The Harvest

Chapter 1 August

A year and some months after the immense alien Artifact parked itself in a close orbit of the Earth, Matt Wheeler spent an afternoon wondering how to invite Annie Gates to the party he was hosting Friday night.

The question was not whether to invite her—obviously he would—but how. More precisely, what would the invitation suggest about their relationship? And what did he want it to suggest?

Pondering the question, he washed his hands and prepared to see the last two patients of the day.

In a town the size of Buchanan a doctor ends up treating the people he sees at backyard barbecues. His last patients were Beth Porter, daughter of Billy, a sometimes-patient; and Lillian Bix, wife of his friend Jim.

The two women, Beth and Lillian, were posed at opposite ends of the waiting-room sofa like mismatched bookends. Lillian paged through a Readers Digest and dabbed her nose with a hankie. Beth stared at the far wall, absorbed in the music that seeped from the headphones of her Walkman like the rhythmic rattling of a pressed tin pie plate. A few more years of this, Matt thought, and he’d be treating her for hearing loss.

The teenager was first up. “Beth,” he said.

She gazed into space.

“Beth. Beth!”

She looked up with the resentment of someone startled out of a dream. The resentment faded when she recognized Matt. She thumbed a switch on the cassette player and pried the phones out of her ears.

“Thank you,” he said. “Come on in.”

As he turned, Annie Gates stepped out of her consulting room with a file folder in hand. She glanced at Beth, shot him a look: Good luck! Matt returned a smile.

Annie Gates wore medical whites and a stethoscope around her neck. Unlike Beth and Lillian, Annie and Matt were a matched set. They were business partners. They were professionals. He was sort of in love with her. He had been sort of in love with her for most of a decade.

Matt Wheeler had been practicing primary-care medicine in this building for fifteen years. He had grown up in Buchanan, developed what he thought of as “the medical impulse” in Buchanan, and after serving his residency in a Seattle hospital and passing his general boards he had hightailed it back to Buchanan to open a private practice. His partner then had been Bob Scott, a dark-haired and high-strung Denverite who had interned with him. Together they had rented this suite, a waiting room and three consulting rooms on the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, a sandstone legacy of the Hoover era planted firmly at the intersection of Marina and Grove.

Matt and his partner had understood the perils of family practice, or thought they did. The real money was in specialties, in “doing procedures”; the hassles were in family practice. Not just patient hassles—those they had been prepared for. But insurance hassles, Medicare and Medicaid hassles, paperwork hassles… in time, a crippling, skyrocketing overhead. Dr. Scott, professing a nostalgia for city life, bailed out and left for L. A. in 1992. Last Matt heard, he was working at the kind of corporate storefront clinic sometimes called a “Doc-in-the-Box.” Bye-bye hassles. Bye-bye independence.

Matt persevered. He couldn’t imagine a life outside of Buchanan, and he couldn’t imagine any work more satisfying than the work he did, at least when he was allowed to do it. Celeste had died around the time Bob left for California, and the new demands on his time had been, perhaps, a blessing in disguise.

Bob Scott’s replacement showed up in June of that year: a young female internist named Anne Gates. Matt had not expected a woman to show interest in the partnership, particularly not a young blond woman in a businesslike skirt and a pair of black-rimmed glasses that amplified her eyes into something owlish and fiercely solemn. He told her she’d have to put in long hours, make house calls, cover at the local ER, and expect nothing spectacular in the way of remuneration. “It’s not city work,” he said, thinking of Bob Scott’s defection and the cut of that Perry Ellis skirt.

Whereupon Anne Gates informed him that she had grown up in a farm town on the prairies of southern Manitoba ; she knew what small towns were like and Buchanan didn’t look so damn small to her (though it did look decent). She had survived a residency in an inner-city hospital where most of the ER patients had been gunshot wounds, knife wounds, and drug ODs. She had emerged from this ordeal still believing in the fundamental value of primary-care medicine, and as far as “remuneration” went, she would be happy to live in the absence of cockroaches, get more than five hours’ sleep in a given week, and treat at least the occasional patient who didn’t initiate the relationship by vomiting on her.

Whereupon Matt Wheeler discovered he had a new partner.

They had worked together for nearly a year before they discovered each other as human beings. He was recovering from Celeste’s death and what interested him about Anne Gates in that unhappy time was, for instance, her remarkable finesse with fiber-optic sigmoidoscopy, a procedure he loathed and dreaded, or her uneasiness with cranial injuries of any kind. They shifted patients according to each other’s weaknesses and strengths; Anne ended up with many of his geriatric patients, and he took an extra share of pediatrics. But she was also a woman and Matt was a widower and there were days when the vector of that equation did not escape him. On the first anniversary of her arrival in Buchanan, he took her to dinner at the Fishin’ Boat, a restaurant by the marina. Soft-shell crab, shallots in butter, margueritas, and a prearranged ban on doc-speak. By the end of the evening he was calling her Annie. They went to bed for the first time the week after that.

They were passionately involved for most of that year. The year after, they seemed to drift apart. No arguments, but fewer dates, fewer nights together. Then the pace picked up for another six months. Then another hiatus.

They never talked about it. Matt wasn’t certain whether these peaks and valleys were his fault or hers. Whether they were even a bad thing. He knew for a fact, however, that a pattern had been established. Nearly ten years had passed since Annie Gates stepped through that office door for the first time. Mart’s hair had grayed at the temples and run back a little from his brow, and Annie had developed frown lines at the corners of her eyes, but ten years was an eyeblink, really, and at no point in that time had they ever been entirely separate… or entirely together.

Lately they had drifted through another vacuum, and he wondered how she would take this invitation for Friday evening. As a courtesy? Or as a suggestion to spend the night?

And which did he prefer?

The question lingered.

He showed Beth Porter into his consulting room, down the hall from Anne’s.

The consulting room was Mart’s enclave, a space of his own creation. Its centerpiece was a set of authentic Victorian oak medical cabinets, purchased at a rural auction in 1985. Behind his desk was a creaking leather chair that had formed itself to the precise contour of his behind. The window looked crosstown, beyond the sweltering marina to the open sea.

Beth Porter took her place in the patient chair while Matt adjusted the blinds to keep out the afternoon sun. Annie had recently equipped her office with vertical blinds, covered in cloth, which looked exactly sideways to Matt. His consultancy announced: Tradition. Annie’s replied: Progress. Maybe that was the invisible hand that conspired to pull them apart.

She was on his mind today, though, wasn’t she?

He took his seat and looked across the desk at Beth Porter.

He had examined her file before he called her in. Matt had been Beth’s regular doctor since her eleventh birthday, when her mother had dragged her into the waiting room: a sullen child wearing a cardboard party hat over a face swollen to the proportions of a jack-o’-lantern. Between rounds of birthday cake and ice cream, Beth had somehow disturbed a hornet nest in the cherry tree in the Porters’ backyard. The histamine reaction had been so sudden and so intense that her mother hadn’t even tried to pry off the party hat. The string was embedded in the swollen flesh under her chin.

Nine years ago. Since then he’d seen her only sporadically, and not at all since she turned fifteen. Here was another trick of time: Beth wasn’t a child anymore. She was a chunky, potentially attractive twenty-year-old who had chosen to wear her sexuality as a badge of defiance. She was dressed in blue jeans and a tight T-shirt, and Matt noticed a blue mark periodically visible as her collar dipped below the left shoulder: a tattoo, he thought, God help us all.

“What brings you in today, Beth?”

“A cold,” she said.

Matt pretended to take a note. Years in the practice of medicine had taught him that people preferred to make their confessions to a man with a pen in his hand. The lab coat didn’t hurt, either. “Bad cold?”

“I guess… not especially.”

“Well, you’re hardly unique. I think everybody’s got a cold this week.” This was true. Annie had come to work snuffling. Lillian Bix, in the waiting room, had been doing her polite best to suppress a runny nose. Matt himself had swallowed an antihistamine at lunch. “There’s not much we can do for a cold. Is your chest congested?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “A little.”

“Let’s listen to it.”

Beth sat tensely upright while he applied his stethoscope to the pale contour of her back. No significant congestion, but Matt was certain it wasn’t a cold that had brought her in. The ritual of listening to her lungs simply established a doctorly relationship. A medical intimacy. He palpated her throat and found the lymph nodes slightly enlarged—hard pebbles under the flesh—which raised a small flag of concern.

He leaned against the edge of his desk. “Nothing too much out of the ordinary.”

Beth inspected the floor and seemed unsurprised.

“Maybe it isn’t a cold you’re worried about. Beth? Is that a possibility?”

“I think I have gonorrhea,” Beth Porter announced.

Matt made a note.

She surprised him by reciting her symptoms without blushing. She added, “I looked this up in a medical book. It sounded like gonorrhea, which is kind of serious. So I made an appointment. What do you think?”

“I think you made a reasonable diagnosis. Maybe you ought to be a doctor.” She actually smiled. “We’ll know more when the test comes back.”

The smile faded. “Test?”

Annie came in to chaperon and distract Beth while Matt took a cervical culture. There was the inevitable joke about whether he kept his speculum in a deep-freeze. Then Annie and Beth chatted about Beth’s job at the 7-Eleven, which was, Beth said, as boring as you might think, selling frozen pies and microwave burritos until practically midnight and catching a ride home with the manager, usually, when there was nothing on the highway but logging trucks and semitrailers.

Matt took the cervical swab and labeled it. Beth climbed down from the table; Annie excused herself.

Beth said, “How soon do we know?”

“Probably tomorrow afternoon, unless the lab’s stacked up. I can call you.”

“At home?”

Matt understood the question. Beth still lived with her father, a man Matt had treated for his recurring prostatitis. Billy Porter was not a bad man, but he was a reticent and old-fashioned man who had never struck Matt as the forgiving type. “I can phone you at work if you leave the number.”

“How about if I call here?”

“All right. Tomorrow around four? I’ll have the receptionist switch you through.”

That seemed to calm her down. She nodded and began to ask questions: What if it was gonorrhea? How long would she have to take the antibiotics? Would she have to tell—you know, her lover?

She paid careful attention to the answers. Now that she had popped the cassette out of her Walkman, Beth Porter began to impress him as a fairly alert young woman.

Alert but, to use the old psychiatric rubric, “troubled.” Enduring some difficult passage in her life. And tired of it, by the pinch of weariness that sometimes narrowed her eyes.

She was twenty years old, Matt thought, and seemed both much older and much younger.

He said, “If you need to talk—”

“Don’t ask me to talk. I mean, thank you. I’ll take the medicine or whatever. Whatever I have to do. But I don’t want to talk about it.” A little bit of steel there.

He said, “All right. But remember to phone tomorrow. You’ll probably have to come by for the prescription. And we’ll need a follow-up when the medication runs out.”

She understood. “Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.”

He dated the entry in her file and tucked it into his “done” basket. Then he washed his hands and called in Lillian Bix, his last patient of the day.

Lillian had skipped a period and thought she might be pregnant.

She was the thirty-nine-year-old wife of Mart’s closest friend. The conversation was genial, rendered a little awkward by Lillian’s tongue-numbing shyness. She came to the point at last; Matt gave her a sample cup and directed her to the bathroom. Lillian blushed profoundly but followed instructions. When she came back, he labeled the sample for an HCG.

Lillian sat opposite him with her small purse clutched in her lap. It often seemed to Matt that everything about Lillian was small: her purse, her figure, her presence in a room. Maybe that was why she took such pleasure in her marriage to Jim Bix, a large and boisterous man whose attention she had somehow commanded.

They had been childless for years, and Matt had never commented on it to either of them. Now—armored in medical whites—he asked Lillian whether that had been deliberate.

“More or less.” She spoke with great concentration. “Well. More Jim’s doing than mine. He always took care of… you know. Contraception.”

“And you didn’t object?”

“No.”

“But contraception has been known to fail.”

“Yes,” Lillian said.

“How do you feel about the possibility of being pregnant?”

“Good.” Her smile was genuine but not vigorous. “It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time.”

“Really thought about? Diapers, midnight feedings, skinned knees, stretch marks?”

“It’s never real till it’s real. I know, Matt. But yes, I’ve imagined it often.”

“Talked to Jim about any of this?”

“Haven’t even mentioned the possibility. I don’t want to tell him until we’re certain.” She looked at Matt with a crease of concern above her small eyebrows. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

He said, “I can’t unless you want me to. Confidentiality.”

“Confidentiality even between doctors?”

“Honor among thieves,” Matt said.

She showed her brief smile again. It was there and gone. “But you have lunch with him all the time.”

Jim was a pathologist at the hospital; they had done premed together. They liked to meet for lunch at the Chinese cafe two blocks up Grove. “It could make for an uncomfortable lunch, sure. But it’s a quick test. We should have a verdict before very long.” He pretended to make a note. “You know, Lillian, sometimes, in a woman who’s a little bit older, there can be complications—”

“I know. I know all about that. But I’ve heard there are ways of finding certain things out. In advance.”

