Rabbit takes the keys, which come into his hand as cold as if they have been in the refrigerator. “Thanks a lot. Or have I said that before? Sorry about this. Great dinner, Peggy.”

“Glad you liked it.”

“We’ll let you know what’s what. It’s probably nothing, the son of a bitch is probably just stoned out of his mind.”

Nelson has put his socks and sneakers on. “Let’s go, Dad. Thank you very much, Mrs. Fosnacht.”

“You’re both very welcome.”

“Thank Mr. Fosnacht in case I can’t go on the boat tomorrow.”

Billy is still trying. “Mo-om, let me.”

“No.”

“Mom, you’re a bitch.”

Peggy slaps her son: pink leaps up on his cheek in stripes like fingers, and the child’s face hardens beyond further controlling. “Mom, you’re a whore. That’s what the bridge kids say. You’ll lay anybody.”

Rabbit says, “You two take it easy,” and turns; they flee, father and son, down the hall, down the steel stairwell, not waiting for an elevator, to a basement of parked cars, a polychrome lake caught in a low illumined grotto. Rabbit blinks to realize that even while he and Peggy were heating their little mutual darkness a cold fluorescent world surrounded them in hallways and down stairwells and amid unsleeping pillars upholding their vast building. The universe is unsleeping, neither ants nor stars sleep, to die will be to be forever wide awake. Nelson finds the blue car for him. Its dashlights glow green at ignition. Almost silently the engine comes to life, backs them out, sneaks them along past the stained grotto walls. In a corner by the brickwork of a stairwell the all-chrome mini-bike waits to be repaired. An asphalt exitway becomes a parking lot, becomes a street lined with narrow houses and great green signs bearing numbers, keystones, shields, the names of unattainable cities. They come onto Weiser; the traffic is thin, sinister. The stoplights no longer regulate but merely wink. Burger Bliss is closed, though its purple oven glows within, plus a sallow residue of ceiling tubes to discourage thieves and vandals. A police car nips by, bleating. The Acme lot at this hour has no horizon. Are the few cars still parked on it abandoned? Or lovers? Or ghosts in a world so thick with cars their shadows like leaves settle everywhere? A whirling light, insulting in its brilliance, materializes in Rabbit’s rear-view mirror and as it swells acquires the overpowering grief of a siren. The red bulk of a fire engine plunges by, sucking the Fury toward the center of the street, where the trolley-track bed used to be. Nelson cries, “Dad!”

“Dad what?”

“Nothing, I thought you lost control.”

“Never. Not your Dad.”

The movie marquee, unlit and stubby, is announcing, BACK BY REQST—2001. All these stores along Weiser have burglar lights on and a few, a new defense, wear window grilles.

“Dad, there’s a glow in the sky.”

“Where?”

“Off to the right.”

He says, “That can’t be us. Penn Villas is more ahead.”