his banner. It’s written by a thing with five hundred million root tips. It says, Oak and door come from the same ancient word.
After the closing night party, Ray and Dorothy end up in bed. Theater and Dorothy’s whim have held them in suspended thrall for that long. Then, a cliff dive for him, after all. It’s dark enough to hush the worst of their many inner sirens and alarms. But six inches from his candlelit face, she can still make out the smallest muscles around his eyes.
“How do you feel about your parents? Have you ever had racist thoughts? Did you ever shoplift?”
“Am I on trial? Why are you torturing me?”
“No reason.” Her whole face twitches like a Mexican jumping bean.
He rolls onto his back and looks up to the ceiling. “I’ve never been onstage like that before. It makes you feel like you’re talking to the gods.”
“Doesn’t it, just?”
And then: “Do you think we’re going somewhere?”
She scrambles up on her elbow to find his face. “We? You mean, like, humanity?”
“Sure. But you and me, first. Then everybody.”
“I don’t know. How the hell should I know?”
He hears her anger, and thinks he understands. His hand pats about on the sheets, feeling for hers. “I feel like this was supposed to happen.”
“This?” Merciless Lady M. Mocking. “Destiny, you mean?”
It’s like he’s frozen-floating across the stage in time-lapse again, disguised as Birnham Wood. “I earn a good salary. I’ll be all paid up on my loans in five more years. They’ll make me a partner before you know it.”
Her eyes squeeze shut. In a few years, the bombs will be falling, the Earth will be spent, and the only humans left will be fleeing the planet in rockets to nowhere.
“You wouldn’t have to work, if you didn’t want to.”
She sits up. Her hand presses down on his sternum, pinning him. “Hang on. Oh, god. Are you proposing?”
He cocks his head and dares her. Heart of oak.
“Because we slept together? Once?” She doesn’t need her special gift to see how badly the mockery stings him. “Wait. Am I your first?”
He holds still, frozen, halfway across the stage. “Maybe you should’ve asked me that two hours ago.”
“Look. I mean . . . marriage?” The mere word in her mouth turns baroque and alien. “I can’t get married. I’m supposed to . . . I don’t know! Go backpacking in South America for two years. Move to the Village and take drugs. Get involved with a light plane pilot who moonlights for the CIA.”
“I have a backpack. They have patent lawyers in New York. I’m not sure about the pilot part.”
She’s ambushed and laughing and shaking her head. “You’re joking. You’re not joking. What the hell?” She does a back dive onto the pillows. “What the hell, I say. Lead on, Macduff!”
They have each other again. This time, it’s binding. In the stillness of afterward, she can feel the wet on his temple. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t scare the crap out of you?”
“No.”
“You’re lying to me. First time.”
“Perhaps.”
“But you love me.”
“Perhaps.”
“ ‘Perhaps?’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Something huge and heavy and slow and far away and altogether unknown to him begins to say what it might mean. And then he proceeds to show her.
. . .
RAY’S PREDICTION COMES TRUE. It takes just five years to pay off all his debts. He makes partner soon after. He’s brilliant at what he does: nailing intellectual property thieves and getting them to cease and desist or pay up. His earnestness is hypnotic, his commitment to fairness and stability. You’re profiting from something that belongs to someone else. The world can’t work that way. Almost always, the other side settles out of court.
Dorothy’s prediction, for her part, is not exactly wrong. The bombs are indeed falling. But mid-sized bombs, all over the globe, small enough that nobody has to flee the planet, just yet. She, for one, keeps the day job, transcribing the words of people under oath as fast as they can speak. The secret is not to care what the words mean. Paying attention decimates your speed.
Half a dozen years pass as if a single season. They break up. They get re-engaged, while playing the romantic leads in an Alter Ego Community Theater production of You Can’t Take It with You. Her feet go stone-cold again. They recommit, after walking five hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail together in twenty-eight days. Then again by hand signals, while skydiving.