"We call that Brahman," Sheela's disembodied voice responded. "Not to be confused with Brahma. Brahma, with Vishnu and Shiva, is a major deity, though he has not generated the legends and temples of the other two. People do not love Brahma as they love the other two. But behind them is Brahman. He is what you might call G.o.dhead, beyond describing. He is closest to your Christian concept of G.o.d. You have gone now more than six minutes. Almost halfway."

"Does anybody believe in Him? In It?"

"Numerous millions," Sheela a.s.sured him, her soft voice stiffening a little. "There are no disbelieving Hindus."

"Does He ask you to feel guilty?" Cell after cell, it seemed to Fleischer, was igniting within him, one microscopic sun after another.

Her voice became merry again. "No, we are not like Americans. We are still too poor for guilt. I do not mean to be flippant. Each Hindu feels set down in a certain earthly place, and tries to fill that role. Each person, from the maharajah down to the crippled beggar, is doing what is prescribed. That is what Krishna said to Arjuna on the battlefield in the Bhagavad-Gita. 'Be a warrior,' he said, 'and do not trouble yourself with the ethics of killing.' You have done over eight minutes. From now on, most patients a.s.sure me, it becomes easier. It will be downhill. Can you feel that yet?"

"At my age," Fleischer announced from the center of his burning blindness, through lips immobilized by a mask of inward-directed needles, "it's all downhill."

Each of Fleischer's three wives had borne one child-girl, boy, girl. They in turn had each produced two children, all boys, oddly. Odd, too, was the way they all, against the dispersive tendencies of American independence and enterprise, lived within an hour's drive of the Swampscott condo to which he had retired. Guilty about his inadequate grandfathering-he never, unlike grandfathers in television commercials, took his grandsons fishing or onto idyllic golf courses-he tried to visit each household once a month. In the weeks after his blue-light treatment, he would rather have hidden in his stuffy bachelor quarters, their curtains drawn to keep out any further light, while the television set in the corner muttered and shuffled its electrons like a demented person playing solitaire.

But once a parent, always a parent. Guilty habit drove him forth. His younger daughter lived in a sprawling old farmhouse that had lost most of its acres but kept its barn and long side porch. She and her husband, in what seemed to Fleischer a precarious arrangement with the real world, ran a riding stable in the barn, and an advertising firm out of their bas.e.m.e.nt-rural bohemians plugged into the World Wide Web. Once his shyest, plumpest child, Gretchen had acquired in her thirties a lean, sun-hardened horsewoman's confidence, and a hearty, not always welcome frankness to go with it. "Dad," she greeted him, "what happened to your face? face? It's so It's so red. red. Does it hurt?" Does it hurt?"

"It did. It doesn't now. You should have seen me five days ago. I looked monstrous. Not just red but all swollen, as if I'd been punched."

Gretchen blinked, but did not contradict him. How could she? She hadn't been there, in the room of merciless blue light. Nevertheless, he felt nettled, ent.i.tled to more sympathy than he was getting. He went on, "I've been trying to hide, but I remembered Tommy's birthday was yesterday, and I didn't want him to think I'd forgotten. Here. I got him that electronic King Kong game I think he said he wanted from seeing it advertised on television. The kid who waited on me in Circuit City thought this must be the one I meant, but he didn't seem to know much, and he kept staring at my poor red face."

"Poor Dad. Actually, Tommy's birthday was last week. But he'll be thrilled. I'll call him in from the barn. He was helping Greg."

"Don't bother, if he's doing useful work. I'll just leave King Kong here."

"Don't be silly, Father. Tommy's always asking, 'When is Grandpa coming to visit?' "

Grandpa-Fleischer couldn't identify with the name, but on the other hand couldn't think of a better. It was what he had called his own grandfather, with whom he had lived until the dear old man died. Tipping back his head to see through thick bifocals, his grandfather had read the newspaper and the Bible in his favorite armchair and smoked cigars on the porch and taken a nip of whiskey in his bedroom, which smelled wonderfully of bygone mores and medicines. For every day of Fritz's young life he awoke to the sounds of his grandfather coughing his tenacious tobacco cough, muttering to Grandma, walking up and down stairs in his squeaky high-top shoes, and shaking down the clinkers in the coal furnace in the bas.e.m.e.nt. When the Depression had hit, his pregnant daughter and out-of-work son-in-law had taken refuge with him, and they had gratefully named their baby for him. Fritz, a solid old German name. One of the Katzenjammer Kids in the Sunday comic strip had been called Fritz.

