1. The walls.

A city is defined by its walls. They mark the divisions between interior and exterior spaces, separate the small and large volumes of air that create a sense of "inside" and "outside."

Walls are punctuated by openings. We see the large ones and think of them as specific functions (doors and windows). But in truth walls are like dense meshes, or nets, full of little holes that the air (and things upon the air) can move through. Walls are permeable in ways we don't intend them to be.

Rare is the wall that functions in such a way that it completely excludes. That would need to be a very high, very thick wall indeed.

2. Veins.

If walls are a city's skin and bones, then paths and roadways are its veins and arteries.

That a city is alive is unquestionable. It remains to be seen if a city can be said to have a heart, whether one or several.

3. The bridge.

There was a bridge in the city, a large one, one of a number spanning out in every direction, and over it there was a constant flow of people going back and forth. A pair of eyes regarded this river of people intersecting the river of water below, not looking at any of the figures themselves but rather the flow of them.

The water below was still enough that the reflection of the bridge could be seen, with its burden of movement. At night, lights would be lit along the bridge, and its twin in the water below would be indistinguishable from it.

4. The watcher.

The one who watched was quiet. In his own mind he was inseperable from the tide of people on the bridge, from any of them or all of them. For that matter he was no different from the bridge itself, or the river, or the air that moved invisibly over all of these. He could feel every footstep as he made it and as though those footsteps were upon him. He could actually feel these things in his own feet and upon his spine and within his body.

5. The name, part 1.

This man had once had a name, but it was gone now like a sparkle upon the water, a pretty thing that hadn't lasted, a gleam amidst so many gleams that holding onto it was impossible. With the name had come an identity, partly of his own making, partly of others'. Like the river's water, it whispered distantly to him, but had no more significance than a single footstep or thought or muttered word on the bridge, or on either shore that it connected.

6. Memory.

Yet he had memory of that life, of that name, and of many lives before that one, some which had come before, others which were yet to be, and others that never were nor would be. He was many lives in the great neutrality of being both foot and path and observer.

Closing his eyes, he observed with a certain interest that nothing was invisible to him. Every current of water and movement upon the bridge still played through his mind. As he breathed, he could taste motes of people who had lived, some of them centuries before, and turned into dust. These memories tickled against his own. He had been some of those people.

Opening his eyes again, he observed that it was sunset. The body that carried him suggested fatigue and hunger, in a distant voice.

But first he must remember. In the life he had led, and the ones that had preceded it, and in the ones that had never been and would never be, were a medium to communicate a great thing he had learned, a thing that would allow him to deliver others from suffering. This was his one task, to which a thousand million lives traced back.

7. The trap.

Of all the traps he had ever faced, all the temptations and distractions, he had met his greatest defeats through cleverness.

At times he hadn't been clever, and was envious of the cleverness of those around him. Then there were the lives in which he had been clever. He expressed it in small, cutting remarks he believed no one understood (not having the memories of what it was like not being clever before). He had carried himself through whole lives in an envy of cleverness or letting cleverness carry him. In all these lives he had realized the essential at the very end. And he had tried to hold on to it, take the lesson with him, but he forgot it in each lifetime. Each lifetime but one.

The image of the bridge was still clear in his mind, though his eyes were trained on the street in front of him.

This is how he would have looked to those watching him, if there had been any: a handsome young man, perhaps a bit tired, but beautiful in a way that no two observers would have easily agreed upon. His eyes were heavy-lidded, like he was just on the brink of falling asleep, had his movements not been so precise, so efficient. The corners of his full lips looked one moment as though they were about to break into a smile, and the next perfectly expressionless, but they hadn't moved. And he walked with a fluid grace that spoke of purposelessness, but there was nothing aimless about him.

He smelled a little of the street around him, but of fear, or exertion, or despair (and all these have scents) there was no trace. A mild sweetness stayed close to his skin, a scent a little like honey, which was also suggested by his gently golden hue, like he had been caressed by the sun. It was a smell of flowers too, of rare wood, of precious spices, but so subtle that the scent never coalesced into any one thing or lingered long enough to be identified.

8. The fire, part 1.

And then, with all of this gentle beauty, there was something else. In the serenity of his eyes, there was an edge of flame, as though it were reflected on his surface as he regarded it coldly, like he was maintaining a tension between the fire and the void and walking slowly along that line.

This fire was many things: his enemy; his protector; his lover, of a time long past. It was the shape of desire and the sting of fear.

With the fire, along his arms and on the back of his neck, another thing rested: an electrical force, enormous but carefully and quietly coiled: the power of absolute annihilation.

9. The crossing.

He walked across the bridge. He still didn't wish to be seen, and so he was not looked at. The vehicles that sped along the roadway at the bridge's center contained people who were looking out--as one must, it seems, when crossing a bridge--over the water, and he crossed their line of sight, but it was as if a cloud moved across their vision when they saw him, and they continued gazing out.

The surge of walkers on the bridge had subsided and there were only a few, and these ignored him too.

10. Kapilavastu.

He thought of a time long ago, when he had moved with similar purpose to the center of another city far away, toward a grove filled with the sweetness of nature, a deer park. (That grove had later been paved in gold.) There too he had moved without being seen, until he had chosen the correct place, and then gathered people to him. This is how it would be again.

The names danced on his tongue: Kapilavastu, Maghada, Sarnath. He remembered walking, the feeling of his footsteps on the road, and the footsteps of the road on him, he his own antipodes and the receiver of all steps, unmoved, immovable, moving always.

11. Union Square, part 1.

He arrived at a square that wasn't a square, a park that wasn't a park. He could taste the hollowness and misery around him, the suffering of the whole world. This was the one thing that held him to the ground, kept him from drifting up and away into dissolution, the flame and the void pulling apart: this little shard, the rough silver cord, that caught the silken banner of his essence and held it.

Here the misery took as much a physical form as it had those long days ago, with the same methods of holding at bay. Containers of anguish moving along, even smiling and laughing, rivers of sorrow held in thin glass thimbles.

12. Ascent, part 1.

He ascended shallow stairs. His steps slowed as he rose. Around him, the people began to look.

13. The correct place.

Past the debris of discarded paper cups, cigarette buts, the bottle caps of beer, he walked. Skateboarders sped by him, then turned, kicked up their boards, and watched him.

He came to a circle of benches beneath the shade of some trees. An old man--unconscious and reeking--was slumped to one side. An old woman, a portrait of loneliness with swollen ankles, clutched her purse on the bench opposite, staring straight ahead. A couple broke off from each other to watch him, one of the two young men extinguishing his cigarette with his shoe and absently forgetting to exhale.

He had found the correct place. The pigeons fluttered around him, then descended. In Sarnath, they had been doves.

14. One life.

His earliest lives were vague and blurred, even to the clear sight he now possessed. It had been a matter of awareness. Though he had the faculties to recall every event of every life, to compare and correlate them, to examine neutrally how there were lessons he failed to learn life after life (all this irrelevant now, and unimportant, because he had arrived where he was, regardless of the path and the steps), awareness had eluded some of his past forms. Their memories were streaks of fear and agitation, each with its ocean of feelings unconnected to those of the others, though interwoven.

In some lives he had been a monster, a predator. In others ostensibly gentle, but no less destructive. In some lives hot metal had run through his veins, in others he had spent years within four sets of walls, imprisoned.

As he readied himself to speak, one life suggested itself, drew itself into his memory.

He had been beautiful in that life too: very beautiful.

15. The coal eyed woman.

In that life, in fact, he'd been a woman. From her earliest days as a girl, she had fascinated everyone who watched her. Her eyes were like coals, and her hands and feet had the texture of petals.

She had been named after a flower too, a rare flower known only in the language of the place where it grew, which was the only place in the world it grew, where she grew, from a girl with flashing eyes into a woman of such grace that her flower-name seemed mundane.

Every man in her town wanted her, made constant pleas to her father for her hand in marriage. Because this had been in the days and in a place where women were property: first their fathers', then their husbands', and finally the property of their graves. Her father brought each suit to her though, to seek her agreement, because she was precious to him and he couldn't have endured her anger. She rejected each one.

This woman, for all her beauty, did not want to be possessed by an earthly man, or woman for that matter. Since she had been a girl she had stared up at the skies and wished to commune with the gods.

16. The rejection, part 1.

Each festival in the town was consecrated, marked by dancing and celebration and voices raised up. But festival times were also times for marriages. The woman spun and sang with wild abandon, devoted herself over and over again to the gods. Her mind left the baseness of the earth while the others feasted and watched her: some with lust, others with concern.

She soared, reaching her arms up. Just beyond the tips of her fingers, she could feel the hands of the gods reaching down to her from above.

It was two days after the festival of the harvest that she told her father. He brought two more suits to her, imploring her to accept one of the men. She watched him with her coal-black eyes, and finally said it:

"I reject this earth."

Her father stared. What did she mean?

Just that, she said. The earth was not for her. She belonged to the gods. Her life was not made to be rudely touched by the rough hand of a man, to birth his whelps, to carry wood, to slave in his fields. The gods were there, she could feel them, and she would become theirs. As her father stammered, she walked out of their home, to the center of the town, and proclaimed this aloud.

Some of the men who had been pressing their suit upon her were in the market. Crowds of people have possessed a savagery throughout time. Jealousy, covetousness, hatred, all these amplify. A circle formed; stones flew, hands shot forward and clutched and tore.

When the mob withdrew, as all mobs ultimately break of their one mind and shatter into a hundred regrets before running from the crime they have committed, the body of the woman lay on the ground, bleeding and broken.

The ending of every life is brutal, as the spirit fights to hold on to the scraps of flesh that remain. But this death had been different. This woman, who all that time ago so far away (but not that long ago, and not that far) had rejected the earth, moved beyond the tearing of her flesh and the blows raining down upon her.

In her death there had been ecstasy. She could feel the gods reaching down to embrace her and lift her away. Finally the men's hands had touched her, as rough and brutal as she had imagined them to be and worse, and finally the gods had taken her.

As she rose up through the air, it was a filigree, her body, though mangled, was like blossoms on white. The shocked faces of the onlookers didn't matter to her. She had left behind caring about them long ago, when she was a girl.

17. The story.

Other lives called to him too. Each one had a thousand lessons in it, each life an overflowing well of knowledge that could deliver all these people who now began to gather around him as he stood.

He selected instead a life he had never lived, a world he had never lived in. He selected a story he had used before. Let him begin with something they could all understand.

18. The arrow.

This is what he said:

"Let me tell you all a story."

By this time a dozen people were within the sound of his voice. Those who hadn't been watching him, which was most of them, turned as they heard him.

"Once, there was a man who was hunting in a forest. He was hunting a swan.

"As he ran through the forest, he spotted the swan. He raised his arrow and took aim. But just as he was about to take a shot, he felt himself get hit, just below the shoulder. The shot had grazed his heart. The arrow was embedded in him, protruding from his back."

He paused. Everyone was listening.

"The hunter's companions rushed to his side, knowing that he was about to die.

"His first words were, 'Who shot me?'"

19. The answer.

A young woman spoke first. "I've heard that story before. It's a Buddhist parable."

He waited.

"The idea," she said, "is that, instead of accepting that he was about to die and making peace with the world, he wasted time thinking of revenge."

A few of the people muttered. The woman continued watching him. She sipped from her cup of lukewarm coffee.

"That is the point, and it isn't," he said. The woman scoffed, got up, and left, although she did cast a backward glance. The old woman was now staring at him.

"What is the point then?" the old woman asked, in a dry old voice. She seemed mildly surprised that she had said anything at all.

"The point is that the man did nothing about his suffering, and consumed the last moments of his life trying to find its source: an irrelevant thing."

The old woman didn't react. He walked toward her as the others watched.

"Imagine what it was like. He had been shot. He could feel his chest tightening, the fluids building up around his lungs. His breath quickened. Dark spots appeared at the edges of his vision. Through a sickening, wet warmth that spread now up to his neck and into his abdomen below, he could feel the first sharp stabs of pain."

The old woman's eyes widened.

"The pain had become a searing agony by the time his companions arrived. Death was an absolute certainty. He had forgotten what he was hunting, had forgotten his family, had nearly forgotten who he was. And through all this, he believed that knowing who shot him would bring him some comfort, some great answer. Instead of removing the arrow, or in some other way reducing his suffering, his mind craved information as irrelevant as the name of the midwife who had helped deliver him."

"I'm a Christian," the old woman said finally.

One of the young men spoke up next. "So is the point that we're all suffering, and doing the wrong thing about it?"

He turned to them and regarded them carefully. "Knowing the nature of the suffering is irrelevant. The source of the suffering is irrelevant. It is relevant that we are suffering, that all material life is suffering."

"But then there's no answer," the other young man said.

"Man," a passerby commented. "Pretty depressing stuff. There's a reason they call it a nihilistic religion."

20. Nightfall.

He waited there until nightfall. Some of the onlookers had lingered to see if he would say anything further, and seeing that he did not, they left. The old woman had continued to watch him for a moment, poised as she was to get up and hurry away, and as soon as he turned away from her she did so, apparently convinced that he was quite insane. Others came, but he wasn't speaking, wasn't putting stories out into the world, so they took no notice of him, and ultimately they left too.

