Maddie and I were getting ready to grill a couple of trout in her backyard.  The evening sun lit the tops of the rounded foothills of the Berkshires, there were only a few small clouds in the sky, the mosquitoes hadn’t come out yet.  Perfect, really.  Still, we were being careful with each other.  Earlier that day I’d got a surprise call from my old friend Rob, who was in New York, and I told him I might come down to see him while he was in the city.  Maddie knew Rob had offered me a job with his new outdoor company in Utah and with my track record, what was to keep me from bolting from the pretty little town of Runyon, Connecticut, where I’d lived for just over a year?  I suppose it was a reasonable suspicion on her part and I won’t deny that the prospect excited me, for a while.  But no, I told her truthfully, I had no interest in taking up Rob’s offer; it would just be nice to see an old friend from my days on the fire line.

Apparently I wasn’t entirely convincing.  Maddie seemed a little too intent as she went about making a salad.  “Nice evening,” I observed neutrally, and she barely nodded.  I put the glistening fish onto the foil, their open insides filled with lemon, shallots and thyme, I sprinkled them with salt and pepper, then closed the foil over them.  “These babies are looking good,” I said, doing my best imitation of a locally popular TV chef, and this time she smiled.  I asked her if it was OK to put the fish on the grill.  “Sure, go ahead, Charlie,” she said (Charlie was the chef’s name) and took her glass of wine back to her chair on the grass.  I’d heard the loosening in her voice, for which I was grateful.  Maybe it was the smell of the fish cooking that did the trick, the pale column of smoke rising up against the background of lush green around us.  As the crinkled foil shone on the grill I was determined to show her that this time I could be trusted.  It was an old problem for me.

But it wasn’t just me who carried baggage.  Maddie could fall into sudden moods without any of my help.  It was a phenomenon I called Hurricane George.  Her late husband had been dead for almost four years but he could still make his presence felt, especially on some kind of anniversary.  “I’ll never love anyone the way I loved George,” she told me straight up in the first days of our relationship.  OK, I figured, she’s setting up boundaries, she doesn’t want to give me any false hopes, I get it.  I’m human, though, and the extent of the dead guy’s hold on her could sometimes piss me off.  Weren’t you supposed to go through the stages of grief and get over things?  But who was I kidding?  More than most people, I knew that, for all the neat theories about stages leading to “closure,” things are rarely that simple.

I’d picked up the story of their life together in bits and pieces.  George was Chinese-American, a medical researcher from San Francisco.  Handsome, very smart, “with the most seductive voice you’ll ever hear.”  And, wouldn’t you know, a great dancer, to boot.  Maddie, who’s a nurse, was in her late twenties when they met in Colorado, George was a few years older.  On their first date they went white-water canoeing and their boat turned over.  “George had this wonderful laugh,” she told me.  “I think he won me with that laugh.  Here I was, drenched and shivering, and so was he.  We’d come within an inch of our lives—I was scared and angry, and then I looked at him laughing and suddenly what happened to us seemed hilariously funny.”

They had, according to Maddie, an idyllic few years in Colorado.  “I’d never thought I could be that happy,” she said, looking off into the distance.  “That kind of happiness, it just didn’t seem like me.  But we were happy, oh, we were.”  She didn’t go into detail, but I had no trouble imagining the young couple suddenly caught up in a lustful urge that overturns their plans for dinner and results in late-night take-out.  That much I guessed from the curve at the corners of her mouth when she said George’s outward manner could fool some people into thinking he was all reserve and politeness.

The brain tumor that killed him brought an abrupt end to all their plans but her admiration for George only grew as he lived out his final days.  He was no man of stone, clenching his teeth and shutting others out of the athletic rigors of his dying.  As much as was possible, she said, he remained himself.  “There was a kind of grace.  That’s the only word I can use for it.”  At times it even seemed as if he were trying not to make those who’d survive him overly uncomfortable, but the manner of his going only sharpened the ache of his loss.

“He was smart, funny, warm and considerate.  He was a nice man who was also the most interesting person I’ve ever known.”

What can you do with a figure like that looming in the background?  “I wish I’d have had a chance to meet him,” I told her, though what I really meant was that I wished I’d never heard of the guy.

George was the past, I wanted to say.  We should concentrate on the future.  Easier said than done, though.  Here we were, preparing to have dinner in this pleasant green space where we looked out at the low mountains on the horizon, with the wonderful smell of cooking fish on the air—what more could you ask for?  And I was thinking about a dead guy.  But the fact was, though his sudden presence could be disturbing at times, I’d got used to George over the course of my time with Maddie.  He was part of her history and I knew it was better to accept this ghost than to try to chase him away.

In truth, Maddie and I were both damaged goods.  The shadow of her marriage never entirely left her and I wondered if it ever would.  As for myself, with a string of jobs—driving a cab, delivering mail, fighting fires–that seemed to lead nowhere, I had what would look to some people like the resume of a loser.  Still, each of us was determined to make this work.

“Hey, Mister,” Maddie said.  “Can I get a refill?”

It was a welcome jolt back to the present.  Smiling, she held out her glass and the sun traced the fine hair on her forearm.  As I poured the wine I knew we were going to be OK.

Back at the grill, I heard the pop-pop-popping of Kyle Ryder’s helicopter moving toward his country house, a spectacular mansion hidden away among the trees that was built in the 1920s for a movie star who called it “Eagle’s Nest.”  Modeled on an English manor (the actor’s specialty was playing dispossessed noblemen determined to win back the lands and titles that were rightfully theirs), it was set among a thousand acres of pines, hemlock and maple.  The town of Runyon had experienced a flash boil of excitement and speculation a couple of years earlier when the news got out that the place, unoccupied for more than a decade, had been bought by Ryder, so frequently referred to as “the Manhattan real estate mogul” that it seemed like an official title, but once his plans to build a large retirement village in the center of town were disclosed, the residents of Runyon split into warring camps.

Kyle Ryder was someone Maddie and I despised.  “If that guy gets his way,”  I said, “he’ll have us dress in peasant outfits for the entertainment of his guests as he flies them to his castle.”  We listened as the sound of the helicopter was lost somewhere among the forested slopes.  “But then,” I added, “the Indians might get us first.”  There’d been a buzz in town recently about a group of Native Americans who’d decided to petition the government for recognition as the Nashatock tribe, presumably in order to build a casino.  Though people who knew about these things dismissed the claim as a long shot, at best, there’d been a shiver of fear in Runyon.

Maddie shook her head.  “To some folks an Indian takeover would be like the fall of Rome.”

“Don’t laugh,” I said.  “I can see it all too clearly: Fruchbom’s will be shut down and there’ll be no place to buy over-priced pastries.  And what if the Louvain Chocolaterie had to leave town, along with the fancy clothing stores and art galleries?  All the rich New Yorkers would have to find someplace else.  I guess the silver lining is, I could always get a job in valet parking at one of the new casinos.”

Truly, both of us were worried as Hell about what was going to happen to the town we lived in.  With the ever-rising real estate prices and the threats from developers like Ryder, we might soon find ourselves on the outside looking in, which was why we’d joined the group that was trying to block his venture.  In the meantime, though, what could you do but laugh about it?

Maddie lifted her glass.  “Here’s to Runyon as we know it, however brief its days may be.”   If she was still upset about my possible visit to Rob, she was no longer showing it.  I took a few quick steps and gave her a peck on the brow.

“Mmm,” she said.  “What was that for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.  “General principles, I guess.”  Just now I felt like a very lucky man.  What were the chances, after all my past romantic misadventures, that someone like Maddie was going to cross my path?  The two of us knew enough about things not working out to appreciate something good when we had it.

The trout was delicious and we lingered at the picnic table, opened another bottle of sauvignon blanc, but when the mosquitoes showed up it seemed smarter to have coffee indoors.  A rich aroma filled the little house she’d inherited from her grandmother as Maddie ground fresh beans and we waited patiently for the coffee to drip through, not rushing a thing.  All the while I was aware of the delights to follow, and my rising excitement was enhanced by the dutiful observance of ritual: the slow sipping of coffee, followed by washing of the dishes.  Finally, when the last dish was in the rack, Maddie wiped her hands dry.  “Well,” she said with not quite convincing casualness, “that’s that.”

Then all at once we were in the bedroom, where the measured rhythms gave way completely, and we tore at each other, urgent and hungry.  Skin slid against skin, our breath came fast.  Time expanded, then contracted, stretched languidly, made sudden leaps and bent back on itself.  When I looked at the glowing digits that said 11:05, I couldn’t believe it had been so many hours since I’d heard Ryder’s helicopter thudding on the horizon.  I lay awake in Maddie’s bed, breathing in the familiar smell of her body as she slept beside me.  “You and I, we’ve got something here,” I whispered to her in the dark, my weight pressed down on her softness, willing my urgent message to break through the barriers of flesh and history that separated us.  “Do you know what I mean?” I kept saying, as if the simple sequence of words was a sorcerer’s powerful incantation.  “We have to make this work.”  What I was trying to tell her was that she’d saved my life, that I was sure we had a story to tell together.

