Tom Foran Clark

They were in a far country -- this had sunk in.

In the morning, Pike left his treasure map and diary in his coat pocket and actually read something different for a change. Somewhere along the way he got two guide books, one about Spain and the other about Greece. Actually, the one book was only about Galacia, in northern Spain, and the other was only about the Greeks who’d colonized the coast of southern Italy and Sicily in the eighth century BC -- Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece.

“The Romans conquered Paestum,” Pike read aloud. “Then malarial mosquitos swept in, and the city was abandoned. Arabian Saracens sacked nearby Agropolis, introducing buffalo and pasta to the region."

They left Paestum and resumed their grueling machinations up steep cypress covered slopes to million-knuckled jumbles of high mountain villages clinging precariously to jutting crags, offering marvelous views to Agropolis and out over the haze-veiled ocean. From these, they trekked to mountain villages still higher. Clouds dominated. The sun tried to break through; clouds prevailed; the sun fell back. The two started down the other side of those mountains, then up mountains, down mountains, and up again. The weather stayed dim and cool, given over to the ambivalent ramblings of the clouds.

They would round a bend believing the journey now would be wholly down. Instead, they’d climb higher still -- higher into thicker forests; higher into the clouds. They knew then what gravity was! They were required to push higher, but gravity, like divers’ weights, pulled them down. When the road did sweep down, inevitably a wind swooped up, chilling their bones. Bustling clouds approached ominously, then dispersed.

They passed through spare stone villages where the local women balanced baskets and clay vessels on their heads, lazily exchanging conversation, two by two, sashaying heavily up or down their village roads. Roosters cawed; pigs screeched; lambs cried; donkeys neighed -- their stubborn complaints echoing far and wide through the canyons.

Then they fell a little ways, down into a wide, gravely valley and river bed tucked away high in those mountains. An envoy of goats and lambs made their way though it, their attached bells clanging, herded by an old woman dressed all in black, head to toe, and an old man, likewise all in black. From this valley, the two followed a switchback road narrowly cut into the ragged slopes, passing from one lonely outpost to another -- all dispersed, scattered, isolated. Merry village schoolchildren customarily fanned them by, waving, cheering us on -- not a few also chiding them.

At sundown, Pike and Emery arrived at a mountaintop pasture, where they pitched their tent. Through the night, they heard the clanging of bells. In the morning, a goatsherd went by calling out, "Hey-a. Ho! Eeeeee-a! Yo! Weeeeeee-o. Whip-brrrrrrrr. Yip! Ha!" and then he and his goats all disappeared in the morning mist, the clanging retinue growing muted, then fading to a murmur -- then silence again. The two continued on, rising higher into the clouds. Every sound grew yet more muffled as they went higher, as if that world were folded away into a giant conch shell.

The dazzling view from the snowy mountain ridge village of Cuccaro reached clear to the sea. The gray clouds overhead were tumultuous, bustling, loop-the-loop. The sun broke through, but only for moment, full upon them. They passed by burros hauling sticks; more old women all in black with jugs and baskets on their heads; more goatsherds and shepards; more goats and sheep. All mundane and quotidian. It was just another day in those scattered mountain villages. At the same time, they’d look out and see the ethereal wonders, unsurpassed views, awesome breathtaking scenes.

A triangular wedge of ocean came into view, framed by harsh, rugged peaks raised like fists, daring them to approach, plunging almost vertically down from where they stood to the farmlands far, far below.

Late that afternoon, Pike and Emery arrived in the sleepy village of Laurito, wedged precariously amid conflicting inclines. An old man with several missing fingers welcomed them to that far place, shaking their hands insistently, then pointing to the ominous sky. More rain would soon be coming.

They rolled down through the village of Alfano, and continued down and down. They came to a riverbed at the deepest bottom of a high gorge. Sun poured in. The road turned upward, steeper than ever. The two pressed on. They approached a square stone house divided into three inner rooms, one in which the orange tile roof had given way. They found a corner that they felt would prove to be sufficient protection against the rainstorm coming. They went through their customary ritual of pouring wine, one glass each, then making sandwiches, perhaps eating beans from cans, perhaps likewise opening canned peaches, always finishing off their repast with cookies. Usually they’d finish off a day with studying maps or reading or writing by candlelight.

