"Well I don't think I'll really eat. But it's so crazy, so much of this business is done at lunch. And I've been away for three weeks now, and so I have to make up for it. Two lunches a day. Why is that, books and lunch."

"I don't know."

"We never really got to talk." She regarded him, cheek in hand, and seemed to remember an old smile she had once kept for him. "I thought about you so much, these last few weeks. Lots of stuff. I wondered: did you ever come up with that third wish?"

"No," he said. It had been with her that he had first begun working out the constraints and possibilities of three wishes. He didn't want to say that she herself, her person, had been the tentative subject of the third, what time she had been off in California; the subject, in more than one casting. "No. Not finally."

"Maybe now," she said. "You're learning all these new powers."

"Not for me," he said. "What should I do, practice conjuring?" He tossed his napkin onto the table, rising. "You've got to remember the one great drawback of practical magic, Jewel. It didn't work." She was rising too, but he forestalled her. "Sit, sit for a sec while I, and then we'll go. One sec." She sat, becalmed, before her cold cup, her hand on the typed pages.

She really hadn't been suggesting that his book ought to teach magic procedures. No. The meaning, the world-view behind them, the soul-sense they made: that's what she meant. The practices themselves-that was much too dangerous. She knew more than one person who had been hurt that way: or who had hurt others.

Pierce would laugh to hear her say that.

What a strange guy. She had used to ask him what good does it do you, Pierce, working out these wishes, protecting yourself every which way, if you don't believe you can make wishes?

And he would say: Believing in it doesn't make it so, Jewel.

Old Pierce, she thought with a welling of pity. He thinks he's so sharp, so unfooled: like a color-blind person, undeceived by color. What he could never see is that those powers he had been just talking about weren't wandering around in the world free like mutts waiting to be adopted; they were the creations of souls, created between souls, they were creation itself, and bringing themselves into being was the use they had. If you can create such power in your life, then it's your duty to create it. If you are somehow granted it, it's not for no reason. That's what evolution is.

One day he'll learn, she thought, if not in this lifetime, the next, or the next. It's the task set for him, even if he doesn't know it: he who knows so much else.

There was a reason she was here, no longer Pierce's lover but with her hands on Pierce's work. The world is changing, evolving in a new and accelerated way, and its evolution too is up to people, people bringing the future into being.

Evolution. She felt a soft surge as of sea foam through her veins.

All that summer she had heard about these noises off the Atlantic coast, a series of great booms like sonic booms but not sonic booms. The TV had reported them but could give no explanation. No one knew what they were. The little group that Julie was one of, a group which kept in touch coast to coast as much by an interlock of thought and feeling as by phone and letter, had all come to think that what this might be-just might be-was the signal that Atlantis was rising: the time had come ripe at last. At Montauk Julie had stood sunburned on a headland in the salt breeze, growing certain that it was about to be: that the blazing tip of its pyramid would any moment break the rolling sea's surface, then its towers and ramparts too, shedding green water, she knew it, she just knew it.

She felt it still, that certainty, just as she still felt the burn on her shoulders and the sweet tone of her muscles. She should tell him: and tell him too that her certainty itself was part of what was calling that drowned world back: like calling to like. She should.

"Okay," Pierce said beside her, hands in his pockets and a guilty impatient air about him that she had used to know. "Okay."

"Okay," she said. And she placed on the bill a card of gold-colored plastic.

She took a cab; Pierce walked home, the September sun in his face and Julie's new business card in his pocket (midnight blue, with the stars of Scorpio picked out on it in silver). In the fading elation of his two scotches he could not tell if he was downcast or triumphant.

The return of the magus, bearing in his hands the old potent physics out of the past, secret doctrines decoded, the numbers of the pyramid, was that in the end what he had to sell? Then he would sell it.

There had been a time when he had thought of nothing else, when he had stood on his rooftop watching the grimy spheres of heaven revolve around him, Oh I see, I get it : but to hear those notions in another's mouth, unqualified, fitted to a different kind of consciousness, made them sound at once loony and banal, too much and not enough.

And yet were they not brave, those old mages, knights of Egypt, were they not heroes? Wrong as they may have been in almost everything they thought they knew for sure, they were heroes, the more Pierce had read about them the more they had come to be his own heroes. An Agrippa, a Bruno, a Cardanus about to take up the wand, open the book of Hermes, incise strange geometries on a sheet of virgin wax: they may have thought they were only tapping into the ancientest wisdom, only cleansing corrupt sciences and restoring them to purity: but what they were postulating was a new heaven and a new earth, and it was one like our own.

