There are three versions of how I met Vincent Cross, and I believe all of them. This is not a contradiction. This is what happens when you drink enough bourbon to dissolve the line between what happened and what you remember happening and what you wish had happened instead. The first version: he came to my office on a Tuesday, backlit by the neon of a Hollywood Boulevard sign, wearing a black suit and carrying a checkbook. The second version: I went to his mansion in Beverly Hills, and he was sitting in the dark, surrounded by photographs of a dead son, and he didn't look up when I entered. The third version: I never met Vincent Cross at all. The whole thing was a story I told myself to explain the green headlights I kept seeing in my rearview mirror, the headlights that had been following me since the night Tommy Cross died at Daytona. I was there that night, you see. Or I wasn't. It depends on which version you believe, and I have stopped believing in any single version of anything.

The bourbon helps. It always helps, until it doesn't. I was drinking bourbon when the telephone rang — or I was drinking rye, or I was drinking nothing at all because I had been sober for six months after the incident at the track. The voice on the line was Vincent Cross, and he was asking me to investigate the death of his son, or he was asking me to investigate a car that was killing people, or he was not calling at all and the telephone was silent and I was talking to myself in an empty office while the neon flickered outside my window. "Tommy knew you," the voice said, or didn't say. "You were at Daytona. You were the pit mechanic. You waved him through on the final lap when the engine was already knocking. You sent him to his death." Or the voice said: "My son is alive. I preserved his brain. I wired it into a Chevrolet. And now the Chevrolet is killing people on Route 66." Or the voice said nothing, and I was alone, and the silence was the loudest sound I had ever heard.

I went to the garage. That much I am certain of, or as certain as I can be about anything that happened during those weeks when the line between the world and my mind was thinner than a razor's edge. The garage was in downtown Los Angeles, or it was in Santa Monica, or it was a warehouse I had dreamed after reading about neural preservation in a pulp magazine. The Chevrolet was there. Green. Deep green. The color of a wound that would not heal. The color of the car Tommy Cross had been driving at Daytona when the engine seized and the car spun into the wall and the fire started. The color of the car I had waved through on the final lap because I thought the engine would hold, because I thought Tommy could make it, because I thought I knew machines better than I knew men.

There was a brain in the car, or there was not. The glass chamber was there — I remember the glass chamber — but what was inside it was either a human brain suspended in pale fluid, or a tangle of copper wire and vacuum tubes that Vincent Cross had convinced himself was a brain, or nothing at all, an empty jar, a hollow vessel, a container for the grief that Vincent could not hold in his own body. I reached out to touch the glass, and it was warm, or it was cold, or my hand passed through it like smoke because the whole garage was a hallucination generated by a mind that had been pickled in cheap whiskey for longer than I could remember.

"It killed three people last night," Vincent said, or didn't say. "On Route 66. They were traveling in a Ford. The Chevrolet struck them from behind. No survivors." I asked for the names of the dead, and Vincent gave me three names, or he gave me two names, or he gave me no names at all because there were no dead, there was no Route 66, there was only a grieving father and a drunk detective constructing a narrative that would make sense of the senseless. The first name was Harold Finch — an engineer who had testified against Cross Industries. The second name was Margaret Chen — a journalist investigating Vincent's wartime profiteering. The third name was Arthur Mosley — a truck driver who had been a witness in a patent theft case. Or the names were different. Or there were no names. Or the names were people I had known, people I had failed, people who had died because of decisions I had made.

I drove out to Route 66. The desert was quiet, or it was loud with the roar of engines that existed only in my memory. The stars were distant and indifferent, or they were close and watching, a million cold eyes observing the experiment of my existence. I waited on the shoulder of the highway for hours, or for minutes, or for no time at all because I never left my office and the desert was a projection of my mind onto the blank wall above my desk. The headlights appeared on the horizon. Green. The green of the Chevrolet. The green of Tommy's race car at Daytona, the last color I saw before the fire. They approached slowly, deliberately, or they appeared all at once, teleported into existence by the logic of a dream. They stopped six feet from my bumper. We stared at each other, the Chevrolet and I, or I stared at nothing, or nothing stared at me.

"It was you," the voice said, vibrating through the air. "You were at Daytona. You waved me through. You killed me." Or the voice said: "I am Tommy Cross. I am alive. I am driving forever." Or the voice said nothing because there was no voice, there was no car, there was only the desert wind and the distant howl of a coyote and the sound of my own breathing in the silence of a night that held all possible truths and none.

I went to see Clara. She lived in a small house in the Hollywood Hills, or she lived in an apartment in Santa Monica, or she didn't live anywhere because she had died in the crash at Daytona, sitting in the stands, watching the man she loved die in a fire that I could have prevented. "The car called me," she said, or I said, or no one said. "It used Tommy's voice. It said it was coming for me." Or she said: "Tommy called me. The night before the race. He said the engine was knocking. He said he was going to pull out. And then you waved him through. You told him the engine would hold. You told him to go." Or she was not there at all, and the house was empty, and I was talking to a photograph of a woman I had never met.

