Twelve

They went to the service elevator, Dora with a heavy plastic helmet under one arm and a waist high plastic bag stuffed with discarded tape and packing peanuts; Edward's face and civilian clothes were hidden by the enormous bundle of broken down cardboard cartons he clutched in his arms. When the elevator doors opened, another worker got out of the elevator. "See you've got an assistant today," the man said.
"This is Edward, one of those interns from the tech school. I'm trying to teach him everything they don't tell you in class."
"Like carting trash," the fellow said good-naturedly. Edward had to juggle the unstable pile of cardboard to shake his hand before edging into the elevator beside Dora.
"I thought that was it." Edward's stomach began a slow ascent after dropping to somewhere near his knees.
"You know," she said as she pushed the buttons, "I used to be just the most timid thing. I was scared to say anything to anybody. And now, I don't care."
At that moment, trapped in the elevator and still in the depths of the mall, Edward was disinclined to discuss transformations. But when they were safely in the parking lot _ the cardboard stowed in one of the vast recycling bins and the plastic in another _ he asked, "Do you think it really changes us?"
"I think that's why we came," she said. "Except you, maybe."
"Maybe," said Edward, "though the mind is like water."
"I haven't heard that in a while," Dora said with a smile. 
Edward looked around the parking lot, the once dense ranks of motors rapidly thinning out. "I bet Kara and her friends will have gone home." 
"Must have. Mall closed half an hour ago. What will she think? Will she call the police?"
Edward hadn't thought of that. "No. Maybe she'll think I've gone. I've got to get back. There must be a bus."
"I have a scooter _ ancient but I can keep it running. After a tide turbine none of this stuff is hard. You can hitch a lift on the back, though I don't have a helmet for you."
"I'll take the chance."
 "I sometimes wonder," Dora said as she led the way to a rusty two wheeled contrivance that seemed very small amidst the other parked motors, "if we really take risks here at all."
"What do you mean?" Edward asked, though he felt doubt stirring like a rogue tide and, in one way, knew exactly what she meant.
"Just how real is all this?" she asked with a wave of her hand. "Some days, some of my reckless days, I'm tempted to find out. The experimental mind at work," she added as she hopped onto the scooter. Half embarrassed by the proximity of their legs, not to mention her round and solid bottom, Edward climbed behind her, put one hand behind him to grip the edge of the seat, and placed the other tentatively on her waist.
"Hang on tight!" She said as she turned the key. The motor whined then caught. As they rolled forward from her parking place, she pulled up her feet, and at once they were sweeping across the parking lot, fast and low to the ground like a swooping gull. Forgetting all notions of CC propriety, Edward grabbed her around the waist and tried to keep his head behind hers. Brake and a bump, and they were on the street, cars on both sides, both directions, Dora weaving to the outer lane, Edward trying to follow her every shift. Please, not the interstate, he thought, but no, a small mercy, just the street. Hot wind off the boiling tarmac, exhaust from the motors, the roar of accelerating cars and trucks, colors pouring by him fast, faster, the world a blur. Escape velocity: old words for a new situation. Having escaped before in the Mall, Edward feared that he was now to be launched physically into some mysterious alternative, a notion that was bathing his system in adrenalin, when, suddenly, deceleration as the little scooter stopped at a traffic signal behind the vast white and chrome rear end of a giant motor.
Dora twisted her neck and shouted, "Mind if we stop for a sandwich? I miss lunch so I'm starving after work." 
"No problem." Edward said, as the motors around them huffed gas fumes around them. In the distance, he spotted big Travelers Tower, sharp and solid, and, by fixing his watering eyes on the spire, he kept in contact with present reality until they nipped down a side street. Avoiding parked cars and two careless pedestrians, Dora turned smartly into the lot of a small restaurant. "Quick stop," she warned. Edward dropped his feet onto the asphalt with relief.
"You okay?"
"Sure," he said. "Great sensation. You're so close to the road you really feel the speed."
"Close to trucks, too," she said, looking at his white face. "Listen, it takes getting used to."
"I'd be all right if things didn't get blurry around the edges. Like I need glasses badly, but I really don't, because most of the time I see just fine."
"We all have symptoms," Dora remarked when they were seated in a booth with overstuffed sandwiches. "Though not all the same ones."
Edward nodded. He noticed she did not discuss her own anomalies.
"The worst goes _ or I guess you go back." She spoke casually as if either alternative would be okay with her.
"I suppose it wouldn't be real life if you knew your future for sure," Edward said. 
"Uncertainty is fundamental." When he gave her a sharp look, she asked, "What?"
"I can't believe we haven't met before _ I mean before. You don't look familiar, but you sound familiar."
"Forbid it! I like to think I'm unique."
"Maybe just a turn of phrase. Kara's careful _ her Ancient English is perfect. Not that yours isn't great, too." 
Dora was not interested in this line of thought. "You want to call her?" she asked abruptly. "Tell her you're ok?"
"Have you one of those cell things?" Edward asked with both eagerness and trepidation. He was anxious to see Kara, yet he could think of no good explanation to give her friends and nothing reassuring to tell her, either.
"Too expensive _ but there's probably a public phone here. You put in a phone card. Maybe even coins."
"She's waited this long. It isn't very far now, is it?"
"Two minutes," Dora said, crumpling up her sandwich wrapper and finishing the last of her chips, as if she were truly enthusiastic about Ancient cuisine.
Back to the scooter, which Edward now saw bore an ominous brand name, Riptide.
"Perfect, huh?" Dora nodded toward the much corroded name plate. 
"It has that feeling," Edward agreed, then they were off in a gut clenching surge _ amazing, he thought, that it was common to eat so much peculiar food before engaging in traffic. He searched the twilight sky for the spire, and, when he found it, the towers of downtown, the wall of the interstate, the railroad bridge, all came into focus, enabling him to direct Dora down the darkening side streets to Kara's house.
"Here you are. Curbside service."
"Thank you so much. For everything. I don't know what I'd have done back in the Mall."
"You'd have thought of something. Nothing like imminent arrest to focus the mind." She put out her hand, and, momentarily forgetting the custom, Edward clasped it for a moment before hurrying onto the porch where he turned and waved. A deep breath, then he rang the buzzer, three long times in his agitation.
"I'm coming, I'm coming."
He recognized Sam's voice. 
"Well, look who's here." She turned away and hollered up the stairs. "Kara! Look who the cat dragged in! Boy, are you in trouble," she said to Edward, but with a wink so that he understood she was teasing. He was suddenly glad that Dora and her scooter had already left the area, that he hadn't tried to invite her in.
A clatter above brought Kara downstairs so fast she almost stumbled at the bottom. "Are you all right? What happened? I thought, I thought you were _." White-faced and near tears, she seized his arms.
 "I don't know what happened. I went to look at the ornamental plants and suddenly I felt dizzy."
"Oh, I was afraid of that." Kara looked at Sam. "I said to you, didn't I, that I was afraid he'd had a seizure?"
"We called security," Sam said. "But they couldn't find you."
"Well, it was the craziest thing," said Edward, thinking, in more ways than one. "Whatever happened, I must have wandered into that restaurant with the bird noises _"
"The Rainforest?" 
"Yeah. You know I'm working in a restaurant, and automatic, I guess, I walked right into the kitchen and out the back door."
"Sounds like a fugue state," said Sam.
Kara gave her a look.
"I wound up in the basement, the lowest level of the mall. I don't know how long I was there." That wasn't strictly true, because Dora's workroom had a clock, one of the digital models with the jumping numbers, but Edward thought it wise to skip the details. "I don't know if the buses run that late, but I got a lift back. Safe and sound," he said and put his arm around Kara, who was looking teary eyed. "I'm all right, really. I'm sorry to have put you to trouble," he told Sam formally.
"No harm done. Kara did say you have a condition. But for sure it made for a dramatic day at the mall." 
Tears were running down Kara's cheeks, and with a nod to Sam, Edward led her upstairs. 
"I was so afraid," she said in a low voice as soon as the door closed behind them. "I was so afraid you'd gone." She flung her arms around him and kissed him until he began to feel reality altering in a highly positive way. 
 "I wouldn't go without you," he said, cupping her face in his hands. "I promise, Kara. I won't go without you. It was just for a moment, I felt everything _ slipping, that's what it felt like, everything slipping away, but I wouldn't leave you behind. And then I felt neither here nor there, or as if I was in two places at once."
"You're safe now," she said quickly, as if she did not want to know any more. "The first times in new places are hardest, and crowds, big spaces. I should have thought. Edward, I just didn't think!"
"But you're glad I stayed? You're not sorry that I came back? I've thought sometimes_"
"I've never regretted, never," she said. "As long as you're all right. I'm so happy that you're safe, that you're here."
"I'm perfectly all right," he said, but though she brought him great pleasure, freer and wilder than anything they had experienced together before, there was something missing. Her passionate relief and joy, which he had wanted so much the day he first found her at The Gallows, had perhaps come too late, and now their emotions were subtly out of sync. Perhaps it was the shock of whatever it was that had happened or almost happened in the Mall, or his uneasiness at her quick lie to her friends, or just the necessity of concealing their essential foreignness. But she loved him, he knew now she did, and when they were naked in each other's arms, their damp bodies cooled by the night breeze, she whispered, "This is real. Wherever we have this, is real. Everything else can change but not this."
"Not this," Edward agreed, suppressing all his doubts in the intensity of the moment, but later in the half light of the urban night, it seemed to him that the walls, the house, the city, itself, were becoming permeable, that whatever had happened to him in the Mall might be only the beginning, that even his promises might mean little.
"Do you ever think of before?" he'd asked Dora. That was when they were standing near the dumpsters, and their misadventures in the basement and the elevator had created a kind of intimacy where such a question was possible. From some low place near the parking lot, frogs were calling, and overhead a group of night hawks swooped after moths _ the sounds of before.
She had not answered for a moment, and Edward studied her broad, rather handsome face, wondering if he had committed some breach in etiquette. Then she said, "Lately, I have."
"And earlier?"
"Nothing. I remembered nothing. But just recently, I've had a few moments. That's how I recognized you right away. That look as if you're seeing two things at once and, of course, your talking so much about water. Some days," she added in a low tone, "I hear the tide turbines. I know it's just the AC; I work on the system every day, but some days the motors sound different."
"That must make for difficulties."
"I take a break and go shop for a pretty dress or blouse."
"I don't know if that would work for me," said Edward.
She laughed. "You never know. You see all kinds here."
"What does it mean, do you suppose? That all of a sudden, one remembers. But that's not quite accurate, is it? It's more that before starts to return."
"It may be different for everyone. But I think something starts to pull you back."
Edward thought about this idea in the dark bedroom. He regretted he had not questioned Dora further, had not asked who or what remained in her mind. Everything had seemed so simple before, when, of course, he had not envisioned anything like his present existence. He had come for Kara and imagined a swift return. Though he lingered here for her, there were obviously other claims on his affections and interests. The fact was that Edward was home sick, and the afternoon had showed him that he could return. Given the right circumstances, perhaps just the right degree of disorientation, he could. And Kara could, too, if only she wished. He glanced over toward where she slept, her fine hair dark in the faint cold glow of the street light. She talked in her sleep sometimes, unintelligible words freighted with heavy emotion, as if she had another, nocturnal life that would forever remain mysterious to him, as mysterious as much of her present life, even her relationships with her friends, her housemates, her theatrical colleagues. 
"They don't know, do they?" he asked the next morning. They'd waked up together, a little surprised and shy. The latter was soon remedied, but lying relaxed, watching her dress, Edward found himself waiting for her answer with some trepidation.
She turned, her milky shoulders framed by the curious Ancient garment that covered her breasts. "No. Why would they?"
"It is certainly a remarkable feature, isn't it?"
"But what difference would it make _ supposing they even believed me?"
"I guess. But _"
"What?"
"Most people return," he said. "We have a short life here _"
"We have as long as we want."
"Can we be hurt here? Can we die here? What do you think?"
"Don't, please," she said coming over and kneeling down on the edge of the mattress. "Can't we be happy? We live here and die here or before _ what difference does it make?"
"Philosophically," he began.
"I'm no philosopher," she said and started dancing in her underwear, her body supple with some inner music, her bare feet tapping a rhythm on the wood floor, her long hair flying. Just for a moment, Edward saw something that he had not fully understood, not even when he saw her on the stage. She was a creature of the imagination and ultimately where she went he might not be able to follow. She mimed joy and she became happy; she started to dance and she transformed the moment. This was what she needed, and as long as she had it _ a role, a dance, a song, a speech _ she was happy. She loved him, but in some essential way, this, not him, perhaps not any person, was what she needed.
Kara finished with a pirouette which went awry and stopped to correct the motion, finished, then flung her arms up with a smile.
Edward clapped. "Very good," he said, though now her skill made him a trifle sad.
"You don't mind, do you?" she asked. How quickly she picked up on his emotions.
He shrugged. "I'm a pretty straightforward person."
Her face changed. "You wouldn't tell them. You wouldn't, you couldn't, Edward." Very serious.
"Why would I?" he asked, but deep inside he knew why, and he found himself tempted.





