For Abe as for most people, the weeks fly by in a haze of undifferentiated activity. He can never believe it as he tears the month past off the calendar: whatever happened to that one? His shifts on the job all blur together, especially since he deliberately tries to forget most of them. He couldn’t tell you a thing about his mad drive from Laguna Canyon Road up to UCI hospital: did they lose the victim that time? Was he working with Xavier? He has no idea, and what was it, one, two months ago? No one can tell; no one is operating on that kind of long-term time scale anymore. Lucky if you can remember what happened day before yesterday.

Somewhere inside him, of course, it is all remembered: every crash, every drive, every expression flitting over X’s face as he sweats it out with the victims in the gutbucket. But the recollection mechanism is firmly turned off. As far as Abe knows in his waking hours, it’s completely gone. Two months ago? Gone! It’s present tense for Abe, the here and now his only reality, the moment and the only moment. This may account for the fact that he very seldom has an ally. He doesn’t think about it. Alliance? With Inez, right? Or was it Debbie. He’ll find out tonight at Sandy’s party.

Tonight he’s working with Xavier again, as usual. As long as one of them doesn’t trade around off days to extend a vacation (which happens fairly frequently) they’re a team. They like that. It gives the job some continuity, makes it a little more like ordinary jobs.

The radio crackles, X picks it up. “We hear you, All-Seeing One.”

They’re tapped out. Code nine, pile-up, five to eight cars, Foothill Freeway just west of the Eastern Freeway, still up on the viaduct. They’re on the Santa Ana Freeway in Tustin, they gun up the Eastern and then up onto the Foothill. The tracks are stacked, Abe drives them on the really narrow viaduct shoulder toward a seemingly airborne forest of flashing reds and blues, three CHPs and another rescue truck already on the scene. Abe and Xavier jump out. The other rescue pair is engaged at the front of the pileup, so they go to work on the rear end. “X, see if you can get another truck or two here fast.”