I sat behind the wheel of my old convertible, staring out at the hazy, smog-choked Los Angeles sunset, vaguely feeling as though I should be pissed off the cosmic rust wasn’t worth the trouble I’d gone through to get it.  But I wasn’t pissed.  I hadn’t been pissed in a long time.  Hadn’t been much of anything in years, just a fucking loser.  Should’ve died in New Orleans fifteen years ago, when I’m pretty sure I was supposed to.  It would’ve been a stupid, pointless death, but after having a decade and a half to think about it, a stupid, pointless death was probably better than a stupid, pointless life.  At least it was quicker.

            With my faintly shaking hand, I untied the rubber hose from around my arm and tossed it onto the floor next to the needle I’d used to shoot the cosmic rust into one of the few good veins I had left.  So that was that.  A couple of guys had gotten killed so I could ultimately achieve nothing.  Oh well.  Fuck ‘em.  They were assholes, anyway, the kind of bottom-feeders that I used to make fun of, back in the 70’s.

            I leaned back in my seat and put my hand on the ignition, half-thinking about going somewhere, but I didn’t really have anywhere to go.  My little shithole apartment off the Strip?  Let the rats have it … they liked it more than I did.  This sprawling, empty old parking lot was just fine.  At least I could watch the sun set.  I let my hand fall off the ignition and land back on the seat, where it quietly trembled, so slight that you barely noticed, but big enough to take away the last thing I’d had.  One of my little souvenirs from cheating death in New Orleans.

            The sun had slipped beneath the horizon, and overhead, a few brave stars fought against the perpetual orange haze of L.A.’s light pollution to make their presence known, but it was a futile gesture, because nobody really noticed them anyway.

            I blinked my eyes a few times as I realized that I’d lost an hour or so there.  Had the cosmic rust worked?

            Click-click-click-click-click-click.

            I picked back over what had been going on in my head since the last time I’d noticed anything, and figured out that it hadn’t.  I’d shot myself up with an elephant-sized dose of what was supposed to be one of the most potent new drugs out there, and I’d just dozed off for a little while.  It hadn’t even messed with my dreams, if you could call them that.  No … they weren’t dreams.  I didn’t dream any more.  All I ever got was a few ugly memories, which I’d rather just forget.

            Click-click-click-click-click-click.

            I used to wake up screaming and crying, but that had stopped years back down the road.  I wished that it hadn’t.

            “You shouldn’t take things without paying for them.”

            I glanced over to my left and saw a skinny kid with a mohawk and mesh shirt standing next to my car, watching me from behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses; my reflection looked bored.  The kid kept clicking his front teeth as he watched me, and the only time he stopped was when he talked; a clicker.  Just like crackheads tended to itch after they’d gotten deep enough into the cesspool, rust-heads started to click once they’d hit the point of no return.  Kid was probably connected to the guys I’d gotten the cosmic rust off of.

            “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t,” I replied.

            He seemed momentarily confused; he must have been expecting a bit more from me.  Tough shit.

            The kid held up a nine millimeter, the rate of his teeth-clicking increasing as he leaned forward in what was supposed to be a menacing manner, but still had just enough inexperienced caution to it that I could tell he was new to this.  “You shouldn’t kill people when you take things without paying for them, either.”

            “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t,” I said.  “But they were in my way.  They wanted me to pay, and I didn’t have the money.”  I shrugged.  “Had to be done.”

            The kid stood and clicked for about half a minute, thinking things over, and I was pretty sure he was mostly thinking about how much he wanted to get back to whatever toilet he called home and hit the rust again.  From the way he was clicking, he had a pretty good habit going, which was probably why he was doing somebody else’s dirty work.  Or at least making a poor attempt at doing somebody else’s dirty work.  I tried to help him out.

            “So … what are we going to do here?” I asked.  “You gonna shoot me, blow out my knees, knock me around, what?”

            That caught him up short, and I could feel his stare intensify, his assuredly large, light-sensitive eyes getting just a bit wider as he tried to figure me out.  He shouldn’t have put the effort into it, because I was pretty simple when you got right down to it.

            “Huh?” he intoned.

            “Somebody sent you here to teach me a lesson, or collect from me, or kill me,” I said, “Since I iced a couple of shitbag dealers so I could try out the new wonder drug all the kids are talking about.  You going to get on with it, or just stand there and click all night?  I’ve got all the time in the world, but you’ve probably got at least a couple of things you’d rather be doing right now.”

