Seize the Night Read Free

retribution. I’ve also been spared all the physical infirmities that my physicians have long predicted.
    I am twenty-eight years old.
    To say that I am living on borrowed time would be not merely a cliché but also an understatement. My entire life has been a heavily mortgaged enterprise.
    But so is yours. Eventual foreclosure awaits all of us. More likely than not, I’ll receive my notice before you do, though yours, too, is in the mail.
    Nevertheless, until the postman comes, be happy. There is no other rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of precious time.
    Now, here, on this cool spring night, past the witching hour but with dawn still far away, chasing my sherlock hound, believing in the miracle of Jimmy Wing’s survival, I cycled along empty alleys and deserted avenues, through a park where Orson did not pause to sniff a single tree, past the high school, onto lower streets. He led me eventually to the Santa Rosita River, which bisects our town from the heights to the bay.
    In this part of California, where annual rainfall averages a mere fourteen inches, rivers and streams are parched most of the year. The recent rainy season had been no wetter than usual, and this riverbed was entirely exposed: a broad expanse of powdery silt, pale and slightly lustrous in the lunar light. It was as smooth as a bedsheet except for scattered knots of dark driftwood like sleeping homeless men whose limbs were twisted by nightmares.
    In fact, though it was sixty to seventy feet wide, the Santa Rosita looked less like a real river than like a man-made drainage channel or canal. As part of an elaborate federal project to control the flash floods that could swell suddenly out of the steep hills and narrow canyons at the back door of Moonlight Bay, these riverbanks had been raised and stabilized with wide concrete levees from one end of town to the other.
    Orson trotted off the street, across a barren strip of land, to the levee.
    Following him, I coasted between two signs, sets of which alternated with each other for the entire length of the watercourse. The first declared that public access to the river was restricted and that anti-trespassing ordinances would be enforced. The second, directed at those lawless citizens who were undeterred by the first sign, warned that high water at a storm’s peak could be so powerful and fast-moving that it would overwhelm anyone who dared to venture into it.
    In spite of all the warnings, in spite of the obvious turbulence of the treacherous currents and the well-known tragic history of the Santa Rosita, a thrill seeker with a homemade raft or a kayak—or even just a pair of water wings—is swept to his death every few years. In a single winter, not long ago, three drowned.
    Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.
    Orson stood on the levee, burly head raised, gazing east toward the Pacific Coast Highway and the serried hills beyond. He was stiff with tension, and a thin whine escaped him.
    This night, neither water nor anything else moved along the moonlit channel. Not enough of a breeze slipped off the Pacific even to stir a dust ghost from the silt.
    I checked the radiant dial of my wristwatch. Worried that every minute might be Jimmy Wing’s last—if, indeed, he was still alive—I nudged Orson: “What is it?”
    He didn’t acknowledge my question. Instead, he pricked his ears, sniffed the becalmed night almost daintily, and seemed to be transfixed by emanations of one kind or another from some quarry farther up the arid river.
    As usual, I was uncannily attuned to Orson’s mood. Although I possessed only an ordinary nose and mere human senses—but, to be fair to myself, a superior wardrobe and bank account—I could almost detect those same emanations.
    Orson and I are closer than dog and man. I am not his master. I am his friend, his brother.
    When I said earlier that I am brother to the owl, to the