slept. Was that what death was like--eternal sleep. He couldn't understand that. He couldn't or wouldn't accept that he would permanently lose consciousness. He hated the thought, it terrified him.

What happens to the dead, he thought, where are they now? Nowhere? His mother had told him that as long as someone remembers you in some way you are still alive. That was OK but it would end when the memory did. He didn't want to be forgotten that way or like others he'd known who died. Like his grandfather, who he remembered lying on his long bed, blood emptying out of the back of his head, staining the mattress an ugly black-red.

In the snap of a finger, he thought, our lives will be over and we will be in our death beds. And it will be so quick. Fearing the direction of his thoughts, he drove the idea from his mind. All he wanted was for things to be back to normal. To be like they were before this frightening thing had started happening to him. Before these ideas started plaguing him, before the freight train sound had begun to roar in his ears and head at unpredictable, terrible moments.

He breathed a big sigh of relief and stood up creakily. Walking to the window he looked out to see if Bonnie was around but the only movement was the waves of heat rising from the road. I'll get over this, he told himself hopefully, though doubtfully, it'll stop one of these days. Maybe it's because everything's different out here or something. That's probably it; it's because it's all still so new to me.

With another big sigh, he sat back down in front of the cooler. It was really hot but he was feeling all right. He'd analyzed his problem without triggering it. That was some kind of success. He took a big, refreshing drink of Coke and leaned back in the chair. He had weathered a bunch of these things and you never knew when the next one would come, but at least he was OK for now. He picked up a stray copy of Life and calmly leafed through it. Yeah, he was all right, for now. And the way things had been going this summer, he told himself, that was as good as he could hope for.

Joshua inhaled deeply, trying to hold the smoke deep down in his lungs. When he breathed, nearly coughing, blue smoke escaped from his mouth and nostrils. He half-heartedly waved it back towards his face.

On the creek bank in front of him, Sara paced back and forth, trying not to look bored. The creek, maybe twelve feet across at its widest point, ran swiftly along. It was shallow, not much more than ankle deep. Sara liked the creek. She liked to hear it run, splashing over the rocky bottom. It reminded her of when she was small. Innocent then, full of expectations. She looked at Joshua on the quilt. He sat among the remains of their picnic, writing and smoking. She turned back to the creek. She prided herself on not bothering him when he wrote. He liked that about her and she knew it.

Fifteen I stood there my friend, Joshua wrote with a ground down Number 1 pencil, and I sharing my first - his who knew how many - quart of beer/The grass was late spring dew wet/above the empty stadium.

So long ago, he thought, so far removed. He took a slow drink of soda letting it coat his smoke-scratchy throat. He looked up at Sara. She was pretending not to be bored. He watched her walk, her young, tight buttocks moving with the natural sexual rhythm of a young woman. Watching her made him ache and he sighed, a mixture of sexual release, frustration, and desire. He tried to concentrate on his writing.

Here have a shot he said/Yeah drinking grimacing a throat full of bitter/Do you suppose there's life up there.

What a night, Joshua remembered, the words of his poem triggering the past association. In one moment gone, like a weight dropped or a cover, too. His brothers Wade and Pete and his sister Bonnie already gone from Lafayette before he and his mother. No one to talk to. You can't tell your mother that at fifteen you just lost God and church and faith. Not quite.

And me looking up like some fool/saw stars cold far emptier than the stadium shivered/Do you think there's anything/No I said I don't know yes maybe/Scared like never before but many times since/Vision tunneled gut hurt fear frozen/God I said Oh Jesus God.

"Hey," Sara called out, "hey." Joshua looked up, annoyed. "Are you done yet?" she asked, walking back towards him.

"In a minute," he said roughly. But as she came nearer, he quickly softened. When she knelt down and kissed him, his annoyance fled.

"Listen," he said, looking into her light green eyes. "I won't be much longer. OK?"

"What you writing about?" she smiled.

"Oh, just about a night and some stars. When I was a kid."

"Oh."

"Oh."

"Anybody in it I know?"

"What?" he laughed.

"Is one of your brothers or somebody I know in it?"

"No, just a friend when I was a kid. That's all."

"Oh," she said again.

"Let me finish," he said, "and we'll go back in and get a beer or somethin'."

She rolled her eyes in mock hurt. He reached over and ran his hand across her breasts. She slapped him playfully, then went back to the creek bank. He watched her walk away. Wrote a few more short verses.

What's the matter he said/I said oh God no sense how can anything exist/What are you talking about?

"What are you talking about?" Joshua remembered someone saying recently. "Killed who? Who did?"

