I began by saying goodbye to Mother. She had asked me if I wanted her to come to the station with me. I knew she didn’t want to. It would have been the farthest journey she’d made from the apartment in months. I told her no.

You had gone down to the sea already, riding the ferry back and forth to Nantucket. It was a perfectly respectable job for a Hyannis boy, but inexplicably you chose to lodge at the other end of the line. A girl was involved, I suppose.

– No.

A boy, then. A dog, a fire engine. Some wildflowers by the side of the road. It doesn’t matter. Nantucket was a lonely outpost at the edge of the new world, a world still fresh and dripping wet to an American boy even after four hundred years, a suitable shore to wash up on after our shipwreck of a childhood. Now you’ve found yourself another life-saving station here in gaunt, fallen Northangle, separated from the rest of Massachusetts by a ring of sullen hills and an ocean of forgetfulness. Does anyone in the State House know this town exists? Anyone east of the Connecticut River? You wouldn’t have found it yourself if it weren’t for that compass in your soul that always points to the edges of things.

Of course I don’t presume to know whether you have a soul. Your compass might be in your cerebral cortex, or your hypothalamus, or your pocket. It’s a question of some delicacy. Now that Duda is gone, I don’t know of anyone actively hunting for a man without a soul, but you never know when you might meet such a hunter. And if you should, there’s only one thing you can do: invite him out for a drink. Then walk him home in the dark and kill him.