Having a child was a curious kind of surgery, or so Matthew Krauter always thought. You start out a whole person, and from the first stroke of the knife that is your kid’s ugly, waking scream, there’s a hollow place inside you. You’ve got this organ that exists outside your body, this vital, fragile piece of you that you cannot protect or control. Moms and dads spout a lot of sentimental doohickey about their children, but deep down they’re scared—scared all the time. The fear that sleeps in a parent’s heart is a tossing, turning thing, quick to rise and hard to put back to bed.

  Matthew felt his fear stir this morning as he watched Nicholas ride off to school on his bicycle. He felt it again, for no reason that he could explain, when he stopped by Nicholas’s room to shut off the light. He lingered outside the door, looking in at the discarded backpack and overflowing bookcase, at the leaning stacks of video games beneath the television and the big-breasted bikini model on the wall (better Nick stare at her than at other women on the internet, women who would not be covered at all), and the fear leaped up inside him so suddenly that his back stiffened and his breath stopped. It was something about the shadows, the way they laid over the covers and nestled at the foot of the bed. He turned the light back on and tidied up the room, never mind that he was already running late. When it came to his son, Matthew Krauter had no schedule. Only as he was winding through the mountains in his Prius did he realize: the backpack. Nicholas had forgotten to take his backpack to school. Matthew pulled out his phone, shifting against the sun-warmed seat, and dialed.

  “Dad.” Heavy breathing. “Hey.”

  “Hey, kiddo. How’re you doing?”

  Moving air covered his son’s voice.

  “You’d better not be riding your bike while you’re on the phone,” Matthew said, slowing into a curve. “You know that’s dangerous.”

  “I’m not,” Nicholas said, but the crunch of tires in dirt betrayed him.

  Pick your battles. “Okay. I was just calling to say you left your bag.”

  A pause. A long one. “Oh. Shoot! I’ll come back and get it.”

  “I can swing by school and drop it off—”

  “No. Don’t do that. You don’t have to do that, I mean. It’s cool. I’ve got time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positeevo. Catch you later, Dad. Have a good one.”

  The line went dead before Matthew could answer, and he continued down the highway with the strange and unfamiliar feeling that his son had been less than honest with him. Not about the backpack—that truly had slipped Nicholas’s mind, he believed—but about something else. Only what could it be? Matthew decided they’d discuss it later, and did his best to ignore the senseless dread tossing around inside him. There was no reason to worry. Nicholas was a good boy, and good boys did not have secrets. Or if they did, their secrets were little. Harmless. By the time Matthew merged onto the I-15, seventeen miles from home, he had almost reassured himself. He turned on the radio and bumped his head along to Kanye West, taking no small pleasure in the music (though he would have turned it off quickly had Nicholas been in the car). The sunshine was as thick as the traffic, which rubberbanded about at seventy miles per hour, knuckleheads zipping from lane to lane and jumping into gaps with inches to spare.

  A red Yamaha flared up in Matthew’s rearview mirror. He shivered just to see it go. God, but what a beautiful creation it was—the MT-10, their flagship model. Matthew had a cautious nature—he was a lifelong ten-and-two driver and seatbelt enthusiast—but nothing made his bones sing like the purr of a bike. He ran his motorcycle shop as if it were a zoo filled with exotic and deadly beasts, looking but never touching, living vicariously through his reckless, thrill-seeking customers. One day, he thought, watching the Yamaha slip away down the dotted white line. One day, when Nicholas is grown up and—

  Darkness fell over the freeway.

  Matthew did not register the night in that first, timeless moment. What he saw was absence, a profound and sudden Wasn’t. The valley to the southwest, where a far-off train dragged orange box cars, fell into the Wasn’t; so did the hills piled up to make room for the northbound lanes, and the maintenance roads running through those hills. Everything to nothing, all colors turned to black. For a heartbeat, the world shrank to the three glowing digits on his dashboard clock. 7:48. Then the Wasn’t burst into bloody streaming lights as the vehicles around him locked their brakes. He slammed down on his own, and a walloping, cushiony blast punched him back into his seat. There was a period of movement and noise, Kanye’s voice lost and found and lost again. One of the windows blew in soundlessly, peppering his cheek with sharp kisses, and he thought of his son, who had kissed him goodbye just a little while ago, his son, Nicholas, his son, Nicholas, his son, his son, his son.