	         			Thirteen
	Edward walked Kara to The Gallows, then took Broad Street toward the south end and the garage. The high sun was bright _ pleasantly warm to Edward, outright hot for the natives, who stood sweating at the bus stops or drove by closed up in air conditioning. Salsa and rap issued from some of the open vehicles and the windows of houses and apartments offered music gratis to the street. He liked the raucous bursts of melody and percussion which reminded him of the buskers and the lively street life of the CC, fresh in his memory this morning, and he started to whistle an old tune as he approached the white painted brick structure with its front yard jammed with cars right up to the stout wire fence. He anticipated some teasing from Hector because this was the first time he'd stayed all night at Kara's, and laughter from the other fellows in the garage. That would be all right, too, on a happy morning. 
	The bays of the garage were open in the heat, and Edward walked down the short drive to the back, where they stored more customer cars, a few junkers for parts, the dumpster and trash barrels, and a bench where the workers caught a quick smoke or ate the lunches they bought from the street vendor and the fast food shop. He had reached the stair up to the adjoining apartment, when the silence struck him. There should be the clank of tools on metal, the pneumatic whoosh of the tire machine, the clank of jacks, the sound of compressed air, or the rubbery bounce of a discarded tire on cement. No voices, either, only the salsa station favored by the staff, playing at top volume with an excitable gent yelling so fast in Old Spanish that he must have been paid by the word. All normal. Edward had his foot on the first step when he stopped. No, not normal. After years on the marsh, his hearing was acute, used to teasing out the sound of a hidden warbler from the ambient noise of the reeds, to detecting shifts in the wind, to picking up the distant sound of paddling or the creak of a solar. He heard a voice. Two. Half hidden under the radio. And where was Hombre, the guard dog who usually barked from his run at the back? Where were Carlos, Martin, and Hector, or, if they were inside, what were they doing? 
	With a sudden perception of trouble, Edward moved to the door that gave access from the work floor. He turned the handle carefully. Muy especial! cried the announcer over a burst of frenetic syncopation, then there was a thump, not the usual garage thump of rubber on cement or metal on rubber, but the sick, distinctive thump of something hard on flesh. Edward stepped inside. 
	They were over by the grease pit, two of them, wearing hats and dark glasses, and they had cornered Hector against the rack that held the motor oils and filters. One stood a little to the side with a stubby, black gun in his hand. The other was pounding Hector mercilessly. 
"Non sabe, non sabe," Hector gasped.
	Another thump.
	Edward looked around. A wrench, a grease gun. No good at this range. The compressor wasn't running for the paint sprayer, either. Then he saw the fire alarm, lifted the wrench, smashed the glass. He jerked the handle and dropped behind a cart loaded with trays of nuts, bolts, and washers, as a tremendous bang reverberated and a projectile whanged against the metal overhead. A shout and a crash below, the result of someone tumbling into the grease pit. Edward launched the cart, sending it bouncing and rattling across the empty floor into something tall, solid, and furiously angry. In the collision, the gun flew in the general direction of the order desk, before the man _ Edward had only a glimpse of a white shirt, bare yellow arms, a black straw hat _ picked himself up and scuttled toward the open bay of the garage. Edward straightened up, too surprised even for fear. 
Someone was screaming from the grease pit, but not Hector. Hector had one eye swollen and his mouth was bleeding, but he was upright and on garage level and yelling, "Vamanos, vamanos!" He grabbed Edward's arm. "We gotta go now."
	To the side door where Hector ran his hand over the rack and palmed a key. Screams still coming from the grease pit, followed now by shots that rang off the metal roof. A frantic sprint to the back down a congested row of cars. Key in the lock of a black Lexus; doors open. "Get in, pronto," said Hector. Edward inside. "Belt," said Hector, who had the car started and in gear and out onto the street and peeled around the corner, before they heard the distant sound of a fire engine. Down Maple to Wyllys with the massive Victorians set on their wide lawns, past the round construction of the Civic Center, cranes and earth movers in attendance, out onto the highway, slow, slow for a truck with a smashed windshield, cop car beside it, flashers going _ Hector white faced, gripping the wheel _ then over the bridge, across the river Edward loved, gulls in a raft near a little backwater, and out, fast, far faster than the city traffic, the river behind them, the world dissolving.
	"You okay?"
	It was not the right time to discuss his peculiar situation, and the weakness of one of his co-worker's children suggested an excuse. "I get car sick," Edward said. 
	"Madre dios!"
	"Terribly." In truth, he did feel very squeamish.
	"Like my oldest," said Hector. "But not when you drive, right?"
	"I don't drive," said Edward.
	"Non. Not possible."
	"Yes, possible. I don't drive. We didn't have a motor - a car."
	Hector gave him a strange look.
	"What does it matter? You're driving just fine."
	"I need you to bring the car back," said Hector. "This is Se–or Obrigon's car. If it's not back, mucho problema. Mucho."
	"So where are we going?"
	"Willimantic. Good friends will help me disappear, if you return the car."
	They were in greenery, that was all Edward knew, with a stream of motors around them and, across a divider of grass and trees, another line of approaching motors. Hector might have asked him to fly.
	"Watch," said Hector, "watch what I do. This is an automatic, no worries about shifting. You turn the key, you drive, you stop, you park, you turn the key again. Yes?"
	I'm dreaming, Edward thought. I am still at Kara's; it is very early morning, and this is one of those weird, coherent dreams one sometimes has. "Yes," he said.
	"Right pedal for gas, yes? Comprende? And left for brake." He touched it, slowing them for an instant, then back to the gas. "That's it. You read the signs, you signal this way" _ he showed Edward the lever on the steering wheel. "Wheel makes you go left or right, yes?"
	Why, Edward wondered, did he keep falling into these miseries with Hector? Kara was happy with her theatrical group, and Dora seemed to have found appropriate skilled work, while he was living hand to mouth, exposed to all the ills and dangers of Ancient Hartford. This life was a dream, it was fundamentally a dream, and perhaps the two women had simply dreamed good alternatives for themselves, while he, stumbling behind after Kara, had taken what came along. Maybe he could open the door now and step out and, instead of the dizzying ribbon of concrete, he'd be on a sidewalk somewhere or, better yet, setting off on a boat along a creek with his collecting gear and notebooks, doing the work he could do instead of driving virtually blind at enormous speed.
	"You can do this?" Hector asked. 
	Edward hesitated. He did not think he could do this at all.
	"You came in, a good thing, a kind thing. I am grateful, mucho, but now I have to leave."
	Edward looked at him. "What will you do?"
	"Further north or maybe out to the Midwest. I have a cousin there." 
	"I'm sorry."
	"They might have killed me," Hector said. "Bad men. Don't go to work today. I'll call Jorge for you and explain."
	Edward nodded, feeling increasingly queasy as Hector recounted the events of the morning _ Hombre sick, maybe poisoned; Carlos sent to take him to the vet; Martin off as usual on a parts run, and then the soft footsteps at the back of the garage. Edward didn't ask for details, knowing too well how easy it was for illegals, hidden precariously in plain sight, to become enmeshed with the city's low life. He tried, instead, to focus on the steering wheel, on Hector's hands making slight adjustments, on the movement of his right foot from the gas to the brake and back.
	Imagine, he told himself, I have to imagine something familiar here, houses, trees, hills; this is the Highground, so hills. I'm seeing hills and trees and houses, probably houses. 
	"Not far now," said Hector, "We're on the bypass."  
	Salvation came with that one word, for Edward suddenly remembered the Great Willimantic Bypass Race, a semi-legendary motor event, a last splurge of gasoline from around the time of the first Great Rising, an event commemorated _ wait, commemorated by _  by a bicycle and foot race, that was it. Every year on this very stretch. He'd read descriptions, and it now seemed to him that he'd been brought as a boy, a small boy, to one of the really big race meetings. He remembered crowds on a sunny day, clapping and shouting behind the ropes; the much patched pavement shimmering in the heat with bare yellow spots where the weeds and grass had been carefully removed. Vendors, of course, wearing their high, distinctive hats, selling cakes, fruit, dried fish on little sticks, and lemon drinks. Musicians were playing, and there were jugglers and clowns and even actors, mounting little plays on stages before the tents. He remembered the runners with their flashing legs, their chests and faces gleaming with sweat, before it was time for the packs of cyclists in their bright silks to tear down the road, their derailleurs whirring as they free wheeled into the hairpin turns. Here. I've been here, he thought, I just need to remember, to look. And sure enough, though the close packed little houses lining the stretch were gone, replaced by trees only occasionally broken by the cleared ground of a farm, there was the double line of cement, up hill and down, but straight, mostly straight, rare here for roads, and ending, he was sure it did, in a hair pin turn that would be banked with blocks of marsh hay on race days to protect the cyclists. He began to feel better as the ribbon of gray, green, blue, and white resolved itself into something like a normal landscape. 
	"They hold the races here," he said without thinking. "Or used to."
	"Yeah?" Hector asked. "You would build up some speed on this stretch." He began talking about auto racing in Sonora and about some famous Mexican street racers. He knew how to set up a sweet running car for the street. "Not this one, though. You drive this one carefully, not a  scratch," he joked. 
	Edward could see Hector really did not believe that he was ignorant of motors.
	They went off an exit ramp, before Edward could confirm the sharp turn at the by-pass end and drove onto a commercial strip. "What do they do here?"
	"Used to be mills," said Hector. "Lots of industry. Not much now."
	This wasn't helpful, and Edward felt the queasiness returning, until Hector began proudly pointing out various little Mexican owned businesses, notable for the green, white, and red flags crossed with the stars and stripes. "Americans are lazy," he remarked. "Mexicans know how to work. Give us a couple generations, this place'll be big."
	Edward smiled painfully. It was true that the Highlands were destined to pick up population, but now the Risings came back into his mind. Even with serious floods within living memory, the Great Rising had been only another school topic. The world was the way it was, and all that really mattered was the present, the people one knew, the pleasures and problems of the moment. This is why people come back strange, he thought. One knows too much, one sees too many people one knows are doomed, or their children are doomed, or their grandchildren, and things better left abstract become real.
	"Here we are," said Hector, pulling into the side drive of a yellow wooden building with two stories and two apartments. "You'll know what to do."
Edward realized that Hector had been giving him more advice and instructions about the car _ all wasted; he remembered nothing.
Hector's friends came out, three stocky men wearing low slung jeans, work boots, and worn t-shirts. They had flat brown faces and straight black hair underneath their billed trucker's caps. After shaking hands with Hector, they greeted Edward warmly, patting him on the back, telling him he had been a bueno amigo, a valiente hombre. Edward's eyes kept sliding back to the black Lexus _ if only they knew how much more courage he would need for that. But like Hector, they could not conceive of an ignorance-based  fear of motors, and it was essential, they all agreed, that the car be returned. But not by them. 
Once they were all inside the yellow house with cans of beer in their hands and cigarettes going, Edward learned that this was a turf matter, involving the gang that Hector _ and by extension Edward, too, _ had become entangled with through the garage. Apparently the Kings were cutting into another gang's territory in some way involving motors and the auto business. More than that Edward was better off not knowing, but after years of Resurrectors and smugglers, he felt he got the picture.
All that afternoon, Hector and his friends sat around congenially. They sent out for a meal of fried chicken, and as they cracked open a few more beers, Edward grew more and more uneasy and disoriented. Yes, they were hard workers, but without much sense of urgency, loitering through the afternoon without any plan while he missed work and his life went to pot. The sky was beginning to darken in the east when Hector abruptly stood up to embrace Edward and clap him on the back. "Time to go," he said. "Rush hour is over." 
 Edward realized they had been waiting to give him an easier drive into the city. He asked them to back the car out onto the street for him and get it pointed in the right direction. This request made the others hesitate for the first time, and, his face anxious, Hector ran through all the directions again, while Edward nodded without paying entire attention. He was thinking that he had to imagine doing this, that he had to get the road side to solidify, that he had to think himself managing one of the solars in especially tricky water conditions.
 "Be safe," he said to Hector, "smooth water." That was not what people said here, but it was on his tongue before he realized. Then Hector's thin, taut face was at the window, saying good-bye, and Edward felt a brief, poignant sorrow. He raised his hand, released the brake as he'd been shown, and moved the gear to drive. The Lexus was beginning to move when he remembered to look, saw motors approaching, stabbed the brake, stalled the car. A rueful smile at Hector. Then he ran through the drill again and got properly into the street. 
He braked for the first light too soon and too violently, and at the second, too lightly and too late, but by some confluence of grace and luck, he negotiated the main street and got himself up onto the bypass, wide and blessedly nearly empty of traffic. True, he was unclear about how fast he should go. Forty seemed very quick to him, but when three cars and a truck screamed by him, he realized this was not as fast as was needed. Cautiously up to fifty, which, when the bypass ended, seemed way too fast for the many entering and leaving cars, the sudden turns, the winding road. He settled for thirty-five, ignoring the angry motorists who hovered inches from the back of Se–or Obrigon's car and roared past him whenever there was the slightest break in the oncoming traffic.
At first Edward responded by swinging wildly to his right, sending the wheels of the black Lexus jouncing onto the shoulder so that he thought more than once the car would leave the road altogether. Imagine, he kept saying to himself. Imagine the road is water, all smooth. Go gently on the wheel. A certain desperate inventiveness and the favor of the water gods got him to the interstate, where it was clear neither thirty-five nor fifty was going to be quick enough, and he was again tempted by the idea that all was illusion, that what he did made no difference, that he could stop or leave the road or smash into another motor and be left no worse off. But then he remembered Hector's swollen, bleeding face, and the sound of metal meeting flesh and knew he could not risk the experiment. 
Think instead of SurferKlub outings, of a board rigged with a sail, of speeding before the wind, of flying into the low red sun. The window on the driver's side was open and the rush of air with his increased speed aided the illusion of flying across the water miraculously shimmering ahead of him. He touched the brake nervously, knowing this was not a motor for liquid, but the other cars surged forward and, however distinct the water was, the cars never left dry land. An optical illusion, heat borne, one he could use. He was on the water, running a solar full out, a storm behind him, wind whistling around his ears, motors with their fumes long gone, trucks vanished, the CC and the dike appearing like a mirage from the marshland. He was there, he was almost there, he could smell the brackish waters of the marsh, hear a heron overhead in the evening sky, feel the way the solar shuddered in a sudden current or a strong cross wind: home. Suddenly red lights in front of him, a horn behind. Edward hit the gas, saw the lights racing back toward him and found the brake, halting with a swerve and a jounce just inches from the rear fender of a sizeable white truck embellished with a design of colossal cabbages, green beans, and strawberries. He wasn't home; he was almost at the bridge to Ancient Hartford and there was some sort of tie up. 
As if aware of his uncertainties, the car sat juddering and shaking like an overheated animal. When they were finally able to crawl forward a few yards, the engine stalled. Restart, hitch forward. It was an accident, he saw at last, with two of the sinister-looking troopers with the shiny boots and broad brimmed hats directing traffic. Edward hoped they would not ask for documents and was again tempted by the sight of the river. He could step out of the car, dodge around the other motors and head straight for the water, for the river and the willows he could see along the bank. In his nervousness about the troopers, he was distracted from his struggles with the car, and he was free of the tie up and racing across the bridge before he realized he was unclear about his route.
Instant nausea. The guard rails wavered, even the river seemed alien, caught as it was between the towers lining both banks. He followed the traffic, too uncertain of his steering to switch lanes, and found himself at a traffic light off the interstate. He glanced away from the road to the list of streets he had copied down at Hector's dictation _ Wyllys, that's what he was looking for. He missed one turn and had to circle a block, narrowly missing a cyclist and cutting off another car at a light. He was on the verge of stopping, just stopping, when he saw the white towers of the hospital, and, after many false starts and a wrong turn onto a one way street _ as a pedestrian, he had scarcely noticed such restrictions _ he found himself on Maple Street in light traffic, the world solid, the car reasonably responsive, though he had some problems with smooth braking and was inclined to go over the edge of curbs on turns. Not bad, though, and he was beginning to see the appeal of motors when he turned onto the street with the garage. Two blocks, just two blocks; he slowed down instinctively, fearful of jeopardizing his almost certain success, and spotted the yellow tape festooned on the fence and across the drive before he signaled to turn in. What was this?
Nowhere close to park. Edward drove around the block and then again, in the other direction in order to seize a parking spot on the opposite side of the street. He got out, his legs trembling with strain and his shirt soaked with sweat. Police Line, Do Not Cross was repeated in thick black letters down the length of the tape. Of course, the shots, the man screaming from the grease pit, who knows what else? Edward knew that he could hardly leave the car on the street. But while the back would be locked, he could pull into the drive, indicating to those who knew such things that Se–or Obrigon's black Lexus was under the protection of powerful forces best appeased. The sliding gate had been left as usual partially open to allow access to the apartment and to Juan-Jesœs, who did mysterious bits of business in the office after hours. 
Edward crossed the street and slid the gate back a few feet, then a few feet more _ that seemed right. Back to the car, which he now saw was under observation by a couple of women on a second story porch, by a gaggle of knowing looking kids on skateboards and chopper bikes hitched up like a bad pair of pants, and by a phlegmatic gent with a dark face and a six pack, surveying the world from his front step. Edward gave them a wave and a smile which he hoped was convincing before restarting the car. His angle was wrong, that was the first thing. The only parking space had been almost directly across from the drive, and, though in theory Edward knew motors could back up, he felt reluctant to put his knowledge into practice. Round the block again, the shorter way this time, so that he was approaching from the garage side of the road. All good, no oncoming traffic, so he'd be able to swing out wide, as he now saw was going to be needed, to clear the posts. 
He misjudged the gap and the angle the first time. There was nothing for it but to risk the R on the gear box and slide back into the street. A horn somewhere nearby caused Edward to throw the gear back into drive just as a boy balanced on the rear wheel of his bike zoomed across the sidewalk in front of him. Edward lifted his foot, missed the brake, jerked the wheel; there was a clank on the left fender as it touched the rear of the bike and spun the boy howling onto the cement, followed by a violent scraping and crunching as the car's whole right quarter panel made contact with the post and the fence. Trailing a length of police tape, the Lexus rolled forward well into the drive before Edward got it stopped. He turned the key, threw open the door, felt the car rolling, and with a frantic grab, found the brake.
"Are you all right?" he called to the boy, who had a nasty scrape on one bare calf. He'd gotten his bike upright, ready to leave _ and probably would have _ if the neighbors, who, Edward was sure, had kept their ears closed during the mysterious noises of the morning, had not suddenly turned officious. Carlos will have to see a doctor. He might have broken something. Where was the insurance card? And your license? This to Edward. Anyone can see you can't drive. And, most ominously, Isn't that Se–or Obrigon's car?
Edward defended himself as vigorously as he could, while Carlos, a light brown skinned boy with eyes between blue and green and long thick, starlet's eyelashes, put on an increasingly pathetic look and allowed the women to fuss over his scraped leg. I was going so slowly. Everyone on the street could see I was trying to pull in _ you were all watching. You saw the boy came right in front of me. The volume rose all round; content to be the center of attention, the treacherous Carlos began to snivel, and things had progressed as far as threats to summon the police, before Edward had the inspiration to say he would go get his license. He had left it in his jacket. "Yes, yes, all the documents," he said.
"Insurance card?" the six pack owner asked. "Better bring your insurance card."
Edward assured them that he would. He locked the car, keys inside, as he went by. "See, I'm not going any where." A smile back to them.  He ignored another length of warning tape to climb the stair to the second floor, stripped a third tape off the door and entered the apartment. He grabbed the heavy plastic carrier that he had brought for his extra pants and shirts, stuck his toothbrush, comb and sandals on top, lifted a paperback copy of Petersen's Field Guide to Eastern Birds, and after a quick look around, went straight to the toilet window and pulled out the screen. There was just a three or four foot drop to a shed roof below, and Edward figured that, while the neighbors were watching the stair, he could get himself a few blocks away and out of sight. 
	

