They get out a full container of California Mello, and lid the whole thing, back and forth, back and forth, until the tears are running down Jim’s face, and his corneas feel like thick slabs of glass. White-orange clouds, heavily underlit by the city, roll slowly inland. Slowly, very slowly, Jim’s anger subsides. It’s still there, but it’s been muted, banked like the coals in the hibachi to a small, melancholy feeling of betrayal. That’s life. People betray you, betray your friends. He recalls the look on Debbie Riggs’s face as she yelled at him. He himself has betrayed more people than have ever betrayed him, and the realization dampens his anger even more. He was shifting onto Erica what he felt toward himself.…

“Angela called,” Tash says. “She said you went to dinner with Virginia?”

“Yeah. Damn it.”

Tash chuckles. “How is she?”

“Feeling enormous amounts of righteous indignation, I would guess, this very moment.”

“Virginia nirvana, eh?”

Jim laughs. They can insult each other’s ex-allies, and cheer each other up. Very sensible. The Mello continues to kick in and he sees how silly his thoughts are. He’s blasted into a calm almost beyond speech.

“Whoah.”

“No lie.”

“Heavy.”

“Untold.”

They chuckle, but only in a very mellow way.

Much cloud gazing later, Jim says, “So what will you do?”

“Who knows.” After a long silence: “I don’t think I can go on living this way, though. It’s too much work. I’ve been thinking about moving.” And suddenly Jim can hear pain in Tashi’s voice, he understands that the stoic mask is a mask and nothing more. Of course the man is hurt. Emotions punch their way through the fog of the Mello, and Jim regrets the anesthetizing. He feels, all of a sudden, overwhelmingly helpless. There’s nothing he can do to help, not a thing.

“Where to?”

“Don’t know. Far away.”

“Oh, man.”

They sit together in silence, and watch a whole lot of orange clouds float inland.

Chapter 63

63

When Jim tracks home later that night, he is feeling about as low as he can remember feeling. He’s below music, he doesn’t even try it. Just the sounds of the freeway as he types in the program for home and tracks along, slumped back in his seat. Even in the middle of the night the lightshow is pinballing all over the basin, a clutch of silent helicopters hovering over the Marine Station like flying saucers, jets booming down onto John Wayne, the flying freeways almost at capacity.…