 
Hibbard 127

### The Inelegant Universe

Stories

Charles Hibbard

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Charles B. Hibbard

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Chapter 1. Fare Evader

He's an English teacher. Five foot nine, dark hair, sunglasses, he leaves the apartment hurriedly with the cat, Reyjavik, slung over his shoulder, wrapped in his girlfriend's best bathtowel, the one her ex-boyfriend gave her when he got back from Turkey. This is a fine how-de-do. He doesn't even like cats. Reyjavik is an orange tabby whose one permanently drooping eyelid gives him an air of disapproving contempt even when he's at his nominal cutest, "playing" with his catnip mouse. The name, Frances has told him, is an homage to her happy days with the Peace Corps. "They don't have the Peace Corps in Iceland," he pointed out. "It's not an underdeveloped country." "Well, it was then," she replied. "And anyway, it's all relative." Personally, he thinks the name is onomatopoeic, a reference to Reyjavik's little problem with hairballs.

Only yesterday morning, Sunday, Frances stood in the bedroom doorway and reminded him that he was in charge of Reyjavik. He lay on his side in bed with the sheet draped over his hips, the contrast of his messy nakedness and the sagging of his gut with the fine trim of her business suit making him feel like a slutty odalisque. Her little black suitcase on wheels peeped between her gleaming pantyhosed legs like a well-disciplined child. Frances is gone a lot, sometimes traveling for two weeks at a time, calling in every other evening from Atlanta or Dallas. They started living together only a couple of months ago, moving into an overpriced three-room apartment with a fireplace and a nice western exposure. The bedroom wall (the landlord, riding the wild surf of the San Francisco real estate market, had felt no need to repaint) still bears the marks of the brackets where the previous tenant, a casual friend of David's who clued them in to the vacancy, hung his shackles and whip-holder. These marks sometimes inspire certain visions while David lies in bed waiting for Frances to finish brushing her teeth; but her tastes are more mainstream, and David feels that he'd been able to satisfy her needs in that area even before they took the apartment. He suspects, in fact, that in Frances's mind the new living arrangement is aimed at normalizing her relationship with Reyjavik, who suffers so deeply during her absences that he is scarcely able to drag himself out of his fluff-lined bed. Perhaps it's only the relative newness of the arrangement, but David still has trouble shaking the feeling that he's been retained primarily as a cat companion.

And now, only a day after Frances has departed for DC, Reyjavik is draped over David's shoulder, wretching on the Turkish towel and yowling heart-rendingly at 30-second intervals. David has returned from school in the early evening, his arm aching from the weight of a briefcase full of term papers, to find the cat lying helpless in a pool of his own fluids. Now he hurries along the sidewalk beneath dancing late sunshine-lit May leaves, heading for the subway. In his pocket, a single wrinkled dollar bill and his Clipper card. He has neglected to go to a teller machine, knowing there's enough packaged food in the house for his dinner; and now this emergency, with no money for a cab.

The underground blows its complex, musty perfume at him as he trots down the stairs into the cool station. From her glass case the station agent glances at him as he shifts Reyjavik to his other shoulder and slaps his Clipper card onto the stanchion of the toll gate. The red light of malfeasance begins blinking on the digital readout, and a loud beeper sounds. His monthly pass has expired. That's right! Another thing he forgot to do.

What now? David approaches the toll booth with his yowling companion. Inside, behind several inches of bulletproof glass, a small, neat black lady is crocheting an enormously complex lace garment. She examines him over the tops of her glasses. "Excuse me," he says. "I just realized my monthly pass has expired, and I don't have any money with me to reload my card. My cat is very sick, and I'm trying to get him to the vet. I don't suppose you could let me through." He waves Reyjavik gently at the woman.

"I'm sorry sir," she says, "I can't do that." She continues to stare at him over the tops of the glasses, as though her dispassionate gaze must convince him of the rightness of her cause.

"But my card just expired today. You know I'm going to renew it tomorrow, so it all comes to the same thing. I just want to get on Muni and take my sick cat to the vet."

"I'm sorry sir. I can't do that."

David feels his face getting red. Her refusal to defend her heartlessness in any way infuriates him. "Can't you cut me a break? I don't have any more money and the cat is really sick. I'll be renewing tomorrow. What's the big deal if you let me through?" In front of him the turnstile gate gleams implacably. He's feeling a little desperate. The interval between Reyjavik's yowls is now only 15 seconds. What's Frances going to say? "You tried to take him to the vet on Muni? Are you crazy? Why weren't you carrying any money? What is the MATTER with you?" He looks at the tollbooth lady, who's still examining him coolly over the tops of her glasses, unblinking, willing him not to interrupt her crocheting any further. Her complacency, in there behind her bulletproof glass, maddens him; her complete failure of empathy for the urgency of his situation, her lack of concern for the welfare of animals.

"Well, I'm going in," he tells her, dropping suddenly to the floor and sliding under the gate, then proceeding across the polished stone floor toward the stairs. That was easy, he thinks. An enormous electronic click resounds through the cavernous station followed by a godlike voice echoing from hidden speakers: "FARE EVADER IN THE STATIONATION. FIVE FEET NINENINE, STOCKYOCKY, DARK HAIRAIR, SUNGLASSESASSES, APPEARS TO BE AN ENGLISH TEACHEREACHEREACHER."

"Jesus Christ!" David has the presence of mind to slow his pace, to appear as casual as possible, the last person who would ever perform any act of rebellion against the state. He also removes the sunglasses quickly and tucks them into his shirt pocket. Reyjavik squirms and yowls.

It being rush hour, at the foot of the stairs is a crowd suitable for melting into. A few of them are looking his way, having apparently succeeded in translating the announcement. That asshole, he fumes, but cuddles Reyjavik tenderly, noting out of the corner of his eye a transit cop, galvanized at the far end of the platform, and a train gliding in. As the cop proceeds in his direction with exaggerated calm, David shuffles into the crowded car along with the rest of the commuters. Fenced in by weary bodies, newspapers, glazed expressions, David senses, rather than sees, the cop at the far end of the car, methodically examining the passengers and checking an occasional transfer.

"I hope you're taking him to the vet. Because he's really not well. Your cat is not well." The car, with its load of exhausted nine-to-fivers, provides a nearly silent backdrop for Reyjavik, who hoists one particularly long, loud lament, the cry of a doomed soul. Necks are craned. By now nearly to the center of the car, the cop puts her hand reflexively on her gun. At David's shoulder a minuscule platinum blonde woman is gazing reproachfully at him, her sun-ravaged face projecting a predictable mix of emotions: sorrow for Reyjavik's plight, angry disbelief at the callousness of his owner, weary acceptance of the limitless brutality of the human species, determination to do the right thing, no matter how futile or even dangerous to herself. "Your cat is really not well. You know that, don't you," she says.

"He's not really my cat. I'm just doing a favor for his owner." If she gets to me, David is thinking about the cop, I'll just have to tell her the truth. I'm totally innocent, for god's sake. But the cop has planted herself in front of a young man in black leather, headphones, and a lot of not very convincing chains, the sort used to connect broken-down bikes to rusty newspaper boxes. He's maybe five foot three, lean as a weasel, and his purple spiked hair puts him near the outside of the English teacher envelope. He is, however, wearing sunglasses. The cop, smelling blood, is asking him for his transfer. As the train slows for Castro Street the kid fumbles around with the many zippers and interstices of his uniform, chains rattling, but fails to produce the transfer.

"Looks like I lost it," he sneers.

"Are you taking your cat to the vet?" says the blonde woman. "Because I really think you have to do something. He's not at all well." The train stops, and the cop retreats with the crowd surging to the door, braces it open by standing with her back against it. "Sir, I'm going to ask you to get off the train now."

"Yes, I'm going to the vet," says David, looking over the woman's head to the platform, where the cop is lecturing the now hangdog but still defiant kid with emphatic hand gestures. After a moment the door closes and the train pulls out. He feels slightly limp, but also empowered. He reaches into his pocket and takes out his sunglasses, puts them back on. "I don't even really like cats," he tells the blonde woman. "If he belonged to me, I'd probably just let him die peacefully at home, surrounded by his friends and favorite toys. As it is, the last thing he sees will probably be a stainless steel examining table or a pair of latex gloves." Reyjavik's yowls have ceased for the time being. He's either much better or much worse, David thinks. "Or maybe just the inside of this train. You." he adds. The sunglasses have strengthened his position. The blonde woman is now on his side, nodding sympathetically, won over by his spirited advocacy of dignified pet death.

The train emerges from the tunnel at West Portal, and David feels normalized by the circulation of the passengers and the reconnection of the car to the outside air as its door opens. The concerned blonde woman, wishing him luck, departs with most of the rest of the riders, and he is able to find a seat. Reyjavik has been silent for several minutes by now, and David is avoiding looking at him. I'll just wait until we get to the vet, he thinks.

But at the vet, whose doors are closed and locked in any case, the news is not good. Reyjavik is no longer breathing. His good eye, or the eye that has recently been good, is now closed, but the droopy eye is still open, halfway through a wink. David pulls the towel over the face of the deceased and loiters for a while on the street outside the vet, listening to the muffled howls of canine boarders. Now what? Frances will have a shit fit, of course, but really, what could he have done? His thoughts stray to the pile of term papers tossed on his desk when he found the cat _in extremis_. He's way behind on his grading, as usual. The little teenage faces will be cranky. Grades are due, he has to write a final exam, and he doesn't really know what he's going to talk about tomorrow morning in class. Alas, poor Reyjavik. He can wing it, talk about death. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee; my girlfriend's in Charlotte or is it Trenton. And meanwhile there is the problem of corpse disposal.

An L car is approaching from the other direction, crawling up the long staircase of Taraval from the Pacific. A broken layer of clouds filters the sunlight, leaving the ocean's surface, sleek and still at this distance, mottled black and blinding silver. David wraps the towel carefully around Reyjavik's head and, leaving him slung over his shoulder, boards the L at the rear door, taking advantage of the Proof of Payment honor system and for no reason feeling certain that this time no transit police will appear to disturb his reveries. He sits by the window, a young father perhaps, with a sleeping baby on his shoulder, thinking about consigning Reyjavik's mortal remains to the freezer so as to give Frances a final viewing. Will she really want to see that? More to the point, how will it affect her evaluation of his own performance during the cat's final hour on this earth? His own philosophy is that whatever Reyjavik was, his catness, has been simply sharpened down to the disappearing point, or maybe narrowed and extruded into a parallel universe; in either case, the earthly remains are basically an empty old coat, for which any rag pile or dumpster will do. But he doesn't think Frances will see it that way. She'll want closure.

By the time he reaches home, it's getting dark. Frances calls, perhaps sensing catastrophe, before he's even had a chance to turn on the lights or put his bundle down on the bed. He stands in the dark with a dead cat on his shoulder, listening. "Yep, everything's fine. Just got home. No, a little tired, that's all. How about you? Yes, he seems fine. What do you think? He's right here on my shoulder. He's resting. Actually he seems to be handling it a little better than usual. He's very calm. Just eatin' and sleepin'. Yep. I will. No. I don't kiss cats. Yes, me too. I'm thinking about you a lot. OK. Be good."

He hangs up and stands for awhile vaguely gazing out the darkening window, trying to imagine the scene when Frances returns: removing the stiff, neatly wrapped package from the freezer where it will have waited for the week with the porkchops, ice cubes, blue gel paks, and miscellaneous food-encrusted frost buildup. The eye, clouded and fishy, the orange fur pathetically tipped with hoarfrost. Not good; and yet if he's simply gone, vanished, deceased, flown when she returns? There's something wrong with that, too, isn't there? She might not even believe his story, might imagine that he's been planning this hit since he moved in, watching Reyjavik's yawnings, stretchings, and barfings with murder in his heart, or at least kidnapping. Alive, the lazy beast has been an annoyance and a handy spark for arguments; vanished without a trace, he could become a furry splinter working its way to the very heart of their relationship, a source of recrimination at best, at worst of dark suspicion. But the wooden freezer-cat scenario won't play well, he's sure of that.

He feels a surge of annoyance at the thought of this complication, when he should be sitting down to grade at least some of those term papers: hundreds of pages, the equivalent of a whole bad book that he has to read in the next few days – and not only read, but critique, edit, try to understand, even make marginal comments, wade around in the sucking morass of teenage reason and elocution.

It's the weight of the term papers that tips him over the edge into decisiveness. A plan enters his head and with it a furtive joy, the prospect of his second illegal act of the evening, this one to be conducted in the city's shadows, in the light of the sinister moon, which he notes out the window, low on the horizon and shredded by the big white pine in the back yard.

He changes clothes – black sweater, black pants, white sneakers, the only ones he has. A purple ski cap. All black would be nice, but this will have to do. Leaving Reyjavik wrapped in the ex-boyfriend's Turkish towel (I knew you'd want him to be buried in something nice, sweetheart) he stuffs the whole bundle with some difficulty into his briefcase and snaps the lid closed. He checks himself in the mirror, trying to twist his too full lips into a world-weary smile. A cat-burgling English teacher, rendered innocent by the bulging briefcase. For tools, only a cake knife, which glints once in the moonlight as he shoves it into his pocket.

Thinking of the tollbooth Defarge, he rummages around his dresser top to come up with a buck-fifty in change. And she's still there, watching him approach the turnstile. She stares at him over the tops of her glasses, unfooled and unimpressed by his disguise. He hoists the briefcase up and over the turnstile, ostentatiously depositing his change, seizing the salmon-colored tongue of the transfer as it pops out of its slot, striding deliberately toward the stairs, waiting for the mighty click of the PA system, which doesn't come. Leading him to wonder, as he sits, briefcase on his knees on the marble bench, why she didn't include in her original fare-evader description the yowling, expiring cat on his shoulder, surely a more salient feature than dark hair or even English teacherness. It's an enigma. He imagines her interminable hours behind the bulletproof glass, her countless sighs, her fingers roughened by the years and the miles of yarn pulled through them, but none of these provides an answer. What seems clear is that for some reason she was willing to give him a fighting chance. He's heartened by this conclusion, as if it were a message of potential redemption from the world of endless term papers, disapproving girlfriends, and dead cats. He's very aware of the weight of the briefcase on his knees, the insistent tug of the earth, now at last unresisted by dear old Reyjavik.

The train slithers out of its tunnel into the city night festooned with yellow-orange globes and peopled with shadows, walking, standing enigmatically, anonymous backs curved over trash bins, joggers keeping pace with the train for a block, then falling behind, catching up again at the next stop, finally running backward into oblivion. The blank faces of the houses too, edge-on and narrow ahead, growing and fattening out of the train's unhurried rumble, turning briefly real, then sliding away into the darkness. He shares the rocking little lighted room with a few bored companions, arms folded, sleeping or staring into their own interior action. Looking back out the window he imagines Frances in her hotel room in Cincinnati or is it St. Louis. She prefers the old historic hotels in the city centers, even if the beds are bumpy and the plumbing drips rust stains onto the curving porcelain sinks. She'll be brushing her short, thick blond hair, gazing abstractedly out the window at the neon of a gas station or a bar, then climbing into bed and flicking off the slightly tilted lamp on the bedside table. He wonders if someone is climbing in there with her, some amiable stud from the Ft. Worth office. She certainly has plenty of opportunity for dalliances, with all the time she spends on the road. But then, so does he, alone in the new apartment, and all he ever does is grade papers and worry about who's going to take the role of Stanley Kowalski in class tomorrow. Having called home, she's secure in the knowledge that her darling is all tucked into his own bed for another night. Little does she know that he's actually stuffed into a briefcase on the L car, wrapped in a Turkish towel and headed for a lonely grave. It seems there's no good way to handle this. If he tells her the truth during one of her nightly calls, she'll be upset and furious at him, and her trip will be spoiled, although, he reminds himself, it's only a business trip. If he waits until she gets home, there's not only the shock of the missing cat but also the problem of all the lies he's had to tell her on the phone. Maybe he should just be "out" a lot, or on line, conduct the whole correspondence by e-mail, adroitly evading her queries about Reyjavik in his best forgetful style. It won't lessen her dismay when she gets home, but at least he won't have actually lied. He'll only have to defend himself against her suspicions of foul play or rank incompetence in feline management. The problem for some reason seems less pressing than it did earlier. Shouldn't our relationship, he thinks, be able to withstand the sudden death of a cat? And, more boldly: Hasn't Reyjavik been a sort of buffer between us? Now maybe we'll have time to fight about better things than his hairball production.

He disembarks from the train at one of those anonymous avenues halfway to the ocean. Here the houses all look the same for block after block, silent streets, every parking spot with its motionless vehicle, as if no one has ever arrived or departed. He lugs his briefcase over toward the dark mass of the park and enters it, as befits his extralegal mission, in a trackless area through a grove of pungent eucalyptus, his path down the grassy and uneven slope lit only by the percolation of moonlight through the thick branches. Their dry, stiff leaves clatter softly in a light breeze off the distant rumor of the ocean.

At the foot of the slope is a pond, silent but for occasional mysterious plops. The grass and the bushes surrounding it are rustling, too, with anonymous sprites, the sighs of the homeless under their tarps, and perhaps a few of his own students trading skilled, ignorant caresses. The cake knife does not make an ideal gravedigger's mattock, but he has plenty of time and works slowly, squaring the hole carefully as he digs, pausing frequently to listen to the wind. He wants to do this right; he actually feels something other than irritation for old Reyjavik, a sadness that even such a wasted, nonproductive life, a pointless round of eating, sleeping, and defecating, has had to end. He wants to be able to tell Frances that Reyjavik has at least received a proper burial.

With the hole finally a foot and a half deep and the cake knife twisted beyond any possible appropriate use (something else to answer for, he thinks, but then flings it without a glance over his shoulder into the welcoming pond), he carefully lowers the Turkish bundle into the grave and continues to kneel, gazing at it. It's too exposed, the ancient earth will lie too heavily on Reyjavik's ribcage, people will step uncaringly on the grave, doing who knows what damage to the moldering corpse. He removes the bundle, replaces it in the briefcase, and snaps the lid shut, then positions it in the hole and begins sweeping loose soil onto it with his bare hands. He flattens the top (a mound will attract animals, park employees, vandals) and covers it with dead leaves. A small boulder, half-embedded, for monument – Frances may want to visit.

The moon lolls just above the consoling complexity of the treetops as he exits the park and walks the dark streets, invisible in his black except for the swinging arcs of the white sneakers, like the grins of two traveling cheshire cats: a few long blocks to the Muni stop, where he waits tranquilly for the night train, transfer clutched in a muddy hand.

Chapter 2. Baking Day

Cutting school with a head cold, his voice swerving from honk to whisper, Chuck decided to bake. Sick days were always a mixed experience: there was the pleasure of snuggling back into the covers while his wife trudged off down the stairs to work, with her purse and knitting bag, and the relief of having lifted unexpectedly the nominal attention of 35 pairs of glazed eyes. But there was also, when he woke up after half an hour (he was a lousy sleeper), the slick tongue of guilt licking behind his ears in the quiet of the apartment, whose walls and windows were too thin to keep out the sounds of the working world, the mutter of traffic on Market Street slashed by hostile farting of motorcycles, the tapping of hammers at some local construction project, electronic piddling of telephones in surrounding apartments, all the little tinkerings of people with busy lives. The warmth of sanctuary warred with a sense of cheating, remembered from his earliest school days, lying to his mother about having a sore throat. In his eyelids' semidarkness were images of his poor substitute, handing out xeroxes or stabbing at buttons on the DVD player. Chuck would look at the alarm clock and think, "Now first period is starting. Now homeroom. . ." Later he would imagine the melancholy afternoon classes, where, with blood sunk to their abdomens to process pizza, peanut butter, packaged oreos, the students would be staring blankly at the unfamiliar face trying to rob them of their day off. Not to mention the sub's contempt as he gradually discovered all of Chuck's dirty secrets: the disorganization of his classes, the sloppy attendance-taking, girls putting on makeup in class, boys reading the sports pages during lectures. . .

The laundromat was the first line of defense against the feelings of isolation and uselessness. There he could toss the clothes in the machines, clang the lids down, and read for an hour without shame while his underwear frolicked with soft, puppy thumps in the dark windows of the dryers. But after that, and after rolling his clean socks, and after the vacuuming and another half-hour nap and washing out the bathtub, the thought of baking something radiated a great light. In fact, he'd promised the homeroom kids, who'd lately created the tradition that someone had to bring in home-baked goodies once a week to treat the class, that he would take his turn this week. That meant that baking wasn't merely a stopgap to produce the illusion of productivity, but that most desirable of activities, an actual obligation, whose fulfillment could shut off all superfluous rumination for at least an hour or two. He'd been planning to do it the following evening, but being home now with nothing to do, he could use it to improve this wasted hour.

However, while drying the big broad blue ceramic salad bowl that he liked to use for mixing, he dropped it. It fell to the edge of the counter, where it separated into large shards, then continued to the floor and smashed to tiny bits. He knew the worst as it left his hands, and was already vocalizing, something between a curse and a moan, even before he felt the patter of glassy chips on the tops of his bare feet, followed by the slower settling of powder. There were also slicing sensations on one finger and the side of his hand that sent little vortices curling, for some reason, along his buttocks. "Shit," he said, finding the broken honking of his voice inadequate for the situation.

There seemed to be too much blood for the modest wounds on his hands, big dark saucers of it on the white floor, first sharp-edged, then creeping and blurring amongst the scattered debris. He watched this display for a second or two, then traced the flow back to his wrist, where red was curtaining out from a neat diagonal slash, running into his cupped palm, and then spilling to the floor. Instinctively he squeezed his forearm with his other hand, which slowed the red river to a trickle; then released it long enough to wrap the dishtowel around the wound. After a moment's contemplation, he walked to the phone and dialed 911. "I've cut myself and I'm bleeding quite a lot," he whispered to the operator. "What?" "Please repeat yourself, sir." Though clearly annoyed at his failure to speak up, she seemed willing to send an ambulance. He hung up and stared for awhile at his red fingerprints on the phone buttons, trying to recall what he knew about shock, then dialed Marnie's work number.

"I broke the salad bowl," he told her.

"What? I can't HEAR you."

"I broke the salad bowl. You know, the big blue one with the feathers on it, or leaves. The one we got at that Rhinebeck crafts fair."

"My mother's bowl?"

"Did she give us that one? Oh yeah, I guess she did."

"Yes she did. It was her wedding present to us." She paused meaningfully. He was silent, thinking. "Can you fix it?" she asked.

I'm sorry dear," he whispered. "It's in smithereens on the floor. I would have tried, but it's really hopeless. We'll get another one, a nice one. Let's have a date."

"If we can find something we like," she said. "Oh well."

He darted into the seam of her philosophical tone. "It cut me when it was falling," he said. "I think it needs to be stitched up. I'm actually going to Kaiser."

"Are you all right?? How are you getting there?" He wondered if she was sufficiently alarmed. She promised to meet him at the hospital, and he hung up, planning to go downstairs to wait for the ambulance. But then he didn't like the thought of sitting on the steps wrapped in his bloody dishtowel, with passersby flicking their eyes away or, worse, asking him if he needed help. He sat down in the kitchen and waited, drifting and strangely relaxed, looking out the window at the sharp outlines of the distant east bay hills and thinking idly about cleaning up the mess on the floor.

Eventually the defective door buzzer croaked, and two paramedics came thumping up the stairs, looking like twins in their medical greens. They wore chain bracelets on tanned, hairy forearms and had bands of beard clinging to the sculptured lines of their jaws. Both of them affected the showy physicality and slow calm of young men trained to deal with other people's catastrophes. One of them examined the wound on Chuck's wrist, then, instructing him to continue squeezing with the dish towel, wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his other arm with a great ripping of velcro. "Let's have a look at the scene of the crime" said #2. They went into the kitchen and looked at the floor sprinkled with blood and chips. "I dropped the salad bowl," said Chuck, "and one of the pieces must have cut my arm on the way down." The two medics glanced at each other, then at the slash on his wrist, which was about to disappear under white gauze. #2 gazed at the splatters of blood on the refrigerator door. "Riddle my murdered digit and cut bait," he said. Chuck thought, I really must have lost a lot of blood. "How often we turn liquid glamorous star," replied #1. Chuck realized they were reading the random fragments of poetry magnetized to the refrigerator. #1 said to him, "You hold this.

The two paras handed Chuck off to the Emergency Room receptionist and took their competent, hairy forearms off to the next call. Chuck sat next to a desk with his white-swathed cut wrist raised above his head while a green nurse took his blood pressure again. "They already did that," he told her. "I still have some."

"How are you feeling right now," she asked him.

"OK." He examined his perceptions. "Amid twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing is the eye of the blackbird." In truth the world, this room, the fragmenting bowl all did seem rather remote. The nurse made notations on cream-colored paper and led him past gossiping medical staff to an examining room. "A doctor will be in to fix you up in a few minutes," she said, drawing a curtain halfway across the door. He sat staring at the trouty pages of _Outdoor Life_. Nurses kept strolling by and glancing sharply at him behind his curtain. Some of them smiled, others nodded, still others merely noted his continued existence and passed on. After half an hour a youngish doctor appeared, dark-haired and female, smiling reassuringly. "Let's have a look," she said, moving him to the paper-covered examining table and unwinding the red-spotted bandage from his wrist. She began cleaning the gash and tossing bloody disinfectant pads into a tray. "It's a nice clean cut. Very professional." She laughed. "I don't even have to snip off any skin. You were . . ." "Baking," he said. "The mixing bowl broke..." "and did this to your wrist?" She finished swabbing and rummaged in a stainless steel toolbox. "Help me visualize this."

"It broke on the edge of the counter, into big pieces," he said. "One of them must have sliced my wrist." "A very nice cut," she repeated, holding the edges of the wound together with her left hand and beginning to stitch with her right. He preferred women doctors. Their hands were more aware than male doctors'. This one had a child's stubby fingers, with bitten nails. "How do you feel right now," she asked him. "A little detached? Distant? We sometimes worry about shock in cases like this, especially if you've lost a lot of blood."

"I'm all right," he said. She glanced up at him, looking his face over like a building inspector scanning for earthquake damage.

Marnie peeked around the curtain, then came in red-cheeked and out of breath. She looked at the wound, nearly closed up now, and at his face, and seemed reassured. "Armstrong," she said, putting her hands on her hips, "have you been cooking again?" She and the doctor began chatting immediately about embroidery, the antiquity of needlework, the bacteriocidal properties of bone needles. Chuck sat quietly, watching the needle puncturing his skin, wondering why he felt no pain. The doctor finished sewing, tied off the last knot, and rebandaged the wrist.

"This magnitude of cut, along with the blood loss, can be very traumatic," she said, all casualness. "People sometimes go through mood swings or get depressed after one of these and do strange things. I'd like to have you talk to a psychiatrist for a few minutes, just as a precaution."

"I'm fine," he said. "I'm just feeling a little vague. I think I need to go home and lie down for awhile." They were both staring at him, the doctor from her little stool, stubby hands on her green thighs, Marnie with her purse and knitting bag clutched against her chest. "It's such a big cut," she said, "and you look kind of pale. It's probably not a bad idea."

"I'm _fine_ ," he said. "I don't want to wait here for another hour for a psychiatrist. That'll _really_ depress me."

"It'll only take a few minutes," said the doctor, standing up and heading for the door. "Just a precaution, and then we'll get you a cab to go home." She vanished behind the curtain.

"OK, I get it," he said. "They think I did it deliberately. For Christ's sake, it was an accident. The goddamn shards slashed me on the way down."

"I know, I know. But people do get post-traumatic shock syndrome. Remember John, with that fat nodule on his neck?"

"JOHN thought it was neck cancer or something. I'm not going to die from this. I'll have a nice scar to show the kids at school. They like that kind of stuff. It'll be very useful. The best thing that ever happened to me."

"You look very pale," she said. "I just think it's a good idea to talk to someone."

"I'll talk to YOU!" He was trying not to yell, not wanting to agitate the ladies outside in wrinkled green hospital gowns, wheeling their IV stands toward the restroom.

"I'm not a professional, and I can't be objective about this." Her tone was turning admonitory. "I'd feel better if you talked to someone else."

"Shit," he whispered. But the smashed day of solitude, the hospital, the green attendants, the intermittency of his voice, perhaps the draining of his blood, had sapped his will to argue. "This is not how I planned to spend my sick day. It's not exactly a restful experience."

"I'm sure it isn't. I don't think you should go in tomorrow. You really need time to recover physically and emotionally from something like this."

"It's a damn _cut_. Do you know how many times I've cut myself in this lifetime? I really don't want to spend another day at home. I've got things to do."

"It's not just a little cut, and you've lost a significant amount of blood. I _wish_ you wouldn't always downplay these things. I'm surprised you even called the ambulance."

"We don't have any bandaids big enough," he said. She dragged her chair over and put her arm around his shoulders.

This helped, until the psychiatrist finally arrived. He was at least 25 years younger than Chuck, with an alert and professionally expressionless face. He straddled the stool vacated by the previous doctor and gazed searchingly at Chuck. "So what's the story," he said.

"Just your standard salad bowl suicide attempt," Chuck answered. "Just STOP it!" said Marnie, removing her arm from his shoulders. The doctor glanced at her, then back at Chuck, antennae all atremble. "Well, what did happen?"

"I've got this cold," said Chuck, "so I stayed home from school today. I got so depressed from being home all alone that I had to drop a salad bowl and deliberately let the pieces slash my wrist. But then I changed my mind when I saw all the blood and called an ambulance." He leered clownishly. The doctor didn't smile back. Marnie was silent and angry.

"I need to understand how you're really feeling about this before I can send you home," said the doctor. His voice hinted at the possibility of hours of "observation" in one of these rooms, and probably a number of little talks like this one. Chuck thought about the annoyance of calling another sub from a pay phone, setting up more lesson plans, the prospect of a couple of more days hanging out in a room at Kaiser with green shrinks circling around him on sneakered feet, determined to make him vocalize his mental state. Words like Thorazine and Prozac marqueed in his imagination. Marnie had distanced herself to the other side of the room and sat avoiding his eyes.

"It was an _accident_ , for god's sake," he said, disgusted by the whine he heard in his voice, the gas of capitulation that filled the room. "I was washing a big bowl and it fell and broke. My arm was apparently in the way." He held up the bandaged wrist. "I'm perfectly fine. I'd like to go home now, wipe the blood off the kitchen floor, and get on with my life."

The doctor rubbed his thighs, which were green like everyone else's in the hospital. "We may not always be aware of the source of our actions," he said. "Or even if we _are_ quite self-aware, events like this one can sometimes bring up unexpected perceptions and behaviors. Some of them can be negative. You need to be aware of that." He paused. "Do you find yourself brooding a lot when you're alone?"