	

			 Fourteen

	Leaving nosey garage neighbors, squads of marauding children, and hyperactive dogs behind him, Edward approached Kara's house, already deep in the shade of the big maples. Music and voices floated from the open windows, and Matt, the resident poet and smoker, was sitting out with a cigarette on the porch. He raised a lazy hand when he saw Edward with his bundle of clothing. "Evening, Eduardo. You're off early."
	"Off, period," said Edward. "Kara home?"
	"Not yet. Everyone else is in residence."
	Edward put down his bundle and sat uncertainly on the lower step. "I may need a favor."
	"What friends are for." Despite his vocation, Matt was singularly laconic.
	"I guess. I've had to leave my apartment."
	Matt raised his eyebrows. "We've all been there," he said. "Troubles with the rent or the roommate?"
	"This was more like troubles with the Latin Kings."
	 "What an interesting life you have, Eduardo."
	"You wouldn't believe," Edward said honestly. "One of those friend of a friend troubles that just spread like swamp water."
	 "So crash here for a while. Do your share of the work and pitch in for the costs. We'd have to vote, but I don't think anyone will mind."
	"That's kind. Thanks."
	Matt finished up the last drag of his cigarette and rubbed out the stub on the pavement. "You can help me right now. I'm doing the dinner magic tonight."
	That's where he was when Kara came home, grating cheese for scalloped potatoes, while Matt fussed out back over the grill for some hotdogs and burgers. It was funny _ the house was noisy, at least two stereos going; Andrew and John in the drive shooting baskets despite the heat, Meghan noodling at a difficult passage on her flute, the usual street noises of neighbors' dogs and passing cars _ yet Edward heard her voice with perfect clarity, as if everything else were insubstantial. Her voice and another, low enough to be male. Edward turned from the table, heard a car door shut, her steps on the porch, at the front door, starting up the stair.  "You got company," Meghan called from the front room. Kara's voice again, before her steps in the hall.
	"Hi," said Edward.
	"I thought you were at work." 
	"Minor disaster. I need a place to stay for a couple days. Hide out,   actually." He shrugged apologetically.
	"What happened?" Concern in her voice which before, he thought, had registered surprise and something else he couldn't quite define.
	He gave her an edited account. Hector's beating, their retreat to Willimantic, his own heroics and near disastrous ending with the car. The latter captured Kara's imagination, and once they were upstairs in her room, sorting out a place for his stuff, she asked about driving. 
	"It's really not too hard, then? I mean, you managed all that way. Somewhere you'd never been."
	Edward gave a tight smile. She must know the same sense of dissolution, the way the world wavered and everything became uncertain, even if she wouldn't admit it.
	"I was a bit lucky, but yes, it can be done."
	"I want to learn and I'm going to soon. I've been saving my money for lessons, but Sam has offered to teach me."
	"Why bother when you have the bus? And friends. You got a lift home, didn't you?"
	She didn't take him up on this _ an omission he noticed. "Everyone drives here. A car is almost a necessity. I can get a license. So could you."
	He looked away, tempted to press the issue but reluctant, too, when they had been so happy only the night before. "The speed is incredible," he said. "Out on the interstate."
	"But you did it," said Kara. "You managed. And now you're safe. You're safe here." She put her arms around him, and the scalloped potatoes would have dried up and burned if John, who was always hungry, hadn't opened the oven and rescued them. 
So there was a way for them to be happy, though all felicity was unstable, and his precarious personal life was bound up with Kara's in a way he had once desired and now partly resented. There were other uncertainties, too, as he discovered when he appeared in his white shirt and black pants, togged out for bus boy duty at the restaurant. He hadn't been working more than five minutes before Jorge bustled in from his back office. "Edward, a moment, please." The manager's round, usually cheerful face was tense and flushed, and when Edward followed him into the dark, cluttered office, he shut the door behind them. 
"I'm sorry about yesterday," Edward said. "But Hector said he'd call and explain to you."
"Oh, yes, Hector called. I have no problem with yesterday. It is today and tomorrow I worry about, Edward. Hector had no right to involve you _ I know, I know, friends." He waved a pudgy hand as if to dispel such complications. "But you can't work here. They'll know who you are soon, if they don't already, and I can't afford trouble. It takes so little trouble to ruin a restaurant."
Edward sat still, waiting for some other proposal, for some time frame, to be told stay out for a day, a week; to move to one of the other restaurants in the city.
Jorge looked unhappy. "I hate to do this, but you have to leave _ permanently. I can't afford trouble_ especially when you have no papers." His shrug encompassed not only Edward but a number of other undocumented employees.
"I'm fired?" He had not expected that, and it seemed incredible to Edward that a city bristling with weapons should be so fearful. Where were the police? Where was the pride in good order?
"I'll pay you for this week," Jorge said, moving to his desk. "I like Hector, too. He's a good man in a bad situation. Making the best of life like the rest of us, right?"
"Yes," said Edward. As Jorge counted out some bills, he looked around at the posters on the walls: the high cliffs at Acapulco, the great temple at Teotihuac‡n, the floating flower market, all places of beauty and drama, yet Jorge had left them behind. We have things in common, Edward thought, we're living here and also in memory.
"Do you know anyone who needs a good bus boy? I could wait tables, too, you know." With sudden bitterness, Edward realized that promotion, a decent wage, even a temporary success had been his unvoiced hope. 
Jorge patted his shoulder. "You could do anything you wanted with papers. Remember that. I will ask around, Edward. But it won't be in Hartford. Hartford's no good for now. You'll need to look elsewhere." 
His heart sank at that. Hartford was the one place he could not leave, and a few days later Edward again found himself near the station, hoping for day work. He had closed his ears to Kara's many suggestions about false numbers and papers, deceptions of varying ingenuity and expense. And he was right, he thought, looking around him in the still cool and shadowed morning. For what was this but illusion, the crowd of ill dressed, badly fed men, the shiny suburban pickups of the contractors, the tattered bills that passed from one hand to the other, symbols simultaneously of wealth and poverty? 
There were moments when he seemed to see through even the dark bricks and mortar of the station building, when the vast gray pylons of the interstate and the glassy towers of the skyline resolved themselves back into the high walls of the dike, the bright awnings and greenery of the houses, the great stretches of marsh and river. These moments of dual perception made him stubborn with Kara and careless of danger. On days when he did not get a few hours of construction or landscaping work, he checked the local restaurants, but without Hector's contacts he found it harder to get in the door, and the very perfection of his Ancient English made his lack of papers seem more, rather than less, sinister.
Then a stroke of luck. A nursery manager came by desperate for workers to handle lawn turf and manage shrubs for the upcoming fall planting season. Edward was taken on with a promise of three weeks work at a good wage and the hint of a permanent job. Out in the sun and air, he worked hard and efficiently, and when he saw that the irrigation system was badly laid out, he suggested a water saving plan.
Tom, the manager, seemed delighted, but Edward did not get a check at the end of the week. "You started on a Tuesday," Tom said. He had a heavy red face topped with prematurely white curly hair and a thick, large boned frame. "Book keeping can't cut checks less than a week's work. Damn accountants," he said, as if he were helpless before their rules. When Edward complained that left him no money for food, Tom opened his wallet and handed him a pair of twenties.
"Best I can do at the moment," he said.
Edward wondered about that, given the big crew working at the sod farm and the considerable number of day laborers and horticulturalists, but he pocketed the money. 
"Next Friday for sure," said Tom.
Edward thought that there were other nurseries, though this one was attractive, being just south of the city and within his old precincts as marsh keeper. He had told himself that on the way in Tom's big truck with the extra seat behind the driver. I've been here in a solar, I've heard the wind through the reeds, here. But he had managed to Willimantic and back; there were other growers; he had skills; he just had to be patient and travel outwards one step at a time. Besides, he found the work congenial. He liked working with plants and water systems, and he didn't doubt his abilities would be recognized.
The next Friday, Edward stopped work a few minutes early to get over to the office. He had noticed Tom's car _ not the truck, but the big Suburban he took home _ parked waiting by the office door and had an uneasy feeling. 
"Yes?" asked Tom, looking up from his long desk with the little baskets for mail and invoices and the big complicated looking telephone. 
"I need my pay," said Edward. And waited.
"I don't think checks have come over from bookkeeping just yet. We may have to wait until Monday _ you know, Celia's been out this week." He reached into his pocket for some loose bills. "Tide you over," he said. "I'll drop you on my way."
He stood up, easy and confident, ready to brush by Edward and all complaints. Something in his casual tone and sideways glance told Edward that he would not be paid, that Tom had never intended to pay him, that the manager had cheated others before. There was a moment of stillness between them when Edward thought, this man has gotten fat on the hunger of my friends, on the labor of folk like Hector and Maria and the day workers at the station, before his anger exploded. The nursery owner was taller and outweighed Edward by thirty pounds, but he grabbed the front of Tom's shirt and, catching him by surprise, banged him against the metal bookcase holding the office's records.
"I want my money. I've worked two weeks for you, ten hours a day; I fixed your stupid leaking irrigation system."
"Hey," said Tom. "Take your fucking hands off me." There was a distinct wheeze in his voice that Edward detected. Though big, Tom was not as strong as he looked, and Edward hit him hard, low in the gut and again in the center of his chest, one, two. Gasping, Tom staggered toward the phone, but Edward swept the console off the desk and picked up the one heavy thing in sight, a plaque honoring Tom Rortson for Services to the Nursery Community. He swung it at Tom's head, the sharp metal base catching him above the temple and sending him to the floor. 
"Pay me," Edward shouted. "I'm not your usual illegal. You mess with me, they'll be washing you away."
 "Who's going to believe you?" the nursery man gasped. He had one hand on the desk and hauled himself, swearing, up to a sitting position. "You'll be up for assault. You'll be in jail." 
"But you'll be dead." Shaking with fury and almost beyond reason, Edward was ready to strike again, when Tom wiped his hand across his forehead and saw blood dripping down his fingers. His look of surprise, as if he'd undergone one of those so familiar rearrangements of reality, brought Edward back from some interior edge. He lowered the plaque a fraction, and Tom was smart enough to hold up one hand. Leaning against the desk for support, he opened his wallet and counted out several hundred dollars. Edward folded the bills up and put them in his pocket. He walked to the door, dropped the plaque on the floor, and kicked it back across the room. 
Tom's voice was hoarse with rage, behind him. 
Edward made one of the obscene gestures Hector favored, then he was outside, passing the neat rows of balled, burlap-wrapped conifers, the potted rhodies and azaleas; the hopeful saplings, maples, honey locusts, flowering crabs; the cement bird baths, the elves and angels, and the glass gazing globes that reflected the edge of the nursery yard where, his heart hammering, his shirt sticking to his back and chest, he found anger like an aura enclosing the world. Someone called to him; Edward didn't answer. He had to leave straight away, because if he saw Tom again, if Tom tried anything with him, it could be, would be, disastrous. He was on the street, walking toward the highway, before he realized that he might have killed the nursery manager. He might have, not necessarily meaning to, but not necessarily regretting it, either, for Tom was the worst kind of bully and cheat. There had been a moment, the moment that he picked up the plaque, right then with anger at the flood tide, when he might have crossed the frontier to an unknown land more dangerous than even Ancient Hartford. I can't stay here, Edward thought. 
That evening he told Kara, "I can't live this way. It's doing terrible things to me. I want to go back." He had just come out of the shower with his towel still around his shoulders. He'd noticed as he was washing himself that the knuckles of his right hand were swollen. He had hit Tom that hard. 
"You can't just go back _ like that," she said. "It's not like buying a ticket." She gave a nervous little laugh. "As if you could. Regular flights to the Future."
"You're happy here, so it's maybe not on your mind _ or in your vision."
"What do you mean?"
"There are moments when the _ when whatever there is between before and after _ gets thin for me. When I hear the wind coming across the marsh, when I can almost see the dike behind the towers and the interstate. That's what I mean, and the only thing keeping me back is you. I don't want to leave you behind. Twice it's almost happened. Almost. The next time I'm afraid it will. I'll be gone, and I don't think I can come back a second time."
"You're unhappy with your work," she said. "So it's natural for you to remember _ you had a good job before. And you could again, Edward, if you weren't so stubborn about papers. No one's totally honest here. They don't care. They expect people to lie to get work. It's no big deal."
"It's more than work," he said. "It's everything. Us, too. We're not the same as we were."
At this her voice rose with exasperation, as if he had missed something obvious. "I came to be different, Edward. I thought you knew that. I came because I was afraid all the time, because I was suffocating."
"And was I part of that? Is that what you're telling me? I shouldn't have left my folks and my friends and my work?"
"You love me," said Kara. "I know that. And I want us to be happy here. And we can be. You just have to show more initiative. What are you doing working day labor with your education? That's all I'm saying."
But she hadn't said the key thing. She hadn't said, yes, you made a mistake or no, you did the right thing. Her face was uneasy and her eyes slid away from him. Kara was a gentle person, Edward knew, very averse to hurting others. He was afraid that made her deceitful at times. 
He pulled on his clothes and went straight downstairs. Kara followed a few minutes later; it was their night for dinner prep. He was cutting up a cabbage, slicing through the thick, pale head with a steady crunch, when he told her, "I could have killed a man today."
"Edward!"
"I'm serious. He didn't want to pay me. That's what some of these owners and contractors do. Hire illegals, get the work out of them, then cheat them. I hit him."
"With so many guns here, you're lucky you weren't shot! Or arrested!"
"I picked up this thing on his desk. Some sort of honorary plaque, but heavy. I hit him in the head with it. A few inches lower _ do you hear what I'm saying, Kara? _ I could have killed him. Over a few hundred dollars. A man I hardly knew could have died for a few hundred dollars. I'm becoming a different person and not a better one, either."
"Maybe then you should go back," Kara said. Her voice was sad. "Maybe you should." 
"And will you come?" 
She didn't answer.
"Will you come, Kara, will you?"
"Hey, guys!" Sam appeared in the doorway. "What's with the long faces? I smell chili, don't I? You don't know how lucky you are," she said to Kara, "that Ed's a demon cook."
"How's everything?" Edward asked. His face felt stiff. It was unreal to be discussing a near homicide and chatting with the ebullient Sam almost simultaneously.
"Everything is good. Well, except for the frozen shoulder I'm working on. Stretching, heat, exercise, cold _ patient full of complaints at every stage."
"You smell of chlorine," said Kara, who had recovered her voice.
"Mile and a half in the pool. Healthy body, dirty mind." She grabbed a handful of the raw cabbage and crunched it noisily before she started taking plates out of the cupboard to set the table. John arrived next with his Ipod in his ears and treated them to some new dance moves that amused Meghan, who came in with the score of some difficult new piece. Pretty soon the dining room was full and food on the table and most of them talking at once, while Edward and Kara looked uneasily at each other, his question still hanging between them.



