“Until they’re claimed. So far it’s classified as ‘unclaimed remains.’” He had finished feeding the last of the paper, yet the photocopier continued to chatter, shooting out and sorting the copies into the tray. “So far it looks like no one wants him.”

“We want him,” Olive said.

Just before Red Hill, on their way back to the North Shore, they passed the morgue, which was visible from the freeway—a windowless building beyond a stand of flowering trees, and the sign that Stickney had mentioned, AFFORDABLE CASKETS.

“We could stop.”

Sharkey was driving, badly—but he’d insisted. He accelerated—his way of replying—and past Red Hill said, “Let’s look at these papers first. Get acquainted.” He said nothing more for a few miles and then, at the Pearl City exit, “He’s just ashes now.”

Sharkey drove on, pondering. That the man was reduced to ashes was both a solution and a dilemma. He was no longer a whole corpse, with the scars of the accident—not a stitched carcass and cracked staring head, yellowish, waxen, wounded, looking offended in death, the fatal embodiment of blame. He was now dust. As a pile of ashes, probably a few scoopfuls in a small box, he had less power to haunt.

But that was the paradox. Pulverized, he seemed impossible to identify. He was not a man anymore, he was less than ashes, he was powder, like a heap of coarse-ground pepper. You could scatter him over a bowl of noodles and who would know the difference?

Sharkey was silent the rest of the way, the sort of silence that was more and more his mood, his demeanor, as though stunned and enfeebled, bringing darkness wherever he went, and at times a sudden irritability, as when he had shouted at Wencil, “I could kill you too.” It was shocking to Olive because it was just what she feared, that he was dangerous, not only to himself but to anyone near him—and she was nearest.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked in traffic at Wahiawa.

He did not answer until a mile farther on, at Helemano.

“I can drive,” he said, looking grim, because the shoulder of the road there was loosely paved with crushed lava stone that had the appearance of ashes.

Afraid of angering him, Olive said nothing more. She knew, as a nurse, that it was a provocation to remind a patient, especially a frazzled one, that she was a caregiver. Better to promote the illusion that she was a friend, that he was not fragile, that whatever issue had arisen could be solved; and above all, never to suggest that his mind was shattered, that he managed to survive only by groping and being ignorant of the truth of his condition and not acknowledging that she was doing most of the work, propping him up and humoring him, as she did in the hospital to the most damaged patients.