This_Shared_Dream

Megan and Abbie

ZOZO

June 20

MEGAN GOT OFF THE BUS and hurried up the hill. Jim had asked her to come home early. He had a suddenly-yesterday deadline and the babysitter couldn’t make it. She had found herself looking up side streets from her bus window, trying to spot Walking Man.

When she let herself in the front door, she was puzzled. No one in the living room. No one in Abbie’s room. She poked her head inside Jim’s office. “Where is she?”

Jim nodded. “In your room. In the loft.”

“But—”

“I put up the ladder. She’s fine. She has a grip like a monkey. Close the door when you go out, please.” Jim became very short when on deadline.

Megan went down the hall and heard Abbie chattering. She opened the door, thinking that Abbie must be talking to someone on the phone. But no, she was talking some kind of weird baby talk. “Mareem? Ush gondo maybe.”

Megan climbed the ladder and poked her head over the ledge’s edge. Megan looked up and said, “Arabwa—mama aqui.”

“Arabwa,” said another child’s voice.

“Who are you talking to?” asked Megan. “What is that?” She crawled into the loft and nestled next to Abbie.

“It’s, ah, it’s a new classbook.”

“Oh. Did you get it at school?”

Abbie nodded.

“Turn it back on. I want to see it.”

Abbie sighed and touched it.

Megan saw the back of a boy’s head. He was black, and his head was close-shaven. She heard jungle birds and monkey calls and padding feet.

“What is this?”

“Shhh,” said Abbie. “En finate?”

“Na,” said a girl’s voice. The screen’s view moved dizzyingly, and Megan saw a girl’s face. Her skin was very black, and her hair was braided in an intricate, beautiful pattern. She was sweating. “Un garo.”

“What are you saying?” asked Megan.

“I asked her if they were safe and she said no.”

“Safe from what?”

“Soldiers are following them.”

As Megan watched, the scene veered wildly. The children appeared to be running.

Then the view turned into a map with a blinking red dot and a blinking yellow dot.

“Eh, vega abuente nin oest. Oest! Bey ingo! Now!”

The red dot veered left suddenly, then stopped. “Oosha,” whispered another voice. “Oosh.”

There was no sound. The yellow dot bypassed the red dot, and after a few more minutes turned right.

“Abwe,” said three voices at once.

“Thank be,” said the girl whose screen it was.

“Welkum thee,” said another child’s voice.

“Who are you?” asked Megan.

There was no answer.

“She doesn’t speak English, Mom.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Kids’ language. Zozo. We make it up.”

“Where is that girl?”

Abbie touched the pad a few times and the view enlarged, showed a continent. “Africa,” she said. “The Congo. It’s really bad there. We help kids get away from soldiers and find food. It’s really, really educational.”

“I see. What else do you do?”

“When kids need help, like when parents are hitting them, we call police. There was a girl in New York City last week. Her dad locked her in a closet. We saw it all on her classbook. The police came and got her. Look, here’s an SOS.”

Megan’s head reeled. “Have you seen any—really bad things?”

“Lots.”

“I mean, like…” Shootings. Sex.

Abbie shook her head, still looking at the screen. “Shanwee ib jump. No. The screen won’t let us. It goes blank. It won’t show people hurting other people. I think that maybe that information is somewhere. But I’m too young to see it.”

Megan was relieved. “How old do you have to be?”

“I don’t know. Way old. When you’re older, the system knows. Then you can see and do more.”

“Can I use it?”

“Won’t work for you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re old. The classbook can tell.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But you can’t even talk like us. Adults aren’t allowed. They just want to fight with one another and boss kids around.”

“I don’t want to fight. I am your mother, though.”

“You have your own places to go. Kids have this place. It’s our own place.”

Megan recalled Jill’s garden. She’d planted it when she was ten. She studied a garden book from the library, in her typical Jillish way, and planted bachelor buttons and carnations and snapdragons. Jill would then take a book inside her private kingdom and lean against the tree trunk and read. Sometimes she would just think, or draw. Maddeningly, Jill would not let Megan or Brian inside, or even pay a bit of attention to them or their distracting antics as they tried to annoy her. It was as if she were protected by an invisible curtain when she was in there. Sam and Bette enforced this. “She needs a private space,” Bette said. “You can make your own if you want.”

“I don’t want my own,” Megan said. “I want Jill’s!” She hadn’t understood her mother’s smile, but she did now.

“Does Miss Ginny know?”

Abbie was silent for a moment, watching her screen. She did not raise her eyes as she spoke. “Miss Ginny told us not to use this part in school because she thinks it’s distracting.”

“Imagine that.”

“Some kids said that their parents wanted it blocked, but other parents got mad and said their kids need it for emergencies. I think people have tried to block it but they can’t.” Her fingers whitened as she gripped her classbook. She all but curled herself into a ball around it, and glared at Megan.

“Listen honey, I need to take your classbook for now and ask some questions about it.” Megan felt very predictable.

“No!” Abbie held it close to her chest. “We need it!”

“We?”

“All of us kids. We made it. It’s ours!” She shouted at the screen. “Mommy quieras abro!”

The screen was instantly filled with the faces of angry children, of all colors, all kinds of interesting hair, bright and dull clothing, each in their own little window, and all of them were shouting, in their strange new language.

“What are they saying?” asked Megan, although she had a feeling she knew.

“They say … not to let you. They say … hide it from the grown-ups.” She looked up at Megan, tears in her eyes, and Megan knew she was in for a righteous-passion meltdown, level ten. “I was! You came home early!”

Nevertheless, Megan pried it, as gently as possible, finger by tight finger, from Abbie’s hands. “Your father and I will talk about this and decide if it’s safe for you.”

Abbie burst into loud wails and slid down the ladder, releasing her feet so that she bumped against every rung.

“And don’t bother your father now!” Megan yelled, as Abbie slammed the door behind her. Megan sighed, climbed down, and went to grab her before she could bother Jim.

Jill

FUGUE

July 1

A FEW DAYS BEFORE HER PARTY, Jill was in her office at the Bank. So far, she kept telling herself, she’d been doing just fine being back at work. Her colleagues were looking forward to her party, curious, of course, about her house. No one but her boss and good friend, Don Robertos, knew about her St. Elizabeth’s sojourn, and it seemed he had not told anyone, because there had been no sidelong glances or any change in manner among her fellows—except, perhaps, a wee bit of jealous surprise that she now had her own office, complete with a window and a door, thanks to her doctorate. That was a part of the deal she’d made a while back.

She was only a few blocks away from the Serendipity Books, so it was easy for her to take evening shifts, if necessary, and Elmore had no problem with picking up Whens from school on those days.

Six floors below, outside of Jill’s unopenable window, a summer morning in Washington slid into afternoon. Busses, cars, and cabs rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, and pedestrians thronged the street.

Jill tried to concentrate on reading a report on riots in Nairobi. They were worsening.

One school, an earlier project, not one of the new domes, was now occupied by militants. Anyone who could, escaped out the windows, even from the second floor. All the girls that couldn’t get away were raped; all the boys were marched off to join the insurgents.

She was reading the report for the third time because it seemed that when she read it the first two times the words just beaded up like raindrops on a windshield. They didn’t penetrate her mind. Where she wanted to see “Reading scores up” and “Fifty percent of graduates find jobs,” she saw rape, murder, and, even though the words weren’t actually there, propaganda and religious ideology. She saw Us and Them, words she wanted to see used in less extreme ways.

She closed the screen, picked up her purse, and stepped out of her office into a large room filled with corrals, locking her door behind her.

Bill Anderson—someone who she would just as soon not talk to right now—showed up instantly, meticulously dressed, as usual. She never saw him with rolled-up shirtsleeves, much less scuffed shoes. His ties were beautifully coordinated, and his haircut probably cost him fifty bucks every ten days. He stood in front of her, looked past her, looked at the floor, and finally came out with, “How about lunch?”

She smiled, she hoped. At least, she made her mouth into an approximation of one, and said, “Not today.” Everyone knew about her separation and pending divorce, and she knew that he was working himself up to asking her for a date. For some reason he made her uneasy. He liked to stand in her doorway and talk about Germany, which was his specialty. Hers too, but he once or twice dropped in seemingly casual questions about her mother and father. He was not very good at it. Why would he want to know about Sam and Bette? He tried to cover it up by talking about his own parents, and he was clumsy about that too, insisting on some storybook tale of immigrants from Germany in the 1700s farming and living in nice little farmhouses in Pennsylvania. Of course, tens of thousands of people had done just that, but he made it sound like something he’d learned from reading children’s primers from the 1950s. She wished she could have uninvited him to the party, but she could hardly have left him out.

That was just a small niggle, left behind as she headed toward the elevator. The real problem was that she felt stiff inside a straightjacket of ineffectiveness. The World Bank was not supposed to distribute classbooks, a powerful learning tool, proscribed by international law from containing “propaganda.” Some people believed that language itself was propaganda, that words, inflections, idioms, all contained cultural biases of which the user was often unconscious. Fair enough. But words were all they had, right now, to combat images of violence in video games, in movies, in real life—images that Megan claimed activated something called mirror neurons, which caused people to imitate one another.