            The kid stood and stared at me for a while longer.  “Huh?”

            I reached into my pocket and pulled out my knife.  I flicked it open and held it up, and the kid took a half-step back.  “Would this help you make up your mind?” I asked.

            After another half-minute of clicking, the kid lowered the nine millimeter and shook his head.  He didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do.  They never did.

            I closed the knife and put it back in my pocket, and then settled back into my original position, closing my eyes.  “Let me know when you’ve figured out what you’re going to do, all right?”

            “This is messed-up, man,” he finally muttered.  His feet scraped on the weedy, cracked asphalt of the old parking lot, and I knew he was turning to walk away, which is what always happened.  I knew from long experience that even if I chased after him, he’d likely just take off running and never once use that gun, consequences when he returned empty-handed be damned.

            Then something different happened.

            A loud, sharp crack filled the steamy air.  It wasn’t the kind of crack that came from a gun being fired, either.  It was the crack of bone.

            Her fiery hair was long and slightly wavy from the summer humidity, and she was dressed in torn denim jeans, biker boots, and a tight Death Angel tanktop that showed off her lush curves without making her look cheap.  A blue metal pentagram was set into a black choker around her neck, and it glinted faintly in the dimness of the parking lot, where most of the lights had been long busted out.

The last time I’d seen this woman had been several years back, when I’d gone to one of her shows and watched her play the guitar and sing heavy metal, rock ‘n roll, and the blues with equal skill on all fronts, supported by one of the better backing bands I’d seen in my time.  Her name was Venus d’Morte, and as I’d watched her play through her set, I’d realized that I was looking at a fantastic talent, one pure and free of corruption, and the music she played was strong, true, and powerful.  If she’d wanted to, she could have become one of the greatest performers in the world, but instead she stayed here in Los Angeles, playing to smaller crowds and turning down all offers to go on to bigger and better things.  She played because she loved to and because she wanted to, and the joy she radiated onstage was so infectious that it had been the last time I’d really felt anything.

I’d fucking hated her.

Once she’d finished her set, to the deafening roar of the crowd, I’d left the club and had proceeded to get so fucked up that I still couldn’t remember what had gone on in the three days following, which was also the last time that I’d been able to achieve that level of fucked-up-ness.  I’d stopped going to clubs after that, and I hadn’t seen her since.  And now here she was, not ten feet from me, having snapped the neck of the clicker that had decided he wasn’t going to kill me.

As I looked at her, I realized that there was something about her that I hadn’t noticed before.  She seemed to stand out in the semi-shadows of the parking lot, as though she were more real than everything else, and I squinted my eyes, not quite sure what to make of it.

“You’re pretty far gone,” she said, noticing my scrutiny.  “When you get past a certain point, there are things you can see that others don’t notice.”

“Things like you?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“And what kind of thing are you?”

“The kind of thing that’s supposed to exist only in stories.”  Her voice was soft and velvety, with an underlying strength to it.

“What, a musician that does it for the hell of it instead of money?”

“You used to be that kind of thing.”

I snorted.  “You got that wrong.”

When I blinked, she was gone, which gave me my second surprise of the evening.

“I saw you at CBGB’s in 1976 with Electric Thunder and then there again in 1979 on your own, and you weren’t thinking about money either time.”

I jumped and then turned to the passenger seat, where she was comfortably reclined, gazing at me intently, with a little smile on her red lips.  The surprise quickly faded away, and I returned her gaze coolly.

“You’re full of shit,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” she asked, though she knew full well what it was.

“That was 30 years ago.”

“So?”

I gestured at her.  “You can’t be more than 25, maybe, maybe 30, and that’s pushing it.”

“You sure of that?”

“I’m not stupid, kid.”

“I’m not saying you are,” she replied, not unkindly.  “But you’ve got to remember that I’m the kind of thing that’s supposed to exist only in stories.”

“You don’t say,” I murmured, turning away from her to look out over the city, wreathed in its gaudy whore’s dress of perpetual light.  After a few moments, she spoke up.

“Am I bothering you?  I can go away.”

“No.  No!”  I snapped back towards her more quickly than I’d intended, with more force in my voice than I’d wanted, and as I stared at her, I realized that my heart was beating very, very fast.  I didn’t want her to go, not at all.

