Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE RIVER STYX RUNS UPSTREAM

EYES I DARE NOT MEET IN DREAMS

VANNI FUCCI IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN HELL

VEXED TO NIGHTMARE BY A ROCKING CRADLE

REMEMBERING SIRI

METASTASIS

THE OFFERING

E-TICKET TO 'NAMLAND

IVERSON'S PITS

SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT, TWO BITES

THE DEATH OF THE CENTAUR

TWO MINUTES FORTY-FIVE SECONDS

CARRION COMFORT

Introduction by Harlan Ellison

Then the time comes when it is clear nothing new or important will be done; and one draws out the ledger and begins to itemize what there is, of value, that can be offered to posterity. And here a good deed, and there an act of courage; during this year one worthy story was told, during that decade involvement in an important social movement. If there are babies, that is logged in. If there are books, they are noted. Loving friends. Wives and husbands. Kindness to small animals. A hill bearing your name. But the laurels you counted on, they've turned to dust.

Cultural amnesia. Yesterday is buried. Who ever heard of Crispus Attucks or Edward Yashinsky, Bettie Page or Wendell Willkie, Preacher Roe or Memphis Minnie Doug-las? Seven people in all the world remember them. Just you and I, and five others.

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls

Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just

Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear whose potent hug

Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,

And I don't feel so well myself.

ON THE VANITY OF EARTHLY GREATNESS by Arthur Guiterman

It is certain no one will remember, when I am gone, that I was a man who first published Lenny Bruce; that I saved two hundred acres of watershed land from develop-ers; that I once singlehandedly caught a car thief and on another occasion deduced the identity of a cat burglar and was instrumental in his capture; that I corresponded with the mysterious B. Traven and published his first book of short stories; that it was I who manipulated Mystery Writ-ers of America into paying authors and editors who con-tributed to their anthologies.

These things are important to me; but when I go ... that they ever happened will pass from the world. The awards won, the escapades mythologized, the love spent so unwisely ... it all grows clouded in the mirror, and the mirror is covered with a white sheet, and the ancient fur-niture is stored away, and one night when it gets cold the old furniture is broken up for kindling. Then who is to say what was important when this one lived, or that one made his mark?

In the ocean of time it is merest chance that saves the handful from oblivion. It is my ever growing sense that of all the chances thrown to me, lifelines in the ocean of time, that my best chunk of flotsam is that I discovered Dan Simmons. Oh, yes, that's the correct word. I discovered him.

There is a wonderful record album that Stan Freberg put together, titled The United States of America (Volume One: The Early Years). And one of the shticks on that al-bum has Columbus meeting some Indians on the beach, and he tells them, "I've found you!" To which they reply, "We weren't lost. We knew we were here." So Columbus amends his declaration and says, "Well, at least I discov-ered you here on the beach," and they kind of agree that it's pretty dopey, but what the hell. In much the same way I discovered Dan Simmons. All pink and cranky, there on the beach.

It is a story worth telling, for there is an important les-son to be learned from this bit of incidental literary his-tory. And if I set it down, posterity may take note.

The catalyst was Ed Bryant, now a close friend of Dan's, but unknown to him at the time. Ed and I had been chums for a long stretch; I suppose that's why I allowed him to enlist me as one of the visiting authors to the Col-orado Mountain College

"Writers' Conference in the Rockies." It was the summer of 1981, it was hot and moist, and I dreaded having to workshop the stories of a group of aspiring authors who seemed more dilettante than the talented people I'd worked with at various Clarion conferences.

The physical set-up of the workshop sessions was hardly conducive to establishing rapport with the students: it was a stuffy classroom, with tablet-top chairs; the un-comfortable, hard-seat kind you suffered with in the third grade. Arranged in rows. There was a step-up platform where the "instructor" sat, facing the assemblage. From on high, one supposes, words of auctorial wisdom were in-tended to shower down on the groundlings.

Compared to the efficient and reassuring circle of sofas and comfy chairs at a Clarion Workshop, where everyone has a clear view of everyone else's face, where the group leader has no greater position of authority than each stu-dent ... this was a nightmare. And the group was too large to service everyone.

When I had arrived, the evening before, I'd been given a stack of manuscripts that needed to be workshopped, but no advisement was forthcoming as to the order in which the stories would be discussed. So I'd read at random, not much impressed by the quality of the material, hoping I'd hit the ones that would be up first. Naturally, I spent the night reading exactly the ones for later in the week. So when I got to the foyer of the building next morn-ing, with everyone mingling and doing bagels and dough-nuts and coffee, I checked the list. Imagine my pleasure at discovering I hadn't even glanced at the first three or four scheduled for discussion. Hurriedly, I grabbed copies of the unread stories from the stacks, found myself a far corner of the library, and be-gan to catch up. The first three were undistinguished, but competent. The fourth was just plain awful. I didn't get to the fifth story ... the call for beginning the session was delivered by a staff liaison. I entered the classroom, saw the rows filled, saw the empty chair on the low platform, waiting for me as if I were some stump revivalist minister come to preach The Word. My heart sank, and I knew this was going to be an extremely difficult morning.

Understand: I do not believe "anyone can write." That is to say, anyone can slap together words in some coherent sequence if s/he had done even a modicum of reading, and has at least a bare grasp of how to use language. Which is talent enough for writing letters, or doctoral theses, or amusing oneself with "creative endeavors." But to be a writer—not an "author" like such ongoing tragedies as Ju-dith Krantz, Eric Segal, V.C. Andrews, Sidney Sheldon, and hordes of others I leave to you to name—one must hear the music. I cannot explicate it better than that. One need only hear the music. The syntax may be spavined, the spelling dyslectic, the subject matter dyspeptic. But you can tell there has been a writer at work. It fills the page, that music, however halting and rife with improper choices. And only amateurs or the counterproductively soft-hearted think it should be otherwise. When I am hired to ramrod a workshop, I take it as my bond to be absolutely honest about the work. I may per-sonally feel compassion for someone struggling toward the dream of being a writer, who doesn't hear the music, but if I were to take the easy way out, merely to avoid "hurt-ing someone's feelings"—not the least of which are my own, because nobody likes to be thought of as an insensi-tive monster—I would be betraying my craft, as well as my employers. As well as the best interests of the students themselves. Lying to someone who, in my opinion (which can certainly be wrong, even as yours), doesn't have the stuff, is mendacious in the extreme. It is cowardly, not merely dishonest. Flannery O'Connor once said,

"Every-where I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writ-ers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

Similarly, I take it as my chore to discourage as many "aspiring authors" as I possibly can.

Because you cannot discourage a real writer. I've said it a hundred times in print. Break a real writer's hands, and s/he will tap out a story with feet or nose. That was my attitude when I took my seat before the wary eyes of young and old men, young and old women, all of them assembled in hopes of having some guru tell them they had a chance. (I have virtually given up doing workshops. I cannot bear the pain I cause in the name of the holy task that is writing well. Let someone else do it.)

One of the writers whose manuscript was early on the list was elsewhere, in a poetry section, I believe. So we talked about the second story, and we went around the room asking for the opinions of the other workshoppers, before I spoke to the work at hand. The comments weren't particularly scintillant. The usual "I liked it a lot" or

"I'd give it an 86, it has a good beat, and you can dance to it" but nothing very deep, and nothing very deep needed: it was an okay piece of writing, but no more than that.

Same for the third story. But then we came to the fourth; a truly amateurish hodge-podge of incomprehensi-ble cliches presented without grace, virtually every word misspelled, and festooned with all of the worst bad habits indulged in by those who (in Stanley Ellin's words) "mis-take a love of reading for a talent for writing." I knew this was going to be an unlovely interlude.

Comments around the room were sparse. Most of the people there had at least enough ability to recognize plain awful writing when they encountered it. So they lay back, and as I asked for more opinions, and didn't get them, a sense of genuine uneasiness filled the room. The tension that precedes the high wire aerialists attempting for the first time the death-defying simultaneous three-person tri-ple somersault.

I asked for the gentleman who had written this story to identify himself. If I was to do it, at least let me be brave enough to look the man in the eye. An elderly man, tall and thin, looking weathered but very kind, raised his hand. I cannot remember his name.

And I told him. I told him that insofar as I was equipped, by years as an editor and critic and workshop at-tendee or instructor, by a lifetime of reading and struggling to overcome the flaws in my own writing, by everything I knew or believed or suspected about good writing, that he seemed—in my view—to possess no talent for writing. Not a small, but serviceable, talent. No talent at all. I was not insulting or disputatious, but I was sincerely firm in giving it to him straight. As I spoke, the room grew tenebrous. Some of the at-tendees slumped far down in their chairs, as if trying to vanish from my sight. Others turned away, using one hand as blinder. On the faces of some of them I saw a look that must parallel that worn by soldiers in combat when they see, with guilt and human relief, that the bullet has struck the next man in the trench.

There was no way of stopping without explaining, page by page, the utter tone-deafness and ineptitude of what he had done.

Finally, I stopped. Then I asked him if this was his first story, or if he had ever submitted anything for publi-cation.

He was a nice man, a very decent man, and he answered me without rancor. He said,

"I've written sixty-four novels. I've never been published." My heart broke for him. But what was I to do? I said, "Perhaps you might better spend your time at a craft, or an art, for which you have a greater aptitude."

He shook his head. No one else but us in that room. Just that fine old man and I, joined at the hip forever. "I appreciate what you've said," he told me, with a strong voice. "I think you're being honest and saying what you believe. But it won't deter me. I want to write, and I'll keep at it. But I thank you." I think about that man whose name I cannot recall almost every week. Whenever I sit down to work, I think of him.

But it was clear we had to have a break right then.

We couldn't continue without a pause. It had to settle to its own level of acceptance in each of them. So I told them we would reassemble in fifteen minutes. The room emptied in an instant; and no one came out of the group to speak to me, or to ask a question. I feared I had been destructive, no matter how deeply I believed it was my ob-ligation to be candid.

It was not in me to join the students in the corridor. I knew they hated the thought of returning, probably for more of the same; and wishing they had chosen one of the other visiting instructors' section. I couldn't blame them. It had been a horrorshow. So I picked up the fifth story, now at the top of the stack. No matter how awful I felt, it was my job to get it read before the fifteen minute break was up. But the room, and my outlook, was dolorous. Pity the poor sonofabitch who had written that fifth manuscript. I began to read.

It bore a mundane title, but the opening sentences were strong and written well. Thank goodness, I remember thinking. At least we won't have another bloodbath. And I read on.

It occurred to me, somewhere along about the middle of the story, that I was crying. And when I finished the story, I had been touched, had been manipulated as all ex-cellent writing turns and bends us, had truly experienced that frisson we seek in everything we read.

I found my way into the corridor, needing air. The story had really gotten to me. And all down the hall, I saw others from the section, sitting on the floor, crying; hold-ing onto the wall for support, crying; standing in small groups outside, many of them crying. Clearly, this was more than merely competent work. We had been reached by a real writer; a writer with a helluva gift.

When the section reassembled, I called out the title of the story, and said we would now open for discussion.

