She only smiles at the conceit. “I missed you,” she says.

  He touches her cheek. She does not shy away. Her cheek presses into his hand, and he knows that she understands why he brought her here and what he means to do.

  Her breasts are perfect but small, her buttocks are boyish and slender, and the only hair on her body is that which tumbles onto her shoulders, that which he must brush out of her face to kiss her again. “I love you,” she whispers. All my life I love you.”

  And it is exactly as he would have had it in a dream, except that the flesh is tangible, the ecstasy is real, and the breeze turns colder as she shyly dresses again. They say nothing more as he takes her home. Her mother has fallen asleep on the living-room couch, a jumble of the Daily Herald piled around her feet. Only then does he remember that for her there will be a tomorrow, and on that tomorrow Charlie will not call. For three months Charlie will not call, and she’ll hate him.

  He tries to soften it. He tries by saying, “Some things can happen only once.” It is the sort of thing he might then have said. But she only puts her finger on his lips and says, “I’ll never forget.” Then she turns and 24 walks toward her mother, to waken her. She turns and motions for Charlie to leave, then smiles again and waves. He waves back and goes out of the door and drives home. He lies awake in this bed that feels like childhood to him. and he wishes it could have gone on forever like this It should have gone on like this, he thinks. She is no child. She was no child, he should have thought, for THIEF was already transporting him home.

  “What’s wrong, Charlie?” Jock asked.

  Charlie awoke. It had been hours since THIEF brought him back. It was the middle of the night, and Charlie realized that he had been crying in his sleep. “Nothing,” he said.

  “You’re crying, Charlie. I’ve never seen you cry before.”

  “Go plug into a million volts, Jock. I had a dream.”

  “What dream?”

  “I destroyed her.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “It was a goddamned selfish thing to do.”

  “You’d do it again. But it didn’t hurt her.”

  “She was only fourteen.”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “I’m tired. I was asleep. Leave me alone.”

  “Charlie, remorse isn’t your style.”

  Charlie pulled the blanket over his head, feeling petulant and wondering whether this childish act was another proof that he was retreating into senility after all.

  “Charlie, let me tell you a bedtime story.”

  “I’ll erase you.”

  “Once upon a time, ten years ago, an old woman named Rachel Carpenter petitioned for a day in her past. And it was a day with someone, and it was a day with you. So the routine circuits called me, as they always do when your name domes up, and I found her a day. She only wanted to visit, you see, only wanted to relive a good day. I was surprised, Charlie. I didn’t know you ever had good days.”

  This program had been with Jock too long. It knew too well how to get under his skin.

  “And in fact there were no days as good as she thought,” Jock continued. “Only anticipation and disappointment. That’s all you ever gave anybody. Charlie. Anticipation and disappointment.”

  “I can count on you.”

  “This woman was in a home for the mentally incapable. And so I gave her a day. Only instead of a day of disappointment, or promises she knew would never be fulfilled, I gave her a day of answers I gave her a night of answers, Charlie.”

  “You couldn’t know that I’d have you do this. You couldn’t have known it ten years ago.”

  “That’s all right, Charlie. Play along with me. You’re dreaming anyway, aren’t you?”

  “And don’t wake me up.”

  “So an old woman went back into a young girl’s body on twenty-eight October 1973. and the young girl never knew what had happened; so it didn’t change her life. Don’t you see?”

  “It’s a lie.”

  “No, it isn’t. I can’t lie, Charlie. You programmed me not to lie. Do you think I would have let you go back and harm her.”

  “She was the same. She was as I remembered her.”

  “Her body was.”

  “She hadn’t changed. She wasn’t an old woman, Jock. She was a girl. She was a girl, Jock.”

  And Charlie thought of an old woman dying in an institution, surrounded by yellow walls and pale gray sheets and curtains. He imagined young Rachel inside that withered form, imprisoned in a body that would not move, trapped in a mind that could never again take her along her bright, mysterious trails.