I got  out of bed and went to the kitchen, where I drew myself a glass of water from the sink.  When I put the glass down, I listened to the house sounds.  I was staying tonight, but when the weekend was over, I’d be returning to my place.  To this point Maddie had been as skittish as I was about coming to a more permanent arrangement.  And yet, both of us knew it couldn’t continue this way forever, that something was going to have to happen, one way or another.

My skin prickled with the sudden sense that time was accelerating, carrying me toward decisions that could be no longer put off.  What was I going to do, work in the Book Nook the rest of my life?  I’d be forty before I knew it.  I had to admit that the battle against Ryder had excited me, that I now had a significant stake in what happened here.  I was ready for something.  It was getting tougher to put up with the miseries of being alone, waking up at night and catching a sudden glimpse of a weary stranger in the bathroom mirror.

“Maybe the two of us know too much about each other,” Maddie said once when things were pretty rocky between us.  “There’s no way we can hide our weaknesses from each other.  We’re wounded,” she said, “and the wounded are the ones that get picked off first.”

“Everybody’s wounded,” I said.  “At least we’re lucky enough to know it.”

“Some luck,” she said.

“You don’t hear me complaining,” I said.

I’d already decided to finesse that meeting with Rob–I had more important decisions to deal with closer to home–but I regretted having to pass up the opportunity to shoot the shit with him about old times when we were in the forest service, before my knee gave out on me.  In those four years I saw a lot of the country, I met some great people, there was the satisfaction of doing useful work.  It could be tough duty, all right, sliding down from the chopper on the rappelling rope, my heart pounding as I guided my descent under the thud of the rotors until my boots finally hit the uneven ground on the edge of a moving Hell.  When I let go of the rope I’d sometimes feel a momentary sense of abandonment as the chopper made its way back toward the safety of the base.  Even as I readied myself for the work I’d been trained to do, a part of my mind couldn’t keep from imagining how quickly those flames could leap over the tree tops, making the trees crackle menacingly like creatures from a child’s nightmare, and I swallowed hard, breathing in the acrid smoke.

It was exactly the kind of thing I’d want to talk about with Alec but my best friend from Carolina days had been unavailable since the age of eighteen.

Every now and then, out of the blue, I’d hear the sound of his voice, remember a bit of one of our conversations.  Like the time I told him the Zen story about the man who escapes a tiger by clinging to a vine hanging over the edge of a cliff, only to discover other tigers on the ground below and, even more alarmingly, two mice above him gnawing on the vine.  Noticing a wild strawberry growing on the cliff, he reaches out and plucks it.  The punch line, of course, is his recognition that he’d never before realized how sweet a strawberry could taste.

Alec’s response to that little nugget was, “If it was me in that situation I’d be shitting my pants.  I wouldn’t taste a thing.”

Which, I had to admit, would probably have been true of myself as well.  “Yeah, yeah,” I conceded, “but it’s an interesting situation, isn’t it?  I mean metaphorically.”

Alec wasn’t interested in the metaphor, he was still visualizing the scene.  “I’ll bet the sound of those mice’s teeth would be louder than Niagara Falls.”

“Well,” I insisted, “in a way all of life is hanging on to that vine, isn’t it?”

“Come to think of it,” he said, “I’d ditch the strawberry.  It would just add to your weight.”

We’d been smoking a little weed during that conversation, and we talked about all sorts of stuff, like hitchhiking to Alaska and working in a cannery.  Dreams, bullshit.  We were the golden children of adoring parents who expected us to do good and important things.  In the end, both of us wound up seriously disappointing our elders.

The funny thing was that Alec, with his smooth good looks and surface politeness, was the one everybody thought would eventually go into politics and do great things, on the left, of course, someone they’d love to interview on NPR.  He was able to play the role of the good boy, and I was one of the few people aware of his wilder side, like getting the sudden idea to go out to the quarry late one night and jump off the cliffs.  I was usually the one who was hanging back and it was Alec who insisted.  “You’ll never know, will you, until you do it?”

Talk about hanging on to a vine above a bunch of growling tigers.  At least the guy in the Zen story would have a little time to meditate as he chewed on his strawberry.  But, dropping through the night toward something below that could rise up and kill you with as much finality as any tiger, you had little time to think, or even breathe.  Alec was right, though: once you knifed through the surprisingly hard surface of the water and were pulled downward and dreams of drowning swirled noisily around you until at last the grip of gravity was released and you rose, first slowly, then more swiftly and at last burst through the water into the warm night air that you tried to inhale all at once, there was no denying that you were alive.

But thinking about Alec only led in one direction, the night we returned from one of those visits to the quarries.  The experience of having leapt from those cliffs and lived to tell the tale had sent my blood surging, as, I could see, it had Alec’s.  Both of us wanted to hold on to the rush we’d experienced dropping breathless through the cool night air toward the dark water below.  What were we talking about?  Women, sports, our futures?  God knows, it could have been anything.  We were listening to an oldies station and when the Eurthythmics’ “Sweet Dreams  Are Made of This” came on Alec leaned over from the passenger’s seat and turned the volume up to the max.  No doubt each of us had his separate memory of the video of that song with its succession of surreal images, which had blown our minds when each of us first saw it on MTV at the age of ten or so: Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart wearing masks, playing a cello in the rowboat, the two of them lying on a table, still as corpses, the inexplicable animals, but most of all there would have been the vision of the orange-haired crew-cut Annie dressed in a man’s suit and tie, hands gloved, a vampiric dominatrix.  At least that’s what I was seeing.  I remember that as the synthesized bass rhythm pulsated Alec started slashing karate chops to the beat and I joined in by banging the steering wheel as we sang along with Annie in the heavy Carolina night.  Sweet dreams are made of this/Who am I to disagree?/Travel the world and the seven seas.

Later, remembering, I could see it all from a distance, the car gliding through the dark streets of Raleigh, a town notoriously quiet in the loudest of times.  With the radio turned up loud, the two of us singing along, it would have been cacophonous inside that car yet in my memory the sounds were muted as the Toyota drifted in slo-mo toward the traffic light hanging over the street, a giant red moon conjured by the music, beckoning, giving permission as no green light ever did.  What were the chances as we glided into that sodium-lit intersection of North Carolina’s sleepy capital at that late hour that someone else who was truly stoned would be hurtling at top speed into that same space, his twelve-year old Mercury transformed by his drug-induced frenzy into a lethal missile that slammed with a sudden shuddering impact into the passenger’s side of the car, crumpling the metal in an instant, turning the glass into summer frost, yanking the car into an abrupt change of direction that was only halted by a telephone pole on the other side of the street, so that it was a miracle I survived with only cuts and gashes, some bruises and a pair of broken bones while Alec never had a chance and the driver of the Mercury no doubt passed in an instant from a partial state of oblivion to an absolute one without knowing the difference.

It was a speck of time, but it left a permanent mark on me.  It didn’t matter that Harold Ray Jeeter was as guilty as he could be of reckless driving under the influence, a lowlife whose license had already been taken away more than once, and thus a convenient villain, now conveniently dead.  The fact was, if I’d have stopped for that red light as I had on every other occasion in my life, my best friend wouldn’t have died.  Because I drove through that light, whatever their protestations to the contrary, Alec’s parents couldn’t help blaming me for robbing them of their child, and I couldn’t help blaming myself for their subsequent divorce soon after, as I blamed myself for my own parents’ divorce a little later.

Of course, no future fuck-up of mine could top that, though I did my best.  I’d been given a blank check, I sometimes thought, to cover all the subsequent failures of my life.

When I heard the toilet flush I realized that Maddie was awake.  “Hey,” she said.  “Can’t sleep?”  She was wearing her faded blue tee shirt, holding herself by the elbows.

“Oh, I’m OK,” I said.  “What about you?”

“I had a dream,” she said, and laughed to herself, “a memory of something that really happened.  When I was with George.”

All right: George.  “What was it?” I asked her.

“There was nothing to the dream,” she said.  “Just a moment.  But it brought the whole thing back.”

“Brought what back?”

She sighed, as though only now coming fully awake.  “We were driving across the country,” she said “and we were staying in a town in Ohio called Port Clinton.  We stopped there just because I liked the name.  Also because in the guidebook it was called ‘The Walleye Capital of the World,’ which we both thought was kind of campy. ‘Not exactly Paris,’ George said.  ‘We don’t want to get our hopes up.’  The same guidebook called the Great Lakes ‘inland seas.’  Neither of us knew anything about the area and we were curious, since Port Clinton is on the shore of Lake Erie–we could even see the lake from our room.  We loved the idea of an inland sea, which sounded like some kind of secret, so of course we thought of the whole town as our secret.”

