How lovely it would be to avoid that particular argument just once. But you can only stand there, box in hand, the usual confused expression smearing your scarred features. You, like everyone you meet, are a product of fusion, osmosis and mutant nucleotides.

A mistake has been made, you have made a mistake, and now you shall learn what it is.

But first she throws the powdered sugar on the floor, a full tankard of mead into the chiseled blood channels of a pilfered altar. Her muscular arms are sheathed in sweat, and the veins of her once graceful, satiny neck now bulge blackly. Her skills are put to good use-balance, proper distribution of weight across both legs, a ghotthal killing strike stance. She hefts the enormous crystal shaker of salt against the lantern of Baal that the people of the silver city gave you for decapitating the tyrant Po Duk.

She hisses in your face. You try to listen but you've got five g's riding on the Jets and the QB has been blitzed four times.Four times ! d.a.m.n it, stopped at the two, the two.Throwing knives dapple the far wall and stab the pictures drawn by your children. She's yelling about neutrino stars and reflecting nebulae. You can't concentrate. You ought to be on your knees thanking the pulsating variable suns that she's stuck with you after all these years of asteroid misery and ice planet blues. The hunchback Homnulk at the gate nearly severed your left wrist with his blade. And she held your sinews together with spit and sewed up your flesh with thread made of her own eyelashes.

It's true, mostly. You owe everything to her and her father, who put you to work as a stockboy, $4.89 an hour to start, bagging dry goods and carrying the flayed out of the aisles, and this is how you make your rest.i.tution? A four-carat diamond-flawed no less, yellow, poorly refracted light-that you bought off Manny Weidlebaum, that crook on 47th? Wait until she tells Daddy.

The light outside is synthetic and hurts your eyes. Elevated crowns possessing thick, soft, giant leaves and stems a quarter of a mile high drape themselves on water towers and apartment buildings. Mighty herbaceous plants that cannot support themselves, rest-as if for only a moment-against the spires of gla.s.s, stone and steel. Climbing vines reaching across board room windows, wreathing the balconies and affording cover for nooners. The ma.s.sive perennial shrubs arising from the tremendous tubular bases frame the neon EAT N sign, and suddenly you're hungry.

It's time for you to think in terms of I. You make the effort and are surprised it's so difficult. "I . . ." A valiant try considering you have no experience at this. "I, uh . . ." Well, no, see, you're faltering.

And another thing, she says, about this Khyre- The gilded turrets of fate stand firm in the distance, green with life and growing, and you try to do the same. You've been everywhere and done everything many times before, but now there's a new odyssey for you to undertake. You came here for a different reason-not to relive the past extremes but to discover new venues. You've failed in your mission but not entirely. Khyre will help you, that's why you created her. It's why you've chosen yourself.

There's more than one G.o.d.

G.o.d has more than one son. Yes.

Go.

You have finally become I, and I stood in ashes trying to keep from falling to pieces in front of the neighbors. Linda was sobbing over what was left of our bedroom, timbers still smoking. The old ladies of the town circled her, trying to grab her hand, pressing shoulders to her face, but she shook each of them away. It wasn't easy. I counted seven of the elderly women holding four open Bibles.

"Everything's gone," Linda said. "It's all been destroyed."

Smoke coiled in the charred trees like webbing. The stink of gasoline was still heavy in the air. Some of the town kids were coughing and asking their parents to go home, but no one left. They stood on our dead lawn gawking and rubbing their chins and feeling righteous.

Linda sagged and nearly twisted into my arms. I reached out to catch her but she never fell. She showed me her teeth in a vengeful sneer. I tried to tell her something that might sound comforting, but nothing came. The furniture, our laptops, her favorite clothes and implements, that's all replaceable. But the photo alb.u.ms, the ma.n.u.scripts, the rarities of my childhood-what the h.e.l.l was I supposed to do now?

We waited in the ruins, watching the volunteer fireman spraying down the wreckage. Heaps of burned memories cluttered the yard and debris drifted in the mud streams. I watched computer disks, mutilatedDVD cases, and signed editions of rare novels bob, submerge, and drown beneath a tide of muck.

"Our whole lives," Linda whispered. "Gone."

My mother, who had died in fire, would have said, "You still have each other and yourselves." My mother buried three husbands and never knew heartbreak. "The rest is mere property."

Perhaps it was true, but I couldn't feel the weight and tug of my own past anymore. I felt too light, as if I might float off into the thick gray haze clambering skyward. I made a half-hearted attempt to gather up some of the blackened fragments of my history, kicking clots of mangled garbage into a pile.

Paper, so much kindling. Five thousand books and a thousand pounds of ma.n.u.scripts, magazines, notebooks, poetry. I scanned for words that might have some meaning left, sentences that might spell out a reason for all this devastation. The ancients should have prepared me for this, but they didn't. I wrote the lessons down for others but never learned them myself.

