oing dark had been a soft thing, a closing of one’s eyes for sleep. When Occam’s lights return, it’s at stadium wattage, tungsten exploding from windows like backdraft fire, parking-lot lights pounding down like lava. The guard shields his eyes and spins, the building itself having become the ambusher. Giles has one leg out of the driver’s door and hesitates, blinded, too, but somehow, between his pressed eyelids, he looks in the right direction and sees the double doors open and Elisa emerge with a cart, just as planned, except with a large black woman helping her push.

Giles knows he is not a man of action. It has hurt him, again and again. It has taken the life he should have had. Not today. The guard is still staring at the building when Giles has an idea, one he doesn’t allow to reach the scale upon which notions so consequential are weighed. He grabs the door with both hands and slams it into the guard with all of his strength. The van sits high and the sound of the metal door against the man’s skull is awful, and so is the bag-of-bones rattle of the body hitting the pavement, but it is done, the first violent act of his life, and though it does not make him feel good, he knows there is plenty of violence to share, especially here.