There were ten thousand daemons in Bruno's heavens: but for all its occult influences, for all its affinities and sympathies, the magician's universe worked the way it did not because God or the Devil was interfering in it, but simply because that was the way it was. It was an immense, even a limitless universe, a nexus of spirit and matter in which the magus's perceptions and aspirations were bound up, it was far more full of possibility than the small, enclosed, God-and-Devil-animated world of orthodoxy, and it was natural. The true magus didn't need to believe in witchcraft, or in miracles in favor of believers, because his universe was not only large enough to contain reasons for any astonishing thing that happened, but so full of forces, world spirits, angels (themselves objects as natural as stones or roses), that anything was possible, any effect of desire or will working in the world.

So despite how wrong the magicians might have been about any given feature of it, and they could be wildly wrong and amazingly gullible, the size of their world, and the fact that not only did they not know all that it contained but knew-with joy-that it was impossible to know all that it contained, makes their minds like ours.

And not so incomprehensible then after all, or so inexpressible either.

Well then.

He was just then passing beneath one of the stone lions who guard the public library, and he sat there on the step and took a notebook from his pocket. The sun was dazzling. He wrote: "Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out."

Oh god you would have to be so careful though, so careful. Time doesn't return, turn full circle, and bring back what is past; what turns full circle is the notion that time will turn full circle, and bring back the past. That was the secret Pierce knew, the one he must tell. Time turned not in a circle but a spiral, sleeping and waking; any Golden Age perceived to have dawned again, or sad decline repeating itself, or new millennium come, creates in the very perception all the past Golden Ages, or declines, or rebirths, or millennia that it seems to be repeating, Oh I remember, I remember : we ascend upward through the spheres that seem to hem us in.

Wake up, his book must say, you can do nothing unless you wake up. Like Bruno shouting that the sun was rising: wake up.

Bruno himself should be the book's hero, in fact; Bruno with his cocksure announcing, Bruno with his infinitudes and his planets swimming through space like great placid beasts, alive alive-oh; Bruno with his endless impossible systems for remembering and thus mastering everything in the whole wide world-an enterprise that might after all turn out to be not so different from Pierce's own. "Mind, at the center of all, containing within itself all that it is the center of"-yes! Just as Pierce himself had felt the brains within him tightly packed with all that he had ever perceived, like a Kodachrome movie reeled up tightly, and all colored too, for if the mind is not colored, then nothing is.

So could he not do that, then? Could he not entertain the notions that Julie thought would sell, the notions that brought that sudden sparkle to her eyes; could he not do that, and be paid to do it, while at the same time engaged on a different enterprise, the same he had been engaged on for so long: to grasp as in a hand the truth of stories patently false, to recover as a dream is recovered the dream-logic of history, because he had himself long dreamed it, and was now awake?

Could he? He could and would. If fools fell for the stories he would retail, let fools fall for them; for himself, he was smart , and if he did not know the way to say one thing which had the effect of another, a much more qualified, even a contradictory, thing, then his long Catholic upbringing, his expensive education at St. Guinefort's and at Noate, had gone for nothing. We thank You O Lord (he blasphemed, exulting) that You have concealed these things from the simple, and revealed them to the wise.

They couldn't make Bruno give up his large world, in the end, and take their small one instead: and so in February of 1600, that white-numbered year, they took him from his cell in the Castel Sant' Angelo, and, dressed in white penitent's robe and seated backward on a donkey, he was led to the Campo dei Fiori, the Field of Flowers (Pierce imagined a meadow filled with spring blooms), and there they tied him to a stake, and burned him.

But Pierce would not be burned: no, even if he aimed for the same powers, the same infinite grasp and freedom that Bruno had aimed for. That was the difference between then and now: Pierce would not be burned.

"So," said Allan Butterman to Rosie, inviting her with a hand to sit, elegant again in soft tweeds and a shirt blue as the October day. "So now."

"So," Rosie said. She swiveled slightly in her comfy chair, feeling quite at home here on her third visit. "It seems like it's okay, and he doesn't mind."

"Doesn't mind?"

"Well we had some talks. And he didn't really want to talk about anything legal. But I wanted to get it decided and over with. And he said he thought we should talk a lot more, and anyway he didn't like the idea of 'no fault' when it was me who walked out. So I explained to him what you said. What our options are."