None of Fritz's grandsons was named Fritz. Tommy, trailing his little brother, Teddy, came in from the side porch. The nine-year-old, his bare chest slick with sweat, looked disturbingly pudgy. Teddy, at six, was still wiry, but his hair, blond with bits of barn straw in it, hung uncut to his shoulders, so that only Fleischer's having seen the child being bathed at the hospital told him that this was not a girl. The boys came up to him to be hugged yet did nothing to help the embrace, standing there limply and refusing to lift their faces to give his lips access to more than their ears. "I hope this is something you don't already have," he told Tommy weakly, handing him the long flat package. It had cost him several hours in the shopping and the wrapping, plus sifting through the rack at the local drugstore for a suitably jocose but not obscene or hostile birthday card.

In a flash the boy ripped off the paper and confronted the raging gorilla on the box, its giant jaws wide open to engulf an entire lime-colored automobile. "Yippee!" he cried, in what seemed to Fleischer faked rapture. "This is just the one I asked Mom for and she didn't get me."

"It looked pretty violent," his grandfather warily observed. "Why would even a monster chew lumps of metal?" To himself he thought that fewer computer games might take some pounds from the boy's soft, aggressively bare torso.

Gretchen, hearing the critical edge in her father's voice, maternally intervened: "Dad, the latest thinking on that seems to be that the violence, however awful, does children good. good. It gives their fantasies a form and carries them off. Isn't that Aristotle's old theory of catharsis all over again?" It gives their fantasies a form and carries them off. Isn't that Aristotle's old theory of catharsis all over again?"

"I didn't know you read Aristotle. I didn't know anybody still did." To his grandson he said, "Enjoy, Tommy. Teddy, make him give you a turn now and then."

But the boys were no longer listening. The older was whining to his mother, "I gotta gotta go back to helping Dad," and the younger had given up gazing expectantly at his grandfather. "Next time, Teddy," Fleischer told him brusquely. "Today's not your birthday." Still, the boy's unspoken disappointment pained him. The girlish child reminded him not of Gretchen at that age but of the bottomless well of hopefulness he had felt within him at the age of six, against all reason, surrounded as he had been by the Depression. Optimism and a helpless dependence on being loved, he saw with the reluctant wisdom of age, are the meager survival weapons we bring with us into the world. Fleischer still wanted to be loved, however little he deserved it. He sat with Gretchen over cups of herbal tea, marvelling that his baby girl, who had hated her own thighs, should have become not only a woman but a leathery one in jodhpurs, practiced in the ways of equestrianism and advertising and motherhood and, he dismally supposed, s.e.x. go back to helping Dad," and the younger had given up gazing expectantly at his grandfather. "Next time, Teddy," Fleischer told him brusquely. "Today's not your birthday." Still, the boy's unspoken disappointment pained him. The girlish child reminded him not of Gretchen at that age but of the bottomless well of hopefulness he had felt within him at the age of six, against all reason, surrounded as he had been by the Depression. Optimism and a helpless dependence on being loved, he saw with the reluctant wisdom of age, are the meager survival weapons we bring with us into the world. Fleischer still wanted to be loved, however little he deserved it. He sat with Gretchen over cups of herbal tea, marvelling that his baby girl, who had hated her own thighs, should have become not only a woman but a leathery one in jodhpurs, practiced in the ways of equestrianism and advertising and motherhood and, he dismally supposed, s.e.x.

Her good-bye kiss when his time came to leave startled him, considering their relation, by being aimed at the center of his mouth. In backing away, though, she gave him a quick sideways glance, checking on her effect, looking, for this moment, remarkably-piercingly-like her mother. Corinne had been the youngest of his wives and the least philosophical about his leaving her. She had not wanted to be left; she doubted, more than her two predecessors, her ability to enjoy freedom and create a new attachment. Her insecurity, with her watchfully qualified kisses, had been one of the initial fascinations. After his two rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women his own age, Corinne brought out his protective instinct. But then her streak of panic, of fearing she could not cope, excited his capacity for impatience and, in the end, cruelty. He had grown stony under her siege, the last year, of pleas and tears.

Gretchen had been only seven, a wide-eyed innocent bystander. Corinne had, in a fashion, eventually coped, moving to the South Sh.o.r.e and making one of those postmodern living-together arrangements with a somewhat younger man. Fleischer was secretly offended and felt cuckolded. If only she had not shyly held back, giving kisses but then undermining them with a questioning irony-self-protective behavior touching in a daughter but hard to forgive in a wife-Corinne might still be his, a quarter of a century later. He had loved the infantile, trusting way she had slept, her bare toes sneaking out of the covers and a soft round arm wrapped around her face, its pink elbow up in the air.