"The unexamined life is not worth living," replied Chuck. "It's possible for us to over-examine our lives," said the doctor. "Like everything, there's a healthy balance." He looked at Marnie. "Will you be staying home the rest of the day?" "Yes," she said firmly, as though Chuck might object.

He sprawled silently in the corner of the cab all the way home, sullen as a boy caught smashing windows in abandoned houses, letting Marnie deal with the cab driver. Wasn't he supposed to be getting concern, sympathy, mothering? At home Marnie made him lie down and impatiently cleaned up the blood and shattered pottery herself, but she did a lousy job, of course, and he knew he'd have to finish it up in the morning after she'd gone to work. "I loved that bowl," she said. "Why did you have to use that one?" He wasn't sure whether she meant for baking or for something else, less legitimate. He had to lie on his left side all night because of the bandaged wrist, which throbbed and seemed, during his episodes of half-dream, to be swelling to two or three times its normal size. He was surprised to find no obvious change in its appearance when he got up in the middle of the night to pee. Marnie maintained a large punitive gap between their bodies all night.

"Are you sure you're going to be OK, all alone here?" she said on the way out in the morning, looking hard at him. He wanted to ask her why she was going off to work and leaving him alone, if she was so worried. Wasn't she afraid he'd try it again, maybe with a coffee cup or some Fiestaware? In the kitchen, after she left, he could feel and hear little grains of crockery grinding under his shoes, and there were faint brown smears under the overhang of the counter, the part that never got washed. There was dried blood on the bedroom rug, on the telephone, on the chair where he'd sat contemplating the blue distant hills. With a damp paper towel he wiped bloodstains off the refrigerator. "he play hot shot" read the little magnets on the door, and "honey recall still lake." After sweeping carefully, he stood the broom in its corner. The laundry and the vacuuming were done; the kids would have to eat cookies from Safeway. He sat down in the bright light of the kitchen window and unrolled the bandage to look at his wound. It wasn't much, really, five or six neat little black insects tying up a pinkish slit about an inch long. He rubbed off some powdery dried blood left by the casual seamstress, remembering with a slight, almost pornographic quickening how it had looked the day before, the drooling red grin and pitter-patter of drops raining to the floor. He let the sunlight fall on it, illuminating blue veins, one of which twitched rhythmically, tirelessly. Like yesterday, he could hear the sounds of busy people all around him, but there was no one in sight.

Chapter 3. The Pigeon

Martin was walking down the block toward Hackett's house in long November sunlight when he noticed an odd-looking lump out in the middle of the street. He immediately suspected it was a traffic-crushed pigeon or, worse, a maimed one, but as he got closer he realized the situation was more complicated. There was a pigeon all right, but a hawk was perched on top of it, pinning it to the pavement. The hawk, a rather small, rusty-streaked thing, kept raising its wings, vampire-like, and trying to lift the pigeon, but seemed not to be strong enough to get its catch into the air. Martin moved a little closer, intrigued by the scene. The hawk attempted to lift off again, but succeeded only in dragging the pigeon a few feet toward the parked cars at the curb. A gray wing waving imploringly from beneath the hawk signaled that its victim was still alive.

Martin had no intention of interfering, but he was worried that both the birds would be squashed by some maniac jetting by in an SUV. He moved toward the center of the street, hoping to edge the hawk closer to the curb. It made one more effort to lift the pigeon, then let go and flapped heavily upward to the corner of a house, where it perched, irritably adjusting its breast feathers. The pigeon dragged itself off the street and under a parked car.

This was probably the worst of all possible outcomes, but Martin still wasn't prepared to intervene. Maybe the hawk will come back down for its dinner if I go inside for mine and leave it alone, he thought. He rang Hackett's doorbell.

"Martin Mulder." Hackett loomed in the doorway almost immediately, as if he'd been waiting for the bell. "What are you looking at out there?" The usual black beret covered his near baldness, but the white beard had been neatly trimmed for the occasion.

"There's a hawk that's caught a pigeon, but he doesn't seem to know how to finish the job. And then I screwed up and chased him off by accident. So now I don't know _what's_ going to happen."

"Just leave it alone, Marty. There are more pigeons than hawks in this city. The hawk is performing his natural function." Hackett slipped automatically into his retired science teacher voice for the biology lesson.

"Maybe, but he's doing a crappy job. I guess he's a juvenile or something. Or just not very good at it." Martin supposed there must be incompetent birds, just as there were dysfunctional humans. He looked out at the street again. The hawk had dropped back to the pavement and was trying to haul the fluttering pigeon out from under the parked car. Still, it seemed unable either to lift its victim or to finish it off. The entire desperate transaction was being conducted in total silence. Martin watched for a few seconds more, then went in the house, feeling relieved that his presence hadn't scared the hawk off permanently, and reassuring himself that nature would now resume its normal course.

He was late, and the rest of the party had already pulled up their chairs around Dinah's big oval dinner table, which was draped with a white lace cloth. In the center two tall white candles burned, rising from a jungle of seasonal vegetation. Dinah was emerging from the kitchen with the impeccably browned turkey on an oval silver platter.

"Marty. I'm glad you could make it," she said. "Sit down over there next to Bradley. We're just about to start." Her long white hair was tied back in a businesslike bun, and she still wore her apron. She lowered the turkey to the table in front of Hackett's spot, where it sat glowing in the sunlight that poured through the dining room window.

Bradley said in his hearty voice, "Yes, sit down Marty. We were beginning to worry about you." He kept his eyes closed and turned his head only slightly as Martin sat down. His white cane leaned against the bookshelf behind the chair.

"I was watching a hawk trying to finish off a pigeon out on the street," said Martin.

"Oh really?" boomed Bradley. His unnaturally loud speech, Martin had long ago decided, was a strategy for drawing attention away from his blindness, to convince others that it didn't matter to him – in fact, that it could be considered a superior way to live.

"Good!" said Katherine. "Disgusting things!"

"Oh no!" cried Jillian, who was seated across the table from Bradley. "I hate that. Did he kill it?"

"Not yet," said Martin. "He was working on it, but he was having his problems. I think he's a young one."

"I want to see," Jillian exclaimed, pushing her chair back and rushing to the window to look out. "He's still just sitting on it!" She watched for a few seconds. "I don't think he knows what to do."

"Jillian, will you let the hawk alone! He's doing his job. We need more hawks in this city and less pigeons." Hackett was carving and serving the turkey, and the bowls of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans with sauteed shallots, cranberry sauce, stuffing, salad, and pureed turnips were already on their way around the table.

"Come on, Jillian. We're starting." Greg's voice had an edge of impatience, as it usually did when he was addressing his wife. Jillian returned to the table with a worried look on her face.

"I hate that," she said. "I know it's natural, but it just seems so brutal and sad."

"There's a hawk waiting for all of us somewhere. But today we've got this turkey waiting for us, thanks to the efforts of my stupendous wife," said Hackett. They all murmured their thanks to Dinah, who had seated herself at the end of the table opposite to Hackett. "Shall we have some champagne," she intoned. They dutifully presented their glasses for filling.

"Thank you, Lord," said Jillian lightly, afraid the giant meal might go unblessed and hoping to slip the religious reference past the non-Christians at the table.

"We do have a lot to be thankful for," said Dinah, raising her glass for a toast. All the guests also raised their glasses, except for Bradley, who said loudly "Yes, let's be thankful we're not in Baghdad this afternoon." The newspapers were full of another suicide bomber who had blown herself up, along with 20 or 30 other souls, that morning in Iraq.

"We're toasting, Bradley," Martin told him. "Ah yes, a toast," he replied. They waited while he found his glass and lifted it with eyes closed. Then they all began to eat.

"Well, we should be thankful that _someone's_ in Baghdad looking after our interests while we enjoy this delicious dinner," said David, applying himself to a drumstick.

"Speak for yourself. They're not _my_ interests!" Katherine, who detested the president and all his advisers, responded exactly as David had known she would. "As far as I'm concerned, we should just get out of there."

"No one who burned any gasoline to get here this afternoon has a right to say anything like that." David had the maddening habit of arguing without raising his voice, nor did his color ever deepen during political discussions. He had, of course, recognized Katherine's dark green Lexus – the very car under which the wounded pigeon had dragged itself – parked in front of Hackett's house. Katherine, instantly ignited, was about to respond, but Greg spoke first. As a retired executive, he based his objections to the Iraq war primarily on the bad management techniques and inefficiency of the whole operation.

"Whatever you think about the underlying policy," he said, "we were misled about the reasons for going in there, and the whole thing has been handled very badly, with lousy planning. And the guy is just too stubborn and plain _dumb_ to ever admit when he's made a mistake."

"That remains to be seen," said David. "Wars always look messy when you're in the middle of them. Look at the Civil War. What if Lincoln had just pulled out in 1862, after Second Bull Run."

"I _hope_ you're not comparing that son of a bitch to Lincoln," said Katherine.

"Now now," cautioned David's wife, Athena, dismayed at how early in the party her husband had begun his political provocations.

"History will tell." David helped himself to more turnips. Jillian got up quietly and went back to the window to look at the hawk.

Dinah said nothing, but scanned her guests' faces sternly, seeming mildly annoyed by the incivility at her beautifully laid table. She herself read the Sunday _Times_ and the _Economist_ from front to back every week, without coming to any conclusions. She was a marvelous cook. Hackett said, "Jillian, will you leave the damn birds alone? You're sitting here eating a turkey, for Christ's sake, and worrying about a wounded pigeon. Let the damn hawk have _his_ dinner."

"Ah, the suffering pigeon again," Bradley belted out, and drained his champagne glass as if in tribute. There was something oddly detached about his cheerfulness, as if he were humoring his sighted companions, the hapless victims of a group hallucination.

"I can't help thinking about what's going on out there," Jillian replied, still peering out the window. Martin got up to join her. He, too, had been thinking about the embattled pigeon. "He's still there, under Katherine's car," said Jillian. Martin could barely make out the small, dark shape crouched in the shadow of the Lexus. The hawk had disappeared, having apparently decided that dispatching the wounded pigeon wasn't worth all the trouble, or was beyond his capabilities. Martin and Jillian returned to the table.

"Now he's just sitting there. Don't you think we should do something? Call the SPCA? Or maybe we should put him out of his misery somehow," Jillian suggested.

"The SPCA is not going to come out to rescue a distressed pigeon on Thanksgiving Day," Hackett informed her. "And I'm not throttling any pigeons this afternoon, either. Do _you_ want to do it?" But Jillian only shook her head.

"It's a natural process," David said. "Things like that are going on all over the city. All over the world. And much worse things, in fact."

"Thanks to your hero Bush," said Katherine.

"I know," said Jillian, "but we can't do anything about those. We _could_ do something about the pigeon." She was genuinely upset, which had the effect of making her eat faster.

But no one seemed disposed to make any efforts on the pigeon's behalf. While the political argument continued, Martin finished his meal, wondering what the best thing for the pigeon would be. If they did get the SPCA people to come out, they would doubtless cart the pigeon away and euthanize it. Of course, _we_ could put it out of its misery, he thought. Snap its neck quickly or maybe drown it. He wasn't really sure he could cold-bloodedly execute the pigeon, but he thought Hackett probably could. On the other hand, if they just left it out there, it might recover. The bird was probably in shock right now, and possibly in a little pain, but what had the clumsy teenage hawk actually done to it, besides pin it to the street for a while? Maybe after an hour or two it would waddle out from under the car and fly away, like any other pigeon. Was it suffering? They didn't even really know whether it had been injured or just frightened. Animals had amazing recuperative powers. And even if it was hurt, what actually went through a pigeon's brain? Did it _know_ it was hurt? To the pigeon, presumably the whole event was just another incident in its unexamined life. It had nothing to compare it to, none of the awareness that it had been injured or the prospect of imminent death that would have made the experience so meaningful for a human being. Martin doubted that pigeons knew how to feel sorry for themselves. All it was doing was waiting. Wasn't that about all pigeons ever did? Maybe that was the best thing for it. Meanwhile, Martin mused, the hawk was probably venting its frustration on some other, smaller bird. That was nature at work.

"The pies must be done," Dinah announced. She got up and went to the kitchen, from which a delicious fragrance of baking was emanating. She soon returned, first with a pecan pie and then with an apple pie, its crust still domed with heat and perfectly browned. There was also freshly whipped cream. They had dessert, some people even taking a slice of each pie, while David complacently fanned Katherine's flames by moving beyond Iraq to the difficult questions of world poverty and hunger and invoking such hard-eyed concepts as the tragedy of the commons and lifeboat earth. "We're really not helping the situation by sending them money or food or any kind of relief," he pointed out, carefully isolating a forkful of pie on his plate. "All that does is enable them to have even more children, who will then starve in their turn."

"There are actual _people_ there, David," Katherine said. "Little babies with legs skinnier than this turkey wing."

"And if we feed them, there'll be even more little babies to starve to death. Is that what you want?" Eventually Katherine stopped trying to argue with him and simply twirled the stem of her wineglass between her fingers, barely responding even when Bradley proposed a toast to the chef. Shortly afterwards, she made her excuses and prepared to leave.

"Oh, but the pigeon's under your car!" exclaimed Jillian.

"For God's sake," said Hackett, who had downed several glasses of wine. "It's a goddamn pigeon." Having had a small piece of each pie, Martin was feeling somewhat bloated, but he went outside with Jillian and Katherine to check out the pigeon situation. He got down on his knees and peered under the car. The pigeon was crouched in profile like a sitting hen, its gray plumage badly rumpled and stiff, as though it had been caught in a downpour. Its orange eye stared back at him, round and unreadable, blinking occasionally. Martin leaned under the car and swept gently at the bird with one arm. It dragged itself silently away to the shelter of the car behind Katherine's. He wondered whether they should try to get it up on the curb. He was reluctant to disturb the bird any further; but what if the owner of _that_ car came out and drove away, without knowing the pigeon was under it, unable to escape? He'd seen enough mashed pigeons that the thought gave him a little shiver. But on the curb, any passing cat or dog might find it. While he was worrying about that, Katherine got in her car and drove away with only minimal goodbyes. Still brainstorming about what to do with the pigeon, Martin and Jillian went back inside to the tail end of the dinner party.

An hour later, Martin emerged, slowly, with Bradley on his arm. "Is the pigeon still out here?" Bradley trumpeted, cocking his head as though listening for the rustle of feathers. Martin wondered what the word "pigeon" meant to Bradley, who had been born blind. Is the bird more real to me because I can form a visual image of it? And then he started wondering what the _pigeon_ saw when it looked back at him with that alien, orange eye. He helped the blind man into his cab, to a litany of hearty thank-you's and farewells. Jillian and Greg came out, too. The pigeon was still crouched in its new refuge, now only a silhouette in the near darkness. "I hate to just leave the poor thing there," said Jillian, but Greg hurried her into their own car and drove off with a wave.

Hackett and Dinah stood on the porch, watching the last of the guests leave. Dinah had finally taken off her apron and handed it to her husband. Hackett saw Martin bending down once more to look under the car. "Still worrying about the bloody pigeon, Marty?" He shook his head and tied the apron around his waist. He and Dinah said goodnight and went inside to tackle the dishes.

Martin took one more look at the motionless pigeon and then walked slowly up the street toward the bus stop. He was mildly troubled by the feeling that they should have done something about the damn bird. The problem, he reminded himself, was that anything they did could have turned out to be a mistake. From the bird's point of view, of course.

Chapter 4. Birefringence

The white crystals were strewn over the slope below the excavation as though they'd been clawed out by some giant and heedless burrowing animal in pursuit of more important matters. Their facets were all glittering parallelograms, and they ranged from boulders the size of milk crates all the way down to tiny tabs no bigger than a fingernail.

Two hikers with daypacks on their backs moved jerkily along the steep slope, keeping their downhill legs planted while they leaned into the hillside to pick up particularly attractive samples of the crystals and examine them, turning them this way and that, holding them up to the blue sky, then at arm's length against the dark spine of the opposing ridge a couple of miles to the west, rotating them some more, then dropping them to pick up another. Now and then one or the other of them would retain a crystal for a minute or two before rejecting it for a purer or less fragmented specimen.

One of the men wore a brown broad-brimmed hat, shorts, and an oversized blue teeshirt that accentuated his remarkable skinniness. The other, shorter and more solidly built, was in a faded long-sleeved shirt, carefully tucked in, and fatigue pants. He wore an eyeshade, but only thick and wavy hair, beginning to gray, protected the top of his head from the fierce mountain sun. He said, "You get a double image if you turn it to the right angle. It's like a ghost. Or an echo." He was holding a large crystal between thumb and forefinger and examining one finger of his other hand through it.

"Yup. Double refraction," the skinny man replied, dropping one crystal and stooping to pick up another. "The anisotropy of the calcite divides the light into two separate beams, with different polarizations . . . "

"Don't tell me. Please." They continued picking their way along the slope in silence.

"There's a lot of iridescence, too" said the shorter man eventually. "But only at the right angles. You can see it retreating back into the crystal, as if there were different planes."

"I could explain that, too," began the skinny man, the lightness of his tone indicating that he knew he was merely provoking.

"Yes, but don't," said his companion.

The skinny man removed his hat and smoothed his sweaty, thinning hair toward the back of his scalp with strokes of the palm of one hand. "We should probably keep moving, if we want to make it to the top and not spend the night on the mountain." They were pinned high on the western slope of this ridge by the direct rays of the late afternoon sun. Far below them lay the valley where they had camped the night before. The tiny green dot of their tent was visible at the foot of the next ridge to the west, near the shore of a small lake. The color of the lake shaded from pale green at its south end to near black at the gap in the rock walls where the water began its tumbling trip down through a long gorge and finally out onto the desert, which could be seen lying still as painted scenery many miles away.

"I suppose so," said the shorter man. He gazed down at the crystal in his hand. "The problem is deciding which ones to take with me. I keep finding more beautiful ones. And they're quite heavy."

"I know. You keep thinking the next one is going to be better. Anyway, the idea would be not to carry _any_ of them up to the top, since we're coming back this way."

"Of course. So that at least means I don't have to decide yet." The shorter man dug in his deep pockets for the current favorites, then placed them all carefully on the top of a flat boulder. "On the way back I can make my final selection." He shrugged his daypack off his shoulders and set it down, pulled out his water bottle and took a few swallows. "Not that I want a lecture," he said, "but do you know how these things were used? It's a long way to climb for a few pretty calcite crystals."

The skinny man replaced his hat. "I don't know exactly," he said. "Bomb sights, I think. Maybe the double image was useful for some kind of altitude measurement. Like in those old rangefinder cameras. But I don't really know."

They both shouldered their backpacks and began climbing the steep trail once more, taking the short, slow steps of high altitude and pausing often to rest. By now they were above 12,000 feet. Before long they emerged from among the outcrops of reddish rock and began to work their way diagonally upward across a long slope of drab sand and small platelets of loose rock. A fierce wind met them once they left the shelter of the rocks, whistling up the ridge to thunder around their ears and making it difficult to balance. It was hard going; the loose material continually gave way and slid down under their weight and the upward thrusts of their legs, making every step the equivalent of two or more on a hard surface. It would have been shorter to climb straight upward toward the summit, but the slope seemed too steep, and they instinctively took the longer diagonal, which was also marked by a faint trail. After a couple of hundred yards of this slogging they reached the edge of the summit ridge, where they turned back toward the north and paused to rest before starting the last stretch. To their right the mountain now fell away almost vertically for a couple of thousand feet. At the bottom of this drop was a rocky bowl that cupped a perfectly circular blue lake. The skinny man stood casually with his bent uphill leg at the edge, pressing on the crown of his hat with one hand and gazing first downward into the bowl and then outward at a series of increasingly lower ridges and, beyond them, the distant desert floor. Getting a glimpse over the knife edge, his companion made a muffled exclamation, lay down on his stomach, and poked his head over to look, as though clinging to the peak of a dangerously pitched roof. "One good gust," he said after a while, "and you'll be airborne, on your way to that lake. An Icarian flight, I'm afraid. I don't think there'd even be any point in calling the Forest Service. And it's your turn to cook tonight."

"Heights don't really bother me. And this wind is so steady you can basically lean against it." The shorter man glanced up at his friend poised glamorously on the brink of disaster and tightened his lips. He got to his feet carefully and they started toward the top, staying a few feet below the edge of the ridge. In a few minutes they reached the summit. It was a nearly level table of slatey rock, blown completely bare by the relentless gales. Previous hikers, apparently with time on their hands, had constructed a windbreak about a foot and a half high by carefully stacking the flat rocks. Possibly some of the braver ones had even spent the night up here in this desolation. The two hikers sat gratefully down in the lee of the windbreak and gazed out over the dry and crumpled terrain to the east: miles of long, parallel, reclining ridges, then the broad trench of the desert valley, and finally the tall and silent White Mountains. Nothing moved. There was no sign of human activity.

The skinny man unzipped his daypack and pulled out a plastic bag of trail mix. His companion, as if only now reminded of food, unwrapped a granola bar. They sat thoughtfully munching and taking occasional swigs of water from their bottles. It was warm in the lee of the rock wall, though they could hear the wind roaring a few inches above their heads, and neither of them seemed anxious to stand up again. But the sun was lowering, and they had a long walk back down to the valley floor.

The skinny man finally got to his feet and took a few steps to the very summit of the mountain, where he posed, mountaineer-like, in the rushing wind. At his feet, tucked into a crevice in the rock, was a small box. "There's a trail register here," he said. "We should add our names to the list of conquerors." He squatted, undid the hook latch on the box, and opened its lid. Like an angry hand, a sudden blast of wind seized all the small rectangles of paper contained in the box and sent them instantly fleeing out over the ridge like a flock of anxious sparrows, their dips and tumbles precisely tracing the streamlines and eddies of the wind's chaotic flow.

"God _damn_ it, how the hell could you do that?" exploded the shorter man, from his seat in the lee of the rock wall. Without speaking, the skinny man had bared his teeth in an expression half grimace, half smile, as he watched the sailing papers disperse, already shrinking into the distance. His friend also turned to watch the papers.

"Son of a _bitch_!" he said. "That's probably something like 50 years of records you just pissed away."

"You'd think they would have put something in there to hold them down. A rock or something. With the wind that's always blowing up here." The skinny man seemed only mildly concerned by the mishap.

"You just don't give a shit, do you? Those are irreplaceable records! Literally irreplaceable. There's no copy of that history. You've just destroyed something that can never be reconstructed."

"The genealogist speaks," said the skinny man, making an obvious effort to appear unconcerned and continuing to gaze to the east, where a few scraps of paper were still visible, brief flickers of white in the pure air.

"You're goddamn right," said the shorter man, who had now stood up, ignoring the cold wind in his outrage. "You really don't see it, do you? You've just trampled a wildflower, a little florescence of the human endeavor. It's something those people did, something they accomplished, and you just erased it from the record. You might as well have killed them. Or at least moved them a step closer to death and oblivion. It's a callous act. Callous! As if _you_ had the right to obliterate someone else's legacy."

"Legacy! Was that their legacy?"

"Yes! Yes it was! Part of it. You think it's nothing, a name and a date on a scrap of paper, but who are you to decide what's worth saving? Don't you understand? Every _bit_ of it matters, every bit! Every bit of purposeful activity matters. It's like another little stone added to this windbreak. Would you destroy _that_?"

"Well, it was an accident. But yes, some people would. Some people would consider that windbreak an abomination, out here in this wilderness."

"Yes, and those people are idiots. Mindless agents of entropy and death. Those little things are all there is." He turned and waved an angry arm out at the miles of dry ridges, with their narrow rivulets of pale green clinging to the depths of the washes, and beyond them the unrelieved beige of the desert. " _That's_ what else there is! Do you see that?" He was silent for a while. They were both silent. "I know it doesn't seem like much, but you've actually destroyed part of their life's work," he said, more calmly. "It's a small thing, but small accomplishments are all most of us have. And sometimes not even accomplishments. Just a record, a notation somewhere that someone lived. I assure you, it matters. It matters to _someone_. Except for those records, there's only _that_." He swung his arm out toward the desert again. "That dead nothing out there, that tombstone, with the carving already eroding off it. You've consigned them to the void."

The skinny man continued to gaze eastward although the fleeing bits of paper had vanished. He had removed his hat to prevent it from following the escaped names into that emptiness. Finally he said, "Well, that's not how I see it."

"I know you don't. I know that," said his friend, sitting down again in the lee of the windbreak.

"I think there's actually something right about it, to tell you the truth. It fits our fate, doesn't it? Isn't that basically what happens to all our great accomplishments? Blown away on the winds of time," the skinny man said. "Anyway, I don't see loss," he continued. "Nothing's lost there. Those papers still exist, they're still flying around out there. I don't see loss, I see dissemination. In the literal sense, of seeding. Somebody out there in Benton or Tonopah is going to be walking to the Kwik Mart and is going to find one of those scraps, with just a name and a date. And they're going to pick it up and start wondering what it means. Or one of them is going to blow in the window of somebody's trailer home, or wash up on the beach at Crowley Lake, next to all the cow pies, and somebody's going to start wondering. And that's how the ripples spread. Those scraps of paper were useless, sitting up here in this box. Up here is where they were dead. How many people would see them here? The 50 other people who might climb this mountain in the next 50 years? That _box_ is the cemetery, not the world out there."

"Horseshit," said his friend, not looking at him.

"I'm serious, man. You're not happy unless the information is trapped in a box, a nice little dead list. Of what? People who climbed a fucking mountain. Conquered nature, or whatever. And then what? The list can be read by other fools who perform the same irrelevant feat. And there it sits, forever, as far as you're concerned. Their legacy. What's so important about that? It's about as important as graffiti, although at least they didn't spray paint their names on the rocks up here. Who the hell cares if Barney Boot-heel climbed this mountain in 1964?"

"You're missing the point. Totally. We've got to preserve that kind of thing, if humanity's going to create any more meaning than a committee of chimpanzees pounding on typewriters. Randomness is not life. It's the opposite of life. Only intention, execution, and _preservation_ can drive a wedge into that glittering nothing out there. I suppose you see what you did as expressing some kind of freedom, but it's not freedom. It's really just a form of nihilism, your 'dissemination'."

"For a poet, you make a great accountant," said the skinny man. "That information is dead when it's in the box. Or it's on the road to becoming dead. Information is nothing until you release it to the universe. _Then_ it comes alive, and just _because_ no one knows what'll happen to it. Especially in this modern day and age." He emphasized the cliche annoyingly. "Imagine this: down there on highway 395 is a young woman at a rest stop, with the top down on her red Prius convertible. The scrap of paper falls onto the passenger seat while she's looking in the rearview mirror and combing her beautiful blonde hair. She picks it up and reads it: Barney Boot-heel, July 1964. A couple of her axons begin to buzz. It's a message from the universe! She gets interested. When she gets home to Umpqua, Washington, she Googles the name and finds out that Barney Boot-heel is, or was, a professor of linguistics at Fresno State University. Just for fun, she rings up the linguistics department to tell Professor Boot-heel that she found his message in a bottle. They tell her he retired 10 years ago, and now he's in a nursing home in Grass Valley and he has Alzheimer's. But she can't let it go. The universe is talking to her, trying to tell her something! She drives the Prius to Grass Valley to visit the nursing home. The old man is just shuffling down the hallways in those paper slippers with his hands folded in front of him and a worried look on his face, completely _non compos mentis_. He doesn't even remember that he ever climbed a mountain. Holding onto his arm is his kind but embittered 45-year-old son, whose wife recently divorced him, taking the three kids and the house in Marin County. Their eyes meet. . ."

"You are so full of shit," said the shorter man, his voice no longer expressing passion, but only irritation and disgust. "None of that is going to happen, and you know it perfectly well. Those scraps of paper, those names, are effectively lost now, as if they'd never been. As if those people had never lived. They've just gone to join all the roving Safeway bags and gum wrappers that litter the trashy byways of our decaying culture. You've taken order and intention, human striving and achievement, no matter how minor, and turned it into mere litter."

They were both silent, staring out toward the desert while they examined their intellectual positions. Finally the skinny man took a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips. "We better get going," he said. "I don't really want to be up here once it starts to get dark." The shorter man got silently to his feet and followed his companion carefully down the ridge trail, staying well below the frightening edge. Threading their way among the rocky outcrops, they came again to the abandoned calcite mine, with its sloppy white bib of tailings. Presumably the miners, most of them now dead, had diligently selected out all the really good crystals and sent them off to fly over the burning cities of Germany and Japan. All that were left here were the scattered rejects, although there were some beautiful specimens among them. But the two hikers were approaching the mine from the opposite direction now, and the sun had vanished behind the next ridge to the west, leaving this slope in deep shade.

"I can't figure out where I left the ones I was planning to carry down," said the shorter man, with an edge of the earlier irritation still in his voice. He stood with his hands on his hips, scanning the pile of debris.

"Well, just grab a bunch," said the skinny man, unslinging his pack. "We can sort out the good ones when we get back down to the tent." He crossed the fan of tailings once, efficiently loading crystals into his pack, then waited somewhat impatiently while the shorter man made his own, more careful selections. Eventually they shouldered their packs and started on down the mountainside. The crunching of boot soles faded slowly in the twilight.

Later, the wind dwindled and died. The mountain, and the huge emptiness surrounding it, lay perfectly silent under a black sky densely spattered with white stars.

Chapter 5. Archaeopteryx

Probably it's just the mimosas. Her limbs seem to have weights attached to them, hanging from long cables that converge at the center of the earth. Her muscles have melted; her old body is pinned to the bed, engraved on it, while her thoughts flap anxiously around in the semidarkness.

One of the more annoying tricks of old age is that her body demands sleep but won't take it when offered. Her nights now are longer than they've ever been. On the recommendation of friends, a nice young couple in their 60s, she recently bought a new mattress, some kind of special "memory" foam that's supposed to be soft but also to provide better support. Under the meager weight of her bones, which these days feel as frail as dried grass, it gives agreeably, shaping itself to the contours of her narrow body without sagging in any of its other parts. But the new mattress also emits some sort of gas that plays havoc with her breathing, so that she has to lie on her back with her chin tilted up to avoid suffocating. She's hoping it's just the newness of the thing, on which she spent a lot of money. One of the thoughts that now torment her during her wakeful intervals is that this expensive purchase was a mistake.

Her nights are all like this now. Only the subject matter of her mental circling varies. She dozes for half an hour after going to bed, then awakens, at some faint noise from the hallway or from outside, or a bulletin from one of her own internal voices. Then begins a familiar journey of eight or ten hours, depending on the season. She drifts down a long valley toward the dawn, crossing and recrossing the meandering rivulet of sleep that winds along its bottom, her thoughts like the incessant flicker of willow leaves in the sunlight or the swaying of rushes in the wind. She never seems to step into the stream itself, only notices that it's first on her right, then later on her left. She'd like to get up and read, or perhaps listen to some Mahler; but every night she lies like a stone, hypnotized by the trickle of time.