He understood her anxiety and tried to soothe it. “If you’re having a baby, we’ll keep a close eye on everything. I wouldn’t anticipate trouble.” That wasn’t all there was to it… but at the moment it was all Lillian needed to know.

“That’s good,” she said.

But her frown had crept back. She wasn’t reassured, and she was far from happy. He wondered whether he ought to probe this discontent or leave it alone.

He put down his pen. “Something’s bothering you.”

“Well… three things, really.” She rucked her handkerchief into her purse. “What we talked about. My age. That worries me. And Jim, of course. I wonder how he’ll react. I’m afraid it might seem to him like… I don’t know. Giving up his youth. He might not want the responsibility.”

“He might not,” Matt said. “But it would surprise me if he didn’t adapt. Jim likes to shock people, but he comes into work every day. He’s serious about his work and he shows up on time. That sounds like responsibility to me.”

She nodded and seemed to draw some reassurance from the thought. Matt said, “The third thing?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said three things bothered you. Your age, and Jim, and—what?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She looked at him steadily across the desk. “Some nights I open the window… and I see that thing in the sky. And it frightens me. And now what they’ve put in the cities. Those big blocks or buildings or whatever they are. I see that on television. It doesn’t make any kind of sense, Matt. What’s the name of that shape? An ‘octahedron.’ A word you shouldn’t have to use after you leave high school. An octahedron the size of an ocean liner sitting in Central Park. I can’t turn on the TV without seeing that. And no one knows what it means. They talk about it and talk about it and none of the talk amounts to more than a whistle in the dark. So of course you wonder. I mean, what happens next? Maybe getting pregnant is just a kind of wishful thinking. Or a new way to panic.” She sat with her purse nestled in her lap and looked fiercely at him. “You’re a parent, Matt. You must know what I mean.”

He did, of course. The same doubts were written in Beth Porter’s withdrawal into her Walkman, in the way his daughter Rachel came home from school and watched the network newscasts with her knees pulled up to her chin.

He calmed Lillian Bix and sent her home, did a little tidying up while Anne finished with her own last patient. Then he opened the blinds and let the sunlight flood in, a long bright beam of it across the tiled floor, the oak cabinets. He peered out at the town.

From the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, Buchanan was a long flat smudgepot in a blue angle of ocean. Still a fairly quiet lumber port, not as small as it had been when he opened the practice fifteen years ago. Many changes since then. Fifteen years ago he’d been fresh out of residency. Rachel had been a toddler, Celeste had been alive, and the community of Buchanan had been smaller by several thousand souls.

Time, cruel son of a bitch, had revised all that. Now Mart’s fortieth birthday was three months behind him, his daughter was looking at college brochures, Celeste was ten years in her grave at the Brookside Cemetery… and a spacecraft the color of cold concrete had been orbiting the earth for more than a year.

It occurred to Matt, also not for the first time, how much he hated that ugly Damoclean presence in the night sky.

How much he still loved this town. He believed he had always loved it, that he had been born loving it. It was funny how that worked. Some people have no sense of place at all; they can park at a Motel 6 and call it home. And some people, many of them his friends, had grown up hating the provincialism of Buchanan. But for Matt, Buchanan was a map of himself—as essential as his heart or his liver.

He had been a solitary, often lonely child, and he had learned the intimate secrets of the marina, the main street, and the Little Duncan River long before he acquired a best friend. He had folded this town, its potholed roads and Douglas firs, its foggy winters and the Gold Rush facades of its crumbling downtown, deep into the substance of himself.

His wife was buried here. Celeste had been committed to the earth at Brookside Cemetery, a stone’s throw from the estuary of the Little Duncan, where the chapel rang its small carillon of bells every Sunday noon. His parents were buried here.

He had always believed that one day he would be buried here… but lately that conviction had begun to falter.

He had deposited flowers on Celeste’s grave at Brookside just last week, and as he passed through the cemetery gates he was possessed of a dour conviction that some wind of destiny would sweep him elsewhere, that he would die in a very different place.

Like Lillian Bix—like everybody else—Matt had fallen prey to premonitions.

That ugly white ghost ship floating on the deep of every clear night. Of course Lillian was scared. Who the hell wasn’t scared? But you go on, Matt Wheeler thought. You do what you do, and you go on. It was the decent thing.

He heard Annie dismissing her last patient, and he was about to step into the hallway and offer his invitation when the phone rang: an after-hours call from Jim Bix that did nothing to dispel his uneasiness. “We need to talk,” Jim said.

Mart’s first thought was that this had something to do with Lillian’s visit. He said, cautiously, “What’s the problem?”

“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Can you stop by the hospital after work?”

This wasn’t about Lillian. Jim sounded too disturbed. Not having-a-baby disturbed. There was a darker note in his voice.

Matt checked his watch. “Rachel’s home from school and she said she’d fix dinner tonight. Maybe we could have lunch tomorrow?”

“I’d prefer tonight.” Pause. “I’m working shift hours, but how would it be if I stopped by on my way home?”

“How late?”

“Eleven, say. Eleven-thirty.”

“It’s important?”

“Yes.”

Not maybe or sort of, Matt thought. Flat yes. It made the small hairs on his neck stand up.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I’ll be looking for you.”

“Good,” Jim said, and promptly hung up the phone.

He caught Annie as she headed out the door.

When he told her about the party Friday night, she smiled and said she’d be there. It was the familiar Annie Gates smile. She thanked him, touched his arm. He walked her to the parking lot.

By God, Matt thought, we may be on-again-off-again, but I do believe at the moment we are definitely on.

He was surprised by the pleasure he took from the thought.

She gave him a brief hug as she climbed into her Honda. The touch was therapeutic. It wasn’t good to be alone, Matt thought, when the world had taken such a curious turn.

Chapter 2 Brookside

In December 1843, when the explorer John Fremont was mapping what would become the state of Oregon, he descended in a single day from a howling snowstorm in the high Cascades to a lake surrounded by soft green grass—from winter into summer. Winter Rim, he called his starting point, and Summer Lake, where his party pitched camp for the night.

A century and a half later, the state was still defined by its geography. The Willamette Valley, heartland and breadbasket, ran between the Cascades and the Coast Range for 180 miles south of Portland. East of the Cascades was a parched, cold desert. West of the Coast Range was coastal Oregon, 280 x 25 miles of farmland, forest land, and isolated fishing villages.

Buchanan was the largest of the coastal towns, a forest port situated on a broad, shallow bay. It had grown with the Dunsmuir Pulp and Paper Mill (est. 1895) to a population approaching 40,000 at the end of the twentieth century. Its shipping docks handled a respectable Pacific Rim trade, and its fishing fleet was the largest south of Astoria.

Buchanan had begun to cross the demarcation point between town and city, with all the possibilities and problems that implied: diversity, employment, anonymity, crime. But the municipality still held its Fishing and Logging Festival every July, and the local radio station still broadcast tide tables and Salmon Bulletins between sessions of softcore C W.

Like every town on the Oregon coast, Buchanan was accustomed to rain. Each winter, the ocean seemed to infiltrate the air. There was not just rain, there was a complex palette of mist, drizzle, fog, woodsmoke, and low clouds. Winter was the slow season, the melancholy season.

But even Buchanan occasionally saw a blue sky, and this summer had been drier than most. Ever since Independence Day, the town had basked under a dome of clear Pacific air. Reservoirs were low and a fire watch had been declared in the deep coastal forests. Crickets ratcheted in the brown fingers of dry lawns.

Afternoons evolved into long summer evenings.

Matt Wheeler’s thoughts had turned to Brookside Cemetery that afternoon, lingered a moment and turned away. Tonight he sat down to a meal of pan-fried steak and pondered a more immediate problem: that troublesome phone call from Jim Bix. Brookside had fled his attention.

It lingered in the minds of others.

Miriam Flett, for one.

Beth Porter and Joey Commoner, for two more.

announced the headline in the Buchanan Observer.

Miriam Flett spread the front page across the kitchen table and attacked it with the pocket razor she had purchased this morning at Delisle’s Stationery in the Ferry Park Mall.

Miriam appreciated these disposable pocket cutters, a tongue of stainless steel that slid in and out of a round plastic sheath as you touched a button on the side. They were 590 each in a bin on the counter at Delisle’s, and they came in different colors. Miriam bought one every week. This week, she had chosen blue—a calming color.

The blade, not calming, was as bright and sharp as a claw.

Miriam attacked the newspaper. Four neat slashes separated SPEECH PROMISED from the lesser SHELLFISH POISONING SUSPECTED and LUMBER INDUSTRY FORESEES SLUMP.

She inspected the bottom-right corner of the article for a continued p. 6 or similar words—continueds were always annoying. But there was no such notice.

Good, Miriam thought. A good omen.

Miriam did not precisely understand the nature of the work she had undertaken, but she understood two things about it. One: It was important. And two: Neatness counts.

If Beth Porter and Joey Commoner had come roaring along Bellfountain Avenue on Joey’s Yamaha motorcycle—but they didn’t, not until later—they might have seen Miriam outlined in the window of her small bungalow, clipping newspapers as the sun eased down, a compact gray-haired shape hunched over a scarred kitchen table.

Miriam had lived all her fifty-six years in the town of Buchanan. For nearly half of those years she had presided over the reception desk in the principal’s office at the James Buchanan Public School. Last year Miriam had been reprimanded for handing out religious tracts to the children waiting to be scolded by Principal Clay. Principal Clay (whose first name was Marion, and heaven help him if the truth behind “M. Jonathan Clay” ever escaped into the playground) had hinted to Miriam that early retirement might be a wise option. Miriam Flett didn’t have to be told twice.

Once upon a time she might have held on to that job with both hands—gripped it until her fingernails tore free. Miriam was not fond of changes in her life. But she supposed the Miriam who couldn’t tolerate time and change had died last year, when the Eye of God appeared in the sky.

The message in that advent had seemed quite clear.

Places change. People pass on. Love dies. The world becomes, in time, almost uninhabitably strange.

Faith abides.

She seldom attended church. It was Miriam’s opinion that the local churches—even the Truth Baptist, which people thought of as a fundamentalist church—misrepresented the Bible. Miriam believed in God, but she did not have what the television evangelists called “a personal relationship” with Him. The very idea frightened her. The churches made much of redemption and forgiveness, but Miriam had read the Bible three times through without discovering much evidence in those pages of a loving God. Merciful—perhaps. On occasion. But Miriam believed most profoundly in the scary God of Abraham and Isaac, the God who demanded his sacrifices in flesh and blood; who swept aside humanity, when humanity displeased Him, the way a farmer might spray his crops with Malathion to eradicate a persistent infestation of beetles.

These thoughts were vaguely on her mind as Miriam directed her eyes to the clipping before her.

But Miriam sighed and pushed the scrap of paper away. Tonight she seemed to have no relish for the news, particularly political news. She settled her bifocals on the table and rubbed her eyes.

The kitchen table had been much eroded by Miriam’s work. Over the course of a year, her cutter blades—bearing down a little too hard on this clipping or that—had stripped away slivers of Formica. The table had come to look like a butcher block, and Miriam regretted it. The kitchen, otherwise, was quite tidy. She had always believed in a tidy kitchen.

She picked up her eyeglasses and pulled her scrapbook closer.

This was the current volume, Volume Ten. The other nine were stacked on a hutch beside the table. The upper shelf held spice bottles and cookbooks; the lower shelf, her work.

It was not long after she left the school board’s employ—shortly after the Eye of God appeared—that Miriam began to understand that she was quite alone in the world: friendless in Buchanan, considered an eccentric even by the churches. Of her family, only her father had remained alive—and that barely. He had been living in the Mount Bailiwick Care Community, incontinent and incoherent, but Miriam had visited him every day, had talked to him even when his pupils dilated with foggy disinterest. She told him about her project.

“I’ve started clipping the papers,” she said, and watched him carefully for some tic of surprise or discouragement. There was none. Unshaven, he sat in bed and looked at Miriam with the same passive stare he directed at the TV set as soon as Miriam left the room, or before she arrived.

Emboldened, she went on. “I think it’s what I’m supposed to do. I can’t explain how I know that. I don’t suppose anybody told me to do it. But I will take all the newspaper writing about the Eye of God and I’ll put those clippings in a book. And at the end of all this it will remind someone what happened. I don’t know what the end will be, or who will need to be reminded. But that’s what I’ll do.”

In the old days, Daddy would have had some answer. He used to have quite a lot to say about Miriam’s projects, almost always disparaging. Miriam had never quite lived up to Daddy’s expectations.