Her International Schools Project was garnering kudos from thousands of sources. She ought to be very happy about that, Don had told her just this morning.

Wasn’t she?

Jill slid down from the sixth floor of the World Bank in the elevator, which was sleek and like The Future, like the ideas of The Future she’d absorbed in the fifties, and moved into a different state of mind.

* * *

Exiting the air-cooled building, she smiled at the security guy who greeted her each morning and biometriced her in.

She paused in the doorway, hot already, but cooled by bursts of cold air as people went in and out of the building, at a loss. What should she do now? She certainly wasn’t hungry.

Cars poured down Pennsylvania Avenue when the light changed. A bus stopped in front of her; the doors accordioned open.

For an instant she almost jumped on. It was a number ten bus; she used to know the routes of all the busses, although they surely had changed since she rode them everywhere as a child. Streets of small, decades-old shops—drugstores, grocery stores, restaurants—opened in her mind like scenes on a splayed fan: the bus could take her there, there, or there. As she mused, the bus pulled away, the fan closed.

Crossing Pennsylvania Avenue, she quickly entered a neighborhood of town houses. She hiked uphill, angling up the small blocks until she came out on Connecticut Avenue north of Dupont Circle.

The maples lining the sidewalk were quiet, alien creatures in the loud city, and yet, she mused, they would be here, and they would multiply, when the city was gone. It was strange to think of the city being gone, but of course, eventually, it would be. Plants had plenty of time to wait.

Everywhere she looked she saw people—not dense, but quite present, walking in the dappled sunlight beneath trees, each of them made of an uncountable number of cells, each cell capable of generating humans; each one of them constantly, waking or sleeping, generating stories, universes, everywhere, everywhere.…

She realized, distantly, that she was in a fugue state, like the one that had put her in the hospital, but didn’t care. This one was deeply pleasant. She just walked, and walked, among the alien trees and infinite-celled people, and didn’t notice the art store until she was right next to it.

The window was full of completely seductive objects that she had to have. Blank notebooks in many formats, including landscape-sized. Banks of brilliant markers. Easels. Brushes. Watercolors, oils, pastels. Fine paper, in all varieties and weights and tooth.

Though it had been years since she’d done anything in an artistic vein, she felt the thrill of a siren’s call. Painting Woman had been asleep for a long, long time.

Asleep since her mother had disappeared. Asleep since Dallas, and having nightmares of debilitating guilt.

Jill gazed at the window display, and let Painting Woman awaken, stretch, and take a deep breath. She was voracious with memory, eager for the delicious joy of drawing, painting, representing. Her hands fairly ached to move, to draw all that she saw—in hopes of what? Interpreting? Remembering? Laying down a record that said to those who followed This this! is what it was, when it was everything, and everything was magnified; intense, demanding.

She had used pencils, first, and green Morilla Clipper Ship sketchbooks, to bring Gypsy Myra to life. Before that, she had sketched for years, simplified her lines, studied the classics from Harriman to Kelly, acceded when images called her to record them: Megan, asleep on the couch on a summer afternoon; the polished dining room table holding a vase; the intricate frills and leaf veins of a partially shaded rose.

When Underground comix first came out she felt curiously not a part of it. All of the artists were males. They were all males writing about, and drawing, sex. Because her characters were hard-edged and original and wanted to save the world like all good counterculture kids did, she was accepted, but it was kind of as an honorary male, and she was quickly famous—at least in that small, but national, community.

The panels: shorthand. Swiftly drawn lines made emotions clear without the need for fancy verbal descriptions. The character’s background, weaknesses, foibles, were constantly expressed, as if each panel came straight from the center of the story, rather than building with the linearity of a novel. It was a new language.

But it was a scary language. Right now, even the thought of speaking it again brought back all that pain, doubt, suffering, depression, the heavy responsibility, everything that had spiraled outward from Gypsy Myra and had led her to Dallas.

Jill, not Painting Woman, pushed open the door and walked into its cool, waiting realm. Maybe she had learned something in St. E’s after all. How to surrender; the importance and power of being oneself, not many.

She roved up and down the aisles in a time-free interlude of gathering in this land of milk and honey. Unlike in her younger days, she could now afford anything—the finest watercolors, the best paper, expensive brushes analogous to a Stradivarius; pastels and oil crayons to point things up. Good tools that would faithfully reflect her thoughts. The cashier’s face registered astonishment as she rang up the bill, and a young man helped her carry everything out to a taxi.

The taxi stopped at her mansion of flowers and wicker chairs and Zen poems, of Bette’s school and cool stone grotto by the creek coupled with Sam’s cool jazz, of Megan and Brian running up and down stairs, letting screen doors slam, of her father loosening his tie as he strode in the door after work and flinging it on the polished cherry table in the foyer and finding Bette, wherever she was, grabbing her around the waist, and kissing her deep and hard, every single afternoon, exclaiming “Doll baby!” Yes, the house was alive again.

It took Jill a while to carry everything upstairs to her old room. Then, she passed out in her old bed wearing all her clothes, including her shoes, while delicious, overwhelming, color infused her with paradise, complete.

The honking horn of Whens’ school van woke her an hour later.

She was disoriented for a moment, but that didn’t stop her from running down the stairs, opening the front door, and waving to the driver.

The evening passed pleasantly, with Whens so obedient and charming that Jill would have suspected something had he been older. After a perfunctory fuss at bedtime, he was soon asleep. Jill was at his side, falling in the space between waking and sleeping into the replenishing nourishment of Beauty.

* * *

Jill awoke to full, lucid, refreshed consciousness.

The only problem was that it was three o’clock in the morning. Crap.

She wondered if a sound had awakened her, someone trying to break into the house. But Manfred was lying on the floor, peacefully asleep. She eased out of bed, careful not to disturb Whens.

Manfred, instantly awake, followed Jill.

As she prowled the house, Jill wasn’t sure what to do if she found someone there. Maybe Brian was right. Maybe she was just nervous about being here alone.

But finally, she declared to herself that everything was clear. She was just having a case of her regular old insomnia.

Then she realized that it was more than that. It was work time.

This had always been Painting Woman’s favorite time to work. Somehow, in this dark no-time, while stars spiraled overhead, it was easier to access the interstices, to investigate strangeness, to lay down lines of words or pictures, to create these messages from the present to some future.

She made herself a pot of oolong tea and took it up to her old room. The evidence of rough and smooth paper riffling through her fingers convinced her she was awake. Choosing a sheet of medium-slick paper, the paper on which she had pen-and-inked her Madwoman of Time comic, she wondered: Was another installation coming on?

She smiled, recalling Elmore in those days, then frowned. Elmore couldn’t even remember them. Denied them, and therefore, that they had ever fallen in love, caught up in the heady times and their shared commitment to social justice.

As she rummaged in the small top drawer for a clean nib, inserted it into the nib-holder, and opened a jar of India ink, she finally felt the ache of loss that the therapist had told her would come at some point. But it was not just that he’d forgotten their shared past—in this world, he simply hadn’t shared it. Maybe she was silly to think that this made him much poorer in spirit than the Elmore she’d known before. She missed him so! Lavender Lady had no right to him!

She laughed at her thought, then broke into sobs and hugged herself; staggered around and leaned against the doorway until it passed.

Then she hurried down the hall, through ghosts of three kids, and her dad shaving before work as the radio sang “Citizen’s Bank of Maryland conveniently yours,” and yanked the bathroom’s chain light. As large as a suburban bedroom, tiled with tiny black-and-white hexagons, it held the old easy chair where Bette had leaned forward as she watched her kids splash in the slipper tub, next to the tall window admitting the drone of cicadas, and Sam’s moonlight-drenched garden.

When Jill opened the faucet to splash cold water on her face, the pipes shuddered and moaned. She rubbed her face dry and was ready: but for what? Not Gypsy Myra.

But once she was back in her room, it became immediately clear. Painting Woman had awakened. Jill’s walkabout the previous afternoon had been Painting Woman’s yawn, stretch, and coffee interlude, and then she had stocked up with the breakfast and vitamin infusion of materials.

She was, of course, not a separate entity within Jill. But she was a part of Jill’s persona that she had buried. Doing art—penning the Gypsy Myra comics—had led to the complete disintegration of her world, literally. No wonder she had stopped paying attention to Painting Woman’s urges and demands.

Maybe, Jill speculated, she was stronger now, able to bear and allow Painting Woman her rightful place in the physical world, her own means of expression, because of her breakdown. Yes, that sounded like suitable therapy-speak. At any rate, she had tried ignoring her, using the time-honored method of Getting on with Her Life. That had been ever so successful. Allowing felt much, much better.

