'Was it about Seabrook or Chernobyl?'

'Shit, you do remember!'

'If I remembered, I wouldn't be asking you which one it was.'

'As a matter of fact, it was both.' Cummings hesitated. 'Are you all right, Gard? You sound real low.'

Yeah? Well, actually, Ron, I'm way up. Up in the cyclone. Going around and around and up and down, and where it ends nobody knows.

'I'm okay.'

'That's good. One hopes you know who you have to thank for it.'

'You, maybe?'

'None other. Man, I landed on that sidewalk like a kid hitting the ground the first time he comes off the end of a slide. I can't quite see my ass in the mirror, but that's probably a good thing. I bet it looks like a Day-Glo Grateful Dead poster from sixty-nine. But you wanted to go back in and talk about how all the kids around Chernobyl were gonna be dead of leukemia in five years. You wanted to talk about how some guys almost blew up Arkansas looking for faulty wiring with a candle in a nuclear-power plant. You said they caught the place on fire. Me, I'd bet my watch -and it's a Rolex – that they were Snopeses from Em-Eye-Double-Ess-Eye-Pee-Pee-Eye. Only way I could get you into a cab was by telling you we'd come back later and bust heads. I sweet-talked you up to your room and started the tub for you. You said you were all right. You said you were going to take a bath and then call some guy named Bobby.'

'The guy's a girl,' Gardener said absently. He was rubbing at his right temple with his free hand.

'Good-looking?'

'Pretty. No knockout.' An errant thought, nonsensical but perfectly concrete – Bobbi's in trouble – kicked across his mind the way an errant billiard ball will roll across the clean green felt of a pool table. Then it was gone.

3

He walked slowly over to a chair and sat down, now massaging both temples.