She nodded amicably.  “All right.  I’ll stay.”  She smiled demurely and said nothing more.

After several moments of my mind scrambling around, trying to think of something to say, which it definitely wasn’t used to, I finally asked, “So … what’d you kill that guy for?”

A shadow flickered across her flawless features, and she scowled slightly.  “I hate clickers.”

“I don’t like them much, either.”

Her eyes narrowed.  “They make rust out of peoples’ blood, right?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“So you know what one of the main ingredients of cosmic rust is, don’t you?”

I shrugged.  “Everybody says it’s vampire blood.”

She ground her teeth slightly.  “Yeah.”

“That’s a bunch of shit, though.”

She shook her head.  “Nope.”

“Oh.”  My mind did a little arithmetic that had nothing to do with numbers, making my heart skip.  “Then you’re …”

She smiled.

I blinked.

“So,” she said, “What’s the great Davey Danger doing sitting out in an empty parking lot on the bad side of town on a Friday night?”

I found I was a little hesitant to answer, and for some reason, that felt important.  “I was trying some cosmic rust.  I wanted to see what it was like,” I softly replied.  She nodded, seeming to take no offense.

“So how was it?”

“It wasn’t.”

Her slim eyebrows rose.  “No?”

She leaned forward and looked at me very closely, and I felt, for just a moment, how different she really was.  But then the feeling was gone.  I found myself leaning closer to her, as though trying to chase down that feeling and reclaim it.

“No,” she said again, this time as a statement instead of a question, and she sounded almost sad.  “It wasn’t, was it?  None of it is.  Any of it.”

Now my eyebrows rose.  “You know?”

“I can smell it on you, and I can even see it, now,” she said quietly.  “It’s all over you.”  She paused.  “That’s why the clicker didn’t kill you, why he didn’t do anything.  Even he could tell.”

She reached out and put her hand against my heart, and even through my shirt, even in the heat of the summer night, I could feel the warmth of her hand, and I shivered deep inside, wanting.

“Your heart’s beating, but you’re dead.  You have been for a long time, haven’t you?”  Her voice was scarcely above a whisper, and the note of sadness was stronger.

All I could do was nod as I stared into her eyes, searching for … something.

“You can’t kill what’s already dead, can you?  Everybody knows that, even if it’s not a conscious thing.”  She started to pull her hand away, but my own hand snapped up and covered hers, holding it in place.

The hand that made her guitar sing like no other was soft and very warm, but I could feel the power in it, safely kept in check.  Her hands could wreak terrible things if they wanted to, or if they had to.  Beneath her hand, my heart beat loud as thunder.

“What happened?” she asked.

To this day, I still wasn’t entirely sure of what had gone down in New Orleans.  I know I’d gotten in with some real bastards, and I know that things had gotten ugly.  I’d survived, but I’d gotten hurt, really bad.  Bad enough that even when I’d healed, I’d never play guitar again.  Bad enough that my ex-wife had told me, while I was still in the hospital and could barely move, that she wasn’t going to let our three boys be anywhere near a father that could get involved in things like that.  She’d told me that she was taking the boys and going away, far away from me, and that if I cared about my sons as much as I’d always said I did, I wouldn’t come looking for them, so that they wouldn’t get tainted with the madness that my life had become.  I’d fucked myself up, and I’d be damned if I fucked my boys up, who’d never done anything but love me.  So I’d stayed away.

With my music gone, my family gone, and everything else I’d ever cared about gone, I’d just drifted for 15 years, figuring I’d eventually get killed by drugs, booze, bad guys, or a combination of the three.  It had never happened, and I’d stopped caring, stopped feeling, stopped doing anything of any kind of significance, years ago.  She was right: my heart was beating, but I’d been a long time dead.  The great Davey Danger, wildman of Electric Thunder and unpredictable punk rocker in his own right after Electric Thunder imploded, the man who personified danger in all its forms, the man who might’ve given it all up to become a good father but was too stupid to take the chance when he’d had it, had become a corpse nobody had gotten around to burying yet.  Didn’t seem like anybody wanted to, not that it mattered.  Nothing did, not any more.

“Does it really matter?” I asked her, my voice distant.

She sighed.  “I guess it doesn’t.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.”

I laughed a small, bitter laugh.  “Yeah.  You could say that.”

