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In these desperate moments he still missed the old Taz, the one who'd hugged him so hard she'd left bruises. He was afraid of her confidence. But it was also what attracted him: now that he was a freak, an outcast himself, he'd stopped glamorizing the freaky and unpopular. He needed someone who didn't eat glass to like him.

Dustin slipped the Dart into reverse and headed back toward Hawthorne Boulevard, making sure to keep his thumb up in the air so it wouldn't cramp. Last week, drawn by some irresistible force, he'd stopped by Jungle of Pets. He'd parked in front of the store and waited in the car, nervous as a child, unsure if Hector still worked there until he saw him appear in the window. Here was the person who'd ruined his life, dressed in a green polo shirt and matching khakis. Hector bent down to show something to a customer, and Dustin could see Ginger, the sugar glider, nestled in the pocket of his shirt. Amazing that the tiny creature was still alive. He wanted to feel angry, but what he felt at the moment was wonderment. This strange man who carried animals around in his pocket: he hadn't intended to destroy Dustin's life, and yet he had, thoughtlessly, without even meaning to. Now he seemed to have returned to his life as though nothing had changed. Dustin imagined that if he came here every day, if he parked in the same spot and spied on Hector, tracking his every move like a scientist—if he did this, something might be revealed to him, a deeper meaning; the reason behind this obscene cosmic joke would present itself.

Hector bowed his head as he talked to the customer, dispensing some sort of advice, his tall shoulders stooped like a vulture's. The truth was, Dustin missed his companionship. He had no other friends; often, if he wasn't working, he went to the movies by
himself. He waited for Hector to look up and see him through the window, knowing that he would not have the courage to come back, but Hector had turned his head and walked the customer to the front of the store.

Now Dustin drove through Palos Verdes on his way to Rat Beach, where he was meeting Taz. It was ridiculously warm for February; the sun glinted off the cars in the parking lot and hurt his eyes. He put on his cowboy hat and walked down the dirt path to the water, wearing a long-sleeve shirt to protect his scars. It was the first time he'd been back to his old surfing spot since the accident. The waves were small and mushy, four-foot cappers that foamed off on the sand; a few kooks in wetsuits did their best to ride them, spilling off their boards as though yanked by a cane. Dustin was relieved not to see any of his old friends out on the water before remembering they were all in college. It amazed him that he used to call this his life.

How long ago—centuries, it seemed—that he'd come down here with Jonas to meet Kira.

He found Taz near the first lifeguard stand, talking to several teenage girls in sweatshirts hanging to their knees. Even from a distance she looked poised and Kira-like, flinging her hair back when she laughed. She'd stopped dyeing it a while ago; her witch's forelock shone in the sun. Taz reached up to touch her earlobe—just a touch, but Dustin could see the effort it took to keep herself from picking at it. The secret struggle gave him hope. She peeled away from her friends without waving at Dustin and wandered over to greet him.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Some girls from school,” she said, refusing to glance their way. “They're playing hooky, too.”

She looked at his cowboy hat, furtively, and the embarrassment in her face made him heartsick. He wondered if she'd chosen this time to meet him—three on a Wednesday afternoon—because she'd thought no one would be here to see them. He took off his hat and tossed it in the sand, knowing how burned he'd get even in February. The sun on his face felt like a long-lost friend.

They spread a blanket out on the sand, each of them taking two corners and tugging it flat. Dustin had brought some wine in his backpack and they uncorked it with his Swiss Army knife. Passing the bottle back and forth, Taz seemed to lose her embar
rassment, her voice low and affectionate. She leaned her head on his shoulder. She was like this lately, as unpredictable as a cat. He couldn't help wondering if her tenderness was part of a good-bye she'd already enacted in her own mind.

He told Taz about seeing the boy in the burn unit, how his face had seemed so dejected when he left.

“I never would have pegged you for a dad,” Taz said.

“Me neither,” Dustin said. “Maybe it's all those toxic fumes.”

“I'm starting to get a little jealous. You see him more than me.”

“That's not true,” he said, taking a swig. “Anyway, whose fault is that?”

She lifted her head from his shoulder. “What do you mean?”

