For Colleen J. McElroy

without whose aid, advice, comfort, cocoa at midnight, and maddening refusal to understand that some books just don’t get finished, this book would never have been finished.

Ferrell arrived in Avicenna at four-thirty in the morning, driving a very old Volkswagen bus named Madame Schumann-Heink. The rain had just stopped. Two blocks from the freeway, on Gonzales, he pulled to the curb and leaned his elbows on the steering wheel. His passenger woke up with a sad little cry and grabbed his knee.

“It’s all right,” Farrell said. “We’re here.”

“Here?” his passenger asked, still dazed, peering ahead down the street at railroad tracks and truck bodies. He was nineteen or twenty, brown-haired and pink-cheeked, neat as a new ice-cream cone. Farrell had picked him up in Arizona, near Pima, taking the sight of a V-neck pullover, tobacco-tan loafers and white Exeter windbreaker hitchhiking across the San Carlos Indian Reservation as an unquestionable sign from heaven. After two days and nights of more or less continuous driving, the boy was no whit damper or grubbier than before, and Farrell was no nearer to remembering whether his name was Pierce Harlow or Harlow Pierce. He called Farrell mister with remoreseless courtesy and kept asking him earnestly what it had been like to hear Eleanor Rigby and Day Tripper for the first time.

“Avicenna, California,” Farrell announced, grinning at him. “Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.” He rolled down his window and yawned happily. “That good stink, smell it, that’s the Bay. Must be low tide.”

Pierce/Harlow sniffed as instructed. “Uh-huh. Yes, I see. Really nice.” He ran his hands through his hair, which promptly sprang back into one sculpted piece, polished and seamless. “How long did you say it’s been?”