His voice tightens, he’s looking down in the gutter now. “X told me that once when he was losing it bad he couldn’t stand any of the crashes with kids in them. Because once he looked in this backseat and found a body and said to himself, What the hell is this black kid doing with these white folks, and he turned it over and it had one of his kids’ faces. And he sort of fainted on his feet, and when he came to it was some white kid he’d never seen.”

“My God.”

“I know. You can see why X worries me. But—but”—Abe is still resolutely looking in the gutter—“when I saw it was Lillian, I stepped away and all of a sudden remembered X’s story and I thought I had gone crazy, that it wasn’t her and I had hallucinated it. And then when I was sure it was Lillian, I mean really sure … I was almost glad!”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t!”

Abe jumps up, paces back and forth in front of Jim, out in the street. He hands Jim the forgotten spliff: “You don’t understand! You think you do because you read so fucking much, but you never really do any of it so you don’t really know!”

Jim looks at Abe calmly. “That’s probably true.”

Abe grimaces, shakes his head a few times. “Ah, no. That’s bullshit. Everyone knows, as long as they’re not sleepwalkers. But shit. I would rather have had Lillian Keilbacher dead than have gone crazy for even one minute!”

“Just at that moment, you mean. It’s a natural reaction, you were shocked out of your mind. You can think anything at times like that.”

“Uhn.” Abe isn’t satisfied by that. But he sits down on the curb again, takes the spliff.

“Most people would have just freaked on the spot.”

Abe shakes his head, taking a hit. “Not so.”

“Well, not many would try to go tell the family like you did.”

“Uhn.”

They smoke a while in silence.

Jim takes a deep breath; he’s used to the Bernards’ Saddleback house becoming a brooding, Byronic place, overhanging the world; but it appears Abe can confer the atmosphere wherever he goes, if his immense nervous energy is spinning him in the right way, in the right mode … so that Jim’s streetcorner curb under its sodium vapor light now swirls with heraldic significance, it looks like an Edward Hopper painting, the bungalow aps lined out side by side, the minilawns, empty sidewalks, fire hydrant, orange glare of light, giant pylons and the great strip of freeway banding the white-orange sky—all external signs of a dark, deep moodiness.