It's today's lunch at Ellie's house that has left her over-stimulated. The Farm is a perfectly lovely place for a solitary old lady to live. It's like her own country house, or condominium, but with services, including the medical care she knows must soon come to dominate what's left of her life. For the moment, though, despite her nine decades, that's not a problem. Her days are almost too comfortable, too orderly and quiet, a tranquil succession of meals, walks, reading, tending her flower box in the community garden, the occasional exercise class with the few residents who are still able to raise their arms and legs. She attends the latter only to see other faces and maintain her English; the gardening and her daily walks though the hilly environs of The Farm provide all the exercise she really needs, while most of her thinking these days is done in Polish. For the rest, there are her books and her addiction to the Internet, where she can continually update herself on the paleontological controversies that still engage her mind. No one else at The Farm – either residents or attendants – has the slightest interest, although some of them will smile indulgently at her and pretend to listen if she absent-mindedly raises the topic.

Ellie and Andrew live in the city. To go to their house for lunch, as she does a half-dozen times a year, is to be rather shockingly reminded of speed, noise, traffic, fast conversation, people who are doing something other than merely waiting. Ellie loves to assemble gatherings of acquaintances drawn from the diverse sectors of her own busy life, hoping for interesting synergies. There were a dozen guests today, three or four of them almost as old as Freya herself, the rest relatively young and bright-eyed. There was a writer, a couple of TV producers, a black belt in judo; and Freya's brain is still clanging with echoes of the unaccustomed conversation. But mainly she's wondering how much of a fool she made of herself.

Ellie put out quite a spread – bagels, two kinds of lox, cream cheese, hummus, bowls of beautiful strawberries, potato salad. None of this interested Freya, whose nutritional needs have shrunk nearly to zero. But there was also a bottomless pitcher of mimosas, and she found that the combination of sweet juice and champagne went down rather easily. Before long she noticed that she was talking a lot. The other guests were listening politely and watching her with a mixture of expressions that, emboldened by the mimosas, she didn't make much of an effort to decipher.

They sat around Ellie's big round table, where all that food was artfully arranged on a beautiful lace tablecloth and fired by slanting beams of afternoon sun. While the guests attentively dressed up their bagels in lox and cream cheese, the conversation begun in the living room continued with a lot of head-shaking over the distressed economy, progressed to the falloff in public funding for basic amenities, thence to the deplorable situation of the public schools, and finally, rattling off onto a slightly diverging track, the continuing educational battle between evolutionists and creationists in some parts of the nation. Here Ellie deftly applied a drop of social lubrication by mentioning that Freya was not only a paleontologist but, as a recognized expert in the field, had provided scientific testimony for a court hearing in one of those benighted Midwestern school districts that were trying to institute the teaching of "intelligent design" on an equal footing with evolution. This information had inspired some genuine interest in the group, and Freya, absently toying with the bagel whose edges she had mouse-nibbled, described the issues in the hearing, some of the testimony, including her own, and a few of the more garish participants.

But audiences were rare for her these days, and she'd found herself unable to stop with the bare outlines. She knew that in her – tiny, white-haired, bent over her uneaten bagel like a goblin mellowed by extreme age – what the other guests were seeing was a sort of living fossil, like a coelacanth hauled up from the abyss. Far more than the events she recounted, it was her eyewitness to what was for them the deep past that caught their attention. But that knowledge hadn't kept her from talking, each story leading smoothly to the next: the obtuseness and scientific cherry-picking of the creationists who'd testified at the hearing; the tart exchanges between the lawyers of the opposing camps and the bemusement of the judge; the battles among her own colleagues over how best to debunk the scattershot fundamentalist arguments; the intellectual arrogance of some of the paleontologists themselves, including one of the most famous, an icon in the field and, by paleontological standards, almost a household name. She was further tempted by this man's fame and the obvious signs of recognition in the eyes of her listeners to describe how she had risen fearlessly at a meeting more than 40 years ago – she had been one of three women among more than a hundred paleontologists and geologists in attendance – to attack his misguided ideas, as he waited massively and impatiently at the podium.

And although the polite silence enforced by her nonstop rambling had by now become quite noticeable, she continued stubbornly into an exegesis of her own decades-long work, which had focused on the mysterious proto-bird, _Archaeopteryx_. She wanted to impress on these youngsters the amazing beauty of the enigmatic fossils – like fallen angels, sprawled delicately on their backs; and haloed around them, imprinted in the golden limestone, the faint memory of their plumage, the tantalizing hint that these were the ancestors of today's colorful profusion of birds. Of course that. But what was this need to keep talking, without haste, but just rapidly and continuously enough to prevent the conversation from spilling away from her and carving out a new bed? She glanced from face to face as she spoke, willing them to remain silent, focusing mostly on the elegant young woman sitting across from her – one of Ellie's finds – who was not only the editor of a slick Parisian photo magazine but also the mother of two sons. Freya felt that she was speaking directly to this very modern phenomenon as she described her own work, now decades in the past but still glowing in her own mind. She caressed the minutiae of the fossil record, knowing that only a paleontologist could love these homely details. And yet... Most of the fossils had been found on their backs, their wings – if wings they were – wide open and displayed almost heraldically. The theory was that they had floated for a while, dead and belly up, before finally sinking, to be embedded in the muddy bottom of a shallow sea and slowly blanketed by the snowfall of limey sediment. Didn't this bring these ancient animals to life in some way, make them real? And there was the hotly debated question: dinosaurs or birds, or some transitional form? Above all, there was the still unresolved controversy – to which she had devoted nearly 20 years of intensive work before her powers had begun to fail – over whether Archaeopteryx could fly under its own steam, or was merely a tree-climber and glider, like a flying squirrel, or even confined to the ground, the feathers fulfilling an unromantic thermoregulatory function...

Here she was brusquely interrupted by a tap on her upper arm from the old man on her left. He had been introduced to her at the beginning of the gathering as Gerald, a retired physics professor – a large man, somewhat age-bent himself, with thick glasses, a white beard, and a huge head of anarchic Einsteinian hair. Though his weathered face now wore an ambiguous smile, the tap on the arm had clearly been intended, at a minimum, as a rebuke to her garrulousness. "I've heard," he said when she stopped talking to look at him, "that the _Archaeopteryx_ fossils are forgeries. That some 19th-century archaeological villain actually constructed those so-called fossils by adding a layer of cement to dinosaur fossils and then pressing chicken feathers into it. This was supposed to provide proof of Darwin's theories. Or maybe to discredit them."

Now, in the darkness of her bedroom, Freya feels her face turning red as she remembers the suddenly deeper silence at the table while the other guests awaited her response to this crude challenge – crude in its brushing aside of everything she'd just said, and even brutal in its implication that she could be so incompetent as to spend most of her academic career studying a bogus line of geological evidence. It was also contemptuous on a scientific level of which the other guests could hardly be aware. His voice and expression projected the arrogance of the "hard" scientist who believes that his own intelligence and his own sharp-edged discipline are superior to and subsume all others, and especially those studies, like archaeology and paleontology, whose conclusions rest of necessity not on equations but on inference and interpretation, or sometimes even intuition. This foolish forgery theory had been advanced, of course, by two astrophysicists, and very well known ones at that. As though a couple of cosmologists with a camera and some unacknowledged prejudices could overturn a century of meticulous examination and analysis by men and women who had made paleontology their lives.

Freya was suddenly struck by the sheer, obtuse bulk of this man, despite the curvature of old age. His huge head, with its mad hair, floated above her like a grinning rogue planet. She felt bent and shrunken next to him. It was perfectly clear from his expectant leer that he had very little interest in _Archaeopteryx_ and even less in the technical facts that refuted the forgery theory. His object was, in fact, to shut her up; or, failing that to induce her to make a fool of herself. She knew it was a mistake even to attempt a rational reply. But he had read her perfectly, with the intuition of the master tormentor. To him, of all people, it would have been impossible for her not to respond. And to this gathering of nonscientists, as he well knew, the content of her reply would of course lie not in the peculiarities of the Solnhofen limestone or the authenticating characteristics of the fossils themselves or the ignorant misreadings of the challenging astrophysicists, which they could not understand or care about, but in the flush on her wrinkled face and the excessive emotion that colored her words. Despite – or because of – the mocking gleam in the physicist's eye, she could not restrain herself. She could feel the other guests' previous deference turning to indulgence as she spoke. How amusing, and a little embarrassing, that an obscure scientific squabble could still ignite such a flame in the quavering little old lady! They all watched her, fascinated, or perhaps merely trying not to laugh. Even Ellie looked disappointed, as though she'd seen a tightrope walker slip and end up clinging ignominiously to the wire, like an incompetent opossum. The puzzlement on the sympathetic face of the elegant young magazine editor was particularly dispiriting. Only Gerald's wife, a dignified white-haired lady who wore a beautiful peach-colored silk dress she had sewn herself, watched her husband rather than Freya, without expression. But she had hearing aids in both ears, and might not even have been following the exchange.

Freya had eventually managed to get herself under control, with the help of Ellie, who, availing herself of the hostess's prerogative, had hastily retired to the kitchen and returned with a spectacular raspberry tart and a large bowl of whipped cream. The tension was quickly dissipated in the contemplation, admiration, and consumption of this object, while Freya sat silently, clinging to the handle of her coffee cup and feeling her face gradually cool. Gerald the physicist, meanwhile, had commandeered the conversation with an animated lecture on the glories of Viennese pastry, which he and his wife had sampled in depth some 30 years earlier. He dissected them stratum by stratum, expanding on the techniques used to create each one and the gustatorial implications of these age-old technologies. The guests had been greatly relieved by the switch to a lighter topic, and the brisk banter had started up again. Only Freya had not contributed. She'd sat, distracted, her gaze drifting across the faces of the other guests, feeling as though she'd been pushed off a moving train.

She sighs and slows her breathing, trying to calm herself enough to go back to sleep. As often in her wakeful intervals, she tries to focus on the dear _Archaeopteryx_ itself, whose fragile but evocative impressions in the limestone, after so much looking, feel burned into her own neurons. But how is it that after all these years her faith in her own conclusions can be so easily undercut by any arrogant fool like Gerald the physicist, who knows nothing about it and cares less, whose only real concern today was that she was talking more than he was? Never mind about the so-called forgery – that's just foolishness. But _could_ they fly, really? That's what really matters, although she's not sure why. Someone will eventually nail it down, of course, long after she's gone. So why should she worry about it?

Sleep, perhaps, is coming. On her back, arms spread in the only comfortable position her ancient joints will allow, she feels embedded in the new foam mattress, as though she'd fallen from a great height. Arrayed around her in the darkness are all the years of intensive labor and achievement, the mental imprint of her incessant efforts. Thousands of hours spent examining photos of the fossils and the fossils themselves, the minutely argued articles on dinosaur anatomy and bird anatomy and bat anatomy and biometrics and biomechanics and even aeronautics (she'd needed a physicist's help on that one), the dozens of hours spent delivering papers in the semidarkness of countless auditoriums, her face spookily lit from below by whispering overhead projectors. Hundreds of nights like this one, lying awake and staring up into the darkness, puzzling over some ambiguous piece of evidence. In the course of all this she'd more than convinced herself that _Archaeopteryx_ could indeed fly, and not just by dropping from some tree, but under its own power, like any bird, leaping upward and taking to the air. The evidence is overwhelming! How can anyone doubt it?

But who is she talking to now? Ellie's congenial luncheon party has dispersed, north and south, over freeways and bridges, back to their busy lives, its members have doubtless already forgotten the little collision between relics they witnessed at lunch. Gerald the physicist is probably somewhere within a mile of her right now, innocently snoring, dreaming of sacher torte. But the intervention of that embittered old coot has somehow cycled her back helplessly for the hundredth time to the very beginning of her quest, forcing her to shuffle mentally through the old pile of evidence once again, pulling out pages here and there and assembling them in a new framework, slightly different from the hundred others she's constructed in the past, all of them buttressing the same somewhat defiant conclusion. What about those new CT scans, for example, the braincase studies? They've proved that _Archaeopteryx_ 's brain was considerably larger than the brains of most dinosaurs, easily big enough to meet the needs of a flying organism. The unusual development of the vision and hearing and muscle coordination regions...

Tonight, however – perhaps her old tissues are still processing the mimosas – she's unable to taxi very far along the familiar pavement of logic before it's replaced by a feeling of rising and floating, up and out over the edge of the earth, and then settling, as the sediment of sleep drifts down on her.

Chapter 6. Roadwork

His iron habit was to have dinner at Stirling's while there was still plenty of daylight, always the Boca Burger with fries. Then he would roll leisurely out to the desert, watching the lengthening rays of the sun slant across the sage toward the Craters, and pull off onto one of the four-wheel-drive roads that snaked across the gray volcanic ash, looking for the little turnout that marked his usual campsite, hidden in the sage, with its view downslope to the lake and across to the sawtooth Sierra on the west and to the softer shapes of the Craters to the south.

He always performed the ritual in the same sequence. He drove with some trepidation down the long slope from the north, alert to this year's alterations in the landscape and the town of Mildred: new or renovated restaurants or B&Bs, gleaming condos perched on the cliffs overlooking the lake, a new Best Western motel. Even a repainting of the lines on the highway could darken his mood, implying that other people intended to drive this road and thus heralding an increased flux of BMWs from LA and German tourists in, like himself, rented cars.

But the RV park at least was fairly dependable (although this year they had upgraded their bathhouse with a whole new set of restrooms and more shower stalls): he could buy his token (up 25 cents from last year) from the lady in the trailer office and get his five-minute hot shower, afterwards sitting on the bench under the cottonwoods to dry between his toes with luxurious calm, while the cool wind began its evening rush down into the basin. Then on to Stirling's, the Boca Burger, lots of water, the same waitresses just a year older (although sometimes there was an unfamiliar face or one of them had disappeared). Afterwards he drove south, past the PetroMall that, to his dismay, had materialized a couple of years ago, then east on highway 62 and into the desert for a solitary night under the stars. They at least were absolutely changeless; he could count on seeing the Swan gliding down the Milky Way every year, even though there was generally some brash planet or other thrown into the mix, a suspended chord in the music of the spheres.

He had done something like this every year for a decade, once he had discovered the homely charm of this part of the world. Packing into the Sierra canyons to camp in the truly lonely places, was getting to be too strenuous; sometimes he felt the true solitude you could earn that way was not quite worth the agony of hauling a backpack 10 miles and two or three thousand feet up into the high country. But this was easy, and this mild desert had never failed him, aside from a few flies and, one night, spatters of rain. He thought he could continue to make this pilgrimage until he was 80 or even beyond. Often he made the trip in late August, as a final summer excursion, which added to its poignancy.

This year, however, he found that something really bad had happened. The California Transportation Department had determined somehow that it was necessary to widen the highway south of Mildred. There had appeared, suddenly and horribly, a whole complex of embankments, drainage ditches, bridges faced in faux stone, a dusty median trough at least 100 feet wide, and two new lanes of highway, freshly blacktopped, laid like a whip across the rolling flats and washes of the basin floor.

What the hell are they thinking about? he wondered, as he drove slowly beside this outrage, which was not yet open to traffic. There were already four lanes of highway along most of this stretch, although without any median; we can't use the lanes that are already there, at least convert them into a new median? No, we have to add this enormous median AND another two lanes, WITH their damn shoulders and their drainage ditches. They had at least tripled the width of the existing highway, a road that he had never seen crowded, not even at the height of the summer tourist season. Although no one was actually working at this time of day, the earthmovers and trucks and rollers and watering vehicles lolled like huge, callous beasts along the margins of the gash they'd ripped into his frail desert, resting up for another day of mayhem.

The drive eastward across the sagebrush flats after the turnoff soothed him somewhat, as there were at least no visible changes in the landscape. The two-lane road (a large sign announced that it was not plowed in winter) curved up over a saddle between two gray volcanic cones and then wound down toward the lake. He passed one car in the whole five miles, doubtless hurrying to reach the Best Western before darkness fell. His little road was still open, with its "4-wheel-drive vehicles only" sign, which he ignored as usual, and pulling into the little turnout he noted with satisfaction that there were no tracks in it, of either vehicle or human being. Perhaps no one had even set foot on the ground here since he had left last August. And why would they, after all? No Best Western, no hot tubs, no gourmet meals, no gift shops, Yosemite t-shirts, RV toilet dump sites. Just the expectant silence of the desert twilight, the earth-and-sky tinted lake with its islands like drowsing animals, the Sierra front that hadn't changed since the glaciers retreated.

He found a broad enough clearing between the sage clusters to pitch his sage-colored tent. The sandy gray floor was covered with the dried stems of what he had seen, one June, as a pink fog of tiny flowers blanketing the ground. The heat of July and August had ended their blooming, but he knew from having accidentally knocked over a couple while setting up the tent that their roots were still moist.

He placed the tent with its door facing east, so he would be awakened by the predawn glow. It was dark now, and stars were beginning to poke through the deepening blue of the sky. A gang of coyotes began yipping and wailing in the distance. He threw his sleeping bag and pad into the tent, along with a flashlight and sweatpants. Then he brushed his teeth, facing the lake as he visualized and attended to all the dental crevices and crannies. He rinsed the toothbrush with water from a plastic bottle, locked the car, and wandered a few yards away from the tent for a last pee. The coyotes had subsided. All was still, except for the splatter of urine onto the sand.

Zipped into the tent, with his head toward the door, he could see the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle through the mosquito net. A good night for sleeping, he thought. His wandering mind kept butting up against the vision of that arrogant new rift of highway, with its entourage of crouching earthmovers. Nevertheless, he fell asleep before too long.

He awoke, an unknown amount of time later, to the sound of stealthy footsteps outside the tent. He could hardly even class the noises as footfalls; there was just a light, rhythmic crunching and scrabbling in the pebbly sand, seemingly a few feet from the tent. The back of his neck began to tingle, and then his whole scalp. He thought immediately of the coyotes. He knew, in a theoretical way, that they were too small and timid to be any real threat to human beings; but how about a whole pack of them, maddened by his incursion into their domain and emboldened by his solitariness, out here a good ten miles from the Best Western? He had a brief vision of them bursting through the frail walls of the tent from all sides, slashing diagonally with their jaws to open the longest possible wounds all over his body.

At some point in every one of these trips he was assailed by the basic idiocy of camping. Sixty years old, a wife sleeping peacefully in San Francisco with a cat on her hip, a respectable job, reasonable finances and the prospect of a comfortable if not affluent retirement, and here he was lying out alone on an air mattress that wasn't really thick enough, in a plastic house, with cold desert air pouring through its ridiculous flap and over his bald head, surrounded by a pack of hostile predators. The crunching of sand continued, discreet but insistent, amplified by the surrounding silence. He listened to it for a minute or two, eyes staring into the darkness, but the sound neither approached nor retreated.

It's just the two in the morning heebie jeebies, he told himself. Don't be ridiculous. There's nothing out here that can hurt you. Just get up and scare them away. But he found himself reluctant to open the tent and step out into the darkness, where his blindness would give his invisible enemies the advantage. Instead, he rolled over onto his stomach and strained his eyes to see through the mosquito net door of the tent. "What are you doing out there," he asked, trying to put an amiable tone into his voice. "What's going on?" He would have expected the coyotes to at least stop and listen briefly, but the scratching and crunching continued without pause. He felt along the side of the tent, first for his glasses and then for the flashlight, which he turned on, directing it out the door, but of course this made only the netting itself visible. There was nothing for it but to zip open the bottom corner of the flap, stick his arm out through the opening, and shine the light around in all directions. The crunching stopped, but there were no sounds of flight and he couldn't see any glowing eyes or shadowy shapes. He pulled his arm back in and switched off the flashlight, then lay on his back listening. The crunching noises started up again after a few moments, but for some reason the coyote threat now seemed less real. The scratching didn't really sound like footsteps at all. It was more of a digging or nibbling sound, he decided. Probably a rodent of some kind, or a maybe a raccoon? No, not out here. A mouse or a packrat or something like that.

He tried again. "What are you up to?" The scratching or digging, whatever it was, continued. It's only a mouse, he thought, although a curiously unresponsive one. The thing to do is just ignore it, go back to sleep. It'll get tired eventually, or else finish whatever it's doing. He took off his glasses and replaced them carefully along the side of the tent, then rolled onto his aching hip on the too-thin mat and tried to go back to sleep. Possibly he succeeded, but he woke up again with a start, probably only a minute or two later. The scratching noises were quite loud now. They seemed to be right below his ear; in fact, he thought he could feel the tent fabric itself vibrating slightly. Something was burrowing right under the damn tent. He wondered if he had thoughtlessly pitched his tent over the animal's home, and it was trying to create a new access through this unexpected obstacle. Perhaps whatever it was was nibbling on the tent itself, and he would wake up in the morning to find holes eaten into the floor. Also, there was bubonic plague out here. All the campgrounds had warnings about feeding the ground squirrels and chipmunks, and about camping near their burrows. I've got to scare this thing off, he decided. He rolled over onto his stomach again and whacked the tent floor hard, yelling "Hey!" at the same time. The noises stopped. He listened for a while, but all was silent. However, as soon as he rolled onto his other side and tried to go back to sleep, the crunching started again, right under his ear.

"All right, god damn it. I can make noise, too!" He grabbed his glasses and the flashlight again, zipped open the door flap, and trained the flashlight along the front edge of the tent. Nothing. The thing must be right _under_ the damn tent! He carefully lifted up the edge of the tent and the ground sheet, expecting some lightning little mammal to make a break for it. But the light revealed, instead, an enormous orangeish bug, a couple of inches long, with a big shiny bald sphere for a head. It was motionless in the flashlight beam, as though aware it was being observed by hostile forces. He took off his glasses to get a closer look. He had the momentary hope of saving some face in this ridiculous incident by identifying it at least as a scorpion. It had the right color and semitransparency. But really, it was only a Jerusalem cricket, outsized but harmless. Some unknown substance was clinging to its nether parts. At first he thought it had been injured by his blow to the tent floor and was extruding its bug innards, but it might just have been grains of white sand clinging to the sticky-looking abdomen. Nevertheless, he started feeling guilty. The thing obviously had its own agenda, was just going about its usual nighttime business, and here's this goddamn tent in its way. Undaunted, single-minded or even less than single-minded, it had determined to dig under the unexpected obstacle and continue on its way.

Now that he'd probably injured it, was he obliged to finish the job, crush it, put it out of its presumed misery? He didn't like the idea of how much crushing such a large bug might require, and felt squeamish about the volume and quality of stuff that would come out of it. Also, it had started moving again, trying to walk, although with some difficulty. Maybe its situation wasn't hopeless. He poked gently at it with the flashlight; its own violent reaction flipped it over on its back, where it seemed to be trying to threaten him with its segmented legs. A fearless little thing, he thought. But if I were an owl, I'd just eat you. All your leg-waving wouldn't make one bit of difference. He rummaged around inside the tent for a paper towel, which he used to try to scoop up the bug. But once again its vigorous reaction startled him; it seized the paper towel and seemed to be trying to run up onto his hand. He flung it reflexively off into the night. It landed several feet from the tent. That wasn't what he'd had in mind, but it should at least resolve the situation for tonight.

Since he was wide awake and the tent flap was already open, he sat up and put on his sandals, and stepped out onto the sand to empty his irksome bladder once more. The stars were like streetlights, the silence total. The mountains to the west and the much nearer Craters were vague, impassive giants in the darkness. He climbed back into the tent, zipped it shut, replaced the flashlight and his glasses, and tried to go back to sleep. Fifteen minutes later, the crunching started again near his ear.

He rolled onto his back and listened, as he might have listened to a vagrant gust of wind or to raindrops beginning to spatter onto the tent. The damn thing is relentless, he thought. It's like the telltale heart. He imagined it under the tent, earthmoving, excavating, advancing and retreating, cutting and filling with blind determination, heedless of the hulking catastrophe that was trying to sleep above its bald head. He should get up and resolve the issue once and for all, carry the damn thing 50 yards away. But the midnight lethargy was on him, he just wanted to sleep. Please, please, let me sleep! Why was there always something like this on every camping trip? He sat up, threw his little camp pillow to the other end of the tent, rotated the sleeping bag, and lay down again with his head under the window instead of the door. In this position he was unable to hear anything from the other end of the tent, and he finally fell asleep; only to awaken once more to the scrabbling noises near his ear. This time he merely murmured "Oh no," drowsily reversed his sleeping bag again, and went back to sleep with his head by the door, awakening only when the glow of the sunrise sky began to light the interior of the tent and the misnamed nighthawks were already creaking and diving above him.

He got up immediately, not wanting to miss the moment when the rim of the sun first appeared above the low eastern hills. It was his last morning in the desert for this year and he wanted to savor it. The high peaks were already pink, and soon the long rays began to touch the tops of the Craters to the south. He had read yesterday, thumbing through one of the books in the visitor center gift shop, that the first of these craters had appeared a mere 35,000 years ago. He wondered what the sunrise would have looked like out here before the eruptions, slanting across a flat, featureless desert. Of course, the basin had been filled by a lake at that time; his campsite had probably been under 100 feet of water. It was a strange thought, not quite graspable. The vertical black arrows of the Jeffrey pines on the gray slopes looked complacent, eternal, and the Craters themselves occupied their posts with complete authority. As usual, he wanted to stay and think it all through. Maybe he could finally flush the ghost of catastrophe that haunted these silent hills, for once actually see the resin of time that encased them. But he was hungry, and the sun, hoisting itself already far above the horizon, was getting hot and casting a less magical light.

He had already removed the sleeping bag and pad, laid them out in the sun, and started to disassemble the tent before he thought to check for the signs of last night's combat. But there was nothing; or rather, if there was some indication of the determined bug's activities it had been destroyed by his own marks, the deep prints of his sandals, the crushed stems of desiccated wildflowers, the short trails leading out into the sage, with faint moist discolorations at their termini. The bug had not died, apparently, but had finished its work and gone on its way into the desert, where tonight at least it would be able to labor undisturbed, unless by the avid night predators. He spent a few moments trying to brush out the signs of his own occupancy in the sand, but it was futile. The afternoon winds would take care of it in a day or two, and if not, the first winter rain or snow.

With the car packed, he took one last look around. Over the shoulder of the volcano to the west he could see small puffs of smoke where the road builders were already at work, but their feeble noises were deflected by the hills, trapped and swallowed. Here there were only the faint calls of a flock of pinyon jays, tumbling like black confetti over the distant pines.

Chapter 7. Freelancers

I'm on my way up toward the Muni stop with my stuff slung over my shoulder when I notice a familiar looking dude motivating up the hill ahead of me. He's tall, wearing black jeans and a black sleeveless shirt so I can see the goth tattoos slithering down the backs of his bare arms: "Donnerwetter" on the left and "Fresh Choice" on the right. He's got his arms bent, rocking his shoulders to some personal funky beat, even though he doesn't have any phones on. "Hey Fresh!" I yell. He turns around right away and waits for me. I throw him a handshake.

He hasn't changed much – same blonde hair, which he's always got trimmed ala mode, same reddish complexion like he's just finished running a marathon, same jumpy eyes like spastic blue marbles. He's carrying a blue sports bag, probably got a couple of pairs of his best underwear and some reefer in there, and a small paper grocery bag. I'm kind of glad to see him, although he wouldn't have been my first choice. It's been at least a year. "What's up, dude," he says. "Where you heading?"

"I've got a place for a couple of nights out on the avenues. Dude from my poetry class. Where you off to?"

"A meeting of the minds," he says. "Maybe you should join me. Want some Fiddle Faddle?" He goes into the paper bag and pulls out a red carton and lets me get a handful, some kind of sugar-coated popcorn. We stand there munching next to the evening sun-swept grass and whispering trees of Duboce Park, where a bunch of happy-ass dogs are sprinting around in circles while their owners stand there yapping at each other like a scarecrow convention. "All right! We got a party," says Fresh.

"Oh yeah?" My plan is to just head out to this dude's apartment and crash for the night. It's November, so it's already getting dark, I can feel the chill of the outer planets, and I'd like to get settled in. On the other hand, wherever Fresh is there's liable to be some kind of interesting entertainment at least, and probably something to smoke, too, which sounds better than an evening of network TV, or even cable. "Where is it? Is it near here?"

"Up the hill." He motions with his head and starts walking again, crunching Fiddle Faddle and rocking his shoulders. I walk with him. Up the hill are houses, the glass and concrete of a hospital sticking up over the trees, and Buena Vista Park at the top, like a bad haircut. Not that I don't trust Fresh, but he's always been a seriously freaky dude, and his eyes haven't lost that intensity he always had, like a little too interactive. I'm thinking that a measure of caution would be wise. "So, where is this place," I ask him.

He lifts his chin up the hill again, still chewing. "Yeah but do you have an address? Do we know where we're going?"

"I know where _I'm_ going," he says. "I'm going to a meeting of the minds." Fresh, man. I'd forgotten that talking to him is like chatting with the Delphic oracle or something. I'm a little doubtful, but the thought of a party keeps me walking.

"So, is this a party or a meeting?"

He nods. "It's a meeting."

So now the question is what Fresh means by a meeting of the minds. It could be what the rest of the world calls a party. It's hard to tell. He could also be meeting his dope connection, or just getting a blowjob in the park. While I'm thinking about this, he turns into the entrance of the hospital.

"This where the meeting is?" He nods. "Who's in here?" "Garrett," he says. He stuffs the Fiddle Faddle box back into the paper bag.

"No shit! What's the matter with him?"

"Prostate cancer." He nods reassuringly and lifts his index finger to hold my attention while he finishes his mouthful of Fiddle Faddle. "Metatastisized. He's history, dude."

This is a shock. You don't see somebody for a few months and suddenly they're on their fuckin deathbed. And Garrett – he's one of those people you don't think could even change, let alone die. I'm trying to absorb this. Frankly I'm not sure I want to see it, but Fresh is moving, so I follow him on up there.

"Did I tell you assholes to visit me," Garrett says as we come in the room, but he's smiling, with his reading glasses down on the end of his nose. He's sitting up in the bed, wearing the hospital gown and the plastic bracelet, with various tubes plugged into little green things on his wrists or going under the blankets that cover his legs. The rolling tray is across his bed with an open carton of milk on it. Except for the smile, he looks dead already as far as I'm concerned. He's the same color as the walls, and he must weigh about 25 pounds. A walking shadow, except he's not walking. His hair hasn't been combed and it's sticking out all over his head. Marnie Kovac is sitting next to the bed with a curly hairdo I haven't seen before and a book, looking annoyed that we interrupted them.

We drag a couple of chairs in from the hallway and sit down. It's pretty crowded in there, what with the bed and all the medical equipment and the three visitors.

"Well, we've got a regular board meeting going now," says Garrett. His voice is very hoarse.

"A meeting of the minds. Want some Fiddle Faddle?" Fresh has stopped rocking since we sat down and got pretty quiet, as quiet as he ever gets, like a kid in school. He pulls out the red carton again and offers it to Garrett, but he waves it off.

