He finished his Heineken, and I shoved our empty bottles into the cooler.

“Could be that we don’t know half of what we think we know,” Bobby said.

“Like?”

“Maybe everything that went wrong at Wyvern went wrong in the genetic-engineering labs, and maybe your mom’s theories were entirely what led to the mess we’re in now, just like we’ve been thinking. Or maybe not.”

“You mean my mother didn’t destroy the world?”

“Well, we can be pretty sure she helped, bro. I’m not saying your mom was a nobody.”

“Gracias.”

“On the other hand, maybe she was only part of it, and maybe even the lesser part.”

After my father’s death from cancer a month earlier—a cancer I now suspect didn’t have a natural cause—I had found his handwritten account of Orson’s origins, the intelligence-enhancement experiments, and my mother’s slippery retrovirus. “You read what my dad wrote.”

“Possibly he wasn’t clued in to the whole story.”

“He and Mom didn’t keep secrets from each other.”

“Yeah, sure, one soul in two bodies.”

“That’s right,” I said, prickling at his sarcasm.

He glanced at me, winced, and returned his attention to the riverbed ahead. “Sorry, Chris. You’re totally right. Your mom and dad weren’t like mine. They were way…special. When we were kids, I used to wish we weren’t just best friends. Used to wish we were brothers so I could live with your folks.”

“We are brothers, Bobby.”

He nodded.

“In more important ways than blood,” I said.

“Don’t set off the maudlin alarm.”

“Sorry. Been eating too much sugar lately.”

There are truths about which Bobby and I never speak, because all words are inadequate to describe them, and to speak of them would be to diminish their power. One of these truths is the profound depth and sacred nature of our friendship.

Bobby moved on: “What I’m saying is, maybe your mom didn’t know the full story, either. Didn’t know about the Mystery Train project, which might be as much or more at fault than she was.”

“Cozy idea. But how?”

“I’m not Einstein, bro. I just drained my brain.”

He started the engine and drove downriver, still leaving the headlights off.

I said, “I think I know what Big Head might be.”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s one of the second troop.”

The first troop had escaped the Wyvern lab on that violent night well over two years ago, and they had proved so elusive that every effort to locate and eradicate them had failed. Desperate to find the monkeys before their numbers drastically increased, the project scientists had released a second troop to search for the first, figuring that it would take a monkey to find a monkey.

Each of these new individuals carried a surgically implanted transponder, so it could be tracked and ultimately destroyed along with whatever members of the first troop it found. Although these new monkeys were supposedly unaware that they had been put through this surgery, once set loose they had chewed the transponders out of one another, setting themselves free.

“You think Big Head was a monkey?” he asked with disbelief.

“A radically redesigned monkey. Maybe not entirely a rhesus. Maybe some baboon in there.”

“Maybe some crocodile,” Bobby said sourly. He frowned. “I thought the second troop was supposed to be a lot better engineered than the first. Less violent.”

“So?”

“Big Head didn’t look like a pussycat. That thing was designed for the battlefield.”

“It didn’t attack us.”

“Only because it was smart enough to know what the shotgun could do to it.”

Ahead was the access ramp down which I had traveled on my bike earlier in the night, with Orson padding at my side. Bobby angled the Jeep toward it.

Recalling the sorry beast on the bungalow roof and the way it had hidden its face behind its crossed arms, I said, “I don’t think it’s a killer.”

“Yeah, all those teeth are just for opening canned hams.”

“Orson has wicked teeth, and he’s no killer.”

“Oh, you’ve convinced me, you absolutely have. Let’s invite Big Head for a pajama party. We’ll make huge bowls of popcorn, order in a pizza, put one another’s hair up in curlers, and talk about boys.”

“Asshole.”

“A minute ago, we were brothers.”

“That was then.”

Bobby drove up the ramp to the top of the levee, between the signs warning about the dangers of the river during storms, across the barren strip of land to the street, where at last he switched on the headlights. He headed toward Lilly Wing’s house.

“I think Pia and I are going to be together again,” Bobby said, referring to Pia Klick, the artist and love of his life, who believes that she is the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, the goddess of surf.

