And yet, when at last he managed to relax even slightly—unclench his teeth, biceps, stomach, legs, and feet and open himself to this journey whose roaring violence should by any rights have left the buildings they passed smoldering in heaps of rubble, Chris experienced a shocking infusion of joy. He gave himself to the ride—the whiplashing ups and free-fall downs, curves taken at such drastic angles that the pavement fondled his shoulder. He felt elation so pure, so removed from the jittery triumphs of work, that it registered as new. Had he been depressed? A sense of failure had dogged him in the five months since Pamela OD’d in a Starbucks restroom and was revived with Narcan. Her mother drove to San Francisco, helped Pamela pack, and drove her back to Nebraska. Pamela texted Chris that she would be out of touch: “I just need to focus on gtng well…” Who could argue with that? Except that now, according to her social media stories （which Chris monitored more closely than his own）， she’d completed another treatment program and gotten matching ring tattoos with an Ultimate Frisbee player named Skyler.
He’d failed, but how? Was it failure to cure Pamela? Failure to be enough—in bed, in life—to keep her from relapsing? The truth felt deeper, weirder: failure to descend alongside her into catastrophe. Compared with Pamela’s childhood, savaged by sexual abuse from an uncle now in prison, his own had been laughably easy. Its one sorrow—his parents’ divorce when he was eight—had been softened to the point of nullity by the arrival of his uncle Jules to live with them. Jules was a writer with writer’s block, which left him with plenty of time to assemble a LEGO Yeti Enclave for Chris while he was at school; to orchestrate biweekly D&D games for Chris and Colin and, when they were older, ferry them to a former Girl Scout camp in New Jersey where ordinary people transformed themselves into Warlords and Dark Elves and bright blue Naiads; where Chris and Colin took turns playing frightened townsfolk or passing peddlers or （best of all） gore-streaked monsters who swarmed unsuspecting travelers on country roads, sending sprays of imaginary blood into hills of real snow.
All of it had left Chris irrevocably, unshakably well, cauterized from hardship much the way SweetSpotters were from the wretched squalor of that alley down the block. Losing Pamela had left a shadow of sadness that he’d grown so used to, he’d stopped noticing it. And now it had lifted.
The fact that they were tearing along an open stretch of highway permeated his awareness gradually, then with a seizure of warning. He had to get back! He tried leaning around Comstock’s torso to shout in his ear something along the lines of “Dude, where the fuck are you going?” but a rabid wind invaded his mouth, threatening to dislodge the skin from his skull and send it flying into the hills like a pillowcase. He tried rising onto his haunches to bellow the question into Comstock’s ear, but this proved impossible because Comstock was wearing a helmet—and Chris was not! So he clutched and endured, reassuring himself that his predicament conformed perfectly to Straight Arrow, Hijacked by Lawbreaker, Is Unexpectedly Exhilarated [2Pvii], a stockblock firmly lodged in the realm of comedy. They were on Highway 101; the East Bay gleamed opalescently to the left while foothills rose overhead on the right, fog tickling their crests. It was a stretch of highway Chris knew from trips to the airport.
Sure enough, they were soon spiraling among terminals at SFO. “What are we doing here?” Chris managed to shout when Comstock idled to check his phone.
“Her plane landed a couple of hours ago. She’s pissed.”
A moment later, Chris spotted her at the curb, unmistakable in black leather, black lipstick, and a look of seething rage. Comstock jerked the bike to where she stood, leaped off, and began kissing her openmouthed while Chris looked primly away. Then came the sound of her screaming at Comstock in a language Chris didn’t immediately recognize—Russian, maybe? Traffic leaned at the curb, and he heard police whistles. The bike idled beneath him.
“Here, bring it forward a little,” Comstock said, and Chris turned to look behind him, certain that Comstock must be addressing an adjacent person who knew how to drive a motorcycle [1Ziiip]—but no, he meant Chris.
“I can’t drive this thing,” Chris sputtered.