Very few hands were raised to offer comments. But the few who did speak, all praised the story. Then, as if the floodgates had been opened, others began speaking with-out taking turns, just tumbling over each other to say how deeply they had been affected by this wonderful, wonder-ful story.

Then it came my turn to offer a critique. And they looked up at me with some uneasiness. Would this awful man savage even this exemplary piece of work, was he merely acid-tongued and snide, did he enjoy hurting these delicate souls?

I said, "Who among you is Dan Simmons?"

A quiet man whom I hadn't even noticed, in the third or fourth row, raised his hand. He seemed to be in his early thirties, physically average, a plain man with nothing bizarre or even out of the ordinary about him. He looked at me squarely. I only remember, in specific, some of the things I said to him. Dan remembers most of it accurately. But the es-sence of what I said was this:

"This is not just a good story, or a competent story, or an original story. It is a magnificent story. What you have created here is a wonder. It is what writers mean when they say 'this is what good writing is all about.'

"The writing is extraordinarily adept, a level of craft that comes to writers only after years of trial and error. The story is original, and it is filled with humanity. What you have created here is something that never existed in the world before you dreamed the dream."

The section was stunned. Fifteen minutes earlier they had seen a poor guy eviscerated, and now they were see-ing some other guy raised as a symbol of everything they hungered to possess. (Had I planned the encounter as a demonstration of the two edges of a sword, I could not have put it together more perfectly. In real life, one does not encounter these neat, symbolic scenes of contrast. In real life it's messy, and rarely plotted for the epiphany. But here I had stumbled into just such a set-piece.)

Then I said, "Now, having said that to you, I will change your life forever.

"Mr. Simmons, you are a writer.

"You will always be a writer, even if you never set down another word. There may be another writer among this crowd, but I think it unlikely that anyone else here is as totally and correctly and impressively a writer as are you. But now that I've told you that, I must tell you this: you will never, not ever be allowed to turn away from that. Now that you have the knowledge, you are doomed to spend the rest of your life working at this lonely and holy profession. Your relationships will suffer; your wife and family—if you have them—will inevitably hate you; any woman you come to love will despise that part of you for whom the writing is irreconcilable mistress; movies you will miss because you have a deadline; nights you will go without peace or sleep because the story doesn't work; fi-nancial woes forever, because writers don't usually make enough to pay the rent, allow the spouse to quit a second job, buy a kid a toy.

"And the most awful part about this, is that most of you think I dumped on that man..." and I pointed to the kindly old gentleman I'd savaged, "...but I've crowned with laurels this man. But the truth of it, is that I was try-ing to save his life, and I've just sentenced Simmons to a life of unending labor, probably very little recognition, and a curse that will not be lifted, even after death!

"You are a writer, Mr. Simmons. And you know how you can make book on that?

You know you're a writer, when a writer says you're a writer.

"May I enter your story in the Twilight Zone magazine short story competition?" And everyone in the room fainted.

Dan can tell of all this better than I. His memory of that morning in the Rockies is near letter-perfect. But what he cannot tell you, is the look on his face as I spoke. It was amazement, and pleasure, and stunned silence, and fear. It was the moment in which the poor dirty stablehand learns he is the Lost Prince of Dimension Exotica. He won the contest, of course. (On a technicality it was actually a tie with another yarn for first place, but each of the judges—including Peter Straub, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson—went nuts for the piece.) Out of thousands of submissions, Dan Simmons took first place. The story was "The River Styx Runs Upstream" and it was only the first of many works that were to follow along the trail of awards. Dan told me that he had been trying to sell fiction for three years, with very little success. He had sold a story to Galaxy, and the magazine had folded before it could see print. He sold a story to Galileo, and the magazine folded before it could see print. He had been batting his head against the market for three years, while he earned a living as an elementary school teacher, a specialist in gifted and talented education.

He told me that he had come to this workshop as a last chance. It was clear to Dan, and to Karen, that with a child on the way, he had to make a commitment that could in-sure their security. Karen's faith in Dan's talent never wa-vered, but she could see he was torn, and tormented. So she urged him to go to the workshop. And Dan said to her, "If I don't get some small reinforcement that I have talent, I'll pack it in. This will be the watershed for me."

And he won the contest. And he sold a novella to Omni. And he got an agent, and the agent sold SONG OF KALI, and SONG OF KALI became the first first-novel ever to win the World Fantasy Award for best novel. And HYPERION came out, and HYPERION won the Hugo. And I spoke to Dan one night late, he in Longmont, me in L.A., and I said to him, "I once told you a true thing that I said would change your life completely and forever. Did you believe me, then?"

"Yes."

"Will you believe me now, when I tell you another true thing that will alter your life again?"

"Yes."

Across the night that separated us I said as quietly as I could, "Dan, you are going to become famous. Not just wealthy; that's the easy part. You will become one of the most important writers of our time. Strangers will know your name, and recognize you on the street. People will seek your advice, and businessmen will try to attach them-selves to you. What I'm telling you is not just that you will be a great writer, but more: you will become a famous writer. You'd better know it now, because it'll all be com-ing faster than you can take note of it. And you'd damned well better start arming yourself now, because they'll be on you in a trice, kiddo, and you won't have time then to figure out where survival lies."

I have been where Dan Simmons is now, and I have been where he will be soon enough. I may be there now, and I may be there again. But this I know: if I stand a chance of being remembered, it may well be that it will come to me because I

"discovered" Dan Simmons. Now ain't that a pisser!

The River Styx Runs Upstream

Introduction

It's a cliche that writing fiction is a bit like having chil-dren. As with most cliches, there's a base of truth there. Having the idea for a story or novel—that moment of pure inspiration and conception—is as close to ecstasy as writ-ing offers. The actual writing, especially of a novel, runs about the length of a human gestation period and is a time of some discomfort, frequent queasiness, and the absolute assurance of difficult labor before the thing is born. Fi-nally, the stories or books take on a definite life of their own once published and soon are out of the writer's con-trol completely; they travel far, visiting countries that the writer may never see, learning to express themselves flu-ently in languages the author will never begin to master, gaining the ear of readers with levels of affluence and ed-ucation far beyond those of their progenitor, and—perhaps the most galling of all—living on long after the author is dust and a forgotten footnote.

And the ungrateful whelps don't even write home.

"The River Styx Runs Upstream" was conceived on a beautiful August morning in 1979, in the summerhouse behind my wife's parents' home in Kenmore, New York. I remember typing the first paragraph, pausing, and thinking— This will be my first story to be published.

It was, but not before two and a half years and a myr-iad of misadventures had passed.

A week after I'd finished writing the first draft of "The River Styx..." I drove from western New York to Rockport, Maine, to pick up my wife Karen after her stay at the Maine Photographic Workshop. Along the way, I spent a day in Exeter, New Hampshire, meeting and talk-ing to a respected writer whom I'd previously only corre-sponded with. His advice: submit to the "little magazines," spend years—perhaps decades—building a reputation in these limited-circulation, contributor-copy-in-lieu-of-pay markets before even thinking about trying a novel, and then spend more years producing these small books from little-known publishers, reaching only a thou-sand or so readers but trying to acquire some critical un-derpinning.

I picked up Karen in Rockport and we began the long drive back to our home in Colorado. I was silent much of the time, pondering the writer's advice. It was sage advice—only one would-be writer in hundreds, perhaps thousands, achieves publication. Of those who publish, a scant few manage to make a living at it ... even a "liv-ing" below the poverty line. The statistical chances of be-coming a "bestselling author" are approximately the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being attacked by a great white shark.

So between Rockport, Maine, and the front range of Colorado, I pondered, decided that the advice was un-doubtedly sound, realized that the "little magazine route" was almost certainly the wise way to go, and began to un-derstand that it was a sign of maturity to realize that the quest for being a widely read author, a "mass market" writer of quality tales, was a chimera ... something to be given up. And then, about the time I saw the Rocky Mountains rising from the plains ahead of us, I said, "Nahhh." Per-versely, I decided to go for the widest audience possible. Cut to the summer of 1981, two years later. Dispir-ited, discouraged, all but broken on the wheel of rejec-tions, chastened by reality, I "gave up" writing for publication and did something I'd sworn I would never do: I went off to a writers' conference. Paid to go to a writ-ers' conference. A "how-to", "this is the way to prepare your manuscript", "sit-in-the-circle and we'll critique it" kind of writers' conference. It was my swan song. I went to hear and see the writers present and to begin to view writing as a hobby rather than obsession.

Then I met Harlan Ellison.

I won't bore you with the details of that meeting. I won't describe the carnage that acted as prelude as the legendary enfant terrible beheaded, disemboweled, and generally dismembered the unfortunate would-be writers who had submitted stories for his critical approval.

Between story critiques, while Harlan Ellison rested and sipped Perrier, officials of the workshop rushed into the seminar room, carried out the scattered body parts, hosed down the walls, spread sawdust on the carpet, and generally made ready for the next sacrifice.

As it turned out, I was the next sacrifice.

"Who is this Simmons?" bellowed Ellison. "Stand up, wave your hand, show yourself, goddammit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking gall, the unmiti-gated hubris to inflict a story of five thousand fucking words on this workshop? Show yourself, Simmons! "

In one of the braver (read 'insane') moments of my life, I waggled my fingers. Stood.

Ellison stared at me over the top of his glasses. "At this length, it had better be good, Simmons ... no, it had bet-ter be fucking brilliant, or you will not leave this room alive. Comprende? Capish? "

I left the room alive. In fact, I left it more alive than I had been in some years. It was not merely that Ellison had liked it. He ... he and Ed Bryant and several of the other writers there ... had found every flaw in the story, had re-vealed every false note and fake wall, had honed in on the places where I'd tapdanced fast rather than do the neces-sary work, had pulled the curtain off every crippled sen-tence and humbug phrase. But they had taken the story seriously.

Harlan Ellison did more than that. He told me what I had known for years but had lost the nerve to believe—he told me that I had no choice but to continue writing, whether anything was ever published or not. He told me that few heard the music but those who did had no choice but to follow the piper. He told me that if I didn't get back to the typewriter and keep working that he would fly to Colorado and rip my fucking nose off.

I went back to the typewriter. Ed Bryant was generous enough to allow me to become the first unpublished writer to attend the Milford Writers' Conference ... where I learned to play pool with the big boys.

That autumn, I submitted the revised "The River Styx Runs Upstream" to Twilight Zone Magazine for their first annual contest for unpublished writers. According to the folks at TZ, more than nine thousand stories came in over the transom and had to be read and judged. "The River Styx..." tied for first place with a story by W.C. Norris.

Thus, my first published story reached the stands on February 15, 1982. It happened to be the same day that our daughter, Jane, was born.

It was some time before anyone, even I, really noticed that I'd been published. Analogies are fine and the similar-ities between being published and pregnancy are clever enough, but when it comes to being born—babies are the real thing. And so, submitted for your approval (as a certain gen-tleman once said)—a story about love, and loss, and about the sad necessity sometimes to surrender what thou lov'st well.

* * *

What thou lovest well remains

the rest is dross

What thou lov'st well shall not be reft

from thee

What thou lov'st well is thy

true heritage...

—Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

I loved my mother very much. After her funeral, after the coffin was lowered, the family went home and waited for her return.

I was only eight at the time. Of the required ceremony I remember little. I recall that the collar of the previous year's shirt was far too tight and that the unaccustomed tie was like a noose around my neck. I remember that the June day was too beautiful for such a solemn gathering. I remember Uncle Will's heavy drinking that morning and the bottle of Jack Daniels he pulled out as we drove home from the funeral. I remember my father's face.

The afternoon was too long. I had no role to play in the family's gathering that day, and the adults ignored me. I found myself wandering from room to room with a warm glass of Kool-Aid, until finally I escaped to the backyard. Even that familiar landscape of play and seclusion was ruined by the glimpse of pale, fat faces staring out from the neighbor's windows. They were waiting. Hoping for a glimpse. I felt like shouting, throwing rocks at them. In-stead I sat down on the old tractor tire we used as a sand-box. Very deliberately I poured the red Kool-Aid into the sand and watched the spreading stain digging a small pit.

They're digging her up now.

I ran to the swing set and angrily began to pump my legs against the bare soil. The swing creaked with rust, and one leg of the frame rose out of the ground. No, they've already done that, stupid. Now they're hooking her up to big machines. Will they pump the blood back into her?

I thought of bottles hanging. I remembered the fat, red ticks that clung to our dog in the summer. Angry, I swung high, kicking up hard even when there was no more height to be gained.

Do her fingers twitch first? Or do her eyes just slide open like an owl waking up?

I reached the high point of my arc and jumped. For a second I was weightless and I hung above the earth like Superman, like a spirit flying from its body. Then gravity claimed me and I fell heavily on my hands and knees. I had scraped my palms and put grass stain on my right knee. Mother would be angry.

She's being walked around now. Maybe they're dress-ing her like one of the mannikins in Mr. Feldman's store window.

My brother Simon came out to the backyard. Although he was only two years older, Simon looked like an adult to me that afternoon. An old adult. His blond hair, as re-cently cut as mine, hung down in limp bangs across a pale forehead. His eyes looked tired. Simon almost never yelled at me. But he did that day.

"Get in here. It's almost time."

I followed him through the back porch. Most of the relatives had left, but from the living room we could hear Uncle Will. He was shouting. We paused in the hallway to listen.

"For Chrissakes, Les, there's still time. You just can't do this."

"It's already done."

"Think of the ... Jesus Christ ... think of the kids." We could hear the slur of the voices and knew that Un-cle Will had been drinking more. Simon put his finger to his lips. There was a silence.

"Les, think about just the money side of it. What's ... how much .. . it's twenty-five percent of everything you have. For how many years, Les? Think of the kids. What'll that do to—

"It's done, Will."

We had never heard that tone from Father before. It was not argumentative—the way it was when he and Un-cle Will used to argue politics late at night. It was not sad like the time he talked to Simon and me after he had brought Mother home from the hospital the first time. It was just final.

There was more talk. Uncle Will started shouting. Even the silences were angry. We went to the kitchen to get a Coke. When we came back down the hallway, Uncle Will almost ran over us in his rush to leave. The door slammed behind him. He never entered our home again.

They brought Mother home just after dark. Simon and I were looking out the picture window and we could feel the neighbors watching. Only Aunt Helen and a few of our closest relatives had stayed. I felt Father's surprise when he saw the car. I don't know what we'd been expecting—maybe a long black hearse like the one that had carried Mother to the cemetery that morning.

They drove up in a yellow Toyota. There were four men in the car with Mother. Instead of dark suits like the one Father was wearing, they had on pastel, short-sleeved shirts. One of the men got out of the car and offered his hand to Mother.

I wanted to rush to the door and down the sidewalk to her, but Simon grabbed my wrist and we stood back in the hallway while Father and the other grownups opened the door.

They came up the sidewalk in the glow of the gaslight on the lawn. Mother was between the two men, but they were not really helping her walk, just guiding her a little. She wore the light blue dress she had bought at Scott's just before she got sick. I had expected her to look all pale and waxy—like when I peeked through the crack in the bed-room door before the men from the funeral home came to take her body away—but her face was flushed and healthy, almost sunburned.

When they stepped onto the front stoop, I could see that she was wearing a lot of makeup. Mother never wore makeup. The two men also had pink cheeks. All three of them had the same smile.

When they came into the house, I think we all took a step back—except for Father. He put his hands on Moth-er's arms, looked at her a long time, and kissed her on the cheek. I don't think she kissed him back. Her smile did not change. Tears were running down Father's face. I felt embarrassed.

The Resurrectionists were saying something. Father and Aunt Helen nodded. Mother just stood there, still smil-ing slightly, and looked politely at the yellow-shirted man as he spoke and joked and patted Father on the back. Then it was our turn to hug Mother. Aunt Helen moved Simon forward, and I was still hanging onto Simon's hand. He kissed her on the cheek and quickly moved back to Fa-ther's side. I threw my arms around her neck and kissed her on the lips. I had missed her. Her skin wasn't cold. It was just different.

She was looking right at me. Baxter, our German shep-herd, began to whine and scratch at the back door.

Father took the Resurrectionists into the study. We heard snatches of conversation down the hall.

"...if you think of it as a stroke..."

"How long will she..."

"You understand the tithing is necessary because of the expenses of monthly care and..."

The women relatives stood in a circle around Mother. There was an awkward moment until they realized that Mother did not speak. Aunt Helen reached her hand out and touched her sister's cheek. Mother smiled and smiled.

Then Father was back and his voice was loud and hearty. He explained how similar it was to a light stroke—did we remember Uncle Richard? Meanwhile, Father kissed people repeatedly and thanked everyone.

The Resurrectionists left with smiles and signed pa-pers. The remaining relatives began to leave soon after that. Father saw them down the walk, smiling and shaking their hands.

"Think of it as though she's been ill but has recov-ered," said Father. "Think of her as home from the hospi-tal."

Aunt Helen was the last to leave. She sat next to Mother for a long time, speaking softly and searching Mother's face for a response. After a while Aunt Helen began to cry.

"Think of it as if she's recovered from an illness," said Father as he walked her to her car. "Think of her as home from the hospital."

Aunt Helen nodded, still crying, and left. I think she knew what Simon and I knew. Mother was not home from the hospital. She was home from the grave. For the first week, Father slept with Mother in the same room where they had always slept. In the morning his face would sag and he would snap at us while we ate our cereal. Then he moved to his study and slept on the old divan in there.

The night was long. Several times I thought I heard the soft slap of Mother's slippers on the hallway floor and my breathing stopped, waiting for the door to open. But it didn't. The moonlight lay across my legs and exposed a patch of wallpaper next to the dresser. The flower pattern looked like the face of a great, sad beast. Just before dawn, Simon leaned across from his bed and whispered, "Go to sleep, stupid." And so I did.

The summer was very hot. No one would play with us, so Simon and I played together. Father had only morning classes at the University. Mother moved around the house and watered the plants a lot. Once Simon and I saw her watering a plant that had died and been removed while she was at the hospital in April. The water ran across the top of the cabinet and dripped on the floor. Mother did not no-tice. When Mother did go outside, the forest preserve be-hind our house seemed to draw her in. Perhaps it was the darkness. Simon and I used to enjoy playing at the edge of it after twilight, catching fireflies in a jar or building blan-ket tents, but after Mother began walking there Simon spent the evenings inside or on the front lawn. I stayed back there because sometimes Mother wandered and I would take her by the arm and lead her back to the house.

Mother wore whatever Father told her to wear. Some-times he was rushed to get to class and would say, "Wear the red dress," and Mother would spend a sweltering July day in heavy wool. She didn't sweat. Sometimes he would not tell her to come downstairs in the morning, and she would remain in the bedroom until he returned. On those days I tried to get Simon at least to go upstairs and look in on her with me; but he just stared at me and shook his head. Father was drinking more, like Uncle Will used to, and he would yell at us for nothing at all. I always cried when Father shouted; but Simon never cried anymore.

Mother never blinked. At first I didn't notice; but then I began to feel uncomfortable when I saw that she never blinked. But it didn't make me love her any less. Neither Simon nor I could fall asleep at night. Mother used to tuck us in and tell us long stories about a magician named Yandy who took our dog, Baxter, on great adven-tures when we weren't playing with him. Father didn't make up stories, but he used to read to us from a big book he called Pound's Cantos. I didn't understand most of what he read, but the words felt good and I loved the sounds of words he said were Greek. Now nobody checked in on us after our baths. I tried telling stories to Simon for a few nights, but they were no good and Simon asked me to stop.

On the Fourth of July, Tommy Wiedermeyer, who had been in my class the year before, drowned in the swim-ming pool they had just put in.

That night we all sat out back and watched the fire-works above the fairgrounds half a mile away. You couldn't see the ground displays because of the forest pre-serve, but the skyrockets were bright and clear. First you would see the explosion of color and then, four or five seconds later it seemed, the sound would catch up. I turned to say something to Aunt Helen and saw Mother looking out from the second-story window. Her face was very white against the dark room, and the colors seemed to flow down over her like fluids.

It was not long after the Fourth that I found the dead squirrel. Simon and I had been playing Cavalry and Indi-ans in the forest preserve. We took turns finding each other

... shooting and dying repeatedly in the weeds until it was time to start over. Only this time I was having trou-ble finding him. Instead, I found the clearing. It was a hidden place, surrounded by bushes as thick as our hedge. I was still on my hands and knees from crawl-ing under the branches when I saw the squirrel. It was large and reddish and had been dead for some time. The head had been wrenched around almost backwards on the body. Blood had dried near one ear. Its left paw was clenched, but the other lay open on a twig as if it were resting there. Something had taken one eye, but the other stared blackly at the canopy of branches. Its mouth was open slightly, showing surprisingly large teeth gone yellow at the roots. As I watched, an ant came out of the mouth, crossed the dark muzzle, and walked out onto the staring eye.

This is what dead is, I thought.

The bushes vibrated to some unfelt breeze. I was scared to be there and I left, crawling straight ahead and bashing through thick branches that grabbed at my shirt.

In the autumn I went back to Longfellow School, but soon transferred to a private school. The Resurrectionist families were discriminated against in those days. The kids made fun of us or called us names and no one played with us. No one played with us at the new school either, but they didn't call us names. Our bedroom had no wall switch but an old-fashioned hanging lightbulb with a cord. To turn on the light I had to cross half the dark room and feel around until I found the cord. Once when Simon was staying up late to do his homework, I went upstairs by myself. I was swinging my arm around in the darkness to find the string when my hand fell on Mother's face. Her teeth felt cool and slick. I pulled my hand back and stood there a minute in the dark before I found the cord and turned on the light.

"Hello, Mother," I said. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at her. She was staring at Simon's empty bed. I reached out and took her hand. "I miss you," I said. I said some other things, but the words got all mixed up and sounded stupid, so I just sat there, holding her hand, waiting for some returning pressure. My arm got tired, but I remained sitting there and holding her fingers in mine until Simon came up. He stopped in the doorway and stared at us. I looked down and dropped her hand. After a few minutes she went away.

