“Oh, I see. You have the power to turn death into love, just like that.”

Elizabeth smiled discreetly at Michael. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed hers back. “Just like that,” she whispered.

Marlon snorted. “Well, good luck to you. But back in the real world a thing is what it is, and thinking don’t make it otherwise.”

Elizabeth took a compact from a hidden fold of her stole and reapplied some very red lipstick. “You know,” she told him, “Andy once said it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as my ring. That’s an actual quotation.”

“Sounds about right,” Marlon said, spoiling the moment and sounding pretty sneery, which seemed, to Michael, more than a little unfair, for whatever you thought about Andy personally, as a person, surely if anybody had understood their mutual suffering, if anyone had predicted, prophet-like, the exact length and strength and connective angles and occasionally throttling power of their three-way love thread, it was Andy.

“ ‘It is no gift I tender,’ ” Marlon read, very loudly. “ ‘A loan is all I can; But do not scorn the lender; Man gets no more from Man.’ ”

“This is not the time for poetry!” Elizabeth shouted.

“This is exactly the time for poetry!” Marlon shouted.

Just then, Michael remembered that there were a few CDs in the glove box. If he believed in anything, he believed in the healing power of music. He reached over to open it and passed the cases to Elizabeth.

“I honestly don’t think we should stop in Ohio,” she said, examining them and then pushing a disk into the slit. “We could take turns driving. We’ll drive through the night.”

“I can’t drive when I’m tired,” Marlon said, hitching himself up into a semi-upright position. “Or hungry. Maybe I should do my shift now.”

“And I’ll do the night shift,” Michael said, brightening, and he began looking for a place to stop. He could not get over how well he was handling the apocalypse so far. Sure, he was terrified, but, at the same time, oddly elated and—vitally—not especially medicated, for his assistant had all his stuff, and he hadn’t told her he was escaping from New York until they were already on the road, fearing his assistant would try to stop him, as she usually tried to stop him doing the things he most wanted to do. Now he was beyond everyone’s reach. He struggled to think of another moment in his life when he’d felt so free. Was that terrible to say? He had to confess to himself that he felt high, and now tried to identify the source. The adrenaline of self-survival? Mixed with the pity, mixed with the horror? He wondered: is this the feeling people have in war zones and the like? Or—another strange thought—was this in fact what civilian people generally feel every day of their lives, in their sad old rank-smelling Toyota Camrys, sitting in traffic on their way to their workplaces, or camping outside your hotel window, or fainting in front of your dancing image on the Jumbotron? This feeling of no escape from your situation—of forced acceptance? Of no escape even from your escape?

“Marlon, did you know that when Liz and I, when we have sleepovers . . . ?” Michael said, a little too quickly, and aware that he was babbling, but unable to stop. “Well, I really don’t sleep at all! Not one wink. Unless you literally knock me out? I’m literally awake all night long. So I’m good to drive all the way to Brentwood. I mean, if we have to.”

“Don’t stop till you get enough,” Marlon murmured, and lay back down.

“I dreamed a dream in time gone byyyyyy,” Liz sang, along with the CD, “when hope was high and life worth liviiiiiiing. I dreamed that love would never diiiiie! I prayed that God would be for-giviiiiing.”

It was the sixth or seventh go-round. They were almost in Harrisburg, having been considerably slowed by two stops at Burger King, one at McDonald’s, and three separate visits to KFC.

“If you play that song one more time,” Marlon said, eating a bucket of wings, “I’m going to kill you myself.”

The sun was setting on the deep-orange polyvinyl-chloride blinds in their booth, and Michael felt strongly that his new role as the Decider must also include some aspect of spiritual guidance. To that end, he passed Marlon the maple syrup and said, in his high-pitched but newly determined tones, “You know, guys, we’ve driven six hours already and, well, we haven’t talked at all about what happened back there.”

They were sitting in an IHOP, just the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, with their mirrored shades on, eating pancakes. Michael had decided—two fast-food joints and eighty miles ago—to leave his usual disguise in the trunk of the car. It had become obvious that it wasn’t necessary, no, not today. And now, with an overwhelming feeling of liberation, he removed his shades, too. For as it was in KFC, in Burger King, and beneath the Golden Arches, so it was in this IHOP: every soul in the place was watching television. Even the waitress who served them watched the television while she served, and spilled a little hot coffee on Michael’s glove, and didn’t say sorry and didn’t clean it up, nor did she notice that Marlon wasn’t wearing shoes—or that he was Marlon—or that resting beside the salt shaker was a diamond as big as the Ritz.

“I feel like one minute we were in the Garden, and it was a dream,” Elizabeth said, slowly. “And we were happy, we were celebrating this marvellous boy”—she squeezed Michael’s hand—“celebrating thirty years of your wonderful talent, my dear, and everything was just beautiful. And then—” She hugged her coffee mug with both hands and brought it to her lips. “And then, well, ‘the tigers came’—and now it really feels like the end of days. I know that sounds silly, but that’s how it feels to me. There’s a childlike part of me that just wants to rewind twenty-four hours.”

“Make that twenty-four years,” Marlon snapped, but with his classic wry Marlon smile, and all you could do was forgive him. “Scratch that,” he said, hamming it up now. “Make it forty.”

Elizabeth pursed her lips and made an adorable comic face. She looked like Amy, in “Little Women,” doing some sly calculation in her head. “Come to think of it,” she said, “forty would work out just swell for me, too.”

“Not me,” Michael said, letting a lot of air out of his mouth in a great rush so that he would be brave enough to say what he wanted to say, whether or not it was appropriate, whether or not it was the normal kind of thing you said in abnormal times like these. But perhaps this was his only real advantage, in this moment, over every other person in the IHOP and most of America: nothing normal had ever happened to him, not ever, not in his whole conscious life. And so there was a little part of him that was always prepared for the monstrous, familiar with it, and familiar, too, with its necessary counterbalancing force: love. He reached across the table and took the hands of his two dear friends in his own.

“I don’t want to be in any other moment than this one,” he told them. “Here. With you two. No matter how awful it gets. I want to be with you and with all these people. With everyone on earth. In this moment.”

They were all silent for a second, and then Marlon raised his still gorgeous eyebrows, sighed, and said, “Hate to break it to you, buddy, but you don’t have much choice about it either way. Looks like no one’s gonna beam us up. Whatever this shit is”—he gestured toward the air in front of them, to the molecules within the air, to time itself—“we’re stuck in it, just like everybody.”

“Yes,” Michael said. He was smiling, and it was the presence of a smile—unprecedented in that IHOP, on that day—that, more than anything else, finally attracted the waitress’s attention. “Yes,” he said. “I know.” ♦