felt dangerous and edgy and full of urgent desires. I’d liked that feeling. And so just after moonrise I stole from the house to meet Darcy—then my wife-to-be—at the ruin of the Maverick Motel, which stands at the junction of AlA and a nameless street that peters out into the jungle.
Drenched in the milk-and-silver light of a three-quarter moon, AlA was a spooky place, with its line of hurricane battered condos and motels stretching away like worn teeth in the jawbone of a leviathan; the humps of sand dunes glowed snowy white between them, and on the western side of the road, where once had stood shopping malls and restaurants and bungalows, now there was only a wall of palmetto scrub and palms, oaks and acacias. Darcy ran ahead of me over the tilted-up slabs of asphalt: a slim, sun-darkened girl with blond streaks in her chestnut hair, barefoot, wearing a flimsy dress that the wind plastered against her thighs. She was carrying a waterproof bag to keep our clothes in when we swam out to the pier. Every once in a while she’d stop and let me kiss her. Those kisses were playful at first, but they lasted longer and longer each time, until finally we would be locked together for two or three minutes, with land crabs scuttling around our feet like live pieces of a dirty-white skull. By the time we reached the ramp where we intended to turn down onto the beach, I was in so much pain from wanting her I could hardly walk, and I tried to convince her that it was foolish to wait another month. We loved each other, I said. Why didn’t we hole up in one of the old motels instead of going to the pier? But she pried my hand loose from her hip and skipped off along the ramp, laughing at me.
“Goddammit, Darcy!” I shouted. “It hurts.” I walked after her, exaggerating my limp.
“I heard it can be fatal,” she said, smiling and darting away.
Combers were tossing up phosphorescent sprays, crunching on the shore. In the distance I could make out the spidery silhouettes of the canted Ferris wheel and the Tilt-A-Whirl rising from the darkened Boardwalk, and past them, the centipede-on-stilts shape of the pier; the lights on the dancehall at its seaward end were winking on and off, all colors, like a constellation gone haywire. That pier had been around for a couple of hundred years, surviving storms that had twisted newer piers into a spaghetti of iron girders. Ever since I’d been old enough, I’d climbed all over it, and early on I’d learned that if you could keep from being scraped against the barnacles by the surf, you could scale the pilings out near the end and sneak into the dancehall through a storeroom window with a busted latch and listen to whomever was playing: usually fiddlers and guitar players. Not having the price of admission, this was what Darcy and I had planned to do.
We had reached the beginning of the Boardwalk—stove-in arcades (except for Joyland, which was kept up and ran off the same generator as the dancehall) and fallen-down rides and wrecked miniature golf courses with Spanish bayonets sprouting from their rotted carpeting—when a shadow heaved up from the deeper shadow of the crumbling sea wall and called to us. Mason Bird. A loutish, pudgy kid, whom I didn’t like one bit. His family had wanted to arrange a marriage between him and Darcy, and he had convinced himself that Darcy was marrying me against her will, doing it to please her parents and in reality pining away for him. He came shambling over, a sappy grin splitting his round face, and tried to make eye contact with her. “If you’re goin’ to the show tonight,” he said, “you better have a fortune in your pocket.”
“We’re just walkin’,” I said stiffly.
“Gonnabe quite a show,” said Mason, his eyes glued to Darcy’s chest. “This ol’ gypsy girl was tellin’ me ’bout it.”
“Oh?” said Darcy, and I frowned at her: Mason didn’t need any encouragement.
“Yeah,” said Mason. “Seems they was pokin’ ’round in New York City two, three years ago, and they found themselves an android. That’s kinda like a man. Got blood and organs and all, but no personality. No mental stuff.”
“Bullshit!” I said.
Mason acted as if he hadn’t heard. “But them ol’ scientists had a way of stickin’ real people’s memories inside its head, and they give it the memories of