“Well, if I didn’t, who else did?” Todd reasoned to himself. He looked at the typewriter. There was a piece of paper in it, with words typed on it, two or three paragraphs that ended halfway through a word. Todd had written and written until he was forced to stop through sheer exhaustion. Other writers might have worried about picking up the thread again, but not Todd. He could, as it were, just rewind the tape in his head to the point where he’d left off, like a secretary taking dictation from her boss. Except in this case, Todd didn’t know who the boss was.

He didn’t want to think about that right now, though, and he certainly didn’t want to write any more until he’d got some food and coffee inside him. So (while Billy Cairns was bent double over his own toilet and finding out just how empty an empty stomach can be) Todd got stiffly out of his seat, and went out to his car, which was still parked at a rakish angle across the lawn.

*  *  *

Todd liked driving. It was manly, it was American and it put words and phrases into his head that he approved of, like “road” and “motion” and “Bildungsroman.” And besides, driving a car was a great feeling. There was the radio, which you could tune into jazz (hep, fifties), rock (still a young guy at heart), or classical (a thinker). Todd liked to twiddle his way across the dial and sample all these kinds of station, but invariably he would settle on a bland top forty station, ostensibly so he could feel that he was above this kind of pap, but really because he liked it.

Right now Todd was cruising into town with Kansas blasting out the Volvo’s speakers, and composing an amusing riff that went what is it about all these groups who are named after places? Kansas, Boston, Chicago… it’s like America has to keep reminding itself that it’s America, a riff that ended when Todd was unable to think of any more bands who were named after places.

A light turned red and Todd stopped the car. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in vague time to the radio. It was a long light. Todd looked around. He saw cars and trucks. He saw a strip mall. A tire shop, and a diner with an optimistically large parking lot. A small brown car was pulling into the parking lot. Todd despised small cars, regarding them as somehow un-American (the Volvo might be European but it was big, like an oblong Cadillac), and this one was particularly contemptible, being small enough to be Japanese.

“A contemptible automobile,” said Todd to himself, as the driver—a not especially tiny-looking person in a leather jacket—got out. He adopted the voice of Top Cat. “A… contemptible…”