On the bench across from him, the sleeping vagrant shifted and muttered.

21. The return.

He waited.

Finally, she returned: the young woman with the lukewarm coffee, though now a different cup, still lukewarm. He looked at her.

She watched him cautiously, her eyes darting to the sleeping indigent near him. "I wondered if you'd still be here."

"I am still here."

She brought her cup to her lips again, hesitated, and then lowered it. "So, are you homeless or something?"

"I have no home."

She approached, sitting a full body's length away from him along the bench, still occasionally glancing at the vagrant. "You want some coffee or something?"

22. The name, part 2.

They sat across from each other on hard wooden chairs in a brightly lit coffee shop. He smelled the aroma of the coffee, waiting for it to cool. She watched him carefully. The place was still crowded. No one paid any attention to them. She spoke first.

"My name is Nan," she said. There was a pause. "What's yours?"

He began to speak, then stopped. She waited. He spoke, very deliberately. "What would it matter what my name is?"

"Well, then I would have something to call you by."

"You can call me anything you wish."

She sipped her coffee. "Okay." Another pause.

"So, how does a guy with no name wind up reciting Buddhist parables in Union Square?"

The coffee had cooled enough that he could drink it. "Is there a better place?"

She frowned. "It's getting a little chilly out there. Do you have some place to go?"

"There wasn't any place I was thinking of going in particular. And it's not too cold out there."

"You must be hungry."

He watched her for a moment, as though listening to a whisper. "Yes. I am a bit hungry."

She gathered her things. "This isn't the place to get food, trust me. I used to work at one of these. Come with me." And they left.

23. Brown paper bags.

As they walked, she chattered nervously. "My parents were hippies--but I grew up here, so I've seen just about everything."

The avenue they were walking down was a carnival of activity and they weaved between other people, young and old. He had been here before. He matched his pace to hers.

She continued to speak. "I guess every now and then the hippie wins out and I see someone I want to help, you know? But you've got to be so careful in this city. Are you from here?"

"No."

"Huh. Talkative. So why Buddhism? I mean, if you want to get into a rant in Union Square, why not Bush, or racism, or the rights of the American worker?"

Here again he paused. She was becoming accustomed to this. It was as if he wanted to carefully think through everything he said, or as though he was consulting an inner council on each word. After the pause, and the weaving around people, came his answer. "I wanted to reach them, with a story."

"I was into Buddhism and all that stuff in college, but after a while, it just felt too much like I was turning into my parents." She stopped in front of a tiny storefront, crowded with people. "This is the place."

They waited in line. When they reached the counter, she placed her order, then looked at him, then placed his order as well, and paid for both. They walked out with their little brown paper bags.

24. The meal.

They were sitting in a different park now, eating their meals. He chewed slowly, considering every bite. She had devoured hers before he was half way through.

Her attitude told him that she was waiting for answers.

"I'm here to teach people," he said.

She crumpled up wax paper and shoved it inside her brown paper bag. She was still chewing her last bite. "Like, real teaching? In a school?"

"No, not in a school."

She swallowed. "What kind of teaching, then?"

"I'm here to teach people how to free themselves from suffering."

She cocked her head, examining him closely.

"I'm not under the influence of any drugs," he said.

She shook her head. "No, I didn't think you were. Your pupils are okay and you're not shaky or tweaked out on anything." A pause. "My parents are hippies, but they're also shrinks. I'm trying to figure out if you're crazy or not."

He took another bite and chewed it deliberately. "Sanity is an intricate question. If acceptance of delusion is sanity, then I am insane."

"Again with the Buddhism. How old are you?"

He had no answer for her.

"You don't know how old you are?"

"That is also an intricate question."

"Okay. In this incarnation, in this life, in this body, how old are you? How long have you been on the earth in this form?"

"Twenty two years."

"Yeah. You look around my age. Are you a college student?"

He sorted through his memories. "I was. Then I found a different path. I became enlightened. Now I am here to teach."

She didn't react. She just sat next to him, holding her crumpled brown paper bag, and watched him.

25. The rejection, part 2.

In another life he had been a man who felt pain very acutely. Not just pain, but all sensations, to such a degree that even pleasure was an agony, too strong a feeling.

To this man the finest silk felt like burlap. The sweetest taste was sickening, and foods that were sour or salty he couldn't bear at all. This is when he would succumb to eating. To him, the act of feeding the body was an act of raping it, to pump rough matter through the tiny tube of a throat, to grind it sickeningly (each step of which he could feel), then press it through a mile of coiled intestines. The most horrifying sight he had seen as a child was a diagram of the insides of the abdomen on a doctor's wall. It was a clean drawing, without gore; there was nothing inherently frightening about it. But to the man (then a boy) each turn of the guts, each foot of tubing, spelled out an infinity of disgust and discomfort.

And no sooner was the mass expelled from the body, the painfully few nutrients ground out of it until it was hard and stinking, that the hunger began. Whenever he could, the man drank soup or quietly chewed oatmeal for sustenance. His ribs protruded from his chest, stretching the skin painfully. He crushed up vitamins and gagged at their taste as he swallowed them, mixed with milk.

Blinking his eyes as he watched television through sunglasses in his shaded room, the man longed to die, but couldn't bear the thought of the pain he might endure if he brought it upon himself. Even to swallow single a pill was a misery to him, and his oversensitive stomach would expel a fatal dose before he was able to choke it down. Crushing the pills was out of the question because he would not have been able to force the foul-smelling powder into himself. The thought of poison made him shudder. Each day he spent hours trying to think of ways to destroy himself, or trying to work up the courage to face one instant of terrible hurt, so that he could find an end to the million needles of discomfort he felt all the time.

One day, the man walked to the window, not bothering to turn off the television. He slid the pane up (feeling agony in his joints as he did so), and got up onto the sill. Something within him was calm as he stared down upon the street far below, so bright, so loud.

"I reject this pain," he said in a whisper. His ears hurt from the din of the traffic that reverberated all around him, wafting up, beckoning him. And he fell.

26. The name, part 3.

The girl continued staring at him.

"Once I was a man who felt every sensation as agony," he said. "Even eating, even a caress, was pain to him."

She didn't move.

"Everyone is like this. We wrap ourselves in delusion. But if you let yourself feel what you are really feeling, you experience the pain that all life is made of. Pleasure is a mitigating illusion. Only the pain is true."

At last she spoke. "My name...'Nan.' It's short for 'Ananda.' I told you. Hippies."

He smiled.

27. Gypsies.

Nan peeked through the doorway of her parents' living room. They lived in a comfortable brownstone in Brooklyn, which they had filled with bric-a-brac from all over the world: African masks, Indonesian shadow puppets, Indian fabrics, and wafting through the place was a strong scent of incense that barely covered the smoky tang of pot.

"Hi Mom, Dad. This is, uh--" The man had stepped through the doorway behind her. "--someone I met on the street. Or in Union Square, more precisely."

Nan's mother smiled a little blearily. "That's nice, dear. We're watching that documentary about the Gypsies."

Nan's father tugged at his beard. "Not Gypsies, Isabel. That term is pejorative."

Nan's mother held up the box the documentary had come in. "It says it right here."

"The correct way to refer to those people is to call them the 'Rom.'"

"But that's not what they put on this cover."

And so it continued. The man and Nan walked through the living room unnoticed, and climbed up the stairs.

28. Ascent, part 2.

From downstairs, he could hear that the documentary had been started back up. Raucous music--punctuated by clapping and--what was that?--an Egyptian stringed instrument followed them up the staircase.

29. The signs.

He lay on Nan's bed. She leaned against a wooden dresser. He was tired, but alert. She looked at him, spread out on top of the blanket, noticed how golden he was, particularly in the lamplight.

"I remember reading this thing, where the Buddha had all these distinguishing characteristics. There were like eighty of them."

"That got embellished with legend. There are some signs that I've had in every life."

"Like what?"

"The eyes, for one thing." She looked into them: a clear, sparkling, dark blue. "The texts say 'nila'--which means 'blue,' but could also be 'black.' I've had both."

"Yeah, hard to imagine anyone running around in India with blue eyes."

"Not really. Depends on where in India you are, and when."

"Huh. I've never been there."

"You'd like it. You always have."

For the first time she looked a little afraid. He continued.

"Other signs are the scent--mostly the absence of one, but there's a trace of something sweet. I've always had this too."

She approached him cautiously. He offered his forearm to her. It was like the careful dance of two animals. She sniffed his wrist. "A bit like sandalwood."

He withdrew. "I haven't applied anything. I just smell like that."

"What are the other signs?" she asked.

He removed one of his shoes--canvas sneakers--and the sock beneath it. He raised up his foot so she could see the sole. On his heel was a perfectly round marking, resembling a flower. "There's one on the other foot, too."

She examined it minutely, concluding that it wasn't a tattoo.

30. Enlightenment.

There was a long silence.

"What was it like?" She was testing him, still not certain he wasn't under a delusion. He considered the irony of this neutrally, as he considered most things. He was the only person in the world free of any delusion; how poignant then that this woman--this woman named after his first disciple all those hundreds of years ago--must consider him to be the one insane.

He knew what she meant by the question. She wanted to know about the experience of enlightenment, what it felt like, perhaps on the chance that he really was what he claimed.

There were of course no words to describe it. The state necessarily transcended words, or the possibility of communicating it through any other means, and it wasn't comprised of feelings or thoughts, but rather all cognition and none. But he was patient with her. It was right of her to ask; right of her to be curious.

"It is going somewhere, as something, and then returning, as nothing, without having moved, without any time having elapsed," he said. She blinked.

He had explained it this way before, and they had called him "tathagata," the one who "went thus." He had sensed the fear in people when they understood the implications of an identity going somewhere (nowhere) and returning (not having left, but now absent), cleared of its existence. An empty something returning to a vessel it never abandoned, an empty vessel containing everything, and everything that was nothing.

"What did it feel like?" she asked.

"It was the feeling of being someone, something, and then being clear and empty. It is the feeling of being free." This was a gentle description. As the fire of his final trance had risen, the whole world had been listening and watching without knowing it. A great battle was taking place in an infinite field he had been stretched across. Legend had him confronting the Mara, the demon of illusion, but of course there was no Mara; this was just a personification of the forces at work.

That battle was excruciating, and had gone on forever--was going on at all times, simultaneously, in a thousand thousand million places, yet it had never happened, not in the phenomenal world. To be a "tathagata" one entered a realm with no name and no existence, remaining there forever, but not having really crossed anywhere.

She lit a cigarette, watching its smoke curl up around her.

31. The name, part 4.

"Tell me who you were, in this life. Before it happened," she said.

This was not unusual, he thought. The idea of "faith" (which was in fact a set of illusions like any other) was so central to human thought, and it always had been. She was hunting around for things to hold on to, to help her understand. He felt belief dawning inside her, though she was carefully building arguments both ways to protect herself: arguments to defend his sanity, and arguments to refute it.

"I was happy," he said. "Or so I thought. I'd been given everything in life and yet wasn't ungrateful. I had a family who loved me and tried to protect me. I was bright, and courteous, and passionate." He paused. "But I couldn't escape the truth. It couldn't be kept from me. As much pain as I was shielded from, there were moments when the whole world's pain poured into me, threatened to obliterate me. How could I be happy when there was any suffering in the world?"

The smoke of the cigarette tickled his nostrils, and he thought about the man he had been who hurt all the time. In that life he could smell a cigarette from practically any distance, and the smell had made him gag.

"That's basically the story of Prince Siddharta," Nan said. "He grew up in a kingdom, sheltered, but the truth couldn't be hidden from him."

"It's been like that in many of my lives. Sometimes I've understood the message, sometimes I haven't."

"Message? That implies a messenger, or someone sending the message."

"A figure of speech. A message from myself, perhaps," he said with a chuckle. The humor being that he had no self; no one did really, but he didn't even have the illusion of a self. It seemed she hadn't quite got the joke.

She finished her cigarette. "But you, in this life. Tell me more. Who you were, where you lived, what your name was."

He was still smiling. "Why is that name so important to you?"

"It's part of the human thought process. Names and words may be empty, but we still need them to think."

He waited. She hadn't completed her thought, but she wasn't going any further. She changed direction instead.

"I guess I'll call you Sid," she said with a smile. "I should have been called Nancy instead of Nan."

He laughed.

32. The notebook.

The morning had been pleasant. Nan's parents went off to work, leaving a note on the table indicating that there was soy milk and granola to be had. Nan and Sid ate in silence, and he ended the meal by saying it had been very satisfying, and a great kindness. She continued watching him intently, as she had since the first moment they'd met.

They returned to Union Square without specifically planning it out. She'd brought a little notebook.

33. What was in the bag.

The sleeping vagrant was there, as was the old woman. Some new faces were to be seen as well. She sat down across from the vagrant, near the old woman, who looked a little alarmed, recognizing Nan and Sid from the day before.