As I listened I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of exclusion.  “Sounds like fun,” I said.

Maddie’s grey eyes were wide.  “The thing is,” she said, “there were these bugs, these fishflies.  The man at the desk told us about them when we checked in.  It was the season, he said.  He pointed to some stiff brown shapes on the screen window.  ‘ In the evening you’ll see them all over,’ he said. ‘ The fish go crazy when the bugs show up.  To them it’s like manna from heaven,’ he said.  And George, who was remembering that this was the walleye capital of the world, said, in his best fisherman’s voice, ‘Those walleyes will sure be jumping after them, I’ll bet.’

“Was George much of a fisherman?” I asked.

Maddie laughed.  “He wouldn’t know a walleye from a wallflower.”  Then she suddenly shifted gears.  “Oh, there’s one other thing I forgot to tell you about, and it’s very important.  Right across the lake there was this squat funnel shape with a plume coming out of the top.”

“A plume?’” I asked.

“Steam,” she said.  “A white cloud.  We asked the man at the desk what it was and he said it was the ‘nucular plant.’  He got very defensive once we mentioned it and he started assuring us that it provided a lot of jobs for people who lived there.  You know, when I heard that, all at once the fun seemed to go out of our trip, our little secret adventure on the inland sea.  George noticed I’d gone quiet and asked me about it back in our room and I told him that the nuclear plant bothered me.  ‘Hey, there’s still a lot to like about this place,’ he said.  And he was right.  There were wide, tree-lined streets in the old part of town, Victorian buildings, all gables and screened porches, that seemed to be dreaming of another time, there were handsome white catamarans that took people out to islands in the lake.  And still, in some part of me deep down inside, I kept thinking about that thing across the lake and its trailing plume.”

When she fell silent I said, “Bummer.”  Then I added, “Still, I’m glad you told me this.”

Suddenly brightening, Maddie said, “But I haven’t got to the best part yet.  That night we went out to dinner—walleye, of course, and when we were done and walked out into the parking lot we saw the most incredible thing: we were suddenly in the middle of a blizzard of bugs.  I mean, it was snowing fishflies.  It was getting dark and the air was full of them, especially around the lights, where they were so thick they made a cloud.  George got really excited.  So did I, but for George it was like some kind of religious experience.  The night air smelled of fish and these bugs were flying all around us, flying into us, landing on our arms, in our hair.  They had long, tapered bodies, translucent wings that caught the light and these sinuous forked tails.  As you walked you could feel them brush against your face, you could hear their bodies crunching underfoot.  There were thousands, maybe millions.”

“I wish I could have seen that,” I said.

Maddie went on as if she hadn’t heard me.  “When you saw how thickly they covered the road, it was easy to imagine cars skidding all over the place, just like what the man at the motel said.  Well, we stood in that parking lot and looked without saying a word.  You could hear the beating of their wings, those fishflies, they just kept coming, in biblical numbers, I swear.  The lake was close by, and the walleyes must have been jumping all over the place, driven crazy by all that manna from heaven.

“When I looked at George I noticed that there were fishflies on his shoulders like epaulettes.  But he was smiling like a man who’d just seen God and was very pleased with what he saw.  He started talking about what a spendthrift the life-force was, ‘or God,’ he said, ‘if you want to call it that.’  Think of it, he said, all those bugs coming alive in this place for a night, living for only a few hours.  Maybe tens of thousands of them actually got eaten by fish, but look at all the extras strewn across the road, stiffening on window screens, way more than were needed just to feed the fish.  So many.  He was actually speechless for a while, and then he said it was as if the sheer number of those bugs was like a message, even a boast.   ‘Look at this, just look at this,’ someone or something is telling us.  ‘There’s a lot more where this comes from.’”

Maddie’s eyes filled and I had no doubt that at the moment she was back in Port Clinton, Ohio witnessing that profusion of living creatures.  With George.  “And that thing across the lake with the plume,” I asked after a while.  “Did you feel better about that?”

She smiled through tears.  “When all those bugs were flying around, I wasn’t thinking about it.”

I took her hand and closed my eyes, trying to enter the scene, but what I didn’t tell her was that when I saw that blizzard of insects I didn’t have anything like the kind of reaction George had, I didn’t think of the plenitude of life but of the vast amorphous clouds of living things whose only purpose, if any, during their brief existence, was to feed other creatures.  So many, such an extravagance of death!  It was a much less friendly picture of the universe and it made me hug Maddie hard.  You can’t blow this chance, I told myself.  I squeezed her desperately and she squeezed back.  “We have to make this work,” I said, and I could feel her answering nod.

Two men lean against the side of a pickup and consider the distant figure ahead of them. He stands in the middle of the road and appears to be wearing a turban and a salwaar kameez. More important than his clothes, the men wonder if what the man holds in his hands is a gun or a heavy stick. If he’s a shepherd, it may be a stick to prod sheep, but they see no farm animals. Neither of them has binoculars.

–It’s a stick, one of the men, an American aid worker, says. Too thin to be an AK.

The other man, the American’s Afghan driver, shrugs noncommittally. Annoyed, the American folds his arms across his chest. He expected affirmation. He likes to throw out names, abbreviations. AK, short for AK-47, also known as the Kalashnikov, a gas-operated assault rifle. Makes him feel knowledgeable and therefore superior. Like he’s been around and he expects others to view his expertise with deference. He squints, imagines this gives him an aged and even more experienced look, but the silence of the Afghan, who survived the Soviet invasion, the civil wars that followed, the Taliban and now the Americans, makes him feel small.

The Afghan and the American have stopped on this stretch of dirt, mountain road off Highway 1 between Kabul and Ghazni because their car overheated. Rock cliffs jut overhead and dust-covered scrub twists out from between boulders. Buzzards circle in the empty sky and somewhere far off dogs bark and then stop and start again. In a valley below them, mud huts stand scattered on bare ground. Another mile or two, the American thinks, and they would have been driving downhill and all would have been well but once the radiator began to overheat the Afghan, without seeking his permission, pulled over. After they’d rolled to a stop, the Afghan got out, opened the hood and unscrewed the radiator cap with a towel. Jerking back to avoid burning his face as water geysered above his head, the Afghan looked into the sky and closed his eyes against a warm, descending mist and then he leaned against the car still holding the radiator cap and noticed the man in the road watching them. The Afghan said nothing but pointed, drawing the American’s attention to the lone figure.

–You know the expression, farmer by day, Taliban by night, the American says. What do you think? It’s getting late.

The Afghan doesn’t respond. It had been the American’s idea to drive from Kabul to Ghazni to visit an NGO that specialized in irrigation projects. As the Afghan waited for him by the car, the American followed the NGO’s director to a field where rows of wheat withered under the sun, strangled in cracked earth dampened by stooped, barefoot men futilely tossing water from plastic buckets. The irrigation system for the field had broken down, the director explained. He wasn’t sure what happened. He’d put in a request for repairs to his home office and was waiting for a response.

–I return home to Seattle in a week, the director said.

–Not your problem.

–Not my problem.

The American wished him a safe flight home. In Kabul at his own NGO, an agricultural  aid agency called We Are the World, he saw himself like a despotic ruler commanding a deteriorating empire propped by the fiscal department of the agency’s Des Moines headquarters. Someone he never met financed farming projects with the belief that the land at some point would be able to support villages in Kabul province to such an extent that eventually the agency would no longer be needed. The American, however, knows that the Afghans who come to him for food and water and a small, monthly allowance don’t look at him as a temporary provider. They’ve grown accustomed to living off his largesse while they wait week after week for mine sweepers to clear the desolate fields so they can use the hundreds of pounds of seed locked securely in a shed.

Wiping sweat from his forehead, the American recalls a trip he took to Kandahar to tour agricultural projects similar to his own. Before he returned to Kabul, he stopped at an American military base to apprise its commanders of his work. He had just been escorted through the gate when militants began shelling. A soldier wrapped his arms around him and hustled him to a concrete bunker crowded with other soldiers. The shells went wide and the soliders laughed at the militant’s inefficiency but for days later the American believed he had experienced a defining moment. At least he hoped so. He wanted to experience something, he didn’t know what exactly, that would result in distinguishing him from everyone he knew. That would turn him into someone hardened by a unique experience. Someone people would point to and say he is no longer one of us. He is changed, different. He wanted to be defined by something far removed from their own understanding.

