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What makes you so sure we're immortal?
How do you tell when a marriage is over?
How many other people see this world the way you do?
Where can we go to meet someone to love?
We sailed through a day lasted a moment long, as though we ourselves were lightspeed travellers.
Swiftly came the hour we shut our hotel-room door behind us, fell on the bed together.
"Not bad," I said. "Not a bad day. Tired?"
"No!" she said. "There's so much power, so much love in the air, at one of these things. The joy comes and hugs us all!"
"Let's practice seeing auras, next time," I said. "They say that at a good stage event, there's golden light over the audience, over the stage. Everybody's electrified."
I looked at her blouse. "Permission to touch?"
She considered me sideways. "What does that mean?"
"It's an aviation-cadet custom. Never touch another person without permission."
"You hardly need permission, Mister Bach."
"I just thought, before I tear your clothes off, I ought to be courteous, and ask."
"Beast," she said. "When the man asked if there were dragons left, I should have pointed to you."
I rolled on my back, looked at the featureless ceiling, closed my eyes. "I'm a dragon. I'm an angel, too, don't forget. We each have our mystery, our adventure, don't we, going our million ways together across time, all at once? What are we doing, in those other times? I don't know. But I'll bet you a strange thing, sweetie," I said, "I'll bet that what we're doing now ..."
". . . is tied with ribbons of light," she said, "to what we're doing then!"
I shocked awake as she finished my sentence.
She lay on her side on the bed, seablue eyes locked with mine, knowing me, knowing so much more.
I spoke as gently as I could to the life that sparkled and danced behind those eyes.
"Hello, mystery," I whispered.
"Hello, adventure."
"Where shall we go from here?" I said, full of the power of us. "How shall we change the world?"
"I saw our house, today," she said. "When the lady asked do we know our future. Remember our dream? That house. I saw the forest on the island, and the meadow. I saw where we're going to build the house we went to in the dream."
One corner of her mouth curved in a tiny smile. "Do you think they'd mind, all those hundreds of other usses everywhere at once beyond time and space? Considering what we've been through," she said, "do you think they'd mind if we built our house first, and then changed the world?"
forty-nine
THE LITTLE earth-mover roared over the hill, saw me by the meadow, rolled down to meet me, its steel bucket half-full of topsoil for the garden.
"Hi, sweetie!" Leslie called, over the roar of the engine. Workdays, she wore heavy white coveralls, her hair swirled up under a yellow tractor-cap; hands disappeared in heavy leather gloves on the steering-handles of the machine.
She was master of the earth-mover, these days, glad to work at last on the house she had built for so long hi her mind.
She shut the engine down. "How's my darling word-smith?"
