Secret Lives Read Free Page B

Minneman on a mission, as they all knew from past experience, could not be thwarted or redirected. Let it run its course. Let him run it all out as far as it would go, and then he would come back to reality.
    But Minneman himself was unconvinced by this theory, for it was one he had run through his head many times. It was something he’d thought about while he still had control over his actions. A separate part of him observed the part of him searching so desperately for Sonoria with alarm. But, eventually, that part of him faded away, became as pixilated and disconnected from the rest as the little dots that made up the image on the stamp.
    Minneman searched the public library. He searched the microfiche of old and obscure newspapers. For a month, he searched, as the dreams dried up, as the depth and breadth of his tactile knowledge of Sonoria faded to a single pixel point.
    Then, in an old travel issue of Granta , of all things, buried in a footnote in an essay about European refugees, he found something. The single pixel point expanded into the scene on the stamp. He was able to breathe again, properly, for the first time in months. The tight muscles in his shoulders and back relaxed. Right there, right there. The sentence. The sentence that unlocked part of the mystery: “This nameless refugee said she came from the Republic of Sonoria, a small country between the borders of Bulgaria and the Czech Republic—a hidden mountain valley. She was in some distress, in that she had not wanted to leave, but had become lost, she said, and could not now find the way back. There is no Republic of Sonoria, and the woman may have been mad, but there was a resonance to her story that shed light, in an emotional sense, on the fate of displaced peoples everywhere.”
    The mountains. The valley. The river. A chill, a shiver down the spine. The sense of the world opening up right before his eyes. He photocopied the page from Granta . He put it in his shirt pocket, over his heart. Now he had two separate visions of the same place. Now he knew he was not alone.
    The very next week, Minneman told his friends and family that he had to take a trip. He packed up his bags, liquidated his savings into traveler’s checks and cash, and booked a flight to Prague. On the flight, first to New York, and then through Amsterdam to Prague, he hummed to himself, his mind firmly locked on what lay ahead of him. The carry-on bag between his feet held the stamp, still in the envelope, still in the position he had found it, as if it were a compass direction, as if to remove it would be to lose his place in the world. Lewis & Clarke would help guide him.
    The sentence about Sonoria still lay in his shirt pocket, next to his heart. Every once in awhile, he would pull it out and stare at it, and almost cry.
    When he landed in Prague, safely in a taxi heading toward the visitor center, where he would find out how to rent a car that would take him to the border of the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, from whence he would proceed on foot, with a backpack and a walking stick, into the mountains, searching for little signs, clues, for what he sought—when he landed in Prague, the tingle in his palms, the faint scent of mint-and-chocolate in the air, told him that he was close, that he was about to enter the Republic of Sonoria, that he was free . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF
    ALLEN LEWIS
    Allen Lewis (Padre Allen) is an Episcopal priest and banker who loves to cook and collect first edition science fiction and fantasy hardcovers. Padre Allen leads a stable, fulfilling life that often creates solace for others. And yet, behind that gentle smile, those sometimes rambling but always authentic sermons, beats a heart intent on vengeance. Yes, revenge ! A base emotion, and one Padre Allen only allows himself to succumb to once every few years, when he boards an airplane for the Australian coast, near the Great Barrier Reef. Once there, Padre Allen dons a steel mesh scuba suit