Dark Rivers of the Heart

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        "He's not the only one spooked," Ellie said, shouldering the Uzi.
        "Let's finish this."
        Spencer crossed the threshold again, from the cellar into the world beyond. With each step forward, he moved backward in time.
        They left the VW Microbus on the street to which the man on the phone had directed Harris. Darius, Bonnie, and Martin walked with Harris, Jessica, and the girls across the adjacent park toward the beach a hundred and fifty yards away.
        No one could be seen within the discs of light beneath the tall lampposts, but bursts of eerie laughter issued from the surrounding darkness.
        Above the rumble and slosh of the surf, Harris heard voices, fragmentary and strange, on all sides, near and far. A woman who sounded blitzed on something: "You're a real cattnan, baby, really a catman, you are." A man's high-pitched laughter trilled through the night, from a place far to the north of the unseen woman. To the south, another man, old by the sound of him, sobbed with grief Yet another unspottable man, with a pure young voice, kept repeating the same three words, as if chanting a mantra: "Eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues…" It seemed to Harris that he was shepherding his family across an open-air Bedlam, through a madhouse with no roof other than palm fronds and night sky.
        Homeless winos and crackheads lived in some of the lusher stands of shrubbery, in concealed cardboard boxes insulated with newspapers and old blankets. In the sunlight, the beach crowd moved in and the day was filled with well-tanned skaters and surfers and seekers of false dreams.
        Then the true residents wandered to the streets to make the rounds of trash bins, to panhandle, and to shamble on quests that only they could understand. But at night, the park belonged to them again, and the green lawns and the benches and the handball courts were as dangerous as any places on earth. In darkness, the deranged souls then ventured forth from the undergrowth to prey on one another.
        They were likely to prey, as well, on unwary visitors who incorrectly assumed that a park was public domain at any hour of the day.
        It was no place for women and girls-unsafe for armed men, in factbut it was the only quick route to the sand and to the foot of the old pier.
        At the pier stairs, they were to be met by someone who would take them on from there to the new life that they were so blindly embracing.
        They had expected to wait. But even as they approached the dark structure, a man walked out of the shadows between those pilings that were still above the tide line. He joined them at the foot of the stairs.
        Even with no lamppost nearby, with only the ambient light of the great city that hugged the shoreline, Harris recognized the man who had come for them. It was the Asian in the reindeer sweater, whom he had first encountered in the theater men's room in Westwood earlier in the evening.
        "Pheasants and dragons," the man said, as though he was not sure that Harris could tell one Asian from another.
        "Yes, I know you," Harris said.
        "You were told to come alone," the contact admonished, but not angrily.
        "We wanted to say good-bye," Darius told him. "And we didn't know…
        We wanted to know-how will we contact them where they're going? "
        "You won't," said the man in the reindeer sweater. "Hard as it may be, you've got to accept that you will probably never see them again."
        In the Microbus, both before Harris had made the phone call from the pizza parlor and after, as they had found their way to the park, they had discussed the likelihood of a permanent separation. For a moment, no one could speak. They stared at one another, in a state of denial that approached paralysis.
        The man in the reindeer sweater backed off a few yards to give them privacy, but he said, "We have little time."
        Although Harris had lost his house, his bank accounts, his job, and everything but the clothes on his back, those losses now seemed inconsequential. Property rights, he had learned from bitter experience, were the essence of all civil rights, but the theft of every dime of his property did not have one tenth-not one hundredth-the impact of losing these beloved people. The theft of their home and savings was a blow, but this loss was an inner wound, as if a piece of his heart had been cut