“Well?” he asked. “What does it do for you?”

“It was… I was going to say frightening. But interesting. It made you seem like an animal. Like something made of meat.”

“That’s why they’re called carnal relations, I guess.” He lowered her head to the pillow and replaced her hand at her side. He forebore to say what she put him in mind of: a funeral urn.

“Really? It’s not the way I remember it. But that is what ‘carnal’ means, isn’t it? Is that what it’s usually like? For you, I mean?”

“There’s generally a little more response. There have to be two animals involved, if you want results.”

Boa laughed. It was rusty, and she couldn’t sustain it, but it was a real laugh.

“I laughed,” she said, in her next breath. “And I’m so…” She raised both her hands and pressed the fingers together. “… inexpressibly relieved!”

“Well, that’s anatomy for you.”

“Oh, not just physically relieved. Though perhaps that is the more important aspect, at last. But I’d worried so. About having no feelings. No earthly feelings. I didn’t think I’d be able to sing again, without feelings. But if I can laugh… You see?”

“Good. I’m glad you can laugh. Maybe it was my kiss that did the trick. Just like the fairy tale. Almost like it, anyhow.”

She let her hands rest, one atop the other, on her stomach. “I don’t feel tired now. I’ll tell you about my life in the beyond, if you like.”

“So you won’t have to wait till tomorrow to leave?”

She smiled, and it was, though faint, a real smile, not the simulation she’d been practicing. “Oh, you’ll have months of me. How can I sing in this condition? And months are a long time here, aren’t they? They’re not, in the beyond. Time is quite beside the point.”

“Fifteen years just go by in a flash?”

“Thirteen did. That’s what I’m trying to explain.”

“I’m sorry. Tell your story. I won’t interrupt.” He put his coat on the hook, pulled the chair a bit closer to her bed, and sat down.

“I was caught in a trap, you see. The first night, after I left my body, I was so… delighted.” She spoke with a peculiar fervor, with the sudden, illumined lucidity of martyrdom. The present, flesh-encumbered moment vanished in the blaze of a remembered noon. “I flew out of the hotel, and up, and the city, beneath me, became a kind of slow, ponderous, magnificent firework display. It was a cloudy night, without stars, so that, very soon, the city became the stars, some still, some moving. The longer I looked, the clearer it became, and vaster too, and more orderly, as though each node of light were laboring to explain itself, to tear itself up out of the darkness and… and kiss me. Though not like your kiss, Daniel. Really, I don’t think it can be explained. It was such an immensity of beauty.” She smiled, and held up her hands to mark off some twelve inches. “Bigger than this.”

“And you didn’t want to leave it in order to come back to the hotel and nurse my wounded ego. That’s natural enough.”

“I did though, reluctantly. You were still singing, and I could tell you wouldn’t make it. You weren’t even near the edge. You are now. But you weren’t then.”

“Thanks for the Band-Aid. But do go on. You returned to the starry night. And then.”

“The hotel was near the airport. The planes coming in and out seemed, in a comic way, irresistible. Like elephants dancing in a circus. And the sound they made was like Mahler, pulverized and homogenized. It seemed objectively fascinating, though I suppose there was a fascination, underlying that, of a different nature. For what I did that night was follow one of these planes back to Des Moines. It was the same plane we’d come in, as a matter of fact. From Des Moines it was easy to find Worry. I was there by morning. I knew you’d be furious that I wasn’t back yet. I knew I’d made us miss our flight to Rome.”

“Providentially.”

“None of that mattered. I was determined to see my father. To see him as he really was. That had always been my obsession, and that part of me hadn’t changed.”

“So did you get to see him naked?”

“It was moral nakedness I was after.”

“I know that, Boa.”

“No, I never did. I saw him get up on the day after our wedding, eat breakfast, talk to Alethea about the stables, and then he went into his office. I tried to follow. And never made it, of course. I was caught in the fairy-trap in the corridor.”

“You must have known it was there.”

“I didn’t believe it could harm me. There didn’t seem to be any limit to what I could do. I felt like some giant unstoppable wave. I believed I could have anything I wanted just by wanting it. Flying is like that. The only thing was, when I saw the trap, or heard it, rather, for one’s first sense of it is of a kind of siren song played on a tuning fork, far, far away and posing no possible danger… when I heard it, that was what I wanted, what my soul lusted for. Whoever designed the thing is someone who has flown, who knows the sweetest sensations of flight and how to magnify them and draw them out. The damned machine is irresistible.”

“A little rotary engine that spins round and round like a clothes dryer?”

“Oh, it is easy to resist the lure of ordinary machinery. As easy as refusing a piece of candy. But this bore no relation to anything except, possibly, the solar system itself. There were wheels within wheels, and sets of wheels within sets of wheels, in an infinite recession. One moved through them, flew through them, with a kind of mathematical exultation, a steady unfolding of ‘Eureka!’s, each one pitched, so to speak, an octave higher than the last.”

“It sounds better than television, I’ve got to admit.”

“It was like that too: a drama whose plot always became more interesting. Like a game of contract bridge that was, at the same time, a string quartet. Like a test you couldn’t fail, though it stretched you to your limit.”

“It must have been a great vacation.”

“They were the thirteen happiest years of my life.”

“And then?”

“The tv was turned off. I can still remember the dismay of that moment, as the thing ground down to a stop, and I became aware of where I was and what I’d done. I wasn’t alone, of course. There had been hundreds of us whirling in the same ring-dance, dosie-do, and then ker-plunk. The spell was broken, and there we were, reeling a little still, but beginning to remember. And wishing the dead machine would start up again and sweep us back up into its lovely gears.”

“Had your father turned it off then?”

“He? No, never. A mob had broken into Worry. A large mob by the look of the damage they’d been able to do. I never saw the fighting. By the time I’d mustered some purpose and worked my way out of the trap, the National Guard was in charge. So I know nothing about my rescuers, neither their reasons nor what became of them. Perhaps they’d all been killed.”

“It was never in the news.”

“My father doesn’t like publicity.”

“When was that?”

“The spring before last. Before the trees had budded.”

Daniel nodded. “Things were pretty desperate in general around then. That was when—” He stopped short.

“When my aunt died, were you going to say? I know about that. In fact, I was there. I was here too, of course. I didn’t really think you’d have wanted, or been able, to keep my body alive all that time, but I had to find out. I went to the hotel. There’s a kind of cemetery on the roof, with the names of all the missing, and where we must go to find our bodies. Once I’d seen what I’d become, my only wish was to get as far from it as I could. It seemed another kind of trap. I didn’t want to become… meat. I still felt, in a way, new-born, unfledged. For all its fascinations, one doesn’t grow inside a trap. My own sense of it was that only a few weeks had gone by, the weeks I’d spent in Amesville after I’d got out of the trap.”