“Ah. Yes. Well. You know.” And Jim starts to giggle himself. Must have been an eyedropper of Funny Bone, that last unmarked one.

Abe is pointing down at the Orange Mall. “Sandy, did you ever tell these guys about the time we were in the parking garage there?”

“No, don’t think I did,” Sandy says, grinning.

Abe turns to the two in the backseat. “We were leaving the mall and driving out of the big parking garage they have, you know, the thirty-story one, and we’re following the arrows down the ramps from floor to floor, and it’s not a simple spiral staircase situation at all, they’ve got it screwed up and you have to go to successive corners of each floor to get down, or something like that. So here we are following the arrows down, and Sandy’s eyes do their bug-out-of-his-head thing, you know?”

Tashi and Jim nod, imitating the look in tandem.

“Exactly.” Abe laughs. “And he says, ‘You know, Abraham, if it weren’t for these arrows…’ and I say uh-huh, yeah, what? And he says, ‘Stop the car! Wait a minute! Stop the car, I forgot something!’ So I sit there while he goes back in the mall, and then he comes running back out with two big cans of paint—one can white, one a gray the color of the garage floors. And two brushes. ‘We’ll start at the bottom,’ he says, ‘and no one will ever escape.’”

“Ahhh, hahaha.”

“The labyrinth without the thread,” Jim says.

“You aren’t kidding! I mean, think about it! So we drive around and at every arrow Sandy jumps out and quick paints over the old one and puts a new one down, pointing in a new direction—not necessarily the opposite direction, just a new one. And finally we reach the top floor. Already we can hear the honking and the cursing and all from the floors below. And then Sandy turns to me with this puzzled expression, and says, ‘Hey, Abe—how are we going to get out of here?’”

Sandy’s manic laugh dominates the rest.

They’re tracking south on the Orange Freeway, coming to the giant interchange with the Santa Ana and the Garden Grove freeways—another immense pretzel of concrete ribbons flying through the air, lightly buttressed on concrete pillars. Their change to the Garden Grove east will take them right through the middle of the knot. Great views over Santa Ana to the south, then Orange to the north; just names in the continuum of the lightshow, but given what Jim has said about the pattern of the streetlights, interesting to observe.

Tashi rises up like he’s achieved enlightenment, and speaks the message from the cosmos: “There are only four streets in OC.”

“What?” cries Abe. “Look around you, man!”

“Platonic forms,” Jim says, understanding. “Ideal types.”

“Only four.” Tash nods. “First there’s the freeways.”

“Okay. I’ll grant you that.”