Seize the Night

bag and pulling it over my head.
    As the Chevy was passing us, its headlights no longer a danger, I opened my eyes and saw two men in the front, one in the backseat.
    They were big guys, dressed in dark clothes, as expressionless as turnips, all interested in us. Their night-of-the-living-dead eyes were flat, cold, and disturbingly direct.
    For some reason, I thought of the shadowy figure I had seen on the sloping buttress, above the tunnel that led under Highway 1.
    After we were past the Chevy, Bobby said, “Legal muscle.”
    “Professional trouble,” I agreed.
    “They might as well have had it stenciled on their foreheads.”
    Watching their taillights in the side mirror, I said, “They don't seem to be after us, anyway. Wonder what they're looking for.”
    “Maybe Elvis.”
    When the Chevy didn't double back and follow us, I said, “So you're gonna tell Pia that in this dream of yours, she's levitating over some waves, and she says, Papa he'e nalu .”
    “Right. In the dream, she tells me to get a tandem board we can ride together. I figured that was prophetic, so I got the board, and now I'm ready.”
    “What a crock,” I said, by way of friendly criticism.
    “It's true. I had the dream.”
    “No way.”
    “Way. In fact, I had it three nights in a row, which weirded me out a little. I'll tell her all that, and let her interpret it any way she wants.”
    “While you play mysterious, not admitting to being Kahuna but exhibiting godlike charisma.”
    He looked worried. Braking at a stop sign after having ignored all those before it, he said, “Truth. You don't think I can pull it off?”
    When it comes to charisma, I have never known anyone like Bobby, The stuff pours off him in such copious quantity that he positively wades in it.
    “Bro,” I said, “you have so much charisma that if you wanted to form a suicide cult, you'd have people signing up by the thousands to jump off a cliff with you.”
    He was pleased. “Yeah? You're not spinning me?”
    “No spin,” I assured him.
    “Mahalo.”
    “You're welcome. But one question.”
    As he accelerated away from the stop sign, he said, “Ask.”
    “Why not just tell Pia that you've decided you're Kahuna?”
    “I can't lie to her. I love her.”
    “It's a harmless lie.”
    “Do you lie to Sasha?”
    “No.”
    “Does she lie to you?”
    “She doesn't lie to anyone,” I said.
    “Between a man and woman in love, no lie is small or harmless.”
    “You keep surprising me.”
    “My wisdom?”
    “Your mushy little teddy-bear heart.”
    “Squeeze me, and I sing ‘Feelings.’”
    “I'll take your word for it.”
    We were only a few blocks from Lilly Wing's house.
    “Go in by the back, through the alley,” I directed.
    I wouldn't have been surprised to find a police patrol car or another unmarked sedan full of granite-eyed men waiting for us, but the alleyway was deserted. Sasha Goodall's Ford Explorer stood in front of Lilly's garage door, and Bobby parked behind it.
    Beyond the windbreak of giant eucalyptuses, the wild canyon to the east lay in unrelieved blackness. Without the lamp of the moon, anything might have been out there, a bottomless abyss rather than a mere canyon, a great dark sea, the end of the earth and a yawning infinity.
    As I got out of the Jeep, I remembered good Orson investigating the weeds along the verge of the canyon, urgently seeking Jimmy. His yelp of excitement when he caught the scent. His swift and selfless commitment to the chase.
    Only hours ago. Yet ages ago.
    Time seemed out of joint even here, far beyond the walls of the egg room.
    At the thought of Orson, a coldness closed around my heart, and for a moment I couldn't breathe.
    I recalled waiting by candlelight beside my father in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, two years ago this past January, waiting with my mother's body for the hearse that would take her to Kirk's Funeral Home, feeling as though my own body had been broken beyond repair by the loss of her, almost afraid to move or even to speak, as though I might fly apart like a hollow ceramic figurine struck with a hammer.
    And my father's hospital room only a month ago. The terrible night he died Holding his hand in mine, leaning over the bed railing to hear his final whispered words— Fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing —and then his hand going slack in mine. I had kissed his forehead, his rough cheek.
    Because I myself am a walking miracle, still healthy and whole with XP at the age of