The fire marshal and the police asked dozens of questions. Did I have any enemies? None that I knew of.

An ex-lover left on bad terms? No, I'd been happily married to my high school sweetheart for fifteen years. In fact, Linda and I had been out celebrating our anniversary this evening, only to return and find the house annihilated.

They leaned in and repeated the question under their breaths. The marshal actually gave me a nudge in the ribs. I could've broken his jaw. No, no angry ex-lovers.

Max came around and stood at the curb, doing his best not to simply be one of those indifferent onlookers. He was the only real friend I'd made since moving to Silver City almost two years ago. His decency was apparent in the way he kept close in case I called out for him but stayed far enough away in the event I wanted to be alone with Linda and our sorrow.

Except I wasn't sad. The rage hunched itself between my shoulder blades and speared downwards through to my heart. My fists shook at my sides and the hinges of my jaw hurt so badly from clenching my teeth I thought I might crush my back fillings.

"Max?" I called.

He rushed over and made a move as if to hug me, but I held him off. He smelled fruity-apricots, oranges, lemon. Max believed in the earth, everything herbal and natural, from his food to his bathroom cleansers. He was a pagan without even knowing it. He stepped closer and tried to embrace me again but I moved aside. I didn't want to be touched now, not even by Linda.

"You know these people, Max," I said. "Who did it?"

"Thomas-"

"I don't mind not being invited to church picnics or the Fourth of July bunny hop races, but this goes beyond some backyard gossip and a few nasty glares in the grocery store. Don't you think?"

He'd lost his wife of twenty-seven years six months ago and the burden of his pain was clear in every fold of his face. Stooped and frail, he'd aged greatly in the past half year. "No one here would have done this."

"That's a lie."

"There's a reason for everything. Some good will come from this. You'll see. They'll find whoever isresponsible."

"No," I told him, "but I will."

Max ran a trembling hand through his thin white hair and stared at me. We had nothing left to say and he wandered off with a sad huff of air. I watched him go and wished I could've accepted his intimacy at the moment, but all I wanted to do was maim somebody.

I'd lived with occasional vicious bits of hate mail and three a.m. crank phone calls since my third book became a modest bestseller for the New Age groupies. I researched ancient civilizations and explained their practices and religions, showing how to apply Old World wisdom to modern life. The books were alternately shelved in Self-Help, History, and the Occult. Two more such reference works were published and I was getting more high-profile, earning an undeserved reputation as some sort of guru.

The backlash was inevitable. Folks in town had taken me to be a heathen or devil worshiper, and like all good witch-hunters they were trying to burn me down.

I took Linda's hand and led her to the car. We rode out to the highway and nabbed the first motel we saw, just like we used to do it in high school.

Linda spent most of the evening on the phone with her parents while I stared at the free cable station and watched some erotic thriller where the gorgeous girls betrayed the stupid macho males over various caches of loot. It got me giggling and Linda, apparently offended, glanced over at me.

"How can you laugh at a time like this?" she asked, and I sort of pondered on it myself.

Daddy was promising her the entire world again, as if he ever gave us anything I didn't have to pay back with interest. Seventeen years ago he started me as a stock boy for $4.89 an hour, and I had to chauffeur him to and from the store.

I clicked onto the Discovery Channel. They were discussing Atlantis, the Ancient Astronauts, the missing Anastazi who had left their New Mexican caves behind and vanished in a single night. One culture bled into another-the Egyptians, Aztecs, Toltecs, the Mayans. Brothers and sons of lost nations built upon the bone meal of one another. What did they know that I hadn't dreamed of yet?

Christ, now they were tying all of human history in with UFOs, time-travel, Stonehenge, Armageddon, and alternate dimensions. It made my skin scurry and itch. My name came up twice until I just couldn't take any more.

I clicked off the television, sat up and said, "I'm going to go out for a little air. I need some coffee."

"You don't drink coffee."

"I know that."

"Then what do you . . .?"

"I've never had my house burned down before either, honey. It's a time of new adventures."

Of course it was the wrong thing to say-brutal and vindictive, as if she were the cause-and she covered her face with her hands, sobbing painfully into them. She had a smear of soot on her chin that made me ache for the broiling pa.s.sion I'd once had for her, instead of this comfortably lukewarm familiarity. I spent an hour whispering apologies to my wife that she wouldn't accept. I was the reason for her loss, and my own."Insurance will cover most of the loss," I said. "We'll get everything material back."

"The Italian draperies and Moroccan bas-reliefs. Those too?"

"Yes."

"Even my good jewelry?"

"Yes, certainly."

It quieted her down and Linda nodded against my chest. She sighed as I pressed my face into her hair trying to breathe in my forgotten ardor. "Just don't buy me another ring from Manny Weidlebaum," she said.

"Who the h.e.l.l is Manny Weidlebaum?"

The question hung in front of me like the wraiths of the Druids. She never answered, and finally, when she slept, I slipped out and walked across the street to an all-night diner. EAT N flashed at me in time with my pulse.

