“Pursuing your father still?”

“No. He’d changed. He was older, of course, and also, I thought, smaller. No, it wasn’t on his account I lingered there. It was the landscape. That was as fine as ever. The skies and fields, they seemed my real parents, my source. I watched the first shoots force their way into the light, and each one was like a parable. I was a bird. In the trap I had rushed from complexity to further complexity. Now I became simpler, slower. Though I would still be overtaken by sudden alarms. One of them brought me to New York, and when I’d found this body, a worse alarm drove me away. I went to London, and after my aunt’s death, fled again, this time to Vilars, where I’d been sent to school. I fell in love again with the mountains and lived an eagle’s life. There were many of us there, and I began to learn, from the others, that there were forces of beauty and of… attraction… greater than the earth’s. As you leave it, as you mount above the clouds, above the winds, you shrink into a pinpoint of… it isn’t thought, it isn’t sentience… of purpose, call it. But a purpose so pure, so… unearthly… And then, at a certain height, you cease to be finite at all. There is no distinction of you and them, of here and there, of mind and matter.”

“What is there then? Anything?”

“One joins a kind of conscious sphere with the earth at its center, and the sphere revolves. It’s what, in a way, the trap had imitated.”

“Is it real?”

“Who can say? It seems, at the time, the only reality. But there’s something beyond even that. What I describe is the view from the threshold, as it were. I knew that, but I didn’t take the next step. If I had, I wouldn’t have returned. That’s quite certain. Something always held me back. The present delight. But not just that. That other gravity: of the earth and its fields, of my body. This body.”

“Jesus.” Daniel shook his head in mournful admiration. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

“You needn’t be. I did what I had to, no more. I wasn’t ready to go farther than I did. I hadn’t made a proper farewell. Now I have.”

“You don’t want me to come back here again?”

“Did my words betray me again? Come back again if you feel you need to. But not on my account. I’ve told you as much as I know how to tell.”

Daniel accepted this with the politest of grimaces. Then, smiling at the absurdity of the question that had popped into his head but seeing that it was, by its very irrelevance and triviality, a small revenge for her own Olympian betrayals, he said: “Before I go then, there’s one dumb question I’d like to ask you. Can you guess what it is?”

“About your family?”

“No. Time Magazine filled me in about them. My father’s retired and a bit senile. My mother runs a restaurant, and considers me an ingrate. Aurelia works for your father, and like him, has nothing to say about me. My other sister is married and has taken over my father’s dental practice. My question was dumber than that. What did you sing the night you took off? Did you get off on the first song you sang? Was it as easy as that?”

“I remembered the dream you’d told me about, the dream you had at Spirit Lake. So I sang that song. It was the first thing that came into my head.”

“ ‘I am the captain of the Pinafore.’ You sang that?”

“And not even all the way through.”

Daniel laughed. It seemed splendidly unfair.

“I’m sorry I asked. Well… good-bye, then.” He took his coat from the hook on the door.

“Good-bye, Daniel. You will fly, won’t you?”

He nodded, and closed the door.

He did, of course, return many times to the Clinic, and Boa never failed to be cordial. Daniel felt obliged to give his own account of the intervening years, though he doubted whether his story held any real interest for her. Mostly when they talked it was about music. Day by day she grew stronger, until at last she was strong enough to attempt departure. She offered to let him be present on the day, just as she might have asked him to see her off at a dock. He declined to do so. She had been certain she’d succeed and she did. Two weeks after she had left her body, medical support was withdrawn, according to her written instructions. Her body continued its automatic processes for another few days, and then it stopped.

Early in July her ashes were spread, secretly, from a low-flying plane, over the fields of her father’s estate.

The turkey was half raw, but when Michael, at the head of the table, declared it to be done to a turn, they all assented to the proposition in open defiance of the truth. Poor Cecelia wasn’t to blame. She’d had to drive in to Amesville at noon to pick up Milly and Abe, and Milly, who had been threatening to boycott the family reunion along with her other daughter, had taken an hour to be persuaded to get in the car. By the time Cecelia got back to Unity and shoved the turkey in the oven, the dinner was doomed to failure, at least as a culinary event. If it was anyone’s fault it was Daniel’s, since it was because of his eight o’clock curtain that they couldn’t wait till the turkey was done. Family reunions shouldn’t have to be run on a timetable.

Daniel loved the house the Hendricks lived in. He wanted to move it, stuffed pike, slapdash sylvan canvas, and all, onto the stage of a theater and use it for the set of Werther. Behold, it would say, this is the way you must live! With coasters under drinks and African violets pining on the windowsill and mincing china statuettes and babies growing up and trying to smash the lot of it.

Daniel was entranced and already half-in-love with his nephew and namesake, and had already begun, in an avuncular manner, to corrupt the boy, building up towers of alphabet blocks for him to knock down and then inciting everyone to clap for this display of wit and skill. Danny understood at once the nature of applause, that it represented the highest degree of adult attention one could command. He wanted more. Daniel built higher towers, spelling out longer words — TOWER, FLOWER, MANIFEST — and Danny knocked them down with the lightning-bolts of his god-like hands, and the adults continued to enjoy themselves and to applaud. Until they did at last grow restive and started talking to each other again, at which point Danny had knocked over his father’s drink and had to be taken upstairs to bed.

Of the six other grown-ups at the family reunion, three were complete strangers to Daniel, though Michael, Cecelia’s husband, claimed to be able to remember Daniel from the days when they’d been neighbors on Chickasaw Avenue. Daniel, trying to dredge up a reciprocal remembrance, could only produce an account of a slice of apple pie he’d received as a trick-or-treat offering from Michael’s parents, the Hendricks, and the difficulty he’d had eating it through the mouth-hole of his mask. Actually, it had been another neighbor who’d given him that slice of pie, and the reason he remembered it so clearly was because it had been so much better than his mother’s apple pie. He didn’t however, go into that.

Across the table from Daniel sat Michael’s much younger brother, Jerry, and Jerry’s girlfriend (his fiancée, until a week ago), Rose. Rose was (if Daniel were excepted) Amesville’s first genuine phoney. Her color didn’t come off in the bathtub. She was also a follower of NBC’s Dr. Silentius and wore a large button that said GOD IS WITHIN. Between them, Rose and Daniel had kept the table-talk limping along in the face of several massive brown-outs. It wasn’t that his family was being unduly hostile (except for Milly, who was); it was more the natural reticence that anyone feels who’s forced to cozy up to a stranger, which, after all, was the situation they were in.