Fleischer and Gretchen parted on the long side porch, tidily stacked with wood for the coming winter. His face felt hot; the oblique flash of resemblance to her mother had warmed a sore spot within him.

His second wife, Tracy, had taken a good deep tan. They had spent a lot of the days of their brief marriage at the beach together, even though Fleischer burned while she turned the color of a Polynesian. He had hoped some of her melanin would rub off on him, but she kept it all to herself. Quick to marry, once their divorces from other people came through, they had been quick to have a child-a son, Geoffrey. They took him to the beach early, in his cream-colored oilcloth ba.s.sinet, under a layer of muslin to keep off the sand flies and to soften the noontime sun. By the time he was two it became clear that his skin took after his mother's. No sun damage had been inflicted.

Or so it seemed: Fleischer observed that even in his teens, when his parents had been long divorced, the boy kept an indoor complexion, a sallow refusal of gratuitous exposure. He became as sober and cautious a man as his mother had been reckless and dazzling as a woman. At the beach, when she and Fleischer were still married to other people, Tracy's white smile in her brown face had signalled to him from far away, a beacon on the horizon. Then, when she came and stood next to him where he lay dozing, fuzzily hungover, on a blanket beside his first wife, Tracy's long naked legs had stretched, it seemed, almost to the sky. Ah, those scintillating afternoons on the sand in the sun-loving, fun-loving Sixties! People used baby oil and Bain de Soleil back then, instead of number-rated sunscreen. Tracy's long-toed bare feet beside Fleischer's groggy face had bronzed insteps and pale soles and cherry-red nails, and he wanted to lick them, every square inch, but for the scandal this would have caused, and the sand grains that would have adhered to his tongue.

Geoffrey, forty-two, and less than nine at the time of his parents' divorce, lived alone in a Boston apartment whose only disorder came when his teen-age boys visited. Their mother, Eileen, lived a few miles away, in Brighton. They had been separated for three years, with plenty of counselling but no perceptible legal action. Fleischer often wanted to ask his son why the divorce wasn't happening; but he feared the answer, which might have been that his father's impulsive behavior had set a cautionary example. In Fleischer's mind at the time, he was doing Tracy a favor, once the extent of her infidelities-ski instructors, local workmen-had become clear, freeing her to find another husband. No such considerate thoughts, apparently, urged Geoffrey forward, though Eileen was younger than he, and still beautiful. He had been, like many of his generation, slow to marry, close to thirty. The bride was twenty-two, with raven hair, edgy but demure, perfect and spectacular at the wedding, with her china-white skin. Her dark eyes and thick lashes had made smoldering spots of shadow through the veil. The father-inlaw had beamed with pride, gloating, as if over an unexpected inheritance, over the genes she was bringing into the family line. The Fleischers for generations, back to Teutonic hunters and gatherers, had been a homely, k.n.o.bby, unevenly ruddy race; Fritz guessed he wasn't the first psoriatic. Now Eileen's older son, Jonathan, showed her delicacy and precision of feature to rakish effect in a thirteen-year-old's lengthening frame. In his younger, blonder brother, Martin, those qualities were wed to his father's phlegmatic stolidity to achieve a gentler and more angelic handsomeness. Fritz tried to fulfill a grandfather's duty by visiting his son on the weekends when the boys were visiting.

"How's school?" he would ask them.

"O.K.," Martin would answer.

"Sucks," Jonathan would say.

Martin's silence had the innocent purity of there simply being no more he could think to say, but Jonathan's had a deliberately withheld quality. He would not even turn his head for a second to acknowledge the presence of his grandfather, concentrating instead on the television program, or book of science fiction, or piece of drawing (he was artistic) that was engaging him. Fleischer remembered very well the intensity of a child's need to concentrate down into the comic book, the model airplane, the stamp collection-deep into the miniature world that sheltered you from the larger, adult, out-of-your-control world-but his empathy was hard to express. Even Jonathan's blue-black hair, glossily brushed and eccentrically parted in the middle, emanated a desire to repulse. He and his younger brother were enduring a parental separation that must seem endless, a kind of disease eating their adolescence away, and they suspected their grandfather and his obscure sins to be behind it all. Perhaps the boy felt protective of the mother he strikingly resembled; he feared that any friendliness toward his grandfather would lead to an invasion and a betrayal of that large half of his life where she ruled. So Fleischer imagined; he imagined that his sins were as evident as the scorched, mottled look of his face.