            Despite the summer heat and how long it had been there, her hand never once began to sweat while it was over my heart, which had calmed down a bit but was still beating more powerfully than it had in a long, long time.  She never once tried to pull her hand away, and never asked me to let go of it, though I would have let go in an instant if she’d asked me.  She’d awakened something in me, however faint, and I was willing to do anything to get more of it.

            “You know, I would’ve fucked you back in ‘79.  I almost did, as a matter of fact,” she finally said, breaking the silence, and I jumped slightly.  “I’d gotten all the way backstage and everything, but I ended up not doing it.”

            “Why not?”  My throat was dry, and I coughed a little.

            “Because I found out you were married and had just had your third son a few weeks before.  There are some things I just don’t do, even for guys that I admired,” she said, her voice gentle.

            “You admired … me?”  I stared at her, searching her sapphire eyes for the lie, but there was none.

            She nodded.  “Yeah.  I admired your style.  You were the something different in a time when everybody was trying to be like everybody else, and you just did your own thing, regardless of where it took you.  You were pretty stupid at times, but rock ‘n roll’s supposed to be idiotic to a certain extent,” she said with a smile.  “But you were never so bad that you disgusted me.  Sid Vicious was the kind of stupid that disgusted me.”

            Without even realizing it, I returned her smile.  “Sid was pretty stupid.”

She laughed.  “You were a cute kind of stupid, and you were rock ‘n roll for a lot of people.  You still are, actually.”

“For you?” I whispered.

She winked.  “You’re still up there.”

“Even after getting a good look at the reality?”

Her smile saddened considerably, and I instantly regretted saying anything.  But all she did was nod.  “Yeah, even after that.”

Unable to keep my eyes on hers, I looked down, and she reached out and gently caressed my cheek with her other hand.

Rage suddenly engulfed me, and I yanked her hand away, snarling, “Don’t fucking feel sorry for me!  Don’t ever feel sorry for me!  I don’t want your fucking pity!”

She didn’t look the least bit surprised by the outburst, and her expression was calm as she said, “I don’t feel sorry for you.  You got dealt some bad hands, but you had as much a part in your fate as everybody else did … you did a lot of this to yourself.”

Though I knew it was true, it pissed me off even more, and I drew my hand back to bust her one across the face to shut her fucking mouth.  I’d been living the truth for the last 15 years, and I didn’t need her to tell it to me!

I got as far as starting to swing my hand before she slammed me up against the inside of my door so hard I saw stars, the impact bringing me closer to completely losing consciousness and sense of self than any drug was able to these days.  My chest throbbed where she’d hit me and every breath was an agony for well over a minute as I struggled my way through the pain, grateful for every moment of it.  She sat and watched me through narrowed eyes, like a cat watching its prey, saying nothing; she didn’t need to, because we both knew it could’ve been a whole hell of a lot worse.

When I’d finally gotten myself more or less back together, she said, “You done?”

            “Wish I was,” I wheezed, rubbing at my chest.

            “What do you want?  I mean, really?” she asked.  She raised an eyebrow.  “I can fix—“

            I shook my head, knowing where she was going; I’d read enough old pulp stories and comic books to figure out that much.  “No fucking way.”

            After a few seconds of thought, she nodded.  “You’re right.  You shouldn’t have made it past 38.”

            “I shouldn’t have made it past 30,” I replied.  “How do you do it?  All the long years and everything?  How do you keep going?”

            “You wouldn’t understand.”  Her reply was curt, but there was no rancor in it: she was just stating a fact.  “I don’t think you can understand.”

            “Don’t want to.”

            “Then what do you want?” she asked again.

            “Danger,” I blurted, leaning towards her, my voice growing desperate.  “Give me back what I lost that day, so I can finally be who I was meant to be again.  I don’t want to be dead any more, not like this.”

            She considered this.  “I can’t give you back everything you lost, not without—“

            “I don’t want everything back!” I yelled.  “Just give me back, so I can finish what I started and do it fucking right!  Can’t I have that much, at least?!”

            Before I could blink, she’d pulled me across the seat, away from the steering wheel, and was straddling me, pushing down with more force than any woman I’d ever been with, while wearing one of the most wicked grins I’d ever seen.

            “You want danger?” she asked, her eyes glittering red.

