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And for a moment Conn felt tears coming to his eyes.

  Then there was a whoosh, the noise of air rushing by and suddenly his twin was gone. Conn thought something large and metallic had passed him. A car without its lights on?

  Conn kept walking. The ghost didn't come back.

  Much later, a car passed him again, its lights on. He recognized it as Rand's Mustang.

  He saw that as an omen.

  4.

  Kari arrived at about six.

  Rand stared through the screen door watching her come up the walk, her mouth a worried frown. Kari was pretty in an off-key way. Her face was thin, but not gaunt, and her eyes were large and easily her most attractive feature. She was still wearing the skirt and white blouse that she had worn to work. She was tall and walked with a colt-like gait that hovered between grace and clumsiness.

  There was something about late summer, Rand noticed, that made Kari shine. Her green eyes stood out and her brownish-gold hair glowed with color.

  Rand was better now, the emotional cycle had completed its circle and he was cleansed of the darkness. Rand knew he could push the depression away if he tried hard enough. And lately he hadn't been trying at all, he was getting slack. No, it was time to straighten his back and forge ahead. Time to be Rand again, not the sick putrescent schmuck he had been for far too long.

  As he watched Kari climb the steps a new vigor welled through him. She loved him, he knew, and he had let her down. It was time to repair the damage.

  Rand opened the door.

  "How are you?" she asked.

  "A lot better," he said, smiling, and at once a weight was lifted from Kari. He could see it departing, as if a large bird had taken off from her shoulder.

  "You better be," Kari said, moving closer, sliding her hands around his waist. They stood eye to eye.

  "I am: you're here."

  She kissed him quickly. "I already told Mom I wouldn't be home for supper."

  "How do you know I want to eat with you?" he quipped, then felt a sudden guilt for being so flippant. Why do I always play the smart ass?

  "You have no choice, I'm cooking. And I'm hungry, so I'm going to start now." She kissed him once more, let him go, and headed inside.

  A few seconds later the kitchen was alive with sounds. Rand sat down at the table and watched. Cupboards opened and closed, utensils banged, jars rattled as Kari pulled the fridge door open. A wet, red pile of partly-thawed hamburger was ceremoniously dumped into a pan. The smell of cooking beef drifted to Rand's nostrils and his stomach responded accordingly. Rand watched her cook, knowing that it was making her feel better to do something for him.

  They ate a few minutes later, talking very little, but feeling comfortable. Kari's spaghetti sauce always had an extra zing to it that Rand had never achieved with his own.

  Later, after they had finished the dishes, they sat in the living room and watched t.v. Rand pushed back into the couch, moving until he found a comfortable place. Kari leaned against him and he propped one arm up on the back of the couch and played with her hair. It was cooler in the house now, the night had brought a slight breeze that made its way through the open window.

  Rand let go of Kari's hair, patted her head softly. He breathed out slowly then said, "Conn came by today."

  "Really? How was he?"

  "Strange. Something's wrong with him."

  Kari's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"

  Rand shook his head. "I'm not sure. We sat down and talked. He just seemed uptight and he said he had something he wanted to talk about, but he couldn't right now. Then he got up and left." He paused. "I think something might have happened to him while he was in Winnipeg."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you think he might have finally found his real parents?"

  Rand shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows."

  "Why don't you three go away for the weekend?" Kari asked. "I mean you and Conn and Tyler. How long has it been since all of you were together?"

  "It's been ages," Rand said. "That's a great idea." He leaned over and kissed her. "Now I know why I keep you around."

  "There better be more reasons than that," Kari whispered.

  "Oh, I can think of one or two."

  "You better love me too, Mr. Craig."

  "I do," he whispered softly then he kissed her neck and disappeared into the warm fragrance of her hair. He was warm now and content, all the dark strands in his life had faded. A line came to him then, but whether it was from a poem or a story he could not tell.

  Your voice calls me back from the black river of Hades.

