shit that is happening because—”

In Jimmy’s eyes, the boy glowed with the blue edge, like the Sailor on Sunset Boulevard and the men who’d hauled him to the roof of the Roosevelt, but brighter than them. Vibrant, undeniable, otherworldly.

Drew had stopped in midsentence because now, too, that was the way he saw his host.

Jimmy picked up the blue snowboarder’s cap from the table in the foyer and tossed it to the kid.

“Let’s go for a ride,” he said.

A fog had come in. Down below at least. They were on an overlook off Mulholland, above the city. Jimmy had brought him up here to tell him. They leaned against the hood of the car, the yellow Challenger, pointed out at the sea of white. An ambulance far, far below pushed up La Brea, the light throbbing red under the cloud, looking like a fissure in the surface of the earth.

Drew said, “I don’t know why I’m going along with this bullshit.”

Jimmy knew the answer to that. “Because almost everything in you is telling you it’s true,” he said. “It can’t be, but it is.”

“You’re the same as me?”

“Yeah.”

“When did it happen to you?”

“A long time ago.”

“When?”

“Nineteen sixty-seven.”

Drew looked over at him, the youth still in his face. How could it be?

“How did it happen to you?”

A solitary car came past on Mulholland.

“People get to tell you that when they want to,” Jimmy said. “I was about your age. A little older.”

“Why were you there, at the wreck?”

“I was just there,” Jimmy said. “I was out driving around.”

“That woman who was with you, is she—”

“No.”

“What would have happened if you weren’t there? If you hadn’t come by.”

He was smart, asked the right questions. Jimmy remembered when he had had all the same questions himself, all at once. It was like this was a foreign country and, somehow, here you were, standing in the midst of it.

“You would have walked away,” Jimmy told him. “Into the woods. Wandered around for a while. One of us would have found you or you would have found us. Maybe in a hospital. Maybe a cop, a night watchman.”

“Are we angels?” Drew said.

“No.”

“Ghosts?”

“No.”

“What, vampires?” Drew said.

Jimmy looked across at him. “You feel like a vampire?”

Drew said, “No, what I feel like is once I got some blunt down in Hun tington Beach that was messed up and I was stupid for three days. I saw myself in that backseat.”

“What you saw was what was left.”

“I don’t get that.”

“Something they can bury.”

Drew looked like he was going to be sick.

“I don’t get that.”

“It’s just the way it is. Something’s left behind and yet you’re here.”

“I don’t get that.”

“I don’t either.”

“What is the blue shit about?”

“It’s how we see each other sometimes,” Jimmy said. “Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. It comes and goes.” Suddenly Jimmy was tired, tired of this night, tired of all the times it had been repeated.

“This is bullshit,” Drew said.

“Yeah, you already said that.”

When they came down off the mountain, it was after three. The man in the peacoat and watch cap was back at his post on the corner in front of the turquoise nightclub at Sunset and Crescent Heights, now joined by another Sailor dressed the same. Their eyes tracked the passing Challenger.

Drew looked over. There was the blue flash.

“So they’re the same as us?” Drew said.

“No,” Jimmy said, a little too abruptly.

“What’s the difference? I kinda like the coat—”

“There are two ways to go. That’s the other way.”

Since they’d come down off the mountain, Jimmy had been thinking about himself, not Drew, and he had gone to a dark place inside. Dark and quiet.

By now they were on Santa Monica. Jimmy looked over as he drove past one square, blockish building. Clover. It was closed up tight now, a row of razor wire around the lip of roof showing silver in the streetlight, like a crown of thorns.

Jimmy thought how it had been like his church once. In a twisted, dead-end sixties way.

And then he was driving past Chateau Marmont again. It was something they all did. Returning.

Looking up at the roof again.

A cop car cruised along beside them. The cops, a shaved head East Islander and a Latina woman, looked them over good but it was mostly the car, the paint job, the clear-coat, the way the reflected lights rolled off the rear deck in perfect Os. The two cars, the Challenger and the cop car, stopped side by side at the next corner, at the light.

“Take me home,” Drew