Martin was more mechanical in his interests than artistic, and his elaborate Lego constructions and his increasingly polished ventures into carpentry gave his grandfather some slight opportunity to admire and even, through helpful practical questions, to share. But playing with blocks and tools was decades behind Fleischer, and the child's interest, kindled, flickered out as he felt his elder's momentarily roused attention wander away. Grandchildren were raised in an alien technology, an electronic one of amplified noises and simulated violence too quick and coded for an elderly eye and hand. Although he recognized his grandsons as further extensions of himself, it was Fleischer's own, enigmatically wounded son who fascinated him.

"How's it going?" he would ask Geoffrey, letting the question mean whatever his son chose it to mean.

"O.K.," he would say. "She's still fussy, but improving." The p.r.o.noun "she" inevitably referred to Eileen. "The last counsellor helped," he added.

It was apparent to anyone, even to his father and his sons, that nothing would help enough, that the marriage was over for everyone but its two princ.i.p.als. Perhaps it was a family failing, Fritz speculated-not knowing how to let go. In his heart he felt still married to all three of his wives: the marriages continued underground, through tunnels of fondness and mutual understanding. Sometimes it took one or another of his wives to remind him, when he overstayed or over-stepped, that their connections were broken. Women, who must give more thought to their survival than men, are in the end less sentimental.

"It's hard," was all Fleischer could think to say, sitting with his only son, seeing his own features in the stubbornly sorrowing, aging face, and hearing from the next room the m.u.f.fled clutter of his grandsons killing time until they were no longer children and could escape this limbo. A helpless, guilty, wordless silence between the two grown men stretched and burned. To break the silence, Fleischer asked, "Does my face look red?"

Geoffrey, after a quick glance, answered, "I guess. But it always looks sort of red."

"Really? It got blasted at the hospital two weeks ago. I felt like a sun-dried tomato."

"Nothing much shows now. You don't look that bad, Dad."

Fleischer felt exasperation. "Geoffrey, you're not looking. You're thinking of something else."

"You sound like my wife. That's what she always says."

Together, in silence, the two men contemplated the unfathomable pleasure it gave the younger to still be able to say "my wife."

"Dad, what did you do to your face? It looks beautiful! beautiful!" So spoke his eldest child, Aurora, four weeks after his session with Sheela.

He blushed, his skin remembering the heat of the blue light. "Really? It was horrible at first-swollen, all red. I stopped looking in the mirror when it calmed down a little."

"Oh, no," his daughter said, beaming. "More than a little. Dad, I've never seen your face so smooth. You look ten years younger."

He laughed, greedily. "Ten years? That's more than I deserve."

"Why say that? Go for it, I say." Aurora was breezier than Gretchen, happier in her body. Perhaps because of her prematurely New Age name, bestowed by her young parents in the first flush of the power and joy of engendering life, Aurora took thought concerning her health and her rapport with the physical world: she jogged and did yoga, cooked along macrobiotic principles, and would have turned vegetarian but for her husband, a tradition-minded Kenyan who believed his two sons should be fed meat. She was over fifty, a fact amazing to her father, who more clearly than with his later children remembered her newborn weight in his arms, so perilously light, the tiny person so indisputably alive, that his knees had begun to tremble. For fear he would pa.s.s out and drop her, he had had to sit down on Maureen's firm, narrow bed, there in the base hospital at Fort Bliss, Texas. In those days most young males went into the Army, though there was more peace then than there is now.

Wonderingly, those first two years, as he made the pa.s.sage from Fort Bliss to the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, he had observed the minute daily extensions of Aurora's grip, with her slowly focusing slate-colored eyes and grasping little lavender-tinged fists, on the world. She had crawled and then walked and then talked with a growing vocabulary that slowly shed her dear, irrecoverable toddler solecisms. She had been, he and Maureen had joked, an "industrial-strength" child, rarely ill and never injured, the perfect one to practice on. They had intended to have more, but the Fifties consensus was breaking up around them, as easy contraception and a new hedonism swept in. Tracy loomed on the shimmering beach, and by the time John Kennedy was shot Fleischer had attained, in private, to licking her feet, with their tan insteps and cherry-red toenails.

Aurora must have been touched by radicalism in her crib, because after her parents divorced and she entered p.u.b.erty, she manifested a wide variety of erotic attachments, from other girls to college instructors twice her age to musical drug addicts and dark lovers from the Third World. Out of this shadowy ma.s.s of unsuitable mates Hector Kanogori emerged as a savior: Aurora and he met in a pottery cla.s.s. He was interested in the arts only as a hobby, a holiday from his serious work as an a.s.sistant professor of economics at a state-university campus south of Boston.