  He liked it. He wasn't even sure if it was good, but he liked it. The words had come back to him, they had come back. Maybe there was some hope for this twisted world. Maybe there was actually some hope.

  5.

  The highway was Wayne's friend.

  Even now, hot as it was, blistering and burning under the Missouri sun like one long smooth coal, the highway was his friend. It gave him a place to walk, a place to live, a place to sleep. It was his mother, his father, his family. It brought him love and companionship and shiny cars full of people. It gave him something to do. A place to practice his art.

  The highway was in his mind, an imprint, a symbol as huge and wonderful as a cross. He loved it and he knew there was nothing in this world bigger than love. His mother used to tell him that before she turned the burner on.

  Right now, Wayne wasn't thinking of his dead mother, the woman who had squeezed him out into the world twenty seven years ago. No, he was walking; the heels of his boots were making soft imprints in the heated tar. He was traveling down a newly redone stretch of the highway at about two in the afternoon and about twenty miles from Chillicothe. Up ahead the land was distorted and twisted by waves of heat.

  He was walking away from Chilicothe, following the highway. He didn't like places with a lot of buildings, though he knew how to hide there. Even Chillicothe, small as it was, was too large for him. He just liked the quiet, the solitude, the highway.

  Wayne also liked the heat. It was an abnormally hot day for September, the kind of day to make a dog lie down in the shade and flap its tongue out on the ground. Wayne loved what the heat did to him. It cooked his skin a golden brown, made his pores drip sweat, drenched his hair with perspiration. His blue eyes were occasionally stung by salty water. He felt cleansed by the heat. All the bad things that he had ever felt were being sweated out of him into the air. He did his best thinking in the heat. The heat made his thoughts spin with clarity. In heat everything was seen, known, and understood. In heat he acted without boundaries, without bonds. The way he should.

  Wayne had lived on the highway for years. But if someone were to ask him exactly how long, he really wouldn't have an answer. Every day was the same for Wayne. They all blurred together, into weeks, into months. He had worked for awhile with a dog trainer. He had also washed dishes at a dusty, greasy restaurant in a small town somewhere in America's west. He had fixed cars. Had been a farmer's hired hand. Wayne was incredibly adaptable and gifted in a great number of different areas. He was whoever the situation needed him to be. Every job was a new life.

  But he always made his way, weeks or months later, back to the highway. To walk. To practice his art.

  Wayne had just come back to the highway today. He couldn't remember that yesterday he had been working with the garbage man of a small town about 100 miles from where he was standing. He couldn't remember his employer's ragged, whiskery face, nor could he remember his name. Because the highway had, just last night, called Wayne back and every memory had been shredded by this event and dropped into the wastebasket of his subconscious.

  He remembered the highway speaking to him, though. He had been adjusting a Vox radio trying to clear the static from a talk station, when the radio did just that: it talked. Die. Angel. Pain! it said and then he heard singing, the most beautiful singing that had ever touched his ears. A choir of children held on
e high note that made his brain vibrate with the glory of the song, with the glory of life, of the highway. He stood in the garage where they kept the garbage truck, a wrench in his hand, staring at the radio. When the song was finished he set that wrench down, walked out of the garage and headed to the highway. It had taken him fifteen hours of walking and hitchhiking to reach the place where he was standing now.

  Wayne heard a sound and turned. A truck appeared on the horizon, wavering in the lines of heat and glinting with sunlight. The third finger on Wayne's left hand twitched and curled into a claw. It curled and uncurled slowly as the truck approached. He watched with perfect blue eyes, feeling his brain tremble like gelatin in his skull, the perspiration gather in the stubble on his face.

  The scene of the truck approaching gained clarity as if someone had turned a knob on a television set. Wayne was in a movie, he was always in a movie. The sound of the truck grew in his ears, the smell of dry air in his nostrils. He became attuned, a shadow on the highway, waiting.