“It's hard enough to get you on the phone. It's like you don't want to talk to me.”

“Don't be stupid.”

He watched a longboard wash up on the beach, an old man in a wetsuit wading through the foam to retrieve it. The man's face was gouged with wrinkles.

“Maybe we should go on a trip together,” Dustin said desperately. “Drive down to Mexico or something.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, looking away.

“Why not?”

“Maybe because my dad would charge you with rape.”

“He can't charge me with rape. There's got to be a three-year age gap.”

“Anyway, I've got, like, a year left to live, remember? From swimming in the dump. I might as well be ninety.”

“You always joke,” Dustin said quietly.

She frowned and stood up, as though to end the discussion. He knew going to Mexico was a ridiculous idea—she'd miss school, for starters—but he wanted to at least indulge the fantasy like they used to. Taz kicked at the sand, her face hidden behind her hair.

“Do you think . . . I mean, are you going to live out in the desert forever?”

“Why not?”

“I don't know.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe you should go to college or something. Like Lyle.”

“Okay,” Dustin said. “I'll just move into her dorm.”

It wasn't meant to be funny, and Taz didn't laugh. She began to dig a hole in the sand with her foot, as if she were burying a bone.

“So that's what you want?” Dustin said. “Me to ship off to New York like Lyle?”

“It doesn't have to be Harvard.”

“
Columbia
. For Christ's sake, Harvard's in Cambridge.”

Taz looked up from the sand. Perhaps she'd made him angry on purpose; it would make breaking up with him easier. The truth was, he sometimes fantasized about going to New York with Lyle, the two of them renting an apartment somewhere near CBGB and riding the subway around like the Ramones. A ridiculous fantasy. He could work at a video store, a
real
one where customers had heard of John Ford. They'd fix breakfast together in the mornings, before Lyle had to go to class, joking around like they used to do as kids. How much fun they'd had, making up Tom Swifties to lob over their mother's head.
I'll give you a thousand bucks for that piano, she said grandly.
When he looked back at his former life, it was these moments that he missed most of all: not writing songs with Biesty and the band or even surfing a perfect break at the Cove, but the ordinary moments he'd always thought he was tolerating, the meals and camping trips and Monopoly games—the slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville of being a Ziller.

“I thought Cambridge was a school,” Taz said.

Dustin laughed—more meanly than he'd intended. “That's Cambridge
University.
Different continent. This is the United States.”

Taz's face darkened. “Oh, Mr. Fucking Genius. Just because you got burned. It's like you know everything now.”

He knew the day would come eventually when his tragedy would no longer be sacred. Nothing stayed sacred very long: disfigurement, unspeakable pain, it would be used against you eventually. People grew bored with it, and then angry that they were bored.

Weirdly, Dustin felt a lifting in his heart, like a release.

Though it was the middle of February, Taz began to undress, tugging off her dress and stripping down to a black bikini. It hadn't occurred to him that she might actually go swimming. She left him sitting there and walked down to the water, passing a few hard-core sunbathers basking on their towels; her body was softer than these girls', slightly chunky at the waist, but she seemed utterly unself-conscious. Dustin had only a faint recollection of what this must be like. A cloud moved across the sun, dimming
the ocean. Walking down the mostly deserted beach, taking her poised, sweet, oblivious time, Taz seemed like an alien species. She splashed into the water and then dove headfirst into a wave, disappearing from sight before popping up again as if from a toaster.

She was all that he had; he would not have her much longer. Dustin double-checked to make sure nobody he knew was around, then slipped out of his pants and shoes and socks. He saved his shirt for last, yanking it quickly over his head. He'd imagined it might be a liberating moment, but what he felt was ugliness and shame, the scars magnifying in his mind because he refused to look. They embarrassed him much more than the fact that he was standing on a public beach in his boxers. He walked down to the ocean, forcing himself not to rush, all the while imagining the disgust—the shrinking—he was causing in people's hearts. The sun reappeared from its cloud; his new body had never been touched by it. Dustin waded knee-deep into the foam and then dove into the icy water, surfacing from the shock, suddenly alive and gasping.

