IT TOOK A LEX forty-seven hours to get from a smashed forest in Oklahoma to his father’s penthouse in Houston. There was a lot of bureaucratic hassle around the federal disaster zone, but the Guard and the cops couldn’t stop him from walking, and his luck changed when he got his hands on a motor bicycle. He didn’t eat much. He scarcely slept. He had a fever. His lungs hurt very badly, and death was near, death was very near now, not the romantic death this time, not the sweet, drug-addled, transcendent death. Just real death, just death of the cold, old-fashioned variety, death like his mother’s death, an absence and a being still, forever. He didn’t love death anymore. He didn’t even like death anymore. Death was something he was going to have to get over with.