We lay in the dark for a time, silent, thinking our thoughts. Even with my ear fast to her bosom, I could barely detect her breathing.

"Your last chance," she finally said, but then laughed again, as if to resign herself to the mutability of such ultimata, the elasticity of the English language and the human heart.

I held her tight, then tighter.

"Make love to me," she said.

Fireworks, indeed! A Fourth of July extravaganza! A lusty, withering, half-hour cannonade-the barrels melted; I had to spike my guns-after which I collapsed into the edgy sleep of a survivor.

Then came a wild late-night dream. Bloodcurdling, to say the least.

In one unforgettable episode, an all-female Congress had been convened: hundreds of very angry (hence resplendent) young women milling about the floor of a great convention hall, the place seething with taut buttocks and placards and denunciatory feminist rhetoric. I spotted Toni in a Shriner's hat, Megan in next to nothing. The tattooed Carla was there too, and a buxom little businesswoman with a Toshiba, and Deborah and Karen, and a nurse named Rebecca, and Peg and Patty, and Little Red Rhonda, and the sputtering young Sissy, and Laurel in a red choir robe, and Masha and Fleurette and Jessie and Evelyn and Faith and Signe and Katrina and Caroline and Deb and Tulsa and Oriel and blue-eyed Beverly and many, many, many others, whose names and vital data had long since blurred into the larger panorama of things erotic. Curiously, the crowd seemed displeased with me. Much taunting and fist shaking-pandemonium, in fact. At one horrifying point I tried to make my escape, scampering down a long, narrow aisle, but the throng immediately cornered me near the podium, wrestling me into a wooden chair, roping me in tight and lifting me overhead like some captured beast.

And then, for what seemed an eternity, I was womanhandled in the most unspeakable ways. Here, quite literally, was the nightmare of all red-blooded nightmares. A bad dream, I thought, even while dreaming. Yet it would not end. Teetering aboard my fool's chair, I was assaulted with mucus and spiteful epithets; I was stripped to my lanky essence; I was pawed in private places; I was passed from hand to hand like a rag doll, used like a party toy, gnawed upon like a felled zebra, then rudely hauled up to the speaker's platform by several burly members of my seminar on the Methodologies of Misogyny. What I had done to warrant all this was beyond me. "Innocent!" I tried to squeal, but my lips had been stapled shut.

And then what?

Loud, venomous speeches. Bitter invective, outrageous accusations, loudspeakers blaring out old hymns and marching anthems. There were guest lectures. The Indigo Girls performed. And then out of nowhere Lorna Sue was there. She seemed to float up to the platform-or levitate, or fly-alighting beside me with a candle in one hand, my leather-bound love ledger in the other. Her eyes had a metallic, cauterized appearance, like polished aluminum. She wore a black cape, a black bonnet, black tights, black gloves, a diaphanous black veil. What her garb may have signified I had no idea, except that she resembled some sort of renegade mother superior. The hall went silent. Heads bowed-even my own.

Slowly, then, Lorna Sue drifted toward me, hovering there, smiling a vague, cold, sightless smile. Once again I tried to speak, to defend myself, but a pair of unmanicured hands instantly grasped me from behind. Electrodes were attached to my naked limbs, a metal headpiece fitted to my skull. Lorna Sue winked. She was chanting now: an incantatory prayer that was soon taken up by the entire assembly. My fate was sealed, obviously, but even then I could not help but take note of Toni's beckoning brown thighs, Carla's tattoos, Megan's navel, Sissy's moist little tongue, all those firm and fleshy bounties amassed before me like a sumptuous last supper. The girls' fury bothered me not. Nor their bleats of censure. They were here, obviously, for me. For no other. And had I not been strapped to the chair, I most certainly would have raised a hand in affectionate salute. I did, in fact, manage a forgiving nod, but in the next instant a hooded executioner stepped forward-Miss Jane Fonda, I believe. "We're people, we're individuals!" she bellowed. To which, through stapled lips, I replied: "Well, for God's sake, of course you are, A to double-D, all shapes and sizes." This got me nowhere. The executioner-indeed, the above-mentioned Oscar winner-took hold of a large red lever at center stage. (Crass symbolism I leave to the quacks.) I steeled myself for the lethal jolt. Oddly, I felt almost no fear-a tingle of anticipation, if anything-but this changed swiftly when Lorna Sue turned toward the crowd and lifted her candle to my priceless love ledger. I jerked upright. At that instant the executioner did her duty. There was a flash of white light-I was sizzling-and the final image was of Lorna Sue putting the flame to my life's work, my enduring gift to posterity. It all went up in smoke. As I did.

