Needless to say, I did not care for this at all. I would not let that happen. But if it meant that Zeke’s teeth weren’t constantly chattering while we sat next to each other, if it meant that he stopped thinking that he’d actually seen a black van drive by, then I guessed it was okay. It let me keep doing what I needed to do. And it made him a little more excited about what we’d made together, that other people liked it.

Zeke and I sat in my car, the windows down, still baking, our sweat crystallizing, and I watched as he used all his different pencils, and he drew those hands, over and over. I loved watching the quick little movements, that singular moment when you realized what the lines were amounting to. And how, from that moment on, no matter what you did, no matter how you turned your head, you couldn’t unsee it. For some reason, it was a magic trick that I never got tired of. As soon as he was finished, I’d ask him to do it again, and he’d simply flip to the next page in his sketchbook. It wasn’t automatic, it wasn’t rote. Each time, he thought about it, considered what he was doing, and I would sit and wait, trying to pinpoint the second that my eyes could see what I knew was coming. It was July. The summer wasn’t going to last forever. Or maybe it would. I had no idea.

BRIAN TOLD US THAT HE SAW LYLE TAWWATER, WEARING AN Oakland Raiders T-shirt and black sweatpants, hanging up the poster on a gas pump at the Golden Gallon. Lyle was twenty-two and had broken his back in high school when his four-wheeler flipped. His sister had been riding behind him and was still in a coma at a hospital in Knoxville. And Lyle, this quiet little country kid, got real weird when he got out of the full-body cast, started going to flea markets and buying old fixed-blade knives and remaking them into strange, almost medieval-looking devices of violence, which he then sold at craft festivals. He always had the slightest fuzz on his upper lip, the most delicate blond hairs, but his eyes were crazy.

Brian asked Lyle if he was a fugitive, and Lyle smiled and put his index finger to his lips. He got back into his car and said, “I’m one of ’em,” and drove off. Brian had removed the poster and showed it to me. It wasn’t a Xerox of our poster, but Lyle’s own version, the lines so dark and angry, almost vibrating. He’d re-created my phrase exactly, but the hands looked skeletal. And in the bed was a single person, a little girl, hooked up to machines.