Seize the Night

Along bristling brown hedgerows.
    Among dead shrubs from which leaped bony shadows.
    Though the light was directed away from me, the backwash was great enough to be troublesome. My eyes quickly grew tired, they felt strained, grainy. I would have put on my sunglasses, which on some occasions I wear even at night, but a pair of Ray-Bans sure as hell wouldn't facilitate the search.
    Cruising slowly, surveying the night, Bobby said, “What's wrong with your face?”
    “Sasha says nothing.”
    “She needs an emergency transfusion of good taste. What're you picking?”
    “I'm not picking.”
    “Didn't your mom ever teach you not to pick at yourself?”
    “I'm poking.”
    While with my right hand I held the pistol-grip spotlight, with my left I'd been unconsciously fingering the sore spot on my face, which I had first discovered a little earlier in the night.
    “You see a bruise here?” I asked, indicating the penny-size tenderness on my left cheek.
    “Not in this light.”
    “Sore.”
    “Well, you've been knocking around.”
    “This is the way it'll start.”
    “What?”
    “Cancer.”
    “Probably a pimple.”
    “First a soreness, then a lesion, and then, because my skin has no defense against it … rapid metastasis.”
    “You're a one-man party,” Bobby said.
    “Just being realistic.”
    Turning right into a new street, Bobby said, “What good did being realistic ever do anyone?”
    More shabby bungalows.
    More dead hedgerows.
    “Got a headache, too,” I said.
    “You're giving me a full-on skull-splitter.”
    “One day maybe I'll get a headache that never goes away, from neurological damage caused by XP.”
    “Dude, you've got more psychosomatic symptoms than Scrooge Mcduck has money.”
    “Thanks for the analysis, Doctor Bob. You know, you've never cut me any slack in seventeen years.”
    “You never need any.”
    “Sometimes,” I said.
    He drove in silence for half a block and then said, “You never bring me flowers anymore.”
    “What?”
    “You never tell me I'm pretty.”
    I laughed in spite of myself. “Asshole.”
    “See? You're way cruel.”
    Bobby stopped the Jeep in the middle of the street.
    I looked around alertly. “Something?”
    “If I was wrapped in neoprene, man, I wouldn't have to stop,” he said, neoprene meaning the wet suit that a surfer wears when the water temp is too nipple for him to hit the waves in only a pair of swimming trunks.
    During a long session in cold water, while sitting in the line waiting for a set of glassy, pumping monoliths, surfers from time to time relieve themselves right in their wet suits. The word for it is urinophoria , that lovely warm sensation that lasts until the constant but gradual flush of seawater rinses it away.
    If surfing isn't the most romantic, glamorous sport ever , then I don't know what is. Certainly not golf.
    Bobby got out of the Jeep and stepped to the curb, with his back to me.
    “I hope this bladder pressure doesn't mean I've got cancer.”
    “You already made your point,” I said.
    “This bizarre urge to relieve myself. Man, it's … it's mondo malignant.”
    “Just hurry up.”
    “I probably held it too insanely long, and now I've got uric-acid poisoning.”
    I had switched off the spotlight. I put it down and picked up the shotgun.
    Bobby said, “My kidneys will probably implode, my hair'll fall out, my nose'll drop off. I'm doomed.”
    “You are if you don't shut up.”
    “Even if I don't die, what wahine is going to want to date a bald, noseless guy with imploded kidneys?”
    The engine noise, the headlights, and the spotlight might have brought us unwanted attention if anyone or anything hostile was in the neighborhood. The troop had hidden at the sound of the Jeep when Bobby had first driven into Wyvern, but perhaps they had done some reconnaissance since then, in which case they were aware that we were only two and that even with guns we were not necessarily a match for a horde of peevish primates.
    Worse, maybe they realized that one of us was Christopher Snow, son of Wisteria Snow, who perhaps was known to them as Wisteria von Frankenstein.
    Bobby zipped up and returned safely to the Jeep. “That's the first time anyone's been prepared to lay down covering fire for me while I peed.”
    “ De nada. ”
    “You feeling better, bro?”
    He knew me well enough to understand that my apparent attack of hypochondria was actually unexpressed anxiety for Orson.
    I said, “Sorry for acting like a