When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.

Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.

Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell.

Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.

When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley.

Amid them and amid the obdurate angels and the wildflowers pushing up through the earth, Richard could again be one among many.