Ensemble

is like. You start feeling, I don’t know… ready to leave some things like all the news behind.”

  She had apparently moved away from the mayhem and spoke in a more confidential tone now. “I get this hunch you’re holding something back,” she said, a close whisper. “Is it about Tsu-Chi? Are you dwelling on him? It’s awful lonely up there, isn’t it. Aren’t you maybe going to want to go to your sister’s for Christmas this year? Just for a change?”

  “You know I hate the Midwest in the winter. It’s so bitter and bleak—and I’m not even talking about just the weather.”

  “Then you should get away to somewhere warm before you come back.”

  “Who says I’m coming back?”

  “I do. I miss you here in the office, making me laugh. These new guys are all so young and serious. Bottom line this, bottom line that… Besides, my brothers are coming up there New

  Year’s to ski. You won’t want to have to entertain them!”

  “Hey, I’ve got my Pachabel’s Greatest Hit. Ok, ok, I promise, I’ll be gone before then.

  Besides, I have to get things settled back in Cambridgeport.” He wished he hadn’t admitted that.

  “You sound like you are going somewhere else. Did you run into a lumberjack or a Mountie or something up there? What do you mean ‘settled’?” People were singing “We wish you a merry” in the background, overpowering her again.

  “Nothing. Listen, I forgot to charge this phone—you’re starting to break up.”

  “So are you. Mumble mumble. Well, I’ll call you another time, then. Just wanted you to know that despite these damn frat-boys running things, things are going on pretty much as usual around here—it’s just not the same without you.”

  “I appreciate it. This time up here has meant a lot to me. You’ve meant a lot to me, Leia. I owe you so—” But the line had already fizzled away into pure static, and he was left holding the little phone in his palm as if it were some fragile, lifeless bird.

  The seventh level was not at all what he had expected it to be. It was a dark featureless tunnel, or maybe an arid empty plain; synthesized wind sounded from the speakers, and his avatar’s footsteps echoed eerily, as if sounding off unseen canyon-sides or high stone walls or the fortifications of an immense castle. Once in a while light of an indeterminate origin illuminated an abandoned pickaxe or broken vase or cairn of skulls. All was loneliness. Why had his avatar ever left home—to seek riches or spiritual illumination? Why then was the little fellow content to stumble about blindly, the pawn of his programmer; did he never stop in the middle of the game to curse his fate or to cry out loud? Strangely enough, no malformed creatures, no deceitful maidens or hoodwinking sorcerers came his way—and that was all the more terrifying, for the further his avatar progressed on such an uneventful course, the surer he was to run into evil in any shape. Was this a bug in the software? Perhaps he was caught in some kind of loop, doomed to wander forever without reaching the hidden chamber. No matter which direction he guided his alter-ego with the laptop touchpad, he saw only shades of blackness and heard only the low insinuations of the wind. He checked his hoard of icons and his energy level: all was as it should be. The simple face of his avatar betrayed no concern. He wandered and wandered, desperate for anything to happen, even if he should be flung back to the bottom level like a sinner into Tartarus. He pressed keys at random and fiddled with other controls. Still, nothing happened. Perhaps the lesson was in being patient.