Heart beating hard and throat dry, stuttering somewhat from overrehearsal, she had made her speech, explaining to Mike that if he didn't want to participate in a no-fault divorce she intended to sue him for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The awful weightiness of this, which seemed at the same time as weightless and illusory as some big scene in a movie, had ended discussion for the day; Mike, saying he was unsure of his ability to control his response, left the Donut Hole, neutral ground where at a deserted hour they had met.

It was a little like playing Rock, Scissors, and Paper, this countering of Mike's psychotherapeutic strategies with her new legal ones; sometimes when the hands came down she won, sometimes he, but at least she didn't always lose.

She had left it at that for a few weeks, feeling like a gambler who has put up a big stake and waits for the other side of the table to see it or fold; she pondered this scary and exhilarating sensation, the sensation of having power, of being out on a limb that was strong enough to hold her. When she thought she had waited enough, she made this appointment with Allan Butterman, and then called Mike to get an answer: Allan, she said, would have to know how he was to proceed.

And Mike had been reasonable. He had, apparently, lost interest in tormenting her about it all, as though he weren't up for the game; he had seemed-as since their separation she had felt him more and more often to be-distracted, not altogether there, to be on the point of turning away saying Yes yes half over his shoulder, his eyes elsewhere. Rosie supposed she knew the cause, though it surprised her.

"This same woman?" Allan said.

"The same one," Rosie said. "I thought it was just going to be a fling. It looks like it's more than that. It looks like he's kinda swept away. But really he's always been sort of a dope about women." That had used to be one of Rosie's real strengths, that Mike had been a dope about women, that she had known it and he had not. She swiveled thoughtfully in her swivel chair. "I wonder if he's still in his Down Passage Year."

"His what?"

"That's in Climacterics," Rosie said. "It's sort of a new science Mike's inventing. I can't tell you a real lot about it, because I don't understand it really, and also because I'm not supposed to talk too much about it, it's basically a simple idea and he's afraid if the wrong person hears about it they'll steal it." Allan stared at her, seeming to be pondering something other than Climacterics.

"It's about how life is divided up into these seven-year periods," Rosie went on, at least wanting to reassure Allan she wasn't talking nonsense. "Every seventh year you sort of hit a plateau, where you're pretty sure of yourself and have a good hold on things. Then gradually you descend, like on a curve, through a Down Passage Year; then you bottom out, and there's an Up Passage Year, and finally you plateau again, seven years later. Psychologically."

"Uh-huh," Allan said.

"It really sort of works," Rosie said. "You can draw it on a curve." It did sort of work; it described Mike's own life better than it did any other life he had applied it to, but Rosie remembered seeing her own ups and downs reflected pretty truly in the chart Mike had drawn for her shortly after he had worked out The Method, as he always called it, with those audible capitals. She remembered his excitement, passion even, and her own wondering assent, a winter's night years ago. . . . With a wholly unexpected heave, like a freak flood, she filled up suddenly with grief, and covered her eyes, a sob caught in her throat.

"Oh god," Allan said. "Oh don't."

She looked at her lawyer; his face was a shocked mask of pity. Her own rush of feeling receded before his. "Wow," she said, and snorted. "Sorry, sorry, where did that come from."

"No no," Allan said. "No, oh god it's just so rotten."

She laughed, fragments of her broken sob caught in it. "It's okay," she said. "You got a hankie?" He proffered a box. "Go ahead," he said. "Go ahead and cry. That schmuck."

"Allan," she said, blowing her nose. "Really I'm okay. Calm down. What's next to do."

"This is exactly why I don't do divorces," Allan said, massaging his brow. "I just really can't take it."

"What now," Rosie said. "What now."

Allan cleared his throat vigorously, and drew out a long yellow pad and one of the new sharpened pencils he always had (never dull or short, what did he do with used ones?), and tugged at his ear.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. What we have to try to do is come to an agreement now, you and Mike and his attorney and I, about various matters pertaining to your life with Mike, and try to make it as mutually acceptable as possible, and simple enough that even the judge can understand it.

"So let's see. Let's make a list. First is custody, of, of . . ."

"Sam. Samantha. I'll get custody."

"Uh-huh." He didn't write. "And Mike?"

"I'm sure Mike won't want custody. We haven't really made it clear though."

"Uh-huh."