Sid walked to the center of the circle defined by the benches. It was a pleasant summer day, and the sun streamed down upon everyone in the little park. The light illuminated Sid, making his black hair sparkle. Nan watched with fascination, as though thinking, this guy may be nuts, but he's charismatic. She had decided in her own mind that she would make a summer project out of Sid. If he was crazy, he didn't seem to be violent, and she could study the workings of his mind. Although she claimed to be in terror of turning into her parents, she was well on her way, gravitating toward psychology courses and having chosen the field for her studies.

If he wasn't crazy...she tucked a strand of her short, straight hair behind her ear and opened her notebook, filing away the idea. Let's see what he has to say today, she thought.

Sid said, "Once, there were two scholars. They were hotly debating a particular point--let's say they were mathematicians. Both of them were convinced that there was a specific solution, and neither would be dissuaded.

"They decided to go to an older professor to settle the dispute."

Some more people began to gather, drawn by the sound of Sid's voice. Nan scribbled notes in her little notebook. The old woman looked baffled, but perhaps a little relieved that this story wasn't about people being shot with arrows and dying.

"After hearing the argument the first scholar presented, he said, 'You're right.' The scholar was delighted, and gloated, leaving the room.

"The second scholar, disappointed, presented his reasoning. The old professor said, 'You are also correct.' The second scholar was pleased at this, though a bit puzzled, and walked out.

"One of the old professor's students happened to be in the room and had watched these exchanges taking place. He said, 'Professor, how can both of those points of view be correct? They are totally opposing points of view.'

"The old man smiled and said, 'You are correct too.'"

Sid looked around him. Nan frowned as she finished jotting down the parable.

The old woman stood up, more annoyed today than afraid. "Honestly, young man. You come here and bother people who are minding their own business with your silly stories. The one from yesterday was even more confusing. All that gore and whatnot."

She drew her purse to her chest. "You should leave people in peace." She walked past Sid, having spoken her mind.

Sid watched her walk away, and just when she'd reached the edge of the benches, said, "But you are not in peace." The old woman stopped, and slowly turned toward him.

Sid continued. "Look at all the things tormenting you. This morning you woke up, alone and in pain. You took half a dozen pills, the names of which you've memorized, because you have so little else to occupy you. You feel lonely because your children don't make any time for you, and your husband died ten years ago. But when he was alive you longed for him to be gone. When your children were young, you dreamed of a day you wouldn't have to take care of them. And now, when they do call, you have nothing to say to them, and you never call them, unless there's an emergency or a problem with your health."

The woman's eyes were wide and she was shaking slightly, still clutching her bag. Sid approached her. "What's in that bag?"

The old woman started. "What do you mean?"

Sid repeated himself, very gently. "Tell me what's in the bag."

"It's--I--I keep my keys, a magazine...my cell phone..."

Sid placed his hand on her shoulder. She didn't flinch. By this point a dozen people were watching. Nan sat taut, ready to intervene.

"The magazine is two months out of date. You've read it a dozen times, and never renewed the subscription. The cell phone is off. You have no friends."

The woman continued shaking. Her expression was now pleading, as though she was silently begging Sid to stop. He said, "What else is in the bag?"

A tear rolled down the old woman's face. She reached inside the bag, and brought out a handful of something white. It was crumpled paper. She brought out handful after handful of the stuff. Sid kept watching her eyes. As she emptied her bag of the wadded paper, tears continued to stream down her face.

Finally, when she had finished removing it all--in total about a dozen balls of paper--she looked up at him defiantly. Her bag now hung limply, a big container for practically nothing at all.

"Isn't this your whole life?" Sid asked. "How many different ways have you explained to yourself why you do that, filling up this big bag with something light but that will make it look full?"

The old woman, who was still standing stiffly, stifled a sob, turned, and left. Sid watched her go.

34. The old woman's story.

They walked to the same falafel place on Second Avenue for lunch, and went back to Tompkins Square Park to eat. Pigeons pecked around their feet for stray morsels, of which there were none.

Finally she asked. "How did you know what was in that woman's purse?"

He watched her as he chewed. She continued.

"I mean, I guess you could have figured out that it was paper in there. By the shape of the bag. Or maybe because it looked full of stuff but she didn't have any problem lifting it. Maybe you heard the paper rustling in there."

"Is it important how I knew?"

She looked down. As before, she was done eating long before he was. "I guess not. Then there was all that other stuff about her that you knew too, about her kids, for example. But that could have been a lucky guess, too, a woman all by herself in the park, you could have assumed that about her."

"What do you think it meant, that she had done that, wadding up pieces of paper and putting them in her bag?"

"I don't know. Old people do all sorts of crazy things. If you were right about her and she's all alone, she probably has to come up with some ways of killing time. Boredom and loneliness do weird things to people. And people are conscious of appearances."

Sid finished chewing and swallowed. "Why do you think she sits in the park all day?"

Nan looked up. "I don't know. Do you?"

He paused. "When she was much younger, she used to meet a man there in the park. She and her husband had a small dog--it's been dead for a long time now--and she'd walk it. She and the man used to meet there, and then go to his apartment. This went on for almost six years, only in the summertime."

"You don't think she's still hoping to meet him?"

"No. He's been dead almost as long as her husband, although she doesn't know that. She assumes he moved, or stopped being interested. If he were alive and she saw him, she'd turn the other way. She comes to the park because her guilt is like a person to her, some company where otherwise she would have none."

"Do you think she's a bad woman?"

"There are no good people or bad people. I feel compassion for her because she suffers, but in that she's no different from anyone. And her prisons are of her own making."

Nan opened her notebook and jotted some notes.

35. Superknowledge.

Back at the brownstone, they drank coffee and talked.

"The memories," Nan began. "How clear are they? I mean, when you remember other lifetimes, does it get confusing? Do you forget who you are sometimes?"

Sid leaned back, considering what she had asked. "I'm not anybody. Not any more."

"Right. No ego."

"No ego. No self."

"So the memories...how do you keep them organized?"

"Each one is its own life," he said. "It's all information. When it's looked at objectively, it organizes itself. When you take the framework away, truth, reality, takes its own form, its real form. This is what they call 'superknowledge.'"

"Which is also how you do that...that thing and get inside people's heads." He said nothing. She smiled. "Do you have a favorite lifetime?"

He smiled back. "Right now you're thinking that this is like an interview in a magazine, but about such a strange subject."

"You are a strange subject," she said. She made a little decision internally. "If you are what you say you are, it's the biggest news in the world, sitting in my house."

"And if I'm not what I say I am," he continued, "I am at very least a good case study."

36. The search.

Nan sat at her computer, frowning. Sid had gone to sleep earlier. They were talking, and gradually she saw a bit of fatigue cross his face, and asked him whether he was tired. He said that he was, excused himself, closed his eyes, and was asleep immediately. She'd never known anyone who could do that.

Now she was online, looking things up.

She had found thousands of web sites discussing Buddhist matters, hundreds of versions of the life of Prince Siddharta Gautama, and seemingly innumerable sects and schools of Buddhism.

There were translations too, of texts of every type: sutras and aphorisms rendered into incredibly cumbersome English translation from Sanskrit, Chinese, Pali, and other languages. A confusing morass.

One site offered the parables told by the historical Buddha in easy to read language. These had apparently been taken from the words of the Buddha as written by his first disciple, her namesake, Ananda. She hunted for what she was looking for.

37. The binder.

The next day, at breakfast, a little plastic binder was beneath her notebook. Sid didn't comment upon it as they ate their soy milk and granola. As he had the day before, with each meal, he thanked Nan for the food.

38. The fire sermon.

Union Square was a little more crowded than the day before. The old woman with the paper-stuffed bag wasn't there, but the vagrant was. The two young men who had been there for Sid's first sermon were there too, evidently waiting for him, wondering if he would appear. She saw one of them clutch the other's arm when they saw Sid. She followed at a distance, her notebook ready.

Sid said: "Once, long ago, in another life, I meditated for a long time, and the truth came to me, and I was enlightened."

Nan saw the people around him take notice.

"After this I went walking, to look for the best place to start my mission. Those were very spiritual days. Everybody, it seemed, was searching. A number of people recognized that I had been through a transformation.

"One of them approached me, and said: 'Are you a god?'

"I replied, 'No, I'm not.'

"He asked, 'Are you the reincarnation of a god?'

"To this too I replied, 'No.'

"'Are you a magician?' he pressed.

"'Not that either,' I told him.

"'So then you must be a man.'

"'No.'

"Finally he asked: 'Then what are you?'

"I told him: 'I'm awake.'"

Nan flipped through her binder of printed sheets and located the one she was looking for. Underlining a passage, she closed the binder and watched Sid as he looked around the group of people who had heard what he had said.

An angry-looking young man with a skateboard under his arm spoke. "What are you, some kind of missionary or something?"

Sid said, "In a way. Who are you?"

The young man was taken aback. "What do you care who I am?"

"I care who everyone is, or who they think they are."

"Yeah. You cult freaks are all alike. You find some bullshit to latch on to and then you walk around like you've got the answer to everything. Well you don't."

"Do you have answers?" Sid asked. He had a way of doing this that betrayed no sarcasm (if he meant any).

The young man wsa getting angrier. "I have some answers for you. God? Doesn't exist. Heaven? Doesn't exist. Salvation? Bullshit. The answer to life is that there isn't any answer. No one cares. We're all going to die, and it's going to suck the whole way along. That's what no cult is going to tell you."

"If those are your answers, you're absolutely right."

The young man blanched, then recovered himself. "Nice. You've got a little script, a script that tells you how to deal with people like me. You know, you're the fourth religion nut I've seen today. There was some old bitch on the subway too. Then Falun Gong or whatever. Some dude in Times Square with a picture of an aborted fetus, ranting and raving like anyone gave a shit."

"And you don't."

"No. I don’t give a shit. There's too much pain on one city block for anyone to be able to do anything about it by caring."

"Then go."

The young man scowled. "No. I don't think I will. I'll stick around to see what great wisdom you're going to cure all our problems with."

"No, I meant go into the street, just over there," Sid said. "You're in despair. You're right: there's no god, no one cares, not in any way that will matter, and there's nothing at the end of life but oblivion. No meaningful part of ourselves goes on after death, and most of us will be forgotten, because our existence, individually and collectively, is meaningless. It's a question of more or less misery, usually more. The best any of us can do is to try to convince ourselves that this isn't the case, but the painful truth is that it is."

Everyone within earshot listened carefully, looking from Sid to the young man and back. Sid was speaking quietly.

"So go," he said, pointing toward Broadway. "If you catch the light at just the right point, the cars will be moving pretty fast. You could get on your skateboard, hop the curb, and be under a cab's wheels in a few seconds. There would be a moment of pain, but that would end it. No more misery."

The young man looked paralyzed.

"You won't do it, will you?" Sid asked. "You've thought about it a hundred times, but something always stops you."

"Biology," the young man said, recovering himself a bit. "We're wired to survive, some reptile part of our brains that needs to eat and fuck and go on."

"It's more than that," Sid replied. "If the flesh is in pain, it is capable of destroying itself. The part that always holds on is the mind. It's the mind that fears becoming nothing. The body is at least something--a physical construct, a tangible thing. The mind is nothing. It changes from moment to moment, but it doesn't want to die. It wants existence.

"If you killed yourself now, after a certain amount of time passed, no one would remember you. The day after you were dead, people's memories of you would already start to degrade. There would be no 'you' left. You've made no mark that will endure. That's what you're afraid of, and it's the truth.

"The truth is that there's no 'you' now any more than there would be after you were dead. You're a shifting process trying to feel real. But you're not real, any more than anyone else. You are a collection of characteristics that has awareness. I'm not speaking to the same thing I was a minute ago. The image I'm holding of you now is as 'real' as any you've ever held of yourself, as 'real' as you've ever been or will be. But through all this, you're burning: that pain exists, it consumes you, fueled by an inexhaustible source.

"There is another way," Sid said. "The answer is not immortality. The answer is not becoming a god or becoming anything. There's nothing to become. No one can save you. You can't save yourself. But the answer isn't destroying yourself either. That's just playing games with matter, moving the dirt around. The answer is seeing your way out of pain, becoming free, leaving the game, pulling something essential within you out of the fire. That's where the suffering ends."

39. New stories.

They returned to their falafel place and had lunch in Tompkins Square Park, as they had the day before, and dinner the night before that. Sid looked delighted at the falafel he was eating, like it was the first time he'd tasted it, like it was the first time he'd tasted anything.

Nan spoke. "Can I ask you a question?"

Sid looked up. "Food always tastes better when it's a gift. That's what I was thinking. Is this what you were going to ask?"

"No," Nan replied.

"Then what's your question?"

"I looked up some of the parables you've been referencing. The versions you've used--there are mistakes in them."

Sid's expression didn't change. "How can there be a mistake in a made-up story?"

Nan turned to a page of her binder, a print out of the parable web site that she had methodically punched holes into. "The story of the hunter and the swan."

Sid smiled. "I know it well."

Nan looked at him. "Not that well. Your version is different. In the texts, it's a poisoned arrow the hunter was shot with. That's an important part of the story. And he was obsessed with the class of the person who shot him, not just the assassin's identity."