Two stark thoughts had already imprinted themselves on my mind as I awakened. First, fireworks. Second, I had failed to lock the doors.

Mrs. Kooshof's bedside clock showed 2:46 A.M.

For a time I lay listening, sniffing the acrid night air, and after a few seconds before the word smoke returned to me as if curling out of the dream. I may well have whispered it aloud.

I slipped out of bed, put on my pajama bottoms, toddled to the kitchen. For whatever reason, I felt no great alarm; there was just that wispy smoke at the margins of my thoughts. I poured myself a glass of ice water, stood at the kitchen counter, and not until I had finished drinking and carefully rinsed the tumbler did it occur to me that there was nothing in the least dreamy about the odor in my nose.

Bombs, I thought.

I hurried out to the living room, bolted the front door, checked the den and spare bedroom, returned to the kitchen, stood sniffing again, bolted the back door, then switched on the basement light and made my way down.

(Basements, I add parenthetically, are not to my taste. Cobwebs.) Yet nothing was amiss.

Briefly, I scanned the furnace and hot-water heater, peeked into a cluttered storage room, then trudged back upstairs. The smoky odor was now quite powerful. I use the word smoky advisedly, for this was not just smoke. There was also the distinct smell of gasoline.

At that point I knew.

I unlocked the back door and in my bare feet stepped out onto the lawn.

The fire had mostly extinguished itself: tiny tongues of flame, a reddish-orange glow, a charred wooden cross burning against the garage. (Pathetic? Trite? Such is our dismal human journey. We are what we were. We end where we began.) I crossed the yard. At my feet, in the lingering red glow, lay several shards of glass-fragments of a mason jar, I surmised. A large swath of grass had been scorched, the garage itself badly blistered.

What my emotions were I could not be certain. Plainly not surprise.

"Lorna Sue!" I yelled.

I waited a moment, then yelled again. There was no response. Crackling sounds from the plywood. The dark Minnesota prairie.

But she was out there, I was sure.

The second bomb went off at 3:28 A.M., the third only a heartbeat later.

I had just returned my weary bones to the side of Mrs. Robert Kooshof when the twin explosions seemed to flare up behind my eyelids. I jackknifed sideways, flailed against the sheets, caught a glimpse of the bomb's silver afterburn over Mrs. Kooshof's left shoulder. (She was already at the window: a compelling image by any standard. Profile view. Backlighted breasts. Here, even under wee-hour attack, was the purest evidence of my lifelong philogyny, my rock-solid affection for the more malleable sex.) I disentangled myself from the bedclothes, sped to Mrs. Kooshof's side, took up a defensive stance behind her.

The window still shimmied from the blasts.

For a moment or so I felt my very blood wobble. Though partially blinded, I put a hand to Mrs. Kooshof's waist, steadying myself, and peered out at the incontinent night. Not thirty yards away, kitty-corner across the street, a pair of microwave-size fires blazed upon the broad brick steps of St. Paul's.

Lorna Sue stood close by, dressed in a long white nightgown, her face oddly childlike, partly solemn, partly ecstatic. Somehow, as if by magic, she seemed to have shed forty-odd years-a kid again, barely of age. After a second she looked up at our window. Perhaps it was my imagination, but she seemed to incline her head slightly. (An acknowledgment of some sort? A farewell? A threat? I will never know.) A few dark moments slipped by, then Lorna Sue giggled and reached down and lifted her nightgown waist high. Once again she looked up at our window, seemed to smile at something, stepped sideways into one of the fires, stood motionless for a time, and then, without the least hurry-without pain, it appeared-stepped out again, lowered her nightgown, and carefully brushed a streak of soot from its hem.

She skipped down the sidewalk toward her house.