"I can't believe you're offering me that crap. You want me to get sick?" Garrett laughs, but it's not the phlegmy smoker's laugh I remember, it's more like loud panting. I can't get over the way his body has changed. For the first time since we met, when I was still a teenager, I actually feel bigger than him. In fact everyone in this room, even little Marnie, looks like they're bulging with flesh and muscle compared to him. I'm trying to connect this with the hard body setting blind picks that I ran into all those Sundays on the basketball court. I can still feel the bony knee he jammed into my thigh one time I tried to drive around him. That never left a bruise, but it hurt for a couple of months. Garrett sweated a lot on the court and always took his shirt off, so nobody really wanted to guard him, partly because he'd make you look bad, but also because of the sweat, which always smelled like tobacco smoke. This was part of his strategy. I'm trying not to think about what he looks like now with his shirt off.

"Shit, man," I start to say, but he waves that off, too, like the Fiddle Faddle.

"I'm actually glad you guys showed up. You're both in my will. But I made Marnie the executor – she's the only one of you that's worth a shit. She'll make sure you get your ten bucks, or whatever it is. The main thing I'm worried about is the art, though. If I can't get somebody to take that, it's going to end up in landfill. My life's work!" He laughs the panting laugh again.

His art. After the Sunday basketball games Garrett would always take some of us kids out to breakfast at Boogaloo's or one of those places. A lot of us were basically street kids with fucked up families, and we'd be out there on the court hung over from all the beer we'd drunk and the dope we'd smoked the night before, or worse. My father threw me out when I was 17, for example, so I was staying with friends in those days, doing some crank and cutting school and working for one of those organized shoplifting outfits. I was definitely headed for prison at best. More likely getting whacked by some rival gang.

Anyway, Garrett would kick our asses on the basketball court and then he'd buy us pancakes, and after breakfast sometimes he'd take a couple of us, or one of us, back to his apartment, which was actually a converted storefront, and he had this "art" hanging all over the walls. This was the kind of thing: paintings of Wal-Mart with customers wheeling bloody patients around on gurneys instead of shopping carts, or fleets of black oil tankers with antlers cruising across the flat snow of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Or there'd be a big red dick with an arrow through it, instead of a heart. Probably all of it's still there, because nobody would buy that shit or even take it for free. That didn't stop him from doing it, but he had to make his living by writing essays about other people's art. Which he must have been good at, because now and then you'd meet some art person at his place, saying nice things, or at least neutral things, about his stuff. I think he had some kind of reputation in the art world. He'd have a party and there'd be a hundred and fifty friends of his friends crammed into the storefront, some of them very well dressed, although they tried to look cool.

"Marnie's already agreed to take half a dozen pieces," he says. "I'm counting on you guys to take a couple each."

Fresh and I look at each other. Garrett says "I don't want to _hear_ you don't have wall space!"

"It's not that I don't have wall space, man," I tell him. "I don't have _walls._ "

I'm wondering whether a face that thin can actually have expressions any more. Whatever, I can't read his. Also, his eyes don't appear to be focusing all that well, even with the glasses. "You living out of a suitcase again?" he asks me.

I pat my black zipper bag. "It's all right here." So then he wants to know what I'm doing to get over. I'm driving cab, and as a matter of fact I'm not at all short of cash. But who can afford an apartment in this town, unless you moved in 20 years ago. Anyway, you can pretty much get by with a smart phone these days. Then he wants to know if I've got any reefer in the bag. He always did have a taste for it, and there was generally plenty of it around his place in the old days. Some of it got smoked when us kids were there, which occasionally led to other things. It wasn't exactly Sunday school.

"Why, you want some?" I ask him, but I'm just laughing it off. I'm not about to admit I've got any weed with Fresh in the room. I already noticed he perked up immediately when he heard the question.

"What about you, Fresh?" Garrett's giving him the look now. Marnie's watching Fresh, too, but with a different expression. She's also been checking me out, but not in a friendly way, especially my hands, which are a little dirty, and the black nail polish is chipping.

Fresh is hitting the Fiddle Faddle pretty hard now. "Yuh, I guess I could take one or two," he says, mumbling with his mouth full. I know he used to have a basement place down the hill from here, with one window out on the sidewalk, so you could watch people's feet going by. He was cooking up meth down there. Not exactly your ideal venue for displaying art. I don't know if that place is still going, although he looks pretty clean, at least in terms of personal hygiene. I still can't read Garrett's expression, but I have to wonder what he's thinking about his graduates. He says to me "You can take a couple of the small ones, at least. They'll fit in that bag. They're gonna be worth big bucks one of these days." Well, maybe I'll take one, I'm thinking, for sentimental reasons. I always kind of liked his ideas. They were pretty wild and interesting, and his colors could jump out at you. But there was still something missing. Talent, I guess you'd have to say. He couldn't make the paint do what he wanted it to. It resisted him.

"What you been doing, Marnie?" I ask, because this whole subject of Garrett's orphaned art is making me a little uncomfortable, and I'm afraid I'm going to get stuck with a lot of things I can't use. I can see that Marnie doesn't really want to talk to me that much, but she stares at me through her thick glasses anyway and says "I'm writing a book". And she knows I'm going to ask her what it's about, so she says "It's about trusting your intuition." She tacks on in a hurry, before I can ask her what _that_ means, "Learning to have faith in the . . . influences that are reaching us from outside, all the time, and act on them." I remember she always had some kind of Buddhist trip going, but it seems to have gotten out of hand. I don't say that, though, just nod. She glances at Fresh, who's giving her the blue marble stare, with his eyebrows bobbing. I'd have to guess there's still some crank involved there. And you don't need any yogic training to sense the influences that are reaching Fresh from Marnie's direction. She gives him this long look, with the new curls hanging down along her cheeks.

I look back at Garrett. They must have him on some kind of pain drugs. But even though his eyes are half-closed now and like I said not focusing all that well, I know he's seeing the same thing I am. "You doing anything besides driving cab?" he says slowly.

"Poetry class. I'm still writing that shit." He nods after a bit.

"That's good," he says. "Gotta keep working. I was halfway through a painting when they hauled me in here. I brought it with me so I could keep thinking about it." He raises his chin toward the shelf across the room from the bed. There's a small canvas propped up there, about 9 by 12, with a painting on it, the beginnings of a painting. I can't tell what it is – it looks like half of a pinwheel, with stuff flying out in all directions into a black background. It's got his usual freaky color scheme, but all in all I don't foresee any more success for this one than for all the other ones. "You could take that one," he says.

"It's not finished," I remind him. "You need to finish it." He sticks his lower lip out a little bit and shakes his head, and closes his eyes the rest of the way. I watch him for a minute, still trying to get up to date on the way his body looks. The skin on his arms is loose, with a lot of nasty-looking purple bruises, and his legs are stretched in front of him under the hospital blanket like a couple of dead knobby sticks, spread out a little bit. Hard to imagine him running the court on those things. I can't help wondering if prostate cancer has any special effect on your sexual apparatus. I'm checking it out, but I can't even see a lump there. Do they amputate something?

In the old days you could hardly shut him up. He was about the only adult we knew that talked to us like he assumed we actually had a future. We only half believed him, but we hung around anyway and listened, and not just for the smoke and other stuff, because it was a lot better than what you got at home. And a couple of Garrett's disciples did actually develop something like a career. I've run into Marv a couple of times, driving the 22 Fillmore, and he's got a wife and an apartment and a couple of kids. Hopefully Garrett put him in the will, too. Brent got a teacher credential, but I think he only subs. Brent was absolutely a gang-banger, but now I heard he goes to the damn ballet. Maybe they would have done all that anyway.

I'm getting kind of tired of watching Marnie emanate on Fresh and try to tune in the message he's sending back, which is basically "I'm high and crazy too." But she's got so much faith in her intuition that she doesn't even notice he's just freaky, not to mention gay. I don't generally swing in that direction, so it's not like I've got anything going for Marnie myself. Between the two of them I'd probably prefer Fresh. It's just them pairing off like that right here, or at least she thinks they are, and meanwhile Garrett is going off on his own trip, too, not opening his eyes at all any more. That leaves me.

So I pack up and pull out. I take the painting, too. I don't really want the damn thing, but what if Garrett wakes up and sees I didn't even bother to take it? Fresh gives me the handshake and "Thanks for meeting with us, dude," but I'm about as meaningful to him as an out-of-service bus. Marnie's glad to have my negative waves cleared out of the room, so that's OK.

It's already dark. Once the N finally comes along, I'm a little worried that I'm too late, and the dude from poetry class will have gone out or something. I don't really want to end up under a bush in the Panhandle tonight, although I can deal with that if I have to.

I take out the half painting and look at it for minute. I haven't been to Garrett's place in probably a couple of years, but I'm going to miss it anyway. It was always this cool little scene you knew you could drop in on any time. The painting's an ugly-ass thing, but I have to smile a little bit because Garrett got me to take it, and now here it is, traveling with me out into the darkness by the ocean. He'll get other people to take the rest of his stuff, too, because a lot of people owe him, and it'll all spin out in one direction or another, and go through who knows what adventures. And then it'll end up some day in that landfill he's worried about. No Metropolitan Museum for Garrett. But this one piece is safe, for the time being at least, packed away in my black zipper bag.

Chapter 8. Where Are You Going, My Honey, My Lamb?

"You look like a nut," she said. "Even assuming this is the right thing to do, is this really how you want them to find you? Sprawled on your back with your johnson hanging out? Is there something romantic about that? Isn't it just kind of embarrassing? I thought you had more self-respect. It's amazing the things you can still learn about somebody after living with them for 45 years."

"What's with you this morning?" he said. She'd been silent again all night, giving him some hope that she'd finally decided to leave him alone. But there was a different tone in her voice today, a real edge.

The first couple of days she'd taken the rational approach. "Shouldn't you be taking more food with you? How about one of your foam pads, for those creaky old bones? There's no point in being miserable while you die. It's cold up there at night – don't you need one of your fuzzy jackets? Wouldn't it be a good idea to shave? Who's going to give you a ride if you don't at least look respectable? If they _do_ pick you up, aren't they going to be suspicious when they see you don't have anything with you? How are you going to convince them you're just taking a harmless little backpacking trip? An 80-year-old man heading into the mountains with a couple of granola bars and not even a change of underwear? Won't they just call the Forest Service to send out the guys with the butterfly nets? How do you think Meg is going to feel about this, you just disappearing? She's got a husband, and a job, and teenage kids. You really want her to have to deal with this?"

All perfectly reasonable questions, delivered in her best sympathetic tone, but mostly he hadn't answered her, or had limited himself to one-word responses. He'd always armored himself with silence and stubbornness against her quicker brain and tongue. But he knew how he felt. The trick was to stay focused on that: make adjustments wherever she seemed to have a valid point, and keep moving. Thus he'd thrown in a couple of extra granola bars to allow for unforeseen delays, and added a warm hooded sweatshirt just because he hated being cold. Otherwise his dusty old backpack held only his ancient sleeping bag, a water bottle, and the white plastic garbage bag neatly rolled around its contents of a few pounds of ashes. On top of that he'd stuffed a lot of crumpled newspapers to make the pack look full without adding any serious weight to it. He'd also shaved and worn clean clothes.

The bus trip to Argento and the hitchhike to the pass had gone without incident. No one gave him a second look, although the buzzcut Marine lieutenant who plucked him off the shoulder of the highway and drove him up the hill was clearly curious. But the Marines had apparently taught him not to question authority, even the default variety conferred automatically by mere age.

During the long slog up the trail a thin edge of sarcasm had begun to frame her nonstop questioning. He supposed she was annoyed that things had so far gone smoothly and according to his plan. However, he'd last made this sort of climb at least 10 years before, and his physical condition had not improved in the interim. He'd forgotten how the elevation and the endless upslope changed everything. He was forced to slow and shorten his steps until he was barely creeping up the hill. The mere act of breathing required most of his attention. His scrawny thighs burned and trembled, and his head ached, throbbing in time with the veins in his eyeballs. A red-green mandala of hypoxia hung in the center of his vision all that first afternoon, dispersing only briefly whenever he stopped to rest and to take the weight of the pack off his aching shoulders. She'd withered away to almost nothing before she died; how could her ashes weigh so much?

His refusal to respond hadn't discouraged her. "Isn't this a gorgeous day? Kind of hot, though. Aren't you surprised by how little wind there is up here? Us old folks have trouble regulating our body temperature, you know. I hope you're not getting hyperthermia. Aren't your legs killing you? How much longer do you think this will take – the hike, I mean. Shouldn't you pick up the pace a little bit – it's already pretty late. You don't want to spend the night out on this unprotected ridge. I suppose it would have been a good idea to carry an extra water bottle. If you get dehydrated you'll never make it over the ridge. Do you think three granola bars are really going to be enough?" He ignored her, although he stopped once to refill his water bottle from a glittering rivulet that hurried across the trail. "Aren't you worried about _giardia_? It certainly wouldn't be very romantic to die with diarrhea," she said. "It takes a week to develop," he pointed out, and she was briefly silent.

Still, the climb had gone much more slowly than he'd planned, and he did end up spending the first night huddled in his sleeping bag on the steep slope, with his feet propped uncomfortably against the base of a Jeffrey pine to keep himself from sliding down the hill. He felt drained and sick, and was beginning to doubt whether he'd even make it over the ridge, let alone down into the little valley whose green and flowery image had exerted such a pull on him while he'd sat like a stone in the apartment listening to her friends leave their concerned messages on the answering machine.

"You're going to be really sore tomorrow," she said. "What if you can't get going again in the morning? Wouldn't it be silly for them to find you up here, right on the trail, with nothing but a bag of ashes in your backpack?" As usual, the more obviously correct her comments, the more they annoyed him. This wasn't a matter for rational argument, he reminded himself. "I'll be fine tomorrow. I just need some rest," he told her.

But fatigue and the awkward position had made sleep difficult, although during the night she was quiet, for some reason. He occupied himself through the long dark hours by shivering and watching the stars drop, one by one, behind the ridge high above him.

The sky was light, but the sun still hadn't climbed above the eastern peaks when he woke up from what seemed like only a few minutes of sleep. He was stiff and sore, almost incapable of moving, and simply lay still for a long time, staring up into the dark branches of the pine. I can't do this, he thought. I can't even get out of the sleeping bag, let alone walk the rest of the way up over that ridge. He watched its edge sharpening in the first rays of the rising sun. Take your time, he thought. You've got all day. Finally he managed to roll up on his side and reach into the pack he'd dropped heedlessly in the darkness the night before. He ate one of the granola bars and swallowed a little water, and after a short rest he found he was able to crawl out of the sleeping bag and even to stand up, bracing himself on the trunk of his pine tree.

"Well, look at that!" she said as soon as he'd gotten to his feet. "He can actually stand up! As long as he's got a tree to hang onto, anyway." He was embarrassed by the wobbling of his knees, but remained standing, waiting for his strength to return. "Wouldn't this be a really good time to just turn around and go back down the hill? You could be in Argento in a couple of hours. You know you're never going to make it up to that ridge. Think about it. Back to Argento. All downhill."

He sighed. "Back down to what?" Thinking about the apartment, with its countless deadfalls – unfinished knitting projects, stubs of mascara pencils, the pots of dwarf roses that refused to die on the fire escape. And the kindly people he didn't want to talk to, the long afternoons with the sound of distant sirens outside his window and, when the sirens stopped, the wind.

"To breakfast," she said, a little impatiently. "Whatever. Doesn't some scrambled eggs and home fries sound good about now? A nice big blueberry muffin. Coffee."

"That's a low blow," he said lightly. He lowered himself carefully to the ground and pulled on his night-cold shoes. His feet hurt, along with everything else.

"Well? What about it? Where are you going, old man? Really."

"You know."

"Have you got the idea this is something I'd want?" she said. "I hope you don't think you're doing this for me. Because I don't want it."

"I'm not doing it for you."

"Well then why?" He stood up slowly, without answering, leaning on the tree trunk. A sliver of the sun broke the ridgeline behind him and began to warm his back. "Doesn't that feel good?" she said, evidently trying a different tack. "I think it's going to be another beautiful day. Do you remember the first time we came up here? How many years ago was that? I always loved being here. But that first hot shower after we got home – now that's _my_ idea of paradise."

He'd continued to ignore her needling, thinking how even his narrow streak of diffident mysticism had always irritated her. A few minutes of sunshine warmed him enough that he was able to shoulder the pack, work his way painfully back down to the trail without falling on his ass, and start upward again.

He finally made the top about noon. A strong wind was blowing over the ridge from the west, so he sheltered himself behind some boulders and ate his second-to-last granola bar. Her voice had never stopped during the whole exhausting climb, and it continued while he chewed, more out of duty than of hunger. He felt strangely light and remote.

"Isn't it a marvelous view? Have you ever seen the air clearer than this? Look at how sharp the mountains are against the sky. The colors are so rich! It's amazing how many wildflowers there are up here, even this late in the season! All blossoming like crazy before it gets too cold. The birds are so busy, aren't they? They must be getting ready to head south. Doesn't it all give you a sense of . . . life, everywhere, just bustling about its business?"

"It's nice," he said.

"Well, what are you going to do now?" she asked. "Isn't this kind of a turning point? If you even make it down into that valley, do you really think you'll be able to climb back up?"

"You know I don't," he said.

"Well, maybe you shouldn't go down there, then? Isn't this enough? You've had a nice hike. You've proved you can still do it. You spent a lovely night in the great outdoors and you made it all the way to the top. This is 11,000 feet or something. Not bad for a guy who's supposed to be shuffling around in crocheted bed socks. You've earned that hot shower."

"I'm not trying to prove anything."

"Well, what then? What are you doing?" But he'd shouldered the pack again without answering, and climbed back up over the ridge and then continued along the trail, stumbling occasionally with weariness. The main trail was more or less level up here and parallel to the ridgeline, but a hundred feet or so below it. To his left and above, the dark crags gazed silently down on him. Far below to the right lay the little green valley, dotted with patches of yellow flowers and divided by a meandering ribbon of water that was frozen by distance. The sun was still high, and very hot. "I don't suppose you bothered to bring any sunblock," she said. "Not to mention bug juice. Remember what the mosquitoes were like down there? They ate us alive. We had to spend most of the time noodling around in the tent. Not that I minded. We had some pretty lively afternoons."

"I don't have a lot of juice left," he retorted. "For the mosquitoes or anything else." A barely discernible trace branched off the main trail to the right and angled down the slope toward the valley, winding its way through a patch of dwarf whitebark pines. The unrelenting hand of the wind and the weight of the winter snows had flattened the trees into a crouch almost parallel to the slope and left them barely waist high, but their trunks were a foot in diameter. He followed the trail slowly on a long diagonal, stepping carefully so as not to lose his footing and roll all the way to the bottom. The serious hikers, he knew, never bothered to explore this little Shangri-La, because it meant giving up too much elevation, which was why he expected to be alone in the valley for as long as it took. In a couple of hours he was on the valley floor, kneeling on the grassy bank of the stream and trembling with fatigue but rather pleased with himself, splashing the icy water on his face and drinking from his cupped hands.

He'd been hoping for a little peace and quiet. All his efforts of the last couple of days had been directed to making this solemn moment possible, and he'd wanted to give it the proper attention. But her badgering had become, if anything, more strident and annoying.

"So here you are, old man. I'm sure you're feeling very pleased with yourself. You've always been great at inventing pointless projects. Won't your friends be impressed? '80-year-old man drags himself up to 11,000 feet'. Let's not ask why, though."

"I know what I'm doing," he said. He opened the backpack and began pulling out the crumpled newspapers one by one, vaguely noting fragments of headlines as he dropped them on the ground next to the pack. Car bombs, hurricanes, baseball scores. Even this minimal task seemed to take an eternity. Before he finished, the wind rose and took them all, a gleeful flock of tumbleweeds fleeing like naughty children, rolling and bouncing along the tops of the tall bending grass and finally disappearing over the first ledge. He felt a twinge of guilt. I guess I can litter once in my life, he decided. Anyway, there was nothing to be done about it. Still kneeling by the stream, he worked the white plastic bag out of the backpack and untwisted its neck.

It took him several minutes to empty the bag. Its long neck undulated like bleached seaweed as the scarf of white ash unfurled into the icy water, holding together for a few feet, then breaking in a stampeding mob of particles that rushed away from him over the rocks, between the grassy banks, following the stream's twists and turns down and away. He visualized their route through gorges and waterfalls, alpine meadows, quiet pine groves that darkened the surface of the water, and on to the Central Valley, the reedy wetlands, and finally the brackish bay. A few grains might eventually accompany the yachts and black tankers out through the Golden Gate to the ocean. The bag slowly softened and deflated like withering flesh between his gnarled hands, until it was only a sodden, empty rag. With deliberate care he rotated the neck to face upstream and let it fill with clear water, then slowly emptied it again downstream, the water swirling away the last few remnants of white powder.

She kept after him the whole time, not conceding him even a single free minute to examine his emotions or spread his melancholy over the 45 years of their married life. Talking, talking, question after annoying question, while he folded up the plastic bag and packed it away with numb hands, while the afternoon thunderheads reared up in the west, blocking the sun, then gathered in the invisible lower reaches of the valley and swaggered up toward him. She kept talking over the rising moan of the wind as he made his creaky way back toward the overhang where he'd thrown his sleeping bag in preparation for the night. The storm broke before he got there, drenching him in an instant. "The last roundup, just like you pictured it," she taunted, as he crawled through the curtain of runoff that spilled over the entrance to his hideaway. "You're going to have a really pleasant night in your nice wet sleeping bag, plenty of time to thumb through your memories and brood about the ineffable tragedy of existence."

He managed to strip off all his wet clothes and pull the only dry thing he had left, the hooded sweatshirt, over his head, and finally to crawl, sick and shivering, into the sleeping bag. There he lay watching the blue electrical flashes through his closed eyelids and listening to thunder somersault angrily around the high peaks.

"You've accomplished your great goal," she said, speaking right into his ear so he couldn't ignore her. "You carried a bag of ashes up a hill and dumped them in a stream. OK, I give you some credit for determination and of course stubbornness – you've never been short of that. Not too bad for an old man. So now what?"

"Now nothing," he said. "That's it."

"Now nothing! Now nothing!" she mocked. "So that's it. You finished your depressing little project, and now you're satisfied. You can just settle down in your chimney corner like an old grease spot."

"That's right," he flared up, or as much as he was capable of flaring up under the circumstances. "And then maybe I'll give _you_ some of your own medicine."

"Don't be a jerk," she said. "You know it doesn't work that way. I've got a new project for you: get your ass _up_ and _out_ of this valley before it's too late."

"Why don't you just shut up for a few minutes?" he said. "I've been looking forward to a few minutes of peace and quiet to think things over, without the phone ringing or one of your old-lady friends dropping by with a tin of brownies. We've had more than 45 years together, and I've got some nice memories. I'd like to spend a little time with them, if you don't mind. But I can't even think, with your constant jabbering."

"Oh yes, life!" she said. "Yes I've enjoyed it, too. We've had a good life together, I won't deny it. One of the better marriages. The point is, though, your part of it isn't over yet." He was silent. "Dammit, where do you think this leaves _me_?" she yelled, over a final dramatic clap of thunder.

He lay quietly, every part of his body dragged down into the rock by the unfamiliar gravity of a darker, heavier planet. The shivering had almost stopped. The thunder and lightning and wind, having had their say, moved off. All he could hear was the dripping of water from the edge of the overhang and, farther away, the stream talking softly to itself as though the storm had never happened. He listened for a while.

"I just want to sleep," he finally said. She didn't answer.

He awoke thinking, optimistically, that maybe this was already it. He felt strangely rested, and yet at the same time incapable of moving a finger. Despite this paralysis he was able to hear, and to see all around him: the waving tall grass and clumps of yellow wildflowers at the level of his recumbent body, the willows crowding down to the glistening stream, the impassive red-brown mountain slopes and peaks, and behind all that the blue sheet of sky, crossed here and there by hurrying birds and orderly flotillas of clouds, and thick with ingenuous sunshine. He could see all this at once and without moving his head or even, it seemed, his eyes; as though vision had been converted into something more like hearing, merely receptive and almost directionless, an awareness of all light without the necessity of focusing on anything.

He wondered idly if this paralysis meant that death wasn't what he'd imagined in his more optimistic moments – the release of his spirit to fly free, anywhere in the universe, at hyperlight speed. Was this instead his first day of an eternity spent pinned precisely to the spot where he'd given up his material being? An observer forever – not even a restless, interfering ghost, but instead merely watching his own earthly remains sag, shrink, disarticulate, enter the soil by way of the roots of plants, be carried away in the digestive systems of animals and scattered throughout the mountains, until only his loose-jointed bones remained. And eventually not even those. He foresaw the days and nights alternating at an increasing pace as his familiarity and boredom grew, until they were merely a flicker in his eternal vision; the mountains jostling and slumping with the slow heavings of the earth, seas invading even these once elevated zones and retreating, and advancing again. Finally the parent sun turning red and puffing up to devour its offspring, then collapsing into a spinning white tombstone, leaving him hanging alone in space to watch the cosmic cement dry.

In which case the whole effort had been a mistake. If he'd really wanted to spend eternity with Emily he should have pulled a Romeo and Juliet, shot himself over the hospital bed where she'd failed to take that one last breath, or maybe, in consideration of the hospital staff, neatly emptied his veins into the sink. Instead, he'd wasted several days and subjected himself to considerable discomfort in a misguided effort to rescue her ashes from the gray, unattractive bustle of the city, to haul them up here and consign them to the cheerful stream, and then to lay himself down permanently in this wilderness where they had more than once, decades before, cuddled in their zip-together double sleeping bag.

He noticed that he had to pee, however, which made him suspect this wasn't quite the end just yet. It seemed unlikely that of all possible earthly sensations this would be the one a person would carry with him into eternity. The sensation of pressure brought a dim recollection of creeping out of his bodybag in the middle of the night and crawling a few yards from the shallow cave to urinate on all fours under the cold stars, like an old dog too tired even to lift his leg. How could you be so near the end of it all, he wondered, and still be worried that the next hiker in this valley might find your carcass rotting inside a urine-stained sleeping bag? But such was the case; and once he'd left the bag, it had seemed far too much trouble to drag himself all the way back. Anyway the night cold, he had thought, would quickly wind up this project, which was taking way too long and revealing itself to be not nearly as noble and tragic as he'd imagined. But somehow he seemed to have survived the night.

"You look like a nut," she scolded him. Back again. Well, at least she was still speaking to him. He had to admit it was a graceless picture: flat on his back on the stony soil, dressed only in the hooded sweatshirt, which had somehow protected his vital organs sufficiently to keep him alive during the frigid night. Late August, and it already feels like fall up here, he thought. "You're going to get an awful sunburn, lying out here like that," she added. The rising sun was beginning to touch his bare legs. It felt wonderfully warm, and he knew she was right: later it would fry him. But for awhile he stayed still, remembering a lot of shivering mornings up here, waiting impatiently for the sun, the marvelous inflation of relief and well-being when it finally peeped over the ridge and you could begin to strip off a few layers of clothing. The light of this new day had that clarity and freshness that never failed to thrill him.

He was unable to stand up without support, but managed to cross the stony ground to the overhang on all fours. There he spent some time staring at his soggy shirt and jeans and underwear and thinking about crawling back into the sleeping bag. But it was so early, and the day that stretched ahead seemed too long to spend in a cave. The sunshine was flooding the valley now.

He struggled with the stiff, wet jeans for a good 15 minutes before finally getting them up around his skinny shanks, and belted, and even zipped. After resting for a while, he rummaged around in the pack and came up with the last granola bar, which he ate, washing it down with a couple of swigs from the water bottle. Then, with the rocks to lean on, he was able to stand up. He stood for a long while on trembling legs, looking around at the silent peaks, the shining stream, the random nodding of the grass and the yellow wildflowers in the lightest of breezes.

"I was too hard on you last night," she said. "It was dark, and I know you were tired."

"I'll never make it back up out of here," he told her.

"I know," she agreed. "Never mind. The main thing is you're on your feet."

"That's right. And I've got my pants on," he said. "An old grease spot in pants." She laughed. He was happy that he could still make her laugh.

Chapter 9. 1944

The man she might have married is sitting in the branches of an oak tree, thinking about Lord Byron's teeth. Specifically, he's wondering how his own teeth, whose complaints have come to the fore during this long period of enforced inactivity, compare to those of the scandalous poet. He knows that in general the early 19th century wasn't a particularly good era for teeth, even the teeth of the upper classes; and any preexisting conditions might well have gotten rapidly out of control once Byron abandoned his comfortable if turbulent Italian exile for the rockier byways of the Greek independence movement. He thinks also that even Byron's love of adventure and taste for the grand gesture had probably never placed him quite as far from dentists as he himself is now, perched in his oak tree, on the highest, thinnest branches he judges capable of supporting his weight.

Despite the heat and dryness of the terrain in which the oak tree has had the misfortune to take root, its foliage is quite thick, even near the top where he sits, with his aching rear end on one gnarled and scaly branch and his long, khaki-clad legs draped over another. With the slow and careful movements of his head that have already become automatic, he can find narrow tunnels in the leaves through which it's possible to survey parts of the golden, sun-flogged hills, sparsely furred with dry grass, and the tawny ridges sloping down like the forelegs of posing lions. Farther away there are even swatches of sea, in a dark, unreal blue. Occasionally he can spot motion in that dormant landscape: dusty gray shoulders, or the diffuse flash of sunlight off the dome of a helmet.

Perhaps the steady ache from what must be an abscessed molar is actually a blessing. It distracts him to some extent from his current difficulties, the discomfort of sitting on the bumpy branch hour after hour, the silent and suffocating heat, the need to remain as still as possible. Its relentless burn also provides him with food for thought, such as the Byron connection. The tooth explodes with a fiery pain whenever he probes it with his tongue, which he does often, most other physical activity being inadvisable in his situation. The messages from this alien presence in his mouth have become so extreme that he's contemplating the feasibility of extracting it with his own hand; just gripping it slowly and carefully between thumb and index finger and then ripping it out with a single yank, which probably won't attract any unwanted attention if he can restrain himself from screaming. He's confident that he can. He knows that if the people with helmets and gray shoulders discover him in his perch, they will certainly apply methods that will make the flaming molar only a blessed memory. Like the early dental anesthetic technique of holding a hot coal briefly on some other part of the patient's anatomy to make him temporarily forget what was going on in his mouth. Or perhaps they'll even treat him to a percussive extraction. Every cloud has a silver lining, he thinks, pleased that the habit of irony hasn't deserted him, though there's no one around to appreciate it. He wonders if the woman he might have married would have approved of this particular bit of calculated _savoir faire_. And wonders again why she's been on his mind lately. It's been years since he's seen her; he hadn't even thought much about her for several months, and now, without warning, here she is again, her blue eyes and lustrous hair, her humorous mouth. He'd found himself thinking about her even as he'd sat in the front seat of the German general's car in his phony uniform, approaching the first of the series of some twenty roadblocks, the general himself now demoted to the back seat with the barrel of his own sidearm jammed pointedly into his ribs.

