As if in response to his thoughts, Tyler’s insides pitched as the car slowed and then turned to the left. The sky pivoted on its fulcrum, drifted, drawing a line, and then the car paused. Tyler emerged from his drowsiness. He recognized somewhere in the stalled motion that he was required to act. He dragged himself up in the seat, which all of a sudden he smelled: weed and old cigarettes. He looked at his lap and, for a second, didn’t recognize his left hand—it was dyed red, all the way down to the fingernails. He scratched minutely on the upholstery, on a resin-like stain. Tyler looked over at the driver, for the first time. The man was looking away, out the window, his hands still on the steering wheel. He had dreadlocks pulled into a ponytail, stretched earlobes. A little halo of loosed curly hairs around his head glared in the setting sun. Tyler felt he recognized him from somewhere, indefinably, that his bearing, his outfit, the Taurus were familiar to him: he tried to remember the names of people he knew but could only think of Rhea, Typhus, David, Sarah—his life before the basement seemed like a cover story he had poorly memorized. He thought if he could see the driver’s face, he could make a determination. They were in a parking lot in the country, it was almost dusk: these two facts arrived like brilliant flashes of insight, like he’d just run a wet rag across the filthy surface of his perception. The man turned off the engine, which seemed like another signal. Tyler was sweating in concentration in his thick hoodie, in the stale air of the car.

After a minute, when Tyler didn’t move, the man in the driver’s seat turned and looked at him—he was a kid, not an adult. They made eye contact for a second and again Tyler thought he was so familiar, there was a kind of buried history between them, some routine contact he couldn’t call up, he was familiar but there was that space in him, too; Tyler could have reached over and outlined it in marker. How long could one go, Tyler wondered, until they felt it, knew it was there? Forever? Tyler pulled his red hand into the sleeve of his hoodie, concealing it. What was the value in knowing?

The young man’s eyes flicked down at the movement: Tyler noticed that the olive sleeve of his hoodie was spotted dark brown, a blobby trail that went all the way to his elbow.