Appalling, yes. But what it signified I had no idea.

For a minute or two Mrs. Kooshof and I watched the fires die out. "All right," she said. "What was that?"

I began to reply-to tell her about fountains pens and burning churches-but right then, as I exhaled the breath of history, the phone rang. It was Herbie. He needed me.

"Fast," he said. "Get over here."

I threw on a pair of trousers, a fresh cotton shirt, a tie, and carried myself at a trot to the Zylstra home, a half block away. It was now nearly four in the morning, July the fifth. The front door stood ajar. I stepped inside, followed the sound of sobbing into the living room. (A thousand times in my youth I had trodden the same path; I knew this place-feared it, loved it-and in odd, indelible ways it was truly my second home, as deeply embedded in my dreams as my own childhood abode: a snake named Sebastian; a cat dangling from a third-story window; an honor guard; Lorna Sue playing with her dollhouse up in the attic.) Now, though, I sensed something new and undefinable. In the cluttered living room I found Velva in hysterics, Ned and Earleen doing what they could to comfort her, the tycoon sprawled virtually comatose on the sofa.

I began to turn, looking for Herbie, when Mrs. Robert Kooshof appeared in the hallway to my right. She was clad in her blue negligee, a pair of incongruous spike heels strapped to her feet. Apparently, she had followed only a step or two behind me. (Apparently, too, she had outfitted herself in something of a rush.) She glanced at Velva, then at the tycoon, and after a hesitation marched to my side, her pretty Dutch face betraying a sort of embarrassed solicitude.

"Don't ask me to leave," she said. "You're mine, Thomas."

"This isn't the occasion for-"

"It is the occasion. I belong here." She regarded me with a calm directness I had never experienced before, a steadiness that Lorna Sue would never have attempted, certainly not equaled. "New world, Thomas. Understand me?"

"I do. Thank you."

She nodded. "So where is our little firebomber?"

I raised my hands in a display of ignorance. Velva's sobs had ebbed to a garbled moan, and a restful few moments passed before the woman was able to replenish her lungs.

"My little girl!" she screeched. "My house!"

(Which, to me, made not the slightest sense.) Mrs. Kooshof assisted Velva to the sofa, depositing her beside Lorna Sue's insensate tycoon. He, too, was weeping. Occasional nuggets of delirium issued from his debauched, wife-purloining lips.* I smiled and folded my arms. A curious peace passed over me at watching the DNA of this family come unknit before my very eyes.

Perhaps another minute went by, each lengthy second chockfull of blather, and then Herbie came into the room. Exactly how, or from where, I did not notice-he had snatched my arm even before I saw or heard him. (Like Mrs. Kooshof, he was dressed more or less for slumber: boxer undershorts, a T-shirt, bare feet.) He hissed something at me, made a meaningless gesture at the ceiling, then tugged me toward an open doorway at the far end of the room.

Mrs. Kooshof intervened.

"Slow down," she said briskly. "What's happening here?"

"The attic," Herbie said. "Lorna Sue, she has those fucking bombs up there-Tom's bombs-and we have to ..." His voice snagged; he was having trouble, like the rest of the clan, pinning language to thought. He blinked at Mrs. Kooshof, plaintively tugged at me again. His face was layered with a shiny coat of sweat.

"Where Thomas goes, I go," said Mrs. Kooshof. "Attic or no attic."

"You can't," Herbie said.

"No cans, no can'ts. I am."

"Yes, but listen, you don't really ... I mean, it's dangerous."

He was on the edge of panic, his voice ragged, yet even then my newly adhesive fiancee refused to budge.

"It's settled," she said. "I tag along."

Behind us, Velva emitted another lungful of incoherence. Herbie glanced at her, then up at the ceiling, then at Mrs. Kooshof. "I can't explain it now," he said, "but you're part of what's going on here. What set her off, I mean."

Mrs. Kooshof laughed. "She's jealous?"

"Not exactly, but she thinks ... she thinks you've corrupted Tommy. Subverted things."

There was a rubbery silence before Mrs. Kooshof laughed again.

"Jealous!" she said.

Then Mrs. Kooshof looked at me. For all her showy courage, I could see she was frightened-of Lorna Sue, of me, of whatever remained between us.

