A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Fransisco, warring splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four different 'provisional' city governements had done such an efficient job of stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level

Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned out Tucson suburb, making love to a thin teenager from New Jersey who explained the finer points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping that seemed to have nothing at all to do with anything he did or said.

Years later he realized that he no longer had any idea of his original motive in breaking his indenture.

The first three quarters of the cassette had been erased; you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound - the no-sound of the first dark sea... (Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)

Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat lighting that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against magnesium sky.

Many of the refugees were armed.

Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had maintaned in the face of the Coast's attempted secession.

The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump