"You okay?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

She scanned his face, dropped the knife, and crossed the kitchen to embrace him. She held him for a time, then asked again, "Sure you're okay?"

"Okay," he said, holding her tight, then pulling back.

A worried look came over Mary.

"How long's it been since you talked to your folks?"

She stammered something.

He waited.

"A long time," she finally said.

"Want to go home?"

Mary backed up, placed the knife on the counter, breathing deeply. Finally, with the faintest of smiles coming over her, she said, "Yes."

A Future Time, A Future Memory.

Robert and Mary Lieber were taking their first vacation in years, a cross country drive across the states that would end in Sacramento, home of one of Robert's long-lost uncles. Jenn had just started her last year of college, while they had not quite finished paying for it. They had been working like mad for years now, and they decided on a whim one day to just take off, visit Uncle Henry, who was something of a black sheep, which excited Robert to no end. Perhaps Uncle Henry belonged to his mother's side of the family.

On the third day of their drive, they crossed into Arizona, where the world changed. Dust hung in clouds on the horizon; the sun burned down on the bowl of the earth. The road was two-lanes, surrounded by desert and the clay ridges of mountains and canyons. As the landscape became more desolate, Robert began looking at the line of mountains and thought of bones, the slight crescent of a back. Mary awoke from a nap, cradled her pregnant belly, rubbing it, and said, "I can't believe she's almost done with school. She's almost gone."

"Hey, we've got her successor coming," said Robert. They'd been looking forward for the past few years to Jenn starting college, of beginning that long road toward adulthood, but once she actually left, they'd both felt a strange vacancy at the center of their life. So they began trying.

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah," he said, grabbing her hand. "I do."

Mary flipped on the radio. It took her a while to find a station playing something other than old-time country, but finally she happened onto cla.s.sic rock, an old Led Zeppelin tune about a stairway to heaven.

Pa.s.sing what appeared to be a deserted filling station, Robert checked his gauge-three quarters of a tank-and when he looked up he thought he saw a town on the horizon. This seemed odd because he hadn't expected anything for nearly a hundred miles. He sped up, keeping his eyes on what appeared to be some kind of small settlement. Nearing it, he could make out a few large buildings on opposite sides of a central street that led to one more structure at the far edge of the town. Above it, a wooden cross proclaimed Christ.

"Wow," said Robert, pointing. "Either that's a movie set or a ghost town." Mary sat up, rubbed her eyes.

As they approached, a strange feeling came over Robert. At first he thought he was hungry-his hands were beginning to shake, as if he hadn't had enough sugar. But then sweat broke out on his forehead. His tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth.

Something about this reminded him of his college years, when he'd visited New Mexico with a friend he'd met at school. They'd gone hiking a few times on the mountains bracketing a desert that stretched to meet the sun somewhere in the distance. Some journeyed to visit the sea, thought they felt answers pulsing within her vast circulation, thought they felt the water connect them to the continents and islands beyond their immediate reach. But Robert felt this in the desert. Perhaps it had been some kind of buried memory, some connection to his mother's past in the embryonic America of this past century, an America dreaming of Edison but for whom Einstein was an impossible idea. He'd always felt at home surrounded by silence and s.p.a.ce. For some reason, during those summers he'd felt he could solve any dilemma while surrounded by the death of dust. Young men, there was no denying it, were fools.

Now the town was far to their right. They were pa.s.sing it when Robert looked down the long central street, a path of chewed dirt and encroaching clay. Suddenly, he pulled off the road and hammered over a path of uneven land.

"Robert!" cried Mary.

"Hold on," said Robert, barely noticing her. He didn't realize where he was yet, but it was close as a wolf. The Navigator kicked up a cloud of dust, obscuring the town. Then he stopped. The dust lifted, swirling into the sienna sky, and Robert stepped out of the SUV, made his way quickly down Main Street while Mary yelled at him to slow down. He stopped in the middle of town. The bat wing doors of a saloon were to his left. Mary drew next to him, panting, asking what the h.e.l.l had gotten into him.

"Tempest," he said, craning back, looking at the top floor of the hotel. Where his grandparents had stayed the night before they died. He glanced down, to the steps of the inn, where his mother had lost them and something else, something less definable than life, than the blood of innocents. He looked at Mary. Tears lined her eyes. She nodded.

"Here," she said.

They stood in the middle of the street for some time, then started for the church at the end of town. The sun shone off the cross. Nathaniel Durham, thought Robert. For so long, he'd done his best not to think of his past, his blood. He'd needed time, time to heal, time to distance himself. The past was nothing if not a ghost.

He and Jenn had taken long walks during her last year of high school, and she had asked her thousand questions, some about his mother, some about this very town, some about the blood they shared. He'd done his best to answer each of them honestly. But his answers, like his knowledge, were wildly incomplete. He knew little of the world he had entered. He didn't know whether it was a state of mind or truly another world, hiding in another solar system, another universe, another dimension. He'd told her what he'd been fortunate to learn, but even what he believed he knew had eroded under the constant tide of time. He'd begun to think that had he not lived with people who had experienced these things with him, even in their limited way, he would have questioned it all.

Until today. He was, after all, here.

If nothing else, his experience had amputated him from the collective. Popular culture and fashionable thought were altogether alien paths. Science had killed the mystical and the mythical, and had placed religion in an ever shrinking box. Especially religion as proscribed by people like Nathaniel Durham. For Robert, the things that men believed they knew, the systems they created to order their largely mysterious lives and their untameable world, were nothing more than a series of fires built to beat back the darkness of the mystery, of the magic.

But the magic was real. The magic was here.

It was a part of everything, it was in the tiny gaps of information Man didn't realize existed, in the things they thought they knew. As it always had been, and always would be.

Yes, thought Robert. It's in my blood, and it was in the blood spilled on the steps of that inn.

He took Mary's hand, squeezed it.

"You okay?" she asked, her voice small in the open s.p.a.ce.

Robert looked away from the church. "Beautiful," he said, glancing down the center of the dead town. Above, the sun hovered like a G.o.d. "So beautiful."

end.