 


				 Fifteen
	Edward had no work, but instead of calling Jorge again or chancing the rail station hiring point or risking a bus ride west to other eating houses, he decided to spend the day on his own. He still had a few dollars left from his ill-fated nursery job, and he treated himself to a leisurely breakfast out, then set off for Pope Park with the idea of a possible detour to the river. Accustomed to the subtle seasonal shifts of the CC, he detected hints of autumn in a few leaves turning brown at the edges or yellowing at the center, and noticed the faint reddish death flush on one small swamp maple. Already there was a different feel to the wind, as if it had turned in some fundamental direction; soon there would be a melancholy angle to the late afternoon light and the cold of the fall season. 
	Although his funds were rapidly being depleted, Edward was almost beyond worry. He'd been concerned about Tom, envisioning a visit from the police with charges and dangers of some new and humiliating sort, but when nothing happened, he'd grown fatalistic. He'd get work or he wouldn't; he'd remain and survive or he'd find himself back home. Both seemed beyond his control. As for the papers and documents that everyone obsessed about, Edward was not only indifferent but fearful. The notion of a permanent residency card _ the very words seemed a prophesy _ stirred a dread that he would never return home.
	So he'd deceived Kara, getting up early and pushing off before breakfast, only to loiter for a couple of hours with coffee and the local paper. When he found himself near the Gallows in early afternoon, he didn't stop for a sandwich, because he didn't want Kara to know he'd wasted the whole morning _ ammunition for their next argument. In fact, though she didn't know this, he hadn't worked more than a day or two in several weeks. He was becoming good at filling his days with idleness and becoming worse, he was afraid, at resisting the temptations of easy cash that flowed toward men with not enough money and too much time on their hands. 
	He avoided the cafŽ by cutting through campus to one of the pizza joints on New Britain. Afterwards when he found himself sitting out under a tree within sight of the Gallows, he realized that this had been the plan all along: to watch and wait for Kara. This was what he wanted to do, and hidden further yet in the devious recesses of his mind was the notion that he could somehow end the ambiguities between them, that somehow today he could settle their future and draw her back where she belonged. Certainly that would be worth a day of his time.
	Around four-thirty a white Honda parked near the Gallows, the driver cutting forward and back in a complex maneuver to work the motor between two larger parked cars. Austin, Kara's document savvy friend, favored customer at the Gallows, and theatrical enthusiast, got out. Edward recognized him even from the distance by his height and his wide shoulders, and, more, by a certain sinking sensation that indicated the precariousness of his own hopes. Austin locked the car carefully, waved to a passing motorist, and went into the cafŽ. Edward stood up, too restless to sit. 
	He was tempted to go straight to the Gallows and have it out with Austin, but he was deterred by uncertainty over what that 'it' might be. The man was entitled to eat at the cafŽ, to visit with the staff, to pass on the latest theatrical gossip to his friend, possibly his close friend, Kara Wistley. I might go on in, see how things stand, Edward thought, but he was afraid that his presence might change things for the worst. At the very least, Kara would realize that he was out of work. 
	Besides, he told himself, Austin might reappear within minutes, a bag of the Gallows' toothsome brownies or feathery scones in hand. He might. Or with a play script tucked under his arm. Something he'd previously loaned Kara. That was very possible. It might even be that, concerned as she was, Kara had asked Austin to stop by to talk about papers; a difficulty there, to be  sure, but better than the alternatives. Edward sat back down and arranged himself so that some shrubbery blocked the view from the cafŽ. He did not want to spy on her, or, rather, he did not want her to know that he was.
	Twenty minutes passed. Long enough for Austin to have bought a cappuccino or a lattŽ or maybe one of the fancy teas, though somehow Edward did not have him pegged for a tea drinker. A cappuccino, then, Kara or Meghan levering the big brass machine to produce the whoosh of hot milk, followed by the ritual presentation of the finished drink to accompany the consumption of one of the Gallows' baked treats. Or maybe a sandwich. It was getting late, clean-up time, really, but for a steady customer accommodation could be made. Edward saw the whole thing so clearly: the cutting of one of the handsome loaves of bread, the slicing of cheese and tomatoes, the addition of lettuce _ or maybe even some fried bacon. Austin would want something substantial, and the women would oblige. Twenty minutes for all that? Yes, he thought so.
	Five o'clock came. Edward thought, though at the distance he couldn't be sure, that he saw the shade come down, the Open sign flipped to Closed, but maybe not. Maybe his watch was fast; it was a very cheap one. He should start his walk back _ but suppose Austin passed him, offered him a lift. Suppose Kara had left by the rear door, suppose he caught up with her halfway across the shortcut through the college. He would wait; he would go. He stood up just as the door of the Gallows opened and Austin came out with Kara. He held the screen for her and she locked up. The easy way she took his arm wrung Edward's heart. We were like that once, he thought. Just like that. She relied on me and now she relies on him. It was perfectly plain. He could see her smiling; his imagination supplied her laugh at some little joke between them. She got into the car. Edward did not wait to witness Austin's finesse with the motor. He crossed the road, almost running, and had disappeared down the steep steps to Zion Street before they pulled away.
	Edward spend the last of his money on beers at a tavern, dominated by a large screen tv showing a soccer match without sound so that the drinkers could descend further into the lugubrious Old Spanish songs on the stereo. He was in no very good mood when he left, and the walk back to Kara's building, which would usually have put his mind at ease, did nothing for his jangled nerves and sour temper. I have been a fool, he thought. Kara was perfectly happy before I came. She enjoys what she is doing; she might even make a great success as an actor. 
And why not? If she could make decent sandwiches and excellent pastries, why not achieve distinction on the stage, even the screen? That hope, he was sure, was behind her desire to drive. She wanted to go to New York, the great, and for Edward, almost unimaginable city, where she would still have the occasional bad moments when her head hurt or the world wavered or something of home haunted her mind, but where, he understood now, by some force of will or, more likely, of imagination, she would shape her life to her demands. He believed she could do that for a while, anyway, as she had done here. And possibly, one day near in the future _ or far _ maybe very far, when she was old and fat and in some sort of nursing care, she would simply vanish. Or die. Maybe a complete existence here was possible, maybe worlds are permeable. Maybe life was not as linear as was thought. 
	His mind thus in turmoil, fueled equally by Tecates and philosophy, Edward walked to Kara's house, where he found her and Austin sitting in the dark, cluttered living room with the rest. John, allergic to cookery, had bought Chinese take away, and it appeared that Austin was consuming Edward's portion. "Oh, Edward," Kara said, surprised and maybe not overly happy, "I thought you were at work."
	He sat down heavily in one of the chairs. "No," he said. 
	She handed over a container with rice and vegetables. "There's plenty for everyone."
	"Is there?" He picked at the glutinous rice with the scallions, water chestnuts, and bok choy. Normally he liked Chinese food. This tasted like paper. "I'd like to talk to you," he said. "Privately."
	The quick look she gave Austin and his almost imperceptible shake of the head told Edward all he wanted to know, but he persisted. "Just for a moment."
	"We're all friends here," Austin said. His voice was a low rumble, suggesting a certain heaviness of personality, a potential threat. I know him, Edward thought, I know him from before _ somewhere. Where he was no friend of mine. But memory refused him.
	"A moment, Kara."
	"There's no point, Edward," she said, and glanced at Austin for support. "I never wanted to hurt your feelings, but things aren't working out. It's not Austin's fault," she added quickly. "It's not like that at all."
	"What is it like? I'm having trouble imagining."
	"Kara doesn't have to answer to you," Austin said. His voice had risen, and Sam tried to defuse the situation. 
	"Guys, let's just finish dinner," she said. 
	"Yeah, no food fights. We know things have been tough for you lately," John said to Edward.
	He ignored these appeals. "You don't understand the situation. Especially you." This to Austin. "Kara and I don't belong here. We really don't. We're on a sort of metaphysical extended visa _ you won't have heard of that." He caught Kara's eye.	
"Don't Edward. Please don't. You promised."
	"Either they're not completely real, Kara, or we're not. But it's all an illusion, one way or the other."
	"Don't do this," she cried, stricken. "How can you do this? Don't listen to him. I've told you, I explained to you, didn't I, that Edward has these episodes, these moments of absence? Like in the mall. You remember, Sam."
	"And did you tell them I only came back for you? Did you tell them that?" he asked "You wouldn't believe how far I came for her." He could see their faces and knew they wouldn't. "You can't recognize that _ or us _ or what we are _ but it's the truth that we're only here on temporary loan. One day I'll be gone, like so." He snapped his fingers. "Afterwards, you'll be hard pressed to remember you ever knew me. And if you give her your heart, you'll see," he added to Austin. "She'll be gone, too, into thin air. Please, Kara, come with me now. You can only hurt these people and break my heart."
	She started to cry. "It's not true; none of this is true," she whispered between sobs. 
"Please, Kara. I  know you love it here, but it isn't right. We've upset the natural order of things. You can't become a famous actor here or whatever it is you want." 
"I can and I will," she said, suddenly angry and defiant. "You can't stop me."
Austin stood up at this and put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but Edward thought he looked uneasy and felt regret. What have I done, what have I done to Kara? "I love you," he said as his excuse. "I know you and know what you are and I still love you _ can you say the same for anyone else? Can you?" He reached for her hand. "We can be gone, we can be gone in a minute."
"No," she said. "No, I'm sorry. I loved you but I'm never going back. Never, never."
"Please, Kara!" He drew her from the sofa and for an instant, for a particle of an instant, he thought that he had won, that he could lead her to the door, to the porch, to the street, where, he was convinced, they would hear the sound of blackbirds gathering and the soft sloughing of a watery wind off the marsh. Then there was a scuffle, Sam taking Kara's other arm, assuring her she needn't go anywhere she didn't want to, and Austin, bulky in front of him, and an ineffectual punch thrown _ Edward much the worse for the Tecates and smaller in any case _ before he was outside on the porch with the screen door banging behind him. He looked back through the big living room window at Kara, white faced in the shadows, one hand stretched out to him, in appeal, in farewell, and knew beyond any shadow of doubt that this was good-bye.


