“Bombs away,” he says, and tosses the four-page remnant of the LeabrookRegister over the railing of the bridge. The breeze catches it and carries it away toward the George Washington. That’s reality, he thinks, right over there. Those cars, those trucks, those Peter Pan charter buses. But then, among them, he sees a red vehicle that appears to be speeding along on a number of circular treads. Above the vehicle’s body — it’s about as long as a medium-sized schoolbus— a crimson cylinder is turning. BANDY, it says on one side. BROOKS, it says on the other. BANDY BROOKS. Or BANDYBROOKS. What the hell’s Bandy Brooks? He has no idea. Nor has he ever seen such a vehicle in his life, and would not have believed such a thing— look at thetreads, for heaven’s sake — would have been allowed on a public highway.

So the George Washington Bridge isn’t the safe world, either. Or not anymore.

Callahan grabs the railing of the footbridge and squeezes down tightly as a wave of dizziness courses through him, making him feel unsteady on his feet and unsure of his balance. The railing feels real enough, wood warmed by the sun and engraved with thousands of inter-locking initials and messages. He sees DKLMBin a heart. He sees FREDDY& HELENA= TRU LUV. He sees KILL ALL SPIX AND NIGERS, the message flanked by swastikas, and wonders at verbal depletion so complete the sufferer cannot even spell his favorite epithets. Messages of hate, messages of love, and all of them as real as the rapid beating of his heart or the weight of the few coins and bills in the right front pocket of his jeans. He takes a deep breath of the breeze, and that’s real, too, right down to the tang of diesel fuel.

This is happening to me, I know it is, he thinks. I am not in some psychiatric hospital’s Ward 9. I am me, I am here, and I’m even sober—at least for the time being—and New York is at my back. So is the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, with its uneasy dead. Before me is the weight of America, with all its possibilities.

This thought lifts him, and is followed by one that lifts him even higher: not just one America, perhaps, but a dozen…or a thousand…or a million. If that’s Leabrook over there instead of Fort Lee, maybe there’s another version of New Jersey where the town on the other side of the Hudson is Leeman or Leighman or Lee Bluffs or Lee Palisades or Leghorn Village. Maybe instead of forty-two continental United States on the other side of the Hudson, there are forty-two hundred, or forty-twothousand, all of them stacked in vertical geographies of chance.