his hands. “Julian.” Devi was panting. He held on to the black railing to steady himself. He wouldn’t look at the deep dark well at the foot of the telescope—as if he was afraid it would swallow him if he so much as glanced at it. “Explain to me what you’re doing.”
Julian didn’t reply. He glanced at his watch. It was only 11:30. He couldn’t take another half hour of this.
“It won’t open,” Devi said.
“Maybe it won’t. And maybe it will. Maybe it opens every new moon, or every full moon. Or randomly. Or on every other solstice or every other equinox, or on the first and last day of every month, or only on the 29th of February. Maybe it opens when someone wishes it real hard. You have no idea. But one of these days, it will open,” Julian said. “And I will be here when it does.”
“Okay, say it does. Then what?”
Julian whirled to Devi. He knew he must have looked manic, palsied, desperate and enslaved, but he didn’t care. “It took me eight years to understand a central fact of my life,” Julian said. “I have been lost, reformed, made smaller, weaker, sicker. In some ways larger, yes, but not the important ways. For many years I lived with no comprehension of the most vital thing open to me, yet with a total indifference to everything else that mattered. The more filled with mystery my life became, the more frantic I grew, and the more determined to fail at everything else, as long as I succeeded in my one imperative—to save her. In other words, to do the one thing that I could not do, that made the least sense, yet somehow was the sanest thing in my life.”
“You’re upset with me—”
“Oh, we’re way past that. I’m furious. With myself, too, for allowing you to do this to me. I’ve been pissed off for years. Silly me, I thought if I did everything right, if I lived right and leaped by faith and learned to fence and fight, to ride horses, to plant, to make candles and love, to write her poetry and keep evil men away from her, that it wouldn’t all be a pantomime, it wouldn’t all be the dumbest fucking dumbshow on this earth. The idiot that I was,” Julian said through gritted teeth, “I thought that through the sheer immovable force of my effort and hope, I’d pull off the impossible and make her possible, that I would change her fate and give her back her life, the life she had never finished living, the life she had barely begun to live when we met.”
“How can you give her back what you didn’t give her in the first place?” Devi asked quietly.
“Because I’d been given a miracle! You said so yourself! I’d been given a second chance, and I refused to believe it was for nothing. And here’s the thing,” Julian said, leaning forward. “I still refuse to believe it.”
“Yes, you’re the master of not facing facts.” Devi waited. “But now what? All these self-discoveries, encouraging though they are, don’t explain what you’re doing here.”
“I’ve been looking at everything all wrong, thanks to you.”
“I knew it had to be my fault somehow.”
“The Dream Machine said outlook hazy. Try again. So that’s what I’m doing.”
“What is this Dream Machine?”
“A large roulette wheel on a boardwalk that spins and tells you things.”
“So a Magic 8-Ball?” Devi said. “You’re making your life decisions based on a plastic cube inside some water? Do you think perhaps this holy oracle had simply meant spin again?”
“No,” Julian said. “And you know who told me that? You. When you quoted C.S. Lewis to me. Very often what God helps us toward is just this power of trying again, you said.”
“So now the Almighty is communicating with you through an amusement park fortune wheel?”
“It said try again. I will find a way.”
“No, you won’t.”
“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? You’re afraid that the portal will open. Once again, you’re trying to talk me out of it.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
Julian glanced at his watch. “Stop talking. It’s almost noon.”
“So what?”
“Be quiet! I need to focus.”
Noon came.
Noon went.
Nothing happened.
Julian lowered his hand with the crystal chips that looked a lot like glass shards in the blown-apart jeep in wartime London. Carefully he returned the slivers into the jar and tightened the lid.