For days after the mortar attack, the American wondered if he’d experience post-traumatic stress disorder. He waited for a sign. He lay awake at night waiting. In the morning, he examined his dreams for nightmares, for something haunting. After a few weeks, he acknowledged he felt nothing out of the ordinary, concluding that the experience had been little more than an interruption to a routine too well established to be disturbed by something surprising yet inconsequential. Back in Kabul, he resumed sitting behind his desk, no different from hundreds of other people who sit behind desks whether here or in Iowa. Sometimes he’d walk outside expecting to catch a bus to his Westwood home outside of Des Moines and for a moment his confusion left him dizzy and then he remembered he was in Kabul, still firmly ensconced in the established arrangement of his life.

–Look, the American says, pointing.

The Afghan turns his head and both men watch the man in the road raise a hand to the side of his head. Was he talking into a cell phone? Calling someone? Who?

–Is there another road? the American asks. Can we just take a different route and avoid him?

He steps away from the car and sits on a boulder in the shade at the base of an austere hill. He doesn’t know his driver well. He’s seen him in the compound hanging around with other nationals. Always unfailingly polite but a man who spoke little. On their way to Ghazni, the American asked about his family because it seemed to make a positive impression although he’d never met any families of the national staff and really didn’t care how they were. If they were doing poorly, what could he do? Projects were his responsibility, not people. He gave families food, water, a cash allowance. He paid his staff. Beyond that he had no further responsibility.

The American found the Afghan’s silence disturbing. He knew what people wanted from him in his office but outside of it he found them enigmatic. He wondered about the Afghan’s loyalties. He had lost his family in fighting between U.S forces and the Taliban but did not seem angry or bitter. He expressed his grief in a resigned fatalism: If they take my life, they can take nothing more.

As part of his orientation to Afghanistan, the American and other “newbys,” as they were dubbed by senior staff, listened to panel discussions about the 2012 Kabul riots. That year in August, American troops burned copies of the Koran used by Taliban prisoners at Bagram Airbase, about an hour’s drive outside Kabul. Afghans regarded the burn as a desecration of a holy text and the resulting outrage sparked days of violence. Afghan soldiers turned their weapons on their American counterparts. The We Are the World compound went on emergency lockdown. Many of the Afghan staff left to join the protesters and later, after things had settled down, returned changed men. They had seen fear in their American employers and while they continued to do what they were told, the newbys were warned, they did so with a diffident remoteness.

–The engine is still hot, the American says, touching the radiator with a light tap. We can’t sit here all day.

The Afghan stares at the ground.

–Do something, the American tells him.

–I will talk to this man, the Afghan says.

He turns away and starts walking up the road, his sandaled feet scuffing the loose stones in his path. Watching him, the American feels scared but also a kind of giddy liberation and he sees himself seated behind his desk filing papers, a distinct yet far off vision of everything he knows, and he feels an indescribable loneliness within his exultation.

He observes the Afghan approach the man. Both shimmer in enveloping heat waves as if they had entered another dimension. The American closes his eyes. He sits half swooning in the stifling air until he hears a sharp crack and lurches with surprise. The fear and thrill that jerks through him almost instantly becomes subsumed into the vacancy of his isolation. He sits without moving, without opening his eyes, waiting for what comes next.

Charlie stood on the bank of the Rio Grande looking across at the island where, most years, he collected the downed cottonwoods to round out his wood supply for the winter. It was January 6th and the river hadn’t frozen yet. If it didn’t freeze in the next several weeks, it might not freeze all winter. The water, in the patch where the river was open, was a vibrant blue, and Maggie’s eyes came to him, suddenly, with a kind of force that made him catch his breath. The first few times it happened, he thought it meant something, that she’d been in an accident, was hurt, or sick or worse, but now he understood that she was inside him, she had pushed herself into the vacated place behind his heart.

It was the strangest thing, to be in love this close to the end of the world, but he had been on the planet for more than six decades already, and he knew that in spite of the shameless president, the crazy weather, he would still probably beat the world to his end. What he hadn’t expected was Maggie, or the roaring love she’d brought down upon him. He closed his eyes for a minute and felt her naked body nestled under his arm, her hair splayed across his chest, her arm slung over his belly, her feet wrapped around his shin. She made him feel young, though she was 55 herself, 56 next Tuesday.

Charlie was terrible at presents, his ex-wife Sharon always said so. He had barely made it through Christmas unscathed and now this. He shook away the thought that it was only a matter of time before Maggie saw right through him. 

Last night, at dinner, he had told her there was only one thing she could do that would make him leave her. He was dead serious, but she had a twinkle in her eye when she asked him what it was.

“If you slept with another man.  If you slept with another man, there would be an 85% chance I would leave you.”

“Oh,” she said, “That.” She rolled her eyes a little. “I thought it was going to be something interesting.” She pushed the butternut squash pieces around her plate.  “What accounts then,” she said, “for the 15 percent?”

“I try not to be 100 percent on anything,” he said.

“I like that about you,” she said, “but you don’t have to worry. I didn’t even fuck around on the assholes.”

He traced her socked foot with his and reached for her hand across the table. “I really want to make love to you,” he said, “so let’s do the dishes,” and for some reason that he didn’t quite understand, this made Maggie laugh and laugh.

Now she was off on a plane again, California, and then Chicago and then some place in Louisiana he’d never even heard of. He’d told her the most important thing you could give a person you loved was time, and when she was home she gave him all of hers, but for every two days she was home she was gone for ten, or twenty. He wouldn’t have pictured himself being okay with that, but he and Sharon had been around each other 365 days of the year and look where that had ended.  

Maggie had worked in maximum security prisons most of her life, rehabilitating lifers, and now she trained young social workers to do the same. For two decades she’d had the best record in the Colorado State Prison System for getting guys who had served the light end of their long sentence off the block and out into the work force. The law forbade her from keeping in touch with them after they got out (Charlie had been glad to hear) but she had a network that kept her informed of their successes. She said with only a few exceptions, the men she worked with who’d had 20 or 30 years to think about who they wanted to be in the world were the finest people she’d known, that the only criminals who were beyond redemption were the ones currently running the country, the ones who would never see jail time. When bad news came, when the board tuned one of her former charges down or one of her guys fell down into the well of recidivism, she took it hard, went someplace darker than he knew how to help.

“We’ve worked hard all our lives,” Charlie had said to her only once, “don’t we deserve a little time to sit on the porch and put our feet up before we can’t lift them as high as the railing?”

“We are white people in America,” Maggie said, “by definition we deserve nothing. Or more accurately, we’ve already gotten all we deserve and more. You need to understand that I only feel good when I am actively engaged in helping. I’m never going to be okay with just taking up space.”

Charlie had been a public servant for 40 years and now mostly he wanted to go hiking. It was the one simmering bone of contention between them.

There are so many people suffering, Maggie said, just so you and I can go hiking.

“That’s not true,” he had said, though he understood the ways it was.

He missed her when she was gone, all the way down to his cells, but he would never keep her from the work she loved, nor would he get tired of their sweet reunions. 

He got in his pickup and drove to the end of Middle Creek Road. He considered his snowshoes, then his crampons, looked around at the frozen bare ground around him and left both behind—along with his pack—in the car.  It was bad practice, hiking without a pack, especially in winter, but his doctor had cut a little cancer out of his shoulder the week before and it still smarted when anything touched it. It was nearly 1:00 and it’d be dark by 4:50. He drank half a liter of water, stuck a small Ziplock of cashews in his pocket and told his truck he’d be right back.

Heading up into the West Fork burn scar, the wind was blowing hard enough that the snags were speaking their own language. It had been five years since all this country had been on fire, and now the aspen volunteers were taller than he was, so thick in places he had to part them with his hands. The spruce had started back too, but more slowly, and only a cluster every so often. When he passed one along the trail he bent down and gave it a freindly pat.

The hillsides without water, particularly the ones with Southern exposure, would turn into meadows when the dead trees fell. That would be good for the elk, maybe not so good for the birds and the smaller critters, especially with the warming and drying.

Forty years working for the US Forest Service had taught Charlie the only constant in nature was change. And hard as it was for some folks to grasp, people were part of nature. Before humans came on the scene there’d been less than one extinction per millennium. Now they were losing two species a decade, mammals, even, most recently a bat and a rat. The last mass extinction, the one that took out the dinosaurs, was caused by an asteroid. This time humans were the asteroid, poaching and fishing, dumping all manner of toxic shit into the water, the air, pumping it into the ground. And logging. He couldn’t forget logging, though as the Forest Service’s PR guy, it had been his job to be fair to the timber industry even when he didn’t want to.

After Maggie left that morning, he had watched on the internet the Swedish girl admonish the United Nations Assembly: How Dare You Deprive Me Of My Childhood? she’d said. 

How dare they indeed, and how dare he? A soil scientist, who should know better, who did know better, in a room full of scientists. They had tacitly agreed to let it slide.

The trees were already stressed from a dry summer and fall.  If they didn’t get dumped on in February and March, there would be a massive die off, the farmers would be without irrigation for a second year running, and the invasive weeds, that thrived in times of drought and damage would have a heyday.