Sid said, "I changed it. There were irrelevant details."

Non frowned. "There are lots of irrelevant details you kept in. If you were going to alter it, why didn't you modernize the whole thing? Who walks around these days with a bow and arrow?"

Sid didn't answer.

"And the story of the two scholars--the ones that the old professor tells are both correct in their opposing points of view. In the original parable they were monks."

Sid was smiling again. "Not many monks around these days, any more than people who hunt with bows and arrows."

Nan wasn't giving up. "Why the changes?"

Sid leaned back, considering what he was going to say. "The stories aren't important. It's the kernel of truth they contain. The poison wasn't needed; old Indian notions of caste are not relevant to these people, the way they were relevant in the original story."

Nan said, "Then why did you use it? Why not a different story? Why not a new one?"

"Some stories will be useful in all times, in their pure essence. And there will be new stories too. We're making some of them right now."

40. Rest.

Sid was one of only a few people alive on the planet who didn't dream. Dreams were, after all, the spasms of the ego fighting against itself and trying to order its understanding of reality.

His mind moved in specific patterns as his body stilled before rest--memories generally, though sometimes he imagined things. A secret unknown to most people was that the imagination developed quite independently of the ego, a thing more would have realized if they simply observed any human child.

The demands upon his body were enormous. Like a garment, he could easily lose track of it. It could snag or tear or become stained as his mind was occupied with other things. He was indifferent to pain, that body's pain at any rate, which was a drop in the ocean of the vast agony in which all of humanity was submerged.

Fatigue was a much greater enemy than pain, though, much easier to lose track of, until the body just collapsed of exhaustion. This had happened to him in many of his former incarnations. His best known form--that of Siddharta Gautama, the historical Buddha--had expired of a number of conditions related to exhaustion, ultimately disease contracted from tainted food. Afterwards, they had harvested relics from his cremation: things that modern science could have helped them to understand him better, but which at the time seemed simply miraculous.

On this night, as his body quieted, he remembered.

41. The rejection, part 3.

He remembered his time in a famous city at the height of its decadence. This must surely have to do with the souls he saw around him in this city, which would be remembered in similar ways once its own time was over: a capital of excess, an empire of waste, where overindulgence was both the key to success and a normal practice of the elite.

There he had been a plain young woman, but a woman of position, and so forced into the revelries of the nobility. In that place, at that time, they had understood how the body itself would impose limits upon pleasure, but these people had found ways to trick and cheat it. When the flesh revolted against too much food and drink, they purged it of its contents, and returned to the task. When the skin became chapped and raw from rutting, slaves applied a balm made out of walnut oil, and soon the orgies resumed.

Feasts were to last days; to do anything less would be an affront to the gods that were thought to view the city with a particular favor, or a dishonor to whatever mortal person they were celebrating--who was most likely snoring peacefully in a corner. Because those gods too were believed to feast and tryst, and what better worship, what better obeisance, than to imitate them?

It was at one such party that the woman felt (feeling as he had, in life after life) outside of the place and time, and wondered, after the third time a slave discreetly passed by her couch with a gilded bowl intended for her vomit, whether she was born too soon, or too late, or for that matter why she'd been born at all. Her eyes drifted over the body of a tiger and a peacock, placed ostentatiously where all the guests could see them, showing the wealth of the hosts that they could sacrifice such exotic things in their household shrine.

Getting up a little unsteadily, she said, unheard, "I reject this excess," and left the banquet hall. Who or what were they even commemorating? As her thoughts swam in a haze of wine and the nauseating smell of delicacies brought from around the empire (candied birds' wings, spiny fruits, mounds of sugared squares made of who knew what and garnished with the colorful plumage of Indian birds), she wove quietly through the revelers, and once outside located her bearers. The night was sultry and stank of the garbage that had collected in the gutters throughout the day.

They took her home, where she put on a simple dress and a woolen cloak, collected some books and a lot of writing paper, and had herself carried through the darkness of the remaining night. On the way she sipped from a flask of sweet, diluted wine, which her slaves had chilled with shaved ice. This had been before she gave them all her wealth and left before they could recover their words. She looked out into the quiet, dark streets, forming her plan. Just before sunrise she arrived at a town whose name no one in the senate knew.

From there, the next day, she walked on foot, like a pilgrim, further out into the provinces, where only fanatics went, clutching her books and her paper and her little tubes of ink to her like children.

She lived out the rest of her days in the happiest solitude, writing book after book on every subject she knew. This would have been called the first true encyclopedia--the first in the Roman world at any rate--but no one ever read it or knew it existed. A migrant family had found her hovel after she died, happy, in her sleep, and used her books (the ones she'd brought and the ones she'd written) for kindling, after burying her stiff body in the woods.

42. Other paths.

Those lives had been paths of negation. In each there had been something he'd rejected. In the millions of other lives that whispered their memories within him, there were other paths too.

He smiled as his body came to rest. It would please him to recall those other paths, and he would speak about them, in Union Square, the next day.

43. The truth. part 1.

Nan sat at the ready, with her notebook. Today she hadn't brought the binder.

"Once," he began, "there was a woman. She was wanton, lustful."

Today, the two young men from the first day were there, and they had brought a number of their friends. The old woman was back, with her bag, now drooping, emptied of its cargo of crumpled paper, and of course the old vagrant was in his usual spot. About a dozen other people were gathered, including the skateboarder from the day before.

Nan wondered what they were expecting. There were more of them today, so many more.

"I say it this way not because I have judged her," he continued. "You see, I was her." A pause while the listeners absorbed this.

"To her, 'lust' was a word that had a taste, not a bad one or good one, but a strong one. 'Wanton' was a word that implied nothing other than a predisposition, a particular way a mind and a body had woven themselves together. The sensations of physical pleasure were delicious to her. They gave her life. Her body was exquisite, a thing she knew without vanity, the way she knew that the sky is blue, and she loved more than anything to give it to another, and to take another in return."

The people watched in fascination. The young men frowned, but were intrigued. The old woman watched impassively, patiently.

"Her desires brought her sometimes into places of danger. She cared nothing for what others thought of her, but it was the things they thought of themselves which created a cloak of shame around the giving of one body to another, a mist of secrecy and silence around this pleasure. She took the risks.

"More than anything, the censure she received (which was open desire behind a door or within a room) puzzled her.

"One day, she had occasion to look into a mirror.

"Now, mirrors are puzzling things. They are physical objects, of course. But it's that thin stratum of a reflective material that gives the mirror its character. Sometimes there are flaws and distortions in the glass or upon the reflector, and so each mirror has its own personality a bit like a person, but it's the idea of reflection that a mirror embodies for us.

"And this woman--she'd seen her reflection before, of course, but her sense of herself had come from her interior, shaped by the warmth of the moving currents beneath her sensitive skin and within her shapely body. But here she was looking at herself, from the outside, for this one time, for the first time.

"Her reflection in this particular mirror was ugly and wan. She had not slept, after a night of moving along narrow streets in search of what she wanted in places she knew it was available. She had been satisfied several times, but her hunger had not been quenched.

"As she stood there, looking at the mirror, and saw herself as ugly, transparent, and flawed, saw that she had been questing in the warm, salty meat of desire for something absent in herself. She whispered, 'I accept this truth.'

"That day, her desires wound back upon themselves, and burned themselves out. From that day forward, she wore long gloves and long dresses that hid her body and prevented the touch of others. She went to her grave with the memory of all those loves, and was satisfied."

The old woman began to open her mouth to speak, and then stopped. Sid began to walk away. Nan followed him. She had written nothing in her notebook.

44. The heart.

For a moment he thought about the human heart. At the moment it felt like a peculiar and alien thing: his own and those around him. A pump, never quiet, never silent.

Taking a breath, he listened to the heartbeats around him, marveling at how many of them synchronized to those nearby, though only for a few chance moments at a time. They formed sparking, invisible connections between the people who rushed around, consciously (deliberately) oblivious of each other, as their souls intertwined and then quickly pulled apart, unobserved by all but him.

He looked at his hand. Ignoring the oddities that were just his--the surprisingly smooth, unlined surface of his palm; the odd golden quality of it; the slight, almost imperceptible sparkle where the two types of skin met each other at the sides of his fingers--he watched the blood charge through veins and arteries. The hand, a vehicle. So fragile, yet so resilient: so human.

45. Superknowledge, part 2.

Nan was frustrated.

"I need to know more. I need to know who you are, how you know these things, where you get these stories."

They were seated again, this time toward the northern end of the park. Sid leaned back on the bench, stretching his back slightly. "Does it matter?"

"It does to me." Sid watched her. "I want to know what it's like," she said finally. He looked down at his hands. "Superknowledge. That's what it's called, right?"

"That's one of the names for it. But that's not all you're looking for." Little signs of torment were visible on her face when he searched for them. She searched his eyes, as though for an answer. "It's proof you want, direct experience. There are forces in you that tell you that I can exist--that I must exist--and there are forces in you that say I can't, that I mustn't. You want to know for yourself."

Now she looked at her own hands. "That's just about right."

He thought for a moment about the heart. Then he stood up. "Come with me." He began to walk away, toward Broadway.

46. Origin, part 1.

Nan hurried to catch up with him. "Where are we going?"

Sid didn't slow down. "We've been through this, you and I. I'm taking you back to where it started."

Nan frowned as she hurried to keep up with him. He was like a panther, she thought: languid most of the time, in repose, but when he moved, it was with a precision that spoke a whole different story. "I don't understand. We're already here."

He kept walking. "Of course."

"I mean we're here in Union Square. Where we met."

Now he slowed down. They had almost reached the edge of the park, where the cars were rounding the curve along which Broadway turned into 17th Street. "But this isn't where we met. Not the first time, not even the last."

She stepped back involuntarily. Inside, she was rearranging things, making room for ideas, then backing away, drawing things into their safer configurations, pulling her world back together. He was anything she had ever imagined about someone like him--a modern-day holy man, the second coming, the new Buddha. Someone who spoke always in riddles because he knew all the answers already. When had she thought about such things? Never consciously. It was as though these holy men and new messiahs were always there with her, at the periphery of her vision, just waiting to take shape. Well, they had. Here she was looking into these blue eyes, at the lips, where the faintest hint of a smile played at the edges.

His voice grew softer, and he touched her shoulder, gently. "Don't push too hard. Don't ask too much of yourself. Come with me, to where the answers will reveal themselves, where you won't have to struggle." She realized that she'd been holding her breath. She exhaled slowly. His hand still on her shoulder, he drew her back toward Broadway. She thought for a moment of what he had said to the skateboarder. "You're with me. No harm will come to you."

They walked a little more slowly toward the curb. A cab stopped in front of them, and Sid opened the door, got in, and slid across the seat. He hadn't raised his hand, called out, whistled, or done anything else. The cab had just stopped.

47. A small journey.

"JFK Airport, please," Sid told the driver.

Nan jumped. "What--?" Sid looked at her as though with mild surprise. "The airport?"

"Yes, the airport."

"But--" her mind turned to practical matters, and her voice quieted to a whisper. "Listen, I don't have any money with me." She looked at him. Did he?

As though in answer, he said, "I don't have any either." The cab driver's eyes locked onto them in the rearview mirror. He'd heard fragments of the conversion around the chattering in his cell phone earpiece. Sid glanced at the cabbie's pink identification tag mounted on the divider. "It says here that your name is Sitaram," he said, addressing the driver.

The driver muttered something in another language into his headset, then took it out. "That’s my name."

"I've known a number of people with that name," Sid said. The cabbie's eyes flicked back and forth between the road and Sid and Nan's reflection in the rearview mirror.

The girl looked like a hippie. She had probably taken some course in yoga or the Spiritualism of the East and thought she knew something. And the boy with her...he was dressed just like anyone else his age, and looked unremarkable except for those blue eyes. It was likely the two of them had gone on some college break trip to India, stayed in a hostel and drunk lassi with bhang in it, and now considered themselves experts. "There are a lot of people with that name," the driver said with practiced indifference.

"And none of them are you," Sid said gently, with a trace of humor. The cabbie frowned. Were they going to cause trouble?

"What do you know?" the cabbie said a little belligerently.

"For one thing, that's not your picture," Sid said, pointing to the identification tag. "There's a resemblance, but this man named Sitaram is older than you are." The driver's hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. He said nothing. "It's your uncle, isn't it? Your father's brother, I would guess."

The driver remained tensed and pulled up to a stop light on 14th Street. He remained silent, as though hoping Sid and Nan would just open the door and get out of his cab. As the light changed, he continued driving. Nan watched the interaction carefully. Sid was looking out the window in that childlike way of his, as though enjoying the scenery.

"He's old," the driver said finally. Sid looked back at the rearview mirror as though he'd forgotten the conversation of moments ago. "He has arthritis. Some days he can barely open his hands." Sid listened politely. "We--we share his shifts most of the time. He'll go to pick up the cab, drive to a spot a few blocks away, and I'll take over. Then we meet again when it's time to turn it in."

