The Book of Skulls [antikvár]

]l : W'iii- I ' ' ; ' '. 1! ' Coming into New York City from the north, off the New England Thruway, Oliver driving as usual. Tireless, relaxed, his window half open, long blond hair whipping in the ohilly breeze. Timothy slouched beside him, asleep. The second day of our Easter vacation; the trees still bare, ugly driblets of blackened snow banked in dirty heaps by the roadside. In Arizona there wouldn't be any dead snow around. Ned sat next to me in the back seat, scribbling notes, filling up page after page of his ragged spiral-bound book with his left-handed scrawl. Demonic glitter in his dark little eyes. Our penny-ante pansy Dostoevsky. A truck roared up behind us in the left-hand lane, passed us, abruptly cut across into our lane. Hardly any clearance at all. We nearly got racked up. Oliver hit the brakes, cursing, really made them scre^sh; we jolted forward in our seats. A moment later he swung us into the empty right-hand lane to avoid getting smashed by a car to our rear. Timothy woke up. "What the crap," he said. "Can't you let a guy get some sleep?""We almost got killed just then," Ned told him fiercely, leaning forward, spitting the words into Timothy's big pink ear. "How would that be for irony, eh? Four sterling young men heading west to win eternal life, wiped out by a truck driver on the New England Thruway. Our lithe young limbs scattered all over the embankment.""Eternal life," Timothy said. Belching. Oliver laughed."It's a fifty-fifty chance," I observed, not for the first time. "An existential gamble. Two to live forever, two to die.""Existential shit," Timothy said. "Man, you amaze me, Eli. How you do that existential number with a straight face. You really believe, don't you?""Don't you?"7I ^Li'( A, .M , j .