Father's classes had fewer and fewer students and fi-nally he took a sabbatical to write his book on Ezra Pound. He was home all that year, but he didn't write much. Sometimes he would spend the morning down at the li-brary, but he would be home by one o'clock and would watch TV. He would start drinking before dinner and stay in front of the television until really late. Simon and I would stay up with him sometimes; but we didn't like most of the shows.

Simon's dream started about then. He told me about it on the way to school one morning. He said the dream was always the same. When he fell asleep, he would dream that he was still awake, reading a comic book. Then he would start to set the comic on the nightstand, and it would fall on the floor. When he reached down to pick it up, Mother's arm would come out from under the bed and she would grasp his wrist with her white hand. He said her grip was very strong, and somehow he knew that she wanted him under the bed with her. He would hang onto the blankets as hard as he could, but he knew that in a few seconds the bedclothes would slip and he would fall.

He said that last night's dream had finally been a little different. This time Mother had stuck her head out from under the bed. Simon said that it was like when a garage mechanic slides out from under a car. He said she was grinning at him, not smiling but grinning real wide. Simon said that her teeth had been filed down to points.

"Do you ever have dreams like that?" he asked. I knew he was sorry he'd told me.

"No," I said. I loved Mother.

Father put Baxter to sleep just before Thanksgiving. He was not an old dog, but he acted like one. He was al-ways growling and barking, even at us, and he would never come inside anymore. After he ran away for the third time, the pound called us. Father just said, "Put him to sleep," and hung up the phone. They sent us a bill.

That April the Farley twins from the next block acci-dentally locked themselves in an abandoned freezer and suffocated. Mrs. Hargill, our cleaning lady, found them, out behind their garage. Thomas Farley had been the only kid who still invited Simon over to his yard. Now Simon only had me.

It was just before Labor Day and the start of school that Simon made plans for us to run away. I didn't want to run away, but I loved Simon. He was my brother.

"Where are we gonna go?"

"We got to get out of here," he said. Which wasn't much of an answer. But Simon had set aside a bunch of stuff and even picked up a city map. He'd sketched out our path through the forest preserve, across Sherman River at the Laurel Street viaduct, all the way to Uncle Will's house without ever crossing any major streets.

"We can camp out," said Simon. He showed me a length of clothesline he had cut.

"Uncle Will will let us be farmhands. When he goes out to his ranch next spring, we can go with him."

We left at twilight. I didn't like leaving right before it got dark, but Simon said that Father wouldn't notice we were gone until late the next morning when he woke up. I carried a small backpack filled with food Simon had sneaked out of the refrigerator. He had some stuff rolled up in a blanket and tied over his back with the piece of clothes-line. It was pretty light out until we got deeper into the for-est preserve. The stream made a gurgling sound like the one that came from Mother's room the night she died. The roots and branches were so thick that Simon had to keep his flashlight on all the time, and that made it seem even darker. We stopped before too long, and Simon strung his rope be-tween two trees. I threw the blanket over it and we both scrabbled around on our hands and knees to find stones.

We ate our bologna sandwiches in the dark while the creek made swallowing noises in the night. We talked a few minutes, but our voices seemed too tiny, and after a while we both fell asleep, on the cold ground with our jackets pulled over us and our heads on the nylon pack and all the forest sounds going on around us. I woke up in the middle of the night. It was very still. Both of us had huddled down under the jackets, and Simon was snoring. The leaves had stopped stirring, the in-sects were gone, and even the stream had stopped making noise. The openings of the tent made two brighter triangles in the field of darkness. I sat up with my heart pounding.

There was nothing to see when I moved my head near the opening. But I knew exactly what was out there. I put my head under my jacket and moved away from the side of the tent.

I waited for something to touch me through the blan-ket. At first I thought of Mother coming after us, of Mother walking through the forest after us with sharp twigs brushing at her eyes. But it wasn't Mother.

The night was cold and heavy around our little tent. It was as black as the eye of that dead squirrel, and it wanted in. For the first time in my life I understood that the dark-ness did not end with the morning light. My teeth were chattering. I curled up against Simon and stole a little of his heat. His breath came soft and slow against my cheek. After a while I shook him awake and told him we were going home when the sun rose, that I wasn't going with him. He started to argue, but then he heard something in my voice, something he didn't understand, and he only shook his head tiredly and went back to sleep.

In the morning the blanket was wet with dew and our skins felt clammy. We folded things up, left the rocks lying in their rough pattern, and walked home. We did not speak.

Father was sleeping when we got home. Simon threw our stuff in the bedroom and then he went out into the sunlight. I went to the basement.

It was very dark down there, but I sat on the wooden stairs without turning on a light. There was no sound from the shadowed corners, but I knew that Mother was there.

"We ran away, but we came back," I said at last. "It was my idea to come back." Through the narrow window slats I saw green grass. A sprinkler started up with a loud sigh. Somewhere in the neighborhood, kids were shouting. I paid attention only to the shadows.

"Simon wanted to keep going," I said, "but I made us come back. It was my idea to come home."

I sat a few more minutes but couldn't think of anything else to say. Finally I got up, brushed off my pants, and went upstairs to take a nap.

A week after Labor Day, Father insisted we go to the shore for the weekend. We left on Friday afternoon and drove straight through to Ocean City. Mother sat alone in the rear seat. Father and Aunt Helen rode up front. Simon and I were crowded into the back of the station wagon, but he refused to count cows with me or talk to me or even play with the toy planes I'd brought along.

We stayed at an ancient hotel right on the boardwalk. The other Resurrectionists in Father's Tuesday group rec-ommended the place, but it smelled of age and rot and rats in the walls. The corridors were a faded green, the doors a darker green, and only every third light worked. The halls were a dim maze, and you had to make two turns just to find the elevator. Everyone but Simon stayed inside all day Saturday, sitting in front of the laboring air condi-tioner and watching television. There were many more of the resurrected around now, and you could hear them shuf-fling through the dark halls. After sunset they went out to the beach, and we joined them. I tried to make Mother comfortable. I set the beach towel down for her and turned her to face the sea. By this time the moon had risen and a cool breeze was blowing in. I put Mother's sweater across her shoulders. Behind us the midway splashed lights out over the boardwalk and the roller coaster rumbled and growled. I would not have left if Father's voice hadn't irritated me so. He talked too loudly, laughed at nothing, and took deep drinks from a bottle in a brown bag. Aunt Helen said very little but watched Father sadly and tried to smile when he laughed. Mother was sitting peacefully, so I ex-cused myself and walked up to the midway to hunt for Si-mon. I was lonely without him. The place was empty of families and children, but the rides were still running. Ev-ery few minutes there would be a roar and screams from the few riders as the roller coaster took its steepest plunge. I ate a hot dog and looked around, but Simon was nowhere to be found.

While walking back along the beach, I saw Father lean over and give Aunt Helen a quick kiss on the cheek. Mother had wandered away, and I quickly offered to go find her just to hide the tears of rage in my eyes. I walked up the beach past the place where the two teenagers had drowned the previous weekend. There were a few of the resurrected around. They were sitting near the water with their families; but no sight of Mother. I was thinking of heading back when I thought I noticed some movement under the boardwalk.

It was incredibly dark under there. Narrow strips of light, broken into weird sorts of patterns by the wooden posts and cross-braces, dropped down from cracks in the walkway overhead. Footsteps and rumbles from the mid-way sounded like fists pounding against a coffin lid. I stopped then. I had a sudden image of dozens of them be-ing there in the darkness. Dozens, Mother among them, with thin patterns of light crossing them so that you could make out a hand or shirt or staring eye. But they were not there. Mother was not there. Something else was. I don't know what made me look up. Footsteps from above. A slight turning, turning; something turning in the shadows. I could see where he had climbed the cross-braces, wedged a sneaker here, lifted himself there to the wide timber. It would not have been hard. We'd climbed like that a thousand times. I stared right into his face, but it was the clothesline I recognized first.

Father quit teaching after Simon's death. He never went back after the sabbatical, and his notes for the Pound book sat stacked in the basement with last year's newspa-pers. The Resurrectionists helped him find a job as a cus-todian in a nearby shopping mall, and he usually didn't get home before two in the morning. After Christmas I went away to a boarding school that was two states away. The Resurrectionists had opened the Institute by this time, and more and more families were turning to them. I was later able to go to the University on a full scholarship. Despite the covenant, I rarely came home during those years. Father was drunk during my few visits. Once I drank with him and we sat in the kitchen and cried together. His hair was almost gone except for a few white strands on the sides, and his eyes were sunken in a lined face. The alcohol had left innumerable broken blood vessels in his cheeks, and he looked as though he was wearing more makeup than Mother.

Mrs. Hargill called three days before graduation. Father had filled the bath with warm water and then drawn the ra-zor blade up the vein rather than across it. He had read his Plutarch. It had been two days before the housekeeper found him, and when I arrived home the next evening the bathtub was still caked with congealed rings. After the fu-neral I went through all of his old papers and found a jour-nal he had been keeping for several years. I burned it along with the stacks of notes for his unfinished book.

Our policy with the Institute was honored despite the cir-cumstances, and that helped me through the next few years. My career is more than a job to me—I believe in what I do and I'm good at it. It was my idea to lease some of the empty school buildings for our new neighborhood centers.

Last week I was caught in a traffic jam, and when I inched the car up to the accident site and saw the small figure covered by a blanket and the broken glass every-where, I also noticed that a crowd of them had gathered on the curb. There are so many of them these days.

I used to have shares in a condominium in one of the last lighted sections of the city, but when our old house came up for sale I jumped at the chance to buy it. I've kept many of the old furnishings and replaced others so that it's almost the way it used to be. Keeping up an old house like that is expensive, but I don't spend my money foolishly. After work a lot of guys from the Institute go out to bars, but I don't. After I've put away my equipment and scrubbed down the steel tables, I go straight home. My family is there. They're waiting for me.

Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams

Introduction

The summer of 1969 was very hot. It was especially hot where I spend it—living in the "ghetto" section of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Germantown, a pleasant little village in pre-Revolutionary War days, was an inner-city enclave of Philadelphia by 1969. The streets were hot. Tempers—racial and otherwise—were even hotter. I rented the attic of a neighborhood Settlement House/ birth control clinic/community medical center for $35 a month. It was a small attic. On evenings when the tiny second-floor wasn't busy serving as a waiting room, I could put it to use as a living room and use the tiny kitchen off of it. Most evenings it was busy. From my attic dormer windows, I watched several gang battles and one full-fledged riot that summer.

But it is the evenings seen from the front stoop I most remember: a brick canyon rich with human noise, the long sweep of Bringhurst Street's rowhouses illuminated in the sodium-yellow glow of "crime lights" while children jumped Double Dutch and played the dozens in the street, the endless parade of people strolling and laughing and chatting and making room on the step for visitors. To this day, confronted with the privacy-fenced sterility of suburban back-yard patios, I wonder what lunacy made us turn away from the front porch and the front step, the communal ownership of the street, to flee to these claus-trophobic plots of isolation. During the day in that long-ago summer of 1969, I worked as a teacher's aide in the Upsal Day School for the Blind. The children often were not merely blind—some were also deaf and severely mentally retarded. Many of them had been this way since birth.