Then a girl was crying and everybody started getting mad at Nixon and the war and pretty soon memorial services for the four young dead students ended up shutting down it seemed like most of the colleges in the country.

They killed them flat out, he told himself. That's a fact. Just like Kennedy and King before and Jackson State right after. Like so many times before. Who knows how many more to come. And nothing ever happens about it. Nobody does anything. Nothing.

Oh Jesus it's nothing/Dumb shit give the bottle here/Nothing/Oh shut up.

Joshua looked up and focused on a stand of trees near a bend in the creek. A light wind rustled their full leaves and he concentrated on that. It was an exercise he did often--focusing on some distant object after having read or written something up close for too long--it took the tension from your overworked eyes. Sara wasn't in sight, but he went on without looking for her.

Bowel moving skin biting hair electrifying/You don't understand nothin' can't be nothing can it's not possible/Walked off in the dark with the bottle.

Sara came around from the side of the car and walked up behind him. He didn't turn around.

Left alone not crying scared so badly in need/with the black sky above -

And after the big bar fight when I called Pete, Joshua recalled, I was so alone feeling and Pete was all I knew to call.

"I knew about it," Pete had said, "Steve told his folks and they told me."

"That's amazing," he had answered, amazed his brother had already gotten the news from Steve, Pete's wife's brother. "Word spread that far? How come you didn't call?"

"I figured if it was something you wanted to talk about," Pete had said, "you would have called."

"I'm okay, now," he said, "all I have left is a numb tooth and a scar on top of my head. Fuckin' frat rats. Decided they needed to punch out a dirty hippie I guess"

They both laughed. It was okay before he hung up and Joshua, in a rare moment, said: "Pete, I love you." Pete didn't say anything for a minute, then:

"I know."

"I need to say I love you, and Wade, and Bonnie. All of you. I know I haven't always shown it lately . . . ."

"We know."

"Okay. I just wanted you to know."

"I do. Just stay out of the bars for awhile. We don't want you killing yourself, or somebody doing it for you. OK?"

"OK, I will."

"Good-bye, buddy."

"Good-bye, Pete."

Sara bent over and hugged him from the back. He pressed her hands and rubbed his cheek against one of her arms. She let him go and stood up.

Gone and gone just like that/beyond expression retelling.

He tossed his pad and pencil down and reached up for Sara.

"Come on," he said, pulling her down to him. She kissed him and he reached inside her blouse to feel her firm breasts. He was already excited.

"Are you done?" she said, letting him unbutton her blouse. As it often did, his quick sexuality took her by surprise.

"Come on," he said.

"If you're done," she said.

"I'm done," he said. "Come here." Sara laughed. He moved to let her beneath him and pulled off his shirt as he did.

In a moment they lay together naked from the waist up, skin to skin. On the edge of the quilt, the pad and pencil lay unnecessary now by an empty soda can and the remains of a sandwich. A light wind blew, slowly flipping the blank pages of the pad and bathing Joshua's back with pleasant, late afternoon warmth.

After a decade the poem had emerged, blending past and future into the sensuous death of the present. In time, Joshua leaned his head back at the neck and groaned.

"Finished," he said to the sky, "done."

"While this book's still new, Josh," Larry Driscoll said, "now's when I can get you some air time. Just don't blow it by getting out of control, OK?"

"What are you talking about?" Joshua asked.

"You know what I mean," Driscoll answered. "Don't get too radical on the air. I've scheduled you on a local radio talk show. A pleasant little man is the host; so please, no hard core stuff, no raging socialism, no theories about hunting being man's attempt to wipe out his evolutionary memory or whatever. OK? Just this once? You don't need any more bad publicity, right?"

Joshua laughed. He'd had plenty of bad publicity not so long ago when a little one-horse town had brought him up on indecency charges for a prior book. They had wanted to charge him with sedition but even their own lawyers knew that wouldn't stick. Neither did the obscenity charge. It had sold a few books for Joshua, but had made his life miserable for a while, too.

"You're a real corker of an agent, Larry," he told his long time representative. "What do I talk about, stock prices? The weather? Kiss a little you know what?"

"It's not kissing anything, Josh. It's using your head. It's practical. Look, you've had a little success, don't throw it away needlessly."

"Don't forget, it was my little success that got me into the latest scrape in the first place."

"OK," Driscoll said, "but let's not hassle it. We're not in Podunksville, Missouri anymore and maybe with a couple of breaks you'll get the recognition you deserve."

"Isn't it pretty to think so," Joshua smirked.