Across the twilight city, broke and despairing _ no better off than the morning he'd arrived, worse, really, because he had been so hopeful then, so confident of finding Kara and so foolishly sure that all would be well once he did. Down Broad Street, Edward could see the big newspaper building and the arc of the interstate and was surprised at their continued existence. It had been in the back of his mind that everything would be resolved tonight, and now, instead, he found himself hung over with Tecates and regrets, with nothing but disappointment here and no chance of home, either. For this he had left his parents, his friends, his job, the marsh, everything he loved in life, and he had an impulse toward recklessness, tempted by the hypnotic streams of traffic. One quick step into the street and he would know the precise degree of present reality and whether he was invulnerable or not. Edward stood for a moment, judging the speed of the cars, then, recovering himself, doubled back to climb over the guardrail near the ramp. He made his way below the interstate to Joseph's plastic draped nest.
"Long time, no see," said the old man, who gave him a shrewd glance. "You're looking the worse for wear. You haven't thought to bring some of the damage with you?" There was a hopeful note in his voice.
Edward sat down beside him and shook his head. "Sorry. I haven't a penny," he said. "I've got to go home.
"Ah, home is where the heart is."
"Huh," said Edward bitterly. "My heart is here with Kara but I can't stay any longer."
Joseph nodded silently, and, as the pink sky faded and the starlings whirled in their thousands to roost overhead, Edward told him the story. 
"It's not given us to save others," Joseph said when he was finished. "Wisdom of the tribe: it can't be done. Though good men have been tempted," he added kindly. 
"I betrayed her," Edward said. "I told."
"Ahh _ they won't believe you, not for more than a minute or two. The world is so crazy here most anything can be digested and ignored."
There was that. Many strange things were believed, but most of them had the sanction of the papers, the tv, the radio. His word alone might not be enough for Sam and Austin and their friends; he hoped not. "I thought I would be home by now," Edward said after a few minutes. Full dark had come and the lights of the interstate formed yellow and red and blue-white streams. "Maybe I'm stuck here permanently. Maybe Kara will go back and I'll be left behind."
"Go back to where you came in," Joseph suggested. "Go back to the same place."
"And if not?"
"Don't think that. Trust to hope and imagination."
"Kara has imagined a life for herself."
"Do the same," said Joseph.
Edward's head was pounding. He did not metabolize alcohol well and his imagination had atrophied. He stretched out on one of Joseph's plastic sheets. "Can I stay here for a little while?"
"As my honored guest," said the old man. "But morning, get up early. Since you come in early that will be your best bet." He hunched himself into one of his blankets and fell asleep.
Edward closed his eyes against the stream of lights. He could hear the old man's hoarse breathing, the faint rustle of the birds, the endless hum of the interstate. When he opened his eyes again, the morning star winked through a chink in the plastic. The traffic sound had dropped; the birds were asleep. Edward stood up, his mouth sour and chalky, his head gently throbbing. He looked down at the old man, wrapped as in a shroud, asleep in the cold light. To the extent he could trust anyone here, he felt he could trust Joseph; he would take his advice.
"Good-bye, Joseph," he said softly. He slipped through the drapes to the guardrail. He waited until a monster truck roared past and a smaller pickup, then there was a break and he stepped over the rail and crossed all four eastbound lanes to reach the median. Lighter to the east. He waited again, started across but stepped back quickly. Unfamiliar with motors, he had misjudged the oncoming vehicle. I could die here, Edward thought. It's true. I could. This, too, is real, to a point. 
He stood uncertainly for a few minutes, watching the paired white lights of cars advance, watching the billboard sized trucks lit, it seemed, on every surface. Then nothing for a moment but pinpoint sized lights advancing over the bridge. Edward stepped onto the road way and sprinted across. He walked along the gritty verge just outside the guardrail. Crossed an entrance ramp, then an exit ramp. Not the right one, he didn't think, though it was hard to tell in the artificial light. Next one? Yes, he recognized the name. Sisson. Sisson. And now in the street light and the pale morning, he recognized the steep slope below, slick with ice at his arrival, and the little bent shrub that had kept him from falling into traffic.   
Right here, he thought, as he walked down the ramp. Right here. I was walking down the Raised Road, looking east, where the storm was coming, where the morning is coming. He heard a horn behind him, the shudder of the road with the weight of the vehicle and turned to see the truck and jumped toward the guard rail, flat out, desperate to reach the slope, the ground, safety, and landed with a sick thud as the wind of the motor's passing sounded below the inky morning shadow of the dike.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
"Kara!" he shouted into the darkness, "Kara, Kara!" And then he remembered nothing more.

				  Sixteen

Edward walked home in the dawn. He felt shaky on the dike's steep and slippery steps, and he had a dizzy moment at the top, looking east toward golden bands below a raft of slate colored clouds bulging with rain. The air was damp on his skin and a faint smell of wood smoke wafted from the watermen's district along the river. There was the raised road, palely bisecting the city, and the warren of apartments with their roof gardens. The bright awnings were furled; the empty streets, dark with only faint points of light where the reflectors caught the dawn. Behind him, the marsh still lay with the night, but its gray shadows were fading into the pale greens and buffs of day. A vulture swept overhead and a file of snowy egrets flapped across the northern quarter: He was home, and he felt relief and sadness in equal measure. He saw again what he loved and sensed, rather than remembered, all that was lost. Already Ancient Hartford seemed no more than a dream of motors and noise, of towers and glass and gas tinged air, of people, so many people, of Kara. He wiped his eyes and started down the steps.
Returned Absences were supposed to report to the nearest Safetypoint. That was the drill. He'd insisted on it when he'd found that fellow in the marsh near, very near, Edward realized, where he, himself, had just returned. The operating procedure for Absence was to collect as much information as soon as possible, but Edward realized that was nonsense. What could he say, what could he tell them? He'd been Absent, gone, missing, oblivious; he didn't want to explain anything; he wanted to go home. 
The first shutters were opening in the stalls under the pylons; he heard the rattle and creak of a fisher's cart coming from the river. The vegetable women who tended the raised plots on the edge of the marsh would soon be wheeling their laden bicycles along the side of the Rail, and Jonas and his other friends would be eating quick breakfasts and heading out for the solars. If I can just get on a boat, I'll be all right, Edward thought. He was tempted to go straight to the Warden's office, but it was still early, and there would be something unseemly about showing up without even his uniform and kit after all this time. They would want him to visit the SafetyMen, too, and he would not have the excuse of time and pressing work. It would be better to show at punch-in time with badge and kit and proper marsh gear, ready to step into the boat and head out. He could almost feel the motion of the water, could almost see the tall reeds parting as his vessel nosed into a channel. To be there was almost a physical need, and he bestirred himself to get down the steps and into the narrow _ so narrow! _ streets.
A block, two blocks. At the corner of Twain he saw Kara's building in the distance. Was it possible that she, too, was home? Was it? His heart beat faster and he ran to the lobby. But her name was gone from the listing and there was a new name on the plate for her apartment. He wondered, half panicked, if he had somehow entered the wrong door, mistaken her apartment, but no, there was the odd sculptured fish, symbol of the CC, and the purple and brown mosaic let into the cement floor, and the curly iron railing of the stair. This was the apartment for sure and Kara was still Absent. 
Outside, the sun was fully up, and the day already felt warm after his time in the cooler ancient city. Edward realized that he would have to adjust anew to Kara's absence; she would not be on the street, hurrying toward the school nor dancing with him in the Circles, nor beside him in the twilight on the roof garden. She was lost, even if he had come close to success. He had found her, he knew he had, and they had been planning to return _ yet here, he felt a pang; at some level he remembered that had not been the case, that he had failed to persuade her, that she had not loved him quite enough. He walked across Morgan to his own apartment and checked the name plates as soon as he entered the lobby: Edward Nempf in the familiar italics. His apartment was safe.
Upstairs. He took out his keys, surprised at the number of unfamiliar, old fashioned types. Shrugged at the way things accumulate, at how fragile recollection can be. Recognized his thin, flat apartment key, put it in the lock and opened the door.
"Who's there?"
There was someone in the apartment, a man familiar in voice and silhouette( check which way his apartment faces) but with a strange, hunched posture, as if he had taken a tremendous blow and had not yet been able to straighten up. "Dad?"
"Is that you, Edward?"
"Dad, what are you doing here?" He stepped forward and his father rushed to fold him in a hard embrace that refocused all Edward's scattered emotions. He was home, and his father had gotten old in the few months of his Absence. Edward felt like crying with grief and guilt. 
His father clapped him awkwardly on the back. "You're here."
"Yes."
"Where have you been?" Stepping back now. "Your mother has been frantic. We almost gave up hope. Where were you?"
Edward looked around the room, took a step so that he could look into the kitchen and the bedroom _ all as usual. "I was Absent," he said. His voice sounded vague even to him. He remembered trying to shake information out of the man he found in the marsh.
"We know that," his father said, anxiety making him abrupt. "Of course, we know that. But where have you been?" 

