Gabe stumbled into another hump and worked his way around it.
"Picturesque, but not accurate. Now you work in a rucking hole."
"I'm fading fucking out, I'm going so fast sometimes you can see right through me."
"I can see right through you, all right."
The darkness was no longer as deep as it had been. Gabe could make out trees now, plain old trees, and somewhere far off, light flung over the grass in great white circles. He moved sideways now, using the cold stone humps as a guide, stepping from one to another in a straight line. If he could put the voices between himself and the distant white light, he would see where Gina was and who she was talking to.
"… guess we should have taken better care of each other."
"I took great care of you, fucker."
"But when it came down to some things, we did something else. Usually video."
"Twenty years I've heard you bullshit and shoot shit, this is the first time this shit has ever come up. I don't want a postmortem of the last twenty years trying to decide if we did right by each other. What we got right now is what we got. Maybe it's damned fucking little, but it made a difference to me. I didn't keep my life from you."
Now Gabe could see people moving around in the distant pools of light, and something in their motions made him think they were hunting each other. Hunting to music.
"Look, you got a video head, I got a video head, what the fuck were we gonna do, keep the day-care in business? I'll be there tomorrow, for chrissakes, I'll be there. When was I ever not there for you?"
Two dark shapes blocked his view of the people in the light. He recognized Gina's silhouette immediately. There was something familiar about the other one, but he couldn't place it.
"Gina," he said, just as she moved toward the other person. "What?" she snapped.
"Gina," he said again happily, going forward. "Punch me in the-" Something caught him right at his belt line, hard enough to flip his feet up as his head went down. Cold stone bashed into the right side of his face, and there was a technicolor explosion in his head. He was barely aware of his own flailing before something slammed against his back, knocking the wind out of him. Colors poured down in an avalanche.
White light seared his eyes and drilled into his brain. He squeezed his eyes shut again quickly. The buzzing roar now waxing and waning in his ears resolved itself into voices over music. Something was pressing firmly against the side of his face. The patches, he thought; if he could move his arm, he would reach into his pocket and stick on two, or three, or four-
Someone was holding his arm. Laboriously he made his head turn, feeling the pressure against his face yield slightly, and opened his eyes again.
Sam's face swam into focus, started to melt away, and came back again. The hollows below her cheekbones had deepened a bit, and her wide, serious eyes made her look both frighteningly old and frightened and young. The unruly black hair was a little longer, a little softer. She was hanging onto his arm as if she meant to pull him up out of deep water. We're all corks on this ocean.
"So," he said, taking a cautious breath. Pain flared in his back, then receded to a constant dull ache. "And when did you get back into town?"
Sam glanced away for a moment. "I guess you'll be all right if you recognize me."
A young woman appeared behind Sam and put her hand on Sam's shoulder. "Ain't sure we can say the same, doll."
"I know, Rosa. Another minute and we'll go. Where's Jones? Don't lose him again." She looked up, and Gabe followed her gaze to a young guy with nervous-breakdown hair framing a bony, sullen face. "Just make sure you stay there, you," Sam said to the guy, and turned back to him. "Gabe, I can't stick around, and I don't know what you're doing here or what you did to yourself-"
"Told you, he tripped over a fucking tombstone," came Gina's voice from nearby. She was pressing something to the side of his face, he realized, and his head was pillowed on her knees. He reached up, found her hand and the wad of cloth in it. She wiggled out of his grasp and closed his hand around the wad. He had a glimpse of something red.
"… going away," Sam was saying. "For a real long time. Please, don't try to find me."
"You're always going away," he said resignedly. "It would be news if you were staying."
Sam shrugged. "I was going to try to get a message to you later, when things calmed down-" The woman behind Sam gave her a poke, and Sam glanced back at her. "Christ, Rosa, he works there. I gotta tell you, Gabe, I never expected to see you at a hit-and-run in Forest Lawn." She reached over and tucked something into his pants pocket. "If something-oh, I don't know, if something comes up, and you want to tell me something, if there's some kind of trouble, you can try getting a message to me through the name on the paper."
He gave a weak, disbelieving laugh. "Aren't we doing this backwards?"
"I know where you are." She let go of his arm and stood up, her gaze going briefly to Gina. "Some life, Dad." She moved off with the other woman and the guy. He tried to sit up, thinking to call after her, but the pain in his face and the pain in his back blossomed anew, pinning him where he was.
Gina slipped his head onto the uneven pillow of her jacket and then knelt beside him, crossing her arms expectantly.
"That was my daughter," he said, still marveling. Sam had called him Dad.
"That's what she told me."
"But I didn't get a chance to let her know," he added sadly.
"Let her know what? That you've been 'found out'?"
"Her mother's leaving me. She'd have wanted to know that." He took the wad of cloth from his face and looked at it, not understanding right away that the red was his own blood. Gina pushed it back against his cheek.
"You never mentioned that to me, either," she said quietly. "Talked about plenty else. That why you wanted a punch in the stomach, because her mother's leaving you?"
His free hand found hers. "No. When your wife leaves you first thing in the morning, how much worse can the day get? I wanted it because-" Because he thought he was about to lose his job, and he wanted to leave Manny something to remember him by? Oh, that sounded real fierce. Leaving Manny a simulated punch in the stomach for the loss of his simulated girlfriends and his simulated secret life, for the loss of his simulated job. If he was losing it all, he might as well leave Manny with a real punch in the stomach.
The idea gave him a rush of pleasure that temporarily overrode the pain. Take it out of porn, make it something real. Do one real thing. Hell, he might never do another.
Gina's gaze turned to her right. The crazy guy, Visual Mark, was bending over him with the same space-case expression he'd been wearing the day Gabe had first met him.
"Go home and pack," Gina said to him. "I'll be there. Just like fucking always."
Visual Mark straightened up and walked off with his hands in his pockets. Gabe had the sudden wild thought that he'd never see the man again. And Gina?
"Are you going somewhere, too?" he asked her. "You and him?"
"That's a long fucker of a story." She yawned. "You feel sober?"
"I feel pain."
"Yah, that's sober as I remember it."
He took a firmer hold on her hand. "Where are you going?"
"Christ, you don't know anything, do you? Your daughter knows. Old Sam, she's got a line on a lot of stuff."
"What?" He felt a flutter of a strange new fear and tried to tell himself that it was the combination of the drugs and the shock of the injury.