Jill moved pots of dead plants from her weathered oak painting table, sent the remaining dry leaves flying with an old T-shirt, and eagerly unpacked her bags of loot.

Dr. Ph. Martin’s colorfast dyes, in eyedropper bottles, with seductive names like Gamboge and Rose Madder. Fifteen tubes of Dutch watercolors. Ten fine brushes of Kolinsky sable—rounds, filberts, flats, in many sizes.

Painting Woman had never registered hunger or drop-dead exhaustion. She always ignored them, and always ignored Megan and Brian frolicking around her, or her mother, trying to get her to come down to dinner or go to sleep.

She radiated ideas—mostly images, but sometimes narrative as well. Generally, Painting Woman didn’t much care what Jill did with her radiations—sell them, give them away, or toss them in a corner. She was just adamant about the need to record them. Jill imagined poets felt the same imperative urge regarding their poetry, and writers about their stories.

This night, in the old house, in her old room, as creek frogs sang and warm, damp air suffused the paper, was one of those times. She even imagined the comforting, faint scent of Bette’s cigarette, wafting up from the grotto by the creek that Sam had built for her. Bette had been an insomniac too.

Jill rummaged in the large junk drawer, found some masking tape, and taped down the edges of a sheet of watercolor paper. Theoretically, you were supposed to soak the paper in water and tape it to a board, and when it dried, it would remain flat and smooth. But Painting Woman was in a big rush, damn her. She was often wasteful. Not only that, she thought everything she suggested was perfect. Jill, on the other hand, had a moment’s anxiety about using such expensive paper for something unplanned, something that might turn out badly. But using expensive paper was always anxiety producing, whether or not she had something planned.

Jill took a moment to rummage for a water container and found an old enamel pot. Walking to the bathroom, she held Painting Woman at bay, rather like an air traffic controller telling a plane that it had to circle the airport, while Painting Woman yelled over the radio that the passengers were becoming so restless that they just might go to another airport.

It was all marvelously familiar, despite the gap of many years, and a sidestep to another world.

Jill filled the pot with water. She did need water in order to paint, she reminded Painting Woman. She couldn’t be expected to have everything ready all the time.

She switched on a small art nouveau lamp that Megan had found at a yard sale that featured rows of tiny green fish within parallel copper boundaries, and poured herself a finger of Oban Scotch from an old, dusty bottle she’d hidden from her parents ages ago.

Painting Woman always wore a long dress. Jill wore raggedy shorts and a white T-shirt, perfect for wiping her brushes. She sipped the fine Scotch.

She hated to be bossed around.

Finally, she snapped, “Okay! Okay!”

She considered the blank paper.

It was an odd weight, two-hundred pound, but handmade and cold-pressed. It had a pleasing, wavy deckle edge and was off-white, rather creamy.

A pencil was required; a sketch. All these expensive supplies, and she needed a pencil! The junk drawer had one that was from Hart’s Ice Factory on U Street. Teeth marks broke the white paint. A dog’s? A child’s?

Its line was too hard and faint. Her old pencils were here somewhere, real pencils, from 9H to 9B. Finally, she spotted them, splayed in an old jelly jar on top of her dresser.

The picture took form.

The process was not much different from the comics she had created. She saw something in her mind and drew it. It was not that she couldn’t do the elementary things that most artists did; she had taken life classes, she had set up still-life tableaus, she had painted portraits of both Brian and Megan when they were ten and twelve, and they had laughed at them quite cruelly. Jill wondered, as she drew, if the portraits were in the attic, or if they had, as threatened, used the sturdy canvases as sleds the following winter.

There was a headless statue in the foreground. Greece? A tree in front of a wall; the rear of a garden.

The garden contained chairs and tables. Soon, it contained a bar, in the background, with a roof. She determined a vanishing point, got a ruler from the drawer, and redrew.

Those were the sketchy parts, the background for the main subjects. A woman and a man, embracing.

Red, wrote Jill on the woman’s dress.

And finally, with a mixture of dread and love, she sketched out their heads.

It was clear that the woman’s hair was blond, and, although Jill could only see the back of her head, she was Jill’s mother.

The man rested his head on top of Bette’s head, lightly, and of course, he was Sam; the weathered, sad Sam of the 1970s. But in this instant, his features were illuminated with joy. His eyes were closed, and a slight smile played across his lips. His arms held Bette tightly, crushing her dress in radiating shadows.

The flowering tree had a scent, linden, but Jill could not paint that. It was night; and a full moon illuminated the garden, and a light from somewhere—perhaps a house window—brightened a skewed rectangle of Bette’s dress. The brass rail of the bar had a dull glint; the shadows of the linden branches required Jill’s smallest brush. A wash of gold was too strong; she blotted it out with a paper towel, leaving a pale, almost white, yellow, which she glazed with the suggestion of bricks in moonlight.

It was about four in the morning when she realized that the painting was done.

The Biergarten. Was Painting Woman trying to tell her something? If so, she would have to shout much louder. Jill knew all about the Biergarten.

She rinsed her brushes and set them bristle-up in a glass to dry. She carried the old enamel pot downstairs to the porch and tossed paint-tinted water into the backyard, washed the white plate she had used as a palette and set it in the dish drainer, returned to her room and made sure each tube of paint was tightly capped and returned to its assigned space in her toolbox, untaped the painting, and thought she was done.

But no.

Painting Woman was only warming up.

Cicadas whirred their slow calypso of sound, ceaseless and yet varying, comforting waves of intensities and lulls. A drawing took form in a large-format sketchbook.

The Madwoman of Time.

She still wasn’t sure what had happened. She had pressed her father about it again and again, but he just wouldn’t talk about what had happened, about the day of the Kent State Massacre when she had hitchhiked into time to try and prevent Kennedy’s assassination, based on the blueprint poured into her mind by the Madwoman of Time.

Jill sketched her quickly.

She had a strong face, a large, straight nose, large, dark eyes, a wide mouth, and long, dark, curly hair.

When she’d picked Jill up outside Slapdown, Arkansas, she’d been wearing jeans—faded Levi’s 501s, actually—a light cotton, red plaid shortsleeved shirt, and scarred black pointed-toe boots. Her hair was tied back with a red bandana, and she drove a white F100 pickup truck that rattled something terrible. She’d pulled up next to Jill on the hot, narrow road that seemed to stretch to infinity, leaned over, flung open the door, and said, “Get in.”

* * *

“Want a beer?”

Jill looked over and saw that the woman had a bottle of beer clamped between her thighs. She shifted into high gear with eye-blurring speed. Eighty-mile-an-hour wind roared past the open wing windows, and they had to shout to be heard. The woman took a long gulp of beer and thrust it toward Jill.

“No, thanks.”

“Got some on ice in the back.”

“Uh … Want me to drive?”

The woman threw back her head and laughed. “Not quite yet, sister. Now, just look around and tell me what the hell there is to run into out here.”

“Telephone poles.”

“Aaach. What’s your name?”

“Jill.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks.”

“How far you going?”

“Dallas.”

The woman nodded, and a strange look came into her eyes. Her voice changed in a subtle way. She was more serious. And she sounded far from drunk. “Aren’t you a little young to be hitchhiking? You should go back home.”

“I know who you are.” The realization was sudden, but Jill knew that she was right.

“And who is that?”

“Gypsy Myra.” Jill turned and leaned her back against the truck’s door, laid her arm along the back of the truck’s bench seat that they shared. “I created a comic book about you. But there’s something beneath that.”

Jill thought she blinked away tears, but couldn’t be sure. “And what might that be?”

“You tell me.” Working with a bunch of radicals, yelling at protests, arguing political points, and being thrown in jail multiple times had honed Jill’s naturally assertive nature.

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can. It has something to do with the Game Board, right?”

“The Game Board?”

“The Infinite Game Board. That’s what we call it. Brian and Megan and I.”

The woman nodded, as if satisfied. “I do know where you are going, Jill, and I knew where to find you. But you do not have to do this.”

“I need to save Kennedy. Once he is assassinated—”

“History will take a different turn, to be sure. The history that you will be in.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“There are an infinite number of histories, Jill. And I am beginning to believe that when you average them all out, none of them is any better or worse than the other. Each has their share of happiness, misery, prosperity, poverty, inhumanity.”

“But it’s all local,” said Jill. “I’ve heard this before.”

“You have?”

“Not about an infinite amount of histories, no. But you have to work with what’s around you. Change that. It’s hard work. But once you change things, there’s a ripple effect. You go into a poor neighborhood, start with the little kids. Maria Montessori went into Rome’s poorest neighborhood. All the kids were little hoodlums, defacing property, dirty, no manners. And just by thinking scientifically about how humans learn and by developing targeted materials that isolated each step to be mastered, she helped them learn to read in just months. Four-year-old Italian children whose parents probably didn’t know how to read. And now my own mother has a Montessori school in the United States. It’s spreading. That’s what I’m talking about. You need a seed amount of people who have an idea of what to do.”

“This is just amazing.”