"And sometimes," Sid said, as though commenting on the weather, "he drinks. You can smell it on him when he comes to meet you at the end of the shift." The cabbie's hands gripped the steering wheel hard enough to blanch his knuckles. He was staring at Sid in the mirror now, glancing only occasionally at the street. Nan gripped the armrest.

"How did you--"

"The traffic will probably be worst on the Brooklyn Bridge," Sid said. "You might want to use the Manhattan Bridge instead." The driver made a sharp turn at a yellow light off Bowery. Nan's grip on the armrest tightened. There was silence for a long time.

48. Origin, part 2.

The cab sped along Atlantic Avenue. Nan had been to a party near here, years ago, some college guys. She had been involved with one of them, remembered thinking how cool it made her. Six of them had lived in a big, raw loft and had parties every weekend, crowded, loud, smoky affairs with red light bulbs, a deejay in the corner, and a dollar stuffed into a cup at the door. She struggled to remember the boy's name. Something with a B.

"What is your name?" she asked finally. Sid looked at her, but she was talking to the driver. "If it's not Sitaram, then what is it?"

The driver watched her in the rearview mirror. His voice was softer now. "Arvind," he said. Sid smiled.

"Where are you going?" the cabbie asked, looking now at Sid.

"To the place where we met," Sid said. The cabbie's eyes returned to Altantic Avenue.

49. The departure.

"Which terminal?" the driver asked, as they drew near JFK. Nan felt another stab of apprehension.

"That one," Sid said, pointing to a sign organized with colorful letters. "Terminal B."

The sign revealed little, but Nan had an idea of what was to happen next. She didn't want to bring it up in front of the cab driver for some reason, and waited until they were on the curb. The conversation festered inside of her. She had just enough money with her to get them home from the airport on the train, but it would take forever.

"Right here," Sid said. The cab driver glanced back again, wondering why they didn't have any luggage. They didn't look particularly rich, but American kids these days all looked poor. Who were they? How did the boy know what he knew?

They got out, and the cab sped away. The driver hadn’t even asked for money.

"Sid," Nan started.

"Yes?"

"Not only do we not have any money, I don't have my passport or anything. Where do you want to go? These are all international departures."

"Of course they are. Here, let's go in."

Nan struggled, then decided to just go along with it. They walked through the glass doors, through the cloud of smoke where the smokers were having their last cigarettes before entering the terminal. Nan felt strange going in without any bags. She hadn't been on planes much--mostly a few trips to Europe and one ill-fated jaunt to Cancun her freshman year, plus a couple of domestic flights--but she knew the airport rituals as well as anyone.

She followed Sid to the ticketing counter, where an attendant was looking down at her computer terminal, tapping away at its keys.

50. Tickets.

The attendant looked up and smiled. "May I help you?"

"We're going to India," said Sid.

The attendant frowned disapprovingly. "You're pushing it. The Delhi flight starts boarding in about--" she glanced at her terminal--"ten minutes. Ticket?"

"We don't have tickets," Sid said.

The attendant paused in her key-tapping. "Oh. Okay. Just the two of you?"

"Yes, just us."

More keys tapping. Nan could feel the sweat prickling up at her hairline, the way it did when she found herself anywhere without the money to pay for whatever she was doing, or when she was dangerously close to her credit card limit. The racket of the terminal behind her felt like it had congealed into a solid mass, just one little sound here or there spiking up above the others. Sid stood, relaxed, his arm leaning against the counter.

"Any baggage to check?"

"No."

"Traveling light!" the attendant commented. "Not even any carry-ons?" There was an edge of suspicion in her voice.

"Just what we're wearing," Sid said.

"All right, here we go. You're in luck. The flight's almost empty. I'll just need a major credit card. And your passports, of course."

Sid didn't move. "We don't have any money. And we don't have passports."

The attendant's fingers froze above the keyboard. "You don't--"

"You said the flight is almost empty. Will it make much of a difference if we're on it?"

The attendant stared at him. She'd been trained to spot drunks and weirdos. These two didn't seem like either, though the girl was nervous.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"We need to get to India. Your airline is going to India, and there are unused seats. Can't you reserve a place for us?"

There was a way to override the payment step, one of those secrets reservation agents knew. The attendant glanced at the clock across from her counter. Her shift had ended fifteen minutes ago, but she'd stayed on to deal with the inevitable rush of stragglers for the London flight. She looked again at Sid. What remarkable eyes he has, she thought. Something inside her shifted and became quiet. Her fingers tapped out the keystrokes to override payment. She printed the tickets and boarding passes and handed them to Sid. The tickets were made out to John and Jane Smith.

"All right. Here are your tickets and boarding passes. New York-New Delhi. You're stopping over in Zurich for a couple of hours. Have a good trip."

Sid accepted the documents gratefully. "Thank you," he said. Nan gaped at the attendant, then at Sid as he turned and walked toward the security gate, and hurried to catch up with him.

51. Mosquitoes.

Nan had followed Sid as he strolled through the security gate unobstructed, then through the line at the boarding gate, then into the plane. She was only slightly surprised to discover that the ticketing agent had seated them in first class, which was empty except for a couple of businessmen, one of whom was already asleep, sprawled across his wide seat with an airline blanket covering him from chin to toes.

When the flight attendant had come by with glasses of orange juice and champagne, Sid refused both. Nan drank her champagne in two swallows, its tartness making her eyes water, a curdling taste of sour followed immediately by a warmth in her throat and stomach.

Sid was leafing casually through an in-flight merchandise catalogue, and paused at a particular picture. He held up the catalogue for her inspection. Nan looked at the image he showed her distractedly, her head spinning slightly from the champagne. She wanted more, and then she wanted to sleep.

The picture showed a family sitting outdoors for dinner at dusk. The mother was happily serving roasted meats to her equally happy family. In the background was an odd-looking device, one that resembled the barbecue grill from which the servile mother had--presumably--just retrieved her family's meal. Hovering above the scene was the silhouette of a gigantic mosquito with a red bar through it. Taken as part of the scene, the mosquito would have been the size of a large dog. The testimonials of satisfied customers blared in bold capitals underneath the image.

"There's something amusing about the products they're trying to sell in this catalogue," Sid said. "According to this, there is a machine that emits a gas that only mosquitoes can smell, and it drives them away."

Nan looked at him blankly. Her mind was still at the security gate where, however miraculously Sid had procured tickets without money or passports, she had been sure they would be turned away or arrested.

"But really nothing like that will get rid of mosquitoes. The only thing that will attract them is blood--and similarly, the only thing they're repelled by is the suggestion that the blood is tainted."

Was he really talking about mosquitoes? Nan's mind continued to wander as she took a second glass of champagne from the passing flight attendant.

"That's why Indians eat lots of garlic," Sid said, as though confiding the secret of existence. "That, and other spices in Indian food, come out of the pores. It drives the mosquitoes away." Sid paused. "You'll need to eat lots of garlic. And turmeric. You're going to smell different to the mosquitoes otherwise, and they will come after you. Eating the spices will keep them away." Sid pointed once again to the illustration of the family barbecue, kept safe from the enormous marauding mosquito by vapors from the miracle device. "But don’t worry--you won't see mosquitoes this big even in India." Sid examined the photograph minutely, and chuckled. "The cockroaches, on the other hand..."

Nan stared at the curve of Sid's ear, and the way it merged into the contour of his throat. She swallowed the last of her champagne, and closed her eyes.

52. Son of man.

Nan woke up disoriented and bothered by the white noise of the airplane in her ears. Her shoulders were stiff and her feet swollen. She swallowed drily.

Sid appeared to be watching something on the fold-up video screen on his seat, but when she looked closely she could see that he was staring right past it. On the screen was a sports game: basketball.

He glanced over at her. She smiled. The whole trip so far was coming back to her. She'd dreamed of a field of fragrant flowers. She stopped smiling. The air above the field had been filled with clouds of mosquitoes, each one powered by a tiny jet engine, darkening the skies.

"I can't believe we're going to India," she said, unable to think of anything else, and wanting to answer his gaze somehow. He watched her for a moment and then turned back to the video screen.

"Son of man," he said. Nan gave him a quizzical look. "You cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water." Nan sat up, wincing slightly, her back stiff.

"It's a poem," Sid said. Then he leaned back into his chair, adjusting it back to almost a full recline, and covered his chest with a red blanket. Nan frowned.

"Billy," he muttered, just when she thought he had fallen asleep.

"What?" Nan asked.

"Billy. That was the name of the boy you were trying to remember. While we were on our way to the airport." Now Nan was wide awake. And now Sid was asleep.

Two seats in front of them, one of the businessmen had nodded off over a little book. It had been given to him by his lover, who he saw during frequent business trips from Zurich to New York. It was a small edition of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

53. Zurich.

Sid and Nan disembarked from the plane in Zurich for their stopover. Morning light streamed through the tall glass walls of the terminal, confusingly, since it didn't feel like morning. Nan gave up on trying to figure out what time it was supposed to be as far as her body was concerned. She normally used her cell phone to tell time, and at the moment it was just as confused as she was.

Sid walked automatically toward a coffee bar. Nan examined the place, trying to make sense of it through the dissociated haze that accompanied such airport stopovers on long flights. The bar was curved, black marble, with tall, uncomfortable chrome and leather seats that looked engineered to make sure no one lingered in them.

Several businessmen and a glamorous Italian couple were smoking, and two rough-looking young men were drinking beer. Sid sat in a section of the bar that was relatively empty. Nan ordered two coffees and started to reach for money to pay for them, then stopped. Sid watched her with his blank-but-mildly-amused expression. The bartender brought them their coffees, served steaming in double paper cups with square napkins under them. Then he wandered off, not looking at either Sid or Nan. He hadn't left a bill.

Nan blew the steam off her coffee and sipped it pensively. Not knowing what time it was in New York, she had no idea whether her parents would be worried about her. Probably not. They tended not to notice her presence when she was there, and an absence would take a full week to register. On the other hand, they knew Sid had been staying at the brownstone recently, and might worry if she didn't turn up for a couple of days.

Sid, carefully holding the square napkin underneath his paper cup full of coffee, descended from the bar stool and gestured toward a business center. "So you can call home," he explained.

54. Sans serif.

Nan's mother Isabel picked up the phone distractedly. Nan bit her lip. She hadn't thought of what she would tell her parents about where she was, and worried about the questions they might ask. Caught at the wrong moment, her parents could administer a very effective interrogation. "Hello?"

Nan got right into it. "It's me. I'm going to be away for--" Nan looked at Sid. "--a little bit. A few days probably, maybe a week. I've gone on kind of a, um, a sort of road trip with Sid."

Isabel must have been watching television, or attending to something else. "All right, dear. Just call when you know when you're going to get back."

"Thanks, Isabel." Like many second-generation hippie children, there was a standing practice in her family of using first names for parents, much to Nan's grandparents' chagrin.

There was a pause as something clicked in Isabel's mind. Nan tensed. "You haven't gone to Mexico, have you?"

Nan relaxed. "No, we're not in Mexico." Sid smiled.

"Oh. Good. Bye, dear." Isabel hung up.

"How long are we going to be there?" Nan asked.

"I'm not sure," Sid responded. Nan looked puzzled. He seemed to know most other things, she thought. She stopped herself, feeling an edge of uncertainty and fear pulling her back to reality. She wanted to stay in the disoriented fog of airport transit a little while longer. The question of whether she had become the Buddha's traveling companion could wait.

"Let's go look at the shops," she suggested. It seemed as surreal a thing to do as any. As they walked, she pointed out the signs, neatly poised above the store windows in various languages and in a wide palette of bright colors. "I took a typography course once," she said, feeling reassured by her own chatter. "These typefaces, they're called 'sans serif.' A serif is that little slab at the edges of a letter, and these typefaces don't have them. It's very European; very Swiss."

Sid looked at the signs she had pointed out. "Everything here is in that sort of typeface," he observed, his eyes scanning over the notices above doorways, the gate numbers, the news headlines on the plasma television screens. "Even the words in other languages." Sure enough, even the signs that had Japanese on them were sans serif.

"Yeah. Kinda boring. I wonder what the Swiss think of New York."

"The same thing you're going to think of New Delhi," Sid said.

55. Origin, part 3.

They strolled by a duty-free store that meandered, amoeba-like, along a length of the terminal.

"Something to always consider when you're in India," Sid said in his careful, deliberate way, "is that there isn't any other place in the world, for whatever reason, where so many contradictions can coexist." Sid sipped his coffee, peering at the bright packaging of perfumes in a window display. "You will hear that from practically everyone who's been there, and it's completely true."

Nan had heard that, but it always sounded like a touristy sort of thing to say. "Right, the wealth and poverty, the...well, the modern and ancient, that sort of thing?"

"Those, yes, but all that's on the surface. That land has contradictions that go far deeper. Spiritual contradictions."

This was the first time Nan had heard Sid talking with this sort of complexity, or using a term like "spiritual." She wondered what this meant, what kind of contradictions. "Good and evil?"

Sid turned from a display of gaudy cigarette cartons, and smiled. "Simple and complicated," he said. They walked on.

56. New Delhi.

Nan was ready to jump out of her skin the last few hours of the flight.