On that particular evening, Emery noticed Pike was looking at him out of the corner of his eye as he wrote. He looked like he really wanted to say something, or ask something, so Emery invited him to do that. "It’s nothing," Pike said.

"Oh come on, " Emery said. "Don’t give me that bull. Something’s obviously on your mind."

"What are you writing?" Pike asked.

"Just some stuff about what we did today."

"Nothing in particular?"

"Sure, some of it is particular."

"Like what? What did you write about Paestum?"

"I wrote down some of the things you said about the Greeks’ colonizing southern Italy and Sicily and how the Romans conquered Paestum but malaria sent them all running. How Agropolis was attacked by Saracens on buffaloes. That was really interesting," Emery submitted.

"But I didn’t say that," Pike insisted. "Besides, I was reading from a book."

"I was just kidding, Pike."

"Well, if you’re going to write a thing down, you might as well get it right." Pike criticized. "What are you writing down about me, anyway?" Pike wanted to know.

Emery searched his notes for the day and found he’d said nothing at all about Pike, and he said so.

"So -- what? I’m not even part of what you’re writing about?"

"You’re very much a part of what I’m writing about, Pike" Emery reassured him. "It’s just that I didn’t write down anything particular about you today."

"So what did you write about today?" Pike goaded him.

"I wrote about how we pedaled up grueling slopes to villages with great views out to Agropolis and the ocean, and climbed to higher mountain villages, and then down again, then up again. I wrote about the women who balanced the jugs and baskets on their heads, that sudden wind that swooped in and chilled our bones, and how that old man with his fingers missing shook our hands and pointing to the sky to say a storm was coming."

"Isn’t that kind of boring?"

"Do you think that’s boring?" Emery wanted to know.

"Well, yeah. I mean gads, you’ve said nothing at all about the incredible strangeness of this place -- how Goddamned dramatic it is! Everything’s so high -- too insanely high! -- or things plunge awesomely. It’s almost otherworldly, I think. No, it is out of this world! Haven’t you felt at some point like you were going to slide off -- or get crushed -- or tumble sideways and whoooosh! vanish from the earth? I’ve been feeling like that about eighty percent of the time we’ve been up here. I’ve been entrusted with this challenge and this obligation, to get my ass to Spain post haste, and I honestly don’t know sometimes that I’m going to make it! I’ve been entrusted with something truly extraordinary, and for all I know right now, I’m going to fall off a mountain peak and be found, years from now, by some simpleminded shepherd, bureaucratic office clerk, or Swiss or German spy or something, yodeling with pleasure at the discovery of our bodies and Townsend’s diary and treasure map!”

“Is that what you think about up here?" Emery asked.

"Yeah,” Pike snarled. “That’s what I think about. Is that okay with you? I know you take it lightly, but it’s important to me."

“Look,” Emery said, “It’s not me who feels like he’s going to get crushed, tumble sideways off a mountain and, ‘whoooooooosh!,’ vanish from the earth!”

"You obviously don’t get it,” Pike fumed. “You entirely miss my whole fucking point."

"You keep saying that,” Emery said. “So, just what is this fucking point, as you call it?"

"I am definitely not feeling real comfortable about where we’re at right now and what we’re doing right now,” Pike said. “I just wish we were in Spain already. I am spooked by these mountains, I’m not afraid to tell you. I don’t feel like I’m falling half the time; I feel like I’m falling without end. We struggle up a mountain and I get the sense all things are possible -- all beginning and becoming -- and then, for Christ’s sake Emery, we look down, and everything’s plunging all over, all the time. It freaks me out! I feel like everything is being obliterated! Don’t you feel that? And what do you write? ‘Some women balanced baskets on their heads.' I like that. 'It got real windy and an old man shook our hands. He told us rain was coming’."

"So, what would you have me write?" Emery asked impatiently.

"This motion of evolving -- It’s going on all the time! How things are both old and new. How completely familiar things are; and how completely strange."

"Right," Emery said.

"The historical past; the present moment; the future," Pike went right on talking. "The simultaneity of these -- the forever becoming; the forever perishing."

"Got it," Emery said dryly, pretending to jot this down in his notes. "Simultaneity,” he mumbled just loud enough so Pike could hear him. “Wish we were somewhere else -- and in Spain. Too bad about North Africa being in the way. Could prove an obstacle. Wish I’d thought of that before.” Emery turned away from Pike to try and get some needed sleep.

