I nuzzled her hand, feeling the coldness. "Why am I here, Kate?" I asked. "Did you plan this?"

She pulled away. "Plan what?"

"You kidnapped me, didn't you?" I threw out my arms. "Well here I am. You wanted me that bad, why didn't you just say so?"

She drummed her fingertips against her face. "Horse," she said, and looked at the ground. "Horse, I-"

"Blessed Katherine, please tell us, when will be the leave-taking?" The voice came from the last of the construction sites. A fat man in blue overalls three sizes too small for him climbed out from under a wooden porch. His voice was effeminate.

Kate pulled away. "Soon," she called out, on tiptoe, as though willing him not to come near.

"We are all of us so impatient to go." The man waddled toward us. His face held the cherubic innocence of a child. He waved a chubby hand at the houses. "This building activity. It grows tiresome."

"You're paying what, two grand a week to be here, and you're in a hurry to leave?" I asked.

He smiled the smile of an idiot. Or was it a saint? "What does money matter at a time like this?" He clutched his chest with both hands, inclined his double chins to the heavens. "So close are we to bliss!"

"Patience, Blessed Jonathan." Kate squeezed his upper arm. I gritted my teeth. Was this her new lover? Not really her type. If I sucker-punched him, could I take him? And what was up with this "blessed" c.r.a.p, anyway?

"What says the Blessed Victor?" he asked, bending over at the waist. "Have we earned our robes?"

Kate lowered her voice. "He is almost ready. You may tell the others."

The man bounced on tiptoe and clapped his hands together. "Yippee!"

"Will Pitt be leaving with you too?" I asked.

The man beamed. "I should certainly hope so!"

"You know Pitt?"

"Sure." His lips parted. Yellow teeth gleamed dully inside his shiny face. "The Blessed Pitt came to us about a month ago. Didn't know a thing at first. But he soon learned."

"What did he learn?" That was the rub.

A chuckle. "What all of us must learn."

I made a show of looking around. "Where is he now?"

"He has gone."

"Gone where?"

"Where all of us will soon be going." The man addressed Kate. "This one," he said, and jerked his head at me, "he is a new recruit then?"

"Yes." She answered for me. "I have much to explain to him."

"Such happiness! Such joy!" He embraced me. "Oh welcome, welcome, welcome!"

I pulled away. He stank of incense and patchouli oil.

Kate tugged at my elbow. "Dinnertime soon. Why don't you take some sacred sustenance?"

His tongue wagged like a puppy dog. "I shall savor every bite."

I stared at his retreating figure. "'Sacred sustenance'? 'The Blessed Katherine'?"

She lowered her eyes. "It is our form of address."

"Kate, what the f.u.c.k is going on here?"

"I don't know what you mean," she said quietly.

"Who are these people? What is with all of the guns? What are you doing here? And where is Pitt?"

She didn't look at me. "Maybe I should let the Blessed Victor explain."

"And who the f.u.c.k is Victor?"

"Victor," she said, and paused, a thin smile on her lips, eyes lifted once again to the moonlit sky. "Victor is a man."

"I see," I said. "At least we know he's not a G.o.d."

Kate pulled again on my elbow. "He wants to meet you."

I pitched my voice high in a sci-fi monotone. "Take me to your leader."

She laughed, leaned into me. "You'll see."

We walked along, her arm through mine, huddled close against the chill. That old familiar happiness crept in. I piled high the barbed wire, mounted the machine guns, but like a chlorine gas attack it swept across the trenches and descended into my lungs, poisoning my soul with delirium.

I turned to face her. "Kate?"

"Yes?"

"Do you believe in better late than never?"

She smoothed the hair out of my eyes. "With all my heart."

"Because I have to say," and I gestured at the barren beach, the badly built houses, the lake placid and freezing, "I don't see what this is doing for you."

She laid a hand on my chest. "Let the Blessed Victor explain. It will all make sense."

I put my arm around her waist. She left it there.

"Alright," I said.

We came to the cave again. At its mouth, to