Christmas 2001-Summer 2010. Eight years on the shelf. Until she handed me a gift-wrapped package and said, “Happy birthday.” Months from my birthday. Opened it, saw the journal. Thought she was being sweet or trying to make a point of some kind. Took a few minutes before I realized she was serious, telling me where she had bought it, how she had almost forgoten my birthday.

Did I play along? I don’t think so. She doesn’t want me to play along when she gets confused. She wants me to tell her. But she’d never been so unhooked before, so much in another place. So damn out of it. I got confused myself. I didn’t play along, I just didn’t know what was happening.

By the time I read the inscription and realized it was the same old journal, her mind had moved on to something else. The baby. How she had smiled that morning, before she started crying.

Eight years.

And now all I want to do is write in the thing. Get it down. Whatever it is. Get us down. Before she disappears from me.

Don’t think about it, just write.

Xorlar.

3

PARK HADN’T PLANNED ON MAKING A LIVING THIS WAY. Which was odd, for him to be doing something he hadn’t planned to do. But that was the way of the world now. And he accepted it. Or that’s what he would have said, but it wasn’t true at all.

Park did not accept that this was the way of the world. He knew the true world was hibernating, waiting to come out from its long winter nap. People were waiting to be themselves again. It wasn’t that human nature was base and obscene and brutal, it was only fear and confusion and despair that made them look and act that way.

He felt that deeply.

Felt it even as the plainclothes pushed his face a little harder against the raw heat of his car hood.