When I came back from the cabin I felt ten years older. It had been a long time since I was that boy who tripped with Eric Foot then watched him die. My family was feeling better about me. If I counted up the actual years, though, they seemed impossibly few. I was still living in Oakland and when I thought of all the people who came and went I began to feel as though each section of my life broke off completely once I was done with it. There were only a few strange reminders, people two or three times removed, like a young girl from the rock concert for Jesus who had a beautiful long carpet of hair down her back and who I sometimes saw at my grocery store or on one of the streets near that store. Another was a man from the residents' hotel who Betsey called Gumby. None of these people seemed to remember me, though.