The wonderful thing about working in such an envi-ronment is that one learns quickly that human beings—even human beings with such terrible and relentless disadvantages—maintain not only the essence of human-ity and the full panoply of human desires and strengths, but also somehow retain the capacity to struggle, to achieve ... to triumph.

On the day after human beings first set foot on the moon in that hot summer of 1969, I celebrated the event with my class. They were very excited. Thomas, one of the young adolescents who had been blind and retarded since birth but who could hear, had taught himself to play the piano. Another hearing student—a young lady who had been brain-damaged as a result of extreme abuse as an infant—suggested that we end the celebration of the lu-nar landing by having Thomas play our national anthem.

He did.

He played "We Shall Overcome."

* * *

Bremen left the hospital and his dying wife and drove east to the sea. The roads were thick with Philadelphians fleeing the city for the weekend, and Bremen had to con-centrate on traffic, leaving only the most tenuous of touches in his wife's mind. Gail was sleeping. Her dreams were fitful and drug-induced. She was seeking her mother through endlessly interlinked rooms filled with Victorian furniture. As Bremen crossed the pine barrens, the images of the dreams slid between the evening shadows of reality. Gail awoke just as Bremen was leaving the parkway. For a few seconds after she awoke the pain was not with her. She opened her eyes, and the evening sunlight falling across the blue blanket made her think—for only a moment—that it was morning on the farm. Her thoughts reached out for her husband just as the pain and dizziness struck behind her left eye. Bremen grimaced and dropped the coin he was handing to the toll-booth attendant.

"What's the matter, buddy?"

Bremen shook his head, fumbled out a dollar, and thrust it blindly at the man. Throwing his change in the Triumph's cluttered console, he concentrated on pushing the car's speed to its limit. Gail's pain faded, but her con-fusion washed over him in a wave of nausea.

She quickly gained control despite the shifting curtains of fear that fluttered at the tightly held mindshield. She subvocalized, concentrating on narrowing the spectrum to a simulacrum of her voice.

"Hi, Jerry."

"Hi, yourself, kiddo." He sent the thought as he turned onto the exit for Long Beach Island. He shared the visual—the starting green of grass and pine trees overlaid with the gold of August light, the sports car's shadow leaping along the curve of asphalt. Suddenly the unmistak-able salt freshness of the Atlantic came to him, and he shared that with her also.

The entrance to the seaside community was disappoint-ing: dilapidated seafood restaurants, overpriced cinder-block motels, endless marinas. But it was reassuring in its familiarity to both of them, and Bremen concentrated on seeing all of it. Gail began to relax and appreciate the ride. Her presence was so real that Bremen caught himself turn-ing to speak aloud to her. The pang of regret and embar-rassment was sent before he could stifle it.

The island was cluttered with families unpacking station wagons and carrying late dinners to the beach. Bre-men drove north to Barnegat Light. He glanced to his right and caught a glimpse of some fishermen standing along the surf, their shadows intersecting the white lines of breakers.

Monet, thought Gail, and Bremen nodded, although he had actually been thinking of Euclid.

Always the mathematician, thought Gail, and then her voice faded as the pain rose. Half-formed sentences shred-ded like clouds in a gale.

Bremen left the Triumph parked near the lighthouse and walked through the low dunes to the beach. He threw down the tattered blanket that they had carried so many times to just this spot. There was a group of children run-ning along the surf. A girl of about nine, all long white legs in a suit two years too small, pranced on the wet sand in an intricate, unconscious choreography with the sea. The light was fading between the Venetian blinds. A nurse smelling of cigarettes and stale talcum powder came in to change the IV bottle and take a pulse. The intercom in the hall continued to make loud, imperative announce-ments, but it was difficult to understand them through the growing haze of pain. The new doctor arrived about ten o'clock, but Gail's attention was riveted on the nurse who carried the blessed needle. The cotton swab on her arm was a delightful preliminary to the promised surcease of pain behind her eye. The doctor was saying something.

"...your husband? I thought he would be staying the night."

"Right here, doctor," said Gail. She patted the blanket and the sand. Bremen pulled on his nylon windbreaker against the chill of the night. The stars were occluded by a high cloud layer that allowed only a few to show through. Far out to sea, an improbably long oil tanker, its lights blazing, moved along the horizon. The windows of the beach homes behind Bremen cast yellow rectangles on the dunes. The smell of steak being grilled came to him on the breeze. Bremen tried to remember whether he had eaten that day or not. He considered going back to the conven-ience store near the lighthouse to get a sandwich but re-membered an old Payday candy bar in his jacket pocket and contented himself with chewing on the rock-hard wedge of peanuts.

Footsteps continued to echo in the hall. It sounded as if entire armies were on the march. The rush of footsteps, clatter of trays, and vague chatter of voices reminded Gail of lying in bed as a child and listening to her parents' par-ties downstairs. Remember the party where we met? thought Bremen.

Chuck Gilpen had insisted that Bremen go along. Bre-men had never had much use for parties. He was lousy at small talk, and the psychic tension and neurobabble al-ways left him with a headache from maintaining his mindshield tightly for hours. Besides, it was his first week teaching graduate tensor calculus and he knew that he should be home boning up on basic principles. But he had gone. Gilpen's nagging and the fear of being labeled a so-cial misfit in his new academic community had brought Bremen to the Drexel Hill townhouse. The music was pal-pable half a block away, and had he driven there by him-self, he would have gone home then. He was just inside the door—someone had pressed a drink in his hand—when suddenly he sensed another mindshield quite near him. He had put out a gentle probe, and immediately the force of Gail's thoughts swept across him like a searchlight. Both were stunned. Their first reaction had been to raise their mindshields and roll up like frightened armadil-los. Each soon found that useless against the unconscious probes of the other. Neither had ever encountered another telepath of more than primitive, untapped ability. Each had assumed that he or she was a freak—unique and unassail-able. Now they stood naked before each other in an empty place. Suddenly, almost without volition, they flooded each other's mind with a torrent of images, self-images, half-memories, secrets, sensations, preferences, percep-tions, hidden fears, echoes, and feelings. Nothing was held back. Every petty cruelty committed, sexual shame experi-enced, and prejudice harbored poured out along with thoughts of past birthday parties, ex-lovers, parents, and an endless stream of trivia. Rarely had two people known each other as well after fifty years of marriage. A few minutes later they met for the first time.

The beacon from Barnegat Light passed over Bremen's head every twenty-four seconds. There were more lights burning out at sea now than along the dark line of beach. The wind came up after midnight, and Bremen wrapped the blanket around himself tightly. Gail had refused the needle when the nurse had last made her rounds, but her mindtouch was still clouded. Bremen forced the contact through sheer strength of will. Gail had always been afraid of the dark. Many had been the times during their six years of marriage that he reached out in the night with his mind or arm to reassure her. Now she was the frightened little girl again, left alone upstairs in the big old house on Burlingame Avenue. There were things in the darkness be-neath her bed.

Bremen reached through her confusion and pain and shared the sound of the sea with her. He told her stories about the antics of Gernisavien, their calico cat. He lay in the hollow of the sand to match his body with hers. Slowly she began to relax, to surrender her thoughts to his. She even managed to doze a few times, and her dreams were the movement of stars between clouds and the sharp smell of the Atlantic. Bremen described the week's work at the farm—the subtle beauty of his Fourier equations across the chalkboard in his study and the sunlit satisfaction of plant-ing a peach tree by the front drive. He shared memories of their ski trip to Aspen and the sudden shock of a search-light reaching in to the beach from an unseen ship out at sea. He shared what little poetry he had memorized, but the words kept sliding into images and feelings.

The night drew on, and Bremen shared the cold clarity of it with his wife, adding to each image the warm overlay of his love. He shared trivia and hopes for the future. From seventy-five miles away he reached out and touched her hand with his. When he drifted off to sleep for only a few minutes, he sent her his dreams. Gail died just before the false light of dawn touched the sky.

The head of the mathematics department at Haverford urged Bremen to take a leave or a full sabbatical if he needed it. Bremen thanked him and resigned. Dorothy Parks in the psychology department spent a long evening explaining the mechanics of grief to Bremen. "You have to understand, Jeremy," she said, "that moving is a common mistake made by people who have just suf-fered a serious loss. You may think that a new environ-ment will help you forget, but it just postpones the inevitable confrontation with grief."

Bremen listed attentively and eventually nodded his agreement. The next day he put the farm up for sale, sold the Triumph to his mechanic on Conestoga Road, and took the bus to the airport. Once there, he went to the United Airlines counter and bought a ticket for the next departing flight.

For a year Bremen worked in central Florida, loading produce at a shipping center near Tampa. The next year Bremen did not work at all. He fished his way north from the Everglades to the Chattooga River in northern Georgia. In March he was arrested as a vagrant in Charleston, South Carolina. In May he spent two weeks in Washington, dur-ing which he left his room only to go to liquor stores and the Congressional Library. He was robbed and badly beaten outside of the Baltimore bus station at 2 a.m. on a June night. Leaving the hospital the next day, he returned to the bus station and headed north to visit his sister in New York. His sister and her husband insisted that he stay several weeks, but he left early on the third morning, prop-ping a note up against the salt shaker on the kitchen table. In Philadelphia he sat in Penn Station and read the help-wanted ads. His progress was as predictable as the elegant, ellipsoid mathematics of a yo-yo's path.

Robby was sixteen, weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds, and had been blind, deaf, and retarded since birth. His mother's drug addiction during pregnancy and a placental malfunction had shut off Robby's senses as surely as a sinking ship condemns compartment after compart-ment to the sea by the shutting of watertight doors.

Robby's eyes were the sunken, darkened caverns of the irrevocably blind. The pupils, barely visible under droop-ing, mismatched lids, tracked separately in random move-ments. The boy's lips were loose and blubbery, his teeth gapped and carious. At sixteen, he already had the dark down of a mustache on his upper lip. His black hair stood out in violent tufts, and his eyebrows met above the bridge of his broad nose.

The child's obese body was balanced precariously on grub-white, emaciated legs. Robby had learned how to walk at age eleven but still would stagger only a few paces before toppling over. He moved in a series of pigeon-toed lurches, pudgy arms pulled as tight as broken wings, wrists cocked at an improbable angle, fingers separate and ex-tended. Like so many of the retarded blind, his favorite motion was a perpetual rocking with his hand fanning above his sunken eyes as if to cast shadows into the pit of darkness.

He did not speak. His only sounds were occasional, meaningless giggles and a rare squeal of protest, which sounded like nothing so much as an operatic falsetto. Robby had been coming to the Chelton Day School for the Blind for six years. His life before that was unknown. He had been discovered by a social worker visiting Robby's mother in connection with a court-ordered methadone-treatment program. The door to the apartment had been left open, and the social worker heard noises. The boy had been sealed into the bathroom by the nailing of a piece of plywood over the bottom half of the door. There were wet papers on the tile floor, but Robby was na-ked and smeared with his own excrement. A tap had been left on, and water filled the room to the depth of an inch or two. The boy was rolling fitfully in the mess and mak-ing mewling noises.