“What is?”

“That you’ve turned out this way.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I know your parents. But I’ve never met you. It’s just amazing that you have thought about these things at your age.”

Jill was surprised. “But that’s all we talk about, my friends and I. How to make things better. How to change the world.”

As she drew these frames, fifteen years later, it all came back. The background was jumpy, like Krazy Kat’s Coconino County. And drawing helped her remember what Myra said next: that her name was not Myra.

It was Eliani Hadntz.

* * *

Jill bent from side to side to uncrick her back. The sky was growing light; she’d been sitting on her stool for hours. Making words come out of the character’s mouths in little balloons. My Othertime Trip to Dallas. In front of her was a pen-and-ink drawing of Hadntz in the truck, complete with red bandana, as if Jill had sketched it while leaning back against the passenger door as wind riffled the paper, washed here and there with color. She looked around her table. As she worked, she had, without paying much attention, spread all her watercolor supplies around once again. It looked as if a tornado had struck.

Jill forced herself to look at the pictures, the narrative, that had emerged. It took up most of the sketchbook. Her heart was pounding hard, as if she had just awakened from a nightmare. She hadn’t consciously remembered these details. Maybe this was what it was like to be hypnotized—one suddenly recalled things that the conscious mind had forgotten. Or hidden from itself. Or—hadn’t the therapist mentioned post- traumatic stress syndrome? She didn’t know if this was what had really happened.

But it felt true.

And now, with a desire that almost made her sick in body and in mind, she wanted the Infinite Game Board back. But she’d left it in Dallas.

She wanted it just as much, if not more than, the joker who had called her, demanding it, or the Device, back.

Whoever the hell he was.

When It Landed

July 4

NOBODY WAS HOME when the school began to grow, way, way back on the huge acreage that even Sam had not been able to thoroughly tame.

Bette had placed the seed she’d received at her PO box at the far reaches of the property within a dense screen of oaks and kudzu. The tiny meadow was frequented by urban fox and deer, as well as the occasional neighbor kid. Nobody could see it because there were trees all around it.

Whens reached the embryonic school several days later, by a narrow path about a hundred feet long, lined, his mother often warned him, by poison ivy, though she constantly sprayed and pulled and mowed. She was terribly allergic to it. She often threatened to plow it under, pave it over. Whens seemed immune, and liked to go down to the meadow to think, lying on his back inside the circle of giant oak trees, in a round place of tall grass flattened by a deer. The creek burbled nearby, and the leaves and grasses made whispery sounds in the breeze.

But this time, after dragging his shirt free from blackberry thorns, he rounded a bend in the path and almost stumbled into the school.

He stared at it, wonderstruck. The walls were shimmering and translucent, and it looked like half of a big strange ball. A half-sphere, he thought, a … hemisphere, a word he’d learned in school. He knew at once that he would not tell his mother about it. She got so worried about every little thing. And this, he had to admit, was a rather big thing. He would swear Bitsy and Zoe and Abbie to secrecy—with blood, if possible. Sitting cross-legged during the afternoon, he watched the thin skin thicken while Manfred lay panting next to him. It had a round door and a little tunnel that led into the main dome. Kind of like an igloo, maybe.

He heard his mother yell, in her cross voice, “Whens! Time for dinner! Where are you? What did I tell you about—”

He jumped up instantly and ran out onto the lawn behind the house. “I’m right here.”

“You weren’t back in all that poison ivy, were you? You’re probably covered with ticks.”

He ran up the steps. “What’s for dinner?”

* * *

Later on that night, Bette descended her secret stairway, stretched, lit a cigarette, and headed down into the woods to examine the thing she’d seen from her garret window. It was small, but recognizable, a three-dimensional realization of the plans for the Q-School she had sent to Hadntz.

My God, she thought. It really worked.

Jill’s Party

July 6

JILL’S PARTY BEGAN when a few neighbors poked their heads in the front door and asked if they could help, and when Jill said no, helped anyway.

Emmie from across the street filled an old copper tub in the kitchen corner with pop bottles and her husband poured bags of ice on top. Brian tapped the beer ponies and started one of their dad’s reel-to-reel tapes; this one was titled “1939/4.” Cindy pushed Jill out the kitchen door and told her to get ready.

Jill took a shower in the third-floor bathroom, letting cold water sluice luxuriously through her hair, washing away the sweat of the day. Someone had cleaned out the tub, which was nice. Megan, probably. Her missing shampoo was here too.

The temperature was pushing ninety, but downstairs an array of fans alleviated the heat. A huge industrial-strength fan in the second floor ceiling pulled in cool evening air through wide-open windows. The house had no air-conditioning; it had been designed, with thick plaster walls, high ceilings, and cross-ventilation to remain almost comfortable on even the most sultry of Washington summer days.

She pulled the shower curtain aside and stepped out of the claw-footed tub onto the cool mosaic floor and peered out the window into the backyard. About fifteen out-of-control children chased a ball. Good. Wear them out. Whens was screaming loudest.

Whens was such a funny little boy. A few days ago she’d found the picture of Sam and Bette that she’d painted propped next to his bed.

“Why did you take it?” she had asked.

He looked worried. “Is it okay?”

“Of course, sweetie. I’m glad you like it. I was just wondering why.”

“The lady is very pretty,” he had said, and smiled.

Grabbing a towel, Jill walked down to the second floor, rubbing her hair. In the dressing room, she donned the white silk pants she had planned to wear and discovered that they were too big. She looked in the mirror, dismayed. The waistband hung on her hips. Well, she hadn’t been very hungry lately.

She pushed hangers aside and came to a chic, simple dress that had belonged to her mother. She recalled seeing Bette wear it, along with a pillbox hat. It was a rather Mondrian dress, bisected with heavy black lines which contained hot pink, the color of the spring azaleas in the side yard, bright yellow, and a strong, Greek-sea blue. Might as well try it.

Cindy opened the door just as Jill, with some difficulty, finished zipping it up.

“Ooh, la la!”

“Does it look all right?”

Cindy tilted her head and put one finger next to her mouth. “Madam, it could go from an embassy party to a PTA meeting with only a few changes. Let me show you a new silk scarf that just came in that would accessorize it perfectly—”

“Oh, shut up.”

“It looks great. Comb your hair and get on downstairs. Guests are arriving. And,” she said, glancing at Jill’s bare feet, “I know what you’re thinking, but no running shoes. I’m serious.”

Jill sighed and pointed at a pair of flat shoes that resembled ballet slippers.

“God, no. These.” Cindy picked up a pair of white, very high heels, and handed them to her. “Got any pearls?” She ducked when Jill threw one of the shoes at her, and ran down the hall laughing.

* * *

When Jill got downstairs, Cindy shoved a glass of ice water into her hand and told her that absolutely the only thing she had to do was walk around and chat. Jill gulped the water on her way to the buffet and poured Scotch over the ice. She examined the bottle, intrigued. She’d never heard of Teacher’s.

Everyone raved about Jill’s dress, her upswept hair, the magnificent house, and the extraordinary mixture of guests. The house was full of people, and they overflowed onto the porch and into the yard.

By now, the children had been rounded up by their team of two seasoned, negotiation-proof babysitters and were somewhere upstairs, for once not the loudest contingent in the house.

She spent an hour circulating and sat down at a table in a dark corner of the screened-in porch with a glass of dark ale, watching the crowd.

One couple danced to a Benny Goodman tune. Others took advantage of being semi-outdoors to smoke. Most everyone had a glass in their hand. A man in a far corner of the porch, clean-shaven, sat in a wicker chair smoking, a glass of whiskey perched on the arm of a chair, reading a book and nodding along with Glenn Miller. The top of his head had a bald spot.

Something about him seemed familiar. In fact, he put her in mind of Wink, her father’s old friend. Excited, she made to stand up and get closer. The lights blinked off, right then, and just as everyone groaned, came back on.

But the lights were dim and few, now, and a British RAF officer sat across the table from her, looking haggard, though he smiled broadly at her. Dark varnish, marred by a veritable collage of ancient carvings, covered the heavy, ancient, table on which their pint glasses sat, both well below the pint line. At the ornate bar across the room about fifteen people, in forties-style dress or military uniforms, perched on tall chairs or stood with one foot on the brass rail. The same couple still danced; the tom-toms of “Sing, Sing, Sing” beat in insistent pulse; the place smelled of centuries of spilled beer.

The same Wink-like man sat in the corner, this time perched on a barstool, wearing some kind of Army hat. A blond WAC, her back to Jill, spoke and gestured to him with urgent intensity. He responded now and then. Finally she bowed her head as if thinking, looked up again, nodded, and turned to leave the pub.

Jill was going to follow her when she heard the ominous buzz of a V-1 rocket, one of thousands of winged bombs launched from skids on the Continent. They had been falling for months.

All conversation stopped as the distinctive reverberations of hell’s own power mower, augmented a hundredfold, roared overhead and went suddenly silent. The fuel had cut off; a full ton of explosives was falling. Somewhere nearby. Or directly overhead.

