Seize the Night

o'clock.
    Moving out of the street to a leafy Indian laurel, I unclipped the phone from my belt and switched it on. I squatted with my back against the tree.
    Bobby Halloway, my best friend for more than seventeen years, has several phone numbers. He has given the most private of these to no more than five friends, and he answers that line at any hour. I keyed in the number and pressed send .
    Bobby picked up on the third ring, “This better be important.”
    Although I believed that I was alone in this part of Dead Town, I spoke softly, “Were you sleeping?”
    “Eating kibby.” Kibby is Mediterranean cuisine, ground beef, onion, pine nuts, and herbs wrapped in a moist ball of bulgur and quickly deep-fried.
    “Eating it with what?”
    “Cucumbers, tomatoes, some pickled turnip.”
    “At least I didn't call when you were having sex.”
    “This is worse.”
    “You're way serious about your kibby.”
    “So entirely serious.”
    “I've just been radically clamshelled,” I said, which is surfer lingo for being enfolded by a large collapsing wave and wiped off your board.
    Bobby said, “You at the beach?”
    “I'm speaking figuratively.”
    “Don't do that.”
    “Sometimes it's best,” I said, meaning that someone might be tapping his phone.
    “I hate this crap.”
    “Get used to it, bro.”
    “Kibby spoiler.”
    “I'm looking for a missing weed.” A weed is a small person, and the term is usually but not always used as a synonym for grommet , which means a preadolescent surfer.
    Jimmy Wing was too young to be a surfer, but he was indeed a small person.
    “Weed?” Bobby asked.
    “A totally small weed.”
    “You playing at being Nancy Drew again?”
    “In Nancy work up to my neck,” I confirmed.
    “Kak,” he said, which along this stretch of coast is not a nice thing for one surfer to call another, though I believed I detected a note of affection in his voice that was almost equal to the disgust.
    A sudden flapping caused me to leap to my feet before I realized that the source of the sound was just a night bird settling into the branches overhead. A nighthawk or an oilbird, a lone nightingale or chimney swift out of its element, nothing as large as an owl.
    “This is stone-dead serious, Bobby. I need your help.”
    “You see what you get for ever going inland?”
    Bobby lives far out on the southern horn of the bay, and surfing is his vocation and avocation, his life's purpose, the foundation of his philosophy, not merely his favorite sport but a true spiritual enterprise. The ocean is his cathedral, and he hears the voice of God only in the rumble of the waves. As far as Bobby is concerned, little of real consequence ever occurs farther than half a mile from the beach.
    Peering into the branches overhead, I was unable to spot the now quiet bird, even though the moonlight was bright and though the struggling laurel was not richly clothed in leaves. To Bobby, I said again, “I need your help.”
    “You can do it yourself. Just stand on a chair, tie a noose around your neck, and jump.”
    “Don't have a chair.”
    “Pull the shotgun trigger with your toe.”
    In any circumstance, he can make me laugh, and laughter keeps me sane.
    An awareness that life is a cosmic joke is close to the core of the philosophy by which Bobby, Sasha, and I live. Our guiding principles are simple, Do as little harm to others as you can, make any sacrifice for your true friends, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others, and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie.
    Sometimes black humor is the only kind we can summon, but even dark laughter can sustain.
    I said, “Bobby, if you knew the name of the weed, you'd already be here.”
    He sighed. “Bro, how am I ever going to be a fully realized, super maximum, jerk-off slacker if you keep insisting I have a conscience?”
    “You're doomed to be responsible.”
    “That's what I'm afraid of.”
    “The furry dude is missing, too,” I said, meaning Orson.
    “Citizen Kane?” Orson was named after Orson Welles, the director of Citizen Kane , for whose films he has a strange fascination.
    I made an admission that I found difficult to voice, “I'm scared for