  The truck was an old GMC. The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks. Wayne watched as it flew past him, then drew to a stop: the wheels turning slower, slower, and finally stopping. The truck backed up, the window rolled down and a tanned dried face, with sunken, but friendly eyes looked out. "Need a ride?" he asked.

  "Yep," Wayne answered with a smile, the surface of his face showing nothing of the now utter stillness in his mind. Wayne had no personality to speak of, but he had a thousand faces. All of them fake but one, his real face. The face beneath the flesh.

  Wayne walked around the other side of the truck, opened the door. Just as he was getting in, the man said, "Hot out, ain't it?"

  Without answering, Wayne slipped in and shut the door.

  That evening the truck pulled over to a side road, rolled into some bushes, out of sight of the highway. Wayne got out.

  The man had talked a lot and for a long time, but he wasn't talking anymore. He couldn't---Wayne had his tongue in his pocket. He had one eye in the other pocket. He had left the man lidless and lipless, smiling, his one eye staring. It hadn't been Wayne's best work.

  He was still in a good mood, though. When Wayne reached the highway, he bent down, picked up a small stone and swallowed it. For luck, because stones had always given him luck. Ever since his childhood, in prison, in the army, swallowing stones had always meant luck.

  Then the third finger on his left hand twitched and he started to walk down the highway, heading north. There was a tingling in his mind and a whispering like insects' wings and it all meant one thing: he would walk a long distance.

  And sometimes when people stopped to give him a ride he would talk to them as they drove and let them drop him off. And sometimes he wouldn't talk. He let his finger decide. Three days later he was across the Canadian border.

  6.

  The muscles remember.

  Tyler Oak stood at the center of the Shotokan Karate dojo, clad in a white gi. Sweat plastered his dark hair to his forehead and glued the gi to his back so that his shoulders and spine outlined a tree-like pattern. He breathed in and sank down into his stance. His green eyes stared straight ahead, focused on a point on the wall.

  The muscles remember: every twitch, every carefully practiced motion.

  Tyler tensed his stomach and slowly punched forward, knuckles down, simultaneously pulling back his left fist, knuckles up. A moment before his arm reached full extension he twisted both fists and expelled eighty percent of the air from his lungs. He then sank deeper and extended his left hand.

  Practicing karate, to Tyler, was the purest form of release. As he stripped off his everyday clothes and replaced them with a gi and a belt his daily worries were laid aside. By the time he bowed and entered the dojo floor, the world and all its encroaching madness was wiped from his mind. From that moment on there were only three things in the world: his mind, his body, and the correct motions of karate. Practice was the pleasure/pain of seeking the perfection that lay between these three things.

  Tyler let out his breath and could feel the last dark vestiges of the weekend unravel and slip into his subconscious to be forgotten, to be lost among the many unraveled spools that had gathered there in the last sixteen years.

  One thread, almost imperceptible, refused to unbind itself from his conscious mind. It circled like a serpent around his thoughts, always threatening to raise its head.

  The muscles remember. Tyler ran this litany through his mind in an effort to seek that place where there was no thought, only motion. He ignored the thread.

  It wriggled and a voice whispered.

  You're selfish.

  Why do you keep coming back?

  Tyler's eyelids closed slightly as he concentrated. He began the cycle again. Breathed in, breathed out, slowly.

  Look at me! You're not mine.

  Tyler punched forward, his jaw muscles tight. His father's face, the eyes hard and cold, rose to the top of Tyler's mind like a black iceberg rising above the waterline.

  I don't want you! You're not my son!

  Tyler closed his eyes and willed the face away. Things from the outside world were not a part of the mental mechanism called practice. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. His father's face faded.

  Tyler slowly extended his right hand, as if he were punching through water. He concentrated on his hips, searching for the elusive movement that would give more power to his punch. Yesterday it was there, today, somehow, he had lost it. He narrowed his eyes in concentration but once again his hip motions were too wide, too exaggerated.

