Mother loves Ruprecht. Lori loves Skippy. God loves everybody. To hear people talk, you would think no one ever did anything but love each other. But when you look for it, when you search out this love everyone is talking about, it is nowhere to be found; and when someone looks for love from you, you find you are not able to give it, you are not able to hold the trust and dreams they want you to hold, any more than you could cradle water in your arms. Proposition: love, if it exists at all, does so primarily as an “organizing myth”, of a similar nature to God. Or: love is analogous to gravity, as postulated in recent theories, that is to say, what we experience faintly, sporadically, as love is in actuality the distant emanation of another world, the faraway glow of a love-universe that by the time it gets to us has almost no warmth left.

According to the papers, Howard was the last adult to see Daniel Juster alive. Alive, in the rear-view mirror, merging with the dusk, as if he stood on the threshold right at that moment, a dark door Howard couldn’t perceive. But how was he supposed to know? And even if he had known, what was he supposed to have done? Bring him home with him? Ditch his car and go and play with him, in the freezing cold car park? That would somehow have made everything all right? Throwing around a frisbee like he was fourteen years old? When was the last time he even played frisbee?
But then, thinking about it he realizes he remembers the last time quite clearly; and with a disarming vividness finds himself not so much in the grip of a memory as slipped back to that very time, to the shape and feel of being fourteen - the taste of apple flavoured bubblegum in his mouth, the humiliation of a spot on his chin, the unending turmoil of that endless struggle to stay afloat in a roiling sea of emotions, and the thousands of hours spent out on the gravel, determined to master an utterly valueless skill - the frisbee, the yoyo, the Hackey Sack - in the unshakeable belief that in this lay his salvation. Half of him battling to become visible, the other half just wanting to disappear. God, how had he ever endured it?