That he could walk this trail, at 11,000 feet above sea level in January, that he could drive all the way to the trailhead, ought to put the fear of God in him. If those weren’t his own boots walking on the bare dirt, he wouldn’t have believed it was true.  

A snowshoe hare froze on the trail above him, bright white against the windblown grey of the rocks on all sides, his bi-annual color change having gone right ahead without winter ever catching up. “You’ll be easy picking for an eagle,” Charlie told it, “if you don’t take yourself back up to the snow.”

The Swedish girl had said the grown-ups were either evil, or simply not mature enough to face the crisis. He had smiled when she had said that. Not because it was charming, but because she was right.

Charlie had been climbing for twenty minutes when he broke out above tree line, scared up a little herd of elk cows and calves that looked as surprised as he was to be up that high in January.

The animals would adapt or they wouldn’t. Ditto the humans. Or rather, they would adapt as long as they could and no longer. The less well the people adapted, maybe, the better for the animals. Technology would offset greed or vice versa, or maybe they were on the same side. It wasn’t often, Charlie knew, the gentler things that endured.

Above tree line the ground was snow covered, but not deeply enough to make him regret the snowshoes. The wind made his knees ache and he knew he’d pay for this adventure tomorrow. His dentist wanted to graft synthetic bone into his jaw and his GP was pushing him toward hearing aids. There was the cancer (the good kind, the dermatologist called it) freshly removed from his shoulder. A recent thinning of his bladder wall (inconvenient, but common, the urologist said) meant he had to get up and pee four times a night. And yet somehow in the middle of this march toward decrepitude Charlie had had found the woman he had always known was out there.  He couldn’t make sense of it, but neither could he wipe the smile off his face. 

He had mentioned Sharon too many times at dinner last night. He knew because Maggie told him so.  She said, “Every time you say Sharon, I’m going to say the name of one of my exes.”

“What?” He had been cutting vegetables for the salad, had not realized he had mentioned Sharon. He’d been talking about the propane delivery guy. He’d been thinking about how many baths Sharon took, how high it made the bill in winter. Had he said the thing about her baths out loud?

“Yeah,” she said, “Like if you say, Sharon color-coded her clothes in the closet, I’m gonna say, ‘well that’s really interesting, because Gary hated all kinds of soup.’”

Maggie was too fast for him, and he liked going slow. She had memorized the words to every song from the seventies and eighties, could recite whole poems he couldn’t make heads or tails of. She was perfect for him, and he for her, and they both knew each other knew it. At least once a day, she put her hand on his leg and called him her tree. 

When he was 12 years old, Charlie had watched his father break a kitchen chair into splinters. His mother had left for the grocery store— that was what had most impressed him, that his father didn’t break the chair to threaten his mother, or to make a point or to perform his anger to a witness—he had no idea Charlie was there. His rage had to spend itself, and his father wisely made the chair its victim. Charlie knew it could be worse and he wasn’t afraid of his father, but he had felt the stirrings of anger inside his own twelve year old body. What he was afraid of, was turning out like his dad. 

It was in the waiting room of his sister’s dermatologist where he read that first article on meditation, so he went to the library and checked out some books. Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation. When he read the Tao Te Ching: success is as dangerous as failure, and he who masters others is powerful, but no one is more powerful than he who masters himself, it sounded like a lot of ideas that already lived in his head.

He’d been meditating for fifty years. He didn’t like to talk about it—he generally didn’t like the kind of people who talked about their practice—but it had gotten him through the tough times, Sharon’s exodus, the death of his mother, the year it took his broken back to heal. And even though Maggie challenged him on it: guess it works out for you to go all om mani padme hum so you don’t have to worry about those babies your government is putting into cages, he knew, somehow, his practice had gotten him her.

Now Copper Ridge rose in front of him like a big white cake, sitting on a pedestal of the browner ridge below. Thirty years ago he had married Sharon up there, and five years ago, when she told him she didn’t love him anymore, he walked out the front door and came straight back up here, his plan to stay until he could master his own emotion, until he could practice loving kindness meditation towards her. It took seven days. Which was also how long it took to run out of food, which may have contributed to his evolution.

He hadn’t said one unkind word to Sharon during the divorce proceedings. He helped her get set up in a new apartment, refinanced and bought her out of the house, the truck and the timeshare in Cabo that God knows was never his idea. From time to time he even watched her cat. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world was a piece of the Tao he’d always tried to abide by. He figured he’d be alone the rest of his life, which was maybe what old men who smelled like the woods had coming to them. 

It took three years for the Sharon hurt to go away. When he was pretty sure it had, he’d gone back to Copper Ridge to see what it might have to say to him. It had been high summer—the wettest one since the fire. Columbine lined the path for hundreds of yards and the snowfield he had to cross just before he topped out was so rich in algae it glowed like a watermelon. His plan had been to leave behind anything that still connected his heart to Sharon’s, but when he got up there and saw the tundra palette of paintbrush, harebells, and forget-me-nots, when he breathed in the mountaintops, held his arms to the deep blue sky, all he found in his heart was peace.

Three months later, out of that same blue sky, tumbled Maggie. Today, a year and three more months later, he’d come back to Copper Ridge to say thanks.

It went without saying he’d never been on the Ridge in January. It was quite possible no one ever had. The rise was steep, but his lungs handled it easily, even in the cold. His doctor said he had the heart and lungs of a 40 year old, which he’d trade for a host of aches and pains. He told Maggie he wanted 30 years together, though 25 would probably do.

They’d been driving home from that first weekend in the desert, only a month after they met, when he’d turned to her at a red light and saw deep lines in her face and her hair turned steel grey.

That trip had been…well he still didn’t have words for it. The hike to Chessler Park and Druid Arch, the lamb stew he had cooked to perfection at home and reheated on his Svea, sex in the tent with the full moon pouring in. It shouldn’t have surprised him that they were ripe for a fight on the way back home.

The radio was reporting Trump’s cancellation of the DACA program and Maggie had breathed, racist/rapist motherfucker under her breath.

“I guess my question,” Charlie had said carefully, “is what was in Trump’s heart when he made that decision.”

“You,” Maggie said, her voice like a blade, “have got to be kidding.” She let ten seconds go by before she added, “you should maybe take care that your religious devotion to fairness doesn’t accidentally put you on the fascists’ side.”  

“I’m not religious,” he said, turning to her and getting that glimpse of the much older Maggie that made him suck in his breath. “We may as well stop fighting right now,” he blurted, “I know we’re going to get old together. I just saw you with grey hair.”

He wanted to suck the words back in as soon as they hit the aether—this was only their forth date after all. But the truth of what he’d said stunned them both into silence. After a full five minutes she reached over the console and put her hand on his leg.

Dry winter or not, the snowfield near the top of the Ridge was twice the size it was in summer, and hard as industrial plastic on the top. Now he cursed himself for rejecting his crampons. It wasn’t so much the steepness of the snowfield, as consequences if you fell that made it scary. A long increasingly steep descent into an ever narrowing avalanche chute, and then a lip, and a 700 hundred foot drop over cliffs to the bowl at the top of the Red Mountain Creek drainage.

He grabbed the willows at the edge for balance and kicked a few brittle steps into the icy surface. Across the great expanse the chute tumbled into, Red Mountain shimmered with snow. 

Poles, would have also been helpful today, not especially for crossing—it had always been a point of pride for him not to rely on poles for balance, but something he could use to self-arrest if he accidentally found himself  on the way down. 

Any sixty-two year old who claimed, as Charlie often did, that people get hurt in the wilderness because their desire for the outcome hijacks their cognitive understanding of the risk, would turn back to his truck now without hesitation. But here he was, so close to the top, on a pilgrimage of gratitude. If he turned around and things fell apart with Maggie, he’d have to live with the fact of the aborted thanks.   

He stepped onto the snowfield, stood tall in his boots and centered himself for balance. He’d go slow, double kick each step to be sure, and the walk back across would be easy. The wind lifted a light layer of snow that had settled on the crusty surface into a whirlwind, and he squinted against the sun bouncing off the ice.

That morning he’d read Iceland had lost its first major glacier, Okjokull—OK, they called it. Icelanders held a funeral for OK at the site, planted a plaque to mourn its loss, to record the date and the parts per million of Co2 in the air at the time of the ceremony. The number was 415ppm, Charlie remembered. Numbers always stuck in his head, but in this case he remembered the words as well. OK is the first Icelandic Glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.  This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you will know if we did it.  He considered his neighbors who were always saying the democrats were coming for their guns. He wondered how they’d feel about them coming for their diesel pickups. 

