All his hope and science and research and glamour left here in ruins:

The Space Needle.

The Science Center with its lacy domes and hanging light globes.

The Monorail streaking along covered in brushed aluminum.

This is how our lives were supposed to turn out.

Go there. Take the trip, Seth says. It will break your heart because the Jetsons with their robot maid, Rosie, and their flying- saucer cars and toaster beds that spit you out in the morning, it's like the Jetsons have sublet the Space Needle to the Flintstones.

"You know," says Seth, "Fred and Wilma. The garbage disposal that's really a pig that lives under the sink. All their furniture made out of bones and rocks and tiger-skin lampshades. Wilma vacuums with a baby elephant and fluffs the rocks. They named their baby 'Pebbles'."

Here was our future of cheese-food and aerosol propellants, Styrofoam and Club Med on the moon, roast beef served in a toothpaste tube.

"Tang," says Seth, "you know, breakfast with the astronauts. And now people come here wearing sandals they made themselves out of leather. They name their kids Zilpah and Zebulun out of the Old Testament. Lentils are a big deal."

Seth sniffs and drags a hand across the tears in his eyes. It's the Estrace is all. He must be getting premenstrual.

"The folks who go to the Space Needle now," Seth says, "they have lentils soaking at home and they're walking around the ruins of the future the way barbarians did when they found Grecian ruins and told themselves that God must've built them."

Seth parks us under one big steel leg of the Space Needle's three legs. We get out and look up at the legs going up to the Space Needle, the low restaurant, the high restaurant that revolves, then the observation deck at the top. Then the stars.Jump to the sad moment when we buy our tickets and get on the big glass elevator that slides up the middle of the Space Needle. We're in this glass and brass go-go cage dance party to the stars. Going up, I want to hear hypoal-lergenic Telestar music, untouched by human hands. Anything computer-generated and played on a Moog synthesizer. I want to dance the frug on a TWA commuter flight go-go dance party to the moon where cool dudes and chicks do the mash potato under zero gravity and eat delicious snack pills.

I want this.

I tell Brandy Alexander this, and she goes right up to the brass and glass windows and does the frug even though going up, the G forces make this like dancing the frug on Mars where you weigh eight hundred pounds.

The sad part is when the guy in a poly-blend uniform who runs the elevator misses the whole point of the future. The whole fun, fun, fun of the moment is wasted on him, and this guy looks at us as if we're those puppies you see behind glass in suburban mall pet stores. Like we're those puppies with yellow ooze on their eyes and buttholes, and you know they'll never have another solid bowel movement but they're still for sale for six hundred dollars apiece. Those puppies are so sad that even the overweight girls with bad beauty college perms will tap on the glass for hours and say, "I loves you, little one. Mommy loves you, tiny one."

The future is just wasted on some people.

Jump to the observation deck at the top of the Space Needle, where you can't see the steel legs so it's as if you're hovering over Seattle on a flying saucer with a lot of souvenirs for sale. Still, most of this isn't souvenirs of the future. It's the ecology T-shirts and batiks and tie-dyed all-natural cotton fiber stuff you can't wash with anything else because it's never really colorfast. Tapes of whales singing while they do sex. More stuff I hate.

Brandy goes off in search of relics and artifacts from the future. Acrylic. Plexiglas. Aluminum. Styrofoam. Radium.

Seth goes to the railing and leans out over the suicide nets and spits. The spit falls back down into the twenty-first century. The wind blows my hair out over the darkness and Seattle and my hands are clutched white on the steel railing where about a million hands before me have clutched the paint off.

Inside his clothes, instead of the plates of hard muscle that used to drive me crazy, now the fat pushes his shirt out over the top of his belt. It's the Premarin. His sexy five o'clock shadow is fading from the Provera. Even his fingers swell around his old letterman's ring.

The photographer in my head says:

Give me peace.

Flash.

Give me release.

She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says, "Save the world with some advice from the future."

Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read.

On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.

Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss on the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift the card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle.

Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

A kiss, and the card's on its way toward Lake Washington.

From Seth:

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

A kiss, and it's off on the wind toward Ballard.

Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write:

Jump to us going down fast in a TWA return trip home from the moon, Brandy and Seth and me dancing our dance party frug in the zero-gravity brass and glass go-go cage elevator. Brandy makes a big ring-beaded fist and tells the poly-blend service droid who tries to stop us to chill out unless he wants to die on reentry.

Back on earth in the twenty-first century, our rented Lincoln with its blue casket interior is waiting to take us to a nice hotel. On the windshield is a ticket, but when Brandy storms over to tear it up, the ticket is a postcard from the future.

Maybe my worst fears.

For Brandy to read out loud to Seth. I love Seth so much I have to destroy him ...

Even if I overcompensate, nobody will ever want me. Not Seth. Not my folks. You can't kiss someone who has no lips. Oh, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.

Brandy Alexander, her big hand lifts the postcard. The queen supreme reads it to herself, silent, and slips the postcard into her handbag. Princess Princess, she says, "At this rate, we'll never get to the future.”

the fluorescent light coming through in broken exploded bits.

"Veils," Brandy says as each color settles over me. "You need to look like you're keeping secrets," she says. "If you're going to do the outside world, Miss St. Patience, you need to not let people see your face," she says.

"You can go anywhere in the world," Brandy goes on and on.

You just can't let people know who you really are.

"You can live a completely normal, regular life," she says.

You just can't let anybody get close enough to you to learn the truth.

"In a word," she says, "veils."

Take-charge princess who she is, Brandy Alexander never does ask my real name. The name who I was born. Miss Bossy Pants right away gives me a new name, a new past. She invents another future for me with no connections, except to her, a cult all by herself.

"Your name is Daisy St. Patience," she tells me. "You're the lost heiress to the House of St. Patience, the very haute couture fashion showroom, and this season we're doing hats," she says. "Hats with veils."