  “I flashed her picture on the television,” Jock said.

  And yet. Charlie thought, how is it less bearable than that beautiful boy who wanted so badly to do the right thing that he did it all wrong, lost his chance, and now is caught in the sum of all his wrong turns? I got on the road they all wanted to take, and I reached the top. but it wasn’t where I should have gone. I’m still that boy. I did not have to lie when I went home to her.

  “I know you pretty well, Charlie,” Jock said. “I knew that you’d be enough of a bastard to go back. And enough of a human being to do it right when you got there. She came back happy, Charlie. She came back satisfied.”

  His night with a beloved child was a lie then; it wasn’t young Rachel any more than it was young Charlie. He looked for anger inside himself but couldn’t find it. For a dead woman had given him a gift, and taken the one he offered, and it still tasted sweet.

  “Time for sleep, Charlie. Go to sleep again. I just wanted you to know that there’s no reason to feel any remorse for it. No reason to feel anything bad at all.”

  Charlie pulled the covers tight around his neck, unaware that he had begun that habit years ago, when the strange shadowy shapes hid in his closet and only the blanket could keep him safe. Pulled the covers high and tight, and closed his eyes, and felt her hand stroke him, felt her breast and hip and thigh, and heard her voice as breath against his cheek.

  “O chestnut tree,” Jock said, as he had been taught to say, “. . . great rooted blossom er,

  “Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?

  “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

  “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

  The audience applauded in his mind while he slipped into sleep, and he thought it remarkable that they sounded genuine. He pictured them smiling and nodding at the show. Smiling at the girl with her hand raised so; nodding at the man who paused forever, then came on stage.

  The Changed Man and the King of Words

  Once there was a man who loved his son more than life. Once there was a boy who loved his father more than death.

  They are not the same story, not really. But I can’t tell you one without telling you the other.

  The man was Dr, Alvin Bevis, and the boy was his son, Joseph, and the only woman that either of them loved was Connie, who in 1977 married Alvin, with hope and joy, and in 1978 gave birth to Joe on the brink of death and adored them both accordingly. It was an affectionate family. This made it almost certain that they would come to grief.

  Connie could have no more children after Joe. She shouldn’t even have had him. Her doctor called her a damn fool for refusing to abort him in the fourth month when the problems began. “He’ll be born retarded. You’ll die in labor.” To which she answered, “HI have one child, or I won’t believe that I ever lived.” In her seventh month they took Joe out of her, womb and all. He was scrawny and little, and the doctor told her to expect him to be mentally deficient and physically uncoordinated. Connie nodded and ignored him. She was lucky. She had Joe, alive, and silently she said to any who pitied her, i am more a woman than any of you barren ones who still have to worry about the phases of the moon.

  Neither Alvin nor Connie ever believed Joe would be retarded. And soon enough it was clear that he wasn’t. He walked at eight months. He talked at twelve months. He had his alphabet at eighteen months. He could read at a second-grade level by the time he was three. He was inquisitive, demanding, independent, disobedient, and exquisitely beautiful, with a shock of copper-colored hair and a face as smooth and deep as a coldwater pool.

  His parents watched him devour learning and were sometimes hard pressed to feed him with what he needed. He will be a great man. they both whispered to each other in the secret conversations of night. It made them proud: it made them afraid to know that his learning and his safety had, by chance or the grand design of things, been entrusted to them.

  Out of all the variety the Bevises offered their son in the first few years of his life. Joe became obsessed with stories. He would bring books and insist that Connie or Alvin read to him, but if it was not a storybook, he quickly ran and got another, until at last they were reading a story. Then he sat imprisoned by the chain of events as the tale unfolded, saying nothing until the story was over. Again and again “Once upon a time, or “There once was a, or “One day the king sent out a proclamation,” until Alvin and Connie had every storybook in the house practically memorized. Fairy tales were Joe’s favorites, but as time passed, he graduated to movies and contemporary stories and even history.

