Seize the Night

radiation shortens my life, because the effect is cumulative. Years of imperceptible injuries accumulate until they manifest as visible lesions, malignancies. Six hundred minutes of exposure, spread one by one over an entire year, will have the same ultimate effect as ten continuous hours on a beach in brightest July. The luminosity of a streetlamp is less dangerous to me than the full ferocity of the sun, but it's not entirely safe.
    Nothing is.
    You, with your properly functioning genes, are able routinely to repair the injury to your skin and eyes that you unknowingly suffer every day.
    Your body, unlike mine, continuously produces enzymes that strip out the damaged segments of nucleotide strands in your cells, replacing them with undamaged DNA.
    I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies, and yet I don't hate you. I don't resent you for the freedom that you take for granted—although I do envy you.
    I don't hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper … well, then I could almost hate you if I didn't know that, like all of us in this imperfect world, you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by longing.
    Rather than rage against XP, I regard it as a blessing. My passage through life is unique.
    For one thing, I have a singular familiarity with the night. I know the world between dusk and dawn as no one else can know it, for I am a brother to the owl and the bat and the badger. I am at home in the darkness. This can be a greater advantage than you might think.
    Of course, no number of advantages can compensate for the fact that death before the age of consent is not uncommon for those with XP.
    Survival far into adulthood isn't a reasonable expectation at least not without progressive neurological disorders such as tremors of the head and hands, hearing loss, slurred speech, even mental impairment.
    Thus far I have tweaked Death's cold nose without retribution.
    I've also been spared all the physical infirmities that my physicians have long predicted.
    I am twenty-eight years old.
    To say that I am living on borrowed time would be not merely a cliche but also an understatement. My entire life has been a heavily mortgaged enterprise.
    But so is yours. Eventual foreclosure awaits all of us. More likely than not, I'll receive my notice before you do, though yours, too, is in the mail.
    Nevertheless, until the postman comes, be happy. There is no other rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of precious time.
    Now, here, on this cool spring night, past the witching hour but with dawn still far away, chasing my sherlock hound, believing in the miracle of Jimmy Wing's survival, I cycled along empty alleys and deserted avenues, through a park where Orson did not pause to sniff a single tree, past the high school, onto lower streets. He led me eventually to the Santa Rosita River, which bisects our town from the heights to the bay.
    In this part of California, where annual rainfall averages a mere fourteen inches, rivers and streams are parched most of the year. The recent rainy season had been no wetter than usual, and this riverbed was entirely exposed, a broad expanse of powdery silt, pale and slightly lustrous in the lunar light. It was as smooth as a bedsheet except for scattered knots of dark driftwood like sleeping homeless men whose limbs were twisted by nightmares.
    In fact, though it was sixty to seventy feet wide, the Santa Rosita looked less like a real river than like a man-made drainage channel or canal. As part of an elaborate federal project to control the flash floods that could swell suddenly out of the steep hills and narrow canyons at the back door of Moonlight Bay, these riverbanks had been raised and stabilized with wide concrete levees from one end of town to the other.
    Orson trotted off the street, across a barren strip of land, to the levee.
    Following him, I coasted between two signs, sets of which alternated with each other for the entire