Since the stroke, however, Daddy had had no expectations whatsoever. Miriam could say and do what she wished—even in this room.

She had wished to quit her job when Principal Clay accused her of fanaticism. She had done so. She had wished to keep a scrapbook. So Miriam had done so.

She pulled down Volume One from the shelf. It was little more than a year old, but the newsprint inside had already begun to turn brittle and yellow.

All these clippings were from the Observer, mostly labeled UPI or Reuters. Miriam could have had more clippings if she’d taken a Portland paper or gone down to Duffy’s for The New York Times. But the point of the exercise wasn’t more. The point was enough.

Her first and fondly remembered. Miriam turned a page.

Miriam turned a whole sheaf of pages.

Such a sweep of history enclosed in these books! She skipped ahead to Volume Three. By Volume Three, the screaming headlines were more sparse. Many of the clippings were from the Features section. So-called opinion pieces. In Miriam’s opinion, worthless. But she had collated them faithfully.

But Miriam recognized that song: it was a lullaby, whistled in the dark. Clipping the Observer, Miriam had grown tired of Sagan and all the other pundits to whom the media had so eagerly flocked. In the end, they were as plainly ignorant as everyone else. And as plainly misguided.

It is an Eye, Miriam thought, and was there any question just Who was peering through it? And an Eye must have a Hand: of Judgment. Volume Six.

April and May of this year. A very fat volume indeed.

But the photographs told the tale best. Here was a telescopic view of the so-called Artifact, starry dots emerging from it like so much confetti or winter snow, a snow of some two hundred flakes dispersed equivalently across the world. Then, in the later pictures, not flakes of snow any longer but faceted obsidian structures hanging above all the world’s proud hives— New York, Los Angeles, London ; and Moscow, and Mexico City, and Amsterdam ; and Johannesburg and Baghdad and Jerusalem and too many others, all marked on a newsprint map of the world dated April 16. Grim octahedral slabs. Inhumanly perfect. They did not fly, veer, dash, dart, or glide; simply fell through the atmosphere like so many precisely aimed bubbles. They landed with the gentility of butterflies in available open spaces, and when they had landed they did not move. No visitors emerged. Having arrived, the octahedrons did nothing more spectacular than cast their own immense shadows.

Miriam supposed Mr. Sagan was continuing to advise patience.

It was not the Eye but these several Fingers of God that seemed to have worked an effect on the people of Buchanan. Miriam knew people had begun to take the Eye for granted, as people will take anything for granted if it stands still long enough. But the Fingers were a message. They said: Yes, I’ve come for a purpose. No, I’m not finished with you. And: I move slowly but inexorably and you may not lift a hand against me. It was a truth that penetrated the idiotic cheerfulness of her neighbors, a truth that bent, the backs of the proud and softened the voices of the mighty. The town of Buchanan seemed to acknowledge at last that this was the Endtime, or something like it—that nothing predictable would happen anymore.

Miriam opened Volume Ten to the first blank page and installed SPEECH PROMISED ON SPACECRAFT with a few dabs of her Glu-Stik, also from Delisle’s.

She hoped this was the only clipping from the Observer tonight. Miriam was tired. She had shopped for the week’s groceries today and felt worn out, maybe even a little feverish. Light-headed. The check-out girl at Delisle’s had sneezed three times into her hankie as Miriam was purchasing her cutter blade today. Miriam had paid with a one-dollar bill and hoped she hadn’t been handed a case of influenza along with her change. What were they calling it? Taiwan Flu? That was all she needed… what with the difficult times ahead of her.

But Miriam was dutiful and didn’t go directly to bed. Instead she turned the pages of the Observer and frowned through her bifocals at every article. There was nothing more for her collation in the first section. She observed with pleasure that Perdy’s, the big department store at the Ferry Park Mall, had stopped running their NEW MOON MADNESS sale ads with that ridiculous drawing of the Eye of God beaming at a Kenmore washing machine. Maybe Perdy’s advertising department had been talked out of this sacrilege. Or maybe they were just nervous—like everybody else.

Skimming Section Two, the only other section the Observer possessed, Miriam was startled by something she had not expected:

It was her father’s obituary.

Silly to be surprised. She had arranged for it herself. Daddy had been a respected instructor in lathe mechanics at the community college and Miriam thought his passing deserved notice in the Observer.

But the impending publication of the obituary, like so many of the other occasions and observances surrounding his death, had slipped from Miriam’s mind like a dew drop falling from a leaf.

Seeing the notice brought it all back. She had marked appointments on her calendar: a meeting Saturday with Rev. Ackroyd to arrange details of the memorial service. A check to the funeral director at Brookside. Notices to Daddy’s friends and colleagues, of whom only a handful were still living.

He had died Monday night in his sleep. The doctor at Mount Bailiwick said Daddy’s heart had simply stopped, like a weary soldier surrendering the flag. But she had not witnessed the death and still couldn’t encompass the simple fact of his absence.

There would be no more painful, wordless visits to his room. No more of the awful suspicion that his body had been vacant since the stroke—that he had been replaced by some respirating automaton.

But no more Daddy calling her name, either: not even the hope of it ever again. No smell of shaving soap and the razor white of starched collars.

No more his Try to do better today, Miriam, as she trudged out the door to school, woman and child.

Since the stroke, Daddy had been a ghost in a hospital bed. In death, he had evolved. When the man at Mount Bailiwick called to tell her Daddy died, Miriam had been startled by an involuntary memory of places: the house on Cameron Avenue where they had lived so many years, her room in it, her bedspread and her books, the way the lace curtains moved and sighed when she opened the windows on summer nights.

Things she had not thought about for thirty years.

In death, Daddy had entered into the world of all those lost things.

Sorely missed by his daughter Miriam, said the obituary. But that was only half a truth. All the unfulfilled expectations that had dogged her even in his hospital room—all those were gone, too. She had mourned him with tears the night he died… but mourned him also with secret relief and a childish, hidden glee.

She kept these feelings to herself, of course.

But the Eye—of course—could See.

She put the eviscerated newspaper in a pile to be bundled for the garbage. She filed Volume Ten in its place on the shelf.

She made a cup of tea. The sun was well down now. The sky was a transparent inky blue, the Eye already peeking through the big back window.

Miriam pulled the drapes.

She turned on the television and watched the ten o’clock news show, a Portland program on cable. But the anchors, a man and a woman, looked like children to her. Children playing dress-up. Where were the adults? Dead, probably.

She touched her forehead with the back of her hand.

I really am feverish, Miriam thought. At least a little.

She turned out, the lights, checked the lock on the front door, and retired to bed.

She was asleep as soon as she pulled the quilt around her shoulders.

She stirred only once—after midnight, when Joey Commoner’s motorcycle sped past the house, the sound of Beth Porter’s laughter mingling with the roar of the engine.

Miriam turned once restlessly and went back to sleep as the noise faded. But her sleep was not dreamless.

She dreamed of Brookside Cemetery.

At sunset, as Miriam Flett was gazing absently into the many volumes of her Work, Beth Porter stood at the south end of the parking lot of the Ferry Park Mall wiping her nose and waiting for Joey Commoner to show up.

She wondered whether she ought to be here at all. She felt hot and stupid in her leather jacket. She probably should be home lying down. She was sick, after all. Dr. Wheeler had said so.

The parking lot was empty—a lonely vastness in the last blue daylight.

The air was still hot, but the sky had a deep and vacant look, and by midnight there would be a cool wind running in from the sea.

Beth checked her watch. He was late, of course. Joey Commoner! she thought. You asshole! Be here.

But she still didn’t know what to do when he came.

Tell him to fuck off?

Maybe.

Go with him?

Maybe.

To Brookside? In the dark, with a motorcycle and this can of spray paint she had bought for no better reason than because he told her to? Well… well, maybe.

Ten minutes later, she recognized his bike making a noisy exit from the highway.

He zoomed across the parking lot driving gleeful S-curves, leaning with the motorcycle until it looked like his elbows would scrape the blacktop.

He wore a black helmet and a black T-shirt. The shirt was from Larry’s Gifts and Novelties on Marina, downtown. Larry’s had been what used to be called a head shop until they took away all the drug paraphernalia a few years ago. No more waterpipes, no more grow-your-own manuals. Now Larry’s specialized in leather pants, T-shirts illustrated with the gaudy iconography of heavy metal bands, and a few brass belt buckles in the shape of marijuana leaves.

Joey Commoner’s T-shirt showed a neon-blue screaming skull on a bed of blood-red roses. Beth couldn’t remember which band it was supposed to represent. She wasn’t into heavy metal or the Dead. Neither was Joey, really. She was willing to bet he’d chosen this shirt because he liked the picture. It was the kind of picture Joey would like.

He came to a stop a yard away with the engine roaring and bucking. What struck Beth as really bizarre was the combination of that shirt and his helmet. The helmet was gloss black and the visor was mirrored. It made him look utterly insectile. For lack of a face to focus on, your attention strayed to the shirt. To the skull.

Then he pried the helmet off his head and Beth relaxed. Just Joey. His long blond hair was matted by the helmet, but it came free in a gust of wind and trailed around his shoulders. He was nineteen years old, but his face looked younger. He had round cheeks and a lingering case of adolescent acne. Joey would have loved to look dangerous, Beth thought, but nature hadn’t cooperated. Nature had conspired to make Joey’s anger look like petulance and his hostility resemble a pout.

He stood with his bike between his legs and the setting sun behind him, waiting for her to say something.

Beth discovered her heart was beating hard. She felt as if she’d had too much coffee. Light-headed. Nervous.

The silence stretched until Joey took the initiative. “You sounded pissed off on the phone.”

Beth summoned all the blistering accusations she had rehearsed since she left Dr. Wheeler’s office. Eloquence fled. She struck to the heart of the matter. “You gave me the clap, you asshole!”

Incredibly, he smiled. “No shit?”

“Yeah, no shit, you made me sick, no shit!”

He stood there absorbing the information with his lip still curled in that faintly insolent smile. “You know, I wondered…”

“You wondered?”

“Well, it kind of hurts…”

“What hurts?”

He was beginning to sound like a twelve-year-old. “When I pee.”

Beth rolled her eyes. He was hopeless, he was really completely hopeless. It hurts when 1 pee. Well, damn! Was she supposed to feel sorry for him?

“So who have you been screwing, Joey?” He looked faintly hurt. “Nobody!”

“Nobody? You don’t get the clap from nobody.” He thought about it. “Last year,” he said. “My cousin took me to a place. In Tacoma.”

“A place? What, a whorehouse?” I guess.

“A whorehouse in Tacoma?”

“Yeah, I guess. Do we have to talk about this?”

She felt she could only repeat these verbal impossibilities he was pronouncing. She nearly said, “Do we have to talk about this?” Instead she gathered what was left of her composure. “Joey, you screwed a prostitute in Tacoma and gave me gonorrhea. I’m not happy.”

“It was before I met you,” he said. He added—grudgingly, Beth thought—Tm sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t pay for the antibiotics.” She looked away. “It’s degrading.”

“I’m sorry. All right? What am I supposed to say? I’m sorry.” He pushed forward on the Yamaha’s seat. “Climb on.”

No, she wanted to tell him. It’s not that easy. Not just I’m sorry. Climb on. You can’t get away with that.

But maybe it was that easy, and maybe he could get away with it.

She felt something shift inside herself, the tumbling of a weight in the hollow of her stomach.

“You got the paint?” Joey asked.

She was condemned by the weight of the bag in her hand. She held it up to show him.

“Good.” He stepped on the starter until the motor caught and screamed. He lowered his helmet over his head. There was a second helmet strapped to the bike; Beth put it over her head and tucked her hair underneath.

Climbing onto the bike, she felt a sudden burst of something she realized was joy… the mysterious, dizzying pleasure of doing something she knew was wrong. Making a serious mistake, making it deliberately.

“Hurry up.” Joey’s voice was muffled by his visor and the roar of the bike. “Almost dark.”

She put the motorcycle between her legs and her arms around the bone and sinew of his hips.

He smelled like leather and grease and sweat and wind.

Beth remembered schoolgirl gab sessions, steamy telephone conversations, the inevitable question: But do you love him? The same question rattled in her head now, high-pitched and girlish and embarrassing. But do you love him, do you love him, do you love him?

Her first instinct was that the whole idea was ridiculous, even offensive. Love Joey Commoner? The words didn’t connect. It seemed to Beth that he was an inherently unlovable object, like… oh, a garter snake, for instance, or a bait shop, or a can of motor oil. Something only a grubby little boy could approach with affection.

But that was not the whole answer. If the question had truly been asked, Beth’s truest answer would have been something like: Yes, I do love him… but only sometimes, and I don’t know why.