  I don't deserve a black belt!

  Tyler slapped his hip hard then continued to practice. But his hip still swung wide. He slammed his fist against it, then, like a taut string, his patience snapped. He leapt across the floor and punched the boxing bag. His arms blurred as he struck it again and again. Veins stood out on his forehead, his breath came in quick gasps, and his heart strained against the walls of his chest. His anger funneled through his body and out his fists in spiraling waves of energy.

  The grey bag shuddered and whirled on its moorings.

  Tyler stopped and turned away from the bag. Anger seethed through every vein, sparked across every synapse. The bag was not enough—something had to fall before him, something had to be shattered and destroyed. His attention turned to the plaster walls of the dojo, the trophies in their glass case. These things would break. Tyler stepped toward the trophies.

  Within the space of a breath he dismissed the notion. Words from the Dojo Kune came to him: Refrain from violent behavior.

  Tyler narrowed his eyes to slits and sank into a horse stance. Once again he punched slowly through the air.

  The door to the dojo slammed and Sensei Roberts walked down the stairs. Roberts was an average-sized man with short jet-black hair, glasses, and the face of an accountant. But his eyes, unlike those of the average man, held no lingering indecision.

  These eyes were trained on his finest student. They swiveled in their sockets, examining every move. After a moment he spoke: "You're thinking too much about it, Tyler. It stiffens you up. Let your body go; it knows what to do much better than you."

  "Oss," Tyler whispered. He continued to practice. Sensei Roberts walked into his office.

  In time more students appeared, mostly male, though a few were women. They ranged in age from fourteen to sixty. They walked silently down the stairs, saving their conversations until they were inside the change rooms. One by one they came out wearing white gi. They bowed as they entered the floor of the dojo. Fifteen minutes later, dressed in his own gi, Sensei Roberts emerged from his office and they opened the class by bowing twice, first paying their respects to the picture of Gichin Funakoshi, the inventor of karate, and then to Sensei Roberts. He turned the class over to Tyler and Tyler warmed the students up with a brutal intensity. When he was finished, Roberts took over the class.

  An hour and a half later class was done. They went through the closin
g ceremony and, as one, repeated the Dojo Kune.

  "One: Be faithful. Two: Respect others. Three: Seek perfection of character. Four: Endeavor. Five: Refrain from violent behavior." They bowed once again to their sensei and to the picture on the wall.

  Instead of dismissing the class as he usually did at this point, Roberts turned to his students. "There is something I want you to remember," he said looking down the line of karateka, "Shotokan Karate is not a dance. Nor is it just a form of exercise. It is a weapon, a weapon that you carry with you wherever you go. And with this weapon, there comes responsibility. That is what the Dojo Kune is telling you. That is what you must remember." Sensei Roberts bowed and dismissed the class.

  Tyler remained and continued practicing. When he was finished he dressed and walked out into the main room. Just as he started up the stairs Sensei Roberts called from his office. "Can I talk to you for a moment?"

  "Yes," Tyler answered, stopping. His stomach muscles tightened involuntarily. He walked back down the stairs and leaned against the door of his sensei's office.

  Roberts was sitting at his desk, a pen in hand, and a clutter of papers before him. "You haven't been leaving everything outside the dojo. Makes for bad concentration."

  Tyler nodded.

  Sensei Roberts' face softened. "Is everything all right at home?"

  Tyler's eyes narrowed slightly. "Things are working out, Sensei."

  "If you need anything, Tyler, just ask."

  Tyler nodded, thanked his sensei, then turned and left the dojo. He straightened his back. From now on he would walk the straight line. He would train harder.

  He rubbed the black dragon tattoo that stared at him from the back of his left hand, illuminated in the street lights.

  He remembered getting the tattoo, the glorious feeling of the three needles buzzing in and out of his skin. The blood dripping from his wrist, the dragon forming, line by line, on his skin. He was fifteen at the time. Four years ago.