skittered across the walk and bounced into the air and then under the railing that separated the walk and bike run from the fast traffic.

The water bottle bounced into the air and was struck by a northbound Saab, dead in the windshield, bursting. The driver spooked at the splash, the flood, locked the brakes, and crunched the nose of the car into the rail and took the hit from a tailgating Ford Festiva, all in the time it took Jimmy to realize who’d blown past him.

Les never looked back, even as the line of cars in both hot lanes skidded and smoked and banged into each other.

Lucy kept walking. The inverted arc of the main immense suspension cable was beside her to her right, descending as she crossed the lateral plane toward some inevitable point of intersection, the descending curve and the baseline, as if the whole of the Golden Gate were a graph to illustrate the diminution of something. Hope? Promise? A fall from a great height.

But Les caught up to her.

When Jimmy saw that the boy was going to overtake her, or rather when he saw her reaction, when he saw Lucy let go of the dark thing she was holding on to, he stopped, let them have their moment. He had to remind himself that they didn’t know who he was.

Lucy tried to cover with a line or two, and her brother offered her the grace of something close to a laugh, though he certainly didn’t mean it. His face was flu shed from the run. Now he bent over to catch his breath. It occasioned another line from her. The sidewalk was empty around them, had been empty for almost all of the boy’s run after her. It was odd.

The two consoling beauties were nowhere to be seen. They’d just disappeared, like a magic trick, like a magician’s two lovely assistants.

Now the traffic recovered, rolled past Lucy and Les, except for the cars that had crashed. The drivers were out of them now. From the passing cars, no one looked over.

FIVE

Jimmy sat with his eyes closed in a club chair by the window in his tenth-floor suite at the Mark.

For three hours.

There was a bedroom and a sitting room. He was in the bedroom, with the drapes open. When he’d first come back from the Golden Gate, from following Lucy and Les, from looking her right in the eye as she’d walked right back past him on the bridge, he had sat there for a long time and watched the light change, the clouds moving in across the Bay, their quick shadows crossing Alcatraz. Then he’d closed his eyes. Now it was five thirty. The day, which had begun so beautifully, was ending that way. At least for those looking at the sky.

Jimmy opened his eyes. He stood and took off the coat of his suit and laid it across the bed. He looked at the clock. He put on some music, the jazz the black cabby had been listening to, old jazz from a station that broadcast from down on the wharf and used Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront” under its station IDs. He walked back to the window. The low air conditioner under the tall picture window blew right at his groin. It would have been funny, worth a joke, a line, if he’d had anybody in the room with him. He found the little door to look in on the AC controls, fiddled with the knobs and buttons, but couldn’t shut it off. You didn’t need AC in San Francisco, and the hotel didn’t have it for years, didn’t have it the last time he was here. The windows used to open, even the tall ones. He felt his anger rise, felt it burn out to the surface from whatever tight, dark spot he usually kept it stuffed into.

“Goddamn it!” he said, slamming the little lid closed.

The machine wasn’t a bit offended, responded only by blowing more cold air at his genitals.

Jimmy snatched up the phone and rang the front desk.

“Yes, Mr. Miles,” a man with a young voice said, a beat sooner than you’d get for a regular room in a regular hotel.

“I can’t turn off the air-conditioning,” Jimmy said, barked, like some I’m-paying-a-thousand-dollars-a-day L.A. type. He heard the way he sounded but blew out the rest of it anyway. “I don’t want it; I don’t need it. I want to open the window. I’m not going to jump. I just