Fear Nothing

College, when Bobby inherited, after taxes, the house and a modest sum of cash, he dropped out of school. This infuriated his parents. He was able to shrug off their fury, however, because the beach and the sea and the future were his.
        Besides, his folks have been furious about one thing or another all their lives, and Bobby is inured to it. They own and edit the town newspaper, and they fancy themselves tireless crusaders for enlightened public policy, which means they think most citizens are either too selfish to do the right thing or too stupid to know what is best for them. They expected Bobby to share what they called great issues their “passion for and of our time,” but Bobby wanted to escape from his family's influence and from all the poorly concealed envy, rancor, and egotism that was a part of it. All Bobby wanted was peace. His folks wanted peace, too, for the entire planet, peace in every corner of Spaceship Earth, but they weren't capable of providing it within the walls of their own home.
        With the cottage and the seed money to launch the business that now supported him, Bobby found peace.
        The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every timepiece with a digital readout blinks us toward implosion. Time is so precious that it can't be purchased. What Corky had given Bobby was not time, really, but the chance to live without clocks, without an awareness of clocks, which seems to make time pass more gently, with less shearing fury.
        My parents tried to give the same thing to me. Because of my XP, however, I occasionally hear ticking. Maybe Bobby occasionally hears it, too. Maybe there's no way any of us can entirely escape an awareness of clocks.
        In fact, Orson's night of despair, when he had regarded the stars with such despondency and had refused all my efforts to comfort him, might have been caused by an awareness of his own days ticking away. We are told that the simple minds of animals are not capable of encompassing the concept of their own mortality. Yet every animal possesses a survival instinct and recognizes danger. If it struggles to survive, it understands death, no matter what the scientists and the philosophers might say.
        This is not New Age sentimentalism. This is simply common sense.
        Now, in Bobby's shower, as I scrubbed the soot off Orson, he continued to shiver. The water was warm. The shivers had nothing to do with the bath.
        By the time I blotted the dog with several towels and fluffed him with a hair dryer that Pia Klick had left behind, his shakes had passed. While I dressed in a pair of Bobby's blue jeans and a long-sleeve, blue cotton sweater, Orson glanced at the frosted window a few times, as if leery of whoever might be out there in the night, but his confidence appeared to be returning.
        With paper towels, I wiped off my leather jacket and my cap. They still smelled of smoke, the cap more than the jacket.
        In the dim light, I could barely read the words above the bill: Mystery Train . I rubbed the ball of my thumb across the embroidered letters, recalling the windowless concrete room where I'd found the cap, in one of the more peculiar abandoned precincts of Fort Wyvern.
        Angela Ferryman's words came back to me, her response to my statement that Wyvern had been closed for a year and a half: Some things don't die. Can't die. No matter how much we wish them dead.
        I had another flashback to the bathroom at Angela's house: a mental image of her death-startled eyes and the silent surprised oh of her mouth. Again, I was gripped by the conviction that I had overlooked an important detail regarding the condition of her body, and as before, when I tried to summon a more vivid memory of her blood-spattered face, it grew not clearer in my mind but fuzzier.
         We're screwing it up, Chri's… bigger than we've ever screwed up before… and already there's no way… to undo what's been done.
        

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        The tacos - packed with shredded chicken, lettuce, cheese, and salsa - were delicious. We sat at the kitchen table to eat, instead of leaning over the sink, and we washed down the food with beer.
        Although Sasha had fed him earlier, Orson cadged a few bits of chicken, but he couldn't charm me into giving him another Heineken.
        Bobby had turned on the radio, and it was tuned to Sasha's show, which had just come on the