And I say, how about a movie?

And she says, "Not this weekend."

I say, how about I get us tickets to the symphony?

And Helen waves a hand between us and says, "Do what you want."

And I say, great. Then it's a date.

Helen puts her pen in the pink hair behind her ear. She opens another book and lays it on top of the Hebrew book. With one finger holding her place in a dictionary, Helen looks up and says, "It's not that I don't like you. It's just that I'm very, very busy right now."

In the open grimoire, sticking out from one edge of it is a name. Written in the margin of a page is today's name, today's assassination target. It says, Carl Streator.

Helen closes the grimoire and says, "You understand."

The police scanner says a code seven-two.

I ask if she's coming to see me, tonight, in the Gartoller house. Standing in the doorway to her office, I say I can't wait to be with her again. I need her.

And Helen smiles and says, "That's the idea."

In the outer office, Mona catches me around the wrist. She picks up her purse and loops the strap over her shoulder, yelling, "Helen, I'm going out for lunch." To me, she says, "We need to talk, but outside." She unlocks the door to let us out.

In the parking lot, standing next to my car, Mona shakes her head, saying, "You have no idea what's happening, do you?"

I'm in love. So kill me.

"With Helen?" she says. She snaps her fingers in my face and says, "You're not in love." She sighs and says, "You ever hear of a love spell?"

For whatever reason, Nash screwing dead women comes to mind.

"Helen's found a spell to trap you," Mona says. "You're in her power. You don't really love her."

I don't?

Mona stares into my eyes and says, "When was the last time you thought about burning the grimoire?" She points at the ground and says, "This? What you call love? It's just her way of dominating you."

A car drives up and parks, and inside is Oyster. He just shakes the hair back off his eyes, and sits behind the steering wheel, watching us. The shattered blond hair exploded in every direction. Two deep parallel lines, slash scars, run across each cheek. Dark red war paint.

His cell phone rings, and Oyster answers it, "Doland, Dimms and Dorn, Attorneys-at-Law."

The big power grab.

But I love Helen.

"No," Mona says. She glances at Oyster. "You just think you do. She's tricked you."

But it's love.

"I've known Helen a lot longer than you have," Mona says. She folds her arms and looks at her wristwatch. "It's not love. It's a beautiful, sweet spell, but she's making you into her slave."

Chapter 39

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When they had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving them an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave.

Athena was telling them to fall in love.

Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy.

Between television and radio and Helen Hoover Boyle's magic spells, I don't know what I really want anymore. If I even believe myself, I don't know.

That night, Helen drives us to the antique store, the big warehouse where she's mutilated so much furniture. It's dark and closed, but she presses her hand over a lock and says a quick poem, and the door swings open. No burglar alarms sound. Nothing.

We're wandering deep into the maze of furniture, the dark disconnected chandeliers hanging above us. Moonlight glows in through the skylights.

"See how easy," Helen says. "We can do anything."

No, I say, she can do anything.

Helen says, "You still love me?"

If she wants me to. I don't know. If she says so.

Helen looks up at the looming chandeliers, the hanging cages of gilt and crystal, and she says, "Got time for a quickie?"

And I say, it's not like I have a choice.

I don't know the difference between what I want and what I'm trained to want.

I can't tell what I really want and what I've been tricked into wanting.

What I'm talking about is free will. Do we have it, or does God dictate and script everything we do and say and want? Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born? Do I have it, or is my mind under the control of Helen's spell?

Standing in front of a Regency armoire of burled walnut with a huge mirror of beveled glass in the door, Helen strokes the carved scrolls and garlands and says, "Become immortal with me."

Like this furniture, traveling through life after life, watching everyone who loves us die. Parasites. These armoires. Helen and I, the cockroaches of our culture.

Scarred across the mirrored door is an old gouged slash from her diamond ring. From back when she hated this immortal junk.

Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.

I tell Helen, I think we're immortal already. She says, "I have the power." She snaps open her purse and fishes out a sheet of folded paper, she shakes the paper open and says, "Do you know about 'scrying'?"

I don't know what I know. I don't know what's true. I doubt I really know anything. I say, tell me.

Helen slips a silk scarf from around her neck and wipes the dust off the huge mirrored door of the armoire. The Regency ar-moire with inlaid olive-wood carvings and Second Empire fire-gilded hardware, according to the index card taped to it. She says, "Witches spread oil on a mirror, then they say a spell, and they can read the future in the mirror."

The future, I say, great. Cheatgrass. Kudzu. The Nile perch. Right now, I'm not even sure I can read the present. Helen holds up the paper and reads. In the dull, counting voice she used for the flying spell, she reads a few quick lines. She lowers the paper and says, "Mirror, mirror, tell us what our future will be if we love each other and use our new power." Her new power.

"I made up the 'mirror, mirror' part," Helen says. She slips her hand around mine and squeezes, but I don't squeeze back. She says, "I tried this at the office with the mirror in my compact, and it was like watching television through a microscope."

In the mirror, our reflections blur, the shapes swim together, the reflection mixes into an even gray.

"Tell us," Helen says, "show us our future together." And shapes appear in the gray. Light and shadows swim together.

"See," she says. "There we are. We're young again. I can do that. You look like you did in the newspaper. The wedding photo."

Everything's so unfocused. I don't know what I see.

"And look," Helen says. She tosses her chin toward the mirror. "We're ruling the world. We're founding a dynasty."

But what's enough?

I can hear Oyster say, him and his overpopulation talk.

Power, money, food, sex, love. Can we ever get enough, or will getting some make us crave even more?

Inside the shifting mess of the future, I can't recognize anything. I can't see anything except just more of the past. More problems, more people. Less biodiversity. More suffering.

"I see us together forever," she says.

I say, if that's what she wants.

And Helen says, "What's that supposed to mean?"