The forgotten roach, black with oil, is still pressed between Jim’s thumb and forefinger; he pulls a lighter from his shirt pocket, torches the roach’s ashy end, sucks on it till it blooms smoke. He takes a hit so big that he can’t contain it, and coughs hard. Abe has his elbows on his knees now, and he’s staring silently out at the street. His face is all streaked. Jim offers him the roach. He takes it, puffs on it, passes it back, all without a word. A final paroxysm shudders through his flesh, and then he’s still.

After a while he looks at Jim with a wry grimace. “See what I mean?”

Jim nods. He’s at a loss for words. Without premeditation he says, “Yeah, man. You’re fucking nuts.”

Abe laughs shortly. Sniffs.

They finish the roach in silence. They sit on the curb and watch the traffic hum by overhead.

Abe sighs. “I never thought it would get this hard.”

Chapter 65

65

Abe leaves. Shaken to the core, Jim finds himself prowling his ap restlessly. Nothing in it offers the slightest consolation. What a day it’s been.…

The longer he stays in the ap, the more intense becomes his helpless, miserable nervousness. He can’t think what to do. What time is it, anyway? Three A.M. The dead hour. Nothing to do, no one to turn to—the friends he might have looked to for help are looking to him, and he isn’t up to it.

There isn’t a chance of sleeping. The malignancy of thought, vision and memory, all drugged, speeded up, spiked by fear, makes sleep out of the question. The day keeps recurring in his mental theater in a scramble of images, each worse than the last, the sum making him sick with a synergistic toxicity. He recalls Hana’s face, as she saw him and Virginia stagger out of the Hungry Crab together. No great scowl of anguish or despair, no nothing that melodramatic; just a quick snap of shock, of surprise, and then an instantly averted gaze, a disengagement, a refusal to look at him. Goddamn it!

He gives up on any attempt to get hold of himself, and calls Hana’s number, without a thought in his head as to what he’s going to say. At the sound of the ring he panics, his pulse shoots up, he’d hang up if he weren’t sure that Hana would know it was him waking her and then failing to hold together the nerve to speak to her, and with that prospect before him he holds on, through ring after ring.…

Nobody home.

Chapter 66

66

Nobody home.

How did it happen?