Robby was hospitalized for four months, spent five weeks in the county home, and was then returned to the custody of his mother. In accordance with further court or-ders, he was dutifully bussed to Chelton Day School for five hours of treatment a day, six days a week. He made the daily trip in darkness and silence. Robby's future was as flat and featureless as a line ex-tending nowhere, holding no hope of intersection.

"Shit, Jer, you're going to have to watch after the kid tomorrow."

"Why me?"

"Because he won't go into the goddamn pool, that's why. You saw him today. Smitty just lowered his legs into the water, and the kid started swinging and screaming. Sounded like a bunch of cats had started up. Dr. Whilden says he stays back tomorrow. She says that the van is too hot for him to stay in. Just keep him company in the room till Jan McLellan's regular aide gets back from vacation."

"Great," said Bremen. He pulled his sweat-plastered shirt away from his skin. He had been hired to drive the school van, and now he was helping to feed, dress, and Babysit the poor bastards. "Great. That's just great, Bill. \Vhat am I supposed to do with him for an hour and a half while you guys are at the pool?"

"Watch him. Try to get him to work on the zipper book. You ever see that page in there with the bra stuff—the eyes and hooks? Let him work on that. I useta practice on that with my eyes shut."

"Great," said Bremen. He closed his eyes against the glare of the sun.

Bremen sat on the front stoop and poured the last of the scotch into his glass. It was long past midnight, but the narrow street teemed with children playing. Two black teenagers were playing the dozens while their friends urged them on. A group of little girls jumped double dutch under the streetlamp. Insects milled in the light and seemed to dance to the girls' singing. Adults sat on the steps of identical rowhouses and watched one another dully. No one moved much. It was very hot. It's time to move on.

Bremen knew that he had stayed too long. Seven weeks working at the day school had been too much. He was getting curious. And he was beginning to ask ques-tions about the kids.

Boston, perhaps. Farther north. Maine.

Asking questions and getting answers. Jan McLellan had told him about Robby. She had told him about the bruises on Robby's body, about the broken arm two years before. She told him about the teddy bear that a candy-striper had given the blind boy. It had been the first pos-itive stimulus to evoke an emotion from Robby. He had kept the bear in his arms for weeks. Refused to go to X-ray without it. Then, a few days after his return home, Robby got into the van one morning, screaming and whin-ing in his weird way. No teddy bear. Dr. Whilden called his mother only to be told that the God-damned toy was lost. "God-damned toy" were the mother's words, accord-ing to Jan McLellan. No other teddy bear would do. Robby carried on for three weeks.

So what? What can I do?

Bremen knew what he could do. He had known for weeks. He shook his head and took another drink, adding to the already-thickened mindshield that separated him from the senseless, pain-giving world.

Hell, it'd be better for Robby if I didn't try it.

A breeze came up. Bremen could hear the screams from a lot down the street where two allied gangs played a fierce game of pick-up ball. Curtains billowed out open windows. Somewhere a siren sounded, faded. The breeze lifted papers from the gutter and ruffled the dresses of the girls jumping rope.

Bremen tried to imagine a lifetime with no sight, no sound.

Fuck it! He picked up the empty bottle and went up-stairs.

The van pulled up the circular drive of the day school, and Bremen helped unload the children with a slow care born of practice, affection, and a throbbing headache. Scotty emerged, smiling, hands extended to the unseen adult he trusted to be waiting. Tommy Pierson lurched out with knees together and hands pulled up to his chest. Bre-men had to catch him or the frail boy would have fallen face first into the pavement. Teresa jumped down with her usual gleeful cries, imparting inexact but slobberingly en-thusiastic kisses on everyone who touched her. Robby remained seated after the others had exited. It took both Bremen and Smitty to get the boy out of the van. Robby did not resist; he was simply a mass of pliable but unresponsive fat. The boy's head tilted back in a dis-turbing way. His tongue lolled first from one corner of the slack mouth and then from the other. The short, pigeon-toed steps had to be coaxed out of him one at a time. Only the familiarity of the short walk to the classroom kept Robby moving at all.

The morning seemed to last forever. It rained before lunch, and for a while it looked as if the swimming would be canceled. Then the sun came out and illuminated the flowerbeds on the front lawn. Bremen watched sunlight dance on the moistened petals of Turk's prize roses and listened to the roar of the lawnmower. He realized that it was going to happen.

After lunch he helped them prepare for departure. The boys needed help getting into their suits, and it saddened Bremen to see pubic hair and a man's penis on the body of someone with a seven-year-old's mind. Tommy would always start masturbating idly until Bremen touched his arm and helped him with the elastic of the suit. Then they were gone, and the hall, which had been filled with squealing children and laughing adults, was si-lent. Bremen watched the blue-and-white van disappear slowly down the drive. Then he turned back to the classroom.

Robby showed no awareness that Bremen had entered the room. The boy looked absurd dressed in a striped, green top and orange shorts that were too tight to button. Bremen thought of a broken, bronze Buddha he had seen once near Osaka. What if this child harbored some deep wisdom born of his long seclusion from the world?

Robby stirred, farted loudly, and resumed his slumped position. Bremen sighed and pulled up a chair. It was too small. His knees stuck into the air, and he felt ridiculous. He grinned to himself. He would leave that night. Take a bus north. Hitchhike. It would be cooler in the country.

This would not take long. He need not even establish full contact. A one-way mindtouch. It was possible. A few minutes. He could look out the window for Robby, look at a picture book, perhaps put a record on and share the mu-sic. What would the boy make of these new impressions? A gift before leaving. Anonymous. Share nothing else. Better not to send any images of Robby, either. All right. Bremen lowered his mindshield. Immediately he flinched and raised it again. It had been a long time since he had allowed himself to be so vulnerable. The thick, woolly blanket of the mindshield, thickened even further by alcohol, had become natural to him. The sudden surge of background babble—he thought of it as white noise—was abrasive. It was like coming into a glaringly bright room after spending months in a cave. He directed his attention to Robby and lowered his barriers again. He tuned out the neurobabble and looked deeply into Robby's mind.

Nothing.

For a confused second Bremen thought that he had lost the focus of his power. Then he concentrated and was able to pick out the dull, sexual broodings of Turk out in the garden and the preoccupied fragments of Dr. Whilden's thoughts as she settled herself into her Mercedes and checked her stockings for runs. The receptionist was read-ing a novel— The Plague Dogs. Bremen read a few lines with her. It frustrated him that her eyes scanned so slowly. His mouth filled with the syrupy taste of her cherry coughdrop.

Bremen stared intensely at Robby. The boy was breathing asthmatically. His tongue was visible and heav-ily coated. Stray bits of food remained on his lips and cheeks. Bremen narrowed his probe, strengthened it, fo-cused it like a beam of coherent light.

Nothing.

No. Wait. There was—what?—an absence of some-thing. There was a hole in the field of mindbabble where Robby's thoughts should have been. Bremen realized that he was confronting the strongest mindshield he had ever encountered. Even Gail had not been able to concentrate a barrier of that incredible tightness. For a second Bremen was deeply impressed, even shaken, and then he realized the cause of it. Robby's mind was damaged. Entire seg-ments were probably inactive. With so few senses to rely on and such limited awareness, it was little wonder that the boy's consciousness—what there was of it—had turned inward. What at first seemed to Bremen to be a powerful mindshield was nothing more than a tight ball of intro-spection going beyond autism. Robby was truly alone.

Bremen was still shaken enough to pause a minute and take a few deep breaths. When he resumed, it was with even more care, feeling along the negative boundaries of the mindshield like a man groping along a rough wall in the dark. Somewhere there had to be an opening.

There was. Not an opening so much as a soft spot—a resilience set amidst the stone. Bremen half-perceived the flutter of underlying thoughts, much as a pedestrian senses the movement of trains in a subway under the pavement. He concentrated on building the strength of the probe until he felt his shirt beginning to soak with sweat. His vision and hearing were beginning to dim in the singleminded ex-ertion of his effort. No matter. Once initial contact was made, he would relax and slowly open the channels of sight and sound.

He felt the shield give a bit, still elastic but sinking slightly under his unrelenting pressure. He concentrated until the veins stood out in his temples. Unknown to him-self, he was grimacing, neck muscles knotting with the strain. The shield bent. Bremen's probe was a solid ram battering a tight, gelatinous doorway. It bent further. He concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulver-ize bricks, to halt birds in their flight.

The shield continued to bend. Bremen leaned forward as into a strong wind. There was only the concentrated force of his will. Suddenly there was a ripping, a rush of warmth, a falling forward. Bremen lost his balance, flailed his arms, opened his mouth to yell.

His mouth was gone.

He was falling. Tumbling. He had a distant, confused glimpse of his own body writhing in the grip of an epilep-tic seizure. Then he was falling again. Falling into silence. Falling into nothing.

Nothing.

Bremen was inside. Beyond. Was diving through lay-ers of slow thermals. Colorless pinwheels tumbled in three dimensions. Spheres of black collapsed outward. Blinded him. There were waterfalls of touch, rivulets of scent, a thin line of balance blowing in a silent wind.

Supported by a thousand hands—touching, exploring, fingers in the mouth, palms along the chest, sliding along the belly, cupping the penis, moving on. He was buried. He was underwater. Rising in the blackness. But he could not breathe. His arms began to move. Palms flailed against the viscous current. Up. He was buried in sand. He flailed and kicked. He moved up-wards, pulled on by a vacuum that gripped his head in a vise. The substance shifted. Compacted, pressed in by a thousand unseen hands, he was propelled through the constricting aperture. His head broke the surface. He opened his mouth to scream, and the air rushed into his chest like water filling a drowning man. The scream went on and on. ME!

Bremen awoke on a broad plain. There was no sky. Pale, peach-colored light diffused everything. The ground was hard and scaled into separate orange segments which receded to infinity. There was no horizon. The land was cracked and serrated like a floodplain during a drought. Above him were levels of peachlit crystal. Bremen felt that it was like being in the basement of a clear plastic skyscraper. An empty one. He lay on his back and looked up through endless stories of crystallized emptiness. He sat up. His skin felt as if it had been toweled with sandpaper. He was naked. He rubbed his hand across his stomach, touched his pubic hair, found the scar on his knee from the motorcycle accident when he was seven-teen. A wave of dizziness rolled through him when he stood upright.

He walked. His bare feet found the smooth plates warm. He had no direction and no destination. Once he had walked a mile on the Bonneville Salt Flats just before sunset. It was like that. Bremen walked. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. When he finally stopped, it was in a place no different from any other. His head hurt. He lay back and imagined himself as a bottom-dwelling sea creature looking up through layers of shifting currents. The peach-colored light bathed him in warmth. His body was radiant. He shut his eyes against the light and slept.

He sat up suddenly, with nostrils flaring, ears actually twitching with the strain of trying to pinpoint a half-heard sound. Darkness was total.

Something was moving in the night.

Bremen crouched in the blackness and tried to filter out the sound of his own ragged breathing. His glandular system reverted to programming a million years old. His fists clenched, his eyes rolled uselessly in their sockets, and his heart raced. Something was moving in the night.

