But that's when your swim in deep blue becomes a purple haze of sludge that's growing deeper and more difficult to wade through as you struggle to keep your snout above the surface. Only it's dragging you down, man. You are drowning and you don't know it. You do not want to know it. And my only excuse in taking it was because I did not want to think about those cops who had disappeared all those years ago from that place we were all headed to. And none of them ever came back. A good excuse to run away from the wife and kids, they said. One, maybe, but four cops all at the same time, I didn't believe it. No sir, I didn't. Not one damned bit. And so we all kept up the pretence that we were all hugely entertaining to each other and that solved the problem for a while. It absolved guilt, it dissolved danger, and it glued us together in a funny kind of way until it was all pretence as ever before. It was kind of weird though, but it always was kind of weird those summer nights. There weren't many of them when you strung them up end to end, but when each night happened it felt like it would go on forever.
