CHAPTER TWO

Louie Nozawa woke that morning wearing a smile that threatened to swallow his entire head.

The night before, Louie had swatted the game winning homerun for the Spunderville Spartans, his little league travelling team, and had relived his triumph over and over through his mind's eye as he sank into sleep. All night long, his child's subconscious had woven dazzling, dizzying variations on the moment -- lucid, cotton candy confections of victory.

In the last of these brilliant visions, the dandelion-choked Spunderville municipal ball field morphed instantly into Yankee Stadium at the crack of Louie's bat. The detail was exquisite, far greater than Louie could have humanly recalled from watching games on his father's wide screen television. A million moths danced in chaos around the hot klieg lights above, and the capacity crowd roared so approvingly that the ground shook beneath his cleated feet.

Trotting to first base, Louie watched the ball arc over the right field fence and into the cheap seats, where his best friend Kevin snagged it in his outstretched glove. As Louie rounded third, there was Kevin once again, already waiting to greet him as he crossed home plate. Impossible? It didn't occur to Louie. He basked in the welcome glow of the moment -- at least until the friends embraced, and Kevin whispered a single word in his ear:

"Undry."

Befuddled, Louie asked Kevin to explain what he'd meant, but he never heard the response. Louie's mother had already walked into the room, and taken a mother's moment to appreciate the smile on her sleeping son's face. "Time for school," she said. Louie hit the floor running before she was finished speaking, Kevin's strange utterance forgotten.

Over his second bowl of Trix (a breakfast cereal he felt more adults should be encouraged to sample) eight-year old Louie Nozawa decided that his dreams were a window to his true potential. If he wanted to be a New York Yankee, a bush pilot, or the Ambassador to Canada, all he had to do was dream it, and believe. There were no limits -- there were only choices to make. He could hardly wait to tell Miss Trooly, his favorite teacher, who had a mole on her left eyelid and a funny way of talking.

Even Louie's bicycle seemed to respond to his vigor, devouring the steepest hills in Spunderville with rhythmic ease, and negotiating the sharpest corners with confident grace. His smile seemed to infect people on the street; even the irritable old man who swept the street in front of the Hello Deli each morning found himself grinning as Louie passed. Traffic signals turned green in the boy's path with uncanny timing and precision, one after the other. As he surged into the intersection of Sycamore and Twelfth, he popped a little wheelie, and wondered whether life could possibly get any better than this.

That's when he looked up and saw the sign on the far corner. It was a sign perched above the entrance to a Laundromat he'd passed a hundred times without even noticing. The sign was designed to read "laundry" -- only the "l" and the "a" had ceased to light. From Louie's vantage through the morning fog, the sign read, simply, "undry."

"Pahnnnnng."

This was the sound Louie heard as the Eddie Bauer Outdoor Pioneer Sport Package Grill on Bob Ferber's Ford Enormous struck him square in the hip, shattering his pelvis. The adrenaline that blasted immediately into Louie's circulatory system numbed him to the bone fragments ripping through nearby internal organs -- his lower intestine, his colon, his prostate.

Next, Louie's head hit the radio antenna squarely, breaking it off at the root, but not before it laid open his scalp to the bone. For the split second his cranium was in contact with the metal antenna, he heard the broadcast voice of John Lennon, singing, "we hope someday you'll join us..."

But when Louie's occipital lobe impacted the windshield frame, a great white light filled his world, and all sound was gone.

Bob Ferber sat paralyzed in the driver's seat of his Ford Enormous. He had seen the twisted Schwinn take flight; seen the little boy bounce like a rag doll off the Eddie Bauer Outdoor Pioneer Sport Package Grill. He'd watched as the boy tumbled in nauseous stop-frame over his hood and into his antenna, where his scalp split open like a banana peel on the metal wand. He'd heard one final thud off the after-market Thule sport roof rack, then heard his German made anti-lock brakes hiss to rest as the sport utility vehicle jarred to a stop in the middle of the intersection. The whole sickening ballet took less than two seconds, though to Bob it seemed somewhere between seven and eight.

Despite the bracing violence of the collision, and for a reason he could not discern, Bob could not pull his gaze from the flickering neon sign over the Laundromat on that sat on the opposite corner. Only the word "undry" was visible through the light fog.

As he saw stunned bystanders rushing to the boy's aid in his peripheral vision, he thought it absurd that he was staring at such a meaningless object -- and yet he could not pull his eyes from it. He wondered whether he'd been struck dumb with horror, until he actually heard himself utter the word that burned in his field of vision: undry. When Bob heard himself speak, the sheer absurdity of it brought incongruous laughter.

A knock on the window just inches from his head pulled him from the trance. Polly Brubaker was pounding on the glass. "Mister, I think you better get out of the car."

Bob stared at Polly. Her features were slight, and she was really quite beautiful. She wore rings on each of her fingers, and several scarlet flowers that Bob could not identify, tucked into the curls of her hair. Moving for the first time, Bob rolled down his window, but he did not (could not) speak. "Sir, you hit a boy. Didn't you see it? Mister, I think you'd better get out of the car."

Over Polly's shoulder, Bob noticed that a man in a suit was speaking into a cellular phone. Bob knew intuitively from the man's urgency and careful articulation that he was speaking to the 911 operator. Bob watched as the man's lips clearly formed the word "ambulance." He also noticed that a half dozen bystanders had gathered around his door. It was then that Bob became conscious of his lack of response. I look like a dickhead, he thought.

"Yes," Bob said simply. He put the vehicle in park and opened his door.

When Bob's feet hit the ground, he felt a full-body electromagnetic surge that reminded him of the time in college when he drank too many Pabst Blue Ribbons and tried to splice a live speaker wire with his teeth. For a split second, he heard the radio voice of G. Gordon Liddy championing random Federal surveillance of the citizenry-at-large. Simultaneously, he saw Louie Nozawa's broken form lying on the pavement, an angelic smile still on his lips.

Then, a great white light like a supernova filled his world. He uttered one word -- undry -- and slumped unconscious to the pavement.