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now appeared, approaching, and Larry saw that this car could not see him, and so he leaped across the two-lane as it passed, another huge expensive import, a Mercedes of all things, and he cut through the old motel’s broken landing, stepping high in the crumbling concrete, and now Larry found the corner and turned back toward his hometown, running ten minutes and then crossing the tracks and entering the congested little three-story downtown.
    It was close and claustrophobic now to be among things, after having run out on the surface of the planet, and he seemed to be sailing unreasonably fast, up by the Antlers and around two blocks, even as he had done in the past, to greet his father’s hardware store, where he worked part time, and then through the old city park under those thick leafy trees, which he loved, and where Wade always stopped running to turn for Wendy’s house, and Larry always wondered if Wendy asked where he was and if Wade told her he was still running.
    â€œStill running,” he said now, and instead of steering through the village and up the hill home, he saw he was going to run around the whole town proper, which meant that he had to do a five-cent U-turn right in the street and loop out around Poplar Grove, the oldest neighborhood of redbrick bungalows and all the old tree giants, which were great to run under, but not tonight, tonight he was Magellan, and he ran out the cemetery way and up the unpaved sloping road, and he called as he passed the iron fence on the grassy plateau on the dark hill studded with gravestones and the old poplars, which were the most common trees in town, “Not yet, my dear friends.” He called into the fenced graveyard. “Not yet.” He thought he might see that car again up here, since the packed dirt parking for the cemetery was a place for that, but it was empty tonight.
    The footing was tricky beyond the fence, and he slowed to find his way to the far slope, which was a sage hill untouched by the millennia. The snakes that lived here were direct descendants of those vibrated out of their dens a hundred and fifty years before by the first wagons swinging around this very hill toward the water, where the river bowed and then widened for a crossing at what was now Bank Street. “No snakes,” he said, “no snakes,” and he slalomed down in a sinuous course as if skiing, and when he felt the earth grow flat again, he took it as greeting, and he opened his stride and then opened it wider. He crossed from running into flight, a velocity at which he knew he would trip on a root in this blistered plain, and he didn’t care. He could feel the night on his eyes, and he wondered what the sleeping coyotes might make of a man moving this way. His legs were on fire, and then beyond that they ached wonderfully as if he were growing with each breath, and he used the feeling to push, dropping into the ravine before Oakpine Mountain and skiing again, some of his downhill steps eight feet long, and he expected to be upside down at any moment.
    Then suddenly he was on the bladed gravel of the snowplow turnaround and then on the pretty new asphalt of Oakpine Mountain Drive, the smoothest surface all night, his footfall a whisper, with only five or six blocks winding up into the new development of two-acre lots and the smell of scrub oak rich around him, along with the smell of rain, which the wind now delivered, having caught up with him again as he crossed the property line and turned and walked backward up the expansive well-made driveway, regarding the lights of all the lives below, and he said it. “I ran around the town.”
    Upstairs in his room in the new-carpet-smelling house, Larry felt a catch in his breath or an ache in his breastbone, and he looked out his window and saw the town again, glittering, and he saw the two yellow lights at the trestle where he had run forty minutes ago and all the dark houses he had circled, and he