Union Atlantic Page 0,79

think I'm an idiot," Nate said. "You think just because I keep coming to your house you can say anything you want to me. I'm not as weak as you think. I've been through stuff."

"Okay. Fine. But here's the question: Are you strong enough to tell me what you want? That's the test, in the real world. I told you what I want. I want those papers."

He reached out and cupped the back of Nate's skull in his hand, pressing his thumb and forefinger into the taut muscles of his neck. Slowly, reluctantly, Nate leaned forward, letting his head come to rest against Doug's stomach.

"What if I want to tell you that I love you?"

"You don't love me. I make you hard, that's all. Which is fine. The rest is daydreaming. But don't worry," Doug said, running his hand through Nate's hair. "I like you."

"Really?"

"Sure. Why not?"

DAISIES AND MILKWEED and high summer grass scratched at Charlotte's ankles and shins, catching on the hem of her dress as the crickets and frogs all about her in the field sang in endless oscillation.

They can't have gone far, she thought, how far could the dogs have gone? Lights from the party died away at the woods' edge.

"Samuel!" she called into the blackness, dotted here and there by fireflies. "Wilkie!"

Mosquitoes swarmed at her head and along her bare arms she could feel the tingle of gnats. The air itself seemed to sweat, the pores of every living thing opening wide, sap bleeding from the pines, the bushy arrowheads of the grass stalks bursting to seed, the whole warm earth breathing in the darkness.

Her temples still throbbed from the receding cacophony of voices and music. She'd focused as best she could talking to Fanning, as she always tried to in the presence of others, holding fast to the teleological mind, that once broad current that flowed past the lacuna of doubt and random transport. But those organizing arguments dropped away again here.

Stepping into the woods, she reached her hand out and felt the smooth bark of a birch.

"Come along," she called out to them. "Come along."

She could barely see her hand in front of her face, the darkness molten now like a closed eyelid's slow swirl.

Why search? Such pedants and moralists Sam and Wilkie had become. Yet as soon as she imagined being without them the feeling of loneliness bit at her. She had been nearly cured of that disease before they had come along. She had been content in solitude. Her soul kept alive by the leaps of incandescence that now and then hallowed intervals otherwise inconsequent: the rhythm of words singing off a page, a sonata turning time into feeling, a landscape on a canvas so caught as to grant one brief respite from the fear of total neutrality. These were the body and blood of her faith in the world. What the utilitarians and the materialists and the swallowers of all the cheap scientism would never understand: that the privilege of walking by the river in nature's company owed as much to a mind trained by poetry and painting - of Protestant plainsong or Romantic largesse - as to any quiddity of nature's own. You walked through the painting. You saw through the poem. Imagination created experience, not matter alone.

"Wilkie!"

If they went too far they might reach the road, where they could be hit by a car or cut their paws on glass.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard a young woman's cry. She turned, seeing nothing but darkness behind her. All of a sudden, there was a terrible beating of wings and she felt the stiff tips of feathers brush against her arm as a bird took off right beside her, a crow by the sound of the call it made as it veered up and away. She began walking more quickly, her breathing growing heavy again, the back of her dress soaked through with sweat. Roots protruding from the ground and the low branches of the pines made the going hard. Just as she saw what she thought were lights up ahead, she felt a sharp nick on her leg and shifted to her right to avoid it only to feel another stab on her wrist. Frightened, she reached her arms out in front of her, and started moving faster still.

THE GUESTS, stuffed and drunk, had at last been herded out onto the lawn for the fireworks, the flush-faced town collegians on break from summer internships grabbing their third or fourth