Clive hears this, and he thinks about it, but I can't help him. He is young and he is hearing a terrible truth. That life is about painful realization. It's about parties for a long time, and then someone has to pick up the tab. He sees the tab but he can't reach for it yet. Seeing the future is so much more difficult than not seeing it. That's what Isaac Newton would say. Maybe it's even what Hallie would say. Maybe it's what I would say if I weren't glimpsing something more real.

"I'm sorry about that," Clive tells me. "I'm sorry for you."

"Don't," I say. "Don't do that to me."

"Don't what? Feel badly for you?"

"Bad," I snap. "You feel bad, not badly. If you feel badly, it means you have no nerve endings in your fingers."

He just stares at me. I realize two things: that I have veered off into parts unknown, and that I have rejected an honest emotion. It makes me feel bad. Bad, not badly.

I stub out my cigarette and kneel down in front of him. I take his hands into mine. He avoids looking at me. I have shamed him. I don't know why I do that to people.

"I'm sorry," I say. "But you can't go around making people into victims. You can't pity people. Especially if you love them."

He lifts his eyes to mine. "Why?"

"Because the goal is to elevate the people you love. You know, make them better. Make them strong. Expect things from them."

While he is thinking about this, I feel my mind racing back, again, to Hallie. I expected things from her. And I drove her away. I turned her into something monstrous. I devalued her with my expectations. I negated her. I did that.

But I couldn't have done that. I wanted everything for her. I wanted to help.

The thing I didn't see back then is that people can be destroyed by goodness. Damage can be done by hope. If people aren't ready for hope, it's a cruel trick to put it on their doorstep. Like a bag of s.h.i.t on fire. They stomp it out because they don't know what else to do.

I don't know how to say this to Clive, and I am glad. Glad that I can't say it, glad that he wouldn't understand it. Glad that our relationship is so off balance that I cannot disrupt it any further. All I can do is be in it.

He sighs and rubs his eyes, the way a kid does when he is past the point of exhaustion. He blows the breath out of his lips, and they drum together as if he's trying to make bubbles or create a new sound.

He says, "I don't know, Pearl. I feel kind of lost sometimes."

"Yeah," I say.

"Like, I can close my eyes and see my whole future coming together. I can see me in a band or writing songs and recording them in a studio. At the same time, I see me being this totally conventional guy, with a wife and kids and dogs and stuff. They're both me, but in a way, neither one of them is me. It's just a guy I'm imagining."

He stops talking and stares. I know better than to speak.

Then he says, "Sometimes I can't see my future at all. Like it's a complete blank. I try to picture it, but nothing comes."

I nod. He waits. There is nothing to say.

"Do you ever think about the future?" he finally asks.

"Not much," I answer honestly.

"Why?"

"Because I don't believe in the future."

"Oh, right," he says, with a slight eye roll. "There is only now. Don't get Zen on me."

"But there is only now. It's not a Zen thing. It's something I believe. It's more like physics."

"Tell me," he says.

"Well, some scientists believe that everything is happening at the same time. The past, the present, and the future. It's all the same thing. It's one big cosmic soup. It's a kind of perpetual motion. Do you understand?"

He shakes his head, but I keep talking.

"It's the idea that there is no linear time at all. It's all just a perpetual state of now. Like billions of TV screens with the same program on, but at different times. Past and present both affecting each other, but the moment itself never changes. It just is. And there is nothing else."

"There's nothing else," he says slowly, "because we could get hit by a truck tomorrow."

"Well, yes, but we could also never have been born. According to this theory."

"So, like, nothing is real?"

"Nothing is real, and nothing is not real. Things just are. That's why you try to be in the moment. Because you might as well be somewhere. And all evidence seems to point to the fact that being here, now, is where all the good stuff happens."

He nods and stares at my hands, which are still holding his.

He says, "Like when you're playing a riff, and you're not worried about finishing it. You're just in it."

"Right."

He takes one of my hands to his lips and kisses it. Something like an electric current shoots through me. There is a feeling in it, and the feeling makes me want to forgive everyone and forget everything. I am reminded that I am alive, and that might be enough of a thing to be.

He says, "Also, this could all be a dream."

I smile. "Well, like Bob Dylan said."

His face draws a blank. He doesn't know much about Bob Dylan. That's okay, too.

"What did he say?" he asks.

"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

LATER WHEN WE are in bed, huddled together against the cold (as if it were possible to do anything in that bed except huddle), I let my eyes roam across the ceiling and I think of Lance and his voices. The whole exchange seems like something I imagined and willed into existence. He is the first student who has ever talked to me about the voices. Hallie hinted at a similar kind of intuition, but I drew my own conclusions about her. I knew she could hear the music in her head. I knew she didn't have to read it. But that was another thing altogether.

It is true that I have heard similar voices in my life. As Lance said, it isn't exactly a human voice, and it isn't even what we think of as language. It is more like energy, or some kind of intelligence, offering suggestions. Then I translate that intelligence into language that I can understand. The best way to describe it is that it is like a song, but that is misleading, too, because we think of songs as things that already exist, created by people. But where do songs come from in the first place? A tune is not a thing you can construct; it is a thing you deconstruct by putting it into notation, or by rendering it on an instrument. It loses something in the translation. It starts out divine, and as soon as a person touches it, interprets it, it becomes something else. It is not so much despoiled as transfigured into something both human and divine. Like Jesus. Perfectly human and perfectly divine.

I am starting to understand the meaning of this, as I lie very still next to my twenty-eight-year-old lover, whose soft breathing sounds like a primitive kind of music. Music is everywhere. He breathes in a constant, steady rhythm, as it makes sense for a ba.s.s player to do. And maybe that is where rhythm comes from, I think. Our earliest understanding of rhythm. The sound of our own breath, the beating of our own hearts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Thanks to the people who helped me find the music: Dave Marsh, Howard Yearwood, Michael Guidry, Jonathan Grossman, Laurie Gunning Grossman, Jeffrey Allen, Adam Levine, and all the Enablers. Thanks to the people who wouldn't let me stop: my editor, Chuck Adams, and my agent, Cynthia Manson. Finally, thanks to the people who put up with me for free: Karen, Faith, Lyla and Sharon, Craig and Jen, Kevin, and Troy.

Also by Barbara Hall.

Adult Fiction.

A BETTER PLACE.

CLOSE TO HOME.

A SUMMONS TO NEW ORLEANS.

Young Adult Fiction

SKEEBALL AND THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE.

DIXIE STORMS.

FOOL'S HILL

THE HOUSE ACROSS THE COVE.

THE NOAH CONFESSIONS.