He felt it nearby. He felt the power of it. It was huge, and it had no trouble finding its way in the darkness. The thing was near him, above him. Bremen felt the force of its blind gaze. He kneeled on the cold ground and hugged himself into a ball. Something touched him.

Bremen fought down the impulse to scream. He was caught in a giant's hand—something rough and huge and not a hand at all. It lifted him. Bremen felt the power of it through the pressure, the pain in his ribs. The thing could crush him easily. Again he felt the sense of being viewed, inspected, weighed on some unseen balance. He had the naked, helpless, but somehow reassuring feeling one has while lying on the X-ray table, knowing that invis-ible beams are passing through you, searching for any malignancy, probing.

Something set him down.

Bremen heard no sound but sensed great footsteps re-ceding. A weight lifted from him. He sobbed. Eventually he uncurled and stood up. He called into the blackness, but the sound of his voice was tiny and lost and he was not even sure whether he had heard it at all.

The sun rose. Bremen's eyes fluttered open, stared into the distant brilliance, and then closed again before the fact registered fully in his mind. The sun rose. He was sitting on grass. A prairie of soft, knee-high grass went off to the horizon in all directions. Bremen pulled a strand, stripped it, and sucked on the sweet mar-row. It reminded him of childhood afternoons. He began walking.

The breeze was warm. It stirred the grass and set up a soft sighing, which helped to ease the headache that still throbbed behind his eyes. The walking pleased him. He contented himself with the feel of grass bending under his bare feet and the play of sunlight and wind on his body.

By early afternoon he realized that he was walking to-ward a smudge on the horizon. By late afternoon the smudge had resolved itself into a line of trees. Shortly before sunset he entered the edge of the forest. The trees were the stately elms and oaks of his Pennsylvania boy-hood. Bremen's long shadow moved ahead of him as he moved deeper into the forest.

For the first time he felt fatigue and thirst begin to work on him. His tongue was heavy, swollen with dryness. He moved leadenly through the lengthening shadows, oc-casionally checking the visible patches of sky for any sign of clouds. It was while he was looking up that he almost stumbled into the pond. Inside a protective ring of weeds and reeds lay the circle of water. A heavily laden cherry tree sent roots down the bank. Bremen took the last few steps forward, expecting the water to disappear as he threw himself into it.

It was waist-deep and cold as ice.

It was just after sunrise that she came. He spotted the movement immediately upon awakening. Not believing, he stood still, just another shadow in the shade of the trees. She moved hesitantly with the tentative step of the meek or the barefoot. The tasseled sawgrass brushed at her thighs. Bremen watched with a clarity amplified by the rich, horizontal sweeps of morning light. Her body seemed to glow. Her breasts, the left ever so slightly fuller than the right, bobbed gently with each high step. Her black hair was cut short.

She paused in the light. Moved forward again. Bre-men's eyes dropped to her strong thighs, and he watched as her legs parted and closed with the heart-stopping inti-macy of the unobserved. She was much closer now, and Bremen could make out the delicate shadows along her fine ribcage, the pale, pink circles of areolae, and the spreading bruise along the inside of one arm.

Bremen stepped out into the light. She stopped, arms rising across her upper body in a second's instinctive movement, then moved toward him quickly. She opened her arms to him. He was filled with the clean scent of her hair. Skin slid across skin. Their hands moved across mus-cle, skin, the familiar terrain of vertebrae. Both were sob-bing, speaking incoherently. Bremen dropped to one knee and buried his face between her breasts. She bent slightly and cradled his head with her fingers. Not for a second did they relax the pressure binding them together.

"Why did you leave me?" he muttered against her skin. "Why did you go away?" Gail said nothing. Her tears fell into his hair and her hands tightened against his back. Wordlessly she kneeled with him in the high grass.

Together they passed out of the forest just as the morn-ing mists were burning away. In the early light the grass-covered hills gave the impression of being part of a tanned, velvety human torso, which they could reach out and touch. They spoke softly, occasionally intertwining fingers. Each had discovered that to attempt telepathic contact meant inviting the blinding headaches that had plagued both of them at first. So they talked. And they touched. And twice before the day was over, they made love in the high, soft grass with only the golden eye of the sun look-ing down on them.

Late in the afternoon they crossed a rise and looked past a small orchard at a vertical glare of white.

"It's the farm!" cried Gail, with wonder in her voice. "How can that be?" Bremen felt no surprise. His equilibrium remained as they approached the tall old building. The saggy barn they had used as a garage was also there. The driveway still needed new gravel, but now it went nowhere, for there was no highway at the end of it. A hundred yards of rusted wire fence that used to border the road now terminated in the high grass.

Gail stepped up on the front porch and peered in the window. Bremen felt like a trespasser or a weekend house browser who had found a home that might or might not still be lived in. Habit brought them around to the back door. Gail gingerly opened the outer screen door and jumped a bit as the hinge squeaked.

"Sorry," Bremen said. "I know I promised to oil that." It was cool inside and dark. The rooms were as they had left them. Bremen poked his head into his study long enough to see his papers still lying on the oak desk and a long-forgotten transform still chalked on the blackboard. Upstairs, afternoon sunlight was falling from the skylight he had wrestled to install that distant September. Gail went from room to room, making small noises of appreciation, more often just touching things gently. The bedroom was as orderly as ever, with the blue blanket pulled tight and tucked under the mattress and her grandmother's patch-work quilt folded across the foot of the bed.

They fell asleep on the cool sheets. Occasionally a wisp of breeze would billow the curtains. Gail mumbled in her sleep, reaching out to touch him frequently. When Bre-men awoke, it was almost dark, that late, lingering twilight of early summer. There was a sound downstairs.

He lay without moving for a long while. The air was thick and still, the silence tangible. Then came another sound.

Bremen left the bed without waking Gail. She was curled on her side with one hand lifted to her cheek, the pillow moist against her lips. Bremen walked barefoot down the wooden stairs. He slipped into his study and carefully opened the lower-right-hand drawer. It was there under the empty folders he had laid atop it. He removed the rags from the drawer.

The .38 Smith and Wesson smelled of oil and looked as new as it had the day his brother-in-law had given it to him. Bremen checked the chambers. The bullets lay fat and heavy, like eggs in a nest. The roughened grip was firm in his hand, the metal cool. Bremen smiled ruefully at the absurdity of what he was doing, but kept the weapon in his hand when the kitchen screen door slammed again. He made no sound as he stepped from the hallway to the kitchen door. It was very dim, but his eyes had adapted. From where he stood he could make out the pale white phantom of the refrigerator. Its recycling pump chunked on while he stood there. Holding the revolver down at his side, Bremen stepped onto the cool tile of the kitchen floor.

The movement startled him, and the gun rose an inch or so before he relaxed. Gernisavien, the tough-minded lit-tle calico, crossed the floor to brush against his legs, paced back to the refrigerator, looked up at him meaningfully, then crossed back to brush against trim. Bremen kneeled to rub her neck absently. The pistol looked idiotic in his clenched hand. He loosened his grip.

The moon was rising by the time they had a late din-ner. The steaks had come from the freezer in the basement, the ice-cold beers from the refrigerator, and there had been several bags of charcoal left in the garage. They sat out back near the old pump while the steaks sizzled on the grill. Gernisavien had been well fed earlier but crouched expectantly at the foot of one of the big, old wooden lawn chairs. Both of them had slipped into clothes—Bremen into his favorite pair of cotton slacks and his light blue workshirt and Gail into the loose, white cotton dress she often wore on trips. The sounds were the same they had heard from this backyard so many times before: crickets, night birds from the orchard, the variations of frog sounds from the distant stream, an occasional flutter of sparrows in the outbuildings.

Bremen served the steaks on paper plates. Their knives made crisscross patterns on the white. They had just the steaks and a simple salad from the garden, fresh radishes and onions on the side.

Even with the three-quarter moon rising, the stars were incredibly clear. Bremen remembered the night they had lain out in the hammock and waited for Skylab to float across the sky like a windblown ember. He realized that the stars were even clearer tonight because there were no reflected lights from Philadelphia or the tollway to dim their glory.

Gail sat back before the meal was finished. Where are we, Jerry? The mindtouch was gentle. It did not bring on the blinding headaches.

Bremen took a sip of Budweiser. "What's wrong with just being home, kiddo?" There's nothing wrong with being home. But where are we?

Bremen concentrated on turning a radish in his fingers. It had tasted salty, sharp, and cool.

What is this place? Gail looked toward the dark line of trees at the edge of the orchard. Fireflies winked against the blackness.

Gail, what is the last thing you can remember?

"I remember dying." The words hit Bremen squarely in the solar plexus. For a moment he could not speak or frame his thoughts.

Gail went on. "We've never believed in an afterlife, Jerry." Hypocritical fundamentalist parents. Mother's drunken sessions of weeping over the Bible. "I mean ... I don't ... How can we be..."

"No," said Bremen, putting his dish on the arm of the chair and leaning forward.

"There may be an explanation."

Where to begin? The lost years, Florida, the hot streets of the city, the day school for retarded blind children. Gail's eyes widened as she looked directly at this period of his life. She sensed his mindshield, but did not press to see the things he withheld. Robby. A moment's contact. Per-haps playing a record. Falling. He paused to take a long swallow of beer. Insects cho-rused. The house glowed pale in the moonlight.

Where are we, Jerry?

"What do you remember about awakening here, Gail?"

They had already shared images, but trying to put them into words sharpened the memories. "Darkness," she said. "Then a soft light. Rocking. Being rocked. Holding and being held. Walking. Finding you." Bremen nodded. He lifted the last piece of steak and savored the burnt charcoal taste of it. It's obvious we're with Robby. He shared images for which there were no ad-equate words. Waterfalls of touch. Entire landscapes oi scent. A movement of power in the dark.

With Robby, Gail's thought echoed. ????????? In his mind. "How?" The cat had jumped into his lap. He stroked it idly and set it down. Gernisavien immediately raised her tail and turned her back on him. "You've read a lot of stories about telepaths. Have you ever read a completely satisfy-ing explanation of how telepathy works? Why some peo-ple have it and others don't? Why some people's thoughts are loud as bullhorns and others' almost imperceptible?" Gail paused to think. The cat allowed herself to be rubbed behind the ears. "Well, there was a really good book—no, that only came close to describing what it felt like. No. They usually describe it as some sort of radio or TV broadcast. You know that, Jerry. We've talked about it enough."

"Yeah," Bremen said. Despite himself, he was already trying to describe it to Gail. His mindtouch interfered with the words. Images cascaded like printouts from an over-worked terminal. Endless Schrodinger curves, their plots speaking in a language purer than speech. The collapse of probability curves in binomial progression.

"Talk," Gail said. He marveled that after all the years of sharing his thoughts she still did not always see through his eyes.

"Do you remember my last grant project?" he asked.

"The wavefront stuff," she said.

"Yeah. Do you remember what it was about?"

"Holograms. You showed me Goldmann's work at the university," she said. She seemed a soft, white blur in the dim light. "I didn't understand most of it, and I got sick shortly after that."

"It was based on holographic research," Bremen inter-rupted quickly, "but Goldmann's research group was working up an analog of human consciousness ... of thought."

