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“Sounds fucked up, huh?” Bobby scratched at his right knee, which was poking through a hole in his jeans. He also had on a black Monster Magnet T-shirt. Circling his wrist was a bracelet woven of blond hair that I presumed to be Sharon’s. “This whole place is fucked up,” he went on. “I’ve been here going on four years, and I haven’t seen anything yet that made sense.”

With little prompting, he went off into a brief lecture about how various elements of the ecology of the place didn’t fit together, using terms with which I was mostly unfamiliar. “When I first arrived,” he said, “I thought of Yonder as Hobo Heaven, y’know. A lowball version of ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ Everything but the cigarette trees and the free beer. But you know what the place reminds me of now? It’s like the terrain some software guy might write for a computer game. The trains and all the bizarre fauna…I was so freaked out when I got here, I didn’t question any of it. But you examine it and you find out it’s really stupid. No logic. Just this insane conglomeration of irrational objects. But it’s a landscape where you could set a cool war or a puzzle game like Myst.”

“That what you think Yonder is?” I asked. “A computer game?”

“Yeah, why not? An extremely sophisticated one. And we’re the characters. The algorithms the real players inhabit.” He gave a shrug that seemed to signify cluelessness. “What do you think it is?”

“Best I can come up with, I figure we’re dead and this is some kinda test.”

“Then how do you account for the fact that people die? And that some of us travel back to the world?”

“Never said I knew what the rules was for bein’ dead,” I told him. “Maybe it all fits right in.”

He sat there for moment, nodded, then hopped up and went over to the stacked notebooks. “I want you to check this out,” he said, digging through the stacks. “Here!” He came back to the desk and tossed me a ratty notebook with a red cover. “Read this when you get a chance, and let me know what you think.”

“I can’t read,” I said.

He absorbed this for a two-count. “You got a disability?”

“Not that I know of. My daddy wasn’t too big on school. I can sign my name, I can add and subtract. That’s about it.”

“You want to learn, I’ll teach you.”

“I reckon not. I gone this long without, it don’t seem all that important now.”

“I won’t push it,” Bobby said. “But you’d be smart to take me up on the offer. Time can move pretty slow around here.”

The first grown-up book I read start to finish was a taped-together paperback entitled Sweet Wild Pussy. It had nothing to do with cats, nor do I believe it possessed much in the way of literary value, unless you were to count being made incredibly horny as an artistic achievement. Bobby had given it to me because the words were simple, and I felt accomplished on finishing it—the result of months of study. Still and all, I wish he had loaned me something else to begin with. Being the first thing I read, it exerted an undue influence on me for a while, and I found myself thinking overly much about “love ponies ridden hard” and “squeezable passion mounds.” Eventually I got around to reading the red notebook that Bobby had pushed on me during our first meeting. It had been found on a train that had returned from Yonder’s Wall and was purportedly the diary of a man named Harley Janks whom no one remembered. Harley claimed to have ridden straight from the world, past Yonder and on into the mountains. He said that beyond the mountains lay a world that was hellish hard to live in, populated by all manner of nasty critters; but there was a big settlement there and folks were carving out a place for themselves, working to bring order out of chaos. Most people who had read the notebook considered it a hoax. Harley was not a terribly articulate man, and his descriptions of life over Yonder’s Wall were pretty thin. However, Bobby thought the notebook went a ways toward proving his theory that Yonder was part of a computer game, and that the world Harley described was simply the next level.