Rains came in the night -- drenching rains -- wind-blown torrents that rattled the roof like Dervishes dancing in the attic. In the morning, the sky was again blue and clear. Pike and Emery climbed to the village of Castel del Rugge, barely clinging to the edge of its ragged mountain, then rolled on to Torre Orsaia, where they stocked up on soap, bread, fruits, beans, cheese, and wine. From this far outpost in the mountains, they again plummeted down, and down, in fierce, bristling winds. They seemed to fall right out of the sky, weaving round those mountain bends as if we were riding in rollercoaster cars, not riding bikes, slipping down scree, soaring to the coast, right to the ocean’s edge. Murky bay waters bulged shoreward, thick with seaweed, erupting in sunlit beads of froth against gray harbor boulders.

They stayed on that road and rolled down into Sapri, where they slept on the beach on New Year’s Eve, 1999. They got a bottle of Molinari sambuca at an alimentary. Dressed like Alaskan eskimoes against the cold, they made sandwiches and filled their glasses and exchanged toasts, downing the sweet licorice-tasting liquor like sugar water. Just before midnight, there were suddenly people all up and down the beach, admiring the capodonno -- fireworks -- flaring, exploding, whizzing, ripping, fizzling, blazing overhead. A frenzy of cheers went up exactly at midnight. Emery went right in amid the new millennium revelers, hugging and kissing these cheering, hopping, dancing strangers. "Buon Anno, 2000! Buon Anno, 2000!"

Pike kept to himself. He wasn’t having any part of that.

On New Year’s morning in this, the new century, the two riders took the rocky road out of Sapri, carved out of startling cliffs, zigzagging through low chalk-blue grottoes to an awesome high country of dizzying promontories and still more plunging gorges. Strong winds arose, kicking like burros, throwing tumbleweed and whole trees across our path amid the yawning chasms. The gorges plummeted to the waters . Somewhere in that dramatic, lofty country was the most unlikely village -- Aquafredda. The sun blazed against the village walls. There was not a soul in sight. There was, however, a huge statue of Jesus Christ -- de Redentore, the redeemer -- with outstretched arms, looming large over everything. Behind this enormous, wide-welcoming Jesus was the Basilica of S. Biaggio atop its own soaring cliff.

That night they camped at nearby Maratea, a village rising on its mountain in three distinct layers, or terraces. They pitched their tent in a pastoral hillside grove. In the morning they got on a corkscrew road again plunging down. They stopped every five or six minutes, to catch their breath and take snapshots of the stunning views: lofty peninsular crags framing the aqua-colored coral waters, smooth until they met the shore, where random breezes fanned them gently.

They came to a huge, wide river basin carved from mountain canyons that led down to the ocean’s edge, where there were quilts of farm fields. They went along a narrow road paralleling the beach that widened onto a palm-lined thoroughfare entering the village of Praia al Mare, a busy, chalk-white seaside town. They continuerd on to the city of Scalea, where impoverished gauche, gaudy, whitewashed little edifices neighbored gauche, gaudy, whitewashed posh villas, chateaus, and resort hotels. On gulley ridges around the glamorous resorts, goats idly chewed grass. At assorted construction sites, stonemasons poked lazily at tiles and cinder blocks with their trowels. Women in black carried baskets and jugs on their heads. Even in sprawling Scalea, the familiar, easy, slow south Italian pace and ambiance prevailed.

They came to a wide cave where train tracks met, then split, tunneling into still more mountains. They followed one path to an overhanging ridge and pitched their tent on a tiny, precarious cornice. They devoured their humble dinner with exuberance. A single fishing boat was out on the water in the night, shining a dim orange-yellow blinking light.

Both slept for over ten hours. The dawn sky looked like shook pillow stuffing extending from the mountains to the sea. They packed up and rolled on to the seaside village of Paola. The morning sun was a blanket over them -- a warm glaze. Palm trees lined the broad coastal highway that took us to the villages of Amantea and Nocere Terrenese. Pike had a burst of sudden energy, slicing down that road. Emery coasted after, on his tail winds.

At sundown, the two were on the north rim of the Gulf of San Eufemia, slightly inland, between the village of Marina and the city of S. Eufemia-Lamezia. Just off from the main road, they came to a grove of sweet tangerine trees. Pike came to a complete stop, right there in the road. He was crying. "Don't worry," he told Emery. "It doesn’t matter."