"I mean it's clear to me ."

Allan favored her with a smile, a smile of almost professional approval, and wrote. "Well and you've got to be clear too about visiting rights, support, some kind of decision-making process about insurance, and schooling, and who informs who about when the kid goes to the dentist, the hospital . . . ."

"Okay."

"As long as you're still talking," Allan said. "If attorneys do it, it costs more, and maybe you get an agreement nobody likes but the attorneys."

"Okay. Okay." Her heart had filled. Sam.

"Support?" Allan said. "Are you working now?"

"I was," Rosie said. "Teaching art, at the Sun School."

"Oh yes."

"But it looks like they don't need me now." It looked like the little alternative school, housed in a small made-over mill in Stonykill, was going out of business, declining into mess and recriminations.

"If you can," Allan said, "it might be best to stay unemployed. Till after the decree." He drew a line across his pad. "Okay. Property to divide . . ."

"Not really anything," Rosie said. "A house, but the hospital paid the down payment and holds the mortgage, so. And then stuff. Just stuff."

"Stuff," said Allan, nodding. "Stuff." The way he had of speaking, that seemed to weight all his words with a huge burden of feeling: Rosie thought it must be a trick of some kind, or an effect he wasn't really conscious of. But then again maybe not, maybe he did feel the woes and pains of his clients as deeply as he seemed to: maybe, like a practiced weightlifter, he was able to support a larger burden than most people. A cowlick had sprung up from his plastered black hair, and his eyes were sad again. Rosie found herself liking him a lot. "I don't care about it," she said. "I don't really want any of it."

"Sure," Allan said. "You know, back when I did do a lot of divorces, everybody always said, 'I don't want any of it, let her have it, let him have it.' And you know what all the awful arguments, all the pain was always about? Stuff."

"Are you married?" Rosie asked.

"I used to sit here and listen to people grieving about a car, a TV, jewelry, a goddamn set of porch furniture, and I would think, how petty can people be, can't they rise above all that? Didn't their love mean more to them than these materialistic details? It took me some time to figure out that love is in the details. It's in the books and records and the stereo and the convertible. Love is always in the details.

And that's where the pain is too." His eyes, sadder even, were on her, and his white hands folded before him. "Not married," he said. "It's a long story."

"I've been wondering something," Rosie said, beginning once again to swivel in her chair. "You know the old castle down in the middle of the river, on the island?"

"Butterman's."

"Was that you who built it, your family I mean?"

"Well sort of. Some distant connection. I've never worked it all out."

"I hear I own it. That the family owns it."

"I think that's right."

She smiled. "Not part of the settlement," she said, and Allan laughed, the first time she had seen him do so. "What I've always wanted to do," she said, "was go and go in. I never have."

"Neither have I."

"You want to, sometime?" She stretched out in her chair. "You being the family lawyer, and all." He strummed his pencil on the leather drumtop of his desk. "I wanted to give you one funny piece of advice," he said. "You know that even if this no-fault approach works out, it's going to be about a year from the trial date before your divorce is final."

"Oh my god really?"

"Six months after the trial, you get a judgment nisi. Nisi is Latin for 'unless.' Unless something untoward comes up. Then there's a 'nisi period'-six more months, for you guys to think about it, and decide maybe you don't want it-"

"Hm."

"Or more importantly when you can file objections to the settlement. Objections saying that the other party acted fraudulently, or that new facts have come to light. Say, new facts relating to making a correct decision about custody."

Rosie said nothing.

"People don't always know how they feel at first," Allan said gently. "They can change their minds. And if they do change their minds, and if they do want to do something other than what they agreed to do at first, then they're going to be looking for grounds on which to make an objection. And they have a whole year to look. Okay?"

Rosie began to understand; she lowered her eyes, feeling reproached.

"All I want to say," Allan said, even more gently, "is that if uncomplicated custody is what you want, and what you can get now, then my advice to you is to be a model single parent until those final papers come.

If you need to know what one is, I'll spell it out. And if you can't be a model single parent-if you can't be-then Rosie you ought to be a damn careful one."

Before she left town that day, Rosie stopped at the library, to return her latest Fellowes Kraft novel, and take out another. The one she returned was The Court of Silk and Blood ; the one she chose, without much thought, was called A Passage at Arms , and had a seascape, galleons, and a compass rose on the cover. Afternoon was late when she drove out of the Jambs, autumn afternoon closing suddenly.