"What does that have to do with ... with this?" Gail asked. Her hand made a graceful movement that encom-passed the yard, the night, and the bright bowl of stars above them.

"It might help," Bremen said. "The old theories of mental activity didn't explain things like stroke effects, generalized learning, and memory function, not to mention the act of thinking itself."

"And Goldmann's theory does?"

"It's not really a theory yet, Gail. It was a new ap-proach, using both recent work with holograms and a line of analysis developed in the Thirties by a Russian mathe-matician. That's where I was called in. It was pretty sim-ple, really. Goldmann's group was doing all sorts of complicated EEG studies and scans. I'd take their data, do a Fourier analysis of them, and then plug it all into various modifications of Schrodinger's wave equation to see whether it worked as a standing wave."

"Jerry, I don't see how this helps."

"Goddamn it, Gail, it did work. Human thought can be described as a standing wavefront. Sort of a superhologram. Or, maybe more precisely, a hologram containing a few million smaller holograms."

Gail was leaning forward. Even in the darkness Bre-men could make out the frown lines of attention that ap-peared whenever he spoke to her of his work. Her voice came very softly. "Where does that leave the mind, Jerry ... the brain?" It was his turn to frown slightly. "I guess the best an-swer is that the Greeks and the religious nuts were right to separate the two," he said. "The brain could be viewed as kind of a ... well, electrochemical generator and interfer-ometer all in one. But the mind ... ah, the mind is some-thing a lot more beautiful than that lump of gray matter." He was thinking in terms of equations, sine waves dancing to Schrodinger's elegant tune.

"So there is a soul that can survive death?" Gail asked. Her voice had taken on the slightly defensive, slightly querulous tone that always entered in when she discussed religious ideas.

"Hell, no," said Bremen. He was a little irritated at having to think in words once again. "If Goldmann was right and the personality is a complex wavefront, sort of a series of low-energy holograms interpreting reality, then the personality certainly couldn't survive brain death. The template would be destroyed as well as the holographic generator."

"So where does that leave us?" Gail's voice was al-most inaudible. Bremen leaned forward and took her hand. It was cold.

"Don't you see why I got interested in this whole line of research? I thought it might offer a way of describing our ... uh ... ability."

Gail moved over and sat next to him in the broad, wooden chair. His arm went around her, and he could feel the cool skin of her upper arm. Suddenly a meteorite lanced from the zenith to the south, leaving the briefest of retinal echoes.

"And?" Gail's voice was very soft.

"It's simple enough," said Bremen. "When you visual-ize human thought as a series of standing wavefronts cre-ating interference patterns that can be stored and propagated in holographic analogs, it begins to make sense."

"Uh-huh."

"It does. It means that for some reason our minds are resonant not only to wave patterns that we initiate but to transforms that others generate."

"Yes," said Gail, excited now, gripping his hand tightly. "Remember when we shared impressions of the talent just after we met? We both decided that it would be impossible to explain mindtouch to anyone who hadn't ex-perienced it. It would be like describing colors to a blind person..." She halted and looked around her.

"Okay," said Bremen. "Robby. When I contacted him, I tapped into a closed system. The poor kid had almost no data to use in constructing a model of the real world. What little information he did have was mostly painful. So for sixteen years he had happily gone about building his own universe. My mistake was in underestimating, hell, never even thinking about, the power he might have in that world. He grabbed me, Gail. And with me, you."

The wind came up a bit and moved the leaves of the orchard. The soft rustling had a sad, end-of-summer sound to it.

"All right," she said after a while, "that explains how you got here. How about me?

Am I a figment of your imagination, Jerry?"

Bremen felt her shiver. Her skin was like ice. He took her hand and roughly rubbed some warmth back into it. "Come on, Gail, think. You weren't just a memory to me. For over six years we were essentially one person with two bodies. That's why when

... that's why I went a little crazy, tried to shut my mind down completely for a couple of years. You were in my mind. But my ego sense, or whatever the hell keeps us sane and separate from the bab-ble of all those minds, kept telling me that it was only the memory of you. You were a figment of my imagination ... the way we all are. Jesus, we were both dead until a blind, deaf, retarded kid, a goddamn vegetable, ripped us out of one world and offered us another one in its place." They sat for a minute. It was Gail who broke the si-lence. "But how can it seem so real?"

Bremen stirred and accidentally knocked his paper plate off the arm of the chair. Gernisavien jumped to one side and stared reproachfully at them. Gail nudged the cat's fur with the toe of her sandal. Bremen squeezed his beer can until it dented in, popped back out.

"You remember Chuck Gilpen, the guy who dragged me to that party in Drexel Hill?

The last I heard he was working with the Fundamental Physics Group out at the Lawrence Berkely Labs."

"So?"

"So for the past few years they've been hunting down all those smaller and smaller particles to get a hook on what's real. And when they get a glimpse of reality on its most basic and pervasive level, you know what they get?" Bremen took one last swig from the beer can. "They get a series of equations that show standing wavefronts, not too different from the squiggles and jiggles Goldmann used to send me." Gail took a deep breath, let it out. Her question was al-most lost as the wind rose again and stirred the tree branches. "Where is Robby? When do we see his world?"

"I don't know," Bremen replied. He was frowning without knowing it. "He seems to be allowing us to define what should be real. Don't ask me why. Maybe he's enjoy-ing a peek at a new universe. Maybe he can't do anything about it." They sat still for a few more minutes. Gernisavien brushed up against them, irritated that they insisted on sit-ting out in the cold and dark. Bremen kept his mindshield raised sufficiently to keep from sharing the information that his sister had written a year ago to say that the little calico had been run over and killed in New York. Or that a family of Vietnamese had bought the farmhouse and had already added new rooms. Or that he had carried the .38 police special around for two years, waiting to use it on himself.

"What do we do now, Jerry?"

We go to bed. Bremen took her hand and led her into their home.

Bremen dreamed of fingernails across velvet, cold tile along one cheek, and wool blankets against sunburned skin. He watched with growing curiosity as two people made love on a golden hillside. He floated through a white room where white figures moved in a silence broken only by the heartbeat of a machine. He was swimming and could feel the tug of inexorable planetary forces in the pull of the riptide. He was just able to resist the deadly current by using all of his energy, but he could feel himself tiring, could feel the tide pulling him out to deeper water. Just as the waves closed over him he vented a final shout of de-spair and loss.

He cried out his own name.

He awoke with the shout still echoing in his mind. The details of the dream fractured and fled before he could grasp them. He sat up quickly in bed. Gail was gone. He had taken two steps toward the stairway before he heard her voice calling to him from the side yard. He re-turned to the window.

She was dressed in a blue sundress and was waving her arms at him. By the time he was downstairs she had thrown half a dozen items into the picnic basket and was boiling water to make iced tea.

"Come on, sleepyhead. I have a surprise for you!"

"I'm not sure we need any more surprises," Bremen mumbled.

" This one we do," she said, and she was upstairs, hum-ming and thrashing around in the closet.

She led them, Gernisavien following reluctantly, to a trail that led off in the same general direction as the high-way that had once been in front of the house. It led up through pasture to the east and over the rise. They carried the picnic basket between them, Bremen repeatedly asking for clues, Gail repeatedly denying him any. They crossed the rise and looked down to where the path ended. Bremen dropped the basket into the grass. In the valley where the Pennsylvania Turnpike once had been was an ocean.

"Holy shit!" Bremen exclaimed softly.

It was not the Atlantic. At least not the New Jersey At-lantic that Bremen knew. The seacoast looked more like the area near Mendocino where he had taken Gail on their honeymoon. Far to the north and south stretched broad beaches and high cliffs. Tall breakers broke against black rock and white sand. Far out to sea, the gulls wheeled and pivoted.

"Holy shit!" Bremen repeated.

They picnicked on the beach. Gernisavien stayed be-hind to hunt insects in the dune grass. The air smelled of salt and sea and summer breezes. It seemed they had a thousand miles of shoreline to themselves.

Gail stood and kicked off her dress. She was wearing a one-piece suit underneath. Bremen threw his head back and laughed. "Is that why you came back? To get a suit? Afraid the lifeguards would throw you out?"

She kicked sand at him and ran to the water. Three strides in and she was swimming. Bremen could see from the way her shoulders hunched that the water was freez-ing.

"Come on in!" she called, laughing. "The water's fine!" He began walking toward her.

The blast came from the sky, the earth, the sea. It knocked Bremen down and thrust Gail's head underwater. She flailed and splashed to make the shallows, crawled gasping from the receding surf.

NO!!!

Wind roared around them and threw sand a hundred feet in the air. The sky twisted, wrinkled like a tangled sheet on the line, changed from blue to lemon-yellow to gray. The sea rolled out in a giant slack tide and left dry, dead land where it receded. The earth pitched and shifted around them. Lightning flashed along the horizon. When the buckling stopped, Bremen ran to where Gail lay on the sand, lifted her with a few stern words.

The dunes were gone, the cliffs were gone, the sea had disappeared. Where it had been now stretched a dull ex-panse of salt flat. The sky continued to shift colors down through darker and darker grays. The sun seemed to be ris-ing again in the eastern desert. No. The light was moving. Something was crossing the wasteland. Something was coming to them.

Gail started to break away, but Bremen held her tight. The light moved across the dead land. The radiance grew, shifted, sent out streamers that made both of them shield their eyes. The air smelled of ozone and the hair on their arms stood out. Bremen found himself clutching tightly to Gail and leaning toward the apparition as toward a strong wind. Their shadows leaped out behind them. The light struck at their bodies like the shock wave of a bomb blast. Through their fingers, they watched while the radiant figure approached. A double form became visible through the blaze of corona. It was a human figure astride a huge beast. If a god had truly come to Earth, this then was the form he would have chosen. The beast he rode was featureless, but besides light it gave off a sense of ... warmth? Softness?

Robby was before them, high on the back of his teddy bear.

TOO STRONG CANNOT KEEP

He was not used to language but was making the ef-fort. The thoughts struck them like electrical surges to the brain. Gail dropped to her knees, but Bremen lifted her to her feet.

Bremen tried to reach out with his mind. It was no use. Once at Haverford he had gone with a promising student to the coliseum, where they were setting up for a rock con-cert. He had been standing in front of a scaffolded bank of speakers when the amplifiers were tested. It was a bit like that.

They were standing on a flat, reticulated plain. There were no horizons. White banks of curling fog were ap-proaching from all directions. The only light came from the Apollo-like figure before them. Bremen turned his head to watch the fog advance. What it touched, it erased.

"Jerry, what..." Gail's voice was close to hysteria. Robby's thoughts struck them again with physical force. He had given up any attempt at language, and the images cascaded over them. The visual images were vaguely distorted, miscolored, and tinged with an aura of wonder and newness. Bremen and his wife reeled from their impact.

A WHITE ROOM ... WHITE

THE HEARTBEAT OF A MACHINE

SUNLIGHT ON SHEETS

THE STING OF A NEEDLE

VOICES ... WHITE SHAPES MOVING

A GREAT WIND BLOWING

A CURRENT PULLING, PULLING,