  Had to.

  Had to.

  Had.

  To . . .

  Matthew shoved off the heavy, thick blanket of his deflated airbag. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. Dropped it. Picked it up. Dropped it again. Dialed, only to feel the lock-screen give a stubborn buzz. Password. What was the password? Air brushed his neck, softer than a butterfly’s wings. Someone was screaming. Dust burned his throat, stung his eyes. He typed his son’s birth year—2007—with a finger that felt like three fingers joined clumsily together. There. There. As the line began to ring, he turned his head to the broken window beside him. Wedged against his door, rumpled and misshapen, was the hood of another car. Lying facedown on the hood was a woman in jeans and a tank top. She had long hair, some of which was caught in the jags of the windshield. It twitched in the breeze like the tail of an agitated cat. Her right hand opened and closed, opened and closed.

  “Hey!” Nicholas’s voice came through the phone.

  “Son!” Matthew sobbed in relief. “Son—”

  “—leave a message. Or don’t. Yeah, don’t. I don’t listen to them anyway.”

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  Matthew ended the call. Tried again. This time the line did not ring—did not even connect. Matthew lowered his phone. There was blood on the screen. He wiped it away and tried a third time, then a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. Outside his window, the woman’s hand jerked open and her glossy blue fingernails tapped convulsively at the hood of her car. He began to feel for her, so he looked the other way. Feeling or thinking too much right now was dangerous, he sensed. All that mattered was his son. He had to reach his son. But after a dozen more calls and a dozen more hollow silences inside the receiver, he put the phone in his pocket. Home. Nicholas was going home to get his backpack. Matthew would find him there. He crawled across the seat divider and the emergency brake stabbed him in the crotch, delivering a brief, illuminating shot of agony. The sun, he thought with a terror close to ecstasy, the sky, the sun, oh Jesus, where is the sun? As the pain dimmed, his mind dimmed too, mercifully, and the terror that had come close to swallowing him receded over a dark horizon.

  The passenger door opened without a problem, but his legs buckled as he climbed out, and he fell to his hands and knees. The freeway was still hot. Its surface smelled like cooked rubber. He got up, swaying among smoke and screams and lights. Red lights, flashing lights, lights shining on oil-slicked asphalt. Lights, lights, lights. Just like in the Kanye song. His head carouseled, and the urge to laugh came over him. This is what you get for listening to rap, Mr. Vanilla Pudding. He started to walk. A guy wandered by wearing a motorcycle helmet, his sports coat in rags. Another man was using his Range Rover like a battering ram, butting it into an overturned Corolla. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he shouted. “Go! Go!” The woman in the Corolla, hanging upside down against her seatbelt, swung limply with each blow of the truck.

  “Stop that,” Matthew said. “You’re hurting her.”

  Or maybe he only thought it. He kept walking until he came to a tipped semi with cars smashed against its belly. The cars were all lined up, like pups at the teat, and Matthew realized he was going the way the traffic had been moving. He turned the other way, the correct way, and retraced his steps. Dull corkscrews twisted inside his neck. His buttoned shirt flapped over his gut. His paunch had been growing ever since Lucy left him in search of “self-fulfillment,” and while he could look down in the shower and see his toes just fine, his stomach packed enough heft to remind him it was there. Which it did now, getting heavier with every step he took . . . and he still had so far to go. So hopelessly far.

  Matthew stopped.

  The wandering guy in the sports coat was not wandering anymore. He was standing by the guardrail, near the heap of pulverized red metal that had been his Yamaha. His helmet visor was cracked down the middle, and the crack was full of shadows.

  “Sir?” Matthew said.

  “What’s up?” the biker said tonelessly, staring out over the blackened valley.

  “Your motorcycle. Does it still run?”

  “Not sure.”

  Matthew didn’t know what he was going to say next until he said it. “I’m taking it if it does. I have to get home to my son.”

  “Be my guest. Just tell me something first. Is it dark outside? Or is it just the tint on this thing?” The biker raised a gloved hand and knocked on his helmet with knuckles that had been shredded to gristly-white bone.