No one spoke for thirty seconds, but the RAF officer looked into her eyes as what might be the last few seconds of their lives passed. An explosion sounded; pictures on the wall shook. The officer smiled. “Newcastle, I was saying. But if you…”

Someone pried her fingers from the glass of ale. Cindy was bending over her. “Yo. Jill. Coffee break.”

“Iced, I hope,” she managed to say.

Cindy pulled up a chair and sat next to her. “You okay?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

“You had a strange look on your face. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“None. I’m fine.”

Cindy patted her on the shoulder. “People have been asking about you.”

Jill gulped coffee and stood up. “Nobody said this would be easy. Thanks, Cindy.”

The man in the corner, the RAF officer, the blond WAC, and the entire 1940s scene had vanished.

She recalled that her father had been in many such pubs during the Blitz, and it was always the same: The buzz overhead, then complete silence in the pub the instant gas flow to the engine stopped, and everyone waited for death to come or pass overhead. And then it landed. Somewhere else. The explosion sometimes rocked the room, in which case plaster might rain into the ale, or it might land a few blocks off, muffled but still clear. But unless it was a direct hit and set everything ablaze, the patrons instantly resumed their conversations, not discussing the by-now-routine fact that death had skipped them once again.

Well. She would take a cue from that behavior. This was another good thing for a former resident of the loony bin not to mention to anyone. Perhaps a few molecules of the Game Board lingered here on the side porch, where the whole family had once played an epic game on it with Wink, and the Game Board had taken them for a ride in a very unusual airplane.

She took a deep breath and drained her coffee cup.

She went out and chatted with a few people from Georgetown about her dissertation, which concentrated on postwar Russia.

* * *

Bette had closely observed the party preparations from her perch, and through her listening devices. She’d watched as U Street Liquors pushed dollies holding ponies of various beers and cases of wines up the sidewalk and local groceries delivered foodstuffs.

Her own nexus-sensing cues, some kind of new sense developed by proximity to the Device for so many years, gathered, like ozone before a thunderstorm, clear as lightning on a ridgetop or black clouds roiling overhead. But for the life of her she still couldn’t pin it down to sounds, like Sam and Wink, or with the seemingly deliberate poise of Hadntz, who seemed to Bette to just walk down a hallway of time, turn a particular doorknob, and pass from one timestream to another.

Instead, it invaded her being like the aura of a migraine zigzagged across vision, like a snake poised to strike, unavoidable, on the rocky path before her. Something was going to change.

While guests arrived downstairs, Bette readied herself. She donned the clothing in which she’d arrived—her WAC uniform, and prepared for the worst with passports, the currency of many countries, cigarettes for herself and for bribes, as well as jewelry.

As the line of inevitable storm clouds cleared the ridgetop, as a series of dots floated across her vision, as the rattlesnake’s head descended, she descended the back stairs.

She slipped into the nexus through the kitchen door, where dozens of people crushed around the table and leaned against the countertops. She heard Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” issue from the screened-in porch, past the dining room, and made her way to the open French doors, where Wink sat, waiting. No surprise. Just relief. Information at last.

She glimpsed Jill way down the porch, and turned her back to her, tears welling in her eyes. “Where’s Sam?”

She felt a crushing weight on her chest when Wink replied, helpless pain in his eyes, “I don’t know.”

The tears welled over. She turned on her heel, slipped out the screen door, and stumbled blindly downhill to the grotto and curled up on the bench Sam had built for her. Mercifully, no one else was there, and her sobs were drowned by the rush of fast water over stones, and by music.

She jumped at a hand on her shoulder.

* * *

Megan was impressed by Jill’s party, despite herself. She wouldn’t have believed that the place could be brought up to speed so quickly, and decided that Jill really could work wonders—with a lot of help from Cindy and Brian—and felt a twinge of guilt that she’d been too busy to lend a hand. Jill seemed to have come through what could only be called a breakdown with flying colors.

She overheard a tall, bearded blond man who wore shorts, loafers, and talked past a pipe held between his teeth. “It is just a marvelous example of sixties lines. I mean, the color, the shape, everything!” Megan peered over his shoulder. He held the teal Bakelite ashtray Bette had kept next to her reading chair, a bit marred and melted from extreme wear. He caressed it with reverence and set it back down very carefully.

Megan rolled her eyes and moved on.

She glimpsed Jill, who was trying desperately not to be too busy. This meant a lot of glancing around and strange facial expressions as she suppressed her impulse to get someone a drink or direct them to food, all of which the caterers, Cindy, and several of Brian’s multipurpose workers, adept at throwing impressive cocktail parties for the heads of corporations, were doing without breaking a sweat.

The big house throbbed with conversation, and cooler air wafted up from the creek. Megan went out to her car and fetched a sweater. She turned to go back in and saw Halcyon House as it was meant to be seen by the architect who had designed it in 1902: brightly lit, overflowing with guests who sat on the porch or stood on the lawn. She watched through the windows as a couple on the side porch began to foxtrot to a Benny Goodman piece. His lilting, complex clarinet tune perfectly complemented the party’s celebratory atmosphere.

Something caught her eye in the library, but she wasn’t sure what, at first. She watched through the open window as she walked back to the house. There it was. Over the heads of about ten chatting people, she saw the rolling ladder move from right to left. A blond man wearing a light-colored suit climbed the first three rungs and reached up, removed a book from a high shelf. He riffled through it, replaced it, riffled through another, removed a third, riffled through it, and carried it down the ladder. She walked a little more quickly. Of course, guests such as these would be interested in books. But these were her parents’ books, and she didn’t want any of them walking out of the house. Besides, how many people would actually be moved to climb a ladder and take one down?

She took the front steps two at a time, smiling at a couple sitting and smoking on the middle step, and opened the front door.

“Megan! It is you, isn’t it? How nice to see you!”

Startled, it took Megan a moment to recognize Albert Treemain, a distinguished-looking black gentleman whose beard was now white. He had lived four doors down for—how many decades now?

“Al! You haven’t changed a bit!” They hugged, and Megan stepped back. “Really. Except for this.” She tugged on his beard and he laughed. “Remember how I used to do that when I was little? I bet it annoyed the hell out of you. You’re retired now, right?”

He snorted. “Pushed out the door, more like it. Gave me a few plaques for teaching our African-American youth for decades.”

“Is Eloise here?”

He nodded. “Saw her last in the dining room, talking with Jill. We’re so glad to have her back. We do miss your folks.”

Megan angled around so that she could see into the library. To her relief, she saw the man climb back up the ladder and replace the book. Another man, his hair gray, reading while sitting in a leather chair, determinedly kept his head down while she stared at him, trying to figure out where she had seen him before.

Then the book-riffling man sauntered from the library, chatting, and passed Megan.

He had a hundred-dollar haircut. His clothes were equally stylish and perfect. His light blue bow tie might seem a bit different, but Megan noticed that they were just on the cutting edge of incoming style, and his lightweight beige linen suit was perfectly pressed, as if he had not sat down for hours. He wore a faint cologne. The light tan on his ruggedly lined face gave him an outdoorsy look. Probably just this side of his sixties. His sharp blue eyes, which seemed expressionless when he glanced at her in passing, let her know that she had just been as fully appraised and categorized as he had been by her.

Another man bumped into her as he headed toward the front door, and apologized. Unkempt gray hair flared from his large, squarish head like an inconvenient afterthought. His wrinkled short-sleeved shirt and the nasty cigarette-smoke trail he left behind were a complete contrast to the blond man’s couture. He lifted high four glasses he held in one hand and jerked his head to indicate that the blond man join him on the porch to partake of the almost-full bottle of whiskey he gripped by the bottle’s neck in his other hand. He had a most unparty-like air of determination as he opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

Megan went to the dining room and made herself a gin-and-tonic with just a whisper of gin. With the icy, squat glass in one hand, she made her way back toward the library through knots of people and saw two other people head purposefully onto the porch.

Megan poked her head out the door and saw that the gray-haired man had pulled a large, round table to the very end of the porch and was gathering a few wicker chairs, helped by the blond man. A tall woman with short, dark hair, wearing a shantung-silk gunnysack from which poked extremely long, bony arms and legs walked her clanky-earringed self out the door and joined them.

The library had cleared out. While they gathered more chairs on the porch, Megan shut the pocket doors, dimmed the lights in the library to near-darkness, tipped the blinds a bit, then curled up in a wing chair only a foot away from the table outside on the porch, where she could eavesdrop. She pulled a heavy book about Kandinsky onto her lap from the coffee table so she could pretend to peruse it, and cradled her drink in one hand.

They settled into their chairs with scooting sounds. “Just a bit of that Scotch, if you don’t mind”—a glug and a slosh, then another—“Well, a little bit more wouldn’t hurt. Anyone else? Another round for us all, sure.” After a moment, she realized that her book was unnecessary; they were so completely involved in one another and in their conversation that they did not realize that anyone was listening, and did not seem to notice that their voices were raised, and often, as they argued.

