"And you don't think that?"

"I know what he means. I listened. I heard.” He looked around himself, and ran his hand over the surface of his table, smooth and varicolored wood and not quite level, like a plain or a body's back. “I think I'm from here,” he said. “I think this is so, this is actual. I think that all we do and can do and will do arises from it. I just think we don't know all of what it is. We learn. We learn by doing what we think we can't, and when we can, we share, and so we find out more of what it is, or can be."

"So spirit's made of this too,” Rosie said. “Made here. Home-made."

"I think so."

"But not Beau."

"No."

"Do you think,” Rosie said, “he could dream a place for himself to go off into and be lost? Lost to us, I mean."

"Maybe. Not something I know."

"You used to say"—Spofford used to quote it to her, so that it became her truth too over time, to be used with a thousand meanings—"you used to say that life is dreams, checked by physics."

His great broad smile at once shy and cocksure.

"Beau I guess wouldn't say that."

"No,” Cliff said. “But Beau's not here, and I am.” He took away from her the cup he had given her. “Do you want to do some work?"

* * * *

At the post office in Stonykill Rosie emptied the Rasmussen Foundation's big box, a slurry of stuff, it never stopped coming, glossy announcements and posters and news of other conferences elsewhere, in other centers here and abroad, a great circuit or intellectual circus entertaining itself. Among the stuff was a letter for her, though, in a hand she knew: not a postcard but a real letter.

Mom—I've got some bad news, bad for me anyway but not bad bad. I tried to get away with something and it didn't work, and now I'm in trouble. Here's what happened. I didn't tell the captain of this boat, ship I mean, or the director of the program, that I'm taking seizure medication. I know I should have, I know it was the right thing to do, but you know sometimes I get tired of telling people, sometimes I want to just not, and be like everybody. Don't tell me there's no “everybody.” I know. I just want to be like everybody. You don't know the feeling, but you don't need to know. Anyway I got separated from the damn pills, and I couldn't go searching for them, and what do you know, after five years okay, that very night I get hit with a biggie. Wet the bed and all. I still might have got away with it except that my bunkmate was awake and saw it and freaked. O God they were mad. Ranting at me for concealing a serious medical condition, breach of trust, impossible for me to go on with them.

No oh no. Oh poor babe.

So there I was like the Ancient Mariner and I've got to go. We had to turn back so I could be put ashore. I thought they were going to leave me on an ice flow or floe. At least we were only a day out of Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego, where by the way the phones aren't working this week. There's a plane out tomorrow to LA, I'll get Dad to get me there maybe. Mom I'm so hurt and ashamed. I wanted so badly to be there. I get why they said what they said but I wanted to be there and I wanted them to take a chance, and they wouldn't. So I'll call. I'm coming home.

Life is dreams, checked by physics: and physics made or ruled biology, and so also our brains and the flaws in them, and also the medicines that sometimes fixed them, which were dreamed up by other brains, their dreaming limited by physics too, which they therefore had to learn. And they did learn, and kept dreaming, and so did Sam, and only stopped where she had to. For now. Because maybe physics has no end, no end we know, any more than dreaming does.

Oh my dear, oh my dear dear.

But she was coming home anyway. The thought filled Rosie with an expectant hunger, a wondrous craving to see and touch her again. Almost scary to want something—no, someone—that much, but more wonderful than scary: wonderful that you could so much want to have what you actually had. The thought of Sam called down into her heart as Cliff's yell had done long ago when it was asleep or cold: woke it, and started quick tears in her eyes, as though it was, itself, their source.

She drove out through Stonykill and took the turn now marked with a new sign that pointed discreetly but plainly to the Rasmussen Humanities Conference Center up the tree-lined way.

It was the smartest thing Rosie had done as executive director of the Rasmussen Foundation, and she was still proud of it, and it still made her heart clutch in panic sometimes when she thought back on it, of the nerve it had taken, the chance of screwing up. Allan Butterman, in the course of some dealings he had with the state university, had first noted the possibility and alerted Rosie to it, but it was she who'd done the work, gone back and forth to the university to meet deans and alums and the president, a fearsome woman whom Rosie could actually call not so bad in the end to Allan when the deal was done and the press release sent out. So “Arcady,” which was the name a nineteenth-century Rasmussen had given to his new shingle-style fairy castle in the Faraway Hills, was now the university's Rasmussen Humanities Conference Center, and the university was responsible for it, for its plumbing and its boiler and its pretty multicolored slate roofs, for the professors and scholars who came and went there in season, like migrating owls or hawks. Rosie was greeter and facilitator and majordomo, and ran the foundation's business from an office under the eaves in what had been the attic before the splendid renovation. Fellowes Kraft's little villa too had been included in the deal, also now renovated and rearranged and repainted, new windows punched in the old walls and new floors laid. From there and from this great house the proprietary ghosts had vanished gratefully, like old ulcers healed or old errands run at last; their only reality had been their persistence. And every workday evening Rosie pulled a plastic hood over her computer and went home to her own handmade house at the verge of an old orchard up on the slopes of Mount Randa, to the man she still called by his last name (Spofford) and not his first, which would have been odd if she had changed her own name to his on that June day when they swapped rings and those vows at once so profound and so unenforceable, but she hadn't, she was Rosalind Rasmussen, as she had been when she first learned she had a name.

The first conference at the Rasmussen Humanities Center that Rosie oversaw when the renovations were done was entitled “Wisdom and Knowledge: Gendered Hypostases in Western Religious Discourse.” How scholars were to spend days in discussion of a topic even whose name she could not understand was a mystery to her, but she was new to the game, and she'd learn.

There were three scholars bound for that conference who met at the Conurbana airport, coming from three different cities. They were a large round one, a tall lean one, and a very old one; two were acquainted, the third they knew only by reputation. They each were to be greeted there by someone from the conference center, but each had neglected to notify the organizers of their arrival time, and now, finding themselves together and alone, they decided they would take the initiative and rent a car and drive themselves the fifty miles (it couldn't be more) to the center. It was Rosie Rasmussen's constant grief, the way these academics would get up to things like this. The car was a Caprice, and the large round one took the back, the other two the front. Bloom, Wink, Quispel.

"Since the Renaissance we have believed that man is making up these stories, that we ourselves are the authors of the tales we live within. That's the ultimate arrogance of power, the arrogance of the gods: for all the gods believe themselves self-created.” That was the tall thin one at the wheel speaking. Old Route Six wound through winter fields, and night fell.