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HAD stayed up late, the two of us. Leslie was submerged on page 300-something of The Passive Solar Energy Book: Expanded Professional Edition.
I closed A History of the Colt Revolver, put it on the Finished stack and took the top volume from my To-Read-Next pile.
How our books describe us, I thought. At Leslie's bedside: Complete Poems of RE. Cummings, The Global 2000 Report to the President, Muddling Toward Frugality, Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, Unicorns I Have Known, This Timeless Moment, The Lean Years, Baryshnikov At Work, American Film Directors, 2081.
At mine: The Dancing Wu Li Masters, The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Airman's Odyssey, The Aquarian Conspiracy, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Western Edible Wildplants, The Trimtab Factor. When I want to
understand someone swiftly, I need only look at their bookshelf.
The sound of the book change caught her at the end of a calculation. "How was Mister Colt?" she said, moving her solar charts into better light.
"Oh, he's doin' just fine. Do you know that without the Colt Revolver there would be forty-six states in this country today, instead of fifty?"
"We stole four states at gunpoint?"
"That's pretty crass, Leslie. Not stole. Defended some, liberated others. And not we. You and I had nothing to do with it. But a hundred-some years ago, to those people then, the Colt was a fearsome weapon. A repeating handgun faster than any rifle and straighter-shooting than most. I've
always wanted an 1851 Navy Colt. Silly, isn't it? Originals are expensive, but Colt does make a replica."
"What would you want with something like that?"
She didn't mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter nightgown couldn't hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow my simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to choose for her body? Never, I thought.
"Something like what?" I said absently.
"Animal," she growled. "Why would you want an old pistol?"
"Oh. The Colt. Funny feeling about it, as long as I can remember. When I realize I don't own one, I feel sort of undressed, vulnerable. It's a habit to be within arm's-reach of one, but I've never even touched a Colt. Isn't that odd?"
"If you want one, we can start saving for it. If it's that important to you."
How often we're led back to our other pasts by bits and pieces of hardware, old machines, buildings, lands that we
passionately love or fiercely hate without knowing why. Does anyone live who hasn't felt magnetic yearnings toward other places, an easy at-home-ness with other times? One of my pasts, I knew, held the brass-and-blue-iron of a Colt's Patent Revolver. Be fun to track that one down, someday.
"I guess not, wookie. Silly thought."
"What are you going to read now?" she said, turning her book sideways to study the next chart.
"It's called Life at Death. Looks like some pretty careful research, interviews with people who nearly died, what it felt like, what they saw. How's your book coming along?"
Angel T. Cat jumped onto the bed, six pounds of white longhair Persian, walked heavily as six tons to Leslie, collapsed on the pages in front of her, purred.
"Fine. This chapter is especially interesting. It says fur fur fur EYES NOSE EYES fur fur fur claws and tail. Angel, do the words you are in my way have any meaning to you? The words you are sitting on my book?"
The cat looked at her drowsily no; purred the louder.
Leslie moved the fluffy weight to her shoulder, and we read in silence for a while.
"Goodnight, little wook," I said, turning out my reading lamp. "I'll meet you on the corner of Cloud Street and Sleepy-Bye Lane. . . ."
"I won't be long, sweetie," she said. "Goodnight."
I squashed my pillow and curled into a sleeping-ball. For some time I had been practicing induced dreams, with minimal success. Tonight I was too tired for practice. I fell off the edge into sleep.
It was a light airy glass house that we saw, high on a greenforest island. Flowers splashed everywhere, a flood
of color through the rooms, over the decks and beyond, spilling downslope to a level meadow. A Lake amphibian in shades of sunrise, parked on the grass. Away over deep water other islands scattered, evergreen to mistblue.