"What doesn’t matter?"

Pike got off his bike, and kicked it over. Emery could see Pike was overwrought. Emery had not himself completely got rid of a vague uncertain anger that had grown like a moss or a crust since they’d left overcrowded Rome and outrageous Naples. In Pike’s face Emery saw something worse going on. Something had slipped, had come loose, or had outright been dashed hard against the rocks.

"What’s wrong, Pike?" Emery repeated.

"Mind your own business!" Pike snapped. But Emery somehow felt he was, in fact, saying the opposite, "Get involved!" he seemed to be crying out to Emery.

In the middle of nowhere, out in farm fields, was a two-story house with full portico doors at the middle room of the second floor, and a railed balcony. Emery shepherded Pike over to it. The two took shelter in the central chamber, sitting on upended orange crates, looking through Eucalyptus shags at the crimson sunset just beyond the concrete highway. The plumbing in the place had all been disconnected -- also the electricity -- but all the pipes and fixtures and possibilities remained. In the interim, this was just a hollow house.

Emery helped Pike lay out his sleeping bag, and helped him get in it. Pike didn’t want to eat anything. He said he had no appetite. Emery felt his head. For sure he had a fever. In the night, Pike kept mumbling how things were too high; too deep; too wide; too strange; too other. "We’re everywhere at once," he muttered. "And we’re nowhere. Magna Graeca my ass," he cried out in the middle of the night. "This is no Goddamned Great Time here. This is Godforsaken madness."

They’d been out there, without limits or restraints. Emery could see they were paying a price now for that freedom. Pike was in the air, looking for handles to latch onto. He was burning up. Something had been eating him: before he could get to the bottom of it, it was getting to the bottom of him. Emery asked him to let him help. But Pike would not talk about it. That’s how that was.

Most certainly the place had been abandoned after the highway, SS-18, had been built. All night, trucks roared by not thirty feet from the balcony. Trains also shuddered through. The noise and motion were similar to being under stadium bleachers when the crowd goes wild, stamping feet. The whole house trembled.

Where once the dawn had brought the delightful song of morning warblers, there was now angry honking, rushing traffic. The morning light was gray and dim. Clouds cowered low over the mountains, damp and timid. Emery wanted to disperse them with a stick. Pike insisted he was well enough to get up and continue on but, for all the vigor that was in him, Emery might as well have carried Pike on his back that day.

The road continued inland, straight through a pan-flat valley holding leafy stands of bamboo and aisles and aisles of lemon trees, orange trees, and tangerine trees. The two wound up along the coast, higher and higher, to Pizzo. As elsewhere, cheerful local children ran up, encircling them, laughing and hooting. Pike and Emery offered them some of the fruits they carried with them, as gifts. The youths erupted in howls, pointing all around to the citrus trees growing wild in the fields and all along the terraced slopes, down to the distant sea. One child held up a soft, tiny gold-striped kitten for Pike to hold. He received it affectionately, but the tiny cat put out his claws and mauled Pike good. Emery could see in Pike’s wincing, exasperated expression how this hurt his pride. The kids scattered.

The temperature plunged. Under still more ominous skies, Pike and Emery continued climbing -- higher, higher. They walked up the steepest portion of that slope, up to the plateau village of Vibo Valentia. The road made perpendicular right and left angle turns through the town, then dropped to dark olive forests, and then rose yet again. Just as this road reached the apex of its rise, even as the two leaned into a curve, welcoming the coming turn downward, the storm broke -- lightning, thunder, and rain. The rain fell fast and hard. If the wrath of Greek or Roman gods brought on such storms, these gods were clearly furious. Short of cracking open the very ground, they were throwing their worst at Pike and Emery.

There was nowhere to turn for cover. The two pressed on, walking with their bikes. Already, they were thoroughly waterlogged. Visibility was about zero. They were most intent on not accidentally placing a foot on the roadside ledge, which would send them flying. It was grim going.

They went on like that a long time -- shivering, soaked, unsure whether they’d first be struck by a lightning bolt or be flung into empty space by a sudden wind or misplaced step. They finally came to a narrow path turning away from the road, and away from the coastal ledges, taking them to a field and an abandoned farmhouse. The windows of the house were all cracked or completely knocked out. The two found a dry corner and curled up there. But the wild, rumbling rainstorm raged the entire night. They felt minuscule. They cloaked themselves not only in their clothes, and in their sleeping bags, but also in the unpitched tent. They were miserable. They couldn’t sleep. Freezing winds blew in through the open windows. Increasingly, water dripped down on them from the heavily soaked, dilapidated ceiling. "That’s enough!" Pike finally cried out in sheer anguish. "It’s not your decision!"

