I climbed on. I could hear him now. Harry was yelling, the wind carrying his voice to me before I could even see his face. At least I think it was Harry. Either that or the wind had just called me a bastard.

My shoe slipped. I looked down at the water and trembled from top to bottom. It looked like a flat blue slab of concrete.

“Thanks for the backstab, mate!”

Harry was leaning against a steel rail, the one I was white-knuckled clutching for dear life. To drag his leg all the way up that bridge must have been a nightmare. Maybe it was out of exhaustion that he let himself sway, and nearly topple over, with the wind.

His face was all shriveled up. He’d frowned so much he’d actually broken his face. His worry lines had snapped.

“Harry, it was a mistake!” I shouted.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“But we can fix it! Come down and everyone will know the book is yours!”

“It’s too late, Martin! I’ve seen it!”

“Seen what?”

“The hour of my death!”

“When?”

“What time is it now?”

“Harry, don’t jump!”

“I won’t! I’ll fall! You can’t tell a person not to fall! That’s gravity’s business, not mine!” He was laughing from fear, from hysteria. His eyes were on all those guns pointing up at him from below. His paranoia had finally reached enlightenment. The paranoid fantasies and reality were experiencing absolute fusion.

“I fall…I’m gone…there’s another war…an earthquake…and the return of the Madonna…only now she’s a singer…but still a virgin…and now sexual revolution…and marble-wash jeans…”

His ESP was reaching into the infinite, blinding him to the present. His small, twitchy eyes, which usually darted around in their sockets, had finally frozen solid; they were traveling, exploring and seeing everything. Everything.

“Computers…everyone has one…in their homes…and they’re fat…everyone’s so fat…”

He was out of control, prognosticating like crazy! He could see the whole of human future mapped out. He was flicking through the pages! It was too much for him. “She’s dead! She’s dead!” Who? He couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. “A third world war! A fourth! A fifth! A tenth! It never ends! They’re dead!” Who’s dead? “The astronaut! The president! The princess! Another president! Your wife! Now you! Now your son! Everyone! Everyone!” It went on for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. So humanity was going to persist after all. His eyes were pushing through space and time. He wasn’t missing a thing.

Harry’s line of communication with the infinite was broken by the wail of sirens starting up again. We looked down and saw the police and the media trucks backing away. Everyone was leaving.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Harry screamed to the world below.

“Hang on,” I said. “I’ll go see.”

Halfway down I ran into a petrified reporter who’d been overcome with vertigo during his climb and couldn’t move up or down the rail.

“What’s going on?”

“Haven’t you heard? They’ve got Terry Dean trapped! He’s taken hostages! There’s going to be a showdown!”

The reporter’s voice was excited, but he had the kind of deadpan face you usually see behind the wheel of a hearse. I climbed back up to Harry.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Terry,” I said, dreading his reaction.

Harry lowered his head, watched wistfully as the last of the reporters sped away.

“Mate,” I said, “I have to go and see if I can help Terry.”

“Fine. Go.”

“I’m sorry, I-”

“Go!”

I climbed down, my eyes focused on the handrail and my feet, and before I reached the bottom I heard the blast of a gun, the sound of a body whistling through the air, and a splash below that was really more of a thud.

That was it.

That was Harry.

Goodbye, Harry.

The police had Terry cornered in a bowling alley. I knew the whole of Australia would be rushing there as if they were water and my brother was the drain, so I jumped in a taxi and promised the driver untold riches if he could get as close to the speed of light as a V6 will get you. When you’re hurrying off to save your brother’s life you don’t fret over pennies, so every time his foot touched the brakes, I threw money in his lap. When he reached for the street directory, I tore exactly one third of my remaining hair out. It’s a bad sign when the driver cranes his head back to look at a street sign he’s just passed.

No directions were necessary, though; a real cavalcade of vehicles and bodies was surging through the streets in one direction: police cars, ambulances, fire engines, army Jeeps, media trucks, ice cream vans, spectators, gardeners, rabbis, anyone in Sydney who owned a radio and wanted to take part in a historical event.

Everyone wants a ringside seat for history in the making. Who’d turn down the opportunity to watch the back of Kennedy’s head explode if given a ticket to Dallas in ’63, or the falling of the Berlin Wall? People who were there speak as if their clothes were stained with JFK’s cerebrum, as if the Berlin Wall fell from their own persistent nudging. No one wants to have missed anything, like sneezing during a small earthquake and wondering why everyone is screaming. The capture and possible killing of Terry Dean was Australia ’s biggest earthquake in fifty years, which is why they got to that bowling alley any way they could.

I leapt from the taxi and slid ungracefully over the bonnets of cars, cracking my hip on the side mirror of a Ford. I could see it: the bowling alley. It looked like the whole New South Wales police force was there. Snipers were taking their positions on the roof and in the trees in the children’s park opposite. One sniper was climbing up the jungle gym, two were balancing on a seesaw.

I couldn’t get through the mob. I was stuck. I shouted, “I’m Martin Dean! Terry Dean’s brother!” They caught on. They cleared a path and let me through, then I got stuck again. A few people around me made getting me inside their life’s mission, lifting me up on top of the crowd- I rode on a hundred shoulders like a rock god. I was getting closer, but sometimes the crowd pushed me in different directions. At one point I was going across, not forward. I shouted, “Forward! Forward!” as if I were Captain Ahab and that bowling alley was my great white whale.

Then I heard the crowd shouting something new: “Let her through! Let her through!” I craned my neck around. I couldn’t see who they were referring to. “It’s his mother! Terry Dean’s mother!” they cried. Then I saw her: my mother, coming from the opposite direction, rising and falling on the roll of the human sea. She waved to me. I waved back. We were both being propelled toward our family’s destiny. I could hear her now. She was shouting: “It’s the double! The double! We’ve got him cornered!” She was off her head! And the crowd was rushing us so fast now we almost collided. They dropped us on the ground in front of the police, who were trying to keep the crowd and the media back at the same time. Both groups were screaming outrage. We had to squeeze into the circle of police and start answering questions. We showed them ID. I just wanted to get inside, but my mother wasn’t helping with her crazy ranting about the doppelgänger. She was Terry Dean’s mother, she said, but the man inside was not her son. They couldn’t work it out. I had to shout over her: “I can get him to come out peacefully! Just give me a chance!” But the cops had different ideas. It dawned on me that they didn’t want him to leave that bowling alley alive. I had to snap into action. I said, “So what, you want to make a martyr out of him? You want his name to go down in history as another outlaw massacred by the police? If you kill him, no one will remember his crimes! You’ll turn him into a hero! Like Ned Kelly! And you’ll be the bad guys. Let him go to trial, where all his brutality will come to light. Then the hero will be the man who captures him alive! Anyone can shoot a man, just as anyone can shoot a wild boar, then run around screaming, I got him! I got him! But capturing a wild boar with your bare hands- that takes guts!”