“She says Waimea is home,” I reminded him.

“I’m going to work some major mojo.”

Mother Earth was busily rotating us toward dawn, but the streets of Moonlight Bay were so deserted and silent it was easy to imagine that it was, like Dead Town, inhabited only by ghosts and cadavers.

“Mojo? You’re into voodoo now?” I asked Bobby.

“Freudian mojo.”

“Pia’s way too smart to fall for it,” I predicted.

Although she had been acting flaky for the past three years, ever since she had gone to Hawaii to find herself, Pia was no dummy. Before Bobby ever met her, she had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA. These days, her hyperrealist paintings sold for big bucks, and the pieces she wrote for various art magazines were perceptive and brilliantly composed.

“I’m going to tell her about my new tandem board,” he said.

“Ah. The implication being there’s some wahine you’re riding it with.”

“You need a reality transfusion, bro. Pia can’t be manipulated like that. What I tell her is—I got the tandem board, and I’m ready whenever she is.”

Since Pia’s meditations had led her to the revelation that she was the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, she had decided that it would be blasphemous to have carnal relations with a mere mortal man, which meant that she would have to live the rest of her life in celibacy. This had demoralized Bobby.

An elusive squiggle of hope appeared with Pia’s subsequent realization that Bobby was the reincarnation of Kahuna, the Hawaiian god of the surf. A creation of modern surfers, the Kahuna legend is based on the life of an ancient witch doctor no more divine than your local chiropractor. Nevertheless, Pia says that Bobby, being Kahuna, is the one man on earth with whom she could make love—although in order for them to pick up where they left off, he must acknowledge his true immortal nature and embrace his fate.

A new problem arose when, either out of pride in being just mortal Bobby Halloway or out of pure stubbornness, of which he has some, Bobby refused to agree that he was the one and true god of the surf.

Compared to the difficulties of modern romance, the problems of Romeo and Juliet were piffling.

“So you’re finally going to admit you’re Kahuna,” I said, as we drove through pine-flanked streets into the higher hills of town.

“No. I’ll play it mysterious. I won’t say I’m not Kahuna. Be cool. Wrap myself in enigma when she raises the subject, and let her make what she wants of that.”

“Not good enough.”

“There’s more. I’ll also tell her about this dream where I saw her in an awesomely beautiful gold-and-blue silk holoku, levitating over these tasty, eight-foot, glassy waves, and in the dream she says to me, Papa he’e nalu—Hawaiian for surfboard.”

We were in a residential neighborhood two blocks south of Ocean Avenue, the main east-west street in Moonlight Bay, when a car turned the corner at the intersection ahead, approaching us. It was a basic, late-model, Chevrolet sedan, beige or white, with standard California license plates.

I closed my eyes to protect them from the oncoming headlights. I wanted to duck or slide down in the seat to shield my face from the light, but I could have done nothing more calculated to call attention to myself other than, perhaps, whipping out a paper bag and pulling it over my head.

As the Chevy was passing us, its headlights no longer a danger, I opened my eyes and saw two men in the front, one in the backseat. They were big guys, dressed in dark clothes, as expressionless as turnips, all interested in us. Their night-of-the-living-dead eyes were flat, cold, and disturbingly direct.

For some reason, I thought of the shadowy figure I had seen on the sloping buttress, above the tunnel that led under Highway 1.

After we were past the Chevy, Bobby said, “Legal muscle.”

“Professional trouble,” I agreed.

“They might as well have had it stenciled on their foreheads.”

Watching their taillights in the side mirror, I said, “They don’t seem to be after us, anyway. Wonder what they’re looking for.”

“Maybe Elvis.”

When the Chevy didn’t double back and follow us, I said, “So you’re gonna tell Pia that in this dream of yours, she’s levitating over some waves, and she says, Papa he’e nalu.”

“Right. In the dream, she tells me to get a tandem board we can ride together. I figured that was prophetic, so I got the board, and now I’m ready.”

“What a crock,” I said, by way of friendly criticism.

“It’s true. I had the dream.”

“No way.”

