Nelson drives the Corolla through West Brewer. Those new-style icicle lights hang like bright napkins from the little porches of the row houses that slant down to the river and the Weiser Street Bridge. The Bridge has old-fashioned lamp standards, yellow glass balls and iron curlicues going green with age, but the light falls cold and contemporary from tall violet tubes on aluminum stems. At the far end of the bridge sits an upscale coffee bar that used to be a black hangout, Jimbo’s Friendly Lounge, before the blacks were chased out of South Brewer by gentrification. Then there unrolls beneath the wheels of the Corolla Brewer’s main drag in all its Yuletide glory: the trees rimming Weiser Square are looped with necklaces of white lights, scribbles in three dimensions. The square, an open farmer’s market originally, was decades ago blocked to form an ill-advised pedestrian park to revive the downtown, but it turned into a dangerous forest, and by a newer plan has been reopened to automobile traffic. They pass Fourth Street, and the bronze statue of Conrad Weiser in Mohawk headdress in the center of the traffic circle at Fifth Street. Trolley cars used to go east, west, north, and south from this point, to amusement parks and picnic groves. The human traffic thickens; the city fathers have laid on a Millennium Ball in the atrium of the glass-enclosed mall between Fifth and Sixth on the left side of the street, as well as the Christian-rock concert a block up on the right, in the great hole. A dim din penetrates the car windows.

“Hey Nelson,” Billy says. “The Sunflower Beer clock says it’s midnight! Here it’s the millennium and we’re all stuck in this little Jap jalopy! Nothing’s moving!”

“Don’t panic,” Nelson tells him. “That clock never told the right time. The Laid-Back is only up at Ninth, we’ll be there in a minute.”

Then Nelson sees the dire occur: at the intersection of Sixth and Weiser, where Kroll’s Department Store used to be, two cars ahead of them, the traffic light goes out. Hanging high above the asphalt, the light was green, and now is dead. Not red, dead. The sticky traffic halts completely. Revellers, mostly Hispanic kids in jeans and windbreakers, dart among the cars. A shout is going up, but here and there, as if nobody knows exactly what is happening. The cars behind them honk, in celebration or exasperation. The streetlights flicker.

“Oh my God,” Annabelle says, “terrorists just like they said,” and begins to cry again.

“It’s a little glitch,” Billy says, feigning calm, though this must feel like a tunnel to him. “These lights are all on computers.”