What Pike did is, he pitched the tent -- in the house. At least he tried to. Emery pitched in, but it was not meant to be. Pike was exhausted; he was at wit’s end; he had an absolute fit. He just started punching everything insanely. All was in a tangle in the dark. Mockingly, the storm unleashed still worse furor. A crack of lightning made what was, or seemed to be, a direct hit on them. In either case, the roof collapsed and knocked the two to the ground. The jumbled construct of lumber, plaster, and clay was so waterlogged, it felt like they’d been grabbed and hugged by mud. The difficulty now was to disentangle themselves and their things from the collapsed disarray and enveloping sludge of relentless, relentless, relentless disorienting rain.

The only good news was the approaching dawn. In its dim light, Pike and Emery went outside and laid out the tent and assorted gear to be washed clean. They folded everything as best they could, loaded up their bikes with the soaked new burdens, and then straddled them with their soaked selves. And they got out of there.

They went back down the path to the road and rolled to the village of Parotti, where they took shelter in the unmanned open bay of a gas station garage. A dark, bearded man in brown mechanic’s overalls ran in, frowning, shaking his fist at two unwanted intruders, yelling at Pike and Emery. Then, as suddenly as his anger had flared, it ceased. He must have very quickly got the drift of their situation which had just about reached rock bottom. Standing there, frozen, the two must have looked like desperation embodied. The man looked shocked. He immediately ran to get a stack of towels, and returned to wrap them around his two waterlogged guests, gently patting them down. He got them fresh beige mechanic’s overalls -- these looked like prince’s attire to them -- and helped them out of their wet clothes. Then he helped them get their soaked parcels off their bikes. They variously hung them and laid them around the garage. Again the man ran off, returning with bread, cheese, tomatoes, and wine.

Pike was crying. The man ran and got three chairs and returned to eat with them. He introduced himself, pointing to the embroidered patch over his chest pocket -- likewise over our overalls’ chest pockets -- bearing his name - Giovanni. He was cheerful, waving his hands all over the place as he spoke, laughing out loud at whatever he was saying. Out of consideration for his luminous good intentions and generosity, Emery laughed right along, pretending improved cheeriness. It wasn’t very long before Emery was more cheerful in fact -- going right along. Pike, however, remained semi-comatose.

The sun came out. Giovanni helped them hang and spread our things outdoors. He had a look at the bikes, and did some needed tinkering on them. He helped Pike and Emery re-pack the bikes and pointed them in the direction of Miletto and Rosarno. The two tried to pay their savior money, but he would not take it. He even let them keep the overalls. He pinched frowning Pike’s right cheek between his fingers and smiled. Pike only wanly smiled back at him.

In their matching overalls, Pike and Emery rolled through Miletto to the hilltop village of Rosarno, and went on to sunny Gioia Tauro, half an ancient village and half a modern shopping mall. From a nearby mountain ledge they looked out over all of Palmi and the restless sea. The road wound higher up the mountain. When they got to the top, they were greeted with an expansive view in the other direction, to a majestic ice-capped stretch or portion of the tumbling Appenines.

The road opened up then plunged down -- dizzyingly down. The two zigzagged through the village of Bagnara Calabria in Antarctic-like cold, their hands glued to their handlebars. As dusk approached, they came to wide-terraced lemon groves and a ridge offering a wall-bank against the wind, with a view through sinewy lemon trees all the way out to the water. The twin lighthouses of Scylla, on the mainland boot-tip, and Torre Faro, on the northern tip of Sicily, blinked off and on through the night. Around the twin lighthouses, the respective villages sparkled like glitter.

In the morning Pike and Emery put on their customary garb, packing away Giovanni’s overalls as precious keepsakes, and climbed higher into those mountains and merged onto a superhighway that tunneled through the steep coastal slopes and, on high concrete stilts, barreled over plunging canyons, heading for Reggio Di Calabria. They turned off this freeway to enter the port of Villa San Giovanni, where they warmed themselves in a café before boarding the little ferry bound for Sicily, the Rosalia, brilliant white in the dazzling glare of sun.

