Back in the Corolla, the movie uneasily digesting on top of the dinner with its wine and smoked oysters, Pru says, “Well, I didn’t think that was so great. Could you believe that ending? I couldn’t. Stars at night from a field, his grandmother’s hands—that guy never acted like a man who had ever noticed his grandmother’s hands or anything except his own selfish itches and threatened ego.”

From the back seat Billy contributes, “I must say it made me feel better about death. Didn’t Kevin Spacey look happy, dead?”

“He looked spacy,” Nelson says. “He looked like a freeze-frame. That’s what death is, a freeze-frame. Hey, where do you want to go now? I’ve run out of ideas. We have half an hour. There’s stuff downtown, I know. They’ve put a heated tent for a Christian-rock concert in the big hole on Weiser above Sixth, where the housing project has stalled. We could go and mill about.”

“Ugh,” Billy says.

The parking lot at Instant Classics is tricky to get out of, five rows of cars feeding into one exit lane, and Nelson is never very sure of himself on this side of Brewer. They have put in some new bypass highways and mall-access roads that confuse him. He somehow thought they would spontaneously know where to go. Why does everything always fall on him? He says, “I wonder if we could get into the Laid-Back.”

Pru says, “That old druggie hangout of yours?”

“It’s all clean,” Billy pipes up. “It’s changed owners, after the last set got busted and put in jail. No drugs now. No smoking of any sort.”

“Do I turn right or left up here to get back on 222?” Nelson asks.

Annabelle hears him but can only say, “I used to work out this way at a nursing home but everything’s changed.”

“Try right, it’s easier,” Billy says.

As Nelson follows this directive he hears behind him Annabelle ask in a soft sympathetic searching voice she has never used with her brother, “Billy, do you think a lot about death?”

“All the time, how did you know?”

“The way you kept flinching in the movie.”

“I thought that neurotic kid with the videocam was going to kill somebody, maybe the girl he was spying on.”

“Wasn’t she a hard-hearted horror?” Nelson chimes in. “ ‘Kill my father. Do it.’ ” He remembers Michael DiLorenzo confessing that he wanted to kill his parents, and that Michael killed himself, maybe so he wouldn’t do it. Nelson tastes the dead iron at the core of even green planets. No fresh start, no mercy. The headlights are picking up flecks, sparks like mayflies; it can’t be snow, so it must be flying dirt.

“I didn’t like her,” Annabelle announces. “I identified more with the other one, the pretty one who acted like a tramp but then turned out to be a virgin.”