            My blood rushed through my veins as my heart hammered away, and I felt like I was this close to just burning up like a handful of napalm right there.  I wanted more.  I needed more.  “Everything you’ve fucking got,” I growled.

            Her canines extended down to form ivory fangs, and her chuckle was throaty and seductive as she pulled her tanktop off with a single fluid motion, her long red hair spilling over her perfect pale skin like a cascade of fire over ice.  She was utterly perfect, a vision of curved womanhood carved from the most flawless materials nature could offer, her eyes were absolutely electric, glimmering with more wisdom and pure humanity than I could ever hope to understand or even mindlessly absorb.  Just by sitting there, gazing down at me, she completely laid to waste all of the vapid hot-to-trot conquests I’d notched up in hotel rooms, alleys, backstage, and anywhere else I could get away with.

“Be careful what you ask for, tiger,” she purred, lunging forward and giving me a ferociously passionate kiss that blew through my mind like the ocean breeze, filling it up with so much life and energy that it hurt.

Overwhelmed as I was, I doggedly struggled to stay afloat in the swirling maelstrom, urging her for more, and even as she took from me, she gave back something else, something immaterial and essential, never hesitating, never doubting, completely relentless.  She humbled me with her sheer power and boundless vitality, and I would’ve felt like a tiny insect next to her, if she would have let me.  She didn’t.  Every time I thought I couldn’t take any more, she gave me the strength for it, picking me up when I thought I’d fall, carrying me to my limits and far beyond.

            “Fast.”

            “Show me.”

            Over the side of the road, a vast forest stretched out, filling my lungs with its fresh, clean air, clearing out so much of the crap that Los Angeles had left in me during my long stay in its filthy confines, renewing me like the cool water of a baptism after having been scorched nearly to cinders by my little stranger.  I still felt weak after the hours we’d spent together in the parking lot, and probably shouldn’t have even been upright at all, but that wasn’t going to stop me.  Though she’d taken plenty, she’d also given me so much that it had nearly destroyed me, shattering most of my mind to pieces that skidded around inside my skull like a broken mosaic, and even as I drove, I tried to put them back together into something that made sense, but it wasn’t working.  Maybe I should have tried harder, but honestly, I didn’t really want to.

Overhead, the stars shone so brightly that it was frightening.  I’d spent my whole life in cities, and I wasn’t used to the sky being so unchallenged by mankind’s machinations.  The starlight made everything glow with an ethereal silver gleam, outlining it all with an unreal reality that was stunning and intimidating to behold.

            She leaned back in her seat as we tore down the road, never once flinching, never doubting my ability to keep us on the road, her hair streaming out behind her like a burning comet tail as she gazed up at the sky, seeing things I couldn’t.  When she spoke, she didn’t raise her voice above the roar of the engine or the howling of the wind, but I heard her just fine nonetheless.

            “The stars are special to us,” she said, her voice touched with whimsical solemnity.  “They remind us of our place in the universe, and how important it is that we take the little we’ve been given and make the most of it, because even a speck of dust can have meaning and a purpose if it wants to.  Under the stars, my people live our lives, thriving in the world that everybody else fears, and the stars are our friends and constant companions, their light giving us strength when we’re weak and simple comfort when we’re not.  Their tiny vastness keeps us from overextending ourselves and letting our arrogance at the gifts we’ve been given get the better of us.  We’re all human beneath the stars, nothing more, nothing less.  That’s all we can be, and to forget that is to lose ourselves.”

            Her hand reached out and took the wheel.  “Look,” she urged.  “Just look.”

            I turned my head upwards, the stars blasting into my brain with such intensity that I nearly shut my eyes.  How could there be so many of them?  How was it even possible?

            “Do you understand?” she asked.

            “Yeah.”

            “Like hell.”

            “Really, I do.”

            “No, you don’t.  Not yet.”

            She grabbed me and started to kiss me again, forcing my tired and weary body to respond to her once more, and as weak as I was, I willingly gave myself to her.  This time she was even more aggressive, letting much more of her fire through, and I momentarily wondered what it was like to live with so much power and how it didn’t make one crazy.  Or maybe …

            The tires squealed as my car swished across the road, and when I jerked away from her, I saw that she’d let go of the wheel.  She laughed as I grabbed at the wheel and straightened us out.

            “What the fuck did you do that for?!” I demanded.