Mr. and Mrs. Kanogori travel. When Fleischer, by then in the last days of his marriage to Tracy, and Maureen, herself remarried, had consulted a counselling service about their daughter's heedless, impractical involvements, the therapist, removing the pencil from her Cambridge bun, had asked them what Aurora seemed interested in, and Maureen surprised her former husband by responding without hesitation, "Travel." How do women know these things about one another? Yes, their industrial-strength baby's romances had been modes of travelling, and Hector, every other year, took Aurora to Africa and Asia on his academic investigation of developing economies. Their house in Milton brimmed with masks and beadwork and statuettes, souvenirs of their trips.

All very well, Fleischer thought, for them: one more charming black-white couple easing the West's racial conscience. But what about their two boys? Alfred and Daniel, as their grandfather called them-he had trouble p.r.o.nouncing the Kikuyu names also bestowed upon them, in ceremonies both Christian and pagan-had inherited strands of their mother's blithe st.u.r.diness and their father's prim dignity, but these qualities dangled, their grandfather felt, in air. Called black in America, they lacked, as they entered manhood, a black American's street smarts and defenses. On their trips to Africa they had been teased by other boys as wa-zungu- wa-zungu- whites. In the polite society around them, once the enforced tolerance and diversity of school had been left behind, they had no tribal roots, no matter-of-fact acceptance. Bryant Gumbel had managed it, and Ralph Bunche and Tiger Woods, but how many others? Fleischer blamed himself, with his diseased white skin and reflexive liberalism, for allowing the seeds of daring in Aurora to flourish unchallenged and to bear such tender, imperilled fruit. whites. In the polite society around them, once the enforced tolerance and diversity of school had been left behind, they had no tribal roots, no matter-of-fact acceptance. Bryant Gumbel had managed it, and Ralph Bunche and Tiger Woods, but how many others? Fleischer blamed himself, with his diseased white skin and reflexive liberalism, for allowing the seeds of daring in Aurora to flourish unchallenged and to bear such tender, imperilled fruit.

"The skin remembers," Fleischer's old dermatologist had said more than once, closing his eyes as he visualized the phenomenon. Sunburn your bottom once at a nudist beach, fry your nose on an all-day sail, and the insulted epidermis never forgets. Time's blue light flushes out everything immature, ill-considered, or not considered at all. The world was being populated by his mistakes. It was possible that his adventurous daughter, having seen her mother deserted for a woman who took a better tan, had presented to her father, and to the string of Fleischer ancestors bleached white in Europe's fogs, a gift of melanin fetched straight from mankind's African homeland.

Aurora's boys had been his first grandchildren. Enthusiastically he had tackled the role of grandfather. He had asked to babysit for them, insisting on it, determined "to get to know them," pushing himself in, sending Aurora and Hector out to a movie they hardly wanted to see. He would share milk and cookies with the boys, read them ethnically suitable stories from the household's large collection, and, as their parents were about to come home, demand they go to sleep. They were accustomed to sleeping in a heap, in the African manner, in their parents' bed. As an exasperated concession Fleischer would let them share the lower of their bunk beds. There they would fall asleep like bookends, their bottoms touching, bits of bare skin exposed by skimpy pajamas tugged in their final struggle against sleep-soft brown skin, a smooth latte, half and half.

Last June, having invited the Kanogoris to the Swampscott beach his condo overlooked, he watched the two boys, both taller and broader now than he, strip down to bathing suits worn beneath their jeans and, in the unison of a mutual challenge, race to the still-wintry water and dive in. He was amazed by the sight: the breadth of their backs, the flare of the shoulder blades, the oval muscles of their long legs, the erect strength of their necks' tapered columns and their tensed Achilles tendons, the flash and flicker of their naked pale soles as their feet thrashed in the icy blue water. They were grown men-magnificent, potent. If Fleischer had encountered them in a shadowy alley, he would have been frightened. Yet they were his blood. Daniel wore on his broad nose a spattering of the freckles that Fleischer had worn as a child and that Aurora had inherited.

Between his two glimpses-his mulatto grandsons in pajamas and then in bathing suits-there was almost nothing; he had not gotten to know them. Their heads were full of lore and survival strategies that had nothing to do with him. They were creatures seen at a distance, under the sea's dark horizon. When they came out of the water, shivering, towelling themselves furiously, they seemed to surround Fleischer with chilly salt.w.a.ter spray and the warmth of healthy flesh.

He told them, "Boys, that was heroic. heroic. How could you How could you stand stand it, for more than a second?" it, for more than a second?"

"It was no big deal," Alfred rea.s.sured him. "Once you're in." He was the taller of the two, and the more quiet and solemn.

Daniel's face held a spark of mischief, to go with his freckles. "You should have tried it, Grandpa. It gets your blood moving."