She had met him last year during her first month at the 7-Eleven up the highway. Beth had divided the clientele into five basic types: little kids, high-schoolers, suburban family types, bikers, and “Pickup Petes”—the guys who drove pickup trucks with strange accouterments, roll bars or banks of what looked like kleig lights, and who wore those duckbill caps day and night. Joey didn’t fit any of these categories, not even “biker.” He didn’t ride a muscle bike and he didn’t travel with the bike crowd. He always came alone. He shopped for snack food: quarts of ice cream and frozen pies, usually, and almost always on a Friday night. She learned to expect him.

One Friday he got into an argument with a Pickup Pete who had parked his rig practically on top of Joey’s Yamaha. No damage had been done to anything but Joey’s sense of dignity and proportion, but Joey called the guy a “cross-eyed asshole” and spat out the words with such acidic clarity that Beth was able to hear him quite clearly through the window glass next to the checkout counter. The pickup guy’s response was inaudible but obviously obscene.

She had watched with startled interest as Joey hurled himself at the man, who must have been twice his age and nearly twice his weight. Suicide, she thought. He’s fucking crazy. But the b oy moved like a whirlwind.

By the time she remembered to ring for the night manager, the fight was over.

Joey, needless to say, had lost.

When she went off-shift at midnight, he was still sitting on the cracked sidewalk outside. His upper lip was split and dripping blood onto the dusty concrete. In the green-and-white glare of the illuminated 7-Eleven sign, the spatters of blood looked both ghastly and unreal—like alien blood.

She could not say why she stopped and spoke to him. It had seemed like a bad idea even at the time.

But, like many bad ideas, it had a powerful momentum of its own. Her feet paused and her mouth opened. “No ice cream tonight, huh?”

He looked up sullenly. “You saw that guy?”

She nodded.

“He was fat,” Joey said with a shudder of distaste. She learned later that this was one of Joey’s pet horrors: he was disgusted by fat people.

“Yeah,” Beth said, “he was.” She remembered the guy as a steady customer—remembered the distinctive way his jeans sagged below the cleavage of his rump. “Gross,” she contributed.

Joey’s look turned to cautious gratitude.

Later, Beth would realize that she had seen both sides of Joey Commoner that night. Joey the authentically dangerous: Joey who had called that impressive wall of flesh “a cross-eyed asshole” and leapt at him like a crazed monkey attacking a rhino. Joey had been all fingernails and spit and bony knees and her first fear had been for the bigger man.

And Joey the vulnerable, Joey the little boy. Joey bleeding on the sidewalk.

She wanted to mother him and she wanted to offer herself to him. The combination of impulses made her feel like the sidewalk was spinning. “How about a ride home,” she said.

“What?”

“Ride me home and I’ll fix up those cuts for you. I have Band-Aids and things. My name is Beth Porter.”

He climbed onto his motorcycle. “I know. I’ve heard of you.” Well, Beth thought, that fucks that up.

Same story all over again. She was inured to it; nevertheless it hurt. But he scooted forward. “Climb on,” he said. She didn’t hesitate and she concealed her surprise. She climbed on and felt the leather seat press up between her legs. “Joey Commoner,” he said.

“Hi, Joey.”

Zoom.

Tonight he took her south along the highway and across the bridge that spanned the Little Duncan River. He turned off the highway and circled back through a raw development of frame houses to the river’s edge. Beth hopped off the bike. Joey cut the motor and wheeled the vehicle down the embankment behind the concrete pilings of the bridge.

The air was quiet here. Beth listened as the crickets resumed their creaking along the riverside.

The Little Duncan followed this stony bed to the sea. South across an open field, beyond the hydroelectric towers, the lights of the houses looked too far to reach—the last margin of civilization. North beyond the river was only weeds and the greasy back lots of businesses fronting on the highway. East: the Duncan River cutting back into the foothills of Mt. Buchanan. West: the cemetery.

Joey knew what most high school graduates in the south end of Buchanan knew, that if you followed the Little Duncan beyond this rockfall and through the duckweed flats, you could sneak into Brookside Cemetery after the main gates were locked.

Joey took the can of cherry-red aerosol spray paint out of the bag. He balled up the bag and threw it into the moonlit flow of the creek. He tucked the can under his belt, to keep his hands free.

Beth followed him along the riverbank. She understood Joey well enough to know that talking was over: there would be no talking now, only motion.

She had the idea that Joey was a reservoir of motions, that he did much of his thinking with his body. She had to work to stay close to him as he scrambled among the weeds and rocks up to the grassy margin of the cemetery. He moved with a feverish agility. If his motions were ideas, Beth thought, they would be strange ones—deft, delirious, and unexpected.

Maybe they would be dreams. The night had begun to seem dreamlike even to Beth. The Artifact had risen in the sky like a big backward moon. It looked faintly yellow tonight, a harvest-moon color. Beth was as frightened of the Artifact as everybody else, but she took from it, too, a curious exaltation. Hanging in the sky above her, casting its light across the trim grass and gravestones, the Artifact was a refutation of all things safe and secure. People lived their stupid lives in their stupid houses, Beth thought, but this new moon had come to remind them that they lived on the edge of an abyss. It restored vertigo to everyday life. That was why people hated it.

Joey had gotten ahead of her. He moved in the shadows of the trees, uphill to the three stone mausoleums where Buchanan’s best families had once interred their dead. Too good for burial, the bodies had been enclosed in these stone boxes. To Beth it seemed doubly macabre. She had stood once on a hot spring afternoon and peered through the small barred opening into the darkness inside one of these tombs, a garage-sized building inscribed with the name of the JORGENSON family. The mausoleum had been frigid with undisturbed winter air. She felt it on her face like a breath. It must be winter in there always, she thought. And backed away with a shuddery, instinctive reverence.

It was a reverence Joey obviously didn’t share. He raised the can of cherry-red spray paint to the wall of the building and began to work the nozzle.

He worked fast. Beth stood back and watched. He covered the east exterior wall of the mausoleum with a motley collection of words and symbols like a machine printing some indecipherable code. The symbols were commonplace but Joey made them his own: swastikas, skulls, Stars of David, crosses, ankhs, peace symbols. She couldn’t guess what they meant to him. Maybe nothing. It was an act of pure defilement, empty of meaning. The hiss of the spray can sounded like leaves tossing in the night wind.

He turned to the gravestones then, moving along the hillside so fast that Beth had to run to keep up. He made red Xs across the engraved names and dates. Now and then he would pause long enough to make a skull or a question mark. In the light of the Artifact, the red paint looked darker—brown or black on these chill white slabs.

It must be like sex for him, Beth thought. This frantic motion. This ejaculation of paint.

It was a funny thought but truer than she realized. When the can was empty Joey threw it at the sky—at the Artifact, maybe. The can looped high up and came down noiselessly among the graves. Beth approached him, and as he turned she saw the outline of his erection pressing against his jeans. She felt a shiver that was both attraction and revulsion.

He pushed her down—she let herself tumble—into the high grass at the edge of the woods. It was late, they were alone, and the air was full of scary electricity. A cool wind came in from the ocean with the battery odor of midnight and salt. She let him pull up her skirt. He was like a shape above her, something out of the sky. She lifted up for him as he tugged her underpants away. He breathed in curt, hard gasps. His penis was as hard and as chilly as the night. It hurt for a minute. And then didn’t.

Was this what she wanted from him? Was this why she had adopted Joey Commoner the way an alcoholic adopts the bottle?

No, not just this. Not just this push and shove and brief oblivion and sticky aftermath.

Joey was dangerous.

She wanted him—not in spite of that—but because of it.

This was a bad and troubling thought, allowable only in the neutral calm that came after fucking.

He pulled his pants up and sat beside her. Suddenly embarrassed by her own nakedness, Beth smoothed her skirt. Fucking in a graveyard, she thought. Christ.

She followed Joey’s gaze out across the night. From this hill she could see the lights of downtown Buchanan and the night shimmer of the sea. “Someday we’ll do something big,” Joey said.

Joey often made this ponderous statement. Beth knew what he meant by it. Something really dangerous. Something really bad.

He put his arm around her. “You and me,” he said.

He’s like some kind of wild animal, Beth thought. A wild horse maybe. A wild horse you befriended and who lets you ride him. Ride him at night. To some wild place. To the edge of a cliff. She closed her eyes and saw it. Saw herself riding Joey the wild horse to the brink of a limestone butte. Long drop to the desert floor. Some starry night like this. Just Beth and her wild horse and that soaring emptiness.

And she spurs him with her heels.

And he jumps.

Later they saw the lights of the little golf cart the security guard rode through Brookside every night, and they ran down the hill and across the graves to the duckweeds and into the dark ravine where the river flowed. Beth imagined she could hear the guard’s hoots of surprise as he discovered the vandalism, but that was probably her imagination. Still, the idea was funny; she laughed.

Joey sped away past these houses full of sleeping people, wending a crooked path down Buchanan’s side streets… past the house of Miriam Flett, who turned in her bed at the sound of a motor and Beth Porter’s wild laugh, and thought in her sleep of how strange the town had lately become.

Chapter 3 Machines

Jim Bix was ugly the way President Lincoln was said to have been ugly: profoundly, distinctively.

His face was long and pockmarked. His eyes, when he focused the full beam of his considerable powers of attention, resembled poached eggs cradled in cups of bone and skin. He wore a brush cut that emphasized his ears, which stood out not merely like jug handles—the image that sprang to mind—but like the handles on a kindergartener’s clay jug, or the discarded work of a tremulous potter.

It was also a face transparent to emotion. When Jim Bix smiled, you wanted to smile along with him. When he grinned, you wanted to laugh. He was conscious of his own guilelessness, Matt knew, and oddly ashamed of it. He avoided poker games. He told lies seldom and never successfully. Matt had once witnessed Jim Bix attempting a lie: He told Lillian he had broken one of her Hummel figurines, protecting the guilty party, the family dog, whom Lillian despised. The lie had been so incoherent, so patently manufactured, and so blindingly obvious that everyone present had laughed—including Lillian but excepting Jim himself, who blushed and clenched his teeth.

Jim Bix, in other words, was a nearly unimpeachable witness. Matt kept that in mind as he listened to what his friend had to say. From anyone else, it would have been unbelievable. Absurd. From Jim…

Belief, that cautious juror, withheld a verdict.

Matt opened the door a quarter of an hour before midnight that August evening and welcomed in this ugly and obvious man, his friend, who was also one of the best and most scrupulous pathologists Matt had encountered. Jim accepted Mart’s offer of coffee and settled leadenly into the living room sofa. He was 6’3” from toe to crewcut, and he dominated any room he inhabited, but tonight, Matt thought, he looked smaller—a sag had crept into his shoulders, and his frown hung on his face like a weight. He took the coffee wordlessly and cradled the cup in his hands.

Matt interpreted all this as fatigue. Early in the year, Buchanan General had been certified as a regional trauma center. This was good news for the administration; it meant prestige and more reliable funding. Among staff, the reaction was mixed. They were handed a wish-list of technological goodies—respirators, bronchoscopes, a new pediatric ICU. But they also inherited a number of difficult cases that would ordinarily have been transferred to Portland. For Pathology, it had meant a huge new work load without the prospect of additional staff. Jim had been working evenings for most of two months now. Of course he was tired.

Rachel had gone to bed, and the house, with its curtains drawn against the dark, seemed uneasy in its own silence. Jim cleared his throat. Matt said, “How is Lillian?”—disguising the fact that he’d seen her this afternoon.

“Seems fine,” Jim said. “Kind of quiet.” He ran a large hand through his stubble hair. “We don’t see much of you and Annie lately.”

“Lousy hours. Yours and mine. I hope you can make it on Friday.”

“Friday?”

“Friday night. A little get-together. I called about it last week.”

“Yeah, of course. I’m sorry, Matt. Yeah, we’ll try to be here.” Matt said, “You look punch-drunk.” No argument. “Is it that serious?” A nod.

“Then you better tell me about it. And drink your damn coffee before it gets cold.”

“Something’s fucked up at the hospital,” Jim said, “and nobody wants to listen to me.”

It had all happened, he said, very quickly.

It started earlier in the week. He took a couple of complaints from the staff doctors that hematology results were coming back funny. Standard tests: Smack 24s, red counts, white counts. Patients with borderline anemia were showing radically low hemoglobin totals, for instance.

New blood was drawn, new tests ordered, and he promised to oversee the results personally.

“Everything was kosher. I made sure of it. But the results… were worse. ⁷’

Matt said, “Significantly worse?”

“I couldn’t go to staff with these numbers. What was I supposed to say? I’m sorry, Doctor, but according to the lab your patient is dead. When the patient is actually sitting in the dayroom watching Days of Our Lives. And the bad thing is, it’s not just a few samples now—now everything is coming up fucked. Hematology, hemostasis, immune response, blood typing. Suddenly we can’t run any kind of blood assay without getting completely Martian numbers out of it.”

