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handicaps of conscience and soul, my many personal weaknesses. He had few jagged edges himself, and it seemed rare and noble for someone of such ease to be so large-hearted and accommodating about the limitations of others.
    He took the highway because that was the fastest way to get to Susan’s house on a Saturday night. He was eager, even anxious, to spend time with her. He was coming down from the high of what we’d done, and he wanted comfort and compassion as much as sexual release. He was also feeling very tenderly toward her, and that was not always the case. He could be dismissive, cruel, and deceitful at times, and Susan put up with it, saw it, I think, as part of what made him compelling. His present emotional state might have been a passing mood, a letdown from the earlier excitement, or it might have been a tilt toward maturity. I view it as tragic, however, because I think it indicated the beginning of a new him and a different level in their relationship, the place you get to when you learn to actually care about others and their feelings.
    He was driving too fast, so it was no logical surprise, though still a little heart-knocking, when the blue and red lights came on behind him. He hadn’t seen the speed trap. Fuck me, he thought, and gave a laugh. Only Chris could have laughed in such a situation, with so much at stake. Only Chris wouldn’timmediately assume the worst, because he did not experience the universe as oppressive, as out to get him, as lying in wait. He eased his speed down and pulled to the side of the highway carefully, put the gear in neutral, and pulled up the handbrake. He threw his track jacket over the gym bag. The highway was dark all of a sudden. The sun had gone down during a few unnoticed moments and dusk had settled in with the permanence of night. The side of the road did not have a wide shoulder, and he wondered if the cop would be pissed off at him for not pulling over farther. Fuck it, he thought. There was a ditch and then a dense pine forest. The evening was airless and calm. No traffic passed by. He rolled down his window and waited.
    Do you know why I stopped you? the officer asked.
    The question echoed a similar question Chris often asked, but he didn’t think of that at the time. Talking to the man’s belt buckle, Chris admitted that his speed might have been a tad too fast. He apologized like the pleasant and polite middle-class young man he appeared to be.
    But something about the ongoing moment and the police officer’s demeanour sharpened his attention, a nervousness, a touch of formality and strain. Chris knew many cops personally—his own father, his father’s friends, the cops who frequented the Billy Club, the bar he bounced at on Tuesdays and Thursdays—but not this one. His mind worked, in delayed fashion, to interpret this condition of wrongness and understand what, if anything larger, was going on. At the same time, he prepared himself to hand over his documents. Driver’s licence in the wallet in his hip pocket. Registration and insurance in the glove compartment. The police officer did not ask to see those things.
    What’s in the bag? came the question instead.
    And that’s when Chris understood exactly what was happening.
    He thought about the bag and wondered what to do. The obvious answer was to jam the car into gear and gun it. Maybe he could put some distance between himself and the cop, then toss the bag away unseen. He hesitated, however, and those three or four seconds of indecision were sufficient, in the micro-battle between will and circumstance, to allow the moment of action (uncharacteristically) to slip by.
    With a foreign sense of defeat weighing him down, he answered that the bag was filled with workout clothes and added optimistically that he had just come from the gym. The police officer, however, asked to see inside. So Chris dragged the bag toward him slowly, while fumbling as casually as possible to pull the gym clothes closer to