It’s a warm night. Overhead the freeway hums, right in phase with Jim’s nerves. He can see the sides of the cars in the fast lane zoom by, one headlight each. One of the freeway’s great concrete pylons thrusts out of the sidewalk just three houses down. The maintenance men’s ladder starts ten feet up, but the neighborhood kids have tied a nylon rope ladder to it. With some difficulty, aware of his buzz, his drunkenness, Jim gets the daypack on his back and ascends the ladder. When his head is at the level of the freeway he stops. Buzz of cars passing, lightshow of headlights strobing by, zoom zoom zoom zoom. Funny to think that only the little units extending down from the front axle, not quite touching the shiny strip of the track, are guiding the cars, and keeping them from running into each other, or over the rail above Jim’s head, down onto the houses below. Magnetism, what is it, anyway? Jim shakes his head, confused. Concentrates on the task at hand. Left arm wrapped over a step of the ladder, he frees the daypack from his right arm and twists it around to unzip it. Out comes a cassette. All the cars’ tires run over approximately the same part of the freeway; they’ve made two black bands on the freeway’s white concrete, a couple feet to left and right of the track, and almost two feet wide themselves. He’s not too far from the nearer one.

He slides a cassette over the concrete, and it stops right in the black band. The next car to pass crunches it to smithereens. Loops of tape blow off to the side.

“Yeah! Good shot!” Jim continues to cheer himself on as cassette after cassette skids onto the tire track of the fast lane, and is reduced to plastic fragments and streamers of tape.

The last one, however, goes too far, landing between the tire marks and the guidance track. Without pausing to think about it Jim climbs onto the freeway, catching the daypack on the rail and practically pulling himself off into space. Oops. During one of the rare gaps in traffic he runs out into the fast lane, recovers the cassette, trips and staggers, puts the cassette on the tire marks, scrambles desperately back to the ladder.

A big car crunches the cassette under its wheels.

Carefully, awkwardly, Jim descends. Safe on the ground again, he sucks in a deep breath. “Probably should have kept just one.” He laughs. “No backsliding now, boy! You’re free whether you like it or not.” Overhead, long tangles of videotape float across the sky.

Chapter 64

64

No sooner has Jim returned to his ap, which, to tell the truth, looks just as dreary and lifeless as before, than there’s a sharp knock at the door. He opens it.

“Abe! What are you doing here?”

Abe smiles lopsidedly.