Adding to the tooth's complaints, a slight pressure in his bladder has also perversely begun to nag like a jealous younger sibling, notwithstanding the desiccated air and his cracking lips. He's hoping to put off attending to it until the sun goes down, an hour or so from now, when he plans to descend from the tree and take his chances in the dark. Toothache is one thing, but his imagination is having trouble placing the arrogant Byron in a situation in which it would be impossible to relieve himself. Much easier to picture the methodically unconventional poet, fretting in some tedious and endless London reception, pulling it out insouciantly to empty his bladder into the nearest potted plant or convenient Grecian urn. In his own circumstances, however, the rules are much more rigid than at any of the polite dinner parties he's ever attended, and the penalties for transgression will be far less pleasant than the scandalized gossip the poet enjoyed cultivating. The sensation in his bladder is beginning to compete seriously with the aching tooth, swelling and receding like waves riding up and down a beach on a rising tide, each one reaching a little higher than the previous one. The discomfort is beginning to take a definite shape – an inverted triangle, like a funnel, whose sharp apex pokes ever more urgently into his groin, promising a culmination of some kind not far in the future. With meticulous deliberation he changes position slightly, removing his right foot from its branch and letting it hang below him, the process taking at least half a minute. The branch now presses a little more lightly on his perineum, buying him, he estimates, maybe 10 minutes more time.

Before this afternoon he's been far too busy and even, he'll admit to himself, too frightened to bother with minor physical complaints. But with the success of the long operation has come a letdown, a kind of emptiness; and his neglected body has joyfully occupied that sudden void with its childish demands. After the stimulating costume party of the kidnapping itself, and the two weeks of running and hiding from the swarming German patrols that followed, they had finally bundled their prize general onto a launch the night before, in the pale light of a poet's moon rocking low on the horizon, and waved him off to Cairo. The Germans, though, are unaware that they've lost the game, and their enthusiasm for the chase is undiminished. He and his little band of militant shepherds, on the other hand, are weary and, their object attained, perhaps a bit less alert than they really should be. The gray shoulders are now much closer to him than they've been at any time since he and his comrades bluffed their way through the checkpoints, which explains this boring and less than glamorous afternoon in the oak tree. He wonders what's happened to the rest of the fellows. It's a good sign that he hasn't heard any gunfire, but beyond that he knows nothing.

He's holding these anxieties damped well down, knowing it's even more useless to keep running his mind over them than it is to poke at the aching tooth. But that leaves only the physical concerns for entertainment, and when his attention strays briefly from them, thoughts of the woman he could have married. What is she doing at this moment? He doesn't know much about her life, other than that she's married and lives somewhere in Pennsylvania. He invented a husband for her when he heard about her marriage – a pale, skinny intellectual type. Certainly he can't be much of a physical specimen, given that he must be 4-F, or worse, faking some kind of disability. He knows there's at least one child, although his mind tends to shy away from that thought. He makes it a boy, who will now be about 5. Motherhood hasn't diminished her beauty, he's sure, just made her charmingly unkempt. He doesn't know much about parenthood, but he guesses that she's not taking as much trouble with her wavy hair as she used to; it'll be a little wild, and barely corralled with careless bobby pins. He sees the little smile on her lips, and hands resting on round hips inside the pockets of her slacks. But thinking about her body isn't a good idea; it complicates the signals from his groin. Luckily, green Pennsylvania is too remote from this baking hillside to seem very real. Children, grassy back yards, baby furniture; all can seem dreamlike to a man who's being methodically hunted by other men with rifles.

The sun is nearing the horizon, trailed by a pale divot of moon, but he's beginning to fear that the darkness will come too late for his bladder. He considers his options.

A robin, stealing a march on the sun, is already singing from the big oak tree in the back yard when she awakens in the darkness from a long, not entirely pleasant dream of climbing. There was someone with her in the dream, but a little behind her, making her aware of her skirt on the steep hillside. She lies on her back with her eyes open, wondering as usual if his sudden appearance in her mind means that something exciting is happening to him on the other side of the world, or in Washington, or some Pacific island, or wherever he is. It seems possible to her that some people can transmit to each other across vast distances; in fact, she suspects that this ability, if it exists at all, is not limited by space or even by time.

The mental telegrams come quite regularly; not well defined emotions but just signals, like tugs on her skirt. She's received only one physical communication from him in five years; a postcard from Crete. She has no idea how the message managed to cross an entire planet at war from the Mediterranean to her quiet neighborhood of young families on Powell Avenue, Clark's Summit, Pennsylvania. He would have arranged it somehow; it was the sort of thing he always managed. The Greek wine was good, the card informed her, and he found the dry climate exhilarating.

She knows very little about Crete, except that it's an island, and she finds it impossible to picture what he's doing now. Anyway, she knows vaguely that the Germans have occupied Crete, so he must be elsewhere. He wouldn't have allowed himself to be caught, even if he'd been there at the time of the invasion. He's involved with the war somehow, she's sure. Nothing could have made him miss it, or spend it in an aircraft factory like her husband; but there are so many theaters (the term fitting his outlook so perfectly) in this war that she has no idea where to place him in her imagination. Wherever he is, she's sure he won't be marching in a mass of uniformed men shooting their way across France or wading onto a beach of white coral sand with rifles held above their heads. He will have found something more elegant and individual, something that will require him to wear a beret or a silk scarf or, at the other end of the spectrum, to disguise himself as an Indochinese peasant (unthinkable, with his height and coloration, and yet she's sure he could bring it off) herding water buffalo with a stick while he makes mental notes of Japanese troop movements. She doesn't know which of the hundred possibilities to hook her thoughts to, and so she's left with an image of him simply standing and looking at her: tall and sandy-haired, but with incongruously dark eyebrows and the little smile that always seemed to be challenging her to throw something off – convention, obligation, her clothes.

These thoughts cause her to stir under the single sheet in the early darkness, nearly waking up her husband. He's always restless at this time of the morning, already worrying even in his sleep about the problems of the coming day. Hoping to preserve a few more minutes of mental solitude, she freezes, watching him out of the corner of her eye. He rolls up on his side facing away from her, without waking up, uncovering his broad shoulders and smooth back, which remind her of the night before. She's afraid she's pregnant again. In her lower abdomen is a sharp ache that has been growing slowly but steadily for the last three days. She has not, however, mentioned these worries to Peter or anyone else.

By eleven in the morning, the ancient gray flatbed truck of Leo the Italian produce vendor has appeared at the foot of Powell Avenue and chugged its way up the short but steep slope to its usual spot in the middle of the tree-lined block. The young housewives of the neighborhood are clustered around it in their light summer dresses, hoisting the fat cantaloupes to test their ripe aroma and squeezing the dark green zucchini with professional skepticism.

Leo stands near the curved metal pan of his scale, smiling faintly at the young housewives buzzing around his colorful banks of vegetables. Watching him, she realizes to her surprise that it was Leo in her dream this morning, the man climbing slightly behind her. Or was it? Leo couldn't be more different, physically and stylistically, from the man she might have married. He's short and dark, wearing wrinkled trousers, a faded beret pulled low over his watchful eyes, and a gray, weary jacket. Black curly hair shows in the V of his white shirt. She's not unaware of the way his eyes always flicker downward and then back up to her face, and she's both pleased and embarrassed, though not tempted. But there's something about his complicit smile, the silent question posed by his raised, dark eyebrows, that reminds her pleasantly of the other man. She handles the produce automatically, selecting apples with her right hand and dropping them into a paper bag held in her left, while her mind continues to examine the tightening clench in her abdomen. She thinks almost with despair of the being she's sure is growing there, and of her two other young children, whose ceaseless demands already nearly overwhelm her. How can she possibly add a baby to that – the nursing, the diapers, the wailing, the loss of sleep, Bill's sulking about her lack of interest in sex. More worrisome, she doesn't remember any such pain from the first two pregnancies.

Leo flashes his sardonic, questioning smile at her. Of course, he uses it on all the housewives, most of whose husbands are away at the war. She keeps her face expressionless. She's called Dr. Roger, who's promised to come this morning; meanwhile, she tries to ignore the burning in her abdomen.

"Ruth!" someone calls, and she turns to see Evan, her five-year-old, advancing along the sidewalk with blood dripping down his face from a wound over one eyebrow. Evan is an active boy, and prone to injure himself. He's not crying, of course – Evan doesn't cry – but his expression says clearly enough that he expects both immediate medical treatment and praise for his stoicism. In one hand he trails a large cowboy hat of the Tom Mix variety.

"What happened, Lambie?" she says, ignoring the pain in her stomach as she squats in front of him and wipes blood from his cheek with her thumb. "You got blood on your hat." The wound is in the area above the thick curve of one of his eyebrows, but the streaming blood makes it hard to determine the extent of the damage.

"I hit a rock," he tells her. There's something like a smile on his lips as he describes steering his tricycle down the steep, weedy slope of the Carters' driveway next door, losing control, and slamming into one of the boulders old Jared Carter had placed to mark the edges of the drive. For a five-year-old, he's sometimes disturbingly self-aware. She can see from his expression that he knows he's a mildly clownish figure, with the leisurely drip of blood in front of his eyes. But he also wants her to know that he knows.

She takes his hand, slaps the bloody cowboy hat jauntily on her own head, and walks him into the house to the bathroom, leaving the disappointed Leo and the clucking of her friends behind. He sits on the closed lid of the toilet kicking his legs while she rummages in the medicine cabinet for tincture of merthiolate, gauze, adhesive tape. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she leans forward to swab off his face, first with tissue and then with a damp washcloth. The bleeding has mostly stopped. "Does it hurt?" she asks him. "No," he answers, and perhaps it doesn't. But she knows he's also pleased by the volume of blood the small wound has generated. She leans forward to examine it more carefully. The edges of cut skin are surprisingly clean and smooth. She swabs again with the washcloth.

"Look at that!" she says curiously. "There's a little hole right in the middle. I can see the whole inside of your skull. It's just a big empty space!" She does have the odd sensation that she could see through this opening all the way in to his strange little brain, if only she could clean the hole completely. But it refills with blood over and over, no matter how many times she wipes it away with the washcloth.

She pats at his forehead with a towel to dry it thoroughly, then cuts gauze and adhesive tape with the nail scissors to create a dressing of heroic size and smooths it gently over the cut, pressing the tape firmly around the edges. A single spot of blood immediately appears in the center of the white gauze, but grows no further. His face is level with hers, and he smiles happily at her as she examines her handiwork, pursing her lips with mock seriousness, the brim of the bloody cowboy hat flopping low over her eyes.

"Oh, you!" she says, laughing but feeling like crying, and suddenly reaches forward with both arms to hug him. Downstairs the doorbell rings. It must be Dr. Roger.

The moment of decision has arrived for the bladder, although the sun's lower rim barely touches the horizon. Its long, long light bathes the landscape in tender gold. But the nagging in his groin has become a scream, swamping the toothache that was only recently so annoying. The smart thing to do, he knows, is just to let it go, piss in his pants without moving a muscle. The gray shoulders and the helmets are closer now; he's heard voices and the thud of boots less than a hundred yards from his oak tree. But he knows they'll give up the search at dark, load themselves gratefully into their truck and roar back off to whatever comforts the nearby village can supply, leaving a sentry, maybe two, behind. A sentry or two he can handle. Pissing his pants like a little boy in school, however, is not part of the game.

With enormous care he hitches closer to the tree trunk and turns to face it. He wraps his left arm around the trunk and slowly opens the buttons of his fly one by one with his right hand. The trick here is to pee directly against the trunk, at close range; surface tension and the dryness of the air will prevent any telltale moisture from reaching the ground. For a moment he's flooded with a great sense of well-being, and the face of the woman he could have married comes to mind again. She'd laugh at the way he's embracing the coarse skin of the old oak, although he hopes she'd also be appalled by his predicament. As his bladder gratefully empties against the tree trunk, he pictures himself describing this scene to her, the two of them smiling with their wine glasses at a table shadowed by a trellis of grapevines in that outdoor cafe in Iraklion, while Mediterranean breezes twirl the benevolent shades of the Minoans around them...

As the flow dwindles, he glances down along the tree trunk, to reassure himself that all is well. At the foot of the tree, in the dimming light, he sees the top of a helmet and dust-gray shoulders. The German examines something on the back of his left hand for a long moment, then looks up. Their eyes meet.

He still has the general's Luger in his pocket, but what is the point? Even if he manages to dispatch this one German, there are all the others; at the sound of a shot they'll mob him like jackals, before he can even get down from the tree. The option of shooting himself to avoid their ministrations is no more in his repertoire than deliberately pissing his pants was, although now he regrets his fastidiousness.

The German shoulders his rifle and points it at him. " _Herab!_ " he shouts. From the tree branch he watches his threatening enemy without moving, frozen by the sudden dissonance of events. The German fires a burst up into the tree; startled by the noise and the ripping of leaves near his head, he loses his grip and falls, hips, legs, ribs banging painfully against the lower branches as he tumbles, catching himself miraculously only on the final horizontal limb, about 10 feet up, where he hangs for a few seconds like a chimpanzee before dropping finally to the dry soil in a puff of dust. The German has backed off to a safe distance, keeping him covered and calling to his comrades.

He realizes that his equipment is still hanging out. In these awkward circumstances it's a relief to be able to reach down and casually tuck himself back in and rebutton, like any politely inebriated gentleman swaying at a urinal in the men's room at Sardi's. He half hopes that the German, whose rifle barrel is trembling a little with tension, will misconstrue his movements and finish him off here and now. He feels a bit weak himself, but still has enough control to reach into his shirt pocket and pull out the pack of cigarettes and the matches, light one up, and then offer the pack to the German, who merely stares at him, keeping the rifle pointed at his belt buckle. He puts the cigarettes away, leans against the trunk of the tree, crosses his arms to still their shaking, and waits. The cigarette smoke is comforting, but a sharp pain on one side of his chest accompanies every inhalation. No matter, he thinks. In this context, a cracked rib or two is about as relevant as a toothache.

The thudding of a multitude of approaching boots tramples the quiet of the evening, and soon a whole squad of German soldiers are pointing their weapons at him and examining him curiously. He wishes there were a little blood to ignore. An officer appears, upright and stiff in his cleaner, tailored uniform, triumphant but casual. Not to be upstaged, he draws deeply on his cigarette despite the pain in his chest, and directs the exhaled smoke upward with a thrust of his lower lip. " _Guten Abend, Herr Leutnant,_ " he says. The shaking is beginning to subside, and already he feels almost calm; this is a game he knows how to play, at least for the time being.

Under the lieutenant's direction, the soldiers extract the revolver from his pocket and use his own belt to bind his wrists together behind his back. The lieutenant approaches him long enough to remove the cigarette from between his lips and fling it far away, conveying with his expressionless stare that this is only the first, and the least, of many deprivations. Luckily, the truck is not so distant that his beltless pants will fall down before he reaches it. The sun is gone; the soldiers prod him toward the dying moon reclining in a lemon sky just above the dark plane of the sea. We'll go no more a-roving, he thinks, automatically. It would be noon in Pennsylvania; the moon there nearly invisible, high in the summer sky.

He's surprised at how easy, how natural it is to stroll through the soft Mediterranean twilight, to ignore the rude jabbing of the rifle barrel, to hum a few bars of something that used to be popular. He's even enjoying the opportunity to stretch his legs, after the long hours in the tree. But the sharp stab of his cracked ribs, and now also the pointless returning ache of the abscessed molar, remind him a little sadly of his vulnerable body.

She's surprised and a bit worried at the concern shown by the normally talkative and easygoing Dr. Roger. Once she'd mentioned that she might be pregnant, he'd insisted she go immediately to the hospital, which is in Denton, 30 miles away. She couldn't do that, she'd told him. There was no one to take care of the children, after all, and no one to drive her, since Bill was already in Denton himself, at work in the airplane factory. Doctor Roger had brushed off her objections and told her he'd drive her himself. He'd walked briskly next door, explained the situation to Evelyn Carter, and recruited her to watch the kids for the afternoon.

"Is this all really necessary?" she'd asked him. "Can't you just give me something?" But Dr. Roger had loaded her into his rattly old Plymouth without bothering to argue, making her curl up in the back seat with a blanket over her despite the summer heat, gotten behind the wheel himself, and started off down Powell Avenue at a speed she thought was excessive for a residential neighborhood. The whole process had taken less than 10 minutes. The last thing she'd seen of home was Evan standing in the front doorway with the big white bandage on his forehead and a puzzled look on his face. Evelyn Carter's plump white hand rested protectively on his shoulder.

If she tilts her head back now, she can see clouds and a self-effacing little moon drifting in the blue June sky, along with faster-moving leafy trees, as Dr. Roger roars along the ambling country roads toward Denton. Maybe he's right, she thinks. The pain has grown rapidly and now occupies the whole center of her body. But maybe it's just that he's making such a big deal out of it. The power of suggestion. She was getting along all right before. He's taking it so seriously, it's as if he's given her permission to be sick. It might be more than that, though. The signals from her body seem quite real and insistent, and even under the blanket she feels chilly. She drifts for a while, watching the stately clouds.

Bill is there to meet them at the hospital in Denton, with a frightened look on his face. It's important to smile at him; but when she sits up she's overcome with vertigo. It's far from an unpleasant sensation, quite marvelous actually, as though she were being effortlessly accelerated toward a featherbed of cosmic dimensions. Curious, she lets the softness envelop her.

Strangely, when she opens her eyes after a long and dreamless sleep she's still in the back seat of Dr. Roger's car, sitting up, with her feet now on the pavement. Bill has one arm under her legs and the other behind her back, and is trying to lift her out of the car. For a moment she resents his efforts; it's been unspeakably delicious to rest. As her vision steadies, though, her loves begin to reconvene, like anxious sparrows settling on a branch. Julia looking up at her from the crib, Evan at the door with his bandage, his eyebrows upcurved in surprise. Bill of course; she's never seen him look as unguarded as he does now, not even during sex. Even Dr. Roger, she sees, seems to need her attention. He's wondering if he's failed, if he should have driven more recklessly. That's enough of the featherbed, she thinks, a little regretfully. If I go in there again, I might not come back out.

They've got her on one of those carts now, rolling her off down a long hallway. Bill watches helplessly. She remembers to smile at him again; beyond that, she's without volition. There's nothing she can do about all this. Now she's surrounded by a green grove of masked doctors and nurses, all of them gazing at her curiously. She's at their mercy. She suspects that one of the green doctors is about to slice her stomach wide open with a very sharp knife and rummage around in her innards, and she thinks of the time she had to muck out the flooded basement of the house on Powell Avenue. Yet her only emotion is a mild, belated sadness at losing the new baby, and even that is diluting itself in the sharper sense of loss she'd felt earlier, seeing Evan smiling at her from under his silly bandage. Her helplessness makes everything so easy. She's grateful to have only the one task to focus on.

The face of the anesthetist appears above her, upside down, staring assessingly into her eyes. He's wearing a tight green cap and a white mask that hides his whole face except for his own eyes and a pair of dark, curving eyebrows. Though she can't see his mouth, she thinks she can detect a slight smile as he ushers her again toward the featherbed, which now she's allowed, even required, to embrace.

Chapter 10. The Inelegant Universe

According to string theory, which is the latest fashion in so-called theories of everything, the universe is made out of a lot of little vibrating strings. That idea alone is probably enough to drive most of us away; but the string theory cosmos also has something like 10 or 11 dimensions, even though we mere humans are only aware of the usual three – four if you count time. Something apparently happened to the rest of them way back there at the beginning. Either the furious heat of those early events shriveled them, or a kind of crystallization and shrinking took place as the universe cooled. They're all still there, but rolled up tight as pill bugs in winter, so we can't see them. This scheme apparently helps the physicists keep various nagging infinities safely penned up, but at what looks to me like a high price.

I'm officially an astronomer. I've got the degree, and I've put in time in various research facilities, but I can't explain to you what a rolled-up dimension could possibly mean, since I don't really know myself. If you pinned me down I'd probably say it's a form of science mysticism, since it makes the scientists feel good, even though there's no real evidence for it. I only mention it because I've been visiting Peaceful Pastures a lot in the wake of my latest romantic debacle, and have begun seeing an analogy in the situation of the weary denizens of that establishment. Most of them are mute or stumbling along mental trails I can't follow, and so my only clues to the lives whose final teetering scaffolds they're mounting are in the photos and knick-knacks on the shelves in their bare little rooms, the occasional talkative visitor, and the shrunken bodies themselves. They're like evening blossoms folding inward for the night; and there's a sense that all kinds of dimensions of their lives are now rolled up and hidden away: childhood, love affairs, marriage or singledom, parenthood, professional competence, music, sports, art, politics – many more than 10 or 11. Some of the bodies themselves are coiling inward as though for them even the final three spatial dimensions are in the process of closing up shop. The ruthless fourth, Time, keeps cantering along, of course.

Such analogies are useful to me, because in the last few years, having wearied of writing grant proposals and fighting with the Big Names for telescope time, I've deviated from the path of scientific righteousness and become a popularizer – the sort of renegade scientist who pretends to be able to explain to you the significance, if not the meaning, of rolled-up dimensions, quasars, black holes, and Schrödinger's hapless cat. I scrape out a meager living by writing mass-market books about these things; the tradeoff for the loss of regular income being that I'm on my own schedule and so have time to visit nursing homes whenever I want. I've been availing myself of this freedom more than usual lately, since my latest girlfriend chose a particularly creative exit strategy with which to end our relationship. I find that I'm soothed by the company of vague old people, by the pained deliberation of their movements and their ability to contemplate the carpet for extended periods, and even by the faint reality-invoking fragrance of urine that apparently can't be eliminated completely from their habitat. After Donna I seem to need soothing.

My father resides at Peaceful Pastures, which was originally why I started visiting. He's one of the mute ones, however. It's hard to know whether he can't speak or has just decided not to. It puzzles me every time I see him, how this man who made his living for something like 45 years stumping up and down the aisles of the Erie Lackawanna on his titanium leg, jawing and wisecracking and psychologizing hour after hour with the commuters and horseplayers and vagabond grannies whose tickets he punched, could have gone so silent. But there he is every day when I go in, sitting in his wheelchair, staring at a point about a foot below the TV screen that's showing Teletubbies or some other jewel of our culture. I try to tell him a little bit about what's going on in my life – at least I did before the Donna thing – or pointlessly ask him what's been happening at Peaceful Pastures. He'll shake his head or nod slowly, but that's all. It's not very interesting, for either of us I suppose, and after a while I'll go looking for Lina, who as far as I can tell is the only resident at Peaceful Pastures who's still pretty hip. Except for Othello, of course. Othello is the feline mascot of Peaceful Pastures, and Othello is very hip. She's a pure white shorthair with shocking blue eyes, and she occupies the corridors, chairs, laps, and linen closets of the place with ferocious self-esteem. She has a regular inspection route of all the rooms, and will even jump up on my father's lap, causing him to bestir himself to pet her slowly with grave concentration. Like me, though, Othello prefers Lina.

Lina's a couple of rooms down the hall from my father, although she spends a lot of her time wheeling around checking everything out, like Othello – and often with Othello on her lap in fact – making a circuit of the dining room, rec room, exercise room, and also glancing into the rooms of all the residents as she rolls by, hoping to see that they're up to something.

Lina wouldn't be here at all except for two circumstances. One is that she has no family or friends left, all of them having already checked out or moved too far away to visit. The other is that there's something wrong with her legs. Which doesn't keep her from showing them to me every time I visit, flipping her flowered skirt up to reveal knobby knees and sticklike calves carved in venous ivory, above slippers whose toes are the heads of zebras. It's one of her ways of flirting with me; and I don't find that too bizarre because she's among the few oldsters I've met in whom I can clearly see the image of what they were like as young people. Of course, I've examined the photo of her and one of her husbands that stands on a shelf in the alcove across from her bed; but beyond that, there's something in her eyes, a certain birdlike intensity of curiosity and expectation, that makes it easy for me to visualize her with smooth skin and strawberry blonde curls, and pale pink lips formed into a coquettish smile. I'm sure she was a pretty hot number in her day. I can even imagine the calves as they must once have been, tan and firmly curved.

Lina hasn't dimmed by even a milliwatt, as far as I can tell. She's ready to talk about anything: politics, movies, books, the stock market, sex, herself, the other patients. Amazingly, she seems to know all their life stories, along with those of the nurses and other caregivers, even the doctors, who only show up about once a week. Most of the art and music and so on I suppose she can get off the TV. They have cable here – it's sort of a posh place – and CNN or HBO is almost always on in every room, even though most of the residents don't pay any attention to it. Lina can be quite charming, and she probably seduces the nurses and paras into telling her about themselves while they're giving her a sponge bath or inserting her into one of her flowered print dresses. But how does she know about the other patients? She'll tell me, "You know, your father never really forgave your mother for wrecking his Camaro." Which is probably true, but how did she find out? I really don't think he's spoken to anyone for at least a year. Or she'll point out one of the old ladies sagging over the side of her wheelchair with her eyes half-closed and say, loudly, "Maggie's day-dreaming about that dinner date she had with Merle Haggard back in '74. They both got a mite tipsy, I heard." And Maggie will actually open her eyes and straighten up, and smile a little coyly.

If Lina were 50 years younger I could imagine her being the next in my string of asteroid impacts; but her age and immobility have saved both of us from that fate. As it is, I can even talk to her about what's been going on with Donna and get some useful feedback. She's had three husbands herself, although I guess none of them were as exasperating as I apparently am. She talks about them with conditional affection, like pets she was never quite able to housebreak.

There's something about me that sets women off. That's what I've decided after all these years and broken connections. I'm not very good-looking in the conventional sense, but I've been told by various of my girlfriends that I'm bearlike, which seems to appeal to some women. Some of them even said teddy-bearlike. I suppose it's my height and bulk, along with a lot of dark hair, all over. Possibly the lazy eye has something to do with it too – my inability to focus may make me look harmless and even benevolent. This seems to be what gets the action going. I've never had much difficulty attracting women.

But I must be an irritating man, also, because the tail ends of my relationships, which often trail close behind the front ends, have frequently been marked by some degree of violence – not from me, I hasten to add. I've been punched, whacked with folded newspapers and jabbed with rolled-up magazines, kicked, had handfuls of hair on various parts of my anatomy painfully yanked, and even been the target of airborne furniture. I make a point of never raising my voice during these confrontations, because I've learned it's better not to start my own feedback loops spinning; but the result of my restraint has only been to leave me defenseless and to increase the rage of my lovers-turned-tormentors. I don't have any real trouble understanding that kind of spontaneous anger. Donna, on the other hand, adopted an apocalyptic approach that seemed to me to express something a lot darker than the others. A month later, I'm still mulling it over – the look in her eyes, like a crocodile calculating attack angles. I'm 50 years old, and getting a little tired of the struggle. One of these events will obviously have to be my last, and this one might be a good candidate.

I think Lina, despite her reflexive flirting, would have liked me to succeed with Donna. She'd listen to my descriptions of the brief, weird course of our affair, thoughtfully stroking Othello, who liked to lie adoringly on her lap, upside down with all four legs stretched out, front and rear. Then she'd ask some totally reasonable question, like "Well, why don't you just let her use her _own_ kind of toothpaste?" Unfortunately, there's no answer that would satisfy a rational person. But I also don't see why it was so difficult for Donna to accommodate _my_ needs in matters like toothpaste, given that they were important to me and not to her. The truth is, she didn't care at all about such things, but she couldn't let me do it my way, either. I suppose that should have been a red flag.

Lina liked to illustrate her points in our discussions about Donna with parables from her own marriages, of which the second lasted the longest. She portrayed that one as a sort of zenith in her romantic arc. She let the first marriage get away from her due to youthful ignorance, as she freely admitted; and by the time the third rolled around she'd lost all patience with the quirks and obtuseness of the human male, so that one was probably doomed from the start. "I never should have married him. I just let my horniness get the better of my judgment," she told me, watching hopefully for signs of shock.

The second marriage, she noted pointedly, had worked the best because the two of them had given each other a lot of leash. They'd both kept jobs, had spent a good bit of time apart, pursuing their separate interests, hadn't forced their friends on each other, and had even preemptively purchased two TVs, knowing what a problem that could get to be. Lina had worked quite a bit on her cooking, and Frank had indulged her wishes as far as decorating the house was concerned. Besides which, he was damn good in the sack.

"It sounds like Paradise," I said. "So what happened?"

"I had a little fling with the guy who mowed our lawn. He was a part-time park ranger, moonlighting. I'd see him out there on those sultry days, riding around on his big machine in the sunshine, with his shirt off and his shiny back." She cackled happily at the memory, then sighed and went on, in her thin, quavering voice, "You'd think a marriage as strong as ours could survive something like that. I never worried about what _he_ was doing with his secretaries. But he took it badly." Her laugh awakened Othello, who jumped down from her lap and stood for a while with a scowl on her face, lashing her tail, before stalking off around the corner.

The problem between Donna and me wasn't sex or jealousy, I'm sure of that. But that leaves me with the question of what could have inspired her to the vengeful measures she adopted, especially given the meticulous planning that had to have been involved. I wonder about this as I wander around the old house in Ossining, alone again except for my steadfast pal, Hubble, who's got some beagle in him, some basset, and a lot of soul. He's a good-natured guy, and pretty good company when there's something going, like a walk or a frisbee session in the park, but otherwise he just sleeps a lot. While he snores and twitches his feet, I sit at the computer, gazing out the window at the empty bird feeder and the distant Hudson and tapping out yet another jocular screed about the beginnings and history of the universe. Between paragraphs – and even during them, since by now I've written so many similar ones – I have plenty of time to puzzle over what to me is the more interesting question of Donna's motivation.

I see a connection between the two problems, although it might not be that obvious to anyone else. I've been writing about cosmic origins for several years now, and the more I write about it the more I see this Big Bang thing as basically the impact of a giant hammer on a fine and elegant watch. Since that long-ago event all the little springs and balance wheels and tiny screws and jewels and splinters of glass and quasars and galaxies and red giants and pulsars have just been whirling outward through a primordial emptiness (although according to Einstein that nothingness itself is being created as we go along. Is that some kind of clue – that not even nothingness can exist by itself?). Those bomb fragments are what science has been studying so diligently, as if the collisions and entanglements and stately twirlings of all this wreckage were the meaning of everything. If it has any meaning. And in the other direction too, toward the infinitesimal: the electrons, protons, ions and pions, mesons, gluons, quarks, and WIMPs, all whizzing around mindlessly like discount shoppers, and even the so-called virtual particles, which like distant and quirky family members are allowed to visit only if they don't hang around too long. The scientists have managed to find some patterns in this mess – even catastrophe apparently has to have rules. But I find I'm less and less interested in the sterile antics of all that debris and more interested in the shattered watch. Not to mention the hammer – where did that come from? I know my attitude isn't very fashionable, especially for a scientist, even a lapsed one. You'll have to pardon me for wanting to see some kind of order, other than the logic of high explosive, behind all those fleeing motes. Similarly, I've been trying to see back beyond the tangled wreckage of my romance with Donna to whatever it was that uncaged all that violence.

