We sleep beneath a prion moon, Fanta, a billion misfit molecules hunting each and every one of us. Awake, we can’t see even the biggest broken things.

He pressed on.

Like the great martyr Thich Quang Duc, I will bring the light.

Indeed, that had the ring of something Jim Golly might say. One thing from Fanta’s background research had checked out: Both brothers had been drafted. Jim had fought in Vietnam, been wounded, and been discharged on a psychiatric waiver. Jon had safely pushed paper in Guam.

Just where the road degraded into rubble and began to rise steeply, Fanta had to stop the Tercel again.

The white truck blocked his path.

Abruptly breathing loud and fast, he found himself outside the Tercel, gripping its doorframe.

“Hello?”

A barred owl answered close by. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?

“Hello-hello?”

He heard the big bird’s wing beats.

“I’m just trying to say hello!”

He crept forward and looked into the truck cab, seeing the portable cassette recorder on the seat and a bale of recycled newspapers on the floor. In the rear box beside the rusty oil drum he saw a coiled strip of cloth. He picked it up, let it dangle and uncoil, long and narrow and spotted with rusty stains that might have been blood, or maybe just rust—

His inspection stopped with a sharp metallic double-crunch, same as the cocking of a firearm from a hidden place in the jungle.

Fanta retreated to his car and sat behind the wheel, twisting his head every which way, seeing no one yet, seeing no way to turn around. He waited, waited. He was terrible at backing up his car even under ideal conditions. But if no one appeared, he would have to try. He twisted again. On the backseat he saw his reporter’s notebook. OK, then. At least he would not have come all this way for nothing.

A minute later, he left a torn-out page of the notebook beneath the truck’s ragged wiper.

It seems you want to talk to me. So let’s talk. I’ll be back here tomorrow, at “new midnight” sharp. Leroy Fanta.

He was turning his suddenly exhausted body when in a raw blur—red hands, silver braid flying—the woman lunged and cracked his head with a rifle stock, then stood over him hissing, the barrel jammed deep into his soft gut. She tossed her head back, aimed her face at the fire-tipped treetops.

“Papa!” she shrieked. “Papa!”

Fanta drifted in semiconsciousness, staring up a filthy knee-length dress at her thick and hairy legs. To spare both of them, he closed his eyes. His head was cracked, he could feel it. His brain bled. This was it. He couldn’t rise.

“Good day,” a man’s straining voice broadcast from somewhere. “Good day to you, sir.”