That the airline thoughtfully provided a way to watch the slow progress of the plane over land and water didn't help. The exotic names of the places they were flying over or near (Karachi, Kathmandu, Mumbai) enticed her, but then, at this point, so would Cleveland. It almost didn't matter what mysteries awaited them when they got to ground: she just wanted to get out of the airplane.

At least the food had been good, she thought, pausing again at the impossibility of flying in first class. She began to wonder for the hundredth time what she was doing, without even clothes or money or a passport, and for the hundredth time, found some way to distract herself from the growing fear underneath that question.

The things that had happened, the way Sid was, the things he knew and the seemingly magical way he just walked through life and now onto an airplane and into another country--how were these possible? Could she still convince herself that he was just a crazy charismatic? And if he was crazy, now she was in another country with him, having broken international law. They threw people in jail for a lot less that traveling without a passport, and he didn't even have a driver's license.

Or did he? Her mind paused in its reeling. His pockets. She would wait until he was asleep somewhere, and check his pockets.

She felt a sense of elation as the captain announced that landing was imminent. The crew busily puttered around the cabin. She looked over at Sid, who was sitting upright now, as the announcement had instructed him to do, and looking at nothing in particular as he sometimes did.

The plane landed with a bump, and the first class passengers (all four of them) filed out into a dingy, flourescent-lit hallway. At the end of the hallway, against a glass wall behind which drowsy travelers waited (the captain had informed everyone that the local time was 11pm), was a sign that pointed the way to immigration. Nan noted with foreboding that it was entirely hand-made, each letter cut out of plastic and stuck to a substrate of red glass.

"You'll see a lot of that in India," Sid commented, once again accurately following (guessing? reading? just knowing?) her thoughts. "It's easier to make things by hand in most cases here. More people than machines."

Nan lingered at the sign a moment before following the two businessmen down the hall. Above the English text was lettering in Hindi, curly but blocky at the same time, more so because of the crudeness of the sign. She had enjoyed listening to the Hindi announcements on the plane. The announcer had a pleasant voice, but there was something about the sound of the language, rhythmic and repetitive and lilting, that sounded comforting to her.

57. Immigration.

Nan followed Sid down an interminably long hallway, into the immigration area. Several uniformed guards were posted here and there, and their only function seemed to be to point vaguely toward immigration officers. The two businessmen were already done and could be seen hurrying down the corridor behind the officials.

Sid and Nan arrived at the counter together. A blue-turbaned Sikh examined them and raised an eyebrow. "Passport?" Sid shook his head, smiling. "Disembarkation card?" the official pressed.

Nan had filled these out, creating a colorful name for Sid. She slid the cards toward the official, confident that somehow Sid would get them through whatever ordeal would face anyone else. The official didn't even glance at the cards. He stamped each of them twice, slid them back across the counter, and looked in the direction of the line that was already forming.

Sid took his, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

58. The Kowalczyks, part 1.

They walked through baggage claim, where not a single conveyor belt was moving. A few loiterers (or perhaps they were passengers of an earlier flight) wandered around. One of the duty free stores was open, more of a cluttered lean-to than a storefront as such, a sharp contrast (with its hand-lettered sign, Nan noted) to the sleek consistency of Zurich.

The baggage claim, like much of the airport, was tiled entirely in white marble, yet with the ghoulish lighting and stray signs of indifferent cleaning, created the effect of squatters inhabiting an expensive hotel bathroom. Everything seemed slightly worn, nothing entirely new.

"You'll see a lot of that, too," Sid said. "Things are kept in service a long time here. There's not so much of an emphasis on replacing everything to keep it new." Passengers from their flight were beginning to file into the baggage claim area, having made it through immigration.

Nan didn't understand why they were pausing. Sid was looking over the signs that were supposed to indicate which flight went with which conveyor, all of them currently blank. "Sid, we don't have any luggage."

He glanced toward the passengers taking their places along the curving belt. "No, we don't."

Nan frowned. Sid's eyes locked onto two young men, walking side by side toward the belt. She followed him as he approached them.

"Hello," Sid said.

The young men looked puzzled. To Nan they seemed to be about her age, college students for sure. They were clearly related; brothers, probably. The taller of them spoke. "Hey."

Nan did the uncomfortable wave-curtsy that seemed to be an involuntary action when she was introduced to strangers in odd circumstances, and inwardly cursed herself for it. "Hey," she said by way announcing her presence in some way other than the wave.

"Do you live in Delhi?" Sid asked.

Now the other one spoke. "No, our parents do. We're visiting them." They both still looked a bit confused, wondering why Sid had accosted them, but noting, as everyone did, that there wasn't anything the least bit threatening about his appearance or manner.

"Do you mind if we stay with you?" Sid asked. The two young men's confusion deepened.

"Well--" The conveyor belt they were standing next to made a lurching sound as the sign above it flipped crazily through various combinations of airlines and flight numbers, settling at last on their flight.

"We'll help you with your bags," Sid offered.

"My name's Nan," Nan offered. "He's Sid."

One of the brothers offered his hand as the other watched the still empty conveyor belt. "I'm Drew, and this is my brother Matt. Drew and Matt Kowalczyk," he said, reaching forward to shake her hand.

Matt, the one near the belt, raised his hand, in his own version of the uncomfortable wave. "Hey," he said.

"Nan Pressman," Nan said, since Drew had offered his last name. She wished now she hadn't made up such an absurd last name for Sid on his disembarkation card, because now she couldn't think of anything suitable. The sudden appearance of a bag on the conveyor allowed her to drop the subject.

Sid reached into his pocket, fished out the disembarkation card, read the name she'd written on it, and said, "Sid Ister." It came out, even in his evenly modulated tone, just as silly as she'd meant it, the ridiculousness of him claiming he didn't have a name or that it didn't matter: her poetic, playful fusion of "sinister" and "kid sister." Drew's focus was still on Nan, preventing her from shooting Sid a look to keep quiet, but now Matt was looking at him coolly.

"So your parents live here?" she continued, hoping Sid would step back in and finish what he had started, turn on the mojo he used in situations like this to get total strangers to welcome him into their homes. Like he had with her, she thought, her mind once again slowing down to a halt. Like he had with her.

"Yeah," Drew said, still evidently a bit puzzled by the two of them. "My dad works for the embassy here. The American embassy." Seeing that none of the bags rolling along the belt were theirs, he turned to Sid and Nan, and looked Sid in the eye. "So, are you serious that you need a place to stay?"

59. The Kowalczyks, part 2.

Ed and Linda Kowalczyk were waiting in the throng of people behind a metal barricade as Sid and Nan followed the brothers Matt and Drew out of the baggage claim area.

Nan had worried briefly that they would look suspicious going through customs with no luggage, and had thought for a moment to ask Matt and Drew if they could borrow their carry-on bags (despite both brothers' refusal to let them help carry anything) just so they wouldn't be so conspicuous.

Customs, however, was a series of benches with not a soul manning them, above which a white, hand-lettered sign proclaimed that anyone having any complaints about a customs official should contact a Hotmail address. Her worry abated. Strangely, Drew and Matt hadn't asked why Sid and Nan didn't have any bags.

Ed was a pleasant-looking man with a slight sunburn, which looked redder over his pale yellow polo shirt. Linda was slightly overweight. They were both about six inches shorter than Drew, the taller of their sons. They glanced at each other when they saw that their two sons apparently had a couple of friends in tow. Ed gestured for his sons to meet him on the opposite side of the barricade.

Hugs were exchanged, and introductions made. Drew introduced his parents, who stood waiting patiently to discover who the new faces were. "Mom, Dad, this is Nan Pressman and Sid--" Drew turned to Sid. "I'm sorry, did you say your last name is Lister?"

Sid addressed Ed and Linda, who were growing more perplexed by the moment. "It's a great pleasure to meet you. I had asked Drew earlier if we could impose on you for a place to stay." As always, he framed the question so directly he might have been referring to a grocery list.

Ed Kowalczyk's eyebrows went up, but his smile didn't disappear. Linda, too, was frozen in a smile, and looked a little helplessly at Ed. Sid went on. "We're only in India for a little while. We just decided on the spur of the moment to come here, and hadn't really made any arrangements." All four Kowalczyks were watching him with rapt attention.

"So you met Matt and Drew on the plane," Ed said.

"Actually no, just in there, at baggage claim."

Ed glanced at Sid and then at Nan. "But...but you don't have any bags."

"No," Sid said, smiling. "We don't have any bags."

Nan interjected, "Well, we do have these cool little travel kits they gave us on the plane, with toothpaste, a comb, socks..."

Linda's maternal instincts won out. "What! You don't even have anything to wear?" Nan could tell that Ed's mind had already put together that travel kits with socks meant first class. He took a breath.

Sid shrugged. "I thought we'd just pick up some things once we were here."

Ed said, "But you've been to India before? I mean, I hope you didn't just decide to get on a plane and..."

"Ed!" Linda said, with a tone of mild censure.

Sid laughed. "I've been here many times before."

Ed relaxed a bit. "Well, that's good. This isn't the sort of place you can just, you know, wing it." Drew and Matt nodded in agreement.

Linda still looked concerned. "But you do know people here? I mean, of course you're welcome to stay with us, for a few days anyway, but what were you planning to do while you're here?" Ed didn't say anything, but Nan wondered if he was thinking, if these kids hop on a plane on a whim and fly first class, why can't they get a hotel? Nan had to give him that--she was wondering the same thing.

"We know some people," Sid said thoughtfully. Nan glanced at him. Was he lying? She had never known him to lie. "They might be tough to find, and I'm sure some of them aren't around just now." Oh, come on, Sid, she thought. You may not be lying, but you're skirting dangerously close. You're talking about people from other lifetimes.

Linda cocked her head, weighing what he had said. Behind Linda and Ed, their driver, his hands already poised to pick up Drew and Matt's suitcases, shifted uncomfortably. "Mostly I just wanted Nan to see India. We'd talked about it a bit, and it seemed the right time to come."

Linda looked at Ed. She had made up her mind. He didn't look like he was going to object. "Well, it'll be a tight squeeze in the car, but if you two don't mind sharing the front seat, we're only about twenty-five minutes from the airport."

Sid smiled, as did the driver, who realized that whatever negotiation was taking place had concluded. They followed him past some low concrete barricades, through a few piles of filth into an utterly dark parking area. Here and there bright dashed yellow or white lines had been painted on the asphalt, but they didn't logically lead anywhere and seemed more for decoration than any particular organizational function.

"We're in Vasant Kunj," Ed said to Sid, perhaps testing his knowledge of the city. Nan, a bit relieved that forcing themselves on the Kowalczyks hadn't blown up in their faces, savored the sound of "Vasant Kunj" (a neighborhood?) as she took in the smell of the air. Dust; some garbage, for sure; car exhaust, definitely that; something sweet; orange peels...and what was that other smell? The air has a density here, she thought. Charcoal; something cooking (but where?); a little bit of a rain smell, the way rain smelled when it fell on dry, dusty ground...but where would she have smelled that before?

Drew and Matt were chatting about who they were going to look up first. Nan had the impression they might have gone to school here, since they seemed to be talking about people their age. Stray sounds kept jutting into her attention--bicycle bells ringing, a kind of buzzing, quavering horn, the thin, tinny sound of Indian film music coming out of a little radio, a bell, so many voices...

Linda turned to Nan. "You must be so excited," she whispered. "I'm guessing it's your first time?"

Nan nodded, smiling. She liked Linda, who was much more of an archetypal mother than her own. She wondered what Isabel would do here, then remembered, a bit surprised, that her parents had been to India several times before she was born--and on one of those trips, she guessed, came up with the idea of naming her after a man, a man long dead, the Buddha's beloved disciple, who wrote down the Enlightened One's teachings, a person who had lived two and a half thousand years ago. Was she following in his footsteps?

She thought of the flower-shaped mark on Sid's heel, and accepted Linda's outstretched hand.

60. Traffic circles.

The Kowalczyks had a rather large Indian-made, Japanese-designed car, which actually fit four people comfortably in the back seat. Sid and Nan were a little close in the front.

Nan seemed to be uncomfortable, perhaps through a combination of sitting so close to Sid and also being so near the driver, or perhaps because she was on what, for her, was the wrong side of the car in the passenger's seat. Her skin was cool to the touch.

Sid turned and addressed Ed. "What is it that you do at the embassy, Mr. Kowalczyk?"

"Oh, call me Ed. All of Drew and Matt's friends do."

Sid smiled. "Ed, then." Ed worked at USAID, among other things making sure that funds got to local organizations for US government-supported programs. He was passionate about his work, though he was totally aware of the many forms of corruption that ran rampant not only among his colleagues, but throughout the Indian organizations they worked with. At the moment Ed was thinking of a colleague who dined out every night on the tabs of Indian bureaucrats courting American interests.

"I work for the part of the embassy that handles foreign aid," Ed said, oversimplifying his job slightly but puffing up with a slight sense of importance nonetheless.