Eighteen-wheelers crowded the parking lot. Truckers sat inside swapping bennies and black beauties, sharing information about speed traps and loose women in the hills. I sat at a booth and waited for revelation. For all I knew, Atlantis might be at the bottom of the salt shaker.

The waitress swept between the other patrons and appeared at my side. The harsh years had left her hopeful but haggard, with a yellow smile and an extra chin that made her look jollier than she was. She said, "What can I get you?"

"Coffee."

She blinked at me and waited. "That it?"

"I don't even want that to be honest."

"We have the best apple pie in the county. I make it myself. Might be worth trying, if you're just looking for a touch of sugar."

Maybe I was. "Okay, I'll take a piece."

She got three steps away before turning back and saying, "Didn't you writeThe Five Winds of the Earth ?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. I seen you on the TV a couple'a times, the morning shows. I liked that book a lot. Some of the best advice I've ever gotten that didn't come from my grandma. I've tried to put to practice your five rules to my life, but it's harder that you'd think. Sometimes it helps, I'm fairly sure. Number one, make your word your bond . . . two, welcome all trials . . ."

"They're not my rules," I said. "I just pa.s.sed them on."

". . . three, bear the burden of living yourself, don't blame others for your fears or failures . . . four . . ."

"Really, I hope the principles manage to help, but I don't-"". . . let's see, uhm, oh I forget four, what's four again?"

My amiable grin was so forced that it must've looked like rictus had set in. I'd been cornered into this conversation more times than I ever would have imagined when I was writing the d.a.m.n book. I couldn't take it one more time, not now.

"How'd the Jets do?" I asked.

"The Jets?" She let loose with a bark of laughter. "It's July. You mean the Knicks? They're down four at the half. Mel the cook has a radio in back I got to listen to all day long."

She wafted off without counting off the last two disciplines to a healthier way of life, according to the ancients. It was a good thing because I couldn't have named the ideals either. I sat staring at myself in the Formica table top wondering why I'd asked about either the Jets or the Knicks. I didn't give a d.a.m.n about either one of them. I still wanted to wrap my hands around someone's neck.

The pie and coffee came and sat there while I gazed out the window at the moon-stuffed sky. The full eons of the universe seemed to crouch in the heavens just waiting to plummet down on the world. I tapped on the gla.s.s trying to rattle them free.

A throaty voice asked, "May I join you?"

It was a line out of a '40s hard-boiled novel set in Manhattan: rainy night, glow of the streetlights flashing off the windshields of pa.s.sing taxis. For a second I was gone, and then I was back. I glanced up and there she was, still in the movie. Veronica Lake lengthy blonde hair, overly waxed red lips that were made to pout. The eyes of Mary Magdalene staring over a dusty former client on the road to Jerusalem.

"Please do," I said. "There's pie."

She slid into the seat opposite me as if we were about to play a game of chess to decide the future of humanity. Sometimes the earth seemed to hinge on exactly this kind of a trivial instance.

"I'm Khyre."

"I'm Thomas."

She reached across the table as though she might take my hand, but she didn't. A cold and ever increasing tension started to knot inside my chest for no reason. I perked up a bit further in my seat and Khyre met my eyes. "Did you ever feel as if you were chosen, Thomas?"

If she was a prost.i.tute she was the most beautiful one I'd ever seen. None of the truckers were waiting in the wings to take her on down the highway. "Chosen? How so?"

"By a higher power?"

"No. That calls for a belief in fate or G.o.d."

It brought a t.i.tter up that wasn't quite as attractive as the rest of her. "And you believe in neither?

Doubting Thomas?"

I smiled. I got tired of arguing and defending, explaining and fighting. I wondered if it would be tacky if I started in on the apple pie now.

"Perhaps you chose yourself," she said."The h.e.l.l does that mean?"

She brushed the salt shaker aside, then swept her fingers through the grains creating designs. I recognized the patterns as one flowed into another . . . Navajo sand paintings, hieroglyphics, Teutonic runes. I kept thinking of how they'd once tortured witches with salt.

"Do you accept that knowledge is power?"

"Yes," I told her.

"And that some knowledge-especially what's been forgotten by all others-is more powerful?"

It was a rhetorical postulation that I and a hundred other fake New Age pedagogues had made. It sounded deep and mystical and college kids liked to twist it around in their heads when they were high.

"If the ancients were so smart, then why are they all dead? Their empires crumbled beneath the seas and cast across the deserts?"

Khyre let out that t.i.tter again and my scalp p.r.i.c.kled at the sound. "Perhaps that's how it's meant to be.

Ruins with only a few remnants that converge from time to time. The past catches up. Experience, action, prayer, even desire-they all have shape, if you meditate on it."

"I don't," I said honestly.

"Perhaps you do and simply don't remember. Ma.s.s and texture. The more a man does, the more he knows, the greater his place."