Nor could Daniel choose any of the older ladies. With a twinge, he had seen one of their little green books poking from a handbag, the spine marked 1298. The woman in the doctor’s coat, Sangloss, seemed to take a clinical interest in him. The others simply ignored him. He could almost smell their suspicion. In their way, they were stronger and perhaps more armored even than Glaucous. Not for him.

Glaucous sat on a low bench, watching this little drama with a fixed smile. “Go on,” he said. “There’s

nothing for you out here.”

How right he was. Once the door was closed, Bidewell and Glaucous and the ladies might fade away completely. The whole warehouse might just lift up like a burning feather. Anything could happen, but he would survive.

Daniel walked through. Bidewell closed the outer door. The inner left-hand door and the door on the right were both shut and quiet. He could picture Ginny and Jack sitting in those two rooms, bored, waiting for enough time to pass so Bidewell would call them out and apologize. The old man clearly had no idea what was going on.

The warehouse hummed like a sympathetic string. It wanted to join in the vast crumbling. It wanted to die.

Daniel went to the middle door, turned the key, and grasped the knob. He made sure to latch the door behind him. Nobody would sneak in. He had to observe the forms.

In the long room beyond, he sat in the white chair, hunched forward, and waited. Afraid.

The old Dodge was coming up on low hills, and soon there would be mountains, but Jeremy did not know where they were and did not much care.

He lay squished into the corner of the backseat, cast stretched almost full length across the old car. He was in a lousy mood. Not so much a mood as an unyielding concrete tunnel with no end, no exit. Ryan, his father, was dying, and that meant he would finally have no one, nothing but his rudimentary skills: mediocre patter and the poor, blunt magicks Ryan had managed to teach him.

“I had a dream about this Bleak Warden. It’s a kind of flying robot,” Ryan said. “It comes when you’re dead. Takes you away. Kind of like a garbage man, I guess.”

“Comes for you.Not for me,” Jeremy said, and then wished he could take it back. Ryan grinned like a raccoon. “Riiiight. There was this place in my dream, a kind of big cavern with a bright sky, filled with different people. Small ears, bushy fur instead of hair. I only remember a little. I’ve been there a couple of times. That’s what they call death, the people in the dream—they call it the Bleak Warden. Pretty scary, except in this place it never takes the living—and nobody is ever sick. They fight, but they don’t kill each other. They never steal. They raise kids, but they don’t havethem—kids are delivered like packages. Like storks leaving you under a cabbage leaf. Weird, huh?”

Jeremy sat up in the backseat, rearranged his cast, nudged by a phantom memory. Tried to remember where he really was. Could not grasp it—

His father continued:

“They hold festivals and what they call little wars, where tough guys get the crap kicked out of their system. Interesting, huh?”

“Dreams are showstoppers, Dad. You told me that.”

“Well, this one is actually exciting. I keep wondering what will happen the next time I dream. And it’s consistent—except last night, in the motel in Moscow, it changed. I was in a different part of the same place. Some of the people were taller. They were handing out these suits, red and yellow and green, like soft armor, to the smaller ones. Self-contained, like spacesuits, except not only do they give you air and heat, but…this is tough to describe. They keep body and soul together.” Ryan’s voice became reverent, as if he totally believed, was totally reliving that moment.

“You were having a nightmare,” Jeremy said. “You woke me up.”

“You whacked me in bed with your plaster club,” Ryan said, glancing over the seat. “Humor me, Jeremy. This is a long trip. Now of all times.”

That hurt so much, Jeremy thought it was unfair. “I’m listening, aren’t I?”

“We’re not going to have too many of these days, you know, so I thought I’d impart a little of what it means to be your dad, a little fatherly wisdom, however cracked.”

Jeremy did not know whether his father was feeling self-pity or expelling a lousy joke. (Ryan always called telling a bad joke “expelling,” like coughing out a piece of food or a gob of phlegm stuck in the wind-pipe: “You try to tell a joke and it makes you choke, but stop! Don’t expel it. Wrong joke or wrong crowd.”)

“Impart away,” Jeremy said, preparing to suffer in relative silence, because Ryan wasdying, he was pretty sure of that, though of course nobody would tell him anything right up front.

“All right.” Ryan thought for a moment, frowning in concentration. “These suits keep them alive and together in a dark, nasty land where there are no rules. But the people with little ears—me, my friends—we’re going out there, into the weirdness, and these superiorpeople—the tall fellows—are suiting us up. They won’t go themselves. Maybe they can’t, but we can, the little ones. Weird, huh?”

“Totally,” Jeremy said. “I never have dreams like that.”

“When things change, dreams change. I used to have normal dreams. What do you dream about?”

“Roads. Toads and roads.” Jeremy had worked out a pretty funny routine about toads crossing a road, grim and hilarious. “I want to dream about Mom.”

“Right.”

Ryan drove for a while without saying anything.

My father is fat. He wants to be a comedian.That’s what he had told Miriam Sangloss in the clinic. Jeremy’s father had thin red hair and a round red face and the body of a carny roustabout—big muscles, big bones, boiled-freckle skin, Mom had called it, that memorable time when she painted Ryan up in flower and beast tattoos for a street parade in Waukegan. She was acting in a film then, a real paying job, and they stayed over for a few weeks after the end of the shoot, doing local theater and of course that parade, which had been fun.

Jeremy had been eleven. On his fingers, he counted the days after the parade, the days before she died. Four.

The Dodge had taken Ryan and Jeremy through Montana and Idaho and into Oregon. They had stopped off in Eugene, where Ryan had worked a small circus whose owner was once Mom’s boyfriend. Ryan and the circus owner spent one night drinking and crying on each other’s shoulders— veryweird, Jeremy had thought.

They left Eugene for Spokane, crossing the eastern high desert. Their last trip.

“We all lose our mothers,” Ryan said on that trip. “Every mother since the beginning of time has died. Memory is the mother of us all, Jeremy.”

And now— Nunc—he was sitting in the chair.

Everything signifies, nothing is of itself. You call yourself Jack because it is a safe name. So many are named Jack, you can hide; but it is a strong name, universal.The odd thing, as if there had ever been just one singular, odd thing in his life, was that sitting in this room, he had no difficulty believing that road trip with his father was his very first memory, his first experience of being alive. What went before—his mother’s death, the beginning of the trip, breaking his leg—was like the sound of the dying city outside this high, empty room: there, but unconvincing. There is a number, assigned to volumes arranged on a nonexistent shelf in a time far away from now, all waiting to be reconciled. Waiting for choices to be made. Where do youreally come from, Jeremy?

Who is your real mother?

And why does she seek you?