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Thomas had his head down as I gave him my apology. After I was done, he kept it down as if waiting for more or contemplating what he had already been given. Finally he raised his head and gave me a look that was grim and I knew meant trouble. "So that was your apology?" he asked. "That's it?"

"Yes," I said, and then I said, "Sorry," for good measure.

"That was an awful apology," Thomas said. His eyes looked about ready to pop out of his head and he clenched his fists: he was really steaming, there was no doubt about it. Thomas looked exactly like those people you see on TV, those people whose loved ones have been killed and who then get to speak to their killers in court, and who say the things to the killers that they think they need and want to say in order to get on with the rest of their lives and achieve some piece of mind, et cetera, only to find out that the words don't mean anything and aren't even theirs, really, and so end up feeling more desperate and grief stricken and angry after they've spoken than they had before. Thomas looked an awful lot like that. "You're not sorry at all," he said.

"I am, I am," I said, and I was but didn't know what else I could do to convince him, because that's the trouble with being sorry: it's much easier to convince people you really aren't than you really are.

"You dick," he said.

"Hey, now," I said. "No need for that."

"You fucking dick," Thomas said. He moved forward a little, and for a second I thought he was going to jump me, but he didn't, maybe because he saw or smelled the dried sweat from my lawn mowing, or maybe because I was bigger than he was and had about fifty pounds on him. Thomas didn't know that he probably could have roughed me up, and without getting even a little bit dirty: I could feel the old passivity coming on, could hear my heart beating, Hit me, hit me, I deserve it and won't fight back, so hit me. But Thomas couldn't hear my heart, which is just one of the reasons I am happy to have one. Instead he took a step back, and his face took a step back, too, and began to look contemplative but still furious.

"I wonder how many of your neighbors know that you're a murderer and an arsonist," he said. "I wonder if your friends know. Your co-workers."

"Well. . ," I said.

"I bet you haven't even told your family," he said, and when he said this, the world suddenly became blurry and squiggly lined as though I were seeing it through extreme heat, and now I couldn't recognize it, the world, and be sure that it was still mine.

"I know you're not sorry about killing my parents," Thomas said. "But you will be."

And then he left: he turned, walked down my driveway, got into the black jeep parked at the curb, and drove away. After he'd left, my heart slowed down a bit and my head cleared and I could hear the low roar of my neighbors' mowers. I knew that no one had seen Thomas, or if they had, the neighbors wouldn't have thought anything strange about his visit or even paid attention to it. The week before, my across-thecul-de-sac neighbor's estranged wife started banging on his door at three in the morning, screaming and threatening to cut off his vital parts with her grandfather's Civil War saber, and he called the police on her and all in all they made a racket, but it was a distant, vaguesounding racket and we just thought someone had left their TV on too loud, until we read about it in the paper the next day. Our unspoken motto in Camelot was "Live and let live," as long as you lived with your shirt on. Now that Thomas was gone it looked and sounded like a normal Saturday in Camelot. It was as though none of what had happened, had happened.

But it had. The past comes back once and then it keeps coming back and coming back, not just one part of the past but all of it, the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you, and there is no sense in hiding from the crowd, it will find you; it's your crowd, you're the