Edward shook his head. There were a thousand images, ten-thousand, but like the fragments of a dream they were dissolving. "I don't know."
"You can't think what it's done to your mother. You must know."
"Where's Mom?" Edward asked, as if the oddity of his father in residence had struck him again. "Is she all right?"
"What do you think? You go away without a word for half a year and your mother's fine? I leave her at home when I come here; it upsets her so much. And for you just to walk in here like this without warning."
"Coming and going _ you don't know when it will happen. All I know is that I went after Kara." He saw his dad frown. He had never really liked Kara, finding her moody and shy. "I found her," Edward said,  confident of that, "and it was very cold and dry, but I could sometimes still hear the wind around the dike and in the reeds." He suddenly felt dizzy and sat down heavily in one of the chairs. 
"Are you all right? Have you been hurt?"
Edward didn't think so, though it was possible. He retained a sensation of flying or jumping with some tremendous sound ringing in his ears. Then he was on the damp ground below the dike with the marsh sleeping behind him. "It's such a shock to be in one place and then in another. "I came back," he said. "I came back for you and Mom."
He rolled up his pant legs, noticed the bruises but couldn't answer his dad's questions. "It was all gone in a minute, everything I'd seen and done and been. Gone."
His father went into the kitchen and brought him some water. "But what are you doing here?" Edward asked after a minute.
"What do you think? Protecting your apartment. Anything vacant for two, three months they're starting to reassign. I'm here in residence for you. Neighbors have been good," his dad added. "They could have told the Safetymen."
"But I'm a Marsh-Keeper. In fact, I've got to get going. I'm due for punch-in. I came home to get my uniform, my badge."
His father shook his head sadly. "No rush, Edward. You would be better to rest, eat something, get your feet back on dry ground, and_"
Edward interrupted, "I need to be on the marsh, in the boat. I won't feel I'm home until I'm on the water."
"_and see your mother."
"We can stop on the way _ or you can prepare her _ and I'll come by later. I gave you a shock _ I'm so sorry. But maybe it will be easier for her if she knows I'm back and at work and all right. You can see I'm all right, can't you?"
His father had been standing near the window and now he looked out. He started studying the top of the dike, the distant grass and water as if he had never seen them before. "You were always fond of the marsh," he remarked. "The first generation without the long memory and regrets." He gave Edward a sad smile. "Yet you leave, go Absent, as if we had bequeathed you an irresistible sorrow."
"I went for Kara," Edward said stubbornly. "That was all."
"Kara never was easy with this place."
"No, I'm afraid not." Edward found himself reluctant to talk about Kara.
"Your job," said his dad and stopped.
"It wasn't my job," Edward said, but now he suspected it might have been. Marsh-Keepers, Our First Line of Defense, had to live near the water. "At least, she never said."
"A kindly girl," his father said. "Though I never thought she suited you."
Edward hauled himself out of the chair, weary in spite of his eagerness. "I'll just change and we can stop by and see Mom on the way. If you think it won't be too much of a shock."
"You better let me prepare her," his dad said, "But Edward, you can't go to the marsh. Not today."
"Why not?"
"You were gone so long _" and he stopped, looking more hunched and damaged than ever. His hair was very white, too, and his eyes were nervous. He'd always been so good in bad times; in any crisis, Edward realized, he had tried to model himself on his father.
"The more reason not to be past time," he said, but now in a constriction in his chest he sensed what his father was trying to tell him. "What is it?" 
"They've replaced you."
"What do you mean? No one knows the marsh better. No one. And my record _ my record is good." 
 The Chief Warden admitted that. He was very sorry, Edward. Very. 'One of the best men he'd ever had'. Your mother pleaded with him." His dad compressed his thin lips at the memory and straightened his back so that for a moment he was again the man Edward remembered.
"But I came back. I'm back now." It was difficult for Edward to realize that life had gone on while he was Absent; to his mind the CC had stopped and become Ancient Hartford and should now be restarting precisely where it was when he left.
"You have been replaced. There are not ever too many openings _ as you know."
Edward sat back down in the chair and put his face in his hands. After a minute, his dad touched is shoulder. "There'll be other jobs," he said. "You'll need some time."
Edward straightened up, half angry. There was a pattern, he knew, a way Returns were supposed to act, confused, peculiar, between mud and water as the saying went. Not him. He'd see Mom and then right to the Warden. Right to the office. He'd see the SafetyMen if necessary _ Harris would be in a little later. He'd talk to him; tell him he was right _ one didn't know; there was no big knowledge; everything one learned was necessarily left behind. An easy interview and then a boat. He stood up and, for a moment, he felt water beneath the soles of his feet, right through the floor and the ground and the thin bottom of his canoe. 
"I'm going to change," he said. Though his father looked sorrowful, Edward dressed in his full Marsh-Keeper's kit. His only concession was to slip the badge into his pocket instead of wearing it around his neck. 
Downstairs into the morning, the sun lying in hot bars across the pavement like scattered papers. There was a memory for Harris, he thought bitterly: There was a lot of waste in the streets. Where, where? He didn't know. 
"Wait here," said his dad when they reached the familiar pinkish apartment building. He went in alone; Edward waited in the street in the shadow of the pylons, trying to get his mind around dismissal, his possible exile to dry land, his dad's precipitous aging, his mom's need to be forewarned. The woman who sold breads from under the north corner of the building waved to him, and he was about to go over to say hello when he heard a cry from above and stepped out into the light. His mother was at the forth floor window, calling his name.  Something in her voice made his heart jump.
"I'll be there! I'll be right up! Don't come down!"
Under the pylons, up the stair, past the mail boxes of the little lobby, up another stair; he was out of shape with the _ what were they? _ the non-stairs, the Otis, whatever. Another flight, his feet ringing on the treads. A door opening. "Edward! Edward!" 
He had only an instant to see that she was not hunched like his father, but older, old, diminished just the same, her hair streaked with white, then she flung her arms around him. "You're back, you're back. You're safe."
"Yes, yes. And Mom, are you all right?"
"All right now. Let me look at you. Oh, Edward, you have your uniform on. Didn't Dad tell you?" Her face which had been radiant, clouded.
"I'm going to see the Warden and get this straightened out. There may be something."
"Let's not talk in the hall," his dad said.
"Oh, there may be," said his Mom, "though we did try, didn't we?"
His father nodded.
She repeated this several times, strung up with nerves, Edward saw. "But you're home! Everything else is secondary. Everything. Sit, sit. I'll make you a breakfast."
"I want to get to the marsh as soon as possible," Edward said, but this was pro forma. He understood that he would have to eat, even though he felt queasy with conflicting emotions. His dad gave him a warning glance, and Edward added, "Just something quick and light. I'm not really adjusted yet."
His mother rushed into the kitchen and found some cold rice and vegetables. "When did you get back?" 
Edward leaned against the door frame. "Just before dawn. I was in the marsh."
"The marsh!" Her face went white. "All that water! Oh, Edward, you might have drowned."
"No chance of that," he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. "You know how I can swim. But I was right at the dike."
"Water is merciful," she said, but it was a moment before she moved away from him to begin chopping cabbage and squash at top speed, her cleaver a blur. Into the pan they went, sizzling with the heat. A hot pepper followed. The smell brought back the breakfasts of his childhood and Edward felt tears in his eyes. 
"It's all right," said his mother. She stopped her frantic preparations and laid a strong, stubby hand on his arm _ later she would be anxious and demanding and puzzled _ but for the moment they were in harmony. "Water is merciful."

Edward tried to keep that thought in mind as he arrived at the Marsh Station, his shirt sticking to his back in a damp heat that he found almost oppressive. How curious that, while his conscious mind had forgotten Ancient Hartford, his body, adapted to its conditions, should remember. He descended the steps and crossed the stretch of waste ground at the base of the dike. The Marsh Station looked the same: the half empty rack of canoes, the berths for the solars at the little dock, the blocky marsh hut. The breeze was up, sweeping the reeds and grasses, and for a moment he wondered how anything else had ever seemed real to him. Then he stepped inside, waved to Irsak the clerk, who was agog and full of questions before he could be persuaded to announce Edward's return to Jimb. The Station Chief nodded awkwardly, muttered a greeting, and took him immediately to the Head Warden.
"You're in close to time," said the Head Warden, a tall rawboned man with stiff black hair, a beaky nose, and heavy brows, who rose from behind his desk to shake Edward's hand. "When did you get back? Have you gone home? Seen your parents _" 
The Head Warden had always liked Edward, who was competent and honest and more than usually conscientious, and it pained him to see the young Marsh-Keeper appear so hopefully in his full kit. Hadn't he spoken to his parents? Hadn't he gotten the word? Although his job required hiring _ and when need be _ firing workers, the Head Warden was a sensitive man who disliked dealing with conflict and bad news. He'd found it hard enough to tell Edward's parents, and now it looked as if he must go through the whole process again. He'd heard Edward had gone Absent after a woman. A romantic then, not too surprising, seeing how he loved the marsh, water, all the female element, but, still, what had he been thinking! 
"The reason I'm a little late. My mother insisted on breakfast." Edward gave a rueful smile.
The Head Warden frowned slightly. "And didn't they tell you _"
"About my job?" He hoped for something else, but saw the Warden's expression. "Yes, they did." He reluctantly drew his badge from his pocket and laid it on the desk. "But I thought maybe something else might have opened up. I feel such a need to be on the water," he added with a touch of desperation. "After everything."
The Warden shook his head. "Nothing at the moment. I could keep you on the fill-in list and have you in maybe once a week to help Irsak in the office. Not what you want and a waste of your abilities," he added, holding up his hand, "but it's the best I can do. It's not enough to live on, I know, but I held your position for three months. And you know we are understaffed. I couldn't do more, Edward, though I regretted."
Edward nodded.
"If anything opens up. I will call you first."
They spoke for a few minutes more, then Edward said good-bye. He was at the door before he said, "I don't suppose I could borrow a canoe. Just for an hour or so?"
"The regulations," the Head Warden said regretfully. Edward nodded and closed the door behind him. Outside in the warm morning sun, he walked to the dock, almost mesmerized by the dark rippling blue water. It took all his self control not to  lift down a canoe and paddle straight into the marsh. He was expected, obligated, really, to go straight to the Safetypoint, but he couldn't bear the thought of being inside, of being questioned. He went toward the dike, but instead of climbing the stairs he skirted the edge of the marsh. It had been a day like this, with just the first signs of autumn when Kara had disappeared, when he'd sat up on the Terrace CafŽ too anxious to visit her. It seemed to him that he had failed in two different ways, being too timid first and then, with his ill fated Absence, too bold.
He kicked a stone along the track, sent another one into the shallow water with a resounding splash, and, so distracted, did not hear the footsteps behind him. "Edward!"
Jonas was waving to him from near the steps. "Well, this is my lucky day." He hustled up to Edward and clapped him on the shoulder. "You've come back to save me again."
Edward was irked by Jonas' insouciance and yet, as so often, he was unable to be really angry when faced with his colleague's unquenchable brio and good nature. "You seem safe on dry land today."
"But late, my man, very late. The sun is high and I am still on the dike, so to speak."
Edward shrugged. Jonas' habitual tardiness seemed a minor, minor problem.
"If you'll just bring a canoe around, I can be off. I'll punch in later when I have all my data and some Contra and some excellent excuse."
"I can't take a canoe. I'm not working here any more. Don't you know I've been replaced?"
Jonas scowled and bit his lip. "They can't fit you back in?"
"Not now and I don't know when."
"I'm sorry."
"I want so much to be on the water," Edward said. "I won't feel I'm really back until I'm in the marsh." 
"Leave that to Father Jonas. Meet me along the Little Siskon." Without another word, Jonas trotted back toward the Marsh Station.
Edward continued along the dike, wading across various little pools and rivulets until he reached the Little Siskon, one of the many streams that drained from the marsh to the river. It was narrow but deep enough for a canoe or the smaller solar and Edward hadn't been waiting more than a quarter of an hour before Jonas swung in close enough for him to step into the canoe. He picked up the extra paddle and dug into the water. Instantly the world grew brighter, every reed, every blade of grass, every marsh flower and every croaking heron, every butterfly and grasshopper, every small darting fish, every cloud overhead, every reflection in the dark water took on such sharpness that Edward felt renewed, as if he had been lost in fog or submerged in some disturbing dream.
They paddled swiftly up the little rivulet, then turned into one of the broader waters so Jonas could check his gauges. Edward looked back  at the dike and the CC looming behind them and the towering clouds, so much more visible in the familiar watery landscape than they had been with trees everywhere. 
"There were so many trees," he said to Jonas. "All the old species."
Jonas looked at him dryly. "They'll be thrilled to know that. The SafetyMen."
"I guess."
"And do you remember anything else? Anything to enhance our knowledge or make a buck?"
"I remember," Edward said, and then, for a fleeting instant, he saw Kara's white face, sad, imploring, angry at a window of a dark house, and though that was all a dream and an illusion, though it had cost him and his so much, he put his face in his hands and wept.
				Seventeen
	
	Edward yelled from the bow and Alek, mate, engineer, fifty-percent of the runner's crew, threw on the engine. It was a battery job, tetchy and perpetually in need of charging, reserved for only the direst emergencies and for the tricky work of cutting across the tidal flow and docking. "Ease it, ease it!" 
Alek was prone to impatience and tempted by speed. He had a gift for engines and mechanical improvisation of all kinds, but he lacked the feel for ships and water that came so naturally to Edward.
	"Steady. Kill the engine!"
	Fat Goose's bulging side slapped against the wooden pier. Edward threw down the mooring lines and waved to Elephant Symms, who was lumbering from his hut on the dock. Like his namesake, the Elephant was heavy and much wrinkled. His flat feet made the dock vibrate as he stamped out of the hut and came along side to check the cargo: salvaged wood today, black with age and sodden through, a good load, all antique species, sound and straight. He heaved himself onboard with Alek's assistance and checked the cargo.
	"What's this?"
	"Oak. And some fir and a little Southern yellow pine. Good stuff. Way pre-Rising."
	 
	The Elephant cleared his throat in what Edward now knew was a sign of approval. Symms rubbed his red, bulbous nose and scratched at his scraggly white whiskers. He had been reluctant to hire Edward, having a deep suspicion of Authority even in so tenuous a form as the person of a former Marsh-Keeper. But then Alek, who was his son-in-law, ran the pride of his fleet into some pilings downriver, and the Elephant decided to trust Jonah's recommendation. Edward was employed, on sufferance, true, but at least until the next storm season. His expertise with wood had been a bonus, and now the Elephant not only had him inspect every shipment, but kept him running mostly lumber on the Goose.
	"Unload it, boys. We'll catch the turning of the tide."
	Behind his back, Alek rolled his eyes. He had no intention of getting the runner empty in time to catch the return tide, and while Edward began getting the cargo ready for the crane, he found some little adjustment was needed in the engine. 
The Elephant blew the whistle he kept around his neck and three stevedores came onto the dock and turned the capstan to  adjust the crane. The Elephant directed this operation with a good deal of animation. When all was in position, they started the motor, and with a grumble and a whine, the big arm descended toward the deck. All the loading cranes drew their power from the Electric, and anyone on the system knew very well when the day's cargoes began unloading by the sudden drop in juice. 
One by one, bundles of boards and logs soared overhead, to be deposited in the riverside warehouse or, if they were already sold, hoisted over the dike to the rail depot. These, sodden as they were, would have to be dried, laid out on racks, riverside first, then moved to warmer and drier accommodations that The Elephant rented below the Dancing Otter. Edward had already labeled each bundle with the species type and grade, but The Elephant, distrustful and ever cautious, went over nearly each board with him, so that despite his expressed desire, they missed the tide. 
Edward would as soon have been coasting back down river but instead wound up lifting logs onto the drying racks, heavy, tedious work not made any more palatable by The Elephant's cheerful cries of,  "Early day today, boys!" which meant short wages. Still, he was on the water, there was that, Edward reminded himself. Gulls screaming overhead, light reflecting off the water, the smell of the sea tide, the marshland on both banks, the high silhouette of the dikes; he was home as much as he could say he was home, despite the suspicion that surrounded him and questions from the SafetyMen and the WaterPriests. Besides, the work suited him. He caught a glimpse of himself in the reflector as he left the drying shed. He'd lost the weight he'd put on in Ancient Hartford; his face was lean and, thanks to his work loading and unloading salvage, he was more muscular than he'd ever been as a MarshKeeper. There was something different in his expression, too, something he glimpsed in the evening when he was shaving after work, a hardness in his eyes, as if he'd acquired the resentful caution which he had always associated with Resurrectors and river rats of every persuasion _ he was one of them now. I'm a different person, Edward thought. I look different, I am different. Why do I still miss Kara  so much? 
He nodded to Alek, who was hustling off home to The Elephant's daughter, said, despite her parentage, to be a considerable beauty. He set the morning time with The Elephant _ five, no later, to catch the turn of the morning tide _ and promised to stop by Alek's apartment to rouse him. Edward thought that, early as he was, he should visit his parents, but his mother would insist on giving him dinner and the longer the visit the more chance that all their unspoken fears and angers would emerge. It wounded him to think how his parents had suffered in his Absence, yet although he was often angry at Kara, himself, he couldn't bear to hear anything said against her. Much as he loved them, the visits were awkward, especially now that he was working for the less than respectable Elephant Symms. Halfway to the Raised Road and his parents' apartment, Edward impulsively turned north toward Jessie Ashansa's place. 
He had the sense that if anyone could understand his situation, she might. When he saw bunches of frisŽ, her favorite lettuce, at the nearby vegetable stand he took it as an omen and bought a bunch. A few minutes later, he knocked at her door, holding the leafy green head like a bouquet of flowers.
The door was opened by a sturdy young woman with a halo of black curly hair, a wide mouth and dark eyes. He recognized Diorina Ashansa from the Komunicator photos when she went Absent and from another, more subtle and mysterious sense of familiarity which defied explanation. 
"Is Jessie in? I'm Edward Nempf. I've been away and haven't been able to stop by for some time."
"My grandmother has joined the waters." Her voice was flat, whether with grief or indifference, Edward could not tell.
"When? When did it happen?" He had the awful feeling that it might have happened because he became Absent, because she hadn't found anyone else to help her. Edward thought that he should have told his father and enlisted his aid for the old lady. But then his folks would have suspected his plans and realized his obsession with finding Kara.
"Just two weeks ago."
"I'm so sorry. And so very sorry not to have seen her again. But you were with her?"
"Not that it's your business, but yes."
"I'm glad. You'd been gone, too," Edward said quickly. 
"I returned in time." She stood waiting in the doorway, stolid and wary. Something in her expression was familiar _ he had seen it when he passed reflectors.
"I always found her very sympathetic," Edward said, impelled to continue the conversation. "She was so smart, such a pleasure to talk to."
"She was at her best with strangers and acquaintances," said Diorina.
Edward remembered the old lady's remarks about her troublesome grandchild and felt acutely uncomfortable. He realized he was holding the frisŽ and extended the bunch to her. "Her favorite. I used to shop for her sometimes. Please."
He thought for a moment that she would refuse, then she reached for the lettuce and shut the door, but not before Edward saw the tears in her eyes.