The organizer had a Russian accent, which surprised Megan. “I’m glad you could all make it.”

“It’s ground zero, Lev,” said a woman with a gravelly voice. “Light?” Megan heard the snap of a cigarette lighter. “Wouldn’t miss this opportunity for the world.”

Ground zero?

“What’s all this about setting up some kind of controls?” This speaker had a lighter, higher voice than Smoking Woman, and was probably Anorexic Woman, whose legion of bangles raced, clinking, up and down her bony arm as she took a drink.

Lev said, “We need to be seriously thinking about what to do, now that we’re getting closer.”

Closer?

The blond man said, “I’m sure you have ideas about how to set up that kind of system.” He sounded completely middle-of-the-road American.

“I’m sure you do,” rejoined Smoking Woman, in a gravelly voice. “You have a very distinctive—and, I might add, distasteful—philosophy.”

Megan gulped her drink to subdue the tickle in her throat, wishing she had made it a tad stronger.

“You are completely mistaken about me,” said the blond man.

“Excuse me,” said a man whom Megan had not seen. He had a faint French accent. “We all have reasons of our own for participating in this endeavor. No matter what each of us professes, we all must realize that we are a very loose affiliation, and that the ties that have held us together for the past decades may well have changed. I agree that we need to reexamine them at some point, and reassess our goals. But perhaps this is not the time and place? It’s very public here, and I was not, even, actually invited to this party. I’ve never seen this man before.”

Blond Man said, “Nor I you.”

“Seriously,” the Frenchman said, “who is qualified to be a master of history? Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

Smoking Woman said, “I think that any sort of power like this needs to be equally distributed.”

Blond Man said, “All the illiterate, unintelligent, unfit people in the world have a say?”

“She means among us,” said Anorexic Woman.

“I can speak for myself,” said Smoking Woman. “That’s not at all what I mean.”

Blond Man said, “Such power should not be equally distributed. Perhaps it could be according to educational levels?”

“Something like the three-fifths law?” asked Smoking Woman.

Lev said, “Maybe it just doesn’t work that way. It’s probably more like Q. It makes itself available. Which is why it is so important that we intercept it as soon as possible. That is why all of us are working together. Each of us has a different past, but we agree on the need to find this.”

“I agree,” said Smoking Woman. “We’re the third generation of people working on locating the source. If it exists, it’s getting much more embedded.”

Anorexic Woman spoke: “I agree with Bill.”

Megan surmised that Blond Man’s name was Bill.

She continued, “It’s much too important to let the wrong people get hold of it. For instance, Jill is taking over a long-term project to electrify large chunks of rural Africa and put running water in about a zillion villages. If she really had this kind of power, she’d use it, believe me. She’d pass it out like hotcakes. Ergo, she doesn’t. Or if she does, she doesn’t know about it, and that’s why we need to find it as quickly as possible.”

Smoking Woman said, “She can do all that? You’ve worked at the Bank for years. You haven’t done anything of that magnitude, have you?”

“My main function is to observe and keep tabs. I have no idea what you’re doing at the State Department, but I’m not questioning that. I’d like the same respect, if you don’t mind.” She cleared her throat. “Jill has the power. She can get together loans, determine policy. She works hard. Did you notice all those people following her around like chicks from room to room? She’s their boss. They worship her, for some reason. She has a bug about schools, now. More education, less disease, more economic opportunity—pretty soon women will start having less children, because more of the kids will live to grow up, and you’ll have a whole new viable educated workforce on your hands—African women. Millions of them.”

State-Department Smoking Woman said, “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with that?”

Blond Man said, “I’m at the Bank as well, as you might recall. As I see it, this is going to cause great economic imbalance, worldwide, an upheaval. It’s conceivable that Africa could very quickly move to a position where it could control world markets. Africa has vast, untapped natural resources. A well-fed, disease-free, educated population in Africa will eventually economically endanger Europe and Asia. And us. We need to decisively move on this, as soon as possible.”

Smoking Woman said, “I guess I am mistaken about the aims of this group. Or at least about who has been included in it. Are you sure you’re just not racist?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Anorexic Woman said, “He has a lot of friends who are black.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Megan, sitting sideways in her chair so she could hear better, was a bit surprised too. Were there people who actually wanted to obstruct what she thought of as progress? But yes, economically speaking. People in some of the biggest, most well-funded think tanks in Washington, people who had ascended to power for the wealth it brought to themselves and their friends, who kept a firm hand on all kinds of reins. Until now, such people had always remained an abstraction for Megan. Except when they interfered with science funding, which, come to think of it, they did fairly often.

Blond Man continued, “We simply must either quash this—this thing, or gain complete control of it, with as much fear and care as if it were the plan for the hydrogen bomb. To do that, we have to find it. The U.S. has a lot of secrets—”

“Please do not shout,” said Lev.

“Well, it does, and this needs to be one of them. It shouldn’t be in the hands of one person.” He slammed his fist on the glass-topped wicker table, and Megan heard all the glasses jump and land.

The Frenchman said, “I didn’t have much luck. Her library is terribly disorganized. I don’t see how we can possibly find what we’re looking for. I mean, if anything is actually there.”

Megan snorted, rocking with silent laughter. Luckily, they didn’t seem to hear her.

“I might have found something,” said Blond Man, “but I felt as if I was being closely observed, so I had to put it back. Any other progress?”

“The drawers to the desk are locked,” complained Anorexic Woman.

Hmm. Someone had foresight. Not me, thought Megan. She had no idea that keys to that old desk were anywhere to be found.

Lev said, “Let’s get down to business before we can’t see straight anymore. It’s in this house somewhere. You’ve at least been able to make the map?”

The Frenchman said, “This house is very large, and doesn’t make sense, architecturally speaking. I did not get far. A man wearing a fedora followed me up the stairs and told me that the party was downstairs, even after I told him I was interested in period architecture. He seemed … forceful. After that he shadowed me. Is he somewhere behind me now?”

“No,” said Lev. Megan quickly picked up her art book, but no one seemed to think about checking the window.

“I did not want to make a scene. All I saw before he escorted me down the stairs were disorganized rooms full of what looked like unnecessary things. It’s a nightmare.”

Megan’s stomach ached with silent laughter, but then she was angry and wanted to go out and kick every one of them in the face. How dare they snoop around when Abbie was asleep—well, maybe—right upstairs?

“Don’t forget the attic,” pointed out Smoking Woman. “For all we know, there are another five thousand books up there. Look, this house sat empty, by all accounts, for years. We could have done anything then. We could have taken it apart and put it back together ten times. Why now?”

“Sometimes it just takes a long time before information connects,” said Lev. “We’ve all been sleepers for years, and now, something happened. That’s why I called all of you together, here.”

Smoking Woman asked, “What happened? Something that none of us actually know much about. How many of us—here, at that table—have even experienced The Effect?”

The Effect?

Anorexic Woman said, “That’s what I thought. It’s just a chimera. Handed down to us by, well, by our handlers, if you please. Mrs. Bette-Dowdy-Dance was some kind of superagent who totally manipulated world-changing information for her own ends? Have you seen her dossier? Just a nice, middle-class housewife who ran a nursery school in her house. Of which no one remembers a thing and of which there is no sign in city hall about licenses, inspections, or any of that. So even that small detail—her so-called cover—is unverifiable. If there’s more to it, I say, let us know. I think it’s all bullshit. Not to mention that she died twenty years ago.”

“Maybe.”

“But there is hard information,” said Lev.

“Then share it with us,” said Anorexic Woman. “You can’t, because it’s just rumors. Like the rumors that the U.S. was making an atomic bomb.”

“Which they were,” the Frenchman pointed out.

“That doesn’t prove these particular rumors are true. What I mean is, there’s this assumption that this Device is more dangerous, more powerful, for some reason, than atomic fission. Absurd. We’re on a wild-goose chase.”

“We owe it to our country to make sure that we track down everything we can about the Device. It does exist, it has something to do with history, mind control, and brain science, and it is something that the U.S. needs to control. That’s all there is to it. Bow out, if you wish, at any time.” Lev’s voice, cultured, self-assured.

Megan was puzzled. Lev, in his Russian accent, seemed to be saying that the U.S. was his country.

Blond Man said, sounding a bit worried, “I’m sure none of us want to do that.”

“Look who’s coming,” said Anorexic Woman. “Meeting adjourned. Hey, Jill. Grand party.”

“Glad you could come, Dr. Koslov.” Jill’s voice.

“How many times do I have to tell you—call me Lev. How’s your job working out?”

“I love it.”

“By the way, I have a new list for you.”

“Q it to me and I’ll order them. Hey, are you guys leaving?”

“I couldn’t get my babysitter to stay after midnight,” croaked Smoking Woman.

“Papers to grade,” said the Frenchman. “Thank you for your kind invitation. It has been a wonderful party.”

