"Rick. Hey, hi."

"Hi, Jason. Hi, Barb. Jason, I thought you were Kent for a second there. Did all you guys come down together? I can't believe how cheap everything here is during the off-season."

I didn't know how to reply, but Barb said, "I like blackjack, but the guys are more into c.r.a.ps."

Rick said, "I'm a blackjack guy, too. c.r.a.ps is for the real hotshots. I like to stretch my losses out over a few days so I can savor the experience. When did you guys get here?"

"Just today."

"You're staying at Caesars?"

I said we were.

"I'm at this motel off the Strip. Twenty-nine bucks a night, with free coffee and croissants in the morning. Talk about a deal. You guys want to come play with me?"

I was going to motion to the elevators, but Barb said, "Sure." My eyes must have sprung out of my sockets. "Jason, go upstairs with the others. I'll meet you in a few minutes. I think my luck is changing."

Rick said, "Now, this woman has the Vegas spirit. Come on, Barb. I'll show you my lucky table."

Barb said, "I'll be up shortly. Go, Jason."

This was one very screwed-up situation, but the thought of a quiet room was seductive, and I went upstairs. I showered for twenty minutes, and tried to figure out everything that had happened during the day, particularly how we might explain to people how it was that Rick Kozarek saw us in Caesars Palace the night Kent died.

I got out, shivered in the all-powerful air-conditioning and got into bed, awaiting Barb and wondering how Mom was going to take Kent's death. Would she just give up on life altogether?

An hour pa.s.sed. I put cable news on as wallpaper and dozed off. When Barb came in the door and woke me up, her face was neutral.

"It's about time. It's two-thirty, Barb."

"I'm having a shower."

"You went to play blackjack? Are you out of your mind?"

She said nothing, but emerged from the shower and got into bed with me, and the truth is that from the tension and grief and stress and you-name-it, the s.e.x was a repeat of my marriage to Cheryl. Around six o'clock Barb phoned the concierge for tickets on an 8:10 nonstop to Vancouver. We were silent most of the way home.

It was only in the truck, nearing the house, that I asked, "Barb, by the way, you never did say what made you decide to go play blackjack with Rick Kozarek. That was really random."

"Blackjack? I didn't play blackjack. I killed him."

I nearly put the truck in the ditch as I stopped. "You what?"

"There was no other option. He saw the two of us together. He'd have blabbed. So I went back to his motel room with him and cracked him on the back of his head with a forty-ouncer of discount vodka. Done."

"You murdered him?"

"Don't be sanctimonious with me, rebel boy. You wanted to get married in Las Vegas, and you got it. And part of the deal of getting married in Las Vegas is that you might very well b.u.mp into the Rick Kozareks of this world. Now, are you going to drive me the final block home, or am I going to walk?"

I didn't know what to say, because I was thinking, Oh, G.o.d, this is how my father felt back in 1988.

So Barb got out of the truck and walked home. The heel of her left shoe was about to come off, and a mist of dandelion fluff had attached itself to her panty hose. I got out and walked alongside her. "Barb, what if you're caught?"

She stopped. "Caught? Jason, get real. One of the bonuses of staying in a twenty-nine-dollar-a- night motel room is the convenient lack of surveillance or security. And if I'm caught, I'm caught, but I won't be."

We rounded the corner and there were all Kent's friends' cars, as well as my mother's. Barb and I looked like wrecks -we were wrecks - and my distress couldn't have been more visible.

As Barb predicted, she was never caught, and everyone fully bought her story about going crazy - which is, in its way, true. Kent's funeral was four days later, and that was that.

A month later, my mother phoned to say that Barb was pregnant with twins. And maybe another month later I b.u.mped into Stacy Kozarek, Rick's sister, in the Lonsdale Public Market, where she was buying clams. She told me that Rick had been found murdered in his motel room, and the Las Vegas police thought it was somehow gang-related.

And there you go.

I'm looking out the pickup truck's window at Ambleside Beach and the ocean and the freighters - at the mothers tending to their children covered in sand and sugar and spit, at the blue sky and the mallard ducks and the Canada geese. And Joyce is smiling at me. Dogs indeed smile, and Joyce has every reason to smile. It's a beautiful world and she's part of it - and yet . . .

. . . and yet we humans are not a part of it.

Look at us. We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from G.o.d - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must. My heart is so cold. And I feel so lost. I shed my block of hate but what if nothing emerges to fill in the hole it left? The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am on a sunny August morning with chilled black ink pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth.

This letter is now going into the safety deposit box. Happy birthday, my sons. You're men now, and this is the way the world works.

Part Three

2002: Heather

Sat.u.r.day afternoon 4:00

I met Jason in a line-up at Toys R Us. He was in front of me buying a pile of toys, looking slightly sad, slightly damaged and slightly naughty. I had some toy plastic groceries for my sister's kid, who never really cares what I give her, and I just wanted to escape the store. But instead there's this sad guy in front of me - no wedding ring, straight looking, and no apparent tattoos - and so maybe I didn't want to leave too quickly after all. The cashier was changing the paper tape - why does that always happen in my line? Standing on the counter was a plastic giraffe model someone had abandoned. Some wiseacre had strapped it into a little sheepskin coat with a fleece lining; it probably came from the box of one of Barbie's gay boyfriends.

I said, "I think our giraffe here is a bit s.e.xually conflicted."

Jason said, "It's that fleece-lined bomber jacket - always a dead giveaway."

"Manly, and yet more like a prop than a garment."

