he probably did not think his classmates were dead; or perhaps he was too scared to care. Across the generous front lawn and across the generous back lawn he ran, and as he ran, and his mind processed what had happened, he gradually became less scared of the small cadre of bullies and more scared of a station wagon and its homicide of a driver. Soon Myron was on the front lawn of another street, Pennylane Place, if I recall correctly. He saw, to his right, rounding the corner, a station wagon with blood on its hood. A thin woman with short blond hair and sunglasses, he could dimly perceive, was behind the wheel. She could not follow him across the lawns, of course, but her car was much faster than he, and, houses being spaced out as they were, Myron had nowhere to hide. He turned around, ready to run back, and he saw a man there, huge and wild-haired and dressed, unseasonably, in a long leather duster. His nose was as long and square and thin as an ax blade. His back was hunched; patches of long black hairs tufted his chin. The man looked terrifying, for all sorts of objective reasons, but he also made the hairs on Myron’s neck stand up, in a way nothing else ever had. There was a shadow of a memory he could not articulate associated with this sensation. What with all that, it took Myron a moment to realize that the man, whoever he was, had been in the station wagon and had gotten out to chase him.
“What are you?” the man said.
Myron stood paralyzed. He had hardly led a life that had prepared him for acts of violence beyond schoolyard bullying, pummeling and pantslessness, and a little bit of blood. Driving through two people, killing two people—
(One or two people got away. Minors, their names were kept out of the papers if they were ever learned at all.)
—this was another order of cruelty, to which the Garretts of this world, and their friends, could only aspire in time.
The station wagon, behind him, had parked, and Myron could hear the door opening. He risked a quick glance behind and quickly took in a tall, pale woman striding across the lawn toward him. In front of him, “You’re the kid who fought the lion and mane?” the man said, and took a step forward. The afternoon sun was behind the stranger, and he was close enough now that his shadow touched Myron’s shoe.
Just then a pickup truck jumped the curb, skidded across the lawn, and churned to a halt in between Myron and his interlocutor. The passenger side window was down, and from within a smartly dressed young woman, her long black hair in a ponytail, said, “Hop in the back, this is a rescue.”
That was Alice saying that. But I was behind the wheel.
3.
There is a cacophony inside my mouth. I have read a lot of books in my life, and have written more than a few, and, if not all of them, then at least many of them are still there in my mouth in one way or another.
I mean, there are, of course, many ways of telling a story. Horace recommends starting in the middle; the King of Hearts recommends starting at the beginning. Obviously Myron’s story started a while ago, with the accident and all, but I didn’t start back there. Why should you know more than Myron did?
I lived with the Ainu of northern Japan, once, some time ago, and there I encountered an epic poem collected and published under the name “Repunnotunkur” that ran for some five hundred lines of adventures for the narrator, before that narrator was asked to give an account, to a curious man, of everything that had happened thus far—and the poem just repeats it, word for word, five hundred lines, up to the present moment.
Readers would probably not have the patience to let a narrative start over. Imagine if, three chapters from now, Myron Horowitz were asked how he got here, and he replied, “A shameful fact about humanity . . .” I’d certainly close the book.
Oh, we asked him how he got here, and he didn’t answer. He just looked dumbly at us. He was kneeling in the flatbed of the truck as we raced through the sidestreets. It might have been a little scary for a kid.
A small window separated the flatbed from the cab of the truck. Alice