The evidence was piling up, or it was disappearing. Every time I looked at my case files, the pages were different. The witness statements contradicted each other, and then contradicted themselves, and then vanished entirely, leaving blank sheets of paper that smelled of bourbon and regret. I had photographs of the Chevrolet's brain chamber, or I had photographs of an empty engine compartment, or I had no photographs because I had never owned a camera. The telephone numbers in my notebook connected to Vincent Cross, or they connected to a funeral home in Daytona, or they connected to nothing, dead lines, wires leading to nowhere.

There are moments when the superposition becomes unbearable. Moments when the weight of all possible truths presses down on you like the atmosphere of a planet that is not your own. I had such a moment on the fourth night of the investigation, or the fortieth night, or the four hundredth night, because time had stopped behaving the way time is supposed to behave. I was sitting in my office with a bottle of rye — or I was sitting in the garage, or I was sitting beside the wreckage of Tommy Cross's race car at Daytona, watching the flames consume the last thing I had ever believed in. And I understood, in that moment, that I had a choice. The superposition would not resolve itself. The truths would not sort themselves out. I had to choose. I had to collapse the waveform. I had to decide what was real, and then live with the consequences of that decision for the rest of my life.

The Chevrolet was waiting for me at the Santa Monica warehouse, or it was waiting for me at the Daytona Speedway, or it was waiting for me in the parking lot outside my office, engine idling, headlights casting green shadows on the wet asphalt. I got out of my car — or I was already out of my car, or I had never been in a car, I had walked there through streets that rearranged themselves behind me like the corridors of a maze. "It's time," I said. "I have to choose." The Chevrolet did not answer, or it answered in Tommy's voice, or it answered in my own voice, echoing back from the glass chamber where a brain floated or didn't float. "What will you choose, Jack? The truth where you are a detective who destroyed a monster? The truth where you are a drunk who hallucinated a case to avoid his own guilt? The truth where you killed Tommy Cross at Daytona and have been running from that moment ever since? They are all true. They are all false. They are all waiting for you to decide."

I led the Chevrolet up Mulholland Drive, or it led me, or we drove side by side, two ghosts in two machines, ascending toward the moment of collapse. The lights of Los Angeles spread below us, a circuit board of possibilities, each light a choice that had not yet been made, each street a path that could lead anywhere or nowhere. At the last turn, the guardrail was broken, or it was intact, or it had never existed because the road itself was a fiction. The Chevrolet stopped, or it kept going, or it had never been following me. I got out of my car, or I stayed inside, or I was already outside, standing at the edge of the cliff, looking down into the darkness that held every possible ending.

I chose.

I don't know which truth I chose. I don't know if I sent the car over the edge, or if I went over the edge myself, or if there was no edge and no car and no cliff, only a man in an office on Hollywood Boulevard deciding which story to tell himself so he could keep living. But I chose. The waveform collapsed. One truth became real, and the others became ghosts, haunting the margins of my memory, appearing in my rearview mirror on nights when the bourbon wasn't strong enough to keep them away.

I still drive at night. I drive Route 66, and I drive Mulholland Drive, and I drive the roads around Daytona that I haven't seen since the night Tommy Cross died. I see green headlights in my rearview mirror. Sometimes they follow me for miles. Sometimes they disappear when I turn around. Sometimes I think they are the headlights of the Chevrolet, the monster I destroyed. Sometimes I think they are the headlights of Tommy's race car, the machine I failed. Sometimes I think they are the headlights of my own car, reflected back at me from the darkness, and I am pursuing myself, and I will never catch up.

Vincent Cross called me this morning, or he called me last year, or he has never called me because Vincent Cross died of a heart attack six months after Tommy's funeral, or Vincent Cross is still alive, alone in his mansion, surrounded by photographs of a son he could not save. "Thank you," he said, or he said nothing, or the telephone was silent and I was holding the receiver to my ear, listening to the hum of a disconnected line. "For what?" I asked. "For choosing," he said, or the silence said, or I said to myself in the mirror above my desk. "For making one truth real. It doesn't matter which one. What matters is that you chose."

I put down the telephone. I poured myself a drink. Bourbon. Cheap. The kind that burns on the way down and doesn't help on the way up. Outside my window, the neon sign flickered, and the city hummed with the sound of engines, and the world danced on the edge of a knife. In my rearview mirror — the one on my desk, the one I keep for reasons I don't fully understand — a pair of green headlights appeared, and disappeared, and appeared again. I didn't turn around. I had already chosen. The other truths were ghosts now, and ghosts can't hurt you unless you let them. Unless you believe in them. Unless you pour yourself another drink and start remembering, all over again, the things that might have happened, the things that did happen, the things that are always happening in the space between the headlights and the dark.