"I bet you anything our giraffe friend here is always buying Shetland sweaters for the younger giraffes, but he doesn't even understand why he does it."

"The sweater-buying impulse baffles him more than it frightens him."

Jason handed his toys to the cashier. "He's, like, a vice president of Nestle operating out of Switzerland, but he's totally clueless, and he always misses the parts of the board meetings where they do all the evil stuff to third world countries. He sort of b.u.mbles into the boardroom and everyone indulges him ..."

"His name is Gerard."

Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."

"What does the 'T' stand for?"

" 'The.' "

We rang our toys through the till and kept right on talking. I don't even know who was steering whom, but we ended up in the Denny's next door, and we kept expanding Gerard's universe.

Jason said Gerard had this real fixation about being manly. "He wears the sheepskin coat as much as he can. He worships George Peppard, and buys old black-and-white photos and sc.r.a.pbooks about him on eBay."

"And he decorated his apartment in rich tobacco browns and somber ochers in maybe 1975 and has never changed them."

"Yes. Manly colors. Burly walnut furniture."

"Hai Karate aftershave."

"Yeah, yeah - he still uses words like 'aftershave.'"

"And he invites his friends over for dinner parties, but the food is from some other period in history. Cherries Jubilee."

"Baked Alaska."

"T-bone steaks."

"Fondue."

I asked, "What are his friends' names?"

"Chester. Roy. And Alphonse - Alphonse is the exotic one with a hint of 'the dance' in his past.

And Francesca, the beautiful but broke fifth daughter of a disgraced Rust Belt vacuum cleaner tyc.o.o.n."

"Possibly someone, Francesca even, is wearing a cravat."

I thought Jason was the most talkative man I'd ever met, but I later found out he'd said more to me in those two hours than he'd spoken to all the people in his life in the past decade. He was obviously a born talker, but he needed a ventriloquist's dummy to speak through. Somehow that dorky giraffe on the counter had pressed his ON b.u.t.ton, and we had just invented the first of a set of what I would call fusion ent.i.ties - characters, that could only exist when the two of us were together.

I asked, "What kind of car would Gerard drive?"

"Car? That's simple. A 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, white leather interior and opera windows."

"Perfect." In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where the two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid s.e.x and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. And our characters were the best banterers going.

When Jason left to go pick up his nephews that day, he took my number with him and called me, and that was that.

Barb just phoned. She's arrived in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where she works with Chris - Cheryl's brother. The Cheryl. I'm no dum-dum on the score, but Jason and Cheryl was so long ago. We move on, or rather, Jason sure tries.

Barb's commuting down the coast, and she asked me to baby-sit the twins for a few days. Chris proposed to her last week, and she accepted; the world moves in mysterious ways - I mean, Cheryl Anway's brother and Jason Klaasen's sister-in-law.

Chris creates face-mapping software programs for governments and big business. Chris can take your face, pinpoint your nostrils, the ends of your lips, your retinas, and with a few more measurements generate your unique unchangeable face-map. You can't fake a face, even with cosmetic surgery. It all seems a bit spooky to me. I mean, this could be abused so easily, and I told Chris so when he was over at our place for dinner.

"Chris, what if you took the face of a famous actor, and entered their facial proportions into your database - would you find their . . . duplicate?"

"The term we use is 'a.n.a.log.'"

"Come again?"

"Your a.n.a.log isn't your twin or your clone. He or she is the person out there who's maybe a millimeter away from having the same face as you."

"You're joking."

"Not at all. But the weird thing is, an a.n.a.log doesn't even have to be the same s.e.x, let alone the same hair color or skin color. Put you and your a.n.a.log into a room together and people are going to a.s.sume the two of you are twins. If you're a boy and she's a girl, people will simply a.s.sume it's your twin in drag."

"This exists?"

"The government already has face-maps of all prison inmates and other people who float through the judicial system."

Barb was particularly intrigued by this idea. Jason's father had made some very badly chosen comments about the twins at Kent's memorial a few years back, and since then she's been on a crusade to learn everything about twins she can. She began to discuss using face-maps to help twins who've been separated when very young, and where the law prevents them from accessing closed files. She became pa.s.sionate, and there's nothing s.e.xier than enthusiasm, and boy did Chris respond. First, he got her a job at his company's Vancouver affiliate, and now they're engaged.

There's a lesson there.

I'm sitting here inputting this in Barb's home office beside the kitchen, looking around at all the bits of things that make her house a home: flowers; a regularly culled cork notice board; obviously tended-to IN and OUT baskets; framed family photos (where does she get the energy to frame things - how does anybody get the energy to frame things?); clean rugs - it's a long list. I love Jason dearly, but neither of us is very gifted on the domestic front. We're not quite as bad as those people who plaster a Union Jack or a Confederate flag up on the windows as curtains, and Molly Maid comes in once a month to decontaminate the place with industrial vacuums and cleaning agents perfected during the Vietman War. It's always hard for us afterward to make eye contact with the disgusted Russian and Honduran girls who do the place. Is it so wrong to be a slob?

Okay, I know I'm using both the present and past tenses for Jason and me. Is he alive or dead? I have no choice but to hope he's somewhere and breathing. He's been gone a few months now.

Not a peep. He went down to buy smokes at Mac's Milk and never came home. He walked - no car involved - and, well, the thing about people vanishing is that they've vanished. They haven't left you a clue. They're gone. A clue? I'd kill for a clue. I'd sell my retinas for a clue. But "vanish"

is indeed the correct verb here.

It's . . .

The phone. I have to answer it.