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.