"I'm still going," she said. "I need to be in on this. Please."

Herbie shrugged.

Without a word, he turned and led us up to the second floor, then down a corridor to the attic staircase. He motioned for Mrs. Kooshof to stop there; together, my old pal and I climbed twelve creaky steps into the loft.

I edged forward, one hand against Herbie's back, the other reaching out for eternity.

The only illumination was supplied by a swath of moonlight streaming in from an open window to my left-the same window, in fact, from which Herbie had once gone rat-fishing with a terrified cat.

Directly ahead, in the dark, I heard a short giggle: the giggle of a seven-year-old.

I stopped and squinted. For a second I felt myself sliding off a psychic edge, tumbling backward. Here, in this musty old loft, Herbie and I had first broached the subject of a plywood cross, all the possibilities. ("It'll be neat," Herbie had said, and Lorna Sue had looked up from her dolls and smiled at me. We were in love. Puppy love, one might say, but it was full and genuine-as real as love can ever be. "Well, I guess so," she had said, and then giggled.) Now she giggled again.

I took another step forward, but in the next instant a great white star flared up directly in front of me.

I dropped flat to my stomach, thinking the crisp, elegant thoughts of a dead man. There was a sharp crackling nearby, another girlish giggle. "Easy now," Herbie was saying, yet even then I had to will my eyelids open.

The rafters glowed yellow-orange. I rolled sideways and sat up.

Near the window, six feet away, Lorna Sue crouched with her back to the wall, chuckling at my folly, a blazing Fourth of July sparkler held high overhead. In front of her stood my three remaining bombs. Eerie, yes, but what unsettled me was the flickering image of Lorna Sue herself: both middle-aged and impossibly young. How she managed this I do not pretend to know. An illusion of circumstance, perhaps, or my own misapprehension, or the way she giggled, or her little-girl posture, or the fierce, undulating light of the sparkler, or some mysterious inner spirit that came bubbling to the Tampa-tanned surface of her skin. I shielded my eyes and looked again, not quite believing, but there was still that ghostly double exposure, that sense of beholding the child inside the woman.

Herbie saw it too. I know he did: by the way he put his hand on my shoulder; by the inflection in his voice when he said, "Don't worry. It happens sometimes."

Lorna Sue carved a quick, brilliant loop with her sparkler.

"It happens!" she said gleefully.

"Come on, please," Herbie said. "Let's just-"

"It happens, though! It happens, Tommy!"

Her voice had a lilting, melodic sound, like some singsong children's chant. She made a face at me, leaned forward, and passed the sparkler over one of my rigged mason jars.

"Boom!" she cried. "It happens!"

I rose awkwardly to my feet.

In the flaring light I could make out my Joker's Wild firecrackers, their slender white fuses jutting up from the jar lids. And I could also see the contempt in her face. (This is not to suggest that she appeared deluded or deranged. She knew what she was doing; she always had known.) Her gaze was steady. She was in command-quite literally-not only of her emotions but of our very grip on the here and now.

Herbie moved back a step. "Put it down," he said. "Tommy's here."

"Oh, gee! Tommy!"

"Right, baby-just like I promised."

"Funny old liar-liar, flirt-bird Tommy?"

"That's the one," said Herbie. "Let's go downstairs now. We can talk there."

Lorna Sue shook her head and grinned at me. "Scared?" she whispered.

"So it seems," I said.

"Well, you should be. You should be a whole lot scared." She gave her sparkler a quick twirl. "Just a scared old flirt-bird."

I bobbed my chin, more or less assenting. (If nothing else, Lorna Sue had a keen eye for my spiritual shortcomings.) I dared an oblique glance at Herbie, who had inched forward a step or two.

Lorna Sue also noticed. "Hey, Tepee Creeper," she said. "I think you better stop right there."

"Sure," Herbie said.

"You better."

"Fine, honey, I've stopped. Let's just-"

"Then stay stopped," she said, almost playfully, and made another threatening sweep with her sparkler.

Herbie squatted down.

"Listen to me, sweetheart. You don't want to hurt anybody, do you? Not really."

"Maybe I do want to."

"You don't."