Warren parked the Oldsmobile a block away from the Tremors' address and then straightened his tie and name tag in the rearview mirror. The name tags were a new development, designed to make the BladeCo team look more professional. They were instructed to wear them at all times. They were also instructed to park a block away from the house, so that no one would see their cars through the window and make a snap judgment about their character. Snap judgments did not tend to sell knives. Neither did '79 Oldsmobiles with giant skulls on the back window. What sold knives was the sort of cockiness—bullying, effervescent—that did not permit the existence of '79 Oldsmobiles in the world.

Even under the tutelage of Ted, his team leader, it had taken Warren a while to learn this. But he had. Last month alone, Warren had sold six Ultimate Entertainer Sets at $1,899 a pop. Ted had given him a gift certificate to an Italian restaurant in Lancaster: a reward, for him and the “lovely lady.” The certificate was still there on his refrigerator, waiting to be redeemed.

Warren opened the case beside him and did a quick inventory of his knives. As he was hiking the steep hill to the Tremors' house, lugging the briefcase along with him, his chest locked with a familiar pain. He sat down on the curb. The pain deepened into a physical weight, dense as quicksand, before spreading up his neck. A thawlike warmth. He closed his eyes, waiting for the weight to dissolve. This one took its time: even after the pain had faded, the quicksand seemed to remain where it was, lodged firmly in his chest.

He sat there for a long time, catching his breath. The episodes
were getting worse. He'd seen a doctor finally last week, a cardiologist, who'd made him run on a treadmill until he dropped. He had an abnormal EKG—nothing off the charts, but nonetheless “a concern.” Warren was supposed to call the hospital to schedule a follow-up test, something to do with injecting dye into his blood vessels, but for some reason he kept finding excuses to put it off.

One of these days, perhaps, he wouldn't get off the curb at all. He'd collapse out here in the desert. How long would it be before anyone found him?

He got up from the curb and walked through the sun to the Tremors' house. A young woman in a headband answered the door, her red hair crimped like a rag doll's. Warren asked her if her mother was home.

“I'm Mindy Tremor,” the woman said. “We talked on the phone. I was just on the Exercycle.”

Warren apologized and followed the woman into the kitchen, surprised to find a boy only a few years younger than Jonas sitting at the table. A girl was there, too, bony and beautiful, peeling some cellophane from a Fruit Roll-Up. She looked about fourteen. Warren felt impossibly old. Mindy Tremor drifted over to the corner of the room, where an Exercycle stood in perhaps symbolic proximity to the refrigerator.

“You don't mind if I hop on while you talk? I was just finishing my miles.”

Warren had done whole demonstrations to people who were drunk, senile, terminally ill; he could make his pitch to someone on a bicycle. He opened his case on the table and began humbly, inquiringly, as if he were skeptical himself.
Why does a knife go dull? Any guesses?
He was careful to make eye contact, to treat the boy's dim-witted answers with respect. Once he'd earned the family's trust—he was a father himself, not some weirdo off the street—he turned to Mindy Tremor atop her Exercycle and preyed gently on her maternal fears, talking about the danger inherent in a dull blade, citing statistics he made up on the spot, asking how long it had been since she'd sharpened her favorite knife. When she objected to the idea of a metal spatula because it would scratch her nonstick pans, he pulled an article from his pocket—Xeroxed from
The New England Journal of Medicine
—which claimed that Teflon might cause Alzheimer's. Mindy Tremor stopped pedaling to look at the article. Patiently, Warren moved on to the conve
nient features unique to BladeCo, touching on the lifetime guarantee, the patented ergonomic handle, the notch on the top of the tomato knife that prevented juice from running down your arm. He asked the boy to get a tomato from the fridge and then sliced it speedily into disks, pretending that Jonas and Lyle and Camille were watching him. He was making a pitch to them as well, the family he'd lost. It was not the words themselves that mattered but the fact that he was making them. He was doing something for a change. In the end, if it was a good-enough pitch, his family might even buy what he had to offer. They would say,
It's not too late, you've actually learned something, your life hasn't been entirely hapless and for naught
.