  The problem was not the thirst for tales, however. The conflict began because Joe had to live out his stories. He would get up in the morning and announce that Mommy was Mama Bear, Daddy was Papa Bear, and he was Baby Bear. When he was angry, he would be Goldilocks and run away. Other mornings Daddy would be Rumpelstiltskin. Mommy would be the Farmer’s Daughter, and Joe would be the King. Joe was Hansel, Mommy was Gretel. and Alvin was the Wicked Witch.

  “Why can’t I be Hansel’s and Gretel’s father? Alvin asked. He resented being the Wicked Witch. Not that he thought it meant anything. He told himself it merely annoyed him to have his son constantly assigning him dialogue and action for the day’s activities. Alvin never knew from one hour to the next who he was going to be in his own home.

  After a time, mild annoyance gave way to open irritation: if it was a phase Joe was going through, it ought surely to have ended by now. Alvin finally suggested that the boy be taken to a child psychologist. The doctor said it was a phase.

  “Which means that sooner or later he’ll get over it?” Alvin asked. “Or that you just can’t figure out what’s going on?”

  “Both.” said the psychologist cheerfully. “You’ll just have to live with it.”

  But Alvin did not like living with it. He wanted his son to call him Daddy. He was the father, after all. Why should he have to put up with his child, no matter how bright the boy was. assigning him silly roles to play whenever he came home? Alvin put his foot down, He refused to answer to any name but Father. And after a little anger and a lot of repeated attempts. Joe finally stopped trying to get his father to play a part. Indeed, as far as Alvin knew. Joe entirely stopped acting out stones.

  It was not so, of course. Joe simply acted them out with Connie after Alvin had gone for the day to cut up DNA and put it back together creatively. That was how Joe learned to hide things from his father. He wasn’t lying: he was just biding his time. Joe was sure that if only he found good enough stories Daddy would play again.

  So when Daddy was home Joe did not act out stories. Instead he and his father played number and word games, studied elementary Spanish as an introduction to Latin, plinked out simple programs on the Atari, and laughed and romped until Mommy came in and told her boys to calm down before the roof fell in on them. This is being a father. Alvin told himself. I am a good father. And it was true. It was true, even though every now and then Joe would ask his mother hopefully. “Do you think that Daddy will want to be in this story?”

  “Daddy just doesn’t like to pretend. He likes your stories, but not acting them out.”

  In 1983 Joe turned five and entered school: that same year Dr. Bevis created a bacterium that lived on acid precipitation and neutralized it. In 1987 Joe left school, because he knew more than any of his teachers: at precisely that time Dr, Bevis began earning royalties on commercial breeding of his bacterium for spot cleanup in acidized bodies of water. The university suddenly became terrified that he might retire and live on his income and take his name away from the school. So he was given a laboratory and twenty assistants and secretaries and an administrative assistant. and from then on Dr. Bevis could pretty well do what he liked with his time.

  What he liked was to make sure the research was still going on as carefully and methodically as was proper, and in directions that he approved of. Then he went home and became the faculty of one for his son’s very private academy.

  It was an idyllic time for Alvin.

  It was hell for Joe.

  Joe loved his father, mind you. Joe played at learning, and they had a wonderful time, reading The Praise of Folly in the original Latin, duplicating great experiments, and then devising experiments of their own—too many things to list. Enough to say that Alvin had never had a graduate student so quick to grasp new ideas, so eager to devise newer ones of his own. How could Alvin have known that Joe was starving to death before his eyes?

  For with Father home. Joe and Mother could not play.