Maggie drove a Prius back and forth to the Denver airport which he didn’t love because she always left before daylight, and if she smacked an elk in that little tin can…he shook his head to not thing about it. A Prius was a drop in a bucket, and the bucket, they said now, had no bottom. But didn’t they still have to try? Hope is as hollow as fear, the Tao cautioned, but Charlie had never learned how to live without it. He would hold out hope for the Earth, he decided, if not for the humans, then for the time after they were gone. 

He was a third of the way across the snowfield and making decent time when, without a moment’s pause or calculation, without any acknowledgement from his foot that it had landed incorrectly, he was on his back and sliding, no poles to stop him, no crampons to kick into the ice, just sliding, quietly, down the slope, and gaining speed.

He tried to kick one boot in, and then the other, which threatened to spin him around but didn’t come close to stopping him, and whatever he was facing, he wanted to face it feet first. He didn’t scream, or shout. There was no sound whatsoever, except the whisper of friction of the back of his jacket on the hard packed snow. It was so quiet it felt almost like it wasn’t happening.  He had always thought leaving this life would be…loud. 

The slope was steepening and he was going faster. A hundred and fifty yards below him, he noticed, rising out of the permanent snow was a rock the size of a volkswagon. If he aimed for it and hit it, it would break both his legs, but it might keep him from careening off the edge into nothing. How long would he last up here with two broken legs, and no way to get off the snowfield. Maggie wouldn’t be back till Wednesday, and no one else would wonder where he was. The leg breaks would send him into shock, which would reduce his body temperature further. It might be best to go over the edge and be done with it.

He tried to send Maggie an alarm signal with his mind. In the next second he understood there would be no decision, the deepening curve of the chute was sending him straight for the Volkswagon rock. He dragged both elbows as hard as he could trying to slow his speed as the rock got larger and closer. At the last second before impact he closed his eyes and pictured Maggie’s hair.

Just as easy as his fall began was his sudden succession of motion. He opened his eyes with his face inches from the rock. There had been a snow well on the uphill side of the rock, not visible from above but the perfect size to accommodate his body. He had landed in a standing position, feet in the snow, back nestled against the hollow snow well.  He put his hands up and touched the face of the boulder, and something like a laugh escaped his throat.

“Thank you,” he said, and waited for his breathing to slow.

Next came the strategy for getting out of the snow well, and—more difficult—getting back across the snow field to dry ground. The chute was steep, and yet, he reasoned, not quite as steep as other places, because this, after all, was where the big rock came to rest. He kicked around with his feet in case it was an even more magical snow well, one that contained crampons, or an ice axe, or even a large stick, but he found nothing. 

He decided to face the slope and double kick his steps in one at a time while clawing his fingers into the ice for extra friction.  Gloves would have been nice, but the snowfield was much narrower down here and it wouldn’t take him more than fifty toe holds to get across. The wind picked up again and the shadows were lengthening. He wasn’t sure what kind of terrain he’d be facing to get back to the trail, back to his pickup, but the most important thing was to get the hell off the ice. 

The chute got steeper the closer he got to the edge and when he finally stretched one leg off the snow into the willows and his fingers curled around their exposed roots, he thought he might cry but he didn’t. He stuck his hands in his arm pits to warm them up, then pulled the cashews out of his pocket. He eyed the slope that would take him up and out of there. There were a couple of exposed places, but nothing he couldn’t make.

He looked back at the snow field, back at the rock, back at the distance he had fallen. At least 400 yards. He wouldn’t tell Maggie about this. She’d say he was getting too old to do this sort of shit alone.

He kicked the snow off his boots as the last of the sun illuminated the aspen leaves still clinging to the young trees in the burn scar below him. He looked back up to flat top mountain he would not get to today.

He and Copper Ridge had been going round and round for decades. Of all his potential death scenarios, today’s might have been the best one possible, but he wasn’t ready yet, and maybe neither was the Ridge. The first peach of Alpenglow lit Red Mountain across the valley. He stepped over a heart shaped rock on the trail, then picked it up and put it in his pocket for Maggie’s birthday.

Being deeply loved by someone gave you strength, said the Tao, while loving someone deeply gave you courage.  Dying well, Charlie knew, would require both. So too would whatever was ahead for the Earth. When Maggie got home he’d talk to her about it. Maybe together, they could find a way to help.

The car roared into Paul’s rearview mirror like the past. Cruised up fast as if it were actually going to hit his bumper, then backed off just a few feet.  

“What an asshole,” growled Paul, glaring into the mirror.

He recognized the make instantly: Ford Mustang, mid-80s, no class. Squared-off rear window rather than the clean swoop of the late 60’s models. Chopped-off back end instead of the slight, nuanced fins. Paul would know. He’d had a red ‘66 Mustang Fastback as a teenager. The thought of that car, after so many years, still sent a pulse of warm blood through his body. 

“Now that thing had class,” Paul said aloud.

Even his high school girlfriend, Marjorie, who disliked cars, had admitted that. He remembered taking her to the drive-in in the summer, the little kids swinging in the pink dusk below the big screen, his first blowjob, how shocked he was.

“Damn that was a car.” He’s grinning to himself when he glances in the driver’s side mirror.

The Mustang is still riding his ass but he surprises himself by deciding not to let it bother him. Paul is driving back out to his ranch, their home, after another troubling day in the office, and this is his favorite time and place and season. A winter evening, fifteen precious miles of open road. Snow a foot deep in the forest, the highway dry.

His mind falls back to his first love. He worked so hard for that car. A whole summer of night shifts stacking 2x4s in the lumber mill. A winter shoveling snow in a pickup mounted with a snowplow. His uncle owned the business and trusted him. Paul now found that hard to believe. He was only 16 at the time, the same age as his daughter, Lila. Had he been sloppy or reckless, he could have sliced open a dozen cars with that blade. But he drove the pickup, curling waves of snow out of the way, like he would later drive his Mustang, fast, but precise, with intense concentration.

The Mustang behind him is still tailgating. Ordinarily Paul would already be simmering with anger, but he’s enjoying his drive down memory lane.

He is remembering when he finally got his driver’s license. He had known how to drive since he was twelve. His uncle had taught him out on the ranch. An ancient, stiff-geared Studebaker used to haul hay or fence posts. In the beginning he’d had to stretch out his body completely to depress the clutch. Still, it came naturally. From the beginning he could synchronize easing off the clutch and pressing the gas. The truck never jerked. Soon enough he could get the cantankerous beast to do things even his uncle couldn’t.  

He hadn’t even bothered with a learner’s permit. He’d bicycled out to the port authority the day after he turned 16, got his license, and pedaled back home thinking “Now I’m free. Now I’m free.” He’d already been saving his money for two years and he bought the Mustang that summer.

When he drove it up to their basement apartment, his mother had refused to even come out and look at it. But his younger sister, Melanie, was flush with excitement. “Shotgun,” she yelled, and hopped into the passenger seat. They drove all over town together, stopping at the Tastee Freeze to get ice cream cones. Melanie had insisted on paying because she had just gotten a job as a maid.

Later in the year they started sneaking out together to go joyriding. On Friday nights they would play hide-and-seek. It was always after midnight when the whole town was sleeping. People with jobs and work. People his age now, Paul thought. One car would get a 30 second head start, then the other vehicle would try to find the first car. If it was Paul’s turn to hide, he would shoot out, shifting fast, pushing the Mustang, Melanie holding onto the door handle and catching her breath in awe. He would make a quick turn left, shut off his lights, turn left again, glide quietly up behind a parked car, shut off the engine.

Absently looking at his scarred hands on the steering wheel, Paul wonders if he ever told this story to Lila. He hopes not.  It’s not the kind of story a father tells his sixteen-year-old daughter.

Sometimes he and Melanie would drive all the way to the next town, just to do it. He would pass cars as if they were standing still. The speed gave both of them visceral jubilation. Melanie never acted scared or told him to slow down. She trusted him implicitly, which made him imagine that he was responsible and mature. Driving his Mustang was the only ventolin inhaler complete time he felt in control of his destiny.

He never took Melanie with him when he raced. He didn’t even tell her about it, although he knew she knew. He didn’t race that much. Just once in a while, when he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He understood it was dangerous but he secretly loved it. A forbidden pleasure. Even then, at that age, speed and power were more seductive than sex.     

Paul allows himself a glance into the rear view mirror. The ugly Mustang is still there, as if taunting him.

“Fucking tailgater,” he growls.

The car has had several opportunities to pass, but hasn’t taken them. Paul slows down but the car still won’t pass.

“C’mon buddy,” he says loudly.

Paul can feel himself getting angry. He knows this is ridiculous. He instructs himself to let it go. He allows the snow blanketing the landscape to calm him. He takes several deep, slow breaths and tries to look into the rearview mirror with equanimity. So this guy’s driving like a jerk, so what. Paul slides his mind back into reverse.

