"They're nearly all in, Sweetie. Thanks anyhow."

Richard places the final box down on the garage floor. Walking into the house, he sees Karen by the small pool, which in the course of a year has converted itself into an enormous science project on algae. "You okay down there?" he asks.

"I'm fine. I went for a small run. Now I'm just taking in the air. It turned warm a few minutes ago."

Richard goes inside and Karen resumes her sentry over the gone-to-seed backyard. The sky is oranging and she is sad because her voices have departed. She can no longer see into the future or even try to explain the unexplainable. She is merely mortal, and a frail mortal, too. But we've all had our hopes returned, she thinks. Jared will know what to do next.

From somewhere in the house comes the sound of rattling paper. It's Linus feeling his way back out to the patio carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes. "It's gotten warm out all of a sudden," he shouts, "let's barbecue, methinks." Within minutes, the ball barbecue is opened, the briquettes lit, the embers are glowing, and spirits are raised.

The darkening sky is becoming a warm, dead Xerox and the winds blow forcefully as though aimed from a hair blower. Yet there is no sound—a warm river flowing over the skin; the amplified sound of the Moon. It is summer in mid-winter.

My old friends are seated on the back patio, toasting marshmal-lows and joking around. They know that my two weeks are up and I'll be returning shortly.

Richard asks Linus, whose eyesight is just now returning, to count how many fingers he's holding up. Karen darts about serving drinks and flaunting her new legs ("Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce"). Hamilton and Pam sit calmly, their facial muscles loose, their crow's-feet vanished. They listen to the voices of the others with the peace of small children. Wendy helps Linus guide his stick near the flames; she is silent about her pregnancy by me, having kept details of our encounter hush-hush. Megan, seated on a faded folding chair, beams as baby Jane gurgles and clicks with her continuing enchantment with the gift of sight, not crying once since her encounter with me. Richard, bearing a marshmallow-clumped trident at his side, is simply pleased to see his friends so jolly.

"I can smell the skins burning," Linus says. "Carbon."

"Isn't it just the prettiest thing?" Pam adds. "Hey, King Neptune— start toasting your prongs."

As I look down at them from the sky, their barbecue is the only speck of light on Earth for hundreds of miles save for the lava that oozes down Mt. Baker's slope and a small forest fire north of Seattle. I become a star in the sky and grow until Megan sees me and says, "Look. I bet that's Jared now."

Seconds later, I appear at the patio's edge and Megan smiles, saying, "Jane, say hello to Jared," making Jane twitter birdishly.

"Are you able to eat, Jared?" asks Karen. "Marshmallows—a bit stale, but they plump the moment they burn."

"Hey, Kare, no food, thanks, no."

"A dance, perhaps?" She sweeps around the patio, her dress twirling and her eyes flashing because she is in love with the world.

"How about some lemonade?" asks Hamilton. "Num num. Made from a powder, of course, but lemony fresh nonetheless."

"Thanks again, but no, Ham." I move a bowl of potato chips and sit down on a stump Karen's father once used as a chopping block.

Linus, semi-blind, holds up his glass in my general direction and says,"A toast to Jared." The others join in with a cloud of hear-hear's. "Our miracle man."

I blush. Wendy, who's heavily dolled herself up for the night, sugars moonily, "Helloooo, Jared."

"Hey, Wen, looking good." And then there's a pause as in the old days when we made bonfires down at Ambleside beach, a bonfire's flames with embers hypnotic and silencing. "Guys—I need to speak with you all," I say, and I receive seven smiling faces in return—eight, now that Jane, as well as Linus, has vision. "Please listen."

The fire spits as insects kamikaze inward.

"It's hard for me. It's hard stuff. It's about all of you."

"Us?" Karen asks.

"Yup. All of you. And just because I'm able to speak more clearly than when I was alive doesn't mean I feel any more comfortable doing it. Cut me some slack. I'm here to speak to you about transforming your lives and yourselves. Making choices and changing who you are."

32 SUPER POWER

"You've all been wondering why it was only the eight of you who remained to see the world's end. It's because you've all been given a great gift, but a confusing one, too."

"Confusing? Duh," Karen says.

"Gift?" Hamilton doesn't believe me.

"Uh-huh. You've all been allowed to see what your lives would be like in the absence of the world."

Silence while everybody bites their lips.

"This is like that Christmas movie," Pam says, "The one they used to play too many times each December and it kind of wore you down by the eighteenth showing. You know: what the world would have been like without you."

"Sort of, Pam," I say, "but backwards. I've been watching over the bunch of you ever since Karen woke up, to see how different you'd be without the world."

"Why us, Jared?" Linus asks. "I mean, why not a syphilitic middle aged rice trader in Lahore, India, with, um, um, a collection of taxi-dermied squirrels." He pauses. "Or a five-year old Nigerian girl who communicates to the world, um, um, only through a green-painted Barbie she found in the alley behind the Finnish Embassy. I mean, why MS?"

"Why you? People never asked that question of Jimmy Stewart's character in It's a Wonderful Life."

"That's the name," Pam says.

"Just go with it," I recommend.

Richard harrumphs.

"You were spying on us?" Megan accuses—these modern kids—-so paranoid.

"Nope. Just watching. And caring. And worrying. And freaking out.

"What was so wrong about our lives that we had to go through the past year?" Linus asks. "At least Jimmy Stewart was having a life crisis. Our lives were going along pretty smoothly, actually."

"Were they?" I ask. "I mean, were they really?"

"Hey, Jared," Hamilton says, "it's not as if you were out there selling Girl Guide Cookies when you were down here. Who are you to watch over any of us and tell us what our lives should or shouldn't be?"

"For starters, Hamster, I'm a ghost, so that gives me a few extra course credits. No, I didn't get to stay on earth for an extra few decades, but I did get to see—oh, good God, Hamilton—what do you want me to have—wings and a halo?"

"For sta—"

Karen interrupts: "Will you testosterone cases clam up? Shush!"

Wendy says, "Jared, I get the impression that we were supposed to have been doing something else down here this past year—and that we've failed some kind of test."

"Yeah," Richard adds. "And what if we had done the right thing,

Jared? What would we have won—a trip to Rome on Sabena

Airlines? A year's supply of Rice-a-Roni? Maybe you haven't noticed, but Earth is a big slag heap these days. There's not much we couldalter even if we wanted. What—we're supposed to start a new race of human beings? A new civilization? Assemble some new Noah's Ark? Build a legacy? We don't even know what we're going to be able to eat in a year or two. Tang? Each other?"

Wendy adds, "Jared, there's radiation here now. And the weather isn't weather anymore. We can't plan for five years when we're unable even to plan for a week."

"Wendy, you're carrying our kid," I say … oops. "What kind of life do you expect him to lead?"

Wendy replies, "Him? You know the gender already? If you know the future, Jared, you ought to have thought of that beforehand."

"Wait wait wait wait wait," Linus says. "You two made it?" Wendy's sigh is a confirmation. "You bastard!" he shouts at me, throwing a patio chair at the spot where he roughly imagines me to be floating. One of the chair's legs knocks over the barbecue's dome and the embers fall onto the ground, missing Richard by inches.