“Not too hot, not too cold.”
“Ah, I see.” I nibbled a twist of licorice. Then I remembered: “But no one lives in the City, right? Isn’t that what you said?”
He nodded without looking up. “Hasn’t been discovered yet.”
On the deck, he’d pulled apart all the geometrically intersecting walls and roads, all the towers and moats, and made what looked like a random assortment of leaves and stones—what the wind might have left, or a big rain. He kept picking up a certain pocked maple leaf and setting it down somewhere else, perfecting a design only he could see.
Which is why when Patra returned an hour later from errands in town, she walked right over Europa’s capital. Paul howled for exactly one second—”Mooom!”—then laid on his back in the ruins of his city and refused to speak.
“What is it?” Patra asked, at first amused. Then exasperated. She crouched down and kissed at his chin. “Kiddo, what is it? What did I do?” but he wouldn’t open his eyes. She looked over at me, sitting with my knees to my chest, and though it would have been simple to say what she’d done wrong, I kept quiet. I wasn’t sure how to explain Europa’s capital to her without it sounding condescending, without speaking as if Paul weren’t there. I shrugged. “Okay,” Patra said. “Paul the kid is taking a time out. This kiddo here is having a rest, because he’s so excited that his dad’s coming tomorrow. Right?”
It was clearly Patra who was so excited. That afternoon, she’d biked into town to pick up extra groceries and cut her hair instead of working on the manuscript. She’d made an appointment with Nellie Banks—who’d gone to beauty school—and it was strange now to see Patra’s hair feathered and short, curled up under her ears. It moved with a different gravity than it did before, Europa’s gravity perhaps, shifting complexly in the late afternoon light.
Slowly, deliberately, I put on Paul’s leather glove and had it walk on two fingers over to him, sniff his knee like a tiny animal.
“Hee,” he said, sitting up.
When he did, I saw that his face was pouring with sweat. It gathered in a big drip at his chin. His pupils had taken over his eyes, flying saucers coming in. He swayed.
“Okay, then,” Patra said. As if Paul had made some argument to which she’d given in. She scooped him up in her arms, and her voice scrabbled up an octave—”Feefifofum”—then it came back down slowly on stairs. “I. Smell. The blood—” She chewed his neck, and when he half smiled, she said, “Hey, little man. Hey, kiddo. What does CS tell us?”
“I smell the blood.”
“There is no spot where God is—”
“You’re the Englishman,” he told her.
Patra nudged open the sliding door with one knee and went inside, Paul in her arms like an excess of infant—all dangling limbs—and the white cat darted out just as the door closed. Patra didn’t notice. The cat made a break for the far side of the deck, then stopped abruptly, as if coming to an unseen boundary. The end of Europa. The start of the woods.
“What?” I asked it. “May as well try the world.”
The cat turned around to look at me. Ears back, whiskers trolling the air.
I menaced it. “What do you think I’m gonna do?”
It was already evening, already six o’clock. But as I listened to a running faucet, snatches of a song through the screen, the whole day seemed to bare its open jaws at me. There was nothing to do now that Paul and Patra had gone inside. The sun overhead was still high enough in the sky to feel fixed forever. The white cat made a wide slow circle around me on the deck, then sat stiffly at the sliding glass door, waiting to be let back in. Meowing plaintively, going like a clock alarm, without pause. I should have just gone home. I should have clomped down the steps and found the trail, headed for the ridge of red pine, followed by the stand of old birch. Loon nest, beaver dam, sumac trail, dogs. I should have gone home to the dogs, who would have slobbered all over my face and hands with happiness.