He learned so much from that Mustang. It taught him about the unseverable connection between work and money. It taught him about the often invisible connection between maintenance and reliability. It taught him how to run away—out to Seattle, the girl with the earrings in her cheeks—and then how come back. He remembered the pride he experienced his senior year when he tore the whole thing apart and put it back together. At community college, and then at the university, he majored in mechanical engineering.

Before leaving for college, Paul had planned to give the Mustang to Melanie. He’d had it all through high school. He felt he’d gotten everything he ever wanted out of the car and was ready to move on. Melanie had been his co-pilot the whole time. He’d taught her how to drive in the Mustang. He’d even let her take it to the grocery store now and then. She deserved it. She needed it.

To tell her, they went for a drive out toward the ranch. He was passing cars, feeling the exhilaration of acceleration for the last time. He hadn’t said anything yet. He came up on an old ranch truck about like the one he’d learned to drive with. When he started to pass there was suddenly an oncoming car and he had to duck back in. The truck hadn’t altered its lumbering pace. He couldn’t slow down quickly enough and they plowed straight into the back of the pickup. The front end of the Mustang slid partway under the truck’s barn-welded bumper before the bumper smashed  into the hood, cutting right toward them, crushing the windshield.

 The rancher swung open his door and hobbled back to the car, peered through the shattered windshield, and said, “You alright?”

They were wearing their seatbelts, a novel addition to cars of that vintage, and besides tiny cuts from spraying shards of glass, they were fine.

Thanks to an I-beam bumper, the truck was no worse for wear. The rancher backed the Mustang stuck to his bumper down into the barrow pit, then gunned it, separating his pickup from the mangled Mustang.

“You might want to think about this,” said the rancher as he drove them back into town.

That night, Paul recalled, he’d cried himself to sleep, obsessed with the realization that he had almost killed his little sister.

The Mustang has inched closer. Paul knows he should simply pull off, but the pull-outs haven’t been plowed. A drifted dirt road appears now and again, but by the time he has recognized its possibility, he’s flown past. He decides to slow down until the Mustang is forced to pass. And this works.

He can hear the engine of the Mustang roar and begin to peel out around him. Reacting instinctively, impulsively, Paul stomps on the gas pedal before the Mustang can pull up parallel. The speedometer jumps from 40 mph, to 50. 60. 70. They are racing, side by side, screaming down the asphalt, the forest chuttering by in a smear of white. Paul’s 4-cylinder pickup is no match for the Mustang, which begins sliding by just at the crest a hill.

Paul glances across and is gutted by the sight of Lila in the passenger seat of the Mustang, laughing and waving. Then he hears the blast of a diesel horn and out the corner of his eye sees the on-coming snowplow.

He was closer this time. He knew it.

He stood again in the wheat field, gold beneath the summer sun. From here Annam could see the tallest cypress at the far edge of the field, in the distance the low jumble of mountains violet and gray in the heat.

He turned, looked to the right and the gray boundary wall of the old monastery a half-kilometer away. Last time the wall had been only a hundred meters off, placement calculations, like always with first insertions, only hypotheses. Past the wall stood the asylum itself, a string of pale stone buildings with mottled tile roofs, the stub of a belltower at its center. Oleander and olive trees and more wheat between here and there.

He turned back to the mountains, the wheat. The cypress, towering and dark. The pale blue sky piled high with white summer clouds.

He had fifteen minutes.

The mountain ridge was 2.71 kilometers away, his heading at insertion 131 degrees, on line with the cypress straight ahead. From here the ground sloped gently up at perhaps an eight-degree grade.

He started through the wheat, counting his paces. He had two hundred before he’d reach perimeter. Then he’d have to exit, insert again.

This was the fifth insertion in two days, the maximum allowed per week. Sometimes he’d find the objective the first time in, other sites eventually given up on. But this was a near-certainty, too many correlations in the research—the letters, plats, the calibrated angle of the sun in the painting, the particular pigments the XRF picked out, sourced and dry-dated. Too much data to miss this one.

The objective was here, within perimeter. He knew it in the angle of light, the color of the wheat, the line the ridge made against this sky. And the cypress, the green tower of it. The objective was here. He’d find it.

His job was to survey. He had no instruments; none translated. With each insertion, no matter the objective, there was with him only the knowledge his pace measured .8 meters, and the fact of his initial heading. Once he had a visual—when, if—he would turn to it, estimate the number of degrees off initial heading he faced, then walk to it, count again the number of paces. Two known sides of a triangle, the known degree angle between them: the law of cosines. Simple math.

Time wasn’t a worry. He’d done this long enough to know how long a minute lasted, knew it in his fingertips, in his feet. When he closed his eyes and felt the sun, or the cold, or the rain, the dark. Time was no longer a factor he need take into account when he was on survey. He had fifteen minutes before exit, no matter where he was or what he’d found, or didn’t. But he knew fifteen minutes. Time didn’t matter.

Twenty paces through the waist high wheat and toward the cypress, thirty five, forty two, and then the field gave way to a gravel lane that ran to his right and left. What he’d thought one continuous field was actually two, bisected by the narrow track. Grass grew out from the edges of either field into the lane, here and there the bright red surprise of a poppy, and another, another.

He could still be surprised.

He scanned first to his left: nothing. The lane bled away a few meters down, turned slightly and disappeared into the wheat and back toward Saint-Rémy. Then he looked to his right, up the lane that way.

A man, perhaps thirty paces away and in profile to him, seated on a stool before a wooden easel. He had on a ragged and stained blue jacket, the cuffs turned up, Annam could see from here, and wore a battered straw hat. The easel, scuffed and stained and with its drawer pulled out, stood to the right of the lane, the man—the objective of this survey, the reason for the insertion—with his back against the wheat on this side of the track, as though nestled in as far as he could to get what view he wanted.

The cypress, this wheat. The jumble of mountains gray and violet. These clouds.

All of it what Annam expected, given all the research, given all the images he and the world had known all these years. The letters, the calculations. Given the proof of the painting Van Gogh was working on, now. Here.

He’d found it.

People would feel they’d spent their money well on this one. Travelers liked when they saw what they figured they would see. When their predictions as to how history played out were right, and not a surprise. He could see even from here the way the man—he had a weak red beard, his hair a darker red beneath the brim at his neck—jabbed at the canvas with his left hand, the moves stiff and then soft, slash and then jab, the palette in his right hand a smear of colors. Exactly what travelers would hope to see.

Twelve minutes.

He squared himself to the cypress—he could see from here on the gravel track a smaller cypress beside it now, perhaps half its height—then pivoted back to the right by the width of his foot: 21 degrees off heading. He pivoted the same width again, though now, at 42 degrees off, he’d turned a few degrees past the objective. If he were to walk the line between here and the man, Annam would be behind him by ten or so meters. Approximate heading, he’d report, was 35 degrees south of the initial 131.

He started on the gravel lane toward the man, five paces, ten. Still the man jabbed at the canvas on the easel, his jacket sleeve a shock of movement with each blow to the canvas, and now Annam could see out in front of Van Gogh, halfway across the lane and planted like a wooden sign into the ground, a second easel-like structure.

The perspective frame, what looked like a glassless window frame on two wooden legs driven into the ground to eye level so that the painter could view his subject as though already framed. He’d read in the research how often Van Gogh had used one, even had his own custom-made by a blacksmith and carpenter when he’d lived at The Hague seven years before. Thin wires ran from corner to opposite corner across the field of vision, from mid-frame to opposite mid-frame too, making a grid within the frame to allow the accuracy of perspective, and to allow the painter to work that much faster.

Research had said he’d stopped using the frame three to four years before. But here it was yet again: history other than what had been accepted. Fact at objective defying words in a book.

This was a small difference, but a difference still. He wondered for a moment what travelers would think of seeing the frame, an odd contraption that seemed somehow almost like cheating. Of course the paintings were important, relics of all those years ago that still made people go and look at them for hours. There were other surveyors mapping all this week the sites for his works, twelve of them on their fifteen minute shifts scouring the countryside near here, and in Saint-Rémy, The Hague too, and Arles. And of course Auvers-sur-Oise. Travelers would pay well, Marketing had decided, to watch Van Gogh work.

And to die: right now Brin, second behind Annam, was 700 kilometers north and a year away from here, her draw the Auvers-sur-Oise insertion. The room at the Auberge Ravoux, where the objective had smoked a pipe while he lay dying from the gunshot. Of course travelers would want to see that, those moments the real moneymakers. Those moments within the whole survey of time when death lived, and as many as wanted could pay for the privilege to watch.

He thought of Brin, the way post-shift she set about her reports at the console in the blue room as quickly as she could, didn’t let settle in her any deeper impressions than the surface of what she’d seen. Though she, like the whole crew, had drawn some difficult insertions—Gandhi’s assassination, the Battle of Balaclava and the decimation of the Light Brigade, Kurt Cobain at the last in the greenhouse room above his garage—Annam had never seen Brin break, never seen her let show the enormity a moment of history had upon her.