  Bored at last, he snap the laptop case shut and flung himself back on the futon. He seldom ever thought of Nebraska or his childhood—he had left when he was eighteen, and soon after his parents had both gone south to Sun City to waste away—so it was with some surprise that he found himself thinking of his grandparents’ old farmhouse at the edge of Kearney, a place he hadn’t seen since his grandmother had died almost twenty years ago. And yet he remembered every element, every quilt and doily and Jesus calendar of it, precisely; the whole place had been stored complete in some hidden cache of his mind, the front parlor of the house, especially: its faded wallpaper with black swans on it, the enormous peonies floating in cut-glass bowls, the lamps with their fringed and tattered shades, the lilac bushes rustling against the screened windows, the scratchy camel-backed armchair, the occasional car passing by on the gravel road, the smell of Grandma’s rosewater, and Grandma herself, upright in a creaking rocker, adorned with her costume jewelry, unaware that he was even there. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t; he was here, in another decade, another century. She had died a long, long time ago—but she was there in the past, too, rocking and rocking and rocking. She knew he was there, she knew the camel-backed chair wasn’t really empty. Her eyes were blind with glaucoma, her limbs were gnarled by arthritis, she had suffered a partial stroke, and yet she saw into the future. His grandmother was no longer able to talk, but she called his name. She called to him and held out her hands to take his own between her palms. Her hands were as dry and brittle as a bundle of dead maple leaves. She was dead, too, or almost so; it was only the wind through the screens that rocked her chair. He was there; he was only sixteen, he’d been reading to her from the local paper. Could she understand a single word? In another month, he would be standing at her graveside in a little cemetery surrounded by wheat fields. But this moment, this late afternoon hour at the end of a long-ago May, they were together in life. He held her hand, he read the obituaries. Did she nod at the names she knew? Time passed. The peonies shriveled in their bowls, the hands on the mantelpiece clock whirled around until they were a blur; the wallpaper came down in great shreds, a snail raced up and down one window-pane after the other, dust blanketed them like snow, the days and nights blinked outside the windows like a strobe light. Grandma’s hands were only bones, then nothing. Time passed that way. Years melted into each other. He moved away, he grew up, he changed irreparably, and then he was here, in this cabin high in the mountains, looking down at that long-abandoned parlor as if from a great height. He wanted to shout down into that room, to anyone left alive, but no one was there now. In such a way his dreams came and went, and in the morning very little was left of them to remember, just a few shattered jewels that had slipped from a long necklace.

  It might have been the solstice, the morning he rose early enough to see the dawn-light flooding the sky and reflecting off the granite outcroppings all around, pale as the colors of bleached seashells. Somehow, the more he worked in the black and white and gray world of ink and brush, the more sensitive he became to color, the more he relished these hourly transformations of hue and shade outside his windows. The carbon-block ink itself had proven to be the origin of a limitless number of colors—the longer one worked with such a simple medium, the more one discovered these colors, colors that just a dip and tap of the horsehair bristles could create. So, yes, bleached seashells—that was it, and already the tide was turning them onto their shinier side, the sun was rising, the fog was rolling back from the mountainsides to reveal the glare of snow and the black brushstrokes of bare crooked branches. He ate a slow breakfast, watching the mountains burst into flame and heavy clouds fall from the sky like so much ballast, and he took a long time preparing for his hike, as if he were performing a well-rehearsed ritual. It was well past noon, then, before he left the cabin.

  Out on the forest’s edge, it was fiercely cold and windy, but the gusts had swept snow back from the rocky edge of the trail, so he was able to climb with relative ease, as long as he was careful. Once in a while his boot would slip, though there was little danger of falling far; the slope relied on switchbacks, and uphill progress was slow but steady. Despite his lightheadedness, despite his increasing frailty, he had rarely felt so vitalized, with this fresh air in his lungs and Boreas whipping his back and the whole sparkling world around him, glasslike in its clarity. The sunlit summit loomed above him like the outer ramparts of a vast ruined fortress. The sunlight, even on this shortest of days, f
elt warm on his face. Having hiked now for over an hour, he could look behind him and see the snow-covered roofs of the cabins in a row well down the diminishing trail, a chain of toy dwellings from an elfin village you might see within an old-fashioned storefront. It was almost Christmas. He had only a couple more hours of daylight left at most. The year was coming to an end, and he would soon be approaching the limit of his doctors’ sentence. One week, two weeks more at most…

  He had not gone much farther, just around a bend so the rooftops were no longer in sight, when he came to a flat slab of granite bare of snow, where he could eat the half-frozen plums he had brought along and rest. It was growing cloudier once again and for the first time he wondered if he would make it to the lookout point up ahead and back again to the cabin before night began to fall. Last summer Leia had taken him to the same lookout; then, it hadn’t seemed so far from the cabins, and the trail hadn’t seemed so steep. You could see four, maybe five states in the boundless panorama, as well as the Boston skyline and, it seemed, nothing but endless forests from here to the Atlantic. In fact,