  “It’s dark outside.”

  The biker nodded, stepping up onto the guardrail. “In that case . . .”

  His sports coat fluttered as he dropped out of sight. Matthew blinked at the space where the man had been. Moments later, there came a crunch. A belated shiver wracked his body. Perhaps it was the act of admitting that the dark was there, but the night sky seemed much closer all of a sudden. He looked up into its fertile black field of stars, and then his head dropped as if an anchor had been tied to his chin. The dark was simply too big. The size of it—the fact of it—left no room for thought. He would have felt no different had he woken up to find Everest standing in his backyard.

  Matthew reached down numbly and hauled the Yamaha up by one warped handlebar. The headlamp was shattered and the flank had been shredded to expose steaming machinery, but he thought the bike would run . . . for a while, at least. He wrapped his legs around the seat, which had lost most of its stuffing, and observed with not-quite clinical dispassion that he was beginning to breathe harder. What was that dripping sound? Coolant from the four-stroke engine? Or fuel? He would find out when he turned the key. Either a spark would catch and his journey would end before it began or . . .

  The beast coughed. Choked.

  Began to purr.

  “Okay,” he said. He felt the engine rumble in his groin, his bowels. By some miracle, the bike had landed facing the right direction. A sign, if ever there was one. “Okay,” he told himself. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  But the hand gripping the clutch refused to let go. He burped acid through a burning throat. His heart guttered, skipped a beat, and in the pause he heard the silence of a dead phone line—the silence that had greeted him when he called his son. As his pulse thumped loudly back to life, he un-pried his grip from the clutch’s thin steel bar and gave the throttle a twist. The bike lurched forward. Another shot of gas straightened the hog’s wobble, and then he was going, he was riding, for the first time in his life actually riding, out on the road and not just scooting about his dealership’s parking lot. The wind unmade his schoolboy’s combover. Dust from the Prius’ airbag blew off of his buttoned shirt. He weaved along, slipping through gaps, throwing his feet down whenever he needed to catch himself . . . which was often. The Yamaha jerked and fought him every step of the way, its fender skipping madly off the front tire, and soon the engine’s purr took an angry, volatile hitch. He passed a pickup that had exploded through the concrete barrier overhead, flying down from the northbound lanes and flattening a Civic in the process. He passed a tow truck that groaned as it seesawed over the embankment. He passed people trapped inside their vehicles, some motionless, some flailing. Everywhere he looked were bloodied arms and battered faces, bodies mated with capsized metal. In one car a teenage girl was wrapped into a mangled bouquet, steel thorns jutting through her skin. In another a booster chair had become a fly trap, swallowing all but one chubby leg and a single bare foot.

  Too much.

  Too much.

  But nothing compared to the visions in his head. The fear that had been stirring inside him all morning was now wide awake, and only through sheer force of will was he able to hold it down and keep it from running wild. He rode on, pieces of metal wiggling loose from the bike, the tailpipe’s smoke blowing in blacker, thicker clouds, and eventually he arrived at the onramp to the freeway. A fuel truck blazed in the distance; its flames threw the looming hills in and out of focus, making crazy, twisted shadows of the wreckage around it. It was a majestic sight. An awful and somehow final sight. After it, Matthew saw nothing but his son’s face, thought nothing but his son’s name.

  ???

  “Nicholas?” Matthew called into the dark house. “Son?”

  The bike had given up somewhere outside of town, and he had walked the rest of the way, like a man on a tightrope. He walked the same way now, moving from room to room in careful, straight lines, turning on the lights as he went. The kitchen. The den. The hall.

  “Nicholas?” he whispered, because whispering was safe, because if he yelled and heard no answer then Nicholas was not home, and if Nicholas was not home then home was no longer here.

  A dark red spot on the floor.

  Another.

  Another.

  Matthew followed the trail, a moan building in his throat. That most awful of thoughts, that Nicholas was not home, became a frantic prayer: Nicholas was not home. Nicholas was not home. Nicholas was not home. Matthew stopped outside his son’s bedroom. A note was taped to the door, written on the plain white stationary he kept by the refrigerator.

  He was hurting. I helped him. If you want to talk, you know where I am.

  -John

  Matthew opened the door.

  The tightrope broke.