Some came back from insertions weeping before they were even unplugged. Others threw chairs in the blue room, overturned tables. Some drank, or smoked, or spent nights walking alone, or just went home and missed the next shift, disappeared for two days, a week. A month.

All of which Annam had done, back when the company had begun, himself the first surveyor hired. Back when sometimes he’d pull fifteen and twenty insertions a week.

Back before Development had figured some things out, and the five-a-week mandate had begun.

He’d seen more than any of the present crew. Early on he’d mapped some of the big deaths—Kennedy and Lincoln both, Marie Antoinette, Julius Caesar—and had come back from those early insertions carrying in him the notion of truth, of what history meant.

People were involved. That was the truth. Not images of people, or words on people, or academic or religious or political manipulations. Only people. Kennedy’s hand brushing a lock of hair from his forehead, then raising it to wave the instant before. The relief in Lincoln’s laugh there in the box at the theater, him easing back in the rocking chair, Mary’s hand in his. Marie’s apology at stepping on the executioner’s toes, the brittle smile up at him. Caesar silent inside the clustered senators each with a dagger, his eyes open wide, mouth an O so full it had seemed to Annam a miracle there came no sound from him at all.

People.

Surveyors came back to work, even after the worst insertions: Torrez from the heaps at Pickett’s Charge. Caseman from Justinian’s Plague, the Mongols catapulting their own infected corpses over the walls into Constantinople. Rhame from inside a chamber at Auschwitz.

There was extra pay for these duties, mapping the sites the company forecast would be the marquee venues. The demand travelers would make would more than compensate any residual effect surveyors might feel, provided they were paid enough.

 Even Rhame, who’d disappeared for six weeks after the Auschwitz insertion, came back.

Maybe it was the money they were paid. Or because the job was its own drug, being able to map for the first time in history history itself. To be the first, for fifteen minutes up to five times in one week, to see what had happened, and to possess before anyone else that information.

Or maybe because there were weeks like this one, when the company decided to find the making of works of art, and sent the crew into the field to find that beauty.

Sometimes there were good things to see: Salk giving first himself the polio vaccine, then his wife and their three boys there in the laboratory ante-room, smiles for the cameras all around; thin, pale Mozart in a green velvet coat with gold lace at the cuffs, waving down the applause before he lifts the baton to conduct the premiere of Don Giovanni at the National Theater in Prague; Basho seated on the lowland path outside Sarashina, before him his nighttime quest: the harvest moon above, beneath it that same moon reflected in the rice paddies. Enough beauty to last a thousand haiku.

There were good things to see. Like this day, this site a worthy way to have exhausted this week’s insertions.

Eight minutes left.

Fifteen paces, twenty, while still the objective stabbed at the canvas, then withdrew that hand, touched the back of his wrist to his forehead, wiped away sweat.

And now, like always when he entered the realm five meters around objective, that final insertion point he’d map once he’d gotten back to the blue room and entered the coordinates he’d work out, Annam saw them: the travelers.

They appeared as the thinnest sheen of tears in his eyes, these people who would opt as their destination this moment with Van Gogh. Judging from how thick the area swam with the wavelength disturbance every insertion caused—a disturbance so small travelers would not see it, Annam and the rest of the crew trained to note the shimmer and its depth—this was a lucrative site.

Travelers crowded Annam, invisible to one another, and to time. They moved about, transparent glimmers slowly swirling in and through and around Van Gogh, who touched the brush in his hand to the dark yellow pigment on the palette, then held it above the easel a moment.

This feeling, this awareness of the swarm of travelers, was always unsettling. Annam was the surveyor, the first OS to arrive at each demarked point in place and time. But because a point in place and time was fixed, here they were. Whether one day or a hundred years after he reported these coordinates, this moment with the objective, and this sky, these clouds, that towering cypress before him and the surprise of a poppy and another and another, would become—became—the convergence point for anyone who paid. Though any number of these glimmers could be people alive in his time, most of them were people yet to be born, people alive generations from now, all having ridden this wavelength strand to its end in a wheat field in 1889.

Unsettling, because the discovery was never a discovery, but the joining in of an invisible and silent excursion fully in progress.

Van Gogh touched the brush to the canvas then, quickly layered in the color on the bright white at the bottom of the canvas, the sky and its clouds—“Scottish plaid” he had written to Theo to describe the play of white and blue—already painted. The heat of a Provençal July beat down. A breeze moved the wheat in small waves.

What Annam knew of the truth of history was that people were involved. Van Gogh, when he painted this first Wheat Field with Cypresses—there will be three—sat alone on a gravel track and used the perspective frame to square up the composition. He wiped sweat from his brow. He paused above the gessoed canvas before filling in with crabbed and jerky motions the first dark yellow moments of the wheat field before him.

And what Annam knew of his own small role in history as its surveyor was this: Each time he discovered an objective, he was long dead, forgotten when the travelers he encountered there with him had, only moments before and in some future he could not know, handed over their credits, settled into a transport. Even though he was the one to have led them here. Even though he stood beside them right now.

Unsettling, because each time he arrived in the past, he was already dead to the future.

He closed his eyes, felt the sun in its path, sensed time in his fingertips. He felt his heartbeat, the track of a bead of sweat at his lower back.

Four minutes to survey end.

He opened his eyes, then moved into the painter himself, knelt into the objective to gain his line of sight, make certain this was the moment of creation. Marketing had its demands, no matter it seemed to Annam miracle enough to show up in time to watch the man paint. But if travelers were to pay, verification was paramount.

And of course there, in the perspective frame, was the reality of what would become the painting: the low mountains to the right, those two cypresses, an olive tree in the middle distance too. The wheat. The single poppies. And here at the canvas was Van Gogh’s hand at work, the wheat filling in. No mountains yet. But the sky, those white clouds piled high, and the cypress.

Objective verified.   

Then Annam stood, stepped away to get a more certain look at the swarm. There was no definite way to gather a headcount, the moving shimmers more a matter of depth than number. But Marketing needed a grade scale, and though it had always seemed to Annam more a matter of depth, and perhaps too of viscosity, of the apparent thickness of the air, the scale was only a number from one to one hundred. Salk, with its now and again shimmer while the cameras flashed, had been given a 3; the space inside final insertion point for the Kennedy assassination had been nearly gelid for the thousands already there on the curb in Dealey Plaza: ninety-five.

From where Annam stood beside the man he could see this was a middling swarm. A forty-five.

Survey finished. Perhaps a minute left. As planned.

He moved out of final insertion then, the quivering air disappearing as though it had never arrived, and stood again on a gravel track outside Saint-Rémy, beside him on either side wheat fields, a man painting at an easel before him.

He looked at the man’s eyes, focused, blue-green, sharp and purposed. His jaw was clenched, his eyebrows in a tight furrow.

He was alone. He was poor. He had a year to live. And he painted, making in this moment something that would change the world.

Annam looked to the cypresses again, the mountains. The wheat, gold in the summer heat.

Then he turned, started away down the track. He’d hit perimeter about the time survey was over. And as with each insertion, it was at this point he allowed in what he kept at bay in his waking life, the one in the blue room back at the company. What he kept away from the life he lived in his empty house, and the life he walked in the grocery aisles, the life he drove through on the tidal marshes and forests beyond the city once the research for the next insertion became the grind it so often seemed to become.

It was now that he allowed in his own piece of history, the part of him he kept as hidden as a treasure, one he’d buried to keep safe but that he resurrected in the last moments he set aside at the end of each trip into history, when he knew himself to be closest to his own death, swarmed with people alive after he was himself dead.

He thought of his wife, Mia, and of their daughter, Callie. Mia’s hand in his, the soft skin, the delicate bones. Callie in his arms, no weight at all and settled on his hip.

Both dead, as of this day, four years, three months and six days.

Why time wasn’t a worry. Why time didn’t matter. Let me pull fifteen insertions a week, he thought. Let me pull twenty. Thirty, or fifty.

Before him lay the sloping land of 150 years ago, down toward Saint-Rémy with its sharp steeple two kilometers away visible even here. Far beyond lay a low line of green hills, farmhouses here and there, hedgerows to separate fields.

He walked.

“Callie,” he whispered. Then, “Mia.”

Seconds now, only seconds left before—

But there, in the lane, there: something: a shimmer.

A traveler, outside final perimeter. He saw it, in the lane and twenty meters ahead.  A swirl, passing before him fast, crossing the road, the gravel ahead and steeple and hedgerow and far hills a momentary tremor.

No.

He stopped, felt his heart go fast, his hands tremble for what this meant for the whole construct, the entire array.

He breathed in, and in.