HIS MEMORY was like a knife cutting into him. Cutting deep into him with hate. The Secret. He had been riding his bicycle with a friend named Terry. They had been biking on a trail and decided to come back a different way, a way that took them past the Amber Mall. Brian remembered everything in incredible detail. Remembered the time on the bank clock in the mall, flashing 3:31, then the temperature, 82, and the date. All the numbers were part of the memory, all of his life was part of the memory.

Terry had first turned to smile at him about something and Brian looked over Terry's head and saw her. His mother. She was sitting in a car, a strange car. He saw her and she did not see him. Brian was going to wave or call out, but something stopped him. There was a man in the car. Short blond hair, the man had. He was wearing some kind of white pullover tennis shirt. Brian saw this and more, saw the Secret and saw more later, but the memory came in pieces, like this—Terry smiling, Brian looking over his head to see the car and his mother sitting with the man, the time and temperature clock, the front wheel of his bike, the short blond hair of the man, the white shirt of the man, the hot-hate slices of the memory were exact.

The Secret.

Brian opened his eyes and screamed.

For seconds he did not know where he was and thought the crash was still happening and he was going to die, and he screamed until his breath was gone. Then silence, filled with sobs as he breathed in air, half crying. How could it be so quiet? Minutes before there was nothing but noise, crashing and breaking. Screaming. Now it was quiet. Some birds were singing. How could birds be singing? His legs felt wet and he raised up on his hands and looked back down at them. They were in the lake. Strange. They went down into the water. He tried to move, but pain hammered into him and made his breath shorten into gasps and he stopped, his legs still in the water. Pain. Memory.

The late sun came across the water, hit his eyes and made him turn away. It was over then. The crash. He was alive. “The crash is over and I am alive,” he thought. Then his eyes closed and he lowered his head for minutes. When he opened them again it was evening and some of the sharp pain had lessened—there were many dull aches—and the crash came back to him fully. Into the trees and out onto the lake. The plane had crashed and sunk in the lake and he had somehow escaped. He raised himself and crawled out of the water, grunting with the pain of movement. His legs were on fire, and his head felt as if somebody had been pounding on it with a hammer, but he could move.

He pulled his legs out of the lake and crawled on his hands and knees until he was away from the wet-soft shore and near a small stand of brush. Then he went down, only this time to rest. He lay on his side and put his head on his arm and closed his eyes because that was all he could do now. He closed his eyes and slept, dreamless, deep and down. There was almost no light when he opened his eyes again. The darkness of night was thick and for a moment he began to panic again. “To see,” he thought. “To see is everything.” And he could not see. But he turned his head without moving his body and saw that across the lake the sky was a light gray, that the sun was starting to come up, and he remembered that it was evening when he went to sleep.

"Must be morning now..." He mumbled it to himself. As the thickness of sleep left him the world came back. He was still in pain, all-over pain. His legs were cramped and drawn up, tight and aching, and his back hurt when he tried to move. Worst was a throb in his head that pulsed with every beat of his heart. It seemed that the whole crash had happened to his head. He rolled on his back and felt his sides and his legs, moving things slowly.

He rubbed his arms; nothing seemed to be broken. Just bruised. His forehead felt very swollen to the touch, and it was so tender that when his fingers touched it he nearly cried. But there was nothing he could do about it. Like the rest of him, it seemed to be bruised more than broken.

“I'm alive,” he thought. “I'm alive.”

“It could have been different. I could be dead”

“Like the pilot,” he thought suddenly.

The pilot in the plane, down into the water, down into the blue water strapped in the seat...

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination—except that it was all reality. One second he seemed only to have imagined that there was a plane crash that he had fought out of the sinking plane and swum to shore. That it all happened to some other person or in a movie playing in his mind. Then he would feel his clothes, wet and cold, and his forehead would slash a pain through his thoughts and he would know it was real, that it had really happened. But all in a haze.

So he sat and stared at the lake, felt the pain come and go in waves, and watched the sun come over the end of the lake. It took an hour, maybe two—he could not measure time yet and didn't care—for the sun to get halfway up. With it came some warmth, small bits of it at first, and with the heat came clouds of insects—thick, swarming groups of mosquitoes that flocked to his body, went up his nose when he breathed in, went into his mouth when he opened it to take a breath.

It was not possibly believable. Not this. He had come through the crash, but the insects were not possible. He coughed them up, spat them out, sneezed them out, closed his eyes and kept brushing his face, slapping and crushing them by the dozens, by the hundreds. But as soon as he cleared a place, as soon as he killed them, more came, thick, whining, buzzing masses of them. Mosquitoes and some small black flies he had never seen before. All biting, chewing, taking from him.

In moments his eyes were swollen shut and his face weak and round to match his head. He pulled the torn pieces of his jacket over his head and tried to protect himself, but the jacket was full of rips and it didn't work. In desperation he pulled his T-shirt up to cover his face, but that exposed the skin of his lower back and the mosquitoes and flies attacked the new soft flesh of his back so viciously that he pulled the shirt down.

There was nothing left to do. And when the sun was fully up and heating him directly, making him warm, the mosquitoes and flies disappeared. Almost that suddenly. One minute he was sitting in the middle of a swarm; the next, they were gone and the sun was on him.

Vampires, he thought.

"Unnnhhh." He pulled himself up to stand against the tree and stretched, bringing new aches and pains. His back muscles must have been hurt as well—just trying to stand made him weak enough to nearly fall down.

He looked around again. The lake water was perfectly still. He could see the reflections of the trees at the other end of the lake. Upside down in the water they seemed almost like another forest, an upside-down forest to match the real one. Everything was green, so green it went into him. The forest was huge. There was a rocky cliff about twenty feet high.

If the plane had come down a little to the left it would have hit the rock, and he would have been smashed. "Destroyed. Dead." The word came. "I would have been destroyed and torn and smashed. Driven into the rocks and destroyed."

Luck, he thought. I have luck, I had good luck there.

But he knew that was wrong. If he had had good luck his parents wouldn't have divorced because of the Secret. He wouldn't have been flying with a pilot who had a heart attack. He wouldn't be here where he needed good luck to stay alive.

If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you'll come to bad luck. He shook his head again—wincing. Another thing not to think about.

“The scenery was very pretty, he thought, and there were new things to look at, but it was all a green and blue blur, and he was used to the gray and black of the city, the sounds of the city. Traffic, people talking, sounds all the time— the hum and whine of the city. Here, at first, it was silent, or he thought it was silent, but when he started to listen, really listen, he heard thousands of things. Hisses and small sounds, birds singing, hum of insects, splashes from the fish jumping—there was great noise here, but a noise he did not know, and the colors were new to him. The colors and noise mixed in his mind to make a green-blue blur that he could hear, hear as a hissing pulse-sound.

He was still tired. So tired. So terribly tired, and standing had taken a lot of energy, had drained him. He thought he was still in some kind of shock from the crash and there was still the pain, the dizziness, the strange feeling. He found another tree, a tall pine with no branches until the top, and sat with his back against it looking at the lake with the sun warming him, and in a few moments he laid down and was asleep again.