“Way. In fact, I had it three nights in a row, which weirded me out a little. I’ll tell her all that, and let her interpret it any way she wants.”

“While you play mysterious, not admitting to being Kahuna but exhibiting godlike charisma.”

He looked worried. Braking at a stop sign after having ignored all those before it, he said, “Truth. You don’t think I can pull it off?”

When it comes to charisma, I have never known anyone like Bobby: The stuff pours off him in such copious quantity that he positively wades in it.

“Bro,” I said, “you have so much charisma that if you wanted to form a suicide cult, you’d have people signing up by the thousands to jump off a cliff with you.”

He was pleased. “Yeah? You’re not spinning me?”

“No spin,” I assured him.

“Mahalo.”

“You’re welcome. But one question.”

As he accelerated away from the stop sign, he said, “Ask.”

“Why not just tell Pia that you’ve decided you’re Kahuna?”

“I can’t lie to her. I love her.”

“It’s a harmless lie.”

“Do you lie to Sasha?”

“No.”

“Does she lie to you?”

“She doesn’t lie to anyone,” I said.

“Between a man and woman in love, no lie is small or harmless.”

“You keep surprising me.”

“My wisdom?”

“Your mushy little teddy-bear heart.”

“Squeeze me, and I sing ‘Feelings.’”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

We were only a few blocks from Lilly Wing’s house.

“Go in by the back, through the alley,” I directed.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a police patrol car or another unmarked sedan full of granite-eyed men waiting for us, but the alleyway was deserted. Sasha Goodall’s Ford Explorer stood in front of Lilly’s garage door, and Bobby parked behind it.

Beyond the windbreak of giant eucalyptuses, the wild canyon to the east lay in unrelieved blackness. Without the lamp of the moon, anything might have been out there: a bottomless abyss rather than a mere canyon, a great dark sea, the end of the earth and a yawning infinity.

As I got out of the Jeep, I remembered good Orson investigating the weeds along the verge of the canyon, urgently seeking Jimmy. His yelp of excitement when he caught the scent. His swift and selfless commitment to the chase.

Only hours ago. Yet ages ago.

Time seemed out of joint even here, far beyond the walls of the egg room.

At the thought of Orson, a coldness closed around my heart, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

I recalled waiting by candlelight beside my father in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, two years ago this past January, waiting with my mother’s body for the hearse that would take her to Kirk’s Funeral Home, feeling as though my own body had been broken beyond repair by the loss of her, almost afraid to move or even to speak, as though I might fly apart like a hollow ceramic figurine struck with a hammer. And my father’s hospital room only a month ago. The terrible night he died. Holding his hand in mine, leaning over the bed railing to hear his final whispered words—Fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing.—and then his hand going slack in mine. I had kissed his forehead, his rough cheek. Because I myself am a walking miracle, still healthy and whole with XP at the age of twenty-eight, I believe in miracles, in the reality of them and in our need for them, and so I held fast to my dead father’s hand, kissed his beard-stubbled cheek, still hot with fever, and waited for a miracle, all but demanded one. God help me, I expected Dad to pull a Lazarus on me, because the pain of losing him was too fierce to bear, the world unthinkably hard and cold without him, and I could not be expected to endure it, must be granted mercy, so although I have been blessed with numerous miracles in my life, I was greedy for one more, one more. I prayed to God, begged Him, bargained with Him, but there is a grace in the natural order of things that is more important than our desires, and at last I’d had to accept that grace, as bitter as it seemed at the time, and reluctantly I’d released my father’s lifeless hand.

Now I stood breathless in the alley, pierced again by the fear that I would be required to outlive Orson, my brother, that special and precious soul, who was even more an outsider in this world than I was. If he should die alone, without the hand of a friend to comfort him, without a soothing voice telling him that he was loved, I would be forever haunted by—ruined by—the thought of his solitary suffering and despair.

“Bro,” Bobby said, putting one hand on my shoulder and squeezing gently. “Gonna be all right.”

I hadn’t spoken a word, but Bobby seemed to know what fears had rooted me to the alleyway blacktop as I stared into the forbidding blackness of the canyon beyond the eucalyptus trees.