"Those kids and those others are sitting in the first room waiting for the camera to come back. Maybe that's why the thing seems so real. It's true. It's happening. I didn't look for this at all."

_Another woman enters the room. The blond woman from the first sequence. Magda Goebbels-if Lightborne's speculation is correct_.

_She hands the younger woman a flower. Expression of delighted surprise. It's a white boutonniere. The woman takes it into the next room_.

_Visual static. Flash frames_.

"What are we looking at?"

"I don't know," Lightborne said.

"If that's Frau Goebbels standing there, who's the woman who just disappeared?"

"That shouldn't be hard to answer."

"I want to hear you say it."

"You know as well as I."

"Who is she?"

"It's real," Lightborne said. "I believe it. It's them."

The routine persisted.

In the late morning sun, Selvy placed the bolo knife on a bench in the littered compound. Seating himself on an overturned crate, he began working with oil and whetstone on the base of the blade. A snowy torn rolled in the dirt nearby. Directly ahead the spare land extended to the bottom of an enormous butte, its sloping sides covered with rockf all.

He saw it as memory, as playback. The border of appearances. Within is perfect color, the sense of topography as an ethical schematic. Landscape is truth.

When he looked up, ten minutes into his sharpening, he saw Levi Blackwater approaching from the southeast. Had to be him. There had always been something physically offcenter about Levi. Nothing so distinct as a limp or even an ungainliness of stride. The right shoulder sagged a bit. Maybe that was it. And the head tilted. And the right arm hung slightly lower. All apparent as he drew nearer.

He was a tall man, balding, and wore the same old field cap with ventilating eyelets. He was pale, he was sickly white, as always. Soft baby skin. A little like skin that's been transplanted from another part of the body. He stood smiling now. That knowing smile. Dust devils spinning fifty, sixty yards away.

"I came in to feed the cats."

Only Levi could speak of traveling to this remote site as "coming in."

"Where are you when you're out?"

Levi kept smiling and stood in profile, turning his head left toward the barest stretch of desert. He came forward to shake hands. It was the right hand that lacked two fingers, severed by his captors. Selvy had forgotten the directness of Levi's manner of looking at people.

"I always knew if anyone came back, Glen, it would be you."

"Not much left, is there?"

"Everything you'll need."

"I won't be staying, Levi."

People use names as information and Selvy believed the use of that particular name, Glen, indicated that Levi was deeply pleased to see him and wanted to suggest a new level of seriousness. In the past he'd often called Selvy by his rarely used first name, which was Howard. A teasing intimacy. It "had amused Levi to do this. His eyes would search Selvy's face. Those fixed looks, curious and frank at the same time, were irritating to Selvy, even more than hearing the name Howard. But he'd never complained, thinking this would put a distance between them.

Levi had been tortured, had spent extended periods of time in a dark room not much larger than a closet, and consequently had things to pass on, knowledge to impart, both practical and otherwise. He'd found tolerances, ways of dealing with what, in the end, was the sound of his own voice. He'd come out stronger, or so he believed, having lived through pain and confinement, the machine of self.

"This is a stop then? On a longer trip?"

"You might say."

"A way station," Levi said.

The phrase seemed to please him. His liquid eyes peered out of the shadow cast by the visor of his hat. He wore a soiled fatigue jacket, torn in places.

"I see you've brought along some metal."

"An antique," Selvy said.

"We were just getting started when you left."

"I know."

"We were beginning to see results, I think. I'm happy you've come back, even for a while. It's gratifying. You're looking well, Glen."

"Off the booze a while."

"You ought to stay, you know. There are things you can learn here."

"True. I believe that."

"The less there is, Glen, the more you're tested to find the things that do exist. Within and without. It works. If you limit yourself to the narrowest subject, you force yourself to concentrate to such an extent that you're able to learn a great deal about it. You already know a great deal about it. You find you already know much more than you'd imagined."

"I believe that."

"With no limits, you wander back and forth. You're defeated at the outset."

"That's why you're here, Levi."

"Both of us."

"Tighter and tighter limits."

"To learn. To find out what we know. When you left, we were just starting out. Damn shame if you didn't stay for a time. I've learned so much. So very much of everything."

He was squatting on the other side of the bench where the knife lay on several old newspapers, the only things Selvy could find to soak up the honing oil. Levi let a fistful of sand gradually spill to the ground. The sky was changing radically. Dust rising in the wind. Darkness edging across the southwesterly wheel of land.

"I'm born all the time," Levi said. "I remember other lives."

Staring.

"Creature of the landscape."

Smiling.

"Gringo mystic."

The wind lifted dust in huge whispering masses. Toward Mexico the mountains were obscured in seconds. The butte in the middle distance still showed through in swatches of occasional color, in hillside shrubs and the mineral glint of fallen rock.

"I feel myself being born. I've grown out here. I know so much. It's ready to be shared, Glen."

"I'm on a different course right now."

"You were making real progress."

"I'm primed, Levi."

"Yes, I can see."

"I'm tuned, I'm ready."

"I don't accept that."

"You know how it ends."

"I don't understand."

"You know what to do, Levi."

"Have we talked about something like this?"

Sand came whipping across the compound. Above and around them it massed in churning clouds. Wind force increased, a whistling gritty sound. Levi took off his field cap and jammed it in his pocket. His jacket had a hood attachment, tight fitting, with a drawstring around the face and a zippered closure that extended over the mouth. Levi fastened this lower part only as far as the point of his chin.

Selvy recognized a sound apart from the wind. He got to his feet and took off the Sam Browne belt. He threw it in the dirt. Damn silly idea. He had to admit to a dim satisfaction, noting the confusion in the other man's eyes.

"There's no way out, Glen. No clear light for you in this direction. You can't find release from experience so simply."

"Dying is an art in the East."

"Yes, heroic, a spiritual victory."

"You set me on to that, Levi."

"Tibet. Is that the East? It's beyond the East, isn't it?"

"A man chooses a place."

"But this is part, only part, of a longer, longer process. We were just beginning to understand. There's so much more. You think you're about to arrive at some final truth. Truth is a disappointment. You'll only be disappointed."

Selvy went into the long barracks and started ripping apart a bed sheet, planning to fashion some kind of mask, basic protection against the blowing sand.

Levi followed him in. Selvy watched him detach the hood from his jacket. He moved forward and put it over Selvy's head, slowly fastening the drawstring. His eyes, always a shade burdened with understanding, began to fill with a deep, sad and complex knowledge. He raised the zipper on the bower part of the hood. Selvy, feeling foolish, turned toward the door.