"I see," Sid said politely. This week had been particularly tough on Ed. The current American administration was pushing all sorts of religious agendas on the aid programs, something that had become a regular battle for Ed where birth control programs were concerned. Sid thought about that for a moment, feeling the soft pull of compassion: by the time the sun rose, hundreds of children would have been born in the city. What kind of a world would they be entering? Which way would it go?

Linda interjected. "What do you do, dear? Both of you, actually. Are you students?"

"Yes," Sid answered for both of them.

"At the moment, film," Nan said.

"And you?" Linda asked.

"Philosophy," Sid said. "And public service."

A knowing look in Ed and Linda's eyes indicated they had put the final piece of the puzzle in place. Trust fund kid, they thought, literally in unison.

The car went around what seemed like the tenth traffic circle they had come across. "Are we going in circles?" Nan asked. "Seriously. This is, like, the fourth time we've hit one of these." Sid closed his eyes. The city was layer upon layer of history. Half a mile to their left, invisible behind the hazy darkness and the foliage of tall trees lining the traffic circle, was India Gate, and across from it, along a mile-long, wide, tree-lined path and surrounding lawns, the Prime Minister's residence, an imposing sandstone-colored complex of buildings with a central dome. The plan of the city was like a series of interconnected wheels, the spokes radiating out and crossing each other, concentric circles overlapping in teeming ripples.

"The main part of the city is practically built around them," Ed explained, more or less correctly. "They have them at the intersections of all the main roads, and pretty much where the main neighborhoods meet. A holdover from the British, all these crazy roads. In the States, you'd never have to go through all this to get from Point A to Point B." The driver's eyes darted to the rear view mirror and back to the road, unnoticed by all but Sid. "Just as well," Ed continued. "Otherwise the congestion on the main roads would be impassable. This way at least it's spread out." The air conditioning hummed as the car pulled off the roundabout, its headlights (and others') flashing over a peculiarly shaped pointed sign that said, in Hindi, Urdu, and English, that they were going toward Vasant Kunj. Nan was thinking, as she saw the sign, that "Vasant Kunj" was spelled exactly the way she guessed it would be.

A couple of auto rickshaws, metal and vinyl tarp shells over three-wheeled scooters, darted along to the left of the car. In front of them, a brightly-pained truck festooned with tinsel proclaimed, "horn please."

"It's good to be back," Sid said to the driver in Hindi. Nan tensed. The Kowalczyks shifted as well: Matt and Drew because they had never bothered to learn Hindi that well all the years they had been in India and always felt this fact most acutely when they first came back; Ed because he was impressed by any Westerner that had bothered to learn the language; and Linda because she had finally developed the ear to know that Sid's Hindi was completely unaccented. The driver was merely stunned, but recovered quickly. He smiled broadly. "Then the city welcomes you back," he said.

They drove on in silence.

61. Jetlag.

The Kowalczyks' home seemed large to Nan, but then, she noted, so did most places by the New York standards she had always known.

A guard was waiting, or rather dozing, outside the gate. He jumped into action as soon as the car approached the driveway, the start of which was a culvert over a narrow drain that ran the length of the street. The guard swung the gate open and the car pulled into an open garage, next to a second, smaller car. Nan glanced back as the watchman closed the gate. The house had a tall wall going around it, partly disguised by cascading vines. Off to one side of the garden were tall, narrow trees planted in a row. These created a screen between the Kowalczyks and their neighbors on one side, while a higher wall blocked off the house on the other side.

That dusty, smoky smell was here too, but there was something heavy and sweet blooming in the garden that added a new scent to the mix.

The house looked even larger from the inside. The ceilings weren't high, but each room had broad proportions. The sparseness of the furniture gave it a grander scale, this too, Nan thought, a far cry from the clutter of most places in New York. The Kowalczyks seemed to have brought most of their furniture from the States, because the odd pieces that seemed Indian looked heavy and dark in comparison to the lighter items that could have been from anywhere in middle America. Nan wondered now where exactly the Kowalczyks were from. She'd assumed New York, but Matt and Drew could have caught the flight to Zurich from anywhere, and who was to say they were going to college anywhere near where they grew up. The whole family's sensibilities seemed suburban now that she saw them among their things.

A severe-looking middle-aged Indian woman approached Linda and the two conversed quickly. The Indian woman clearly ran the household. Nan had heard her moments before issuing orders to a young man in the long, white tunic she'd seen a number of Indian men wearing, and he was now hauling Matt and Drew's bags up a wide staircase.

Like the airport, the Kowalczyks' home felt a little run down. The walls looked like they had been painted recently, but their surfaces were rough and spots of moisture seeped through the paint. Ceiling fans turned lazily in each room, moving the air around. Nan's senses were overloaded mostly by the scent of things--it seemed like some new smell was intruding on her awareness every few seconds.

Ed flopped down in a chair in the living room. He'd kicked off his shoes before entering the room. The young man, having deposited the luggage upstairs, brought Ed a tall glass of beer, already coated with dewy condensation. "You guys picked a hell of a time to come to India," Ed commented after taking a generous sip, "but it would have been worse next month. At least this year we haven't had a heat wave." Nan felt it was stuffy, but aside from the wave of humidity outside the airport, the night seemed cool.

Drew and Matt sat down on a long sofa. Nan watched Linda and the middle-aged woman finish their conversation. The Indian woman's eyes darted over Sid and Nan before she turned crisply and left the living room, disappearing into what Nan assumed was a kitchen or pantry. Sid watched her go; he had smiled at her as her eyes passed over him, but she gave no reaction.

Linda now came and sat next to her sons, putting her arm around Matt. "It's nice to have guests," she said. "You get so tired of seeing the same faces over and over again!" Matt and Drew were now looking at Sid. Like dogs, Nan thought, sniffing out someone new who had walked into their territory. Her head swam a bit, and she felt like the floor was heaving slightly. She always felt light-headed after a flight, but this was worse.

"Would you like something to drink?" Ed asked. Nan noticed the Indian woman hovering in the doorway.

"No, thank you," said Sid, looking at Nan with a bit of concern.

"Some water would be great," Nan said. Her hands felt swollen, which was weird, because normally air travel only made her feet and ankles swell.

Ed nodded at the Indian woman, who disappeared and, seconds later, appeared with a metal tray. On it were four glasses--also metal--which she brought around to Linda, then Drew and Matt, and finally Nan. Nan took a tentative sip of the water, which smelled a bit funny but was deliciously cool. Condensation had formed on the outside of these glasses too and was beginning to bead and run in rivulets down their sides.

"I'm--I feel so tired, but it just feels good to move around," Nan said finally.

Ed nodded. "That flight's a killer. I have to go back and forth five, six times a year, and it messes me up every time. You'd think," he said, chuckling, "you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I'll tell you, it just gets worse as you get older."

"I'm going to head up," Matt said a bit abruptly.

Drew glanced at him. "I'll hang out for a bit and catch up with Mom and Dad."

Matt nodded as he got up. "I'll see you all in the morning," he said. Then, pausing by the door, he turned to Sid, then to Nan, and said, "Welcome to India. We'll show you around the city a bit tomorrow." It felt a bit compensatory, as though he might be a little worried he'd been rude.

"Thanks," Nan said. Matt trudged up the stairs, and they heard the sound of a door closing.

"I had better turn in too," Nan said.

"Let me just check to make sure your room is made up," Linda said, getting up.

Nan shifted. "Oh--um--" It hadn't occurred to her that Ed and Linda might assume that she and Sid were a couple.

Sid interjected. "Please don't go to any trouble on our account. Here, we'll help make up the room." He got up.

Linda hesitated, then relented. "You'll throw them into a tailspin if you try to help them," she said finally. "Well, let's go up and see how far they got."

Ed showed no signs of moving, or of leaving the second half of his beer. "I'll see you two in the morning," he said.

"Good night," Drew said simply.

Sid and Nan followed Linda up the stairs. The second floor of the house seemed to contain three or four rooms along a hallway. "You have your own bathroom," Linda said on the way. "Fresh towels, and all that." She paused. "I have something you can wear to sleep," she said to Nan, then to Sid, "and I'm sure one of the boys has an old t-shirt and a pair of boxers you can borrow."

"Thank you," Sid said, and Linda smiled. Nan almost rolled her eyes. Sid had a bit of this effect on everyone, but things had already progressed to a stage with Linda where everything he did or said was charming.

"I'm a lot bigger than you," Linda said a big coquettishly to Nan as they approached the guest room, "but a nighty's a nighty."

Inside the room, the middle-aged Indian woman, the young man who had carried Matt and Drew's luggage, and a young woman in a sari were just finishing making the bed. They seemed a bit startled and backed away from the bed quickly. The young man put down a covered pitcher and two covered metal glasses on a side table, and the three departed. The young woman devoured Sid and Nan quickly with her eyes in the few moments it took her to cross the room, and they were gone.

"All set," Linda beamed. Her presence in this room, in this house, in this country was incongruous. Nan wondered how she made sense of her life.

"Thank you again," Sid said.

"Yeah," Nan managed.

"I'll see you two in the morning. Sleep as late as you want, just tell Mrs. Joshi--" (Linda waved her hand in the direction of the stairs) "--she's the older woman, she kind of manages the staff--just tell her whatever you want if we've already finished breakfast." She bustled toward the doorway, and as she passed through it, said maternally, "sweet dreams," and was gone. The door closed gently behind her.

"Well," said Sid. He was clearly enjoying the adventure, as much as he ever visibly enjoyed anything. He surveyed the room, his eyes alighting on a small pile of magazines.

Nan made her way toward the bathroom, extracting her little first class amenities kit--including its all-important toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste--from her bag.

"Remember to use water from the pitcher in there to brush your teeth," Sid said. There was a knock at the door. "Come in?"

Linda appeared through a tiny crack. "I forgot to tell you," she began. Looking at Sid, she said, "You probably know this. But you," she said, looking at Nan. "Make sure you use the water from the pitcher to brush your teeth. It'll take you a while to get used to things here, and the last thing you want in your first few days is a case of Delhi Belly."

"Thanks," Nan said. The door closed. Sid smiled. Nan went into the bathroom.

She splashed some water on her face, catching herself before taking a sip of the cool water from her cupped palm. It was the smell of it, a hint of minerals and something a bit musty, that reminded her not to drink it; she was too tired to have fully processed Linda's comment or Sid's just before that, and her body as moving around more by habit than by conscious thought. He really can read minds, she thought to herself as she dried her face. He really does know everything.

The towels smelled like they had been ironed. Nan brushed her teeth with the filtered water and went back into the bedroom. Sid was sitting in one of a pair of chairs near the bed, reading a magazine. Nan began to speak, and he held out an extra-large t-shirt. "Linda made a third trip," he said. "With things for us to sleep in."

Nan took the shirt and unfolded it. It was light pink and said, in varsity letters on the front, "GAP." She went into the bathroom and changed.

She was asleep within seconds of getting under the cool compression of the blanket, too tired to register yet another series of unfamiliar scents and textures within the bed itself. Sid remained where he was, flipping intently through the magazine in his chair by the bed.

62. The Kowalczyks, part 3.

Sid knew without looking over that Nan was asleep, that she had slipped into exhaustion within moments of curling up under the heavy blankets. The mattress was firm beneath her, firmer than most she had slept on, but the relaxation of her back after all their travel had sent waves of calm through her, and now she slept.

The magazines Ed and Linda Kowalczyk kept next to the chairs in the guest room were out of date. They were a mixture of American and Indian, The Economist and Outlook India and even a Bollywood gossip tabloid mixed in together. Sid had been leafing through the magazines, looking perhaps as though he was searching for a specific article but couldn't remember where he'd seen it (and perhaps he was searching for something in the pages; it was entirely possible). Mostly, though, he was listening.

The air in the house had become suddenly turbulent, as he'd known it would since the first moment he'd noticed Drew and Matt waiting for the flight in Zurich. Sid sat quietly, the magazine still in his lap, but his hands no longer thumbed gently through the pages. Though he was still, he moved, too, in that stillness; he pushed out, felt himself become air.

The second floor was almost silent. Matt had been faking tiredness: he wasn't really fatigued, he just excused himself on a pretext, as he and Drew had agreed previously. He sat in his bed, idly thinking of old school friends he would call tomorrow, and what tomorrow would be like, how he would explain things, whether (a small hope sparked and grew) there would even be anything to explain, maybe there wouldn't. He circled around these thoughts to avoid the deeper, darker well of a thing that had preoccupied him ever since he had gone to meet Drew in Chicago, before they went to catch their flight to Zurich and then to Delhi.

A wave of nausea returned to Matt from those moments, along with a memory of the smell of coffee--a memory of sitting with Drew, who had tears in his eyes and was talking quickly, and wouldn't stop talking, and there they sat in that coffee shop, while people swirled in and out of the place, for hours, unending hours. With a twinge of shame Matt had watched the door of the coffee shop in case any of his college friends might walk in and see them or hear what they were talking about. That conversation, those hours, felt they had taken place a sleepless month ago, but it hadn't yet been a full day. Matt bit his nails and continued thinking about who he would call tomorrow, and what tomorrow would be like, how he would explain things...