“A lab problem,” Matt said.

“Can you think of any kind of problem that would screw up all these results? Neither could I. But I thought about it. I talked to the chief resident, and he agreed we should farm out the most urgent tests to other labs until we track down the problem. Okay, we do that. This was a couple of days ago. We start looking at everything. Some weird contamination coming through the air ducts. Bad sterilization. Voltage spikes on the A.C. lines. We clean it all up. We try some basic tests on a sample of whole blood from the freezer. And everything comes out within reasonable limits.”

“So far so good.”

“Exactly. But I’m not entirely convinced. So we draw some fresh blood from a healthy donor, and we put it through the cell counts, hemoglobin counts, reticulocyte counts—plasma fibrinogen, platelet counts, one-stage assays—”

“And it comes up fucked,” Matt guessed.

“It not only comes up fucked,” Jim said, “it comes up so completely fucked that we might as well have been running tests on a glass of tepid well water.”

Matt felt a touch of fear, as tentative as a cold hand stroking the back of his neck.

If there was some new pathology out there, and if it was common enough to be manifesting in all of Jim’s blood samples… but why hadn’t anyone else seen it? “What about the tests you farmed out?”

“They’re not back. We phone the private labs. They’re sorry, but the results don’t seem quite… plausible. They want to know if the samples were damaged in some way, maybe contaminated in transit. Meanwhile, the chief resident gets a call from the hospital in Astoria. Are we having blood-count problems? Because they are. And so is Portland.”

“Jesus,” Matt said.

“That’s the situation this morning. Everybody’s going crazy, of course. Phone lines to the CDC are jammed. This afternoon, I take some fresh blood and I put it under a microscope. Has anything changed? Well, yeah. Suddenly there’s foreign bodies there. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Matt put aside his coffee cup, which had grown cold in his hands. “Foreign bodies? What—viral bodies? Bacteria?”

“On a slide they look kind of like platelets. Roughly that dimension.”

“You’re sure you’re not looking at platelets? Maybe deformed in some way?”

“I’m not that stupid. They don’t aggregate. They stain differently—”

“I’m not questioning your competence.”

“Fuck, go ahead. I would, in your place. The weird thing is that these organisms weren’t there the day before. I mean, do they reproduce that fast? Or what, were they hiding?”

“It’s just so bizarre. If you were looking at blood from patients with a common pathology, okay, but—the patients are healthy?”

“Far as I can tell, the condition is not making anyone particularly sick.”

“How could it not? White counts are low?”

“White counts are missing.”

“This is ludicrous.”

“Obviously! I know that! I’ve been reminded of it at great length. If you want me to make sense of it for you, I can’t.”

“But it’s harmless?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that at all. It’s an ongoing situation. It scares the shit out of me, actually. You know what I notice? Everybody I run into seems to have a case of the sniffles. You see that in your work, Matt? Nothing serious. But everybody, every individual. Walk into a crowded room and count the Kleenex. Check out a drugstore. Big run on OTC decongestants. My pharmacist says he can’t keep aspirin in stock. Is this a coincidence?”

Matt said, “Well, Christ—I’ve got a bottle of Dristan half-empty in the bathroom cupboard.”

“Uh-huh,” Jim said. “Me too.”

Annie had been sniffling at work. And Lillian, come to that. Beth Porter.

And Rachel. My God, he thought. Rachel.

The two men looked at each other in the sudden silence of shared fears. Matt said, “What do you want?”

“I just want to talk. Everybody I talk to at the hospital, everybody on staff—either they want a quick fix or they just don’t want to know, period. And I want us to drink. Not this fucking coffee, either.”

“I’ll break out a bottle,” Matt said.

“Thank you.” Jim seemed to relax minutely. “You know why I really came here?”

“Why?”

“Because there are very few sane people on this planet. And you happen to be one of them.”

“You got a head start drinking?”

“I mean it. I always thought that about you. Matt Wheeler, one sane individual. Never said it. Why wait?”

Why wait? This was more of an admission than he might have intended. Matt did not pause on his way to the liquor cabinet, but he asked, as casually as he could manage, “You think we’re all dying?”

“It’s a possibility,” Jim Bix said.

They talked it through several rounds of drinks, covering the same territory, deciding nothing, speculating, probing, perhaps, the limits of each other’s credulity. It was Jim, drunk and tired, who first used the word “machines.”

Matt thought he’d misunderstood. “Machines?”

“You’ve heard of nanotechnology? They move around atoms, make little gears and levers and things? They can do that now.”

“You have some reason to think that’s what you’re looking at?”

“Who knows? It doesn’t look like a machine, but it doesn’t look like a cell, either. Looks kind of like a spiky black ball bearing. There’s no nucleus, no mitochondria, no internal structure I can look at with the equipment at the hospital. I wonder what a good research lab would find if they took one apart.” He showed a thin smile. “Gears and levers. Betcha. Or little computers. Little subatomic integrated circuits. Running algorithms on nucleotides. Or something we can’t even see. Circuits smaller than the orbit of an electron. Machines made out of neutrinos. Held together with gluons.”

He grinned, not a happy expression. Matt said, “Sounds like Jack Daniel’s talking.”

“Two advantages to getting drunk. You can say ridiculous things. And you can say the obvious thing.”

“What’s the obvious thing?”

“That this is not entirely unconnected with that rucking unnatural object in the sky.”

Maybe, Matt thought. But he had heard everything from hot weather to diaper rash blamed on the Artifact, and he was wary of that line of thinking. “There’s no evidence…”

“I know what organic disease looks like. This is something altogether else. This didn’t happen over the course of a month, Matt. We’re talking about days. Practically hours. Bacteria can reproduce that quickly. But if these were bacteria they would have killed us all by now.”

But if that were true—“No,” he said. “Uh-uh. I don’t want to think about that.”

“You and the rest of the world.”

“I mean it. It’s too frightening.” He looked into his glass, vaguely ashamed. “I accept what you’re telling me. But if it’s somehow connected with the Artifact—if these things are already inside us—then it’s game over, isn’t it? Whatever they want—it’s theirs. We’re helpless.”

There was a silence. Then Jim put his glass on the side table and sat up. “I’m sorry, Matt. I did a shitty thing. I came here and dumped my problems in your lap. Not fair.”

“I’d rather be scared than ignorant.” But it was late. They had gone beyond productive conversation. Matt was afraid to check his watch; he had office hours to keep in the morning. Plague or no plague. “I need to sleep.”

“I can let myself out.”

“You can sleep on the sofa, you asshole. Is Lillian waiting up?”

“I told her I might spend the night at the office.”

“Spend some time with her tomorrow.” Jim nodded.

Matt gave him a blanket from the closet in the hall. “We’re in some pretty deep shit here, aren’t we?”

“Pretty deep.” Jim stretched out on the sofa. He put his glasses on the table and closed his eyes. His unhandsome face looked pale. “Matt—?”

“Hm?”

“The blood I took? The fresh sample? The blood I looked at under the microscope?”

“What about it?”

“It was mine.”

Matt allowed his alarm clock to wake him—savoring a long moment of twilight sleep, when the things Jim had told him were still submerged, a presence felt but not explicit. Then woke to a raw headache and terrible knowledge.

It was a fine, sunlit morning. He forced himself through a shower and put on clothes that felt like 100-grit sandpaper. Rachel was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. Fried eggs. Matt looked at his plate. Only looked.

“Are you sick?” his daughter asked.

“No.” Unless we all are.

She sniffled. “Dr. Bix is asleep on the sofa.”

“He’s not due at the hospital until noon. We should let him sleep. He needs it.”

She shot him a quizzical look but let the subject rest.

Rachel believed in the power of a home-cooked breakfast, and she insisted on cooking it herself. The pattern had been established during Celeste’s illness and continued after her death, when Matt had been inclined to leave breakfast and dinner in the hands of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, respectively. Matt had supposed it was Rachel’s way of mourning, packaging her grief in these daily rituals. By now it had become simply habit. But she did the work solemnly and always had. More than solemnly. Sadly.

Since last year, that sadness had seemed to infect all the other aspects of her life—the way she walked, the way she dressed, the mournful music she played on the stereo Matt had given her for Christmas. In her final year of high school, she had pulled a perfunctory B average—her aptitude for schoolwork tempered by a blossoming despair.

He picked at the eggs while she dressed for the day. When he saw Rachel again she was heading out the door, meeting some friends, she said, at the mall. She smiled distantly. “Dinner the usual time?”

“Maybe we’ll go out,” Matt said. “Dos Aguilas. Or maybe the Golden Lotus.”

She nodded.

“I love you,” he said. He told her so often. Today, it came out sounding awkward and ineffectual.

She gave him a curious look. “You too, Daddy,” she said. And smiled again.

It wasn’t a happy smile. It said, Are things really as bad as that? Matt tried to smile back. He guessed it was an appropriate answer. A brave but unconvincing grin. Yes, Rachel. Things are at least as bad as that.

Chapter 4 Headlines

Chapter 5 D.C.

The President adopted a posture of calm repose—elbows on desk, fingers steepled beneath his chin—as the Secretary of Defense was admitted into the Oval Office. “You’re looking well, Charlie,” the President said.

“And yourself, sir,” Charles Atwater Boyle responded… perhaps, the President thought, with just a touch of genuine surprise.

The truth was that Charlie Boyle did not, in fact, look remotely well. His cheeks were patchy red, as if he were running a mild fever—no doubt he was. And he appeared to be nervous about this nighttime meeting, to which the President had summoned him without explanation. Charlie Boyle had matriculated through two bastions of poker-faced reserve, the Marine Corps and the banking industry, and had kept his political balance as well as any member of the Cabinet—at least until now—but the blank exterior was itself a clue to the struggle beneath. His notoriously chilly blue eyes darted periodically to the left, as if he was consulting some presence in the air—a cue card, perhaps. Or wishing for one.

The question becomes, the President thought, of whom is he afraid? Of me—or his dubious allies in this conspiracy?

“Charlie,” the President said, “I want to talk to you about your coup d’etat.”

To his credit, the Secretary of Defense did not so much as blink. “Sir?” Charlie said mildly. “Sit down,” the President said. Charlie sat.

“I shouldn’t call it your coup, should I? I know your position is ambiguous. And I don’t expect you to admit complicity in a plot to overthrow the civilian government. It was General Chafee, wasn’t it, who approached you with the idea that you might act as President pro tern? A Cabinet member, a civilian—an ideal front man. You’d lend them an air of legitimacy in a country where the words ‘military junta’ still have a nasty ring to them.” The President put his palms flat on the desk and leaned forward. The gesture, he knew, was aggressive, imperial. “Quite honestly, Charlie, my sources don’t know how you responded to the offer—only that it was made. And that General Chafee was smiling when he shook your hand.”

“For the record,” Charlie Boyle said, “I deny all this.”

“Noted. But that’s beside the point. Your loyalty is in question, but it’s also immaterial.”

“ The Secretary of Defense frowned. He can’t decide, the President thought, whether he’s been insulted. But he’s curious, too.

“In that case,” Charlie said stiffly, “what is the purpose of this meeting?”

“It’s late,” the President admitted. “You probably want to be home with Evelyn and the kids. I can’t say I blame you. But in times like these I think we can be forgiven for some long hours.” He tapped his desk with the point of a fountain pen while Charlie squirmed. “I’ve known you for five years and I’ve studied your career. You were the Cabinet appointment I was most proud of, Charlie, did you know that? I’m not suggesting you’re a scoundrel. Only that your loyalties may be divided. Is that so far off the mark?”

“You’re asking for a statement I can’t make. For the record, I resent the implication.”

“Forget the record. There is no record. This is in camera.”

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“You’re supposed to listen.” The President allowed an edge into his voice. The essential fact about Charlie Boyle was that he recognized authority. His life was a long hymn to authority: recognizing it, respecting it, acquiring it. I know you, the President thought. I know your poor-boy Tidewater roots, and I know what the Marine Corps must have meant to the rootless child you once were. More than a stepping-stone into civilian respectability, though it had been that too. All the old totems retained their magic. Charlie may have decided the man in the President’s office was expendable, but the office itself, the idea of the office, the Commander in Chief, still carried a ponderous symbolic weight. And for the moment, at least, the President thought, that weight is mine to wield.

He chose his words carefully.

“I want you to consider that this effort might be futile. Worse, doomed. I want you to consider that the impressive people the JCS may have lined up are not the only impressive people in the country, military or civilian. There is still a powerful sentiment on behalf of representative government. Your uprising would not be unopposed and it would not be bloodless. And it would not be worthwhile.”

Charlie Boyle sat for a long time in the ticking silence. When at last he spoke, he spoke cautiously. “People say you’re in contact with the Artifact. They say you know something you’re not telling. And there are rumors about some kind of disease. There’s been a lid on the CDC since last week. You and the brass at the NIH and nobody’s talking.”