“You’re welcome,” said Jill, sounding puzzled.

Lev and Blond Man took their leave as well.

After a moment, Megan heard more distant good-byes, and a few car doors slammed. She got out of the wing chair, opened the blinds, and leaned on the windowsill. Jill was holding up the empty bottle. “Vultures,” she muttered.

“How inhospitable of you,” said Megan. “Listen, I have something to tell you.”

From the direction of the front door, Cindy yelled, “Jill? Oh, good. There you are. You’ve got an old friend over here who wants to talk to you.”

“Jill,” said Megan.

Jill paused and looked at her. Megan tried to organize her thoughts and realized that it might take a long time to talk about all this.

“Well, for now,” Megan said, “watch out for that Koslov guy.”

“I already do,” said Jill.

“Well, more so, then.”

“What is it?” asked Jill.

“Well, evidently, he and all the people at his table are sleepers. As in some kind of secret agents.”

“Really.”

“Yes. They were talking about the possibility—or impossibility—of Mom being some kind of intelligence agent. They were trying to make a map of the house—evidently they want to search it. They were going through some of the books up there.” She waved toward the fireplace wall of books. “And—this is really bizarre—they think you might have something that would transform Africa into an economic powerhouse that will swamp this country.”

“Ah,” said Jill. “That makes sense, I guess. That woman—the skinny one? Clarissa. She works at the Bank and not only does she not seem to get much done, but she’s always nosing into my projects.”

“Who’s the blond guy?”

“Bill Anderson. He’s kind of creepy, actually.”

“Jill,” yelled Cindy, still standing in the doorway. “She says her name is Zora.”

“Zora!” Jill smiled. “She was Mom’s old friend the next block over.”

“Right,” said Megan. She got up. “I’d like to say hi to Zora too.”

* * *

At about eleven thirty, after most of the neighbors had left and the party was boiling down to hard-core all-nighters, Brian went out the front door and returned in a few minutes with his sax. Jill, sitting on the stairs chatting with a student, murmured “Save us, dear Lord,” when he walked through the foyer carrying the black case—which, although battered, had been recently polished. He had obviously been inspired by the stellar Lester Young compendium they’d been listening to. She wasn’t sure who was in control of the music, but it was all great jazz from the forties. She itched to grab the case from him—after all, she was by far the better sax player. In her opinion. But that would be so unseemly. Her fingers, though, twitched in unison with the notes played by the backup pianist. Her dad would know exactly who that was by recognizing his style; she did not.

Lester Young, “The Prez,” played recognizable tunes on this tape, unlike Parker and Diz later on. Brian was up and running in the middle of “How High the Moon,” and, after a few dissonant honks, actually created some very sweet harmonies.

“He’s been practicing,” said Jill.

“He’s not bad,” said the student she was talking to. “Who is he?”

“My brother.”

“Who’s the drummer?”

“I don’t know.”

At that point someone began to accompany Brian on the piano, which was out of Jill’s sight. However, she recognized Megan’s decisive phrasings in a few seconds. Soon, Brian called out “Jill, we need you.”

“Sounds like it,” she said, which drew a laugh.

Zoe was in the living room, sitting next to Megan at the piano. Cindy sat next to Brian’s old drum set, which, come to think of it, Jill had seen sitting in the hallway earlier, presumably exhumed from the attic. Cindy said, “Come on over, Jill, you’re our singer. We’ve been practicing. Lots of stuff.”

“Since you’ve been practicing without me,” Jill replied, “I can’t vouch for the results.” But she smiled and joined them, setting her drink on the bookcase.

Megan, a very accomplished pianist, played a suitably swinging intro to “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Zoe slid onto the bench next to her and played as well. Jill listened to the beat and dove in. Brian wove harmonies about her voice, which was uncertain and hoarse at first, but grew stronger by the second verse. He and Megan played a serviceable break, but then Megan dropped out and Jill was amazed at Zoe’s jazzy side, which she’d never heard. Jill had everyone at least trying to sing along by the end. Much laughter and applause; Megan rose from the piano stool and they lined up and bowed together, provoking more of the same.

They tried a request, which went over well, and were on their fourth or fifth tune when another voice chimed in from the direction of the porch, from behind where they were all set up. “If anyone knows ‘White Heat’ I’m in with a cornet.”

Megan, seated at the piano with her back to the man said, “Lunceford, right? I was just looking at the sheet music the other day.” She reached to the top of the piano and pulled out a book from the stack there.

Cindy, who sat angled toward him, said, “We’ve been practicing it at home. Brian really wanted to learn it. Let Zoe do it, Megan, she’s pretty good.” She began a drum intro and the others joined in. The man with the cornet was fabulous. There was no singing part, so Jill, by now sitting on top of the piano, turned around to see who it was, but he was bending over, and in the shadow of the porch, inside the French doors, looking at something on the floor, his face concealed. She turned forward again, and looked toward the foyer.

An exotic-looking woman stood there.

She was quite beautiful. Dark, curly hair, styled in a fashion current in the 1940s, cascaded down her back. Bright red lipstick accentuated the strong lines of her face. She held a classic martini glass, which Jill realized must be one of her grandmother’s, brought down from an upper cupboard where a tarnished silver martini mixer also resided. A tight, red, V-necked dress shimmered in the faint light of the foyer, showed off her voluptuous figure.

Her eyes were closed and she nodded her head to the beat. She had a faint smile on her face.

Jill stared at her. Brian’s family continued to play, lost in their musical world, and Megan, on the bench behind the tall piano, was turning the pages of the music book. The woman opened her eyes, smiled directly at Jill, then turned and walked out the door.

Jill put her splayed hand to her chest, her heart pounding hard. Megan looked up in concern, and nodded to Brian. They brought their piece to a close. Megan stood and smiled at everyone as Jill tried to smile herself. She croaked, “I’m fine—go on!” With surprisingly strong hands, Al Treemain caught her around her waist and helped her slide from the piano. Jill looked around. The man with the cornet was gone too. Everyone applauded and Brian turned up the tape once again. Conversations resumed.

Megan said, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just need some air. Who was that man playing the cornet?”

“I didn’t see him,” said Megan. “I thought he was probably somebody you knew.”

“I couldn’t see his face,” said Jill. “He was wearing an old-fashioned fedora.” She rushed toward the door, though she knew that Gypsy Myra, or whoever she was, would be gone by the time she got there.

Megan was right behind her, and grabbed her shoulder. “What do you mean, a fedora?”

“Just what I said,” Jill replied impatiently, shaking her off. One of her colleagues was lighting a cigarette and Jill said, as she passed, “Can I have that? Thanks,” and grabbed it in passing.

On the table next to the door, beneath a Chinese painting Bette had adored, was the half-drunk martini in the elegant hand-blown green glass. Next to it was a card on fine, light green linen stock.

Jill clamped her cigarette between her lips, then picked up the martini glass with her left hand and the card with her right.

Stepping out onto the porch, she walked down to a lower step, next to a purple hydrangea washed by the light of a moon so bright that it cast shadows, and, after looking up and down the street and seeing no trace of the woman, she read the card.

The beaux arts font read, simply, ELIANI HADNTZ, PHD.

A small but perfect gift: the name of the woman who had … had done what? All this? Changed the world? Made her parents disappear? Given her a template, in the form of a comic book that she knew a young radical of the 1960s could not resist, and that she knew would literally turn her world upside down? Was she a monster? A savior? Where had she come from? What did she want?

But it was a gift because it was information. Freely given, at last. Although, mused Jill, she obviously could have given a hell of a lot more. She could have sat at the kitchen table and just told her in plain English what was going on, and how to find her way to her lost mother and father.

She used a thick-nibbed fountain pen and a precise hand to write, on the bottom of the card, “The work is never finished.”

What work?

She took a thoughtful sip of the martini and then a drag of her cigarette. Brian settled next to her.

“Great party, sis.”

“Thanks to you guys.”

He put his arm around her and gave her a quick hug. “You okay?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice roughened by the cigarette and singing. She nodded once, decisively. She felt strangely ready.

For what, she had no idea.

But her readiness took the form of lines of light. She would draw it from above.

A small, foreshortened figure in a pink dress, head a mop of dark hair, face unseen. Thin ephemeral lines extend into the night-fragrant yard in front of the woman, behind her, into the many-storied house, and into other dimensions, those she could not see, but which the reader would nevertheless infer because of the way she would draw them: the future.

And the past.

Megan sat on her other side, out of breath. “I couldn’t find him.”

“Find who?” asked Jill.

“The Walking Man.”

“The Walking Man was here?” asked Brian.

“Who the hell is the Walking Man?” asked Jill.

“He’s been following me and Abbie around at Tall Oaks,” said Megan. “He wears a fedora.”

“Oh,” said Jill. “What else does he look like?”

“Well … he’s medium-tall. Solid-looking; not thin, not fat. Reddish beard.”