  Before Alvin had taken him out of school, Joe used to read books with his mother. All day at home she would read Jane Eyre. and Joe would read it in school, hiding it behind copies of Friends and Neighbors. Homer. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain. Mitchell, Galsworthy, Elswyth Thane. And then in those precious hours after school let out and before Alvin came home from work they would be Ashley and Scarlett. Tibby and Julian, Huck and Jim, Walter and Griselde, Odysseus and Circe. Joe no longer assigned the parts the way he did when he was little. They both knew what book they were reading, and they would, live within the milieu of that book. Each had to guess from the other’s behavior what role had been chosen that particular day: it was a triumphant moment when at last Connie would dare to venture Joe’s name for the day, or Joe call Mother by hers, In all the years of playing the games, never once did they choose to be the same person: never once did they fail to figure out what role the other played.

  Now Alvin was home, and that game was over. No more stolen moments of reading during school. Father frowned on stories. History, yes: lies and poses, no. And so while Alvin thought that joy had finally come, for Joe and Connie joy was dead.

  Their life became one of allusion, dropping phrases to each other out of books, playing subtle characters without ever allowing themselves to utter the other’s name. So perfectly did they perform that Alvin never knew what was happening. Just now and then he’d realize that something was going on that he didn’t understand.

  “What sort of weather is this for January?” Alvin said one day. looking out the window at heavy rain.

  “Fine.” said Joe, and then, thinking of ‘The Merchant’s Tale,” he smiled at his mother. “In May we climb trees.”

  “What?” Alvin asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I just like tree climbing.”

  “It all depends.” said Connie, “on whether the sun dazzles your eyes.”

  When Connie left the room, Joe asked an innocuous question about teleology, and Alvin put the previous exchange completely out of his mind.

  Or rather tried to put it out of his mind. He was no fool. Though Joe and Connie were very subtle. Alvin gradually realized he did not speak the native language of his own home. He was well enough read to catch a reference or two. Turning into swine. Sprinkling dust. “Frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Remarks that didn’t quite fit into the conversation, phrases that seemed strangely resonant. And as he grew more aware of his wife’s and his son’s private language, the more isolated he felt. His lessons with Joe began to seem not exciting but hollow, as if they were both acting a role. Taking parts in a story. The story of the loving father-teacher and the dutiful, brilliant student-son. It had been the best time of Alvin’s life, better than any life he had created in the lab, but that was when he had believed it. Now it was just a play. His son’s real life was somewhere else.

  I didn’t like playing the parts he gave me. years ago, Alvin thought. Does he like playing the part that I have given him?

  “You’ve gone as far as I can take you,” Alvin said at breakfast one day, “in everything, except biology of course. So I’ll guide your studies in biology, and for everything else I’m hiring advanced graduate students in various fields at the university. A different one each day.”

  Joe’s eyes went deep and distant. “You won’t be my teacher anymore?”

  “Can’t teach you what I don’t know.” Alvin said. And he went back to the lab. Went back and with delicate cruelty tore apart a dozen cells and made them into something other than themselves, whether they would or not.

  Back at home Joe and Connie looked at each other in puzzlement. Joe was thirteen. He was getting tall and felt shy and awkward before his mother. They had been three years without stories together. With Father there, they had played at being prisoners, passing messages under the guard’s very nose. Now there was no guard, and without the need for secrecy there was no message anymore. Joe took to going outside and reading or playing obsessively at the computer; more doors were locked in the Bevis home than had ever been locked before.

  Joe dreamed terrifying, gentle nightmares. dreamed of the same thing, over and over; the setting was different, but always the story was the same. He dreamed of being on a boat, and the gunwale began to crumble wherever he touched it. and he tried to warn his parents, but they wouldn’t listen, they leaned, it broke away under their hands, and they fell into the sea. drowning. He dreamed that he was bound up in a web. tied like a spider’s victim, but the spider never, never, never came to taste of him, left him there to desiccate in helpless bondage, though he cried out and struggled. How could he explain such dreams to his parents? He remembered Joseph in Genesis, who spoke too much of dreams; remembered Cassandra: remembered locaste. who thought to slay her child for fear of oracles. I am caught up in a story. Joe thought, from which I cannot escape. Each change is a fall; each fall tears me from myself. If I cannot be the people of the tales, who am I then?