The allusion escaped Driscoll. Joshua walked around the agent's office, looked out the window, went up to a bookcase. Driscoll went to the center of the room. He acted like he thought it might be necessary to physically keep Joshua in the room until the talk show thing was settled. Joshua didn't seem interested in the discussion.

"Well, what do you know," Joshua said, picking a thin volume from the bookcase. It was a book of poetry. His own. "You ever read this, Larry?" he asked.

"What is it?" the agent asked.

"The book of poetry I wrote. You know."

"Sure," Driscoll said, "of course. I've read all your stuff. Even your earlier things." Joshua furrowed his brow. "Really, Josh, you have to trust me a little more."

Joshua waved Driscoll off and began leafing through the book. Midway through he stopped. One of the poems caught his attention. It was called "Something Lost - A Night of Stars." He read to himself:

                    Fifteen I stood there my friend
                    and I sharing my first - his who knew how many - quart of beer
                    The grass was late spring dew wet
                    above the empty stadium
                    Here have a shot he said 	
                    Yeah drinking grimacing a throat full of bitter 
                    Do you suppose there's life up there
                    And me looking up like some fool
                    saw stars cold far emptier than the stadium shivered 
                    Do you think there's anything
                    No I said I don't know yes maybe
                    Scared like never before but many times since 
                    Vision tunneled gut hurt fear frozen
                    God I said oh Jesus God
                    What's the matter he said
                    I said oh God no sense how can anything exist 
                    What are you talking about
                    Oh Jesus it's nothing
                    Dumb shit give the bottle here
                    Nothing
                    Oh shut up
                    Bowel moving skin biting hair electrifying
                    You don't understand nothin' can't be nothing can it's not possible
                    Walked off in the dark with the bottle
                    Left alone not crying scared so badly in need 
                    with the black sky above -
                    Gone and gone just like that
                    beyond expression retelling.

"Good?" Driscoll asked, seeing Joshua look up.

"Who knows?" Joshua said.

They were quiet a moment. Joshua remembered how he once said that the worst thing about writing, especially writing your own past, was that some real memories get mixed up, even replaced by the fiction or poetry. He figured it was an occupational hazard. He replaced the book on the shelf. Driscoll walked to the window behind his desk. He stood looking out.

"That trial shouldn't have happened, Larry, you know that, don't you?" Joshua asked after a few minutes. Driscoll turned to face his client. "And you know the bad thing? I love Missouri, it's my favorite state."

"But it turned out all right," Driscoll said. "You saw. You've been able to turn it to your advantage. It's legitimized you as a writer; brought you offers. Hell, it may free you more than you can imagine."

"Or the opposite."

"Not very likely. But either way, try to look at the good side of it. Come on, you haven't had to face this alone."

"Uh," Joshua mumbled to himself. He was thinking of Sara, that she had not been at the trial.

"I've been through all this with you before, Josh," she had said in the days leading up to the small town extravaganza, "and not just once. I can't do it again. I can't give that much of myself to you anymore. Can you understand that?"

He hadn't been able to but he didn't argue. Maybe the way he was was too much for someone else to live with as long as Sara had. All he knew was that her absence had made him feel all the more alone, all the more disoriented at the trial. He didn't like it, but he had had to teach himself to practice resignation, not his long suit: resignation, acceptance, and accommodation. Accommodation, he thought chastising himself. He had accommodated his legal team by apologizing to any readers who might have been offended by his fiction. Accommodation in this case felt like selling out, like giving in, giving up.

"Accommodation," he said out loud.

"Yes," Driscoll said, "that's a good word. Accommodation. Do the talk show. Move on from the trial. Go on with your life. That's what maturity is; that's what accommodation is." He looked to Joshua for a reaction.

"To hell with accommodation," Joshua said flatly. He walked over to the door. Driscoll watched him without speaking. "Hey, Larry," Joshua added, "don't worry about it, OK? I'll do what has to be done, like always. I'll be the perfect little writer for you. How's that?"

"Come on, Joshua," Driscoll said. "That's not fair. That's not what I want you to be. I'm looking out for you. I'm trying to help here. I believe in you, too, you know."

"I gotta go," Joshua said, opening the door, "take care of whatever you have to take care of. I'll hold up my end."

"Don't walk out now, Josh," Driscoll said. "Not like this."

"I'll see you later," Joshua said, easing into the hallway. The agent took a step towards him. Joshua shut the door. He was gone. Just walked out. For several minutes Driscoll stared at the closed door.

"Well, hell," he said finally, sighing, "damn."