"That's not hard to figure out either." Giselle passed the joint. I wasn't totally at ease with pot..But that "geek" remark had stung. I toked deeply, and the effect was exactly what it had been back in residence at Stony Brook: instant aphasia. "It must have been awful for her. The Spin happening, and all she wanted to do was forget about it, which was the last thing you or her family would let her do. I'd get religion too, in her place. I'd be singing in the fucking choir."

I said—belatedly, behind the buzz—"Is the world really so hard to look at?"

Giselle reached out and took back the joint. "From where I stand," she said, "yes. Mostly."

She turned her head, distracted. Thunder rattled the window as if it resented the dry warmth inside. Some serious weather was coming in across the Sound. "Bet it's gonna be one of those winters," she said. "The nasty kind. I wish I had a fireplace in here. Music would help. But I'm too tired to get up."

I went over to her audio rig and cued a download of a Stan Getz album, the saxophone warming the room the way no fireplace could have. She nodded at that: not what she would have picked, but yeah, good… "So he called you and offered you this job."

"Right."

"And you told him you'd take it?"

"I told him I'd think about it."

"Is that what you're doing? Thinking about it?"

She seemed to be implying something, but I didn't know what. "I guess I am."

"I guess you're not. I guess you already know what you're going to do. You know what I guess? I guess you're here to say good-bye."

I said I guessed that was possible.

"So at least come and sit next to me."

I moved to the sofa lethargically. Giselle stretched out and put her feet in my lap. She was wearing men's socks, a slightly ridiculous pair of fuzzy argyles. The cuffs of her jeans rode up her ankles. "For a guy who can look at a gunshot wound without flinching," she said, "you're pretty good at avoiding mirrors."

"What's that mean?"

"Means you're really obviously not finished with Jason and Diane. Her especially."

But it wasn't possible that Diane still mattered to me.

Maybe I wanted to prove that. Maybe mat's why we ended up stumbling together into Giselle's messy bedroom, smoking another joint, falling down on the Barbie-pink bedspread, making love under the rain-blinded windows, holding each other until we fell asleep.

But it wasn't Giselle's face that floated into my mind in the dreamy aftermath, and I woke a couple of hours later thinking: My god, she's right, I'm going to Florida.

* * * * *

In the end it took weeks to arrange, both at Jason's end and at the hospital. During that time I saw Giselle again, but only briefly. She was in the market for a used car and I sold her mine; I didn't want to risk the drive cross-country. (Road robbery on the interstates was up by double digits.) But we didn't mention the intimacy that had come and gone with the rainy weather, an act of slightly drunken kindness on someone's part, most likely hers.

Apart from Giselle there were few people in Seattle I needed to say good-bye to and not much in my apartment I needed to keep, nothing more substantial than some digital files, eminently portable, and a few hundred old discs. The day I left, Giselle helped me stack my luggage in the back of the taxi. "SeaTac," I told the driver, and she waved goodbye—not particularly sadly but at least wistfully—as the cab pulled into traffic.

Giselle was good person and she was leading a perilous life. I never saw her again, but I hope she survived the chaos that came later.

* * * * *

The flight to Orlando was a creaking old Airbus. The cabin upholstery was threadbare, the seatback video screens overdue for replacement. I took my place between a Russian businessman in the window seat and a middle-aged woman on the aisle. The Russian was sullenly indifferent to conversation but the woman wanted to talk: she was a professional medical transcriptionist bound for Tampa for a two-week visit with her daughter and son-in-law. Her name was Sarah, she said, and we talked medical shop while the aircraft lumbered toward cruising altitude.

Vast amounts of federal money had been pumped into the aerospace industry in the five years since the Chinese fireworks display. Very little of it had been devoted to commercial aviation, however, which was why these refurbished Airbuses were still flying. Instead the money had gone into the kind of projects E. D. Lawton was managing from his Washington office and Jason was designing at Perihelion in Florida: Spin investigations, including, lately, the Mars effort. The Clayton administration had shepherded all this spending through a compliant Congress pleased to appear to be doing something tangible about the Spin. It was good for public morale. Better still, no one expected immediate tangible results.

Federal money had helped keep the domestic economy afloat, at least in the Southwest, greater Seattle, coastal Florida. But it was a laggard and ice-thin prosperity, and Sarah was worried about her daughter: her son-in-law was a licensed pipe fitter, laid off indefinitely by a Tampa-area natural gas distributor. They were living in a trailer, collecting federal relief money and trying to raise a three-year-old boy, Sarah's grandson, Buster.

"Isn't that an odd name," she asked, "for a boy? I mean, Buster? Sounds like a silent-movie star. But the thing is, it kind of suits him."

I told her names were like clothes: either you wore them or they wore you. She said, "Is that right, Tyler Dupree?" and I smiled sheepishly.

"Of course," she said, "I don't know why young people want to have children at all these days. As awful as that sounds. Nothing against Buster, of course. I dearly love him and I hope he'll have a long and happy life. But I can't help wondering, what are the odds?"

"Sometimes people need a reason to hope," I said, wondering if this banal truth was what Giselle had been trying to tell me.

"But then," she said, "many young people aren't having children, I mean deliberately not having them, as an act of kindness. They say the best thing you can do for a child is to spare it the suffering we're all in store for."

"I'm not sure anybody knows what we're in store for."

"I mean, the point of no return and all…"

"Which we've passed. But here we are. For some reason."

She arched her eyebrows. "You believe there are reasons, Dr. Dupree?"

We chatted some more; then Sarah said, "I must try to sleep," wadding the airline's miniature pillow into the gap between her neck and the headrest. Outside the window, partially obscured by the indifferent Russian, the sun had set, the sky had gone sooty black; there was nothing to see but a reflection of the overhead light, which I dimmed and focused on my knees.

Idiotically, I had packed all my reading material in my checked luggage. But there was a tattered magazine in the pouch in front of Sarah, and I reached over and snagged it. The magazine, with a plain white cover, was called Gateway. A religious publication, probably left behind by a previous passenger.

I leafed through it, thinking, inevitably, of Diane. In the years since the failed attack on the Spin artifacts the New Kingdom movement had lost whatever coherence it had once possessed. Its founding figures had disavowed it and its happy sexual communism had burned out under the pressure of venereal disease and human cupidity. No one today, even on the avant fringe of trendy religiosity, would describe himself simply as "NK." You might be a Hectorian, a Preterist (Full or Partial), a Kingdom Reconstructionist—never just "New Kingdom." The Ekstasis circuit Diane and Simon had been traveling the summer we met in the Berkshires had ceased to exist.

None of the remaining NK factions carried much demographic clout. The Southern Baptists alone outnumbered all the Kingdom sects put together. But the millenarian focus of the movement had lent it disproportional weight in the religious anxiety surrounding the Spin. It was partly because of New Kingdom that so many roadside billboards proclaimed tribulation in progress and so many mainstream churches had been compelled to address the question of the apocalypse.