“Maybe I do know something. Maybe I’m preparing to communicate that knowledge in my own good time. That’s my prerogative, is it not?”

“You haven’t said one fucking word to the Cabinet. Even your own advisors, the NSC—”

“Given the climate of the times, is that surprising?”

“People want to know who’s governing the country.”

“Damn it, Charlie, I am!”

“People debate that. People think you might be a fifth-columnist.”

“People who are compelled to seek power are prone to say any damn thing. Political campaigns aren’t conducted without lies. Neither are military uprisings.”

“You could put these rumors to rest.”

“I’m addressing the nation in two days. Isn’t that sufficient?”

“Maybe not.” Lured into too many tacit admissions, Charlie sat stiffly in his chair—the offended Puritan. “You admit you know something.”

“That’s right. I know insubordination when I see it. And I know how to respond to it.”

Charlie wavered but did not quite abandon his hostile stare. “You have no allies. Sir.”

“Are you banking on that?” There was no response.

“Tell them I’m aware of what’s happening,” the President said. “That’s your task, Charlie. Tell General Chafee and General Weismann and that Pentagon cabal that their plans have been under scrutiny in this office for quite a while. Tell him they can’t get what they want without a great deal of bloodshed.” The President focused on the Secretary of Defense—caught his eyes and held them. “You’ve served this country faithfully for most of your life. Do you really want to plunge it into civil war? Do you really want to be the next Jefferson Davis—and go down the same way?”

The Secretary of Defense opened his mouth and closed it.

“Tell General Chafee—” This was the hardest part. “Tell him negotiation is not out of the question. But violence will be met with violence. And Charlie?”

“Sir?”

“Thank you for your time.”

The Secret Service contingent had been doubled in the halls of the White House. The President wondered if that was a good idea. Too many unfamiliar faces about. It was a risk in itself. And it created an atmosphere of crisis—but perhaps that was unavoidable. He thought of Lincoln arriving in disguise for his inauguration, sharpshooters stationed around the Capitol dome. Times were bad, but times had been worse. Though, it was true, times had never been stranger.

Much of what he had said to Charlie Boyle was bluff, and the generals would know it; but it might be enough to cast doubt in certain quarters. It was a delay he was after here, not a resolution. The next few days were vital. It would be tragic if internecine squabbles such as this one caused unnecessary bloodshed, because those lives… well, they would be unrecoverable.

If it came to that, the President had decided he would issue the necessary orders and surrender his office, minimizing losses. But there were those who would fight on, for the best of reasons; and fighting, they would die; and dead, they would not be resurrected.

The crises we administer, the President thought, are never the ones we expect.

He did not consider himself a man especially well-equipped to administer this one. His career had been enormously successful but in every other respect ordinary. Scion of a New England political family, groomed from childhood for public service, he had graduated from Harvard with a law degree, reliable connections, and enough ambition to light up a city block. But it was an ambition hoarded; he was not impatient. He had moved through the ranks of the Democratic Party with grace, made more friends than enemies. He had run for public office first in his home state, defeating an incumbent Republican so decisively that the Party seriously began to consider his presidential mettle. And still he bided his time. He cultivated acquaintances in the Party hierarchy and among the baronial eminences of oil, law, manufacturing.

He had lost the nomination by a narrow margin in one primary but won it handily four years later. Western oil interests had defected from the complacent Republicans that year, and the South, reeling from the flight of industry to Mexico, had come back into the Democratic fold. And at the level of the ballot box, perhaps personalities had something to do with it. The President was a large man, easy with a crowd, ebullient, humorous. His opponent had been lean to the point of emaciation, prim, and too easily confused. Television debates had amounted to a rout; the Republican campaign tried to withdraw from the last of the three.

There was no suspense on election night, only the pleasure of watching CNN commentators find new ways to repeat the basic datum, that a long Republican ascendancy over the White House had come to an end.

Then the Artifact had arrived in orbit and every other issue dissolved in the immediacies of that almost incomprehensible event. He had spent most of his time in office struggling with it. Ineffectually, of course. It was a crisis that couldn’t be addressed. Its secondary effects—the political instability, the sinking national morale—could. In that respect, he felt he had done some good. What an unexpected opportunity for a twentieth-century political figure: to do good. How Victorian. But he had grasped the unlikely nettle.

And there was still a chance to save some lives; and perhaps his interview with Charlie Boyle had helped. The next few days were critical. Well see, he thought.

Beyond that—

Well, it was a new world, wasn’t it?

He could feel the shape of the future, but only dimly. He suspected it did not contain a place for kings, conquerors, aristocrats; nor even parliaments, congresses, presidents.

Elizabeth was awake, reading a book as he entered the bedroom. She looked up sleepily. “How did it go?”

The President began to undress. “You know Charlie. Stiff-necked. A little dim. Self-preservation at all costs. But I think he’ll be more cautious now.”

“Is that good enough?”

He shrugged. “It’s good. It may not be enough.”

“Poor Charlie. He just doesn’t understand.”

“We’re privileged,” the President reminded his wife. “We were approached first. We’re among the few.” He had a curious thought. “The last aristocracy the world will see.”

“I suppose we are. But if we had Charlie, too, and General Chafee—”

“That will come. Though I wouldn’t count on Chafee. He strikes me as the type who might refuse.”

“I wish it would all happen faster.”

“It’s happening as fast as it can. I only hope that no one dies. Even the generals would come to regret that, I think.”

“They don’t realize what they’re fighting against. The death of Death.”

The President slipped into bed beside his wife. He had brought a slender intelligence document, this morning’s For The President Only, meaning to reread it—but what was the point? He took his wife’s hand and turned off the light.

When he married Elizabeth Bonner, she had been trim, attractive, connected to a powerful Eastern family. In the thirty years since, she had grown ebulliently fat. There had been jokes during the campaign—unkind jokes, cruel jokes. But Elizabeth had not seemed to mind—she did not deign to acknowledge such peccadilloes. And the President was only mildly perturbed. Perturbed because he loved her, not because he objected to her exuberant size. He understood the secret: She had gained weight as she had gained wisdom; it was the weight of their marriage, an alliance well-anchored and substantial.

The bedsheets were pleasingly cool. “The death of Death,’” he said. “That’s an odd thought.”

“But that’s what it is,” Elizabeth said.

The idea was comforting. And true, of course. Trust her to find the most succinct way of putting it.

And Death shall have no dominion. Was that the Bible? Tennyson? He couldn’t recall.

In any event, the President thought, the time has come.

Chapter 6 Fever

Matt was a doctor because he had been seduced by the idea of healing.

A dozen TV series and a handful of movies had convinced him that the heart of the practice of medicine was the act of healing. He managed to carry this fragile idea through med school, but it didn’t survive internship. His internship drove home the fact that a doctor’s purpose is bound up with death—its postponement, at best; its amelioration, often; its inevitability, always. Death was the gray eminence behind the caduceus. Healing was why people paid their doctors. Death was why they were afraid of them.

Contrary to myth, the med degree conferred no emotional invulnerability. Even doctors feared death—even successful doctors. Feared it and avoided it. Sometimes neurotically. During his residency, Matt had worked with an oncologist who hated his patients… He was a good doctor, unflaggingly professional, but in a lounge or a cafeteria or a bar—among colleagues—he would explain at length what weaklings people were. “They invite their tumors. They’re lazy or fat or they smoke, or they inebriate themselves with alcohol or lie in the sun with their skin exposed. Then they bring their abused bodies to me. ‘Cure this, please, doctor.’ Sickening.”

“Maybe they’re just unlucky,” Matt had ventured. “Some of them, at least.”

“The more time you spend on my floor, Dr. Wheeler, the less inclined you will be to believe that.”

Maybe so, Matt thought. The contempt was not reasonable, but it served a purpose. It kept death at arm’s length. Open the door to sympathy—even a crack—and grief might crowd in behind it.

It was not an attitude Matt could adopt, however, which helped steer him into family practice. His daily work was leavened with mumps, measles, minor wounds stitched, infections knocked out with antibiotics. Healing, in other words. Small benevolent acts. He was a bit player in the minor dramas of ordinary lives, a good guy, not a death angel presiding at the gateway to oblivion.

Seldom, at least.

But Cindy Rhee was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He had told the Rhees he would stop in to see their daughter Friday morning.

David Rhee was a forklift driver at the mill south of town. His parents were Korean immigrants living in Portland ; David had married a pretty Buchanan girl named Ellen Drew and twelve years ago Ellen had borne him a daughter, Cindy.

Cindy was a delicate, thin child with just a touch of her father’s complexion. Her eyes were large, mysterious, brown. She was suffering from a neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system.

She fell down walking to school one autumn morning. She stood up, brushed the leaf debris off her jacket, carried on. Next week, she fell again. And the week after. Then twice in a week. Twice in a day. Finally her mother brought her in to see Matt.

He found gross anomalies in her reflexes and a pronounced papilledema. He told Mrs. Rhee he couldn’t make a diagnosis and referred Cindy to a neurologist at the hospital, but his suspicions were grave. A benign and operable tumor of the brain might be the girl’s best hope. There were other possibilities, even less pleasant.

He attended her while she was admitted for tests. Cindy was immensely patient in the face of the unavoidable indignities, almost supernaturally so. It occurred to Matt to wonder where such people came from: the obviously good and decent souls who endure hardship without complaint and cause duty-hardened nurses to weep for them in the hallways.

He was with the Rhees when the neurologist explained that their daughter was suffering from a neuroblastoma. David and Ellen Rhee listened with ferocious concentration as the specialist described the hardships and benefits, the pluses and minuses, of chemotherapy. David spoke first: “But will it cure her?”

“It might prolong her life. It might send the tumor into remission. We don’t use the word ‘cure.’ We would have to keep a close watch on her even in the best case.”

David Rhee nodded, a gesture not of acquiescence but of brokenhearted acknowledgment. His daughter might not get well. His daughter might die.

I could have been a plumber, Matt thought, an electrician, an accountant, anything, dear God, not to be in this room at this moment. He couldn’t meet Ellen’s eyes when she left with her husband. He was afraid she would see his craven helplessness.

Cindy responded to the chemotherapy. She lost some hair but recovered her sense of balance; she went home from the hospital skinny but optimistic.

She was back six months later. Her tumor, inoperable to begin with, had disseminated. Her speech was slurred and her eyesight had begun to tunnel. Matt canvassed the hospital’s specialists: surely some kind of operation… But the malignancy had colonized her brain too deeply; the X-rays were eloquent, merciless. Surgery, if anyone had been mad enough to attempt it, would have left her speechless, sightless, possibly soulless.

Now she was home to die. The Rhees understood this. In a way, the prognosis was kind; she was functional enough to leave the hospital and with any luck she wouldn’t end up DNR in some pitiless white room. Now Cindy was blind and could form only the most rudimentary words, but Ellen Rhee continued to care for her daughter with a relentless heroism that Matt found humbling.

He had promised he would stop by this morning, but he didn’t relish the task. It was hard not to care about Cindy Rhee, hard not to hate the disease that was torturing her to death. There was a state of mind Matt called “being the doctor machine,” in which he kept his emotions filed for later reference… but that was a difficult balancing act at the best of times, and this morning he was feverish and disoriented. He popped a decongestant and drove to the Rhees’ house in a grim mood.

There was the question, too, of what Jim Bix had told him. He carried it like a stone, a weight he could neither dislodge nor easily bear. Jim was sincere, but he might still be mistaken. Or crazy. Or maybe this really was the beginning of the end… in which case, as indecent as the thought sounded, maybe Cindy Rhee was the lucky one.

He parked in the driveway at the Rhees’ modest two-bedroom house. Ellen Rhee opened the door for him. She wore a yellow housedress with her hair tied away from her neck. The air in the living room smelled of Pine-Sol; an old upright vacuum cleaner stood sentinel on the carpet. It was Mart’s experience that in the homes of the dying, housework is performed religiously or not at all. Ellen Rhee had taken to frantic cleaning. In the last few months he had seldom seen her without her apron on.

But she was smiling. That was odd, Matt thought. And the radio was playing. Some AM station. Cheerful pop music.

“Come in, Matt,” Ellen said.

He stepped inside. The house was not as dim as he remembered it; she had opened all the blinds and pulled back all the drapes. A summer-morning breeze swept the odor of antiseptic past him, and a more delicate waft of roses from the backyard garden.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The house is kind of chaotic. I’m in the middle of cleaning up. I guess I forgot you were coming.”

She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a Kleenex. The Taiwan Flu, Matt thought. Wasn’t that what the papers were calling it?

He said, “I can come back another time—”

“No. Please. Come in.” Her smile had not faded.