            Instead of answering, she lunged at me again, pushing me back in my seat as she kissed me, her hands all over me, taking my attention away from the wheel.  I couldn’t even see the road through her hair whipping around in the wind.  I felt the car swerving again, and I tried to pull away from her, but she wasn’t having any of it.

            “You drive!” I snarled.

            “Fuck you.”  She put her lips to mine and overpowered me once more.

            The car began to drift around the road, and I fought against her, trying to look around her hair to see where we were going.

            “Quit!  You’re gonna get us killed!”  My heart was thundering so hard I was getting dizzy and I couldn’t hear anything but the howl of the engine, the scream of the wind, and her voice.

            “You can’t die.  You’re already dead, Davey Danger,” she said, kissing at my neck, letting her fangs graze the flesh.

            I slammed my foot down on the brake, but it barely barked the tires, because she was ready for it, kicking my foot away even as she mashed down the accelerator, smashing me back into the seat.  The note of urgency in the engine went up as the car began to shake.

            “You wanted danger?” she purred.  “You got it.”

            She knocked my hands away from the steering wheel, and when I screamed, she just kissed me again.  I tried to grab the wheel, but I couldn’t get past her hands.  We started to drift again, the engine roaring a song of triumph while the car felt like it was going to shake itself apart.

            I made one last grab for the wheel, and when that failed, I tried to punch her, to distract her long enough that I could regain control, but she was ready for that, too.  My hands were pinned back as we careened down the road, the little stranger that called herself Venus d’Morte pushing against me, burning me with her passion as her mind brushed against mine, filling my head with more than I could handle.  I finally just gave in to her in a moment that stretched to infinity, losing myself in the madness of the speed, the night, the stars, and her.

            “Live well, Davey Danger,” she murmured into my ear.

            With a final kiss on my cheek, she was gone, just like that.  One second she was there, the next, she wasn’t, as though she’d never existed in the first place.  I gaped at the empty seat next to me for a full second before my scattered brain remembered exactly how fast I was going down the mountain road.  I grabbed the wheel at long last, but it was too little, too late.

            My car smashed through the guardrail with a sharp jolt and screech of ripping metal, the same superb construction that had held my car together so well for so long cutting through the barrier like a machete through a branch … the guardrail didn’t even slow me down.

            The road had become an incline when I hadn’t been looking, and it served as a ramp to launch me into the fresh, open air, towards the stars and infinity.  I glanced back and saw the safety of the road rapidly dwindling far behind, forever out of reach.  The forest spread out far, far below me, an endless sea of dark green, lightly brushed with nightsilver.  My heart stopped.

            With no foot on the accelerator, the engine’s roar faded to nothing in the wind whistling past my ears, and I stared dumbly ahead as I continued to hurtle upwards into the night.  At some point, probably just seconds into it, though it felt much, much longer than that, all of my momentum had been spent, and Mother Earth reached up to reclaim her wayward child, pulling me back down towards her.

As I began to fall, I looked up at the eternal stars, begging a god I’d never really believed in for deliverance, but the scoundrel’s prayer died aborning on my lips as it all suddenly made sense, every last bit of it.  My heart started again, beating a calm, even rhythm as life rushed back in to fill the void it had once departed, finally getting back what I’d once lost, what I’d once given up.  I was whole.

Somehow, my wicked little stranger had given me what I’d asked her for.

I reached up towards the stars, unafraid of them now, and I touched them ever so briefly as I fell to the earth, the night singing a song of beauty and joy to me.  I laughed in the manner of a child, unselfishly and unconsciously, taking it all in while I could.  The prison of my own mind had been destroyed, and this final act had razed the foundations of corruption and pain, freeing me and allowing me to see the world as it really was.  It was all gone now, the last 15 years and more, leaving nothing behind but the heart of who I was.

As the trees and the ground beneath them drew near, I whispered good-byes to my sons, wherever they were, and I hoped that they knew, despite everything else, that their father loved them.  So much of my life had been tangled up in bullshit, but that was one thing that could never be taken away from me, no matter how pathetic I’d become, and that was worth something.  Maybe the only thing that was worth something.  Whatever it was, it was enough for me, and I hoped it was enough for them, wherever they were.  The uppermost branches of the trees scratched against the bottom of my car, and I leaned back in the seat, looking up at the stars, a smile on my face, contented.