Tom stares out the window bright-eyed. As often happens, his bitterness has galvanized him, made him seem younger. “Sure. If I could do it without hurting anybody. Or getting hurt myself.” Crack! “A liberal to the end. I guess that’s always been my problem. But yeah, why not? It would take a lot of that kind of thing. But they should be stopped somehow. They’re sucking the world dry to fuel their games.”

Jim nods, thinking it over.

They talk about Jim’s parents, a natural enough association, although neither of them mentions Dennis’s occupation. Jim talks a bit about his work and friends, until Tom’s eyes begin to blur. He’s getting tired: slumping down, speech coming with an ugly hiss of breath. Jim sees again that the mind, that sharp-edged bitter quick mind, is trapped in an old wreck of a body that is just barely kept going by constant infusion of oxygen, of drugs. A body that poisons its mind occasionally, blunts all its edges … One gnarled hand creeps over the bedsheet after the other, like a pair of crabs; spotted, fleshless, the joints so swollen that the fingers will never straighten again.… That has to hurt! It all does. He must live with pain every day, just as a part of living.

Jim can’t really imagine that, and the thought doesn’t stay with him long. Too hard. It’s getting time to go, it really is.

“Tell me one last Orange County story, Tom. Then I’ve got to go.”

Tom stares through him, without recognition: Jim shivers.

The focus returns, Tom stares out the window at the sky. “Before they built Dana Point harbor, there was a beautiful beach down there under the bluff. Not many people went there. The only way down was a rickety old wood staircase built against the bluff. Every year steps came out and it got chancier to go down it. But we did. The thing was to go after a big storm had hit the coast. The beach was all fresh, sand torn out and flushed and thrown back in. And in the sand were tiny bits of colored stones. Gem sand, we called it. It was really an extraordinary thing. I don’t know if they really were tiny bits of sapphires, rubies, emeralds—but they looked like it, and that’s what we called them. Not driftglass, no, real stones. Walking along the beach real slow, you’d see a blink of colored light, green, red, blue—perfectly intense and clear against the wet sand. You could collect a little handful in a day, and if you kept them in a jar of water … I had one at home. Wonder what happened to that. What happens to all the things you own? The people you know? I’m sure I never would have thrown that out.…”