I ask Hubble about it several times a day, rhetorically of course, but I'm lucky if he even opens both eyes in response. I haven't been able to get much more than that from my few human friends, when I run into them at the grocery store or the post office. The question I put to them is this: Have you ever really hated someone? I don't mean the wretch who pressed his crotch against your butt in the subway or the genial thug who knocked you off your bike in the park and rode away on it. I mean someone you knew, and spent actual time with – someone you worked with, or thought was a friend, the guy you went out for drinks with after Italian class, an estranged family member, or even someone you loved.

I've had a few interesting answers. One person confessed that, when she was 11, after some childish tiff she'd gift-wrapped a box of dog poop and left it in her best friend's mailbox. Another one described a complicated sort of sting they'd set up at his office to humiliate some guy they all disliked: a phony "surprise" birthday party that they carefully arranged for him to find out about and then on the appointed day all ditched him and met somewhere else to drink and have dinner and sneer at him.

I think we have to eliminate kids from this analysis, along with the somewhat similar genocidal historical monsters, because of their incomplete moral structures. And the phony surprise party doesn't sound exactly like hatred to me; more a matter of group irritation that morphed into a kind of mobbing behavior. And I'm not talking about routine road rage or even the kind of contempt you might feel for someone who behaves dependably in a petty manner. I'm asking about the white-hot fury that burns at your guts day after day until you have to do something: to lash out violently or, more viciously, to plot – to turn someone's friends against him, to destroy his reputation, to confront him with a previously unimagined vileness of human behavior, to leave him in the ditch a smoking wreck. None of my friends would admit to any such feelings, let alone behavior, and though I've gone over my own history carefully, I don't believe I've ever experienced it myself. A couple of days ago, however, I asked Lina, and surprisingly she seemed to know all about it. One of her rolled-up dimensions. She told me the following story.

Back during her first husband she'd had a job in a small publishing house in the Midwest, an outfit called Twitchell-Smelt. It was a sort of harem situation as she described it, more common then than now: an office with a bunch of women all working in various capacities for the same boss, a guy, who was planted in a spacious, windowed office, wheeling and dealing on the phone and dispensing rough justice, while all the women buzzed around him in a hive of soundproofed cubicles.

"His name was Drake. We just called him that, his last name. I was so in love with him," she told me. "All of us were. He had the most beautiful forearms. Just the right amount of hair, and he always had his sleeves rolled up to here." She stopped stroking Othello long enough to indicate the exact location on her own shriveled arm. "He was a very manly man. He was married, of course, but he flirted with all of us. Or not really flirted, but he'd look at you a certain way. His office was the only one that had windows, so going in there was like coming out of a cave into the sun. We'd sit there when he called us in and cross our legs and lean forward to show him a little cleavage, which was all you could get away with in those days, and he'd look, believe me.

"Almost all of us girls got along pretty well together, but there was also this unspoken competition. I don't know what we were thinking about. Looking back on it, I'd have to say there was never any real chance he was going to do anything except look. But I guess we all enjoyed thinking he might." Drake may have flirted with all of them, she told me, but he'd also had a favorite. Needless to say, that had created tension in some quarters.

"Everybody was supposed to love Ruth," Lina said. "Supposedly she was this kind-hearted, benevolent sweetie that was nice to everybody, not a mean bone in her body, etc. etc. I hated her." She laughed her little laugh, which had probably been a musical tinkle when she was a young girl but now had a sheet-metal edge. "Partly I just don't think anybody's really that sweet, do you? So already you had this element of hypocrisy. But the main thing that annoyed me was she pretended not to know anything about Drake, as if she was completely unaware that he liked her, and that she hadn't had anything to do with it. She was married, too, and had several teenage kids, or maybe they were even in college, and she was about 20 years older than me, so she liked to act like all that kind of thing was in the past for her. But she probably spent more time in his office than the rest of us combined. Well, you could say that was because she screwed up more than anybody else, too. She was completely unorganized and she was always late with everything, so she was constantly missing deadlines on her projects and forgetting to call important authors and rushing through her blues so she'd let big mistakes get by. Do you know what blues are? It doesn't matter. But she was Ruth, the sweetheart, you know. So she'd be constantly running down to Drake's office and going in and you'd hear her say 'Well, I screwed up again,' in this phony embarrassed way, and then you'd hear them joking and laughing in there. . . She never had to pay the price. And of course she was the respectable housewife, so god forbid _she_ should ever flirt with him, but she'd always go in there with one too many blouse buttons open or something. It was all supposed to be part of darling Ruth's charming disorganization. Of course, he liked to point those things out to her, and she'd get very flustered. And then he'd spend a lot of time leaning on the door of her cubicle, gabbing with her. This 50-year-old woman! He was _at least_ 10 years younger. She started wearing more lipstick. . . uck! Well, you probably get the picture. The halo didn't convince me. I always thought she was a phony.

"There were a couple of us who were annoyed at her, and we'd talk about it a little bit in the lunchroom. And then we'd have to shut up when she came in, later than everybody else of course, and I noticed that that spooked her a little bit, so I started going over to my friend Patsy's cubicle, which was right next to Ruth's, and having these long conversations with her. And we'd keep our voices really low so she couldn't quite hear us. It might not even be about her at all, although it usually was, but I could practically see her ear coming through the partition when we did it. And over time that kind of built up." Lina sat thoughtfully in her wheelchair, resting her hand lightly on Othello's back. "I guess it was literally what you'd call a whispering campaign. But it was really just revealing that phony bitch for what she was." I noticed an unusual amount of color in her cheeks.

"Then I started thinking maybe she was actually sleeping with him. Well, once _that_ idea got around, you can imagine. Even her friends stopped speaking to her."

Eventually Lina's campaign had had the gratifying result of pretty much isolating Ruth in the office, until she only had one friend left. Unfortunately – law of unintended consequences – that friend had been Drake, since he was the only one who didn't hear the whispers.

"That really made me crazy. He'd still be leaning on her door, jabbering about some project or other, and I couldn't think of any way of waking him up, except to go right in his office and say 'You know, that bitch is making a fool out of you.' And I couldn't do that, of course. I was so frustrated! I started breaking out in a rash all over my body. I didn't know what to do. For a while I was actually sending her stuff in the mail." I raised my eyebrows at that, and she laughed.

"I mean really nasty stuff. Snotty little anonymous messages calling her names. Once I sent her a used tampax." She looked at me a little apprehensively for a second, and then continued. "At least I could see it was all having an effect on her. She wasn't Little Miss Cheerful in the office any more. So that was good. And she was getting more and more flustered and late and disorganized, if that's possible. But Drake didn't really see any of it. Somehow she always managed to pull everything out just in time. But in the end that's what got her, with a little help from Yours Truly."

Lina had finally taken the direct approach, and had simply begun sabotaging Ruth's work. "She was so messed up anyway. I just helped things along a little bit. I always got to the office early, before anyone else was there, so it was easy to find out what was happening with her projects. I could make things disappear, and she wouldn't know what happened because of all the mess in there. I'd be in Patsy's cubicle and I'd hear her shuffling the papers around like mad and going "Damn damn _damn_!" She chuckled at the memory.

"And so one morning I found this table of contents she'd just finished adding the page numbers to – you know, the pages where all the chapters started. That would get sent back to the typesetter so they could set the page numbers. There were two sets of proofs, and one of them was unmarked, so I just substituted the blank ones for the ones she'd fixed, hoping she wouldn't notice and she'd send the blank set back to the typesetter. And she did! That was bad enough, but it all worked out even better than I could have hoped for, because she didn't notice it on the blues _or_ the F&Gs either! So it was really her fault, for not checking her proofs carefully. And the book actually got printed that way, with no page numbers in the TOC! And bound, too! Can you imagine how stupid that looked? I happened to be there when she saw the first printed copy. The look on her face! I thought she was going to throw up..." Lina stopped there. The color was back, high on her cheekbones.

We both thought about that scene for a while, and finally I asked her what had happened. Well, there hadn't been any joking around in Drake's office _that_ time. That little mistake had cost the company a few thousand bucks – serious money in those days – and a good deal of embarrassment, and after that he'd never really trusted Ruth again. He'd started cutting back on her projects and giving her the boring books that nobody else wanted. No more Allen Ginsberg or Staughton Lynd for her. She'd become more and more irrelevant and started looking more and more depressed. Eventually they'd made her go part-time and then freelance, and finally she'd disappeared from the office altogether.

"And then what?" I asked her.

" _What_ , what?"

"Well, what happened after she left? What happened with Drake and all his women?"

She furrowed her brow. "Nothing! Things calmed down after that. I left myself, a few months later. I got my first job in New York." Othello gazed at me expressionlessly from her lap.

"But then why did you do all that?"

"I just _told_ you," she said, stroking Othello peevishly. I thought about Ruth, ejected from her cubicle and spiraling into oblivion. "What happened to her?" I asked. But Lina didn't know. Nobody knew. She'd just vanished. She hadn't really had any ties with the office after she'd left, as you could imagine.

So that was Lina's experience with hatred. I suspected it wasn't the only one, but it was the one that stuck out in her mind. I went home not much the wiser, although I'd at least found someone who admitted to having pulled shenanigans in roughly the same category as Donna's. Maybe that was progress. I found myself wondering what Ruth's life must have been like after the girls of Twitchell-Smelt were done with her. I hoped she'd had some other way to make a living, or at least a rich husband. It didn't sound to me like she'd done anything so terrible, and anyway I only had Lina's version of that ancient episode. I wondered how it would feel to open your mail and find a bloody tampax neatly sealed into a manila envelope.

For my next visit to Peaceful Pastures it occurred to me for the first time to take Hubble with me. I thought he might perk up my father, who had always been fond of animals. That turned out to be a very bad idea, however, because the first thing Hubble did when he got through the door was to kill Othello. It happened so fast I didn't even have time to react. He just made a run at her with that kind of quiet, businesslike snarl they have when they're not fooling around, they know they've really got something, and she first looked like she was going to face him down, which a cat can usually do, but he was moving too fast for that to work, so then she thought better of it and tried to run down the hall, but he got hold of her and snapped her once like a dish towel and that was that. I got him off of her right away – although I didn't really have to, since he seemed to know he was through with her – but it was too late. She just lolled there on the carpet like a rag doll for a couple of minutes and then stopped breathing.

I could hardly bear to look at the residents, who of course were attracted by all the unusually rapid motion and the noise. Most of them I don't think were really all that clear about what had happened, or at least couldn't remember after about two minutes, but they were all leaning forward in their chairs, looking at me with grim expressions and shaking their heads. Lina was beside herself, yelling and waving her arms crazily from the wheelchair. Even my father lifted his gaze from the floor to watch.

One of the paras came and gave me a dirty look and took Othello away, and I just got Hubble, and myself, out of there as fast as I could, with Lina yelling after me. Hubble trotted ahead of me out to the car, quite pleased with himself and fulfilled by his part in all the excitement.

After that disaster I didn't know what to do. I suppose it's a bit morbid, but Peaceful Pastures has sort of become my framework since Donna left. It seems I can only sit around a few hours a day writing about a universe composed entirely of minuscule vibrating strings. Then I have to go out and interact with something a little more interesting, like a dandelion or a human being, even one that's in the process of thinning out to a zero-dimensional entity.

After a couple of days I decided I had to go back and make amends. I left Hubble sleeping peacefully on his favorite throw rug and went to the local animal shelter to pick out a kitten. I didn't think a white one would be appropriate, but I found a nice tabby with yellow eyes and a white bib and white feet, and took it over to Peaceful Pastures.

"I've been wondering when you'd show up again," Lina said, as soon as she saw me. "You've got a lot to answer for, young man." I put the kitten on her lap.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "I don't know what got into Hubble. He's usually such a sweetheart."

"Oh, yes, Othello," she said. "Well, that was sad. A dog is a dog, though." It was apparently something else she was upset about. The kitten climbed around on her lap, anxiously stiff-legged, then up and over her shoulders and down her curved back as if she were just another gnarled old tree. Lina said, "You shouldn't have gotten me cranked up about all that old stuff from the past. I've hardly slept at all the last couple of nights."

"Happy memories?" I said, but she ignored my sarcasm.

"Now you've got me second-guessing myself after all these years. I keep thinking about her face when she saw that TOC. It was quite a train wreck." She'd maneuvered the kitten back onto her lap, but it was trying to make a getaway, for all the world as if an ensemble of little vibrating strings could have a fuzzy will of its own. "I guess it doesn't really matter much at this point," Lina said. "She was 20 years older than me. She must be dead by now. If she isn't, she probably wishes she was. Drake too." I thought her edgy laugh lacked its usual esprit. She looked down to where the kitten was digging its fresh new claws deep into her wooden thighs. "You little bastard," she said fondly.

Chapter 11. Rest Area

She thought it was quite a wonderful spot, for a highway rest area. Fifty yards north of the road, which had crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada only a few miles to the east, was a small parking lot and a tidy cement-block restroom. They were shaded by a cluster of the enormous pines whose bark passed along a delicious rumor of pineapple when the sun warmed it. From the restroom she had threaded her way around and over the surrounding granite boulders for another 100 feet, and found herself on a promontory overlooking a deep gorge topped by tree-blanketed slopes and, higher, the stern, bare Sierra mountaintops. A dam plugged the canyon a mile or so to the west, where its sheer walls closely approached each other. Walking close enough to the cliff edge to make herself nervous she could see, far below, a blue reservoir curling away eastward behind the fragile, convex seashell of the dam.

It was an October morning, and chilly at this elevation, but the sun was strong. She found a spot where the huge coarse-grained boulders sheltered her from the breeze and sat nibbling the granola bar she'd bought at the camp store a little farther up the road. After a while she unbuttoned her sweater and took it off, to let the sun warm her pale, bruised arms.

She was a small woman, with a neat, graying bob and large, not very flattering bifocals, dressed this morning in a pair of bright blue slacks, a printed sleeveless blouse, and blue sneakers. The softening of late middle age was well advanced on her cheeks and her neck. This was her fourth day of driving west, with only the vague goal of California, spending the nights in the cheapest places she could find in her Triple-A guidebooks. The previous night she'd been in the town of Fivespot, in a little independent motel off the main drag. A gaunt and amiable old gent, who'd been rocking on a tiny porch when she drove up, had taken her money and then walked her to the room to light the gas heater for her. Although he'd been talkative and curious, she hadn't volunteered any information.

She'd been avoiding the freeways since she'd crossed the Rockies. In the desert, so strange and thrilling to her eastern eyes, the bare highway junctions had the feeling of accidental encounters. Whenever she reached one, she took the direction that looked the most promising, without really knowing what her criteria were. Her planlessness had led her through towns with names like Burnett and Fiddleneck, and finally to the California border the previous afternoon. But Fivespot hadn't really looked any different from western Nevada; and it was only this morning, having wound her way up the steep eastern slope of the Sierra and over the crest at Pincushion Pass, that she felt herself truly in California.

Now that she was here, seated on the knobbly old granite of the mountains and listening to the fluttering and tapping of the unknown western birds that were breakfasting in the pines around her, she felt no impetus to go farther. Her son lived with his wife in San Francisco, and she supposed that was why she'd headed in this general direction, but he had no idea his mother was now perched on a mountainside only a couple of hundred miles east of him. She wasn't sure how he'd have reacted if he had known. Now there seemed to be no reason to move on, or even to change position on her rock. The sun was warm, and the air had the clarity and freshness that she associated with the few perfect autumn days in the Midwest. If her spirits were not exactly lifted by the serenity of this scene, the stately current of the natural world, to which she was always attuned, was at least having its usual soothing effect.

The granola bar was half gone. She folded the end of the wrapper around the remainder and tucked it in the pocket of the blue slacks. She looked out over the canyon again, thinking I don't have to do anything. I can sit here as long as I want, all day if I want to, and just watch the sun cross to the west. I could go on to San Francisco later, or I could go back to that motel in Fivespot. I could even stay here and sleep in the car. She tried to focus on the novel sensation of being totally without obligations, but didn't quite succeed. For one thing, there was a faint but insistent pull from the east, the brick house in Indianapolis. She supposed Peter was at work, but found it hard to imagine what he was thinking. She'd left without any explanation, not that one was really needed, and hadn't even called since then. There was also a tingle of anxiety, resolutely suppressed so far, deriving from the dwindling supply of cash in her purse, along with the related question of what she was going to do when it was gone.

She heard the faint crunch of tires on loose pebbles as a car rolled slowly into the parking lot behind her and stopped. After a lengthy pause, she heard the car door slam. She hoped it was just someone who would use the restroom and then leave. In this solitude she felt no loneliness, only a magical and sufficient lethargy. She didn't want to have to move, to share the morning, to look at, talk to, or smile at anyone. She was weary of a lifetime of looking, talking, smiling.

A plump, bespectacled woman of about her own age appeared on the rocks to her left, walking slowly with a slight limp toward the spot from which Ruth had earlier gazed down at the reservoir. She was rosy-cheeked, with an ash-blond helmet of neatly combed hair, wearing white slacks and a loose-fitting pale pink pullover and somewhat outsized gold hoop earrings. A white plastic purse was slung over one shoulder. She walked nearly to the edge of the cliff and stood looking down.

Ruth stayed silent and motionless, hoping not to be noticed; but after a few seconds the intruder looked around casually and saw her. She made a little wave with one hand and said, "Isn't this a glorious morning?"

It was beyond Ruth's powers to act as standoffish as she felt. The uncontrollable smile was on her lips as soon as she knew she'd been spotted, and she answered in spite of herself. "Yes, it's a beautiful place. I've just been sitting here soaking it up." To her annoyance, the woman walked over and stood with her hands on her hips, gazing out at the panorama and smiling benevolently. "It's been so hot the last two weeks," she said, "but now it's finally cooled off. I guess fall is on the way."

"It feels like it. It's got that crispness. But it could just be the mountain air."

"Are you from around here?" The woman was examining her a little more closely. "Just passing through?"

"My son lives in Fivespot," Ruth lied, not knowing why. "I'm on my way to visit him. Sort of." She laughed uncomfortably, realizing how silly it must sound.

But the woman laughed, too. "Oh, I know, these kids!" she said. "You never know whether they really want you there or not, do you? But you have to try, I guess. If you don't visit them, then they start to wonder about _that_. I've got a daughter in Boca Raton and a son in Butte, Montana. You don't suppose they could find anywhere nearby to live, do you, so I could at least see my grandchildren occasionally. Or at least closer together, so I could visit them all at once." These thoughts brought a slight squint to her eyes. She turned and looked out again over the canyon and the mountains. She's nice enough, but I hope she stops talking now and just gets back in her car and drives away, Ruth thought. She wanted to be left alone again, to meditate on this mountaintop she now felt she'd been driving three days to reach.

"Is your son your only child?" the woman asked.

"No. I have two daughters, too," Ruth answered, more shortly than she'd intended to, and immediately felt guilty.

The woman nodded thoughtfully and resumed admiring the vista. There was a long pause. The habits of a lifetime prodded Ruth to break the silence, but she resisted stubbornly. I don't have to, she thought. Somebody else can do that work for a change.

"Well it surely is a beautiful morning," her unwelcome companion finally said. She looked down at Ruth and smiled her rosy-cheeked smile again. "I wonder if you'd mind watching this for me for a bit. I'd like to take a little walk in this nice sunshine. It kind of gets in the way when you're walking around these rocks." She unslung the white purse from her shoulder and let it dangle above Ruth.

"Oh sure." Ruth tried to soften her earlier unfriendliness by adding "That's very trusting of you."

"Well, we have to have a little faith in our fellow human beings, don't we?" the woman said. "Otherwise, what's left?"

"True," Ruth agreed with a smile, arranging the purse on the sun-warmed rocks next to her. She watched the woman turn and limp slowly to the edge of the cliff, pause briefly, and then, with a slight hop, step over it and disappear. Ruth listened, but the only sounds were the breath of the wind in the pine needles and the busy tapping of the birds. She tried to remember what the cliff edge had looked like. Was there a ledge the woman could have stepped off onto? She couldn't remember any such thing.

After a minute or two she stood up, a little creakily from having sat still for so long, walked to the brink and carefully leaned over to look, hugging the white purse against her stomach. As she had remembered, it was a vertical drop. Below her, what seemed to be hundreds of feet down, she could see the green and tranquil crowns of trees. They were swaying lazily, but that could have been due to the breeze. There was no sign of the woman. Staring into the deep green of the treetops Ruth had the odd sensation that she was looking not down but up, toward a limitless and textured green sky, into which the woman had somehow flown. Oh Lord, she thought. Now what?

She stood at the edge of the cliff for a long while, occasionally peering over to see if anything was moving down there. Finally she returned to her protected corner and sat down. The sun felt very hot on her head. After a while she unzipped the white purse and rummaged slowly through its contents. There was a package of Trident sugarless gum and a set of keys on a keychain which had a small flashlight attached. There was also a clipped-out newspaper article, folded neatly, explaining how to rid one's house of two different species of ants. Otherwise there was only what seemed to Ruth an excessive number of used, crumpled tissues, some of which were still somewhat moist. There was no wallet, no money, no driver's license or credit cards, no photos of the two children the woman had mentioned or of any man who might have been involved in their creation. At the very bottom of the purse Betty could feel the fine, dried crumbs of what might have been a cookie.

She heard another car rolling into the parking lot behind her. The sound of opening doors was followed by the high-pitched yells of children, along with the officious tone of a woman attempting to assert authority. Two children appeared almost instantly, sprinting toward the edge of the cliff and then halting at the last instant. "Look OUT!" the woman's voice shrieked, but the children were already running away along the edge, laughing, and then disappearing over the piles of boulders. The woman, a somewhat puffy blond in an overstressed tanktop, arrived a few seconds later and stood briefly with her hands on her hips, staring out at the view. She shouldn't be wearing that, Ruth thought, automatically. The woman was soon joined by a glum male, with longish hair curling out from under a baseball cap and a T-shirt that didn't quite extend down to his belt over a massive belly. They glared briefly at the middle-aged lady seated among the rocks with her white purse, then moved away toward the restroom.

I should be doing something, Ruth thought. But her inertia had somehow been deepened by the turbulent, insular little family. She continued to sit quietly, gazing out at the opposite side of the gorge and waiting for them to leave. Eventually she heard the children again, converging on the hectoring adult voices, doors slamming, and the car rolling slowly out of the parking lot. She stood up and walked to the cliff edge again. There was still nothing human in sight below, and even the treetops down there had stopped moving. She turned and climbed back over the rocks to the parking lot, carrying the purse and her sweater. In the lot, a green foreign car with patches of rust underneath the doors was parked next to the tan Pontiac she'd driven from Indiana. With some difficulty she found her own keys in the pocket of her slacks, opened the Pontiac, and sat in the driver's seat with her feet outside on the pavement, holding the white purse on her lap.

The main question seemed to be which way to drive. The nearest telephone was at the camping store where she'd bought the granola bar, back toward the pass. On the other hand, she could keep driving west, down toward San Francisco and her son, and stop at the first telephone she encountered. She had no idea how far that would be. Then should she call 911 or some local sheriff's department, or maybe the state police? She'd always hated calling strangers on the telephone, and now she felt a faint anxiety at the idea of talking to any of those agencies and trying to explain what she'd seen. And of course it would mean the end of her own little odyssey, her interlude of solitude, her unauthorized holiday from the daily grind of dealing with Peter's despair and rage. She was balanced between the two not very attractive poles of San Francisco and Indianapolis, with no particular desire to tip in either direction. In her mind she watched the plump woman step over the edge of the cliff again, with that little hop. She wondered what it would feel like to just let the earth take over.

She removed the keys from the white purse, got out of the Pontiac and, after a bit of fumbling around, found the right key to open the trunk of the old green car, which she saw from the logo was a Datsun. The trunk was empty, and very clean. The interior of the car was in the same condition, as if the woman had spent some time tidying up, preparing for this moment, although she'd left a bit of a mess in her purse. But maybe she'd originally expected to take that with her, and had only at the last instant decided to leave it with Ruth, an enigmatic memento. Ruth was impressed by the care with which the woman had organized her project. I could never have done it so thoroughly, she thought. I would have forgotten something important, or gotten distracted by something in the mail and never done it at all. She tried to visualize the plump, good-natured face, the glasses and smooth hair. Had there been any hint in her expression? She remembered the slight squint when the woman had mentioned her children, but surely that wasn't enough. Arlene, she kept thinking. That was the name that seemed to fit. I'm just not ready to go back. She felt as though she hadn't quite managed to free herself, had barely found her solitary rock in this clean light, before Arlene had arrived with her own obviously very serious problems to drag her back down to the thick air of the human world. She'd climbed laboriously out of the sink her life had become and now, finally, found herself balanced on this high, uncluttered ridgeline. Here the earth stopped rising and began its descent back to civilization; but she felt that it would be good to leave the planet behind completely, to let her upward momentum carry her on into the pure sky of the mountains. How high did you have to go to escape the pull of gravity completely?

She went to the rear of the Pontiac and opened the trunk. There was her one black suitcase, with the green ribbon she'd tied to the handle to make it easier to recognize on baggage carousels, along with a 25-pound sack of dry dogfood that she'd forgotten to remove and a couple of brown bags full of newspapers for recycling. I should do that, she thought. Do they recycle in the West? She gazed into the trunk for a while, with one hand on the raised lid, then took the handle of her suitcase and lifted it out. She carried it over to the trunk of the Datsun and deposited it there, then went back to the Pontiac and leaned in to remove her maps and guidebooks, plus a couple of used Kleenexes. She examined the interior for any other artifacts; but the car was uncharacteristically clean, except for a lot of dog hair on the back seat. She made sure all the windows were rolled up. After a short pause to think, she dropped her own keys into the white purse, zipped it up, and left it lying on the driver's seat. She didn't bother to lock the car.

She had a little trouble with the alien controls of the Datsun, but finally got it started, backed slowly out of the parking spot, turned out onto the road a little jerkily due to the stick shift, and headed east. A few miles farther along she passed the camping store and its telephone, just before starting up the steep grade to the pass. She slowed a little bit, but something prevented her from turning in. She couldn't see herself on the phone to the state police. In her mind instead was the image of the funky little motel, the clean and unnecessarily wide streets of Fivespot, and the noisy crowds of blackbirds foraging in the meadows that edged the road into town, fluttering upward and then settling again like a flapped blanket as cars rolled by.

An hour later she pulled back into the gravel driveway of the motel in Fivespot and parked under the neon sign that read "Oleander" and, in smaller letters, "MOTEL Vacancy." The nondescript quality of the place appealed to her, as it seemed to increase her chances of remaining temporarily anonymous. It was situated just south of the chipped concrete balustrade of the river bridge, within easy walking distance of the few stores, a rundown but homey little restaurant or two, and a couple of slightly more upscale inns. It was a single long, low, narrow, paint-peeling white wooden structure, set at an angle to the highway, a sort of extended shotgun flat partitioned into eight units, one of which functioned as the office. The proprietor, whose name was Merton Pearl, was made even more curious by her return in a different vehicle and her stated intention to stay a few days; but he respected her privacy in good innkeeper fashion and offered her the reduced weekly winter rate in exchange for paying in advance. He insisted that she call him Mert, rather than Mr. Pearl. "Since we're going to be friends," he told her as he carried her bag to the tiny room. "OK," she said, amused at his seriousness.

Despite the ugly exterior of the place, Ruth liked her little room. Mr. Pearl apparently had a taste for wood; or perhaps, not being able to afford new furnishings, he'd been forced to compile his a few at a time from local garage sales and flea markets. The bed had a wooden frame and a mattress that was rendered reasonably functional by Ruth's small stature: she could curl up comfortably in the hollow in its center. The only other pieces of furniture were a creaky old birchwood rocking chair and a small sideboard that held the TV, with its rabbit-ear antenna. The bathroom door barely cleared the edge of the toilet, and had to be completely closed to make the sink accessible. But there were pictures on the walls and the linens were clean. Mr. Pearl had already informed her that he did the laundry himself.

She left her suitcase on the bed and went out just long enough to walk the length of the main street, clutching her sweater around her in the wind. The double line of low structures seemed to hunker between mountains and plains, as though intimidated by the vast scenery. She bought some bread, peanut butter, honey, and a couple of apples to get her through the rest of the afternoon. She also stopped into a little book and card store and bought two postcards with anonymous mountain vistas, one for each of her children, along with two stamps and a used paperback entitled _Far Tortuga_. Then she hid in the motel room, reading and rocking and eating peanut butter and honey until it got dark, after which she ventured out for another short walk. At night the back streets of Fivespot might as well have been the desert suburbs of Indianapolis. Everyone else was inside, and the only sound was the dry clatter of leaves manhandled by the cold wind. The darkness was so thick she couldn't see her sneakers; it felt like a spacewalk. It was a comfort to be able to return to her small, warm enclosure at the Oleander. She carefully brushed her bridgework and got into the bed. The room was not well insulated or sealed, so she could get plenty of fresh air for sleeping without bothering to open the window. She felt quite cozy under two or three red Hudson's Bay blankets, with the gas heater glowing a faint, watchful blue in one corner, ready to spring into action if the temperature dropped too low.

She lay on her back for a while after getting under the covers, staring up into the dark and listening to the ticking of the heater. She thought a little about what must be going on at home – the phone calls to her children on their opposite coasts and maybe even to the police by this time, her morose husband and pets, the neighbors wondering why she wasn't around but afraid to ask Peter what was going on. She also got, against the darkness, sporadic glimpses of the sudden void of sky above the boulders the previous afternoon, when Arlene, as she continued to call her, had disappeared. These visions were more puzzling than sad. Arlene had been so matter of fact in her action, and before it so calm and even cheerful, that Ruth was inclined to accept it as entirely proper, although at the same time horrible in another way of looking at it. She wondered what had been the factors in Arlene's decision to hop over the cliff into that green sky of treetops; but she had been careful to leave no clues, at least for strangers, and Ruth was unable to invent a life for her. The matter-of-factness had made it seem an entirely personal and private act, and so not subject to the judgments of human society. That feeling allowed Ruth to store the idea of informing the authorities in a back closet of her mind. Finally she just drifted, enjoying the knowledge that tomorrow there wouldn't be anything she really had to do except get up and have breakfast.

