Mia watched him, his face pale, his demeanor shockingly stern. 'Now tell me,' he said, 'where exactly do you think Neil is?'

Thomas wasn't sure, not exactly, and the lorazepram wasn't making matters any easier—it made his eyes feel like ball bearings. He found it hard to focus on the surrounding traffic. The I-87 stretched like an endless airstrip before him.

He had double-checked Neil's 'x' against the road atlas, and sure enough, it fell north of the Catskills near a village called, appropriately enough, Climax. Back in their Princeton days, close friends of Neil's grandparents had owned a large cottage near there, which he and Neil had visited three or four times with different women. For an entire summer, drunken one-liners like, 'Would you like me to bring you to Climax?' had been their pub-crawl weapon of choice. Despite the eye-rolling and the indignation, more than a few had taken the bait. (The key, Neil would always say, was to make them feel as though they were on the outside of a friendly inside joke). Thomas had enjoyed many climaxes in Climax. The party ended when Neil's grandmother found several used condoms (which, the story went, she had actually picked up, mistaking them for shed snake-skins) behind one of the beds. He and Neil used to jokingly blame each other, but they both knew they had belonged to Neil.

That had been a long time ago. Climax itself was just off the I-87. Thomas had passed the exit on several occasions in subsequent years, each time struck by the strange vertigo of passing a road once taken, the sense of breezing past something better revisited. The question was one of where to go once he reached Climax—his memories of the route had the sound-stage sketchiness of a passenger's. His only hope was that he would remember on the way.

He found the drive at once calming and unnerving, and he distracted himself by pondering this paradox. He had never liked driving, but there was something about the freeway, the surreal quality of whisking through city, field and forest untouched and anonymous; the sense of power exercised, encumbrances shed, of skating along life's catastrophic edge. At a poker game years back, a volunteer firefighter had once horrified him with tales of rural car crashes, of limbs stretched like Play-Doh through twisted metal. Tn the physics of car accidents,' the man had insisted, 'our body is little more than a rubber bag filled with blood. Go fast enough, and it's like throwing water-balloons.' At the time, the comment had made Thomas positively paranoid. But as years passed and the traffic—despite drunks, faulty wheel-bearings, and reckless teenagers—continued to flash by in orderly little rows, his paranoia became a strange euphoria. Somehow freeway driving had become stealing—or a winning streak that could not end.