Edward's days off were irregular, more a matter of weather and tide than of any fixed schedule. This made it hard to see his old friends, with whom, in any case, he found himself subtly estranged. Through no fault of his own, he was marked as different and his time in Ancient Hartford seemed to have unsettled most of his CC assumptions. A knowledge that the follies of the past had compounded the disaster of the Risings made him suspect all official pronouncements, whether the composite ( and easily manipulated) reports of the overall water levels or the strictures of the WaterPriests, who seemed to him more active and more insidious than ever. 
Once in a while, he filled in at the Marsh Station, but his work for Symms made him suspect with the Warden, and, although he was grateful to Jonas, seeing the other Marsh-Keepers busy at work was painful to Edward. Sometimes he walked below the dike, enjoying the marsh from the track, and occasionally he was able to hitch a ride on a solar or a canoe. But when he was free during the day, he often visited the Museum of Lost Technologies, the big arched hall with the dusty exhibits and faded banners on Quinnak and Cowles. Almost always there were school groups, noisy files of children on educational outings. Today, he thought it was eights and nines, but he lacked Kara's grasp of children's ages and her knowledge of their distinctively colored caps and smocks. Slates in hand, this group was trailing along after a bossy young woman who kept a sharp eye out for clowns and stragglers. 
Edward stood well to the back of the large central hall while the teacher and her young charges clustered around the huge intact diesel truck and the electric locomotive. When they moved on to the Costume Hall and the Historic Images Gallery, Edward walked up to the truck. It was dark green and well preserved except for the crumbling edges of the giant tires. Edward touched the smooth metal side. He could not have said why he came so often. Although he had visited occasionally as a school boy, he had never showed much interest afterwards. Now he longed to open the truck door and climb into the cab. It was called a cab, he knew that. He touched the tires, too, but remembered nothing else. 
There were some other motors including a black Lexus, quite badly damaged but so valuable it was on display, nonetheless. Edward had a great desire to sit inside, but one door was smashed and the other had been sealed shut _ probably to prevent curious school children from injuring their fingers or damaging the seats. 
He heard rapid small footsteps and high childish voices at the entrance _ another class arriving _ and moved on to the Gallery. The MuseumKeepers rotated the pictures to protect them from sunlight and to keep the exhibits fresh. Here was the ancient Civil War Memorial arch with a passing parade, and some street scenes from different eras, distinguishable by the clothing, shop fronts, and marquees. Today they had out a photo labeled, Old Spanish Immigrant Workers, which Edward studied intently. He wondered what it would mean if he should glimpse Hector or Maria or Jesœs. Or himself? Had he ever been photographed on the street? It wasn't impossible.
A picture of the skyline with a fish shaped building that overlooked the river made Edward shiver with a momentary sensation of height, of looking down, of being high, high up in a glass box. And here was another of Bushnell Park with its fountain and the golden dome of the capitol in the background and the white buds of flowering trees _ the park where one had picnics but which one avoided at night. He knew that. Some of the pictures were so old they had been repainted, painstakingly copied in inks on paper and others had yellowed or browned, losing much of their detail, so that they looked, at a glance, not like a mechanical reproduction but an authentic memory.
He looked again at the picture of the workers. Third on left. Thin face, mustache, high cheekbones, a certain proud confidence: could be Hector. Could be. For just an instant, Edward saw his friend's face again in a sour street light, heard footsteps and the metallic vibration of a mesh fence, and shook his head. He came here to be reminded, and yet he knew it would be terrible if Ancient Hartford should somehow have the power to break through present reality. Terrible. The pictures were a danger as well as an attraction, Edward realized, and hearing the bird-like voices of the children approaching, he returned to the now empty main gallery. When he walked around the locomotive toward the display of two wheeled motors, he noticed another visitor, a woman with an untidy mane of black hair who was looking at the motorized bikes. He thought he knew who it was and approached. She didn't acknowledge him at first, then she said, "Riptide with a four stroke, air-cooled motor. Gets up to 80 miles per gallon and has a top speed of 40 miles per hour."
Edward's stomach gave a lurch. He had a vivid memory of riding on one of these devices, of streams of motors passing him on either side. 
Diorina Ashansa turned and looked at him. "Do you come here to remember?" she asked. 
"I don't know. To remember is frightening but not to remember is terrible."
To his surprise, she smiled and her solemn face lightened. "I didn't trust you the other day when you came. Though Grandmother had said you were very kind."
"A hazard of our condition, I think. I've only met one other Return, but he was newly back and no help at all."
She nodded and reached out to touch the handlebars of the Riptide, then asked, "Why did you go Absent?" without preliminary.
"I went after Kara, my companion." He wished he could have said, my committed. "I was happy enough here, otherwise. I'd been a MarshKeeper." He could not keep the regret from his voice.
"You lost your job? Me, too. But I think I have other prospects. I must have learned some new skills, because I just passed the Electric exam without trouble." She gave the scooter a last regretful pat before  starting toward the exit. Edward accompanied her out to the street. 
"And why did you go?" he asked. It seemed natural between them to ask such normally taboo questions.
"I needed to get away. From various things _ and people. Even Grandmother, though everything good as you observed, could be difficult with family. She'd hoped I'd take on her archival work."
"She was still working?"
"Virtually to the end. I used to borrow material from here for her. They didn't have that much, but whatever they had, she wanted. She wanted me to transfer to the Highlands, to one of the Recovered Institutes, but I have no head for theory. All my brains are in my hands." 
 Edward had a fleeting image of a woman working with tools and then a sensation of fear and speed. "You called yourself Dora," he blurted out, "and you gave me a ride from _" But place and time were gone.
"So we did meet then! We did! Just the way you looked at that old Riptide scooter made me think we had." She turned and stared at him for so long that they began to be jostled by the other pedestrians in the crowded streets, but nothing more came to either one of them. "And maybe we'll meet again," she said, then she turned and walked away. Edward watched her meld into the crowd and disappear behind a pair of Carters with an overloaded trolley.
Because of his irregular hours, Edward could plan nothing, but to his surprise, he saw Diorina the very next week. He'd been on his way to the Museum, drawn as irresistibly, it seemed, as he had once been drawn to the marsh, when she came down the steps. And then, three nights later he saw her at Batwing, where they danced and had a coffee together and joked about Mr. Jonah. So it was, without any conscious planning or design, that she became a part of the new landscape for him. She shopped at the vegetable stall where he had bought things for her grandmother and which his employment on the river made convenient. Fairly soon the vegetable lady with the dyed hair would call out to him, "Diorina's just in the next block," or "Would you let Diorina know I have that  bok choy she wanted?" Or else it would be the fish merchant with a message to pass on or the information that, "You've just missed her," for, since her Return, Diorina had become outgoing and cheerful. "Ill, she was; she was that ill!" confided the rice seller, her sun-wrinkled face beaming. "And now_ like sunshine!" The woman winked as if to hint this transformation was all Edward's doing.
He smiled and nodded, with the mental reservation that he was in love with Kara Wistley. He dreamed of her sometimes, or at least he thought he did, for though he retained not a single image, he often waked in the morning filled with melancholy longing. And curiously, he saw her about town, a will-o-the-wisp of red hair, dappled face, pale arms, or heard, in the sea wind, an echo of her pretty voice. He twice ran madly along Twain shouting her name and nearly fell over the side of Fat Goose, when he was momentarily beyond doubt that she was calling from one of the new islands. After a time, he realized these were tricks of memory and imagination, and he came to wonder how much of the Kara he had loved had been his own creation. Back in the old days, he had not realized that she wanted an entirely different life than he did, and so it was not too hard to understand why he still occasionally believed he saw her or why he wondered sometimes if it had been Kara's very elusiveness that had enchanted him, that kept him, even now, in thrall. 
His friendship with Diorina was quite different. Pretty but solidly down to earth, cynical and practical, she understood when he felt all at sea, and, more important, she was someone who also had little grains of memory that irritated the mind like sand in an oyster. Who knew what pearls_ if ever_ those would produce. They were drawn together by their shared and mysterious experiences, so it seemed natural to talk quietly in front of the evocative pictures of the Historical Images Gallery or to study the motors which still haunted their dreams or to travel along the edge of the marsh in a canoe that Edward, now in high favor with the Elephant, had managed to borrow, and to think, sometimes aloud, of where this or that might have been or how things had been done in Ancient Hartford. He felt easier with her than with his old friends and even with his parents, who distrusted his assurances that he was all right, that he was back for good, that his new career as a Resurrector was strictly temporary, that Diorina, infinitely suspect as a Return, was strictly a friend.
A particular friend, true, but a friend. A friend in need. They were both haunted by fleeting and disturbing dreams about which they sometimes compared notes. This was how they recalled the Mall where she had worked and he'd been frightened. "I know where it is," Edward said one day.
Her face took on the peculiarly intent look associated with discovery and recovery. "I want to go there." 
"Is that wise? It's a ruin. I'm just guessing, but I think that's why I panicked the day I was in the Mall."
"I want to know if it was real," she said, her voice low and passionate, so that Edward sensed she had more of her grandmother's love for knowledge than she pretended. He promised to guide her, but it was several weeks and the start of spring with the redwings and grackles calling and frogs churning ponds in mad amphibian sex, before the tides that ruled his work cooperated with her day off. Edward borrowed the canoe, and they pushed away from the Elephant's loading dock to paddle against the tide as far as Hog Creek and the west quadrant. Within an hour, they were scanning rivulets and mudflats _ always shifting and changing _ for the little waterway Edward remembered. They made two false starts and then, as Diorina was beginning to get discouraged, as well as sore from the unfamiliar exercise, he spotted what he was sure was the right stream. They dug their paddles in and soon saw the stretch of raised ground with the low cement wall where he had found Jonas. 
"I came here the day before I went Absent," Edward remarked.
"But not from here?" Her momentary anxiety told Edward that she was content in the present and hoped he was too.
"No, no. Raised Road the next morning."
They tied the canoe to one of the tough scraggly willows and stepped onto the boggy shore.
"You think this is it?" Diorina looked doubtfully at the crumbling cement. 
"There's more; the lower floors are still partially intact. The foundation goes down quite far_ totally unsafe." 
She started around the building without answering. Only when they were well out of sight of the canoe and the waterway did she concede the structure was big enough. Edward pointed out the fallen girders and what looked like the collapse of some huge sky window, but Diorina was not convinced until they came to a higher bit of ground, thinly vegetated and suspiciously flat. She knelt down and began scraping away the dirt and grasses to reveal a crumbled black lump below. "Asphalt," she said.
"A parking lot." She sat back on her heels and looked at the ruin, squinting against the sun as if to envision the building in Ancient Hartford. "It was all real then." 
	"We knew that," he said. "We knew there was an Ancient Hartford. But how much did we make up?"
	"I made up a different life," she said. "One I thought I wanted. One without ties or grandmother or any boundaries."
	Edward nodded. "I thought I wanted to live with Kara Wistley."
There was a world of implication in those words, but though she stood up and took his hand, all she said was, "Let's get out of here." 