"Next time," Fleischer promised.

But life runs out of next times, at least for non-Hindus. Today, as her father visited, Aurora's cheerful manner hid a sorrow: her boys were gone, Alfred a soph.o.m.ore at the University of Arizona and Daniel a senior at Deerfield. "How are they doing?" Fleischer asked her.

"Well enough, but not well enough for Hector. I tell him, 'You were exceptional. Always first in your cla.s.s at mission school, scholarships abroad-all that. I wasn't. Blame me,' I tell him."

"You had another agenda."

This made her laugh; she saw through this remark to the image her father retained of her, of a girl out of control. Her laugh was cut in half as she turned her head aside. Like her mother and father, she had turned gray early. She is over fifty, She is over fifty, Fleischer thought. Fleischer thought. She knows her life has been mostly lived. She knows her life has been mostly lived.

Fathering children, Fleischer had never pictured their gray hairs or their own children. He had just selfishly wanted to create little beings who would look up to him, despite his bad skin, and brighten his life with their sunny innocence. But he had abandoned them all, with their mothers, when their innocence gave out. And now each had created another generation, extending rootlets into the world's hard substance. He could not imagine what his grandchildren would do in the world, how they would earn their keep. They were immature cells, centers of potential pain.

Outage

THE JOLLY WEATHERPERSONS on television, always eager for ratings-boosting disasters, had predicted a fierce autumn storm for New England, with driving rain and high winds. Evan Morris, who worked at home while his wife, Camilla, managed a boutique on Boston's Newbury Street, glanced out of his windows now and then at the swaying trees-oaks still tenacious of their rusty leaves, maples letting go in gusts of gold and red-but was unimpressed by the hyped news event. Rain came down heavily a half-hour at a time, then pulled back into a silvery sky of fast-moving, fuzzy-bottomed clouds. The worst seemed to be over when, in mid-afternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly a.s.sembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence. A beam creaked. A loose shutter banged. The drip from a plugged gutter tapped heavily, like a bully nagging for attention, on the wooden cover of a cellar-window well. on television, always eager for ratings-boosting disasters, had predicted a fierce autumn storm for New England, with driving rain and high winds. Evan Morris, who worked at home while his wife, Camilla, managed a boutique on Boston's Newbury Street, glanced out of his windows now and then at the swaying trees-oaks still tenacious of their rusty leaves, maples letting go in gusts of gold and red-but was unimpressed by the hyped news event. Rain came down heavily a half-hour at a time, then pulled back into a silvery sky of fast-moving, fuzzy-bottomed clouds. The worst seemed to be over when, in mid-afternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly a.s.sembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence. A beam creaked. A loose shutter banged. The drip from a plugged gutter tapped heavily, like a bully nagging for attention, on the wooden cover of a cellar-window well.

The lines bringing the Morrises' house electricity and telephone service and cable television came up, on three poles, through two acres of woods. Evan stepped outside in the storm's lull, in the strangely luminous air, to see if he could spot any branches fallen on his lines. He saw none, and no lit windows in the nearest house, barely visible through the woods whose leaves in summer hid it entirely. The tops of the tallest trees were heaving in a wind he barely felt. A spatter of thick cold drops sent him back into the house, where drifts of shadow were sifting into the corners and the furnace ticked in the bas.e.m.e.nt as its metal cooled. Without electricity, what was there to do?

He opened the refrigerator and was surprised by its failure to greet him with a welcoming inner light. The fireplace in the den emitted a sour scent of damp wood ash. Wind whistled in crevices he had not known existed, under the eaves and at the edges of the storm windows. He felt impotent, and amused by his impotence, in this emergency. He remembered some letters he had planned to mail at the post office in his suburb's little downtown, and a check he had intended to deposit at the bank. So he did have something to do: he collected these pieces of paper, and put on a tan water-resistant zippered jacket and a Red Sox cap. The burglar alarm by the front door was peeping and blinking, softly, as if to itself. Evan punched the reset b.u.t.ton; the device fell silent, and he went out the door.

It seemed eerie that his car started as usual. Wet leaves were plastered over the driveway and the narrow macadam roads of this development; the neighborhood had been built all at once, twenty years ago, on the land of an unprofitable farm. He drove cautiously, especially around the duck pond, beside a vanished barn, where, in a snowstorm ten years ago, a teen-ager had slid through a rail fence and sunk his parents' Mercedes up to its hubcaps. The downtown-two churches, a drugstore, a Dunkin' Donuts, a pizza shop, a mostly Italian restaurant, two beauty parlors, a dress shop, a bridal shop, a few more stores that came and went in the same chronically vacated premises, an insurance agent and a lawyer on the floor above a realty office, a dentist, a bank branch, and a post office-was without electricity but busier than usual, its sidewalk full of pedestrians in this gleaming gray lull.

