He had been in my house. (He denied this.)

He had been in Aimee Light’s car. (But had you really seen him?)

He was involved with a girl I was involved with.

(Bring this up. Admit the affair. Let Jayne know. Lose everything.)

And he had been in a video that was made the night my father died twelve years ago.

(But don’t forget: in the video he is the same age as he is now. That’s the crowning detail. That’s the admission that will really make this case fly. That’s the thing that would be used against you.)

In the end it was the fear that Kimball might view me as insane that was the most legitimate reason I had for not saying anything.

(The wind? What do you mean, the wind stopped you from searching a parking lot? What were you looking for? The car of a nonexistent student? A phantom? Someone who had the same exact car that you had driven as a teenager and was—)

Another horrible feeling: I was gradually being comforted by the unreality of the situation. It made me tense, but it also disembodied me. The last day and night were so far out of the realm of anything I had experienced before that the fear was now laced with a low and tangible excitement. I could no longer deny becoming addicted to the adrenaline. The sweeps of nausea were subsiding and a terrible giddiness was taking their place. When I thought of “order” and “facts” I simply began laughing. I was living in a movie, in a novel, an idiot’s dream that someone else was writing, and I was becoming amazed—dazzled—by my dissolution. If there had been explanations for all the dangling strands in this reversible world, I would have acted on them

(but there could never be any explanations because explanations are boring, right?)

though at this point I just wanted it all to hang in the limbo of uncertainty.

Someone has been trying to make a novel you wrote come true.

Yet isn’t that what you did when you wrote the book?

(But you hadn’t written that book)

(Something else wrote that book)

(And your father now wanted you to notice things)

(But something else did not)

(You dream a book, and sometimes the dream comes true)

(When you give up life for fiction you become a character)

(A writer would always be cut off from actual experience because he was the writer)

“Mr. Ellis?”

Kimball was calling to me from someplace far away, and I faded back into the room we were both in. He was already standing and his eyes interlocked with mine as I got to my feet, but there was a distance. And then, after a few promises to keep each other posted in case anything “came up” (a term that was left so deliciously vague), I walked him to the door and then Kimball was gone.

Once I closed the door, I noticed the manila envelope next to the footprints stamped in ash, resting on the floor, an object I hadn’t noticed before.

(Because it hadn’t been there before, right?)

My mind shrugged: anything was possible now.

I stared at it for a long time, breathing hard.

I approached it not with the casual wariness I usually felt when a student was handing me a story, but with a specific trepidation that spasmed throughout my body.

I had to force myself to swallow before picking it up.

I opened the envelope.

It was a manuscript.

It was called “Minus Numbers.”

The name “Clayton” was scratched in the corner of the title page.

I don’t know how long I stood there, but suddenly I needed to talk to Kimball.

When I rushed to the window I saw the taillights of Kimball’s sedan rolling down College Drive and in the distance, farther into the valley, the searchlights of an army helicopter sweeping over the deserted forest.

By now it was completely dark out.

But what was I going to tell Kimball? The paralysis returned when I realized I wanted to ask him something.

You will drive to Aimee Light’s studio, which is located a half mile from the college in a series of perfunctory brick bungalows that house off-campus students and brackets a parking lot surrounded by pines. Her car will not be there. You will cruise through the parking lot, searching for it, but you will never find it (because it was driven from the Orsic Motel and dumped somewhere) and your palms will actually be sweating, which will cause your grip to slide off the steering wheel. The moon will be a mirror reflecting everything it looms over, and the smell of burning leaves will permeate the night air as you briefly reflect on a day that has passed too quickly. You will park in her empty space and get out of the Porsche and you will notice her lights are off, and the only noise will be the hooting of owls and the cries of coyotes lost in the hills of Sherman Oaks, emerging from their caves and answering one another as they lunge toward lit pools of water, and always with you everywhere will be the constant scent of the Pacific. You will walk to the door and then stop because you don’t really want to open it, but after pushing uselessly against it you will give up and move to a side window and you will peer through it