“Why don’t you take tomorrow night off. In the long run it’ll help you keep this pace.”

“Good idea.”

So the next night he comes home early, around eleven, and corrals Abe, Tashi, and Jim. “Hey you guys, let’s cruise.”

The others like the idea. They get in Sandy’s big car and track onto Newport Freeway north. Sandy programs a loop into the car: Newport Freeway north, Riverside west, Orange south, Garden Grove east, and then north on the Newport again: it’s upper level all the way in each of these directions, so that it’s like going for a little plane ride on autopia, with the great lightshow and all the other cars and their passengers for entertainment.

They started doing this together on the wrestling team, when they first got driver’s licenses. Starving and thirsty high school kids, trying to make weight, or celebrating the end of the weekly necessity to make weight by pigging out.… Tonight there’s a strongly nostalgic feeling about it; they’re cruising the freeways, a basic OC activity. How could they have lost the habit?

Sandy is driving, Abe’s in the front passenger seat, Jim is behind Abe, Tash behind Sandy. The first order of business is to deploy a few eyedroppers, in fact there’s a sort of synergistic capacity upgrade when these four get together like this, and they really drown their eyes, according to long-standing tradition.

“Nothing like coming down to the old club and settling in,” Jim says blissfully. “The lightshow is good tonight, isn’t it? Look there, you can see in the pattern of the streetlights, the original plattings for the first towns in the area. See the really tight squares of streetlights are the oldest towns, when the platting was into really small blocks. There’s Fullerton … there’s Anaheim, the oldest … pretty soon we’ll see Orange … and in between the pattern stretches way out, see? Longer blocks and twisty housing tracts.”

“Yeah, I see it!” Sandy says, surprised. “I never noticed that before, but it’s there.”

“Yep,” Jim says, proudly. He goes rattling on about real estate history, which his employer First American Title Insurance and Real Estate has all the records for; then about First American and Humphrey’s attempt to build his office building on the land of the dismembered Cleveland National Forest; then about a new computer system that the company has installed in the offices, very advanced, “I mean you really can talk to it, not just simple commands but really complicated stuff, it’s like the real beginning of the man-computer interface, and it’s really going to mean a lot for,” and then suddenly all three of his friends have turned to stare Jim in the face.

He comes to a halt and Sandy giggles. Abe, shaking his head, says in a pitying, exasperated voice: “Jim, no one gives a fuck about computers.”