But in the morning, sitting over the coffee, whole wheat toast, and small orange juice she'd ordered at the Deerslayer Cafe, whose walls were covered with plaques bearing the heads of noble dead animals, she had an attack of almost unbearable dread. Outside the window was the pristine white facade of the little County Building, surrounded by huge, comfortably spaced cottonwoods with yellowing leaves that flashed their undersides in the wind. Dense blue air clung to all the corners and edges of the buildings, and bolts of sunlight glanced off the row of pickup trucks parked at the curb outside the Deerslayer. In the backs of several of the trucks sat well-trained dogs, gazing solemnly into the windows of the cafe where their owners were having breakfast.

These were things that ordinarily would have provided Ruth a good deal of pleasure; but viewed in the stark morning light her situation suddenly appalled her. How could I have taken her car, she asked herself. And now that I have her car, how can I report her suicide to the police? And of course they _will_ find out, and what are they going to think when they do? What can I possibly say to them? She could actually feel the sweat breaking out on her back and under her arms when she thought about these things.

She hurried out of the cafe without finishing her breakfast, got back in the green Datsun without even stopping at her room to brush her teeth, and drove all the way back over the pass to the rest area, thinking she would, if nothing else, claim her own car and leave Arlene's where she'd found it. That, she thought, would at least reestablish the status quo as of just before her loss of sanity. Then she could decide what was the best thing to do.

But there were no cars in the parking lot at the rest area, and there was no sign of activity – no police cars or yellow tape, no detectives in trench coats and slouch hats, no bloodhounds hullooing at the base of the cliff, nothing. Just the same sun and wind as yesterday, the same faint tapping of birds foraging in the big pine trees. She sat with her stomach grinding, staring out the window of the Datsun. In this wild zone, that was without other means of transport, it now felt shackled to her like a green, rusting corpse. After a half-hour of paralysis she drove slowly back over the pass and on down to the Oleander, parked the car, and shut herself into the little room, where she sat on the sagging bed, waiting for the resolve to begin untangling the mess she'd created for herself.

She was no longer able to reconstruct the reasoning, if there had been any, that had made her take Arlene's car and leave her own at the rest area. She supposed it had seemed like a way to gain a little extra time, a few more days of freedom for herself; but now the idea seemed merely insane. Why had she left the keys in her car? Why hadn't she at least locked it? And why hadn't she called the police about Arlene? What about the people who must be worried sick about her by now? How could she have convinced herself that they didn't need to know what had happened to their wife, mother, grandmother, friend? I must be going a little crazy, she thought. First leaving home without a word, and now all this. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, tears collecting in the corners of her eyes. You've got to do something, she told herself. But she couldn't make herself do anything, except lie back on the bed, with her knees up. Eventually she dozed.

She was awakened by a knock on the door. She sat up, disoriented by sleep, then got off the bed and stood next to the door, listening fearfully, wondering who it could be and hoping they'd go away. But after a few seconds there was another knock. It wasn't a very loud knock, she thought, not a police knock. Since there seemed to be nothing else to do, she opened the door. Standing outside was Arlene, as plump and rosy-cheeked as if she'd never stepped off a sheer cliff at all. Ruth stared at her. Parked behind her, next to the old green Datsun, was her own tan Pontiac. "May I come in?" Arlene asked. Ruth stood aside to let her in. She sat on the edge of the bed, while Arlene took the birchwood rocking chair and sat rocking peacefully for a minute or two.

"Well, we seemed to have exchanged cars," she said finally, with a little smile. "How did that happen?"

"I didn't think you were coming back," Ruth finally managed. "You just... disappeared."

"I _said_ I was going for a walk." There was a slight edge to Arlene's voice.

"Well, you were gone a long time," Ruth said. "I looked for you. But I didn't see where you could have gone."

"What did you think – I just vanished into thin air?"

"Well, yes, actually. In a way." They looked at each other.

"Did you call the police?" Ruth admitted she hadn't.

"Well then, why did you take my car?" There was definitely an accusing tone in Arlene's voice now.

"I don't know why. I guess I didn't think you were going to need it any more." Ruth felt the beginnings of annoyance at this odd power struggle. Here she was being attacked by a woman who, if she'd done what she was supposed to do, wouldn't have had anything to say about her car or anything else. But it was apparently important to Arlene to establish that she'd been wronged.

"What's your name, anyway," her accuser asked rather rudely. Ruth told her, and added "I've been calling you Arlene. In my mind."

"While you were driving my car around."

"Well, I left you _my_ car," Ruth reminded her. Which sounded stupid, she thought. It had been a little more than a simple car trade, at least in her mind.

"It's actually Margaret." Margaret, who still seemed to have the moral high ground, rocked thoughtfully, while Ruth waited. Finally she said "I haven't had anything to eat since yesterday. Maybe we should get something." Ruth didn't relish the idea of spending more time with her aggrieved new companion. On the other hand, she was finding the confrontation in her tiny motel room very claustrophobic. A change of venue might relieve some of the strain.

They sat under the glassy gaze of a dusty bobcat in the Deerslayer while Margaret wolfed down an enormous salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. Betty ordered a club sandwich, but could only eat about a quarter of it, plus a few french fries. Although Arlene/Margaret's reappearance had abruptly resolved her immediate worries, it was far from clear what the new situation was, and her stomach was still acting up. It was a pleasant enough restaurant, she thought, looking around curiously at this unfamiliar world. The waitresses were busy but calm, tending to happily gabbling families with small kids and small groups of men in baseball caps, hunters or maybe fishermen. A faint, pervasive odor of mold and dust underlay the food smells, as though the carpeting needed replacing. Outside the windows darkness was diffusing upward from the low eastern hills.

"Your son doesn't live here," Margaret announced, when she'd finished cleaning her platter.

"No. He's in San Francisco." Ruth paused, and then for some reason added "I'm actually a Hoosier... on the lam." She had to laugh a little at the term.

"From your son?"

"My husband."

"You drove all the way from Indiana? Does he know where you are?"

"Well, I sent postcards to the kids," Ruth told her, feeling the first real twinge of guilt that she hadn't at least called Peter.

"That was quite a fight! A 2000-mile fight." Margaret took one of Ruth's french fries, dipped the end in ketchup, and nibbled it down to her fingers.

"I guess it was," Ruth said. She was remembering the heel of Peter's hand, punching her again and again on the shoulders, his enraged, miserable face. But all she said was "Are you from around here?"

"Wishbone. Just down the road from where we met." There was a pause, while both of them, Ruth supposed, thought about what Margaret had been doing at that rest area, only a few miles from her home. Finally Ruth asked, timidly, "Are you having trouble with _your_ husband?"

Margaret blew out a tiny amount of air. "I _wish_ I was having trouble with him. I have nothing from him. That's the trouble. He talks to the dog more than he talks to me. He's got a thumb like a bear trap from operating the TV remote. The kids left home years ago and they both moved about as far away as they could get. They don't even write, basically. So it's just me and the dog and the satellite dish and silent Fred. The dog only puts up with me when Fred's not home."

"Well you must have some friends," Ruth suggested.

"A couple," Margaret admitted. "But try to picture Wishbone, California, in the winter. I don't think I can face another one of those. In the summer at least you can take a walk. In the winter there's _nothing_ to do, unless you're an alcoholic. You need more than a couple of friends, believe me." It seemed to Ruth that her companion was enjoying complaining about her plight. She had the odd thought that she might have given Margaret something to live for, at least temporarily, by stealing her car. Still, the image of a tiny mountain town, more or less snowed in all winter, was kind of scary. Did they get skiers, maybe? Who else would come up here that time of year?

"What _do_ you do all winter?" she asked. Margaret clasped both pudgy hands around her water glass and looked down at her plate. A large diamond glittered on one finger.

"Not much," she finally said. "Wait for my cancer to show up."

And what do _I_ see when I look ahead, Ruth wondered. Her weird, mostly widowed friends, also aging rapidly. Weeding her garden and keeping the birdfeeder filled, packing groceries with the girls at the church. Occasional visits from the kids and the grandchildren. Mice and squirrels in the attic, leaves clogging the downspouts, tree branches lashing the roof in the winter storms, a failing septic system. Peter in his armchair every evening, yelling at the newscasters. The bruises on her arms still ached. I should never have quit the publishing company, she thought. What keeps _me_ from walking off a cliff, other than the general shortage of cliffs in Indiana? My life, in fact, could use more cliffs.

Margaret didn't seem to have much else to say. She also didn't have any money, so Ruth paid. They hurried along the dark street toward the Oleander, battling a wind that poured down from the mountains as though a dam had burst. I'll have to buy a jacket if I'm going to stay here any longer, Ruth thought. Margaret was shivering in her thin pink pullover.

They stood next to their cars in the Oleander's parking lot and exchanged keys. "What are you going to do?" Ruth asked.

"I don't know," Margaret said. "I slept in your car last night. But I don't really want to go back to Wishbone tonight. It's a long way over the pass in the dark." And probably something of an anticlimax, too, Ruth thought. Could you yank your whole life up to a point, the way Margaret had, and then just let it subside?

"Well, you could at least spend the night here." She resigned herself to paying for Margaret's night in the Oleander, too. What was she going to do, just say good night and leave her new friend standing in the wind? "Let's see if we can find the owner."

The office was empty, suffused by a reddish light from the apparently permanent MOTEL Vacancy sign. Behind the white barracks of the motel they found Mr. Pearl's little house and peeped in his window. He was seated before the TV, motionless, in an armchair, the front side of his body bathed in phosphorescence like the moon in first quarter. "Look at him," Margaret whispered, with a little sneer in her voice. But Ruth was noticing his white hair and expressionless face and thinking he looked kind of lonely. She wondered how he spent the winters. Even now, all the other rooms were empty. What must it be like in February? Mr. Pearl was so still that he appeared to be asleep, or dead. His white hair was electrified by the TV glow.

They broke his enchantment by knocking on the door and getting him to check Margaret into the room next to Ruth's. He furrowed his brow when he noticed that there had been another automobile switch, but they stonewalled, and eventually he went back to his TV, after lighting Margaret's heater for her. "It's a good night for sleeping," Ruth told her. "I bet you'll feel better in the morning."

Back in her own room, she listened for sounds of Margaret moving around, turning on the TV, getting into bed; but there was nothing. All she could hear was the wind and the heater's obsessive muttering. What was she doing over there? Was she thinking about Wishbone, California, or maybe planning a new life? Or about revisiting her cliff at the rest area? It was surprising how even the flimsy walls of the Oleander were enough to shut out another person's life so completely.

Margaret knocked on Ruth's door early in the morning, but she was already up. Together they pursued their long shadows back along the highway to the Deerslayer. Margaret was stowing away a three-egg cheese omelet with bacon and hash browns and Ruth was warming her hands around her cup of coffee when Mr. Pearl appeared next to their booth and asked if he could join them. He ordered coffee and a stack of blueberry pancakes, and then sat staring shyly at his cup.

Just to get the conversation started, Ruth told him how much she liked the little room at the Oleander. "How did you get into the motel business?" she asked him. He relaxed then, and while they finished their breakfasts he told them his life story, managing somehow to maintain his stream of talk even as he chainsawed his way through the stack of pancakes. He spent about six months a year in Fivespot, he told them, from May through October, running the Oleander and fishing in the afternoons when things were quiet at the motel. He was from Lake Havasu City, Arizona, which information he thought should be sufficient to explain why he was in Fivespot right now. "Been 120 degrees down there all summer," he said, shaking his head. Not too many folks stayed there in the summer; most of the population were what he called snowbirds, people who just pulled their vehicles into the RV park in November or December and stayed all winter. In the summer they all scattered to the mountains or the north. It was beautiful down there in the winter, though, and the population tripled or something like that in the winter months. Used to be a quiet place, when he moved there 25 years ago, but not any more. Traffic! You wouldn't believe it, out there in the middle of the desert. You'd have to wait 10 minutes at an intersection! But in the summer it was real quiet. His wife was one of the few who stayed. "Seems like she just prefers her own house and her own bed."

He didn't linger on the subject of his wife. "That town's all about the lake – didn't even exist until they got the lake. And then they got that London Bridge, you know. It's their claim to fame. You ever seen that? They bought the whole bridge and took it apart and moved it over to the desert, and set it up again. It's really something. Golf courses and palm trees, and then London Bridge." He smiled happily. "It's pretty historic."

"I can see why your wife wouldn't want to leave," said Margaret, "living right next to London Bridge like that. I bet she's got a British accent by now." Her tone made Mr. Pearl stop talking and apply himself to what remained of the blueberry pancakes.

"I've been to Florida in the winter," Ruth said, trying to soften the awkward silence, "but I've never seen the desert at that time of year. It must be wonderful in February." In Indiana in February the icy winds would be roaring and the squirrel nests of dead leaves high in the bare treetops would be swaying and swaying all night long.

Mr. Pearl eventually recovered his spirits, bolstered by a refill of his coffee cup. "I'll be heading back in a week or two," he told them. "You two ladies are liable to be my last guests this season. It slows down quite a bit up here once the weather gets cold, and then I start thinking about the sunshine and them palm trees." He laughed.

"And your wife," said Margaret. Ruth wished she'd let go of that. But Mr. Pearl only nodded, without losing his smile. He insisted on buying their breakfasts, over Ruth's weak protests, and then walked them back to the Oleander. "You drive carefully, wherever you're headed," he said to Margaret. He went off to do some chores, although Ruth couldn't imagine what chores there could be, she and Margaret being the only guests.

"One thing about not carrying any baggage is, it's real easy to check out of a motel," Margaret said.

"What are you going to do?" Ruth asked her. "Are you going to be all right?"

"Yeah, I'm all right. I gotta do something, though. Wishbone." She shook her head.

"Maybe you should just go somewhere else. What's the point of being there, if your husband doesn't talk to you? Move to a bigger town and get a job. Make some new friends."

"Yup. I guess I'll think of something. Money's one problem, though. I haven't had a job for 20 years. Did you leave some gas in my car, by the way?" Ruth gave her some more money, just to make sure. She thought she was probably still feeling guilty about having taken Margaret's car. They exchanged addresses. Shouldn't I have hugged her, she was wondering, as she watched Margaret pull out of the parking lot. But she hadn't really wanted to.

With all that had happened since the previous morning, Ruth hadn't really been thinking much about what she was going to do herself. With Margaret gone she was alone again; but this was no longer the enchanted bubble of solitude that had wafted her across the plains and all the way up to her warm rock on the mountaintop. Fivespot looked pretty bleak this morning, despite the sunshine, and her room in the Oleander looked less like a cozy haven and more like a lonely little motel room. She was no longer quite sure what she was doing there. Without thinking much about it she brushed her teeth and began packing up her suitcase.

Mr. Pearl was a little surprised that she wasn't going to stay out her time, but he kindly refunded the money for the unused nights. "You get that hankerin to be home, I guess," he said knowingly. In fact, she didn't really want to be home just yet. She reminded herself that she still had quite a bit of time. There were the rollercoaster ranges of Nevada, and then the Rockies, and finally the long coast back down the gentle slope that separated the Rockies from Indiana. There would be at least two more motel rooms all her own and thousands of miles alone in the Pontiac, as the mountains gradually dropped below the horizon behind her.

"You have a good trip back to Arizona," she told Mr. Pearl, "and enjoy that winter sunshine."

"I will," he said. It was nice to see his face brighten at the thought of London Bridge and the flocks of returning snowbirds settling in the trailer parks, and maybe of his wife.

Chapter 12. Yard Sale

My mother told me on the phone that she wanted to have a yard sale. For years she's been trying to clean up the old house, going through the detritus of the eons, the 1930s dresses and top hats, cracking shoes, electric trains, leather-bound books, yearbooks from North Central High School. This mountain of material weighs heavily on her, as she doesn't like to think of my sister and me having to go through it all after she's "gone." Or maybe she's afraid we'll just toss it all, which affronts her frugal sensibility.

I visit her every April to take off the storm windows and put on the screens, and every October to reverse the procedure. There's also a summer visit, and of course a Christmas one, which every other year takes place at my sister's house instead of in Indianapolis. At every one of these visits my mother will have packets of old letters, addressed in sweeping 19th-century script, wrapped in rubber bands and ready for my perusal at the breakfast table. We'll sit there together looking out the window at the birds that come and go on the feeder and reading letters my father's grandmother wrote to him when he was at Ann Arbor or that my mother's mother wrote to her when she was trapped in Michigan for the summer with three screaming brats (my sisters and me).

Mother's distractibility has increased markedly in the last couple of years, as my father has sunk inexorably toward the nursing home where he now resides, talking very little and sometimes drooling when he dozes off in his wheelchair. The financial and maintenance responsibilities she once deferred to him as the man of the house have now fallen on her overloaded mind, never the most organized. She has to get someone to mow the lawn and someone else to blow the scale out of the aging hot water pipes, whose flow has been reduced to a trickle. She's developed a close personal relationship with Mr. Amron, who fixes the washer and dryer, and the tile guy who redid the bathroom because the floor under the bathtub was rotting out. The nursing home fees are of course unpayable by any normal economic entity; she's had to apply for spousal impoverishment status so that Medicaid will pick up the bulk of the payments. She walks rapidly from room to room with furrowed brow, stopping frequently to mutter "shit shit shit" and stare sternly at the dog-stained rugs, as though the location of the missing pharmacy bill or property tax receipt might be inscribed there. Her vagueness comes in handy in such situations, as she can be easily sidetracked by one of the North Central yearbooks, or even the question of what to cook for dinner. But she's lost weight as the relentless point of old age has pressed down on her, and her posture has developed a symbolic stoop. Excruciating foot cramps wake her up nearly every morning before sunrise. She's all bones, which I can feel through her blouse as I try to relax her shoulders, although her mind generally still functions in its accustomed swerving manner, like a kitten chasing leaves in the wind. Out in the world, at the mall or grocery store, she walks with one hand in her pocket and shies away like a diffident puppy from the younger people who barrel along the aisles with their beefy shopping carts. Getting on the phone to make a restaurant reservation is a terrifying chore for her; a call to the Social Security office drains all her reserves of courage. She's the only person I've ever met who apologizes to waitresses for not finishing her oatmeal.

But she seized on the idea of a yard sale, thinking it would help her get rid of some of the stuff she knows my sister and I don't want. "Maybe I could make some money too," she told me enthusiastically. She worries a lot about money, even though her daughter's husband, a very generous man, has so much rolling in these days he's literally looking for ways to get rid of it. He sends her a couple of thousand a month, which she allows to build up to five comforting figures in her checking account, drawing essentially no interest.

She got the idea for the yard sale from her new friend, Deanna Dubai, who had lived in the dark brick house across the street while she was growing up and whose parents have recently died in quick succession. Though I shared a neighborhood with Deanna Dubai for probably 10 or 15 years before she left home, I'm not sure I ever saw her in all that time. She was a few years older than I was, so I wouldn't have known her in school. I have a vague image of a girl in a plaid skirt walking along the sidewalk in subzero weather near that house, but that could have been almost anybody female. Deanna Dubai recently had a yard sale for some of the things in her parents' house. "I don't think it worked very well," my mother told me on the phone. "There was nobody there even looking when I went over. I don't think she advertised it. There isn't enough traffic on Wing Street. And everything I looked at she forced me to take without paying for it, so I had to stop talking about things. She gave me some nice insulated cups. I think I'll use one for my bathroom glass; it looks very nice in there. She's really a very nice person. I never even knew she lived there all those years! I wonder why she never got married." I refrained from pointing out to her that everything she accepted or even bought from Deanna Dubai would have to be sold at some other yard sale after _she_ passed away. We agreed that on my next visit we'd do it.

At the breakfast table on Columbus Day weekend she showed me her ad in the North Side Topics, laughing embarrassedly at the unaccustomed feeling of public exposure. All she'd been able to think of to say was "Yard sale, Saturday, October 13, 5935 N.E. Wing Street, between 59th and 60th."

"You didn't mention any of the big draws, like your antique tablecloths the squirrels used for nesting material or the electric hedge clipper that doesn't work any more," I told her. I went out and tied a couple of balloons on the mailbox. It was a beautiful day for a yard sale, clear and brisk. In all the well-tended yards and in my mother's, which wasn't well tended, the trees were turning orange against a cobalt sky. I'd had in mind major items, such as boxes of old books and 78 record albums, and my father's dusty rowing machine and punching bag, which hung by springs from the ceiling beam in the basement and used to flex the entire living room floor with a sound like a squeaky mattress when he went down there to vent some hostility, of which he had an abundance. There were a lot of tools that had been rusting for decades and a portable workbench, never used. Also some of my old clothes from high school days – pants that still fit me and that would look as nerdy on me now as they did then – plus army uniforms and brittle "combat" boots from that era in my life, weird ties, both mine and my father's, spanning the wide and narrow epochs of tie fashion. My mother also made me drag down a lot of drapes, still in their cleaning bags, which she'd never gotten around to rehanging, the aforementioned 30s dresses and hats, both my sisters' high school clothes, including saddle shoes and threadbare pointy brassieres, the mismatched golf clubs I'd used with a great sense of grievance through my teenage years, hockey sticks, fossilized baseball gloves, great granny Armstrong's mandolin and my abandoned trombone, various bedraggled typewriters. Mother rushed back and forth into the house, bringing out the bizarre items she kept finding in forgotten corners and cupboards, like a set of leather coasters in a little holder, and partial sets of dogeared playing cards (but they have nice pictures on them, don't they?), and a white glass hen you could lift off her glass nest. My grandmother always put the soft-boiled eggs in it and let one of the kids open it at the breakfast table. There are no kids any more, however. My sisters' have grown up, and my wife and I have proved to be an infertile couple, as it would say in the Reader's Digests that sit on the laundry hamper in my mother's bathroom, open to "Laughter, the Best Medicine."

We laid it all out in the October sun at the foot of the weedy driveway, where it looked pretty odd, as if someone's life had been lazily bombed. For me, the image of my high school self suspired irresistibly from it: the crewcut and acne, the horn-rimmed glasses, the thoughtless clothes hanging on my jumpy frame, the unspeakable lusts. The subsequent 35 years of development might have been all for naught, and I felt that, at my core, I was still the same pitifully shy adolescent.

The first person to show up for the yard sale was Deanna Dubai, who'd read the ad and, I suppose, wanted to provide moral support. She was a secret the neighborhood had somehow hidden from me for 40 years, and I examined her carefully while she politely nodded and exclaimed over the junk on the lawn. A tall woman apparently in her late 50s, she had an unadorned straight hairstyle, smooth skin, and active brown eyes behind rimless glasses. Her presence had a kind of stillness, like a dignified house, full of years and character, with sweeping lawns. This made me want to keep sneaking looks at her.

"Now it's your turn to take some of _my_ things," my mother told her. "How about this," pointing to a little round three-legged table. Its top was designed to hold an ashtray, and it also had a wider, skirt-like shelf for I don't know what – something social. My parents had devolved from origins in the canape crowd of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. One of the three curved legs had lost its toes, probably as a result of one of my preteen living room football games, giving the table an awkward tilt. "Well, I don't know," said Deanna Dubai, her eyes flickering. "I don't smoke." They were both laughing, my tiny gray mother and this tall woman curving over her, holding up the table by its convenient handle in mock speculation. In an indefinable way they resembled each other, despite the disparity in size. The skin was softening along Deanna Dubai's jawline, and her carefully pressed print dress made no attempt to hide her broad, middle-aged figure.

"It was a wedding present, I think. Mrs. Jay gave it to us. She was our wealthy benefactor. Everyone smoked in those days," my mother told her. "But see, you could put a vase on the top with some flowers, and then some – things – on the lower shelf." Deanna Dubai glanced at me. I liked the way her mouth kept threatening to smile but didn't quite. While my mother was urging a pair of bent candlesticks on her, a truck turned the corner down at the end of Wing Street and slowly grew larger. Mr. Spock, the dog, who had been briskly examining the bushes he'd already watered hundreds of times, lifted his muzzle to look.

The truck moaned to a halt beside us, hanging a blue gauze of exhaust on the still air. It was a world-weary thing with a rounded and sagging grill, missing a fender or two and wearing a coat of the dandruff found on the shoulders of freeways no longer young, as opposed to the more macho stuff airbrushed onto shiny new pickups and their nouveau gaucho drivers in TV commercials. The cargo bed, which was formed by a sort of sagging picket fence that had perhaps once been hemlock green, was about half full, a mound of stuff thrown in at random. The jumble made it impossible to focus on any one item; it had the look of one of those great archaeological finds where the bones of 50 species of dinosaurs were tossed together by some antediluvian cataclysm. In the cab a huge, overhanging nose and bright, birdlike eyes scanned my mother's array of goods, then rotated toward us. "Anything left?" The voice had a slight quaver. Its owner fumbled, muttering, with something by his side; then the door swung open with a scream that startled all of us, and a small, rotund man in a stained pale blue summer blazer stepped to the ground.

"George Curtis," he said, looking sharply at the little table still in Deanna Dubai's hand. His voice had a quality of confident but mousy entrepreneurship; his long white hair was in need of a shampoo. Mr. Spock warily sniffed the toes of his wrinkled shoes and whined. "Good morning," we all said. "Are you here for the yard sale?" my mother asked him. He nodded impatiently. From the handle of the open truck door hung a length of clothesline. It appeared to me that Mr. Curtis used the clothesline to secure the door when the truck was in motion.

"I'll take it," he said.

My mother was taken aback. "You want to buy something?" Even though this was a yard sale, it had apparently not occurred to her that anyone would actually want to take away any of her things.

"All of it," said George Curtis. "I'll take all of it." He ignored our shocked expressions and stood with his hands like two bunches of bananas riding his hips, surveying the cluttered lawn. "I'll give you two hundred dollars for the whole lot." He finally met my mother's gaze, having somehow deduced that it was she who was offering this load of mismatched family history. A pure white cloud of hair haloed my mother's suddenly panicky expression. "All of it?" she said. "Well..." She looked at it all again. "Shouldn't we leave some for the other people who might come along?"

I felt it my duty to speak on behalf of efficiency. "Why don't you go for it, Mom? Who knows how much of this stuff you're going to sell. We'll probably just have to carry most of it back in the house, and you'll be right back where you started." I felt Deanna Dubai's flickering eyes on me.

Mr. Curtis put one banana hand in his pants pocket and pulled it back out with a thick fold of obviously pre-owned bills. He counted them, pausing now and then to lick his thumb. My mother was speechless, staring at him, then at the punching bag and the rowing machine. I could tell things were moving far too fast for her. She no longer trusted her own judgment, and my endorsement of the plan, the pressure to be sensible, had swayed her. "Well," she finally got out, "I suppose so. I guess the point is to sell things. But not that table," pointing at the three-legged ashtray holder. Deanna Dubai appeared to be about to object, but kept silent. Mr. Curtis nodded, peeling off one five-dollar bill from the stack and adding it to the remainder, which he tucked back in his bulging pocket. "Help me load this in the truck, will you," he said to me.

My mother watched with a stricken expression as we piled everything in the back of the truck, avoiding landslides with some difficulty. "Well, that was easy," Deanna Dubai said, trying to soothe her. But I understood. I felt a little ache in my gut as I loaded my old clothes and all the other artifacts into this stranger's hands. Each item suddenly seemed to bloom with vague possibilities as I found a place for it on George Curtis's mountain, potential that we'd somehow overlooked during the years it had sat silently in the dark upstairs closet or silting up with dust on the mantelpiece. There was a feeling of opportunities and little friends lost forever.

"I'm selling some things too," said Deanna Dubai as we finished loading. George Curtis slammed the gate of the picket fence and secured it with a few turns of a frayed bungee cord. "Well, let's have a look," he said.

We paraded across the street to the Dubai house, with Spock reconnoitering ahead of us. My mother walked with her head down, the slump of her bony shoulders more pronounced than before. In the garage were neatly arrayed all of Deanna Dubai's parents' worldly goods. They were much nicer than ours, I thought. The pieces of furniture seemed to go together, and there were full sets of china and dinnerware. Everything was in much better condition, as though the Dubais had lived a more orderly life, a better life, than we had. There were no oil spots on the garage floor. I tried to picture an adolescent Deanna Dubai in this habitat, doing homework in white knee socks, but nothing came.

George Curtis wandered along the edges of the display, abruptly lifting a candlestick or a fork and then putting it down just as fast. "No," he said, "I don't think so." Danna Dubai blushed. "You don't want _any_ of it?" "Nope," said George Curtis, dusting off his hands on his smudged polyester pants and heading for his truck.

He maneuvered the sputtering truck around and crept off in the direction he'd come from. We all gazed after him, Mr. Spock standing on three legs, like a pointer. In the silence I could hear the dry tick of maple leaves sifting down to the lawn.

"Never mind, Deanna," my mother said. "I think your things are really too _nice_ for him, don't you?" But when the truck turned the corner onto 60th Street and disappeared, it was as though a door had closed. My mother was near tears. I could see that this lightning assault was not at all what she'd had in mind. She'd just liked the idea of a yard sale; she hadn't really wanted to sell anything, or maybe just big white elephants like the rowing machine. She'd been looking forward to all the people who would stop by and fondle the leather coasters, try on the top hat, blow a blast on the trombone, and then, maybe, buy a cut glass ashtray for a quarter. She'd wanted to talk to them all, to hear what they were doing with _their_ houses, and about their children in grade school or college, their elderly aunts who were moving into condos, or the old Victorian they were renovating downtown. But George Curtis had short-circuited the whole thing. His rude hands had swept away the frayed web she'd been unraveling one careful strand at a time for the last couple of years. Our family history was riding off into the unknowable on a plume of blue smoke, to be touched by strange hands and worn on alien bodies. Perhaps it would be abused.

"Oh, now what are we going to do?" she lamented. "We advertised this yard sale, and now people will come and there won't _be_ anything."

"We could sit out here all day and apologize to everyone," I suggested. "Make some lemonade or ice tea and give it away. Maybe that would mollify them."

Deanna Dubai looked at me disapprovingly. "Why don't I put _my_ things out?" she said. "Nobody will know the difference."

And so we carried her stuff out of her garage and plunked it down on our lawn, and we made the lemonade and ice tea and sat in our lawnchairs, wearing floppy hats against the slanting sunlight. My mother and Deanna Dubai talked about parents, life, old age, shopping at Marsh's, the horrendous traffic on 62nd Street, the changes 40 years had written on the neighborhood, the lives that were moving in to replace our own. I mostly just listened, watching Deanna Dubai's long hands gesticulating and remarking again her inexplicable resemblance to my mother, the guilelessness of her words. Strangers drove up from time to time and got out to look over the display, shyly at first and then more confidently as we plied them with lemonade and conversation. Deanna Dubai even sold a few things, driving diffident bargains.

Trade dropped off as the afternoon arrived and then narrowed toward evening. The day grew cooler despite the rich sunlight, and I took the balloons off the mailbox. We hauled Deanna Dubai's remaining items back to her garage.