In the next room, Linda was brushing her teeth as she watched herself in the mirror, raising her chin, tightening the skin of her neck, wondering whether it was time she went in for what so many of her friends, the embassy wives, now treated as routine. India had a thriving industry in what was now called medical tourism, plastic surgeons of such skill that men and women from all over the world came to be cut by their delicate, precise instruments into newer, more youthful shapes. The embassy wives, in particular, with their schedules of constant travel, feigned trips home or to some other place, vanishing for a few weeks into secluded "recovery houses" on estates in nearby Gurgaon, only to reappear younger-looking and refreshed.

Linda thought about this every night, and each night she concluded, not yet, maybe next year, or when the boys are done with school. But who am I doing it for? she wondered. As she spat out the minty foam of her toothpaste, rinsing her mouth carefully with bottled water, she glanced at the folds above her eyelid, and wondered what her eyes had looked like ten years ago. She was oblivious to the conversation taking place downstairs, or to her sons' odd demeanor since they'd arrived, which, had it attracted her notice, she might have attributed to the presence of the strangers, Sid and Nan.

What an odd boy Sid was, she thought, then immediately corrected herself. Sid was a young man, just as her sons were young men, getting close to the age she and Ed had been when they got married. What an odd young man, her thoughts went on, as she splashed some cold water on her face, toweled off, and made her way to bed (leaving a single dim lap on, as she always did, on Ed's side). Sid was so handsome. She smiled to herself, a little conspiracy of one, allowing herself to be both a woman old enough to be his mother and also just a woman, and she tried to imagine what Sid's naked body must look like. Sinewy, she decided. Taut, hard, but with skin as soft as powder; pale, clean, symmetrical.

He must smell wonderful, she thought, though she hadn't been close enough to catch his scent. The smell of a young man, a youthful man's body that imitated the form of a young warrior or dancer, before the flesh began to fall toward gravity, and stray hairs of an eyebrow or chest grew long and gray, before the skin grew slack and cool to the touch. She imagined the curve of a lower back, the firmness of a shoulder, the strength of a hand--and those eyes. Warm desire floated her toward sleep.

As he listened indifferently to Linda's thoughts, Sid was also observing what was happening on the floor below, sounds insulated from Linda's ears by the hum of multiple air conditioners and the rhythmic clicking of ceiling fans. Though the conversation on the first floor was quiet, and punctuated by long, awkward pauses, it burned like a beacon in the night: a signal of suffering, conflict, and fear.

63. Morning.

By the time Nan got downstairs for breakfast, Ed Kowalczyk long since left for work, Linda was out shopping with friends, and Drew had caught a ride with Linda to meet old schoolmates. Matt and Sid were at the breakfast table.

Matt had finished eating and was reading a newspaper as he finished his tea. Sid had been waiting for Nan to come down, a plate of fruit (sliced pineapple, papaya, and guava) in front of him. He had that distant look in his eyes that Nan was so familiar with, which dissipated the moment she came into view. He received her with a smile.

"You didn't have to wait for me," she told him.

"Good morning," Matt said, and returned to his newspaper.

Sid indicated his plate. "You should try these fruits," he said. "They're delicious."

Matt glanced at him over the newspaper, noting that he hadn't eaten anything or had a sip of his tea, now cold. How did he know how the fruits tasted?

"Thanks," Nan said, sitting down. Her mind was full of a hundred things, aggregated and waiting to be sorted out. She wanted clean clothes. She hadn't had time to even wash her underwear, and she doubted that even the resourceful Linda would have any on hand that were her size.

"I thought we might go into the city today," Sid said, pouring some tea for Nan, "and pick up a few things."

Without looking up from his newspaper, Matt said, "I'm probably going to stay in for most of today. Mom and Dad took the cars, but I can help you find a taxi, there are a bunch over closer to the university."

Sid smiled. "Thank you. But we don't want to put you to any trouble. We can find one ourselves."

"Your Hindi's pretty good," Matt said, still poring over his newspaper. Nan noticed that his manner was a bit like Ed's this morning, as though Matt was acting the part of the man of the house as the eldest male Kowalczyk present. Sid didn't respond. "How long did you live here?"

Sid paused, as he so often did when considering a question. "I suppose you could say I grew up here."

Matt nodded, and put down his newspaper. "India's funny that way. You can be away for a week and it feels like years, but then when you go back practically nothing has changed."

Sid cocked his head. "I see many changes. Everything is very different from the last time I was here."

"How long ago was that?"

Another pause from Sid. "It feels like a lifetime."

Matt frowned, but didn't say anything. Especially as someone who had lived in India, he was repulsed by New Age Americans who romanticized Indian spirituality. At least Sid had been here before, but he was laying the whole blissed-out hipster hippie thing on pretty thick. He decided to let it go. He had more than enough to worry about without trying to figure Sid out. He'd gotten up after Ed, Linda, and Drew had left, so he had no idea what had transpired downstairs last night, who knew what. He glanced at Nan. "Did you sleep well?"

Nan's face lit up. "I don't know if I've ever slept like that. Normally I can't sleep anywhere it's quiet."

"It's the travel, for sure. It wears you out to a point where you can sleep on anything," Matt said.

Nan made appreciative noises as she ate a small cube of papaya. "I've only ever had dried papaya," she said, recalling trips to food co-ops in Brooklyn with her parents. "This is so good!"

"It is pretty good," Matt conceded. "Mrs. Joshi has this trick of putting some lime on it. Cuts the bitterness."

64. Union Square, part 2.

At that exact moment, Sid was also sitting on a bench in Union Square in New York, where it was just after one o'clock at night. He was watching the homeless man, who stirred restlessly in his customary spot.

One of the two young men who had come to see him before approached nervously. "Hi."

Sid looked up. "Hello."

The young man sat down carefully, reverently, across from Sid, not even glancing at the homeless man. "I haven't seen you here for a few days," he said finally.

Sid answered, "I've been traveling."

The young man nodded. "You're usually here with that girl, the pretty one. She always has coffee. Or at least, I've seen you with her a few times."

"She's in India."

The young man was surprised. "Wow. Did she...I mean, was she planning that trip?"

"No."

"Oh. So you're here on your own."

"I'm here with you," Sid said, with a smile. "And I'm here with him." The homeless man shifted again, as though trying to get comfortable. The young man glanced at him now, a little nervous. He could smell him from across the path, an acrid stench, like old sneakers, dirty hair; a locker room. "This man is suffering," Sid said simply.

"What's wrong with him?" the young man asked.

"He's dying," Sid said.

"Should we call someone? Like, an ambulance, or the police? Maybe they can get him to a shelter."

Sid thought for a moment. "He doesn't want shelter. His life is basic. He sleeps during the day, usually here, and at night, after using various means to get hold of some money and scavenge a bit of food, he finds a place that will sell him a little bottle of very strong, very cheap rum. He drinks this slowly, at first, lets his body get used to the sting of it. Then it's not so bad. He drinks it in bigger gulps. Then he walks the streets of this city while they're nearly empty. No one bothers him."

"Why does he do that?"

"He's retracing his memories," Sid explained. "There are things he wants to recall, and other things that are so painful that he needs to go there night after night, thinking about only a little bit of it at a time." Sid glanced north. "Every night, he starts on 96th Street."

The young man glanced again at the lump curled up on the bench near Sid. How could he bear to sit so near that smell?

Sid went on. "Yes, look at him. You would never know that this was once a very rich man. His family owns dozens of businesses throughout this city. Their fortunes have diminished, but they are still wealthy. And they are still looking for him. They have no idea what he's become, no idea he's so close. If they passed him on the street, they wouldn't see him or recognize his face." Sid paused, as though remembering. "He grew up there, uptown, on 96th Street. That's where he lived as a young man." Sid looked over at the sleeping form. "Near here, a little to the east, is where a woman once lived. She died some years ago. That's where his wanderings end, when he's just on the brink of lying down and slipping into sleep. That's where his greatest pain is."

"How do you know all this?" the young man asked, a little awed. "Have you spoken to him?"

"No," Sid said. "He doesn't speak to anyone, unless it's absolutely necessary. Even then, there is an economy to his words, as though he's saving them."

"Have you followed him?"

Sid smiled again. "Yes. I have." The young man frowned, and began to speak. Sid cut him off. "Even if we call someone who drags him off to a shelter, he'll get away from them. There are hundreds of places he can sleep, and get his rum, and jump turnstiles to get to 96th Street. This is what he needs to do."

"But he's dying," the young man said.

"Yes. He is."

There was a long pause. Something within the young man sparked. "He's free."

"In a manner of speaking. It might be more correct to say that he's reduced his burdens to a select few, ones that he's deliberately chosen, and is slowly ridding himself of them. He's like an artist," Sid said. "He looks at the same composition each night, night after night, from different angles, studying it, often erasing the whole canvas and starting again, to get to the image he needs. He is trying to uncover the truth of his life. He is accountable to no one. There's a nobility in begging, in being rid of the terrible costs of worrying about survival. He's indifferent to death."

"You said he goes wandering at night. But he's still here..."

Sid nodded. "His body is wearing out. Tonight, he won't go walking. He's going to rest. I'm watching over him."

The young man nodded, then his mind returned to an earlier question. "The girl you were with. When's she getting back?"

"She's not sure," Sid said. "At the moment, she's very much enjoying some hot, sweet Indian tea and a plate full of pineapple slices."

65. A sign, part 1.

Matt was talking about his first days in India, when his father Ed had been assigned to the American embassy. Nan was listening politely while she ate her breakfast.

She glanced over at Sid. There was that far-away look in his eyes again. What was he thinking about when he was like that? There had been the moment on the plane, when he quoted poetry to her (what was it he quoted? she had been so groggy, now she couldn't remember it), times when he seemed to be almost completely absent.

"He's suffering," Sid said.

Conversation stopped. Matt, interrupted mid-sentence, looked over at Sid. "Pardon me?"

Sid returned, but only partially. His eyes were still hazed, like he was looking at something beyond the table, behind the wall across from him. "Your father. He doesn't like it here."

Matt frowned again. His gradual disapproval of Sid was growing. He wanted him out of the house.

Sid continued. "He came here because he thought it would be the best opportunity for him, the best career. He's well paid, but he hasn't really enjoyed his work for some time."

Matt's anger was rising. "Well, that's the way it is for most of us," he said, trying to ignore the tight feeling in his chest. "Not everyone can just do whatever they want."

"That's true," Sid agreed. "We could do whatever we want, but we won't let ourselves. It's just as well. If everyone did whatever they wanted, things would be even worse."

Matt got up slowly, pushing the chair back with his legs. He picked up his newspaper again. "If you'll excuse me, I've got better things to do."

He walked out of the dining room without looking at Nan.

Nan stared at Sid.

66. Union Square, part 3.

The homeless man shifted again. His leg convulsed, then was still. Sid closed his eyes.

The young man spoke. "You said he was dying...did you mean, like, dying right now?" He swallowed, trying not to look at the figure slumped along the bench, trying to be clinical. "We should call somebody," he said again.

A few minutes passed. Then Sid opened his eyes.

"It's over," he said softly. "He's gone." His hand slipped into the homeless man's pocket and drew out a small object. He got up and began to walk across Union Square, toward the subway station. The young man followed him.

67. A sign, part 2.

"Why did you say that?" Nan asked. Sid looked at her, but didn't respond. She went on. "We're their guests. I think you really offended him." She was finished. She pushed the plate of fruit forward. As much as she'd been enjoying it, the flavors in her mouth were sour, a little bitter.

"There isn't any way to hide from the truth," Sid said. "This family is poisoned by secrets. It eats all of them up from the inside. Their ignorance is deliberate."

"And you're going to fix that for them," Nan said, a note of harsh sarcasm entering her voice.

"No. I can't do that."

There was a long silence. Nan sipped her tea, and watched as the faraway look once again entered Sid's eyes, or perhaps it was that his presence departed somehow. He watched the table in front of him, or a plane directly beyond it, and was quiet.

68. The trip uptown.

Sid walked down the stairs to the subway, the young man trailing after him.

"I'm Max," the young man said.

Nearing the turnstiles, Sid turned to look at the booth attendant, a tired-looking woman in a blue uniform. She pressed a button, and a black metal grate clicked. Sid opened the grate and entered the subway. Max, baffled, followed him.

The uptown subway was just entering the station. Sid didn't quicken his pace. By the time they got to the platform, the doors of the train were just opening.

The train was nearly empty. Sid selected a seat, and sat down. Max sat across from him. The train rocked gently as it hurtled uptown.

69. Myths and the truth.

He remembered leaving Kapilavastu, having just begun his quest. A god had walked behind him on that day, one of several gods who had been there all along to make sure he found his way out of the soft prison of his father's love, from a sleeping palace where sickness, old age, and death were hidden from him. Leaving, that night, he had looked one final time upon his sleeping wife, and son, and departed out into the cool night.

Of course there had been no gods. These were part of a myth that had grown to surround him. But the myth was true in the way all myths are true, in that they are created out of a yearning for the deeper truth of things.

A god was following him now, he thought, in myths that might be written of him in this form, some time in the future. He could feel the god's presence, even though this time, as before, there was no god with him.