The first thing Emery did after checking into Messina’s Locanda Bellavista hotel that afternoon was to wash up at the tiny room’s sink. In the mirror he saw his own face staring back -- burned brown, weathered, careworn. Pike sat by the window, staring blankly out. His haggard, sallow, ruined appearance suggested he’d been stung by those same killer mosquitoes that had brought malaria and death to Paestum. He shuffled over weakly to one of the two beds, and carefully lowered himself down on it. He was visibly unsteady. "Do you want to wash up?" Emery asked, but Pike was already gone.

Emery ministered to him, putting fresh cold towels on his blazing forehead. Emery had terrible premonitions, recalling things that had been said in Venice by his guardian angel and Freudian fortune-teller Frida, who’d so earnestly warned Emery of a deep perverseness in Pike -- his predilection for grave danger, his craving for a precipice to fall from, his ridiculous headlong death wish! Thanks for the tip, Frida. Now here was Pike, Emery's traveling partner, at death's door. Was this the inevitable day she’d predicted? Pike and Emery would not be seeing Tunis? They would not ride on to Marrakech?

Emery had initially taken Pike for lighthearted -- Mister happy-go-lucky. Look at him now. The two had come some distance. Pike looked like he’d been hit by a cannonball now taking him down like an anchor. He was fading fast. To study his sleeping, anguished face, twisted up in pain, was almost more than Emery could bear. He finally went and got some help. A cleaning woman took one look at Pike and gasped. She ran to fetch a doctor. The doctor sat by Pike and shook his head. Had Emery waited too long? he wondered. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. What would Emery do now, if Pike died?

After a while the doctor got up and left the room, motioning for Emery to follow him out. In the dark, hushed, narrow hallway, the doctor said -- at least this is what Emery understood -- Pike had about a fifty percent chance of recovering. But the doctor did not want Pike moved to a hospital -- yet.

Emery was at Pike’s side three nights and two days. He occasionally looked out the window, just watching all the many boats arriving and departing. He'd long felt people were not bigger for their little inflated opinions or their self-serving pathetic confessions, but rather for the things they were able to hold inside, to keep to themselves, sparing others. But he did not feel that way right now. There were important things he wanted -- needed -- to tell Pike. Emery drew himself up close to hisd haggard, shivering, comatose friend, and he whispered in his right ear, "I could have fixed that wobble in your front wheel better, but I wanted you to take more responsibility. I didn’t do my best, and for that I’m sorry."

Pike moved his head slowly toward Emery, and opened his left eye. "I didn’t want to work on it myself," he said weakly. "Which you could have construed as an insult."

Emery thought on this. Then he confessed to Pike that he’d regularly been mixing water with their wine, diluting it. He should have said something to Pike, but didn’t, and for that he was sorry.

Pike struggled to speak. “Arlen Townsend entrusted me with his treasure map and diary,” Pike whispered, “but that’s not all he gave me, Emery. He gave me ten thousand Spanish pesetas. It was selfish of me not to say so.”

Confessing he’d been “spellbound” by Townsend’s ambiguous tales of intrigue and hidden treasure, Pike next confessed he’d been in a trance in Venice, too -- enchanted, gaga, swept away by the remarkable brains and good looks of Frida Christensen. He admitted she’d been attracted to Emery, and not to him. In Venice, he had lied to her. Though Pike knew Emery held no principle higher than the sacredness of women -- human and divine -- he’d insanely insisted Emery had said some disrespectful and rude things about Frida behind her back. And when in the evening Emery had passed out after too much wine, Pike had put the make on her. Frida had halted Pike's advances that night and, the next morning, she’d ditched them both.

Emery was silent, collecting his thoughts. Clouds gathered in his head, like in the song -- rain was falling from his eyes. He sobbed into his hands. Pike lifted himself onto his elbows in the bed, and looked at him with great compassion.

"She was going to Grez-sur-Loing,” Pike said. “Can you imagine? It was very strange. That’s where we had met, Emery -- in France. She said she was disappointed with you. It was my fault. She said she was going to meet up with an artist friend of hers in Grez. I never told you. I was going to ditch you down the road and circle back to Grez-sur-Loing alone. But I didn’t. I’m so dog-gone sorry, Emery," Pike said. "I could kill myself."