“Cindy said that the cornet man was wearing a fedora,” Brian said. “Whoever he was, he was good!”

Megan said, “It’s not funny! Who is he? How did he know there would be a party here?”

Jill said, “He wasn’t your guy. He only had a bit of stubble.”

“A man can shave. What’s that in your hand?” Megan took the card from Jill. “Eliani Hadntz? You know her?”

“Do you?” asked Jill, amazed.

“Yes, of course. She works in memory research.”

“Like hell,” said Brian. “She designed the Game Board. The Device. It’s all in Dad’s papers.”

“She’s Gypsy Myra,” said Jill.

“Who?” they both asked.

Bitsy yanked at her father’s arm. Brian lifted her into his lap, where she writhed. “I’m hot. My tummy hurts.”

Megan felt her forehead. “My God, she’s burning up.”

At the emergency room two hours later, as everyone waited, miserable and anxious and quite tired from the party, Bitsy was wheeled to surgery to have her appendix removed.

And Bette, toward dawn, walked to Union Station through the still-dark, rain-cooled city. It would take her days to get there, but to her, it seemed like an hour.

Jill

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ROSA HADNTZ

July 11, Serendipity Books

JILL READ A FEW of the poems in the book Dr. Koslov had translated. They were evocative; rich; tragic, and joyful. Rosa Hadntz, Eliani Hadntz’s mother, had written them.

She closed the slim book thoughtfully, slid it beneath the counter, and made a note to order five more copies; she could easily hand-sell them to some customers she already had in mind.

Brian claimed that Dr. Hadntz had designed the plan for the Device, and thus the Game Board.

Jill had translated her Eliani Hadntz, whom she had seen twice—once, in Texas, in her previous timestream, and now, in this one, at her party—into Gypsy Myra.

Megan said she had met Hadntz. In person, in Cuba, with graying hair. They couldn’t all be the same person. Could they? Jill had not actually considered Hadntz as someone’s daughter before, as someone human. But Rosa was heartbreakingly human.

Jill had just returned from the hospital, where they had all taken shifts at Bitsy’s bedside to give Brian and Cindy breaks. They had caught Bitsy’s appendicitis in time, and she was recovering nicely. Whens was with his dad for the week.

Now, they were all playing catch-up. Brian was already juggling three behind-schedule jobs. Megan had gone to California on Monday morning and would not return until Thursday—tonight—and she had to go to New York for another meeting on Saturday. So, by default, Sunday was the day they’d all agreed they could Get Together and Talk.

The prospect of this discussion felt like a forty-pound weight on Jill’s chest. She couldn’t, simply couldn’t. They didn’t even suspect what she had done. From their point of view, if it were a business meeting, it would be called “Let’s Share Information and Hash This Out.” It would not be called, as she thought of it, “The Unfortunate Sequence of Events in Which Your Sister Jill Deprived You of Your Mother.”

But she had to do this, now that things seemed to be coming unglued for Brian and Megan too.

Lev Koslov, according to whatever Megan had overheard at the party, was involved in some kind of conspiracy. This conspiracy was probably at the heart of Jill’s life. She could ask Koslov about it, but that would probably only put him and his coconspirators on guard.

Jill didn’t think that the delicate translations in Rosa’s Collected Poems could be the work of an evil man. But, on the other hand, perhaps that was precisely what he wanted her to think, so that she would let down her own guard.

Koslov had said that Rosa had died in a concentration camp. So Hadntz had that burden too. According to some of these poems, Hadntz had, evidently, been saving people in Europe, when her own mother was murdered.

For all of its immense powers, the Infinite Game Board had its failings, and they too were immense.

Perhaps, if linked to human consciousness, it just reflected human failings.

Sighing, Jill locked the front door, tidied up, turned off the lights, and found a zip car at the kiosk on the next block that she could use to drive home in immediately. She was too tired to take the Metro, and tomorrow, Friday, was another big day at the Bank. If Bitsy’s recovery was on track, they’d planned to have their talk on Sunday, and wind up with a cookout.

Yeah, thought Jill, turning onto her street, as the moon peeked through the treetops. A nice little chat.

Brian

BRIAN’S NEW TOY

July 12

BRIAN, UNCOMFORTABLE IN his summer-weight linen suit and tie, drove around the block of Connecticut and M Street three times before he found a place to park. As he quickly fed the meter, he noticed that the driver who had been following him in a black sedan tried in vain to squeeze in thirty feet back from the opposite corner, failed, and turned off his engine anyway. Brian was impressed to think that he was important enough for the fellow to risk a pretty sure ticket. His tail wasn’t exactly subtle either. Who wore hats anymore? In fact—he looked again—he wore a homburg, not a fedora. Sam hadn’t worn hats, but had once explained the fashion difference to Brian. Homburgs were more formal, and their top crease and brim were fixed, unlike the more flexible fedora.

It was Friday afternoon, and it had been an exhausting week, made worse by his desire to glean everything he could from the notes before Sunday’s meeting with his sisters.

Brian reached behind the seat for his portfolio of drawings—the rest of the truck was so perpetually heaped with tools and trash that he always kept his portfolio there—slammed the door, and locked it. It was almost four, and he hated to be late for an appointment. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck, and the roar of traffic and the smog he’d seen building in a gray band on the horizon earlier that day—less than precarbon-watch days, but still extensive—had now expanded and was gathering into a dark cloud, making it a familiar summer afternoon. He saluted in the general direction of the man in the hat and hurried down the street to the building that held the office of this project’s architect, J. M. Hamlin, AIA.

Precisely on time, he arrived in her cool, austerely impressive reception room. Jane, a small, trim woman, who wore the same pair of gold earrings every time Brian had seen her, stood, came around her desk, and shook his hand. They laid the plans out on the large table in her office and went over the changes. Brian pointed out that the three new cloister-type windows accompanying a wide, curving staircase would necessitate rather expensive structural changes, and Jane said she would discuss that with her client before finalizing that particular change. She smiled, walked him to the door, and Brian was back on the street precisely twenty minutes after he had gone in.

The short man in the homburg was standing next to the driver’s door of his truck, reaching up, pushing something or other into the place between the top of the door and the truck body. His car was no longer double-parked, but was down and across the street, still illegally parked too close to the end of the block. He must have driven around in vain all that time trying to find a parking place.

Brian broke into a run. The man looked up, and briskly walked down the sidewalk. Brian reached his truck and saw a rubber wedge on the pavement next to his door. That’s right, wedge the door open, stick in a wire, unlock it. And steal—what? Empty potato chip bags?

Enraged, he was climbing into the cab when a policeman, who had evidently been behind him, grabbed his arm.

“Not so fast.”

“What?”

“It’s too late.”

“That guy was trying to break into my car.” Brian shouted, pointing at the man, still walking fast toward the corner. Of course, he couldn’t risk running across the street in traffic—that would attract immediate notice, and a heavy fine for jaywalking. Brian knew, he’d gotten a ticket for it.

“Right,” said the cop.

“Look—”

“You look,” the officer said, getting out a ticket book. “The meter’s expired.”

“No it’s not. I put in enough for two hours.”

“Read the fine print on the meter. A twenty-minute limit after three P.M., except on weekends and holidays. I marked your tire.”

“Okay, give me the ticket already.” The man was crossing the street with a mob of people.

The policeman wrote it up and slapped it in his palm.

Brian jumped into his truck, as the man got into his car. Ha! He couldn’t move; the light was red.

From his high vantage point, he followed the car.

He managed to get a little closer at the next light, and decided to hang back.

The car did not follow any kind of circuitous route, which rather disappointed Brian. Instead, he remained steady on M Street through Georgetown, passing Jill’s bookshop, and took a right on Foxhall Road. Although Brian still stayed well behind the car, there was not much traffic. The guy certainly must know he was being followed.

The car turned left on Reservoir Road, then hung a sharp right.

Brian found himself, to his great surprise, in the parking lot of the German embassy, a classy steel-and-glass structure, six stories high.

The car disappeared into an underground parking garage. Brian had no pass with which to open the gate. He backed up, pulled over to one side, jumped from his truck, and ran through the gate.

There was no sign of any activity in the dark, cool garage.

Brian trudged back to his truck. A security guard approached him. “Can I help you?”

“Yes. I was following a car whose driver tried to break into mine. He went into the garage. What can I do?”

“Turn around and leave.”

“I guess I can call the police.”

“You’re technically in Germany. Your police have no jurisdiction here. And frankly, I don’t like your attitude.”

“Are there surveillance tapes? I’d like to see who just drove in here.”

“Forget it,” said the guard, and walked away.

Cursing, but quietly, Brian got back into his truck and sat there, brooding. Absently, he reached over to see if he could find the bag of half-eaten potato chips he knew was there, somewhere.

He pushed yesterday’s jacket aside and was flabbergasted. That was what the guy was after. But how did it get here?

It was the Infinite Game Board.

He looked on his phone and saw that Jill was calling.