Well in Time Read Free Page B

explain himself later, in some muddled search for understanding.
    “I believe,” he began at last, “that we live over and over again. We die. We are reborn. And we meet certain people in those lives, doing the same thing. Reincarnating. Working through karma, if you will. Struggling, lifetime after lifetime, to learn lessons that are important to their souls.” He clamped his lips, determined to leave it there.
    “Hill, you surprise me.” Javier turned to him, although their eyes, lost in shadow, were as unknowable as the abyss before them. “You’re talking like one of our local shamans.”
    “I met a Buddhist monk in Cambodia, couple of years ago. We talked for two days straight. By the time he was done with me, I was beyond a reformed-Presbyterian-slash-closet-Catholic. I was cosmic.”
    “So I wonder where we were, the last time we gathered around a fire like this?” Calypso’s voice was dreamy, slathered with the cream of imagination. “Maybe we were players, camped in some forest between castles, planning our next production for a count or a king.”
    “With you as the heroine and me as the Fool.”
    “Or maybe we were shepherds on some hillside in Sumeria,” Javier volunteered, “naming the constellations.”
    Hill pointed languidly toward the Big Dipper. “Yes, I remember calling that one
Aunt Agatha
, because it’s small on top and big on the bottom.”
    Calypso pointed southward, to where Gemini’s twins, hand in hand, were just stepping over a horizon of black
barrancas
. “And I named those two
Javier-and-Calypso-With-Walter-Trailing-Along-Below-the-Horizon-In-Some-Foreign-Land-All-the-Time
.”
    “It probably sounded more poetic in Sumerian.”
    “That makes me think, Hill,” Javier said, his face turned terra-cotta in the firelight, “aren’t you getting tired of traveling all the time? Isn’t it about time for you to retire? You’re welcome here, you know. We’ll build a house for you. There’s a good flat place, just back from the cliffs, about a quarter mile from here.”
    “What? And leave Paris?” Hill struck his chest in mock grief.
    “You’re never there anyway, Walter. You’re always off in some God-forsaken land where cholera is killing more people than the resident dictator. Javier and I worry about you.”
    “I think about retiring, sometimes. But I always imagine myself in the apartment. Strolling down Place des Vosges, mornings, to my favorite café for coffee. Maybe getting season tickets to the opera. Taking the Train à Grande Vitesse to the south and getting a tan on some part of me besides my face and forearms.”
    “Oh, that’s a good one! I can just see you lounging topless on the beach at Saint-Tropez. You and your laptop. And your cell phone on speed dial for the closest airport, in some little pocket of your trunks. You wouldn’t make it past the first minor skirmish! You’d be out of there like you were shot from a cannon.” Calypso laughed and swatted Hill on the knee. “Be real, Walter.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it now.” Hill’s tone was petulant.
    “Did you know,” Calypso volunteered, apropos of nothing, “that the word constellation comes from the word
stella
, and means
star togetherness
? It makes me think, when I look at the night sky, that they and we are linked somehow. We form a togetherness.”
    “Yes, the only thing vaster than our own interior spaces is that vastness out there.” Hill’s voice was unusually soft and thoughtful.
    “We touch this world with our bodies,” Javier volunteered, equally serious, “but that one out there—we can only reach it in our minds, when we let them dream.”
    “Or when we worship,” Calypso added. “Even in prehistory the stars were seen as divine figures. Gods, prognosticating the future, not just of mere mortals like us but of entire cultures and civilizations.”
    “Caleepso, how do you know these things? You never stop amazing me.” Javier reached to stroke her