thought how natural it was to allow my body to enjoy the softness of the ferns I had gathered. My weight released the faint odor of cinnamon from the fern fronds. But I did not close my eyes. First I turned my head to stare again out at the unchanging blackness. I liked the way the campfire coals continued to glow between me and the curtain of dark, whether we were all sitting around it or not. Then I turned my head to look at the back wall of rock. It was built in strata, some reddish, some more golden, some dark gray. My life, too, was laid down in strata. Perhaps each layer was a decade, though the divisions were not quite so neat as intervals of ten years might suggest.
“I shouldn’t have made the beds so far apart,” I said into their silence. My voice sounded plaintive.
Neither of them answered. If the beds had been closer together, we might have chatted longer against the darkness. The regret I had voiced was a spontaneous utterance against the desolation I suddenly felt.
There was childhood with my parents in their apartment, and then their leaving for Japan as missionaries and my moving in with my grandmother and grandfather in the bungalow in Memphis when I was nine, and then the years of powerful childhood growing up with the Stimson sisters, how I practiced the viola, and my grandfather’s death, then the binge of studying psychology and graduation from high school. There was the move to Iowa City, my quick engagement as an undergraduate to Thom Bergmann, our happiness as I finished my degrees; our travel and our meaningful work, his international connections. A decade with Thom; the loss of my grandmother; another decade with Thom. The loss of Thom. Again I saw the flap of the black wing of the falling piano, felt the hardness of the pavement under my thin shoe soles as I ran down Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip Café. Igtiyal. What did it matter? Thom was dead. What did the manner of his dying have to say about the nature of his life?
Everything.
What did my own survival tell me since I had come to dwell in this most accommodating of places?
That I knew nothing of who I was. And even less of Thom. Good-bye, Thom.
Of Adam and Riley?
These two men, one impaired of mind, one of body? But those conditions would pass, for each of them—I was sure of it. I was slipping into sleep. For each of us, it was his or her own dream story that would matter. Each was like Earth’s consciousness before Copernicus; each was the center of his or her universe, and there seemed no way for the center to move beyond the infinite arms of its radii. Sleep embraced me. Let all else circle round me. The unconscious breezes of memory and imagination toyed with the kite of my already dreaming mind. Thom lifted his arm and scattered the stars in the firmament. He breathed the deep breaths of passion.
Riley’s breath said sleep had claimed him. Then I floated in my dream to Adam and said, “Love me.” And we did. After we had made love, he disappeared, and I drifted home to my pallet and its scent of cinnamon. I rose again and wafted to Riley. Crossing the stone floor of the cave, my bare feet, though ghostly and immaterial, felt the slight variations in the rock, the places that were cracked, and those that seemed smooth and without blemish. Passing the dying fire, I felt warmth underfoot lingering in the rock. I moved more quietly than the spirit of darkness. When I reached Riley, I slumped to my knees and whispered into his ear, “Love me.” But I awoke too soon, shocked at how thoroughly I had been inhabited by desire.
In the morning, we all three woke up at the same time and sat up on our wilted fern beds.
Both Adam and Riley breathed deeply, and so did I. In unison, they looked at me and said, “What did you dream?”
I glanced at them and kept my secret. Then a piece of another dream visited me. “Toward morning, I dreamed of the sound of an airplane engine,” I told them. “And of flying on and on, from Nag Hammadi to Cairo. It was a memory dream. There was a Muslim girl, Arielle, with me, a young woman, really pretty, at the controls, Egyptian, with shoulder-length black hair. She