Evan saw two young women embracing, before they began to converse as if renewing a long-neglected acquaintance. People stood talking, discussing their fate in small groups. Shop windows usually bright were dark, and it occurred to him that, of course, people had been flushed onto the sidewalk by the outage. The health-food store, its crammed shelves of bagged nuts and bottled vitamins and refrigerated tofu sandwiches, and the fruit store, its rival in healthy nutrition across the street, were both caves of forbidding darkness behind their display windows.

But it did not occur to him that the bank, usually so receptive to his deposits, would have a taped notice on its gla.s.s doors declaring the location of the nearest other branch, and that, although he could see the tellers chatting on the padded bench where applicants for mortgages and perpetrators of overdrafts customarily languished, he could no more access his money than he could have laid hands on the fish in an aquarium. The bank manager, a bustling small woman in a severe suit, was actually patrolling the sidewalk; she told Evan breathlessly, "I'm so sorry, Mr. Morris. Our ATM, alarms, everything is down. I was just checking to see if the hardware store had any power."

"Myra, I think we're all in the same boat," Evan rea.s.sured her; yet he understood her incredulity. He himself did not expect that the little post office, though open to box users and seekers of the inside mail slots, would be also closed to transactions; everything had been computerized by a United States Postal Service zealous to modernize, and now not a single letter could be weighed or a single stamp sold, even had there been enough light to see. The afternoon was darkening. In danger of completing no errands at all, he tested the door of the health-food store. The latch released, and he heard a giggle in the shadows. "Are you open?" he called.

"To you, sure," answered the voice of the young proprietress, curly-haired, perpetually tan Olivia. Evan groped toward the back, where a single squat perfumed candle illuminated bins of little plastic bags; they shimmered with blobby reflections. He brought to the counter a bag of what he hoped were unsalted but roasted cashews. "The register's out. All contributions accepted," Olivia joked, and made change out of her own purse for what he, holding it close to his eyes, verified was a five-dollar bill.

The transaction had felt flirtatious to him, and the atmosphere of the downtown, beneath its drooping festoon of useless cables, seemed festive. Automobiles paraded past with their burning headlights. The ominous thickening in the air stirred the pedestrians to take shelter again. There was a br.i.m.m.i.n.g, an overflow of good nature, and a transparency: something occluding had been removed, baring neglected possibilities. Hurrying back into the shelter of his car, Evan laughed with an irrational pleasure.

Fresh drops speckled his windshield as he turned into his neighborhood, through a break in the stone wall that had once marked the bounds of the farm. PRIVATE W WAY, a painted sign said. A woman in white-a shiny vinyl raincoat and swollen-looking white running shoes-was walking in the middle of the narrow road. With fluttering gestures she motioned him to stop. He recognized a newish neighbor, a wispy blonde who had moved a few years ago, with her husband and two growing boys, into a house invisible from the Morrises'. They only met a few times a year, at c.o.c.ktail parties or zoning-appeals-board hearings. She looked like a ghost, beckoning him. He braked, and lowered the car window. "Oh, Evan, Evan," she said with breathy relief. "It's you. What's hap happening?" she asked. "All my electricity went out, even the telephones."

"Mine, too," he said, to rea.s.sure her. "Everybody's. A tree must have fallen on a power line somewhere, in this wind. It happens, Lynne." He was pleased to have fished her name up from his memory: Lynne Willard.

She came close enough to his open window for him to see that she was actually trembling, her lips groping like those of a child near tears. Her eyes stared above his car roof as if scanning the treetops for rescue. She brought her eyes down to his face and shakily explained, "w.i.l.l.y's away. In Chicago, all week. I'm up there all alone, now the boys are both off to boarding school. I didn't know what I should do, so I put on my sneakers and set off walking."

Evan remembered those boys as noisy and sly, waiting in their little blazers for the day-school bus at the end of the road, just outside the tumbled-down fieldstone wall. If they were now old enough for boarding school, then this woman was not as young as she seemed. Her face, narrowed by a knotted head scarf, was pale, except for the tip of her nose, which was pink like a rabbit's. Her eyelids also were pink; they looked rubbed, and her eyes watered. He wondered if she was a daytime tippler. "I like your hat," she said, to fill the lengthening silence. "Are you a fan?"

"No more than normal."

"They won the World Series."