The clinical word for this kind of behavior was “denial.” But maybe it was simply her way of coping. Carry on, smile, and welcome the guest. A new wrinkle in the etiology of Ellen Rhee’s grief. But it seemed to Matt she looked different. Less burdened. Was that possible?

“Is David home?”

“Early shift at the mill. Would you like a coffee?”

“No, thank you, Ellen.” He looked toward Cindy’s bedroom. “How is she today?”

“Better,” Ellen said. Mart’s surprise must have been too obvious. “No, really! She’s feeling much better. You can ask her yourself.” It was a macabre joke. “Ellen—”

Her smile softened. She touched his arm. “Go see her, Matt. Go ahead.”

Cindy was sitting up in bed, a small miracle in itself. Mart’s first astonished thought was: She did look better. She was still brutally thin—the delicate bone-and-parchment emaciation of the terminal cancer patient. But her eyes were wide and appeared lucid. The last time he stopped by, she hadn’t seemed to recognize him.

Matt parked his medical bag on the bedside table and told her hello. He made it a point to talk to her, though the neurologist had assured him she couldn’t understand. She might still take some solace from the tone of his voice. “I came by to see how you’re doing today.”

Cindy blinked. “Thank you, Dr. Wheeler,” she said. “I’m doing fine.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ellen said when he emerged from the girl’s bedroom. “Come on. Sit down.”

He sat at the kitchen table and allowed Ellen to pour him a glass of 7-Up.

“She really is better,” Ellen said. “I told you so.” Matt struggled to form his thoughts.

“She spoke,” he said. “She was lucid. She understood what I said to her. She’s weak and a little feverish, but I believe she may even have gained some weight.” He looked at Ellen. “None of that should be possible.”

“It’s a miracle,” Ellen said firmly. “At least that’s what I believe.” She laughed. “I’m a little feverish myself.”

“Ellen, listen. I’m pleased about this. I couldn’t be happier. But I don’t understand it.”

And truly, he did not. Yes, there was such a thing as a remission. He had once seen a lung tumor remit in a way that could be called “miraculous.” But Cindy was a vastly different case. Brain tissue had been destroyed. Even if the tumors had somehow vanished, she should not have been able to speak. That part of her brain was simply missing. Even without the tumors, she would have been in the position of someone who had suffered a severe stroke. Some recovery of faculties might be possible; certainly not a complete cure… certainly not what he had witnessed in the bedroom.

He did not say any of this to Ellen. Instead, he offered: “I want to be sure. I want the hospital to look at her.”

Ellen frowned for the first time this morning. “Maybe when she’s stronger, Matt. I don’t know, though. I hate to put her through all that again.”

“I don’t want us to have false hopes.”

“You think she might get worse?” Ellen shook her head. “She won’t. I can’t tell you how I know that. But I do. The sickness is gone, Dr. Wheeler.”

He couldn’t bring himself to argue. “I hope you’re right. Cindy said something similar.”

“Did she?”

The girl had spoken with deliberation, as if the framing of the words still required enormous effort, but succinctly and clearly.

“Poor Dr. Wheeler,” this emaciated child had said to him. “We’re putting you out of business.”

Strange as the incident was, here was something even stranger: He did not dwell on it or even think about it much after he left the Rhees’ house.

He drove downtown along Promenade Street where the road followed the curve of the bay. There wasn’t much traffic. It was an easy drive, the ocean still and blue under a feathery wash of sky. Hot August noon and nothing stirring.

He felt as strangely placid as Buchanan looked. Matt had blamed it on the fever—this empty calm, his own, the town’s—but then it occurred to him to wonder.

Maybe Jim is right, he thought. We’re all infected. Machines in the blood. A sort of plague. The Taiwan Flu… hadn’t he dreamed about it? But these thoughts, too, slipped away beneath the glassy surface of the day.

It turned out that Jill, the receptionist, hadn’t shown up for work—phoned in sick—but Annie was at the office, sitting in Reception fielding calls, mainly cancelled appointments. She put down the receiver and transferred queries to the service for an hour so she could break for lunch; Matt brought up food from the first-floor coffee shop—which was understaffed. Plastic-wrapped salads and ham sandwiches on white. Annie Gates picked at hers, eyes distantly focused. “Strange day,” she mused.

Matt told her about Cindy Rhee, but the story felt distant, curiously immaterial, even as he told it.

Annie frowned. Wrinkle of brow and purse of lips. Trying to fathom all this but meeting some internal resistance. “Maybe that’s why nobody’s keeping their appointments. They’re all—well, better.”

Poor Dr. Wheeler. We’re putting you out of business.

Maybe not better, Matt thought. Maybe sicker.

He told Annie what Jim Bix had said about foreign bodies in the blood of his hospital samples, in his own blood. He hadn’t intended to tell her this, at least not yet—hadn’t wanted to worry her needlessly. But she nodded. “I heard something about it at the hospital. Had lunch with a staff nurse from the path lab. She was scared spitless. So was I, by the time she finished. So I called the hematology resident at the Dallas hospital where I interned. He didn’t want to talk about it, but when I told him what I’d heard he pretty much confirmed it.”

So we were keeping this from each other, Matt thought. It was like an O. Henry story. How many other people were in on this secret?

He said, “That means it’s not local.”

“No. Are you surprised?”

“No.”

“The CDC must have known about it at least as long as Jim Bix.” She sipped her Pepsi. “I guess the clamps came down hard. There hasn’t been a hint of it in the papers. I suppose the thinking is, why worry people? A disease with no symptoms, a disease with no epidemiology because everybody already has it—so why start a panic?”

“Surely they can’t keep it a secret much longer.”

“Maybe they won’t have to.”

He felt enclosed in a dome of feverish tranquility. Part of him was conducting this conversation quite reasonably; another part was encapsulated, silent, but frightened by what Annie had said. These were thoughts he had not yet allowed himself.

A distant, dreamy note crept into her voice. “If this infection has a purpose—and I think it does—we’ll all know pretty soon what it is.”

He gave her a sharp look. “What makes you think it has a purpose?”

“Just a feeling.” She shrugged. “Don’t you think that?”

Not a question he wanted to answer.

“Annie, can I ask you something? You said when you heard about this from your friend you were scared. At the time.”

“Yes.”

“But not now?”

Her frown deepened. “No… not now. I’m not scared now.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, Matt.” She regarded him solemnly across the remains of lunch. “I don’t honestly know.”

He spent the afternoon cleaning up paperwork and attending a single patient: a thirty-year-old housewife keeping an appointment to monitor her blood pressure. Yes, she was sticking to her diet. Yes, she was taking her medication.

Her pressure was a textbook-normal 120 over 80 despite a degree and a half of fever. She seemed absentminded but she smiled as she left. Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.

Matt pulled his chair to the window and watched shade and light mark time in the street beyond.

We’re being sedated.

The town was quiescent. Every motion seemed isolated, a unique event. A car crawled along the hot blacktop in slow motion. An elderly man, his collar open and his suitcoat over his shoulder, stepped out of the Bargain Cuts Uni-Sex Barber Shop and paused to run a bony hand across his stubbled head. Sunlight winked on windshields, softened road tar, and lifted haze from the blank and distant ocean.

I should be terrified, Matt thought. And I’m not. And that should be terrifying, too. But it wasn’t.

Sedation. What else to call this clinical calm? We should be screaming. We should be outraged. We should feel violated. Because this was—

Was what?

The end of the world?

Yes, Matt thought. Probably the end of the world. That was probably what this was.

At three o’clock a courier came upstairs with a folder of test results from the private med lab on the third floor. The blood results might be skewed, but apparently they could still sort out gonadotropin from a few CCs of urine. Matt gave the dossier a quick perusal. Then he phoned Lillian Bix and told her she was pregnant.

They closed the empty office at four.

“I walked to work,” Annie said. “Maybe you can drive me back to your place.” Matt looked blank. “Your dinner party. Remember?”

He almost laughed. The idea was ludicrous. How was he supposed to conduct a dinner party? Serve salt peanuts and play “Nearer My God to Thee?”

Annie smiled. “It’s okay, Matt. Some cancellations phoned in this morning. Check your memo pad. There are probably more on your machine at home. You can call it off if you want… I’ll get dinner at a restaurant.”

He shook his head. “No. Annie, I want you to come home with me. But there might not be anybody else.”

“I know.”

“Nothing to celebrate.”

“I know, Matt. Maybe we can have a drink. Watch the lights.”

“I’d like that,” Matt said.

She was right about the party, of course. Everybody had canceled—most citing the flu—except for Jim and Lillian Bix, who showed up with a bottle of wine.

The mood was not celebratory, though Lillian had announced her pregnancy to Jim and Jim announced it to Annie. It was obvious from their slightly dazed expressions that his friends felt the way Matt did: fenced off, somehow, from the significance of all these strange events. “Like a patient etherized upon a table”—T. S. Eliot, if Matt recalled correctly. The phrase echoed in his head as the four of them fumbled around the kitchen, improvising dinner, while Rachel watched a TV newscast in the next room. The President, Rachel said, had canceled his Friday night speech. But everything was quiet in Washington.

Later, Matt switched off the air conditioning and the adults adjourned to the backyard deck. Lawn chairs in a cooling breeze, wine in stemmed glasses. Sunset faded; the first stars emerged. The breeze swayed the big Douglas fir at the back of the yard and Matt listened to the sound of its branches stirring, as gentle in the dusk as the rustling of a woman’s skirt. “My God,” he said, “it’s—quiet”

Jim looked quizzical. “What do they say in the movies? Too quiet.”

“Seriously,” Matt said. “Listen. You can hear the trees.”

Now they crooked their heads at the evening and grew attentive.

“I can hear the frogs,” Annie marveled. “From the river, I guess. My gosh. Way down the valley.”

“And that ringing sound,” Lillian said. “I know what that is! The flagpole over at the elementary school. I walk by there some mornings. The rope bangs against the staff when the wind blows. It always reminds me of a bell.”

A distant, random tolling. Matt heard it, too. Jim said, “Is all this so odd?”

“Friday night,” Matt said. “The highway runs along the river. You can usually hear the traffic. Usually nothing but. People going to the movies, guys out at the bars, maybe a lumber truck roaring by. It’s the kind of sound you can put out of your mind, but you notice it when it’s gone. There’s always some kind of noise up here, even after midnight. A train whistle. A siren once in a while. Or—”

“TV,” Annie said. “Everybody in the neighborhood with their TV turned up. On a summer night like this? With the windows open?” She shivered, a tiny motion; Matt felt it when he took her hand. She said, “I guess hardly anybody’s watching TV tonight.”

Matt glanced back at the house, where Rachel had switched off the TV and was standing at the window of her room, the light behind her, gazing moodily into the twilight.

“So everybody went to bed early,” Jim offered. “The flu.”

This offended Lillian, who sat upright in her chair. “You don’t have to protect me. I know what’s happening.”

Matt and Jim exchanged glances. Matt said gently, “If you know what’s happening, Lillian, you’re one up on the rest of us.”

Her voice was raw, her eyes mournful. “Everything’s changing. That’s what’s happening. That’s why there’s nobody here tonight but us.”

There followed a silence, which Matt guessed was acquiescence, then Jim raised his glass: “To us, then. The hardy few.”

Lillian drank to show she wasn’t angry. “But I shouldn’t,” she said. “Wine puts me to sleep. Oh, and the baby. It’s bad for the baby, isn’t it? But I suppose just a sip.”

Tang, clang, said the distant flagpole.

Matt stopped to say goodnight to Rachel and found her already dozing, tucked in a pink bedsheet, the window open to admit a breath of night air.

He pulled up a chair beside the bed, mindful of its creak as he sat.

Rachel hadn’t changed her room significantly since her mother died. It was still very much a child’s bedroom, lace blinds on the window and stuffed animals on the dresser. Matt knew for a fact that she still owned all her old toys: a vanity chest full of My Little Ponies and Jem; of miniature stoves, TV sets, refrigerators; a complete Barbie Camper set neatly folded and stored. The chest was seldom opened, but he supposed it served its purpose as a shrine: to Rachel’s mother, or just to childhood, security, the kingdom of lost things.

He looked at his daughter, and the thought of the toy chest made him suddenly, inconsolably sad.

I would give it all back if I could, Rache. Everything the world stole from you.

Everything the world is stealing.

She turned on her side and opened her eyes. “Daddy?”

“Yes, Rache?”

“I heard you come in.”

“Just wanted to say goodnight.”

“Is Annie staying over?”

“I think so.”

“Good. I like it when she’s here in the morning.” She yawned. Matt put a hand on her forehead. She was a little warm.

A troubling thought seemed to hold her attention for a moment. “Daddy? Is everything going to be all right?”

Lie to her, Matt thought. Lie and make her believe it. “Yes, Rache,” he said.