"Thank you for rescuing me," my mother told her.

"Oh no, thank _you_ ," said Deanna Dubai.

"I don't know what I would have told all those people. It would have been very embarrassing."

"Well, it worked out perfectly didn't it?" They smiled at each other.

"Why don't you come over for breakfast in the morning? My son will cook. He has to fly home tomorrow afternoon." She looked at me, laughing guiltily at this presumption of old age, that other people would do things for you. However, I was quite willing.

That night I lay in the upstairs bedroom thinking about my long-lost neighbor. I invented a life for her in our 30 years of ignorant separation. She'd lived in Indianapolis the whole time, I knew; but I gave her a small Eastern women's college, embellished her vague career at the art museum with docent tours and slide presentations, and allowed her a couple of lovers. One in particular, a tall, no-nonsense businessman, she spent 20 years trying to coax a laugh out of, after which he left her for a younger woman. At intervals, as I drifted in and out of this vision, I could hear my mother in the bathroom downstairs, getting ready for bed, brushing her false teeth, turning lights on and off, opening and closing doors as she swished through the quiet house in her flimsy cotton nightgown, making sure all was buttoned down for the night. Mr. Spock was already flattened on his rug next to her bed.

It was a warm night. Outside the open French doors was the derelict silence of the suburbs, suddenly ripped by the mouse-curdling command of a screech owl. In the familiar and sensual darkness of my adolescence I kept returning to the stillness of Deanna Dubai's almost-smile, and I imagined a sadness in her eyes, a childless woman strolling the littered shoreline of old age. I summoned up her tall, heavy body in the print dress, which I unbuttoned carefully, first to nuzzle the pale dune of her stomach, then to lay my balding head on her slack and comforting bosom. I awoke almost immediately to a gray, birdless dawn.

Deanna Dubai arrived for breakfast with a companion, a petite, pale woman with dark hair, considerably younger than herself, whom she introduced as a friend and who spoke hardly a word as we ate scrambled eggs and toast but not the oatmeal with a mashed banana in it that my mother had insisted on making. Dressed in dark slacks and sweater, the friend sat wrapped in her own arms, sipping coffee and following the conversation with quiet black eyes. Our glances met occasionally, but I was mentally halfway back to the West Coast and not in the mood for more mysteries. Mr. Spock browsed under the table while Deanna Dubai and my mother chattered.

"It's so odd, that she never said anything," my mother mused on the way to the airport in the afternoon. "But she looks like an interesting person. She has a nice face." I said nothing. It's not always clear whether my mother is talking to herself or expects a reply, and she never insists. If no one answers, she'll just carry on the dialogue with herself. She sat very straight in the passenger's seat, and I knew she was holding at bay the thought of separation. In the nursing home that morning my father had been apathetic, as he usually was before the afternoon insulin shot, nodding or shaking his head slowly in response to our questions about his nurses, his bath, his breakfast. She stroked his tousled white hair with one arthritis-knotted hand, but he didn't look up. "We sold your punching bag, Dear," she told him. "To 'George Curtis'." She laughed. "He's a funny little man. Anyway, I don't suppose you'll be needing it." He shook his head slowly, after a long pause.

"I wonder who'll be punching that punching bag now," she said later, while we waited at the departure gate. She was looking around at the airport trail mix of travelers and their families. "There are all these _people_ , living their complicated lives. And you never know about most of them." I gave her a long goodbye hug and went down the jetway and squeezed into my window seat, but I knew she was still standing out there waiting to make sure the plane would really pull back from the gate and that there were no freak accidents while we taxied to the takeoff point. She always had to see the plane actually in the air, and would have liked to follow it visually all the way to landing, just to be sure; whereas for me, once inside the plastic environment of the plane it was as though I'd already left. Still, when we finally got airborne, with the usual lilt at the transition between ground and air, I looked down at our skewed shadow racing over the browning fields and imagined her white head, seen from above and shrinking as we elevated, an old lady with one hand in her pocket, walking pigeon-toed on painful feet through the terminal, moving her lips slightly as she tried to remember where she'd parked the car.

Chapter 13. The Grocery Trip

It may just be that Ruth is reluctant to drive her to the grocery store any more, after the many, many trips they've made there together since Wayne died and Peter was shipped to Regency Place. Ruby Mae can, without stretching too much, discern a pattern of increasing tardiness in Ruth's arrivals for these expeditions. Of course, Ruth is late for everything, and has been since Ruby met her 30 years ago at one of Arnold Cruse's homemade donut parties. In those days she was always the same sheepish 15 minutes behind schedule, as though she'd been born late and had never quite stopped running to catch up in the ensuing 60 years. Since Ruby met her, though, there's been a slow but steady accretion of tardiness, averaging about a minute per year, like a set of meandering tree rings that eventually add up to a substantial growth. The usual wait for Ruth is now more than half an hour, but at least with a dependability that allows her friends (whose own preparations for departure on a shopping trip or a lunch date at Applebee's have also been slowed by the years) to predict her arrival time with a fair degree of certainty. More distressing, though, of late, have been the increasingly common occasions on which Ruth has simply failed to appear at all, the grocery date, or doctor's appointment, or food-packing session at the church having been forgotten altogether. That is what Ruby fears has happened this time.

There are 602 bones in the human body, according to Dr. Advert – or is it 206? she's not quite sure – and Ruby thinks that by now, the beginning of her 83rd year, she must have broken, or at least cracked, a significant fraction of them. There was the broken humerus when she tripped on the throw rug. All throw rugs were subsequently removed from her floors by Stephanie, who comes in three times a week (not, unfortunately, today), but this precaution had not prevented Ruby from tripping on the white shag wall-to-wall carpeting she'd indulged in after the kids had all grown up and left home (the very carpet on which she now lies, waiting resignedly for rescue) and crashing to the floor, cracking her pelvis and incidentally separating her right shoulder. "You don't pick up your feet!" Stephanie told her after that event. Which is true; but the fact is, the whisper of her slippers shuffling across the carpet comforts her – it's the only sound in the house once she shuts the TV off. Then she broke her left forearm while falling down a short flight of stairs. Now she sleeps downstairs in the guest bedroom, but there she broke two toes, stubbing them against that unfamiliar bedstead. She's also broken both collarbones, one when she slipped on the ice on her back porch and fell against the steel railing, the other when a cast-iron skillet fell out of an overhead cabinet and landed on her shoulder. And she snapped off part of the upper socket of her right femur when Clawdius took it into his head to leap from a bookshelf onto her temptingly bowed back, like a cougar dropping onto a tottering, superannuated deer. There have also been a couple of cracked vertebrae, caused, according to Dr. Advert, by a startle reaction when the phone rang one night at midnight, as she was removing her robe preparatory to getting into bed. It was only Wayne's brother, calling from his new condo in Budapest and confused about the time difference. It took Ruby nearly six months to recover from that one.

These are the major incidents, or the only ones she can remember. By now she doesn't bother to count or report to Dr. Advert the numerous sprains and what she suspects are hairline fractures. The current situation clearly belongs in the major incident category. She has no idea how it happened. She simply found herself lying on her back on the rather comfortable white shag rug, unable to move herself toward the telephone without blacking out, which she's already done she thinks twice. That is why she now has both the time and good reason to worry about Ruth's attitude toward their grocery shopping expeditions.

The grocery trips, Ruby now suspects, as she tries to adjust her position on the shag rug without fainting again, which were once a welcome release from the home imprisonment both of them were experiencing, have devolved over the years into an obligation and a burden for Ruth. In the bleak mental illumination encouraged by her enforced immobility, Ruby can see that she bears some responsibility for this change. She is the sort of grocery shopper who must examine each of the 14 varieties of Colgate toothpaste and the 12 varieties of Crest and the three types of Tom's of Maine, inspecting minutely their claims of whitening power, tartar removal, bacterial massacre, gentleness, sparkle-enhancing properties, naturalness, and of course price per ounce before making her final selection or, sometimes, rejecting all of them and threatening in outraged tones to brush her teeth solely with baking soda from now on. And she has to compile the nutrition readings on each brand and variety of spaghetti sauce, from Ragu to Paul Newman and even sometimes those suspicious brands that make their way into the store from some stray Chinese container ship: comparing the carbs to the protein and the fat to the sodium (Ruby has congestive heart failure in addition to her galloping, or limping, osteoporosis), and balancing all of them against the calorie count, although she weighs only 89 pounds. But I don't do it deliberately, she says to herself. I like to see all the new things they have out there, and after all a responsible shopper can't just buy the first brand of canned peas that happens to be at eye level on the shelf. And even Ruth is sometimes entrained in that consumer vortex and will stand for a few anxious minutes holding a jug of Eco-Savior in one hand and a jug of Tide "Classic" in the other, reading all the explanatory text and wondering which will keep her closest to the treacherous path of civic responsibility while still getting her socks clean. Unlike Ruby, though, Ruth doesn't enjoy such fraught decisions. "Why do they have to keep coming out with all these new things?" she'll ask plaintively. "What was wrong with the old ones? Maybe we should just go back to the washboard, or start beating our panties with a tree branch on the banks of Fall Creek. But I suppose it's too muddy there," she'll sigh. There seems to be no solution. To Ruth this is a nearly paralyzing state of affairs, whereas to Ruby it's all a stimulating challenge and an opportunity to cluck her tongue at the inexhaustibility of human folly and venality.

The fact is, as Ruby can now admit with all this unexpected time on her hands, she has sometimes deliberately tormented Ruth at the grocery store by lingering longer over the root beer display or the cheese counter than she really wanted or needed to. Partly it's just that Ruby can't get out of the house much any more because of her frailty, and when she does make an escape likes to extend it as long as possible, sometimes even bullying Ruth into a stop at the drugstore on the way back to the car. Partly, too, she feels a simmering but unacknowledged resentment because she's at Ruth's mercy for these trips. By now all her other friends, not to mention her children, with their long experience of her ways, know only too well what awaits them at Kroger's, and are more than happy to leave such duties to Ruth, as long as she can be persuaded to undertake them. And Ruth, for her part, has never yet failed to show up eventually. Or at least not without calling to explain and apologize. She's unusually adept at putting herself in other people's place, and at some point doubtless gets a vision of Ruby, trapped in her too-big house and subsisting for days entirely on Cheerios without milk until someone, who is nearly always Ruth herself, comes by to rescue her.

But, trying with enormous caution to shift her weight from her right to her left buttock and casting her mind back over the last year or so, Ruby can see quite clearly the pattern of increasing lateness and even, on one or two occasions, the postponement of the grocery expedition to the next day. Ruth does always call in those cases. Eventually. But in her current situation, Ruby will not be able to answer the telephone, and she fears Ruth will simply assume that Linda Sue or Geoffrey has stopped by to take her out, or maybe just to drop off a bag of basic rations to tide her over, and will not show up at all today. She knows in her heart that Ruth is just as happy, or at least no more unhappy, to sit at her kitchen table, reading an article from a year-old Christian Science Monitor or starting yet another letter to her far-flung children in her loopy illegible handwriting, and gazing out the window at the finches mobbing her feeder and the squirrels who tirelessly battle with its squirrel-proof features. This although – another cause for the resentment that Ruby never quite allows to surface – Ruth is the only one of her friends who is still mobile enough to get out of the house on her own. God knows _she_ never falls down, although she's occasionally admitted to a dizzy spell or two, and she has bones like steel in any case. She drinks a glass of milk every day, and takes two- or three-mile walks with her dog, all the way up to 65th Street and over to Keystone and back, picking her way along the steep and weedy shoulders where there are no sidewalks, with the cars roaring by, and never a mishap. And she still has her driver's license, although having driven to Glendale with her a couple of times lately Ruby wonders why no one has taken it away from her. Everyone else in the aging neighborhood, except for the 50-ish Burtons, who have adopted Ruth as one of their projects (but not Ruby, since she lives too far away, over on Sherman), is housebound and at the mercy of their hired helpers or Ruth. Gladys is even frailer than Ruby, can barely talk and can't move at all without a walker; Frances left for a nursing home a year ago; the Fürtwanglers moved to a trailer park in Florida; both of the Dubais are near death from various ailments of old age, although their daughter, soft-hearted Deanna, has not been able to get them to leave their old house. Helen is diabetic, vastly overweight, and obsessed with retrieving her car and her driver's license, although she's nearly deaf and legally blind. And Ruth's husband, Peter, is already imprisoned at Regency Place, probably slumping over his dinner tray with his elbow in the mashed potatoes at this very moment, the way he was the one time Ruby visited with Ruth.

The telephone is ringing. This is heartening to Ruby Mae, but at the same time disturbing. Heartening because it means someone is at least thinking of her, even though it might only be the SPCA people again, calling her for a donation. More likely it's Jared or Geoffrey, just checking in. Disturbing because she doesn't dare move even the least little bit toward the phone, which means that whoever is on the other end of the line will have to reach their own conclusions about her status. Despite the mounting tally of her medical incidents, no one will want to think it's an emergency; or if there is a slight nagging in the back of their minds, they'll tell themselves Well, she's just out with Ruth at the grocery store again, we know how _that_ is, not really wanting to admit that she might possibly be prostrate and immobilized on her white shag rug with a broken hip, because that will mean they'll have to disrupt whatever important project they're engaged in to deal with the situation. Only Ruth, being old like Ruby although relatively healthy, really understands and cares enough to worry. As the phone continues ringing, Ruby has an almost physical sense of another person's consciousness on the other end of the line, trying to decode the electronic buzzing for clues as to the state of things at Ruby Mae's house. It's Ruth; she knows it. Everyone else would hang up after a few rings, relieved that they wouldn't actually have to talk to her. Also it must be 4 o'clock or even 4:30 by now, although she's afraid that if she twists her head far enough around to see the clock she'll pass out again. She doesn't like the periods of oblivion. Ruth was supposed to come by at 3:30 to take her to the grocery store, so this would be just about the time she'd realize she was half an hour late and would call to reassure Ruby. And that is the most disturbing thing of all, because Ruby, confined to her rug and without the distraction of TV or her washing machine, can easily come up with half a dozen reasons why Ruth, getting no answer, might not follow up her call.

Although Ruby herself has often been the beneficiary of it, she sometimes finds herself getting a little annoyed by Ruth's excessive solicitude. A lot of it, she feels, is a sort of spineless catering to the demands of a bunch of spoiled old brats. The most glaring example is Ruth's tireless although largely futile effort to get her husband, Peter, out of bed once a day and to at least take a hike around the dining room table, and make him stick to his diabetic diet, and interest him in some news story or even a rerun of Colombo. At least while she was immersed in that project she sometimes needed to escape from the house and Peter's oppressive depression, and would as a result often drop by Ruby's on the way back from her dog walk. With Peter now at the Regency, though, Ruth has to visit him every single day and sometimes twice, to take over his clean laundry and a couple of sugarless Eskimo Pies, although half the time he doesn't say a word to her; and if she's gotten a little behind schedule, the first thing that might fall off her list could be the grocery trip. Given that she no longer really enjoys those trips, if she ever did, it will certainly be easy for her to convince herself that she doesn't have time to make it this afternoon.

Of course, if it really _is_ Ruth on the phone (which has finally stopped ringing), that at least means she's not on the phone with Helen. But at any minute Helen could call Ruth, which she does frequently just to reassure herself that there's somebody at home somewhere in the neighborhood in case she has to be taken to the hospital. She can't call anyone else, because all her friends except Ruth are mad at her for calling them every half hour. Ruth may be mad at her, too, but she puts up with it. And if she does call, Ruth could easily be on the phone with her for an hour or more, because Helen has a very long list of complaints about the world, starting of course with the loss of her driver's license, and because she's nearly deaf, which means everything Ruth says has to be repeated at least once, and because Ruth is too polite, or cowardly, to ever just tell Helen she has to hang up. Plus there's the possibility that Ruth will be reminded of the horrible state of Helen's house – the result partly of her blindness and partly of her obsession with the driver's license, which has driven every other thought out of her head except for the unproductive one of how old and alone she is (Helen's husband, Milton, sat down for a nap in his lawnchair one day after mowing the lawn 10 years ago, and never woke up) – and Ruth will feel that she has to drop in to chat for a minute and at least change the cat box, even though this is a futile task, because the box has been topped off with turds so many times by now that the cat never even thinks of it any more, just goes behind the furniture or down in the basement, so that a hideous jungle odor pervades the house. Luckily, Helen has also lost her sense of smell. But once Ruth is actually inside Helen's house, there's no telling what emergencies might arise, what errands will have to be run for Helen, once again moving the visit to Ruby's to the back burner and possibly foreclosing it completely. It's maddening, because nearly all of Helen's laments, except when she has one of her TIAs and has to be taken to the hospital, are just garden variety whining, whereas Ruby, whatever failings she knows she has, almost never complains about anything, but actually _needs_ Ruth, _right now!_ And here she can practically _see_ Ruth, with the crusted plastic spatula in her knobbly arthritic fingers, sifting through Helen's cat box.

And if it's not Helen, then of course Gladys might call up and whisper God knows what demands into the phone with her failing voice; or Ruth might just remember that she had meant to make a batch of her infamous raisin bran muffins and take some over there, because she worries that Gladys doesn't eat enough – Gladys being a classic stick figure, with calves no thicker than the legs of her aluminum walker and much less flexible – even though Pam is there at least four times a week to clean and bring in groceries, and always leaves her some kind of casserole or a tupperware full of tuna salad. And Ruth might look at the clock (or _not_ look, with the thought of the dreary grocery trip in the back of her mind) and mistakenly calculate that there would be _just enough_ time to make a batch of muffins and run them over and _then_ pick up Ruby to go to the grocery store. Which for Ruby would mean at best another three hours or so of lying on the white shag rug and waiting for Ruth to arrive and at worst a cancellation of the trip altogether. At which point Ruth would probably try to call again, although she might not, telling herself it was a bit late to call Ruby (although she knows perfectly well Ruby stays up until 2 or 3 in the morning), and after all she called earlier and Ruby wasn't there, which must mean one of the kids came by to take her to the grocery store. But if she does call, Ruby won't be able to answer – even if she's still alive by then – and she can see Ruth sitting there on the other end of the phone, pursing her crepey lips and thinking over the possibilities of why Ruby isn't answering. She wasn't home earlier, and she's _still_ not home. Probably Jared came over and took her downtown for dinner somewhere. Once or twice she's even stayed overnight in the guest room of the Victorian he's renovating one room at a time. So that should be all right, she'll tell herself. In any case, although Ruby knows Ruth sometimes worries about her when she doesn't answer the phone, just because of those times when she's broken some tibia or other and had to be taken to the hospital, or of course the time when Wayne just dropped dead in the dining room, she also knows Ruth doesn't really start worrying unless it's been two or three days, because Ruby, unlike Helen or Gladys, never calls her up to demand anything, she's very independent despite all her medical problems and doesn't like to put too much weight on the friendship. And Ruth is liable to put all this together and decide to wait until tomorrow to call. But tomorrow Pam will probably be there early in the morning to distract her; and once Pam leaves, Lee will show up to mulch her leaves or paint her closet or something; and meanwhile there'll be the raisin bran muffins, which she probably didn't quite get around to this afternoon, or Helen will call to say she thinks she's having another TIA... The possibilities are endless, once the thing gets extended through a night and into the next day. It could be two or three days before Ruth remembers that she was planning to drop in on Ruby. _I can't lie here for three days!_ Ruby thinks. And though there's really no pain to speak of as long as she doesn't move, she moves a little bit anyway, in order to feel some pain and reassure herself that there definitely is something badly wrong with her hip, and indulges herself in a rare tear.

It's getting dark now, the early January twilight that materializes like a black fog, and Ruby is beginning to notice that she's very hungry. Not that there's really anything to eat in the house anyway, which is of course why Ruth was supposed to come over and take her to the grocery store. But obviously _that's_ not going to happen. It's necessary to resign herself to that; otherwise she'll spend all these long hours consumed with impatience and resentment that Ruth has thought it more important to change Helen's cat box than to take her friend Ruby to the hospital with a broken hip. That's not quite fair, of course, but it captures the essence of the situation. Her own hunger also reminds her that another thing Ruth could be doing is just sitting at her kitchen table this very minute in front of a bowl of Campbell's chicken and rice soup and a half-eaten piece of cinnamon toast, having suddenly noticed that she was hungry herself and thinking she'd better put something in her stomach at least before going over to pick up Ruby, so she won't keel over while Ruby reads the nutritional information on her 25th package of sliced lunch meat. And, sitting at the table, she could easily get distracted by some article in a Christian Science Monitor from last March, or just in watching the chickadees make their final twilight sorties to the bird feeder, and _forget all about_ Ruby, who is lying on her white shag rug with a broken hip. And once you start examining all the possible excuses Ruth has for not showing up (and after all, it's not only Ruby she stands up in this way), you have to ask yourself, Ruby thinks, envisioning and even smelling the chicken and rice soup, which she's not allowed to have, however, because of her congestive heart failure and all that salt, you have to start asking yourself whether there isn't some level on which Ruth doesn't really _want_ to do all these things that she does – Helen's cat box and the bran muffins she distributes all over the neighborhood and taking Ruby Mae to the grocery store, and even visiting her own husband in the Regency Place. Aren't they all just things she thinks she _has_ to do, for some reason? Everyone loves Ruth, all right, because she's always cheerful and spreads herself all over the neighborhood helping people out, but you also somehow never quite know what she's thinking about it all. Which in the spirit of honesty, given her current extreme circumstances, Ruby will admit has sometimes led her to delay just a little longer than strictly necessary in the frozen food aisle, reading one or two extra labels, in the not really malicious and only partly conscious hope that Ruth will at some point actually express the impatience that is usually revealed only by the way she stands with bowed head, sighing and idly examining a canned ham. And it even occurs to Ruby that, having done all these things for all these different people, for years, perhaps not very willingly, and not really out of the milk of human kindness, but just because she thinks she _ought_ to, Ruth has become hardened toward her friends just a little bit, has gradually become more and more reluctant to perform these charitable tasks, has developed and elaborated more and more reasons for putting them off, even when they might really be _necessary_ ; so that when, for once, Ruby actually _needs_ her, it's actually this one time that she won't show up. And if she'd been a little more _honest_ with herself, and with others as well, if she'd gone over to change Helen's cat box just _one_ less time when she didn't really want to, she might now have enough energy to drag herself away from her bowl of chicken and rice soup, which she isn't going to finish anyway, and leash up her dog and come over to see why Ruby isn't answering the phone.

The timer clicks, and the floor lamp turns on, casting one cone of warm golden light down to the white shag rug, where Ruby lies turning these things over in her mind, and another up to the ceiling, where a few bedraggled spider webs can be seen festooning the moldings. I should vacuum that, she thinks, or at least get Stephanie to do it. I've lived in this house for 40 years, and I've never washed the ceilings, although they've been painted a couple of times. She's relieved that the timer has worked, however. It wouldn't be fun to have to lie here in the dark, wondering if anyone was going to show up. Thank God she at least had turned up the thermostat before she fell, so she's reasonably warm and has the sighing of the furnace to keep her company. Where is Clawdius, I wonder. He could be lying three feet away from her on the couch, with his paws tucked under him, enduring with feline stoicism her odd preference for the floor (although she should be feeding him by now), and she wouldn't even know he was there, because she can't really move her head to look. Does anybody wash their ceilings any more, she wonders. All of her friends' houses have spider populations, or at least ragged old webs with desiccated insect mummies, although the spiders themselves long ago died of old age or moved and reopened their nets elsewhere; but maybe that's just because all Ruby's friends are old. Even though her left eye isn't that good (she never did bother to get that cataract operation), with her right eye she can see what looks like a bug hanging up there under her own ceiling; yes, an old dead carcass in its antique silken hammock, swaying gently in the tropical breeze from the heating ducts.

At the sight of the fly husk, Ruby Mae, who rarely allows herself anything like a negative thought, is finally, after more than five hours on the white shag rug, beginning to appreciate the gravity of her situation. The most frustrating aspect of the whole thing is that nobody knows! And nobody seems to care! She's suddenly furious at them all, starting with Wayne, dying without notice like that; and Stephanie, who's always so busy fighting with her boyfriend that she can only come by three days a week, and not the right days, obviously; and right on through her own children, all four of them, calling up to smooth out their own consciences but never actually doing anything much; and down to Clawdius, who could at least be keeping her company while she waits; but especially at Ruth, the only one of them who probably actually understands, who was supposed to come by in her dog-smelling Ford Taurus and drive them to the grocery store, but instead is missing in action. What is her excuse? Yes, obviously Ruby knows all those _reasons_ why Ruth might have forgotten or gotten sidetracked, she's just spent a couple of hours going over them in her head, but none of those are really excuses. When you get to the bottom of it, there _is_ no excuse. If you're lucky enough to still be able to walk and drive a car when you're 83 years old, then you should at least be responsible enough not to leave your friends lying on a shag rug with a broken hip. They had a date; Ruth is supposed to be here. She just _clutters_ her life, and this is the result. I've always let her get away with it, with her lateness and her forgetfulness and all her unnecessary complications, and now I'm paying the price. Ruby's face feels hot.

But the click of the timer has darkened the whole rest of the world except for the two vertical cones of light – not just outside, where the twilight is still methodically wrapping its cold tentacles around her house, but even inside, reminding her how alone an 83-year-old widow can be. Though Ruby can't turn her head, she can see how the golden lamplight thins and turns grainy at the edge of her vision, and if she could lift her head a little she knows she'd see the light fading even more and shading into an absolute blackness in the corners of the living room and the various crannies of the kitchen, in the ironing board closet, and the guest bedroom, whose warm bed on which she once broke two toes now seems very remote, part of an earlier existence. She's afraid that darkness will penetrate her head, if she continues along this line of thought. And what about when the timer clicks off again, at 2 a.m.? God, that's nine hours from now or something, nine endless hours to wait just for the next event, for her loneliness to be suddenly lifted to a whole new plateau by total darkness.

And here's another tear, two in one day, almost a record for Ruby Mae. She has to get a grip on herself. Come on, girl, she thinks. They're all just busy with their own lives. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm busy with mine, too, so to speak, except unfortunately this is it, this is just the latest part of it. And Ruth, she has to admit despite her resentment, is just old; she's older than I am, in fact, and some emergency probably came up, something to do with the plumbing or the furnace or her asthmatic cat, or she got distracted, or she just plain forgot. She hates these grocery trips anyway, I know that, it's partly my fault of course, but I can't help it either, there's something cheerful about the grocery store, those long aisles with the colorful shelves narrowing to their vanishing points, and the lazy swirls of vapor from the banks of frozen pizzas, and the displays of condoms that you would never have seen anything like that when I was a young mother with four kids. She feels a terrible longing for the bright fluorescents and the camaraderie of the grocery store. But why _should_ Ruth come, anyway, what with her old age and her hammer toes and her sick cat and all the rest of her own disorganized life constantly threatening to slosh over its crumbling levees? It's just bad luck that it's today, when I actually need her, that something got in the way.

Ruby hears the double thump of Clawdius hitting the floor behind her head, and soon his black and white body appears in her peripheral vision, stretching and yawning with eyes closed and white paws extended in front of him. It's dinnertime, and he must be getting restless. Maybe that means at least he'll be a little more friendly for a while, until he figures out he can't expect anything from his guardian, now useless on her white shag rug. But no, he doesn't come any closer; in fact, he's walking away expectantly, toward the back door, where Ruby can now begin to discern some noises from outside. She hears the door open and feels a tide of cold air pouring across the floor to break on her prone body, then sees the black and white streak of Clawdius disappearing into the back bedroom as Ruth's overly enthusiastic dog, Rumpole, bursts in with loud, joyful exhalations and a great scrabbling of unclipped claws, followed by, presumably, Ruth herself. Yes, it is. She appears above Ruby, coated against the cold, backlit electric tentacles of white hair raying out from under her wool cap in a mad corolla, glasses too big for her thin face and already fogging up. On one profoundly mittened hand she's balancing a tupperware container. "Oh, there you are," she says, as Rumpole gives Ruby's face a dutiful swipe or two with his tongue and then prances off to look for Clawdius. "Stop it, Rump! Leave her alone," says Ruth. "I'm sorry I'm late. But I see you've made good use of the extra time to get yourself in trouble."

"No, I just thought I'd lay down on the rug," says Ruby, "and it felt so comfortable it seemed like I should stay here for awhile. I might start sleeping here, I think. That way I won't have to get out of bed in the morning."

"I decided I had enough time to make some raisin bran muffins for Gladys," Ruth explains, placing the tupperware tub on the couch and pulling off her mittens. "Eww-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, it's cold out there! Aren't you cold down there on the floor?" She takes off her glasses, now useless with fog. "I got them in the oven, and then Florence called, of course, and wanted to talk about the plans for Bible study, which I realized with a horrible shock is this Thursday. I'm glad she called me, because I suppose I would have completely forgotten otherwise, but then she has to discuss every detail, right down to the kind of paper napkins I'm supposed to use. And by the time we got that all organized, the raisin bran muffins were hard as rocks. I brought some over anyway, but they're so hard you might have to just put them right in your compost bin." She pops open the tupperware, extracts a muffin, and offers it to Ruby. "What did you do to yourself this time? How long have you been lying here?"

"Not very long," says Ruby, accepting the raisin bran muffin. "I think it's my hip, but I don't really know. I can't move though, without taking a nap. I suppose you'll have to call the ambulance again."

"Well, they'll probably be very glad to see you," says Ruth, "you're such friends with all the ambulance drivers by now. Now what did I do with my glasses?" She's stretching her wrinkly neck out of her coat collar like a turtle to look here and there, and patting the pockets of her coat. "Oh damn! How does this happen? I had them _right_ in my hand 30 _seconds_ ago." She disappears, and for a while Ruby hears her shuffling around the room, running her hands over all the surfaces. "It'd be a lot easier if I could find the light switch," she says. Ruby hears her pick up the phone, but there's no sound of buttons being pushed. "Of course, now I can't see these damn buttons," says Ruth. "And I can never figure out which ones to push, anyway. All these things are different! Why do they have to keep _changing_ everything? What's wrong with the old ones?" Ruby, still flat on her back, takes a bite out of the bran muffin. It's very dry, almost sandy, and she can feel crumbs raining onto her collarbones and working their way inside the neckline of her dress. But there are widely scattered raisins, too, golden raisins. "Damn, damn, damn!" says Ruth. The raisins, when Ruby encounters them, are very juicy and sweet, especially in contrast with the sterile powder surrounding them. She has plenty of time to linger over them while her friend fumbles for 9-1-1.

####

You can find other titles by Charles Hibbard at Smashwords.com:

Retirement Projects – <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/352093>

A Burned-Over District – <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/395039>

Your Hand, Please. Let's Walk. – <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/385390>

Among the Mandolins – <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/418523>

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