"That is true. Get in the car, Lynne," he said, his powers of rea.s.surance deepening. "I'll drive you home. There's nothing downtown. n.o.body knows how long the outage will be. Even the bank and post office didn't know. The only thing open was the health-food store."

"I was taking a walk," she said, as if this hadn't been quite established. "I can keep going."

"Don't you notice? The rain is starting up again. The skies are about to let loose."

Blinking, pressing her lips together to suppress their tremor-the lower had a trick of twitching sideways-she walked around in front of his headlights. He leaned across the car seats to tug at the door handle and push open the pa.s.senger door for her, as if she couldn't do it for herself. Sliding in, with a slither of white vinyl, she confessed, "There was a beeping in the house I had to get away from. w.i.l.l.y's not even in Boston, where I could call him."

"I think that's your burglar alarm," Evan told her. "Or some other alarm that doesn't like losing current. I'll come inside, if I may, and look at the problem."

She had brought a pleasant smell with her into the car, a smell from his childhood-cough drops or licorice. "You may," she said, settling back on his leather car seat. "I got so afraid," she went on, with a wry twist to her mouth, as if to laugh at herself, or at the memory of a long-ago self.

He had never been to the Willards' place. Their driveway was fringed with more elaborate plantings than the Morrises'-gnarly little azaleas, already bare of leaf, and euonymus still blaring forth that surreal autumnal magenta. Their parking area was covered in larger, whiter stones than the brown half-inch pebbles that Camilla had insisted on despite their tendency (which Evan had pointed out) to scatter into the lawn during winter snowplowing. But the basic house, a good-sized clapboarded neo-colonial twenty years old, with a gratuitous swath of first-floor brick facade, looked much like his. Lynne hadn't locked the front door, just walked out in her panic. Trailing behind her, Evan was surprised by the lithe swiftness with which she climbed the steps of the flagstone porch and let herself back in, holding the storm door for him as she opened the other.

Inside, the beeping was distinct and insistent, but not the urgent, ever-louder bleating of alarm mode. He turned the wrong way at first; the floor plan of this house was different from his, with the family room on the left instead of the right, and the kitchen beyond it, not beside it. The furnishings, though, looked much the same-the modern taste of twenty years ago, boxy and stuffed, bare wood and monochrome wool, coffee tables of thick gla.s.s on cruciform legs of stainless steel, promiscuously mixed with Orientals and family antiques. These possessions looked slightly smarter and less tired than those in his home; but Evan tended to glamorize what other people had.

"Over here," Lynne said, "next to the closet"-the very front-hall closet in which she was hanging up her raincoat of white vinyl. The snug knit gray dress she wore beneath it looked to him as if she had come from a ladies' luncheon that noon. Using her toes, she pried off her bulky sneakers without bothering to unlace them-perhaps to avoid bending over, a.s.s up, beneath his eyes-and kicked them onto the closet floor.

"Yes," he said, moving to the panel in stocking feet. "It's just like mine." He lifted his hand to touch it, then took thought to ask, "May I?"

"Help yourself," she said. Her voice, in her own house, had become almost slangy, shedding its quaver. "Be my guest."

He pushed the little rectangular b.u.t.ton labelled Reset. The beeping stopped, sharply. Coming close up behind him, she marvelled. "That's all it takes?"

"Apparently," he said. "That tells it the current shut-off wasn't a home invasion. Not that I'm much of a hand with technology."

She giggled in obscure delight. What he had smelled in the car, he realized, had had alcohol in it, mixed with a licorice scent from long ago. "w.i.l.l.y's such a p.r.i.c.k," she told Evan. "He knows all this stuff but never shares it. Tell me," Lynne said, "as a man. Do you think he really really has to spend all this time in Chicago?" has to spend all this time in Chicago?"

Cautiously, he offered, "Business can be very demanding. At a certain level men-and women in business, too, of course-have to look each other in the eye. I used to be on planes all the time and have meetings and all that myself, but I found working at home was more efficient. With all this electronic communication everywhere there's really no need to get out that much. But, then, I don't know Will-Mr. Willard's business." His words, nervously excessive, seemed to have an echo in the unfamiliar house-or, rather, felt absorbed by its partial strangeness, the sounds falling into the many little differences between this house and his own. The rain, as he had foretold, had returned, whispering and drumming outside, and bringing inside a deeper shade of afternoon. The wind whipped bursts of wet pellets across the windows.

"Me, neither. Could I offer you a drink?" this woman asked, nervous herself. She added with another giggle, "Since you've got gotten out." She gestured toward her becalmed kitchen. "I can't offer you coffee."

"What have you you been drinking?" Evan asked her. been drinking?" Evan asked her.