She nodded and closed her eyes. “I thought so.”

He unwound the studio bed in the basement for Jim and Lillian, who had both had too much wine, or were otherwise “etherized”: too dazed, in any case, to drive.

I know how they feel, Matt thought. Bound up in cotton. Buoyant but sleepy. There had been occasions, as a college student, when he had smoked marijuana in a friend’s dorm room. It had sometimes made him feel like this… encased in a protective and faintly luminescent fog… afloat, after he had found his way home, on the gently undulating surface of his bed.

Tonight he climbed into bed beside Annie.

It had been a while since they’d slept together, and now he wondered why. He’d missed this, the presence of her, her warmth and what he thought of as her “Annie-ness.” She was a small woman, all her vivid energies and enigmatic silences packaged tightly together. She rolled on her side but snuggled closer; he curled himself around her.

The first time Annie came home with him Matt had been guilt-ridden—this had still been very much Celeste’s house and Annie an intruder in it, an insult, he worried, to her memory. And he had wondered how Rachel might take it. A rivalry between Annie and his daughter was a complication he had dreaded.

But Rachel had taken to Annie at once, accepted her presence without question. “Because she mourned,” Annie suggested later. “She mourned for her mother and I think in some ways she’s still mourning, but she isn’t hiding it from herself. She’s letting go of it. She knows it’s all right for me to be here because Celeste isn’t coming back.”

Matt winced.

Annie said, “But you, Matt, you don’t like letting go. You’re a collector. You hoard things. Your childhood. This town. Your idealism. Your marriage. You can’t bear the idea of giving any of it up.”

This was both true and maddening. “I gave Celeste up,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“It’s not that simple. There’s a certain way you shouldn’t let her go—she’s a part of you, after all. And there’s the giving up you couldn’t help, which is her dying. And there’s the space in between. Not a very big space right now. But that’s the space where I fit in.”

Matt wondered, holding Annie close to him, what had provoked this old memory.

You’re a collector. You don’t like letting go. He guessed it was true.

Clinging to Annie now. Clinging to Rachel. Clinging to Jim and Lillian and the practice of medicine and the town of Buchanan. Everything’s changing, Lillian had said. But it was too much to let go of.

A cool finger of air touched the skin of his shoulder, and Matt pulled up the bedsheet and closed his eyes in the summer dark; and then, like Annie, like Rachel, like Jim and Lillian and everyone else in Buchanan and in the sleeping world, he began to dream.

A wave of sleep crossed the globe like the shadow of the sun, a line of dreaming that lagged only a few hours behind the border of the night.

It was a sleep more complete than the planet had known since the human species migrated out of Africa. Sleep tracked across North America from the tip of Labrador westward, and it possessed almost everyone equally: possessed the shift workers, the insomniacs, the wealthy, and the homeless; possessed the alcoholic and the amphetamine addict alike.

It possessed farmers, fishermen, the inmates of penitentiaries, and penitentiary guards. It possessed Methedrine-saturated truckers spinning Waylon Jennings tapes in the cabs of eighteen-wheelers, who pulled into the breakdown lanes of empty highways and slept in their rigs; possessed airline pilots, who landed 747s on the tarmac of sleeping airports under the direction of air-traffic controllers who methodically emptied the sky, and then slept.

There were isolated, and temporary, exceptions. Medical emergencies were rare, but telephone lines were maintained by a few dazed workers (who slept later); ambulances evacuated injuries to hospitals, where a few residents, functional but dazed beyond wondering at the events that had overtaken them, stanched the few wounds of a few sleeping patients… whose injuries, in any case, seemed to heal without much intervention. Fire crews remained functionally alert, though curiously sedated. No one slept until they had attended—without much conscious thought—to the obvious dangers: cigarettes were extinguished, ovens switched off, fireplaces damped.

Chapter 7 The Quiet

The fires that did break out were accidents of nature, not humanity. In Chicago, a welfare mother named Aggie Langois woke from a powerful and incomplete dream—which was not a dream—to find flames licking out of a 1925-vintage wall socket and kindling the paper curtains of her two-room apartment. She took her sleeping baby and her wakeful but calm three-year-old and hurried them downstairs, two flights to the sidewalk… and was surprised to find the other occupants of the building calmly filing out behind her. The crack dealer from 3-A was carrying the legless old man from 4-B; and Aggie’s personal nemesis, the neighbor girl who was a cocktail waitress and who liked to party after hours when the children were trying to sleep, had brought out a score of blankets and handed three of them to Aggie without comment.

Someone had paused long enough to dial 911. The fire engines arrived, not just promptly, but in eerie silence; the crew hooked up their hoses with an easy, economical motion. It was as if only a part of them was awake: the fraction necessary to do this job and do it efficiently. A man from the building next door—a stranger—offered Aggie a sofa to sleep on and a bedroll for her babies. Aggie accepted. “It’s an unusual night,” the man said, and Aggie nodded, mute with wonder. Before an hour had passed, the fire was extinguished and the occupants of the building had been dispersed to new locations, all in a strange and dignified silence. Safe and with her children safe beside her, Aggie began once more to dream.

Apart from the telephone exchanges, local communications dwindled and international networks began to fail. Within hours, the Earth had dimmed appreciably in the radio and microwave frequencies. Night overtook the western cities of Lima, Los Angeles, and Anchorage, and began to darken the ocean, while Israelis watched their CNN satellite feed shutting down due to “unexpected staff shortages,” according to one weary Atlanta announcer; and then there was only a static logo, then only static—as overseas subscribers blinked at the horizon and guessed something was wrong, something must be seriously wrong, and it was odd how calm they felt, and later sleepy.

Some resisted longer than others. By some quirk of will or constitution, a few individuals were able to shake off their sedation, or at least postpone it a few moments, a few hours.

A sales rep for the Benevolent Shoe Company of Abbotsford, Michigan, driving a rental Chrysler northbound on 87 from the Denver airport, pondered the miracle that had overtaken him in the darkness. He was due to check in at a Marriott in Fort Collins and face a convention of western footware retailers, beginning with a “reception buffet” at seven, for Christ’s sake, in the morning. The miracle was that some kind of formless disaster had spared him the necessity of scrambled eggs and bacon with a bunch of sleepy entrepreneurs wearing “Hello My Name Is” stickers.

The miracle had seemed to commence sometime after sunset, when his flight landed at Stapleton. The airport was nearly empty despite the fact that its gates were crowded with motionless aircraft. At least half the passengers on his flight stayed aboard, curled up in their seats… flying on to some other destination, he supposed, but it struck him as peculiar nonetheless. The terminal itself was cavernous and weirdly silent; his luggage was a long time arriving and the woman at the Hertz booth was so spaced out he had trouble holding her attention long enough to arrange a rental. Driving north, he was startled by the emptiness of the highway… cars pulling over into the emergency lane until his was the last mobile vehicle on the road, humming along like a sleepy wraith, listening to a Eurythmics tune that seemed to rattle in his head like a loose pea. Then the Denver oldies station abruptly signed off, and when he tried to find something else there was only one other signal, a country-and-western station, which promptly faded. Not normal, he admitted to himself. No, more than that. This was way past not normal, and it should have been scarier than it was. He pulled into the emergency lane, like everybody else, and climbed out of the car. Then he climbed up on top of the car and sat on the roof with his heels kicking at the passenger door, because—well, why not? Because he understood, in a feverish flash, that the world was ending. Ending in some strange and unanticipated and curiously sedate fashion, but ending, and he was alive at the end of it, sitting on top of this dung-colored Chrysler in a cheap suit and hearing for the first time the quiet of an abandoned night, a night without human noises. His own scuffles on the car top seemed achingly loud, and the wind made a hushed sound coming over farmland through the grain, and the smell of growing things mixed with the hot-engine smell of his car and his own rank sweat, and a dog barked somewhere, and the stars were bright as sparks overhead… and it was all a single phenomenon, the quiet, he named it, and it was awesome, frightening. He thought of his wife, of his seven-year-old son. He knew—another sourceless “knowing”—that whatever this was, it had overtaken them, too. Which made it a little easier to cooperate with the inevitable. He felt suddenly light-headed, too much alone on this immense table of sleeping farmland, so he climbed down and scurried back inside the womb of the car, where the silence was even louder, and curled up on the upholstery and obeyed a sudden and belated urge to sleep.

Among many other things, he dreamed that a mountain had begun to grow from the prairie not far from his car—a mountain as big as any mountain on the Earth, and as perfectly round as a pearl.

A thousand miles south, Maria Montoya, an expensive private escort, as she thought of herself—or whore, as her customers were occasionally unwise enough to whisper (or shout) in the transport of their passions—attempted to keep an appointment with a German businessman at one of the tourist hotels on Avenida Juarez in the Zocalo district of Mexico City.

Keeping the appointment proved mysteriously difficult. For one thing, there were no taxis that evening. Which was, as the Americans would say, a bitch. She depended on taxis. She had an arrangement with one company, Taxi Metro: She took a 10 percent fare cut in exchange for leaving the company’s business card on her clients’ hotel bureaus. Tonight the taxis were absent, the dispatchers failed to answer their phones, and the streets, in any case, were full of traffic that had parked along the sidewalks like clotted blood in an aging artery. The whole city was in this stalled condition. As bad as an earthquake! Of course, there hadn’t been an earthquake or any other discernible disaster; the nature of this confusion was much more mysterious… but Maria didn’t care about the details. She felt feverish, dazed, uneasy. She fixed her attention entirely on the need to meet this client. An important man, a wealthy man. She tried phoning to say she’d be late; the phones seemed to work but the hotel switchboard refused to answer. At last, Maria cursed and went out from her rented room into the unpleasantly hot night, the air glutinous and stagnant, and walked ten long blocks to the hotel district past all these stalled cars… but not stalled, exactly, because the drivers had pulled to the side of the road, sometimes onto the sidewalk, leaving a neat lane down the middle of the street, and they had turned their engines off, and all the lights. The cars had become dark caverns, and through their windows, mostly open, Maria saw the slumped shapes of sleeping passengers. Not dead—that would have worried her—just sleeping. How did she know? It was impossible to say. But the knowledge was inside her.

It was a harrowing journey. She almost fell asleep on her feet. She took a wrong turn and found herself wandering past the Palacio Nacional, its ugly tezontle masonry brooding over the motionless plaza and a hundred stalled cars. Her shoes clicked on the sidewalk, and an echo came rattling back.

She arrived at the hotel an hour late and with a broken heel. Her determination had wavered during the long walk and she was sleepy herself.

But she rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor, negotiated the pine-smelling and air-conditioned hallway to the room marked 1413, knocked and then opened the unlocked door when no one answered. Her client was inside—asleep, of course. A fat German snoring on the bedspread in his underwear, skin pale as eggshell and unpleasantly hairy. She felt a wave of contempt, an occupational hazard, and suppressed it. Obviously, she wasn’t needed here. Not a chance of waking this man, who had made such an issue of her promptness. She ought to go home… but the thought of the journey made her weary.

Conscientious to the last, Maria placed a Taxi Metro card on the nightstand and lay down beside the sleeping German, a stranger, with whom she chastely slept, and with whom she dreamed.

Dreaming marched westward. Dreaming crossed the Aleutians from Alaska into Siberia. Dreaming descended on ancient Asian cities: on Hanoi, Hong Kong, Bangkok. Tokyo slept with such condensed uniformity that it seemed to Hiroshi Michio, the last traffic cop to close his eyes on the cloistered neon of the Akihabara, that so much sleep, like a fog, might rise up and obscure the stars.

Sleep followed night across the Russian steppes, across rusting collective farms and lightless arctic forests, across the Urals and the Caucasus, sleep like an army moving west until it crossed the Finnish border, marched into Ukraine and then Romania, then Poland, where it met no opposition but the cool night air.

Sleep conquered China and rolled into Tibet, Pakistan, India, swept from Calcutta across two longitudes to Hyderabad.

Sleep took Africa in a space of hours. It moved westward from the Gulf of Aden into the dry hinterlands, took the dying children in the refugee camps and suspended them in darkness; followed the equator through jungles and grasslands and consumed the stony deserts of Egypt, Libya, Algeria; took its final subject in a fish shop in Dakar.

Dreaming unwound the cities of Europe, interrupting a river of human night noise that had run without surcease since the founding of Rome. Dreaming silenced Berlin and Leipzig; captured Naples and Milan; shut down the humming grids of Paris and Amsterdam; crossed the English Channel and conquered, finally, London, where a few frightened individuals had monitored the systematic dysfunction of the world with their shortwave radios, silent now, but who slept at last with everyone else, and with everyone else dreamed.

It was the same dream for everyone. The dream was complex, but the dream in its most fundamental form was a single thought, a question posed in six billion human skulls and more than three thousand languages.

The question was: Do you want to live?