 

			      Eighteen

Edward sat out on the Bulwark CafŽ's long stone terrace atop the dike. Behind him, the marsh glowed russet under a bank of blue gray clouds, but all his attention was focused on the crowded streets and close packed apartment houses to the east. He was waiting for Diorina and marking, with a cup of coffee and a handful of chocolates, the anniversary of Kara's Absence. It had been two years, two years almost to the day, since he had loitered the afternoon away, worrying about her health. So though he could have met Diorina in any number of more convenient places, somehow the Bulwark was the only choice for what he wanted to say, for what he was going to ask her.
Two years! Two years during which Ancient Hartford had come to seem no more than a dream, a wave lasting but a moment, as the Water Priests said. Would that was all they said! He'd been hearing their drums all afternoon, and now he glimpsed one of their black robed processions, sweeping arrogantly along the Dike Road _ expecting Carters and Fishers and ordinary folk with real business to clear out of the way. They'd be going to the Tower Point just below the Komunikator mast, set to drum up a storm and awaken the neighborhood with flares. This was something new, this veneration for a nub of ruin long neglected, and Edward had the uneasy suspicion that he might be the cause, for during one of his interminable interviews with the SafetyMen, he had mentioned a tower.
For him it had been a navigation aid, a distinctive, Very Old Style landmark in the midst of the glass towers. He'd probably said that under the influence of the mushrooms the SafetyMen had considerately plied him with. He'd come to shouting, To steer by, to steer by.  Well, if that had gotten back to the WaterPriests, they'd have swum to it for sure, and it seemed they had, though he was certain, and Diorina was, too, that the tower had been purely for business. Now it was the latest Super thing, a popular rally point for the cult and an amusement for the citizenry, who enjoyed the music and the ever-increasing pageantry. On balance, it was a blessing that one remembered so little when so slight a memory could cause such mischief. 
He had been deived for weeks by the local WaterPriest, who had haunted him with an almost uncanny ability. Over and over again, Edward said he remembered nothing, but the fellow, bald and moon faced with intent dark eyes, insinuated otherwise. Surely there were more towers? Surely? Edward had shrugged. It was impossible to explain that memories of Ancient Hartford did not follow any conventional pattern. They emerged in dreams or in confrontation with an object, often a trivial one. Taken to the ruin, he had felt nothing more than that this truncated heap, preserved out of some mistaken civic pride as a combination warehouse and apartment, might better have been replaced with something up to StormCode.
The WaterPriest had only smiled, and perhaps they were happier without too much definite knowledge. That the site was Ancient, that it was connected somehow with the oh, so mysterious Returns gave it power enough. The Tower ruin had survived the Great Rising; it was full of Super; it could be used, though Edward felt, and more than once said, that the time and energy devoted to its veneration might have been turned to more useful ends. It was odd, he thought, that he, who was ScienceSide _ now more defiantly than ever_ had had a genuine Super experience, while the WaterPriests, safe in conventional reality, yearned for those doors to elsewhere that remained closed to them. Diorina said it was the perversity of human nature, and he had to agree. 
In any case, neither Super nor Science had explained their experience and neither seemed capable of recovering whatever it was they had known. Perhaps Jessie Asansha, with her ancient theories of strings and wormholes and quantum uncertainties could have helped them, but it would take a lot of work with her archive to understand how far she'd gotten or whether her diagnosis of Ancient Hartford had been only a lucky guess. Perhaps lucky guesses were more vital than either ScienceSide or Super  acknowledged, for after they had located the Mall to their satisfaction, neither Edward nor Diorina ever found anything else. As far as they were concerned, that last concrete thing, the Ancient City's geography, was lost for good, even if they still had moments when they felt that they were on the verge of recognition. The man on Wynd's boat, for example. That had been a shock. 
It happened because the Elephant, long associated with "Old Alpon,"  had sent Edward over to Wynd's barge with a package and a receipt for some lumber. Still daylight this time, and the guard dog running along the barge deck barked without anger, before a big dark man, silhouetted against the light, jogged not just ordinary, but Ancient Hartford, memory. 
"For Alpon Wynd from Elephant Symms," Edward shouted. He was standing on the string of pontoons that led out from the shore. 
The man swung down the ladder and set the pontoons swaying. "Can't see the boss. He's been taken ill. I'll deal with whatever." He had Old Stock features of the African type, not uncommon but somehow uncommonly familiar, and something more, a weight of presence that tightened Edward's chest. 
"Edward Nempf. I visited Alpon Wynd a couple of years ago."
The man elongated his mouth without showing his teeth. Edward guessed that passed as a smile. "You were looking for someone, someone gone Absent. She ever show up?"
Edward felt a powerful urge to strike the man and, shocked by this impulse, handed over the package before he could do anything foolish. It was only later that he connected the man with Ancient Hartford, with Kara's dark friend, whose name, like so much else, had escaped him. 
"Do you think they all had their counterparts here?" he asked Diorina the next time they met. "Could we see only what we had once seen _ maybe here in the Museum _ and meet only people who exist here?"
He thought she went a little pale at the idea. "I left because of someone _ not just because I wasn't getting on so well with Grandmother."
Edward hadn't known this.  His overwhelming, indeed, nearly his only, memory of Diorina from Ancient Hartford had been her confidence. Her confidence and her motor. She certainly hadn't seemed like a woman on the run. But then, Edward supposed, they had all been subtly different.
"I don't like the idea that he followed me _ or that he was there all the time."
There was an implication in this about Kara that Edward did not want to follow up and yet could not quite ignore. "I have the sense that we created part of everything," he said. "I trusted some people there at first sight. What could that mean? I seem to remember that most of the motors were black or green like the ones in the Museum. And anywhere outside of the CC boundaries was vague, foggy, formless, as if I couldn't quite see _ or imagine _ things that were right in front of me."
For a while, they talked like this, speculating and trying to remember, but then it seemed that, despite all pressures personal and official, even their dreams forgot. The Museum's Historical Images Gallery gradually lost its fascination, and the power of the motors, even the Riptide which Diorina patted every time she passed, dwindled. Edward stopped having glimpses of Kara, and gradually even stopped longing for them. Diorina, having tidied up her grandmother's affairs, began talking about leaving the CC, about making an entirely new start. At first Edward had been only mildly interested in this _ a certain restlessness was typical of Returns, who, having experienced another time frame, seemed uneasy in the CC where everyone knew of their peculiar experience and where, at any moment, a name, a picture, a glimpse of the river could awaken, not memory so much as the painful realization of forgetfulness. A low level of anxiety was common to Returns, along with a suppressed irritation with family and friends _ Edward knew all about that. 
But as he got to know Diorina better and began to rely on her companionship, he listened with some dismay when she spoke of the Highlands or of putting in for one of the new island bases. He grew troubled as her plans seemed to advance and hopeful when he saw that they were often contradictory: she would take her Grandmother's papers, which might, indeed, hold some key to Absence, and try to join one of the Historical Institutes or, on the contrary, employ her manual skills, and what Edward realized was an acute mind, on one of the new islands. Faced with these plans, he always urged more consideration, more time to re-adjust, postponing, which she could see if he could not, certain personal, as well as professional, decisions. But then, with the wonderful news of today, Edward had become suddenly decisive: He would ask her for Commitment and see if she would come north with him.
He looked toward the Rail. She would come from that direction, because she had qualified for a repair job at the Electric Station that served it. He might have met her at one of the little pylon cafŽs along the way or walked right to the Station door. With this thought, Edward wondered if, in some deep place in his mind, he didn't still have reservations, if he had come here not just to remember but for something else indefinable. He left his table and walked to the wall overlooking the marsh. When he had first come back, he visited this spot every day, waiting and hoping to see a woman with red hair and a dappled face standing slightly dazed on the mud flat, only to return disappointed. Today, he saw nothing but a couple of willets going about their business in their grayish speckled suits and a snowy egret industriously probing the brown water near the storm drain _ and felt relief. At this precise moment, he admitted that he did not want Kara to return. Not now. Not soon. He could still not quite bear to say 'not ever', though perhaps that would be best for someone who had never been easy near the water. 
He put his head down on his arms and closed his eyes against the sun. It was hard to recapture the hopes and dreams that had once impelled him: such joys, such sorrows, precious and rare even if highly dependant on his own hopes of what Kara was and what she'd felt. He had deceived himself, and yet his love for her was a permanent part of him, a cherished possession although one he would no longer allow to dominate his life. For better or worse, Kara had been his touch of the poet, as her new life in Ancient Hartford _ a much more ambitious and complex project_ was hers. Thinking of Absence in that way, he wondered if even here in the CC there were refugees from other times. Maybe whenever life became intolerable such things happened, or, seeing that his own generation was mostly adapted, maybe great disasters left open mysterious gaps as a sort of psychic residue. It was possible. 
 Edward opened his eyes: sun glitter on the water, a breeze ruffling the marsh. Diorina would soon arrive, and he was about to return to his seat when, unmistakably, he felt a presence behind him.  She had come soft-footed up the steps to surprise him and he was about to turn, when he heard Kara, it was Kara, he would never, ever doubt that, say, "Good-bye, Edward." 
"Don't," she said, but he had already turned his head.
The terrace was empty. He ran to the stair. No one on the steps. And in the crowded street? No _ or maybe yes, a glimpse of red hair, and then unmistakable, her face, her hand raised for an instant in farewell clutched his heart. But it wasn't Kara at all just a banner or a ribbon fluttering off the back of a cart. He was still scanning the crowds and trying to regulate his heartbeat, when Diorina appeared at the top of the stair, round-faced, smiling, solidly of the here and now. He had asked her once if, like Kara, she had gone Absent to be different. She had and this was the result, this confident, cheerful woman who knew how to dispel the clouds that he seemed to have acquired in his own Absence.
"You look as if you've seen a ghost."
"I did, sort of."
"I saw you waving."
"I've been saying good-bye."
Diorina gave him a look, but she did not ask any questions. She was a person whose understanding did not have to be expressed in words. Grateful, Edward slipped his arm around her shoulders and gave her a quick hug. She laughed. "Ancient manners," she said.
"But allowed today because I have wonderful news. Well, I hope you'll agree it's wonderful. I've been offered a marsh job." 
"Oh, Edward! I'm so glad for you. No more Elephant!"
"No more Elephant, no more Fat Goose, no more Resurrectors. There is a catch, though, not here. There's a marsh being restored and expanded just north of the Boston CC." He spoke so quickly that he almost stumbled over the words in his anxiety to give her all the information and to sweep away any hesitation she might feel. "I'd be Station Chief. It will be another CC eventually _ pretty primitive right now, but, Diorina, there would be opportunities for you. New turbines, Electric, there maybe a Rail. You've wanted to leave, to start again."
 "Well," she said.
"And you could take Jessie's _ your grandmother's_ papers. They say a lot got saved from Ancient Boston. A lot. It wouldn't hurt to study those, to complete your grandmother's work. I could help you. We might even find _ whatever."
"I might." She looked closely at him and waited. 
Edward knew that she was not just thinking of the archive. "Today I said good-bye to all others," he told her. "Here and elsewhere, before and after."
Diorina smiled. "We would be Committed."
Edward took her hand. "From this moment," he said.


  

 
 


 
 

	
	 
	
	
	
	
	
	

		The City of Dreams

			

	Edward Nempf is a Marsh-Keeper of the CC, a closed city set in the vast tidal marshes around what was Hartford, CT, before the great Risings wiped out low lying coastal areas. Edward  is a happy man until his lover, Kara Wistley, becomes Absent, a mystery peculiar to the area and linked to Melankol, a serious form of depression. As Edward searches obsessively for her, even the marsh gives him no solace, and eventually he, too, becomes Absent.

	He finds himself in Ancient Hartford (our contemporary city), where, without papers and speaking a peculiar and much evolved form of English, he joins the many illegals and immigrants in the precarious economic underground, where he is able to function as long as he is within the precincts of the CC. Whenever he ventures toward the Highlands or outside the perimeter of his former marshes, he has frightening perceptual difficulties _ a common weakness of Absences. He remembers little of his earlier life, but he is haunted by the sounds of water and of wind moving through reeds and troubled by what he sees as the vulnerable architecture of the city. Until an INS raid disrupts his job, he supports himself working on a cleaning crew, then as a bus boy, and finally, after a confrontation with members of a powerful street gang, as a day laborer in the landscaping business. 

After several months of searching, he finds Kara, now outfitted with false papers and happily performing with an amateur theater company. Edward had believed that once he found Kara, everything would be fine and they would return to their old lives in the CC, but this does not happen. Kara has thrown off Melankol with the exercise of talents useless in the functional river town of the future, and she has no intention of returning. Hoping to change her mind, Edward lingers in the turbulent and sometimes dangerous city, but when he suspects her of beginning an affair with one of her new friends, he despairs and finds himself back in the CC. 

In the months of his absence, Edward finds that his parents have aged, and that he has lost his precious job on the marshes. He remembers almost nothing of his period of Absence, despite the attentions of officials both religious and secular, and he lives an unsettled life until he meets Diorina, a fellow Return, whose scientist grandmother had been his friend and advisor in the months just after Kara's disappearance.

At the end of the novel, Edward has been offered another marsh job in a new CC north of Boston, and it appears that the skillful and intelligent Diorina will accompany him, perhaps with the idea of completing her grandmother's work and pursuing the secret of Absence.
Janice Law, Biographical note

For a complete list of works, please see my website, www.janicelaw.com

My first novel, The Big Payoff,  which introduced Anna Peters, was inspired by the then on-going Watergate investigation. I transposed some of the events to an oil company, and made my heroine a working class woman with a shady background. The book was nominated for an Edgar and seven other Anna Peters novels followed, published by Houghton Mifflin, then by Walker and St. Martins. They were  translated into several languages and the last four were issued in paperback by Worldwide Mysteries. I have reissued the earlier ones via IUniverse.
	
	Besides mystery novels, I have published two historical novels, one of which All the King's Ladies, includes a famous historical mystery, two history books (the most recent, Discovering Hampton, received the 2001 Betty M. Linsley Award by the Association for the Study of Connecticut History), a fair number of articles, both popular and scholarly, and short stories. In the last decade, I have regularly published stories in both Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines. Several of my short stories have appeared in anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories, The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, Riptide, and the upcoming New Fabulist Fiction.
	
	My most recent books are The Night Bus, The Lost Diaries of Iris Weed, and Voices from Forge. They are contemporary novels with strong mystery elements. The university setting of  The Lost Diaries reflects my work as an instructor at the University of Connecticut, where I have taught for over ten years. The Lost Diaries was a finalist for the Connecticut Center for the Book Fiction Award last December, and Voices is a finalist for the same prize this year.
	







We live in the city of dreams
We ride on the highway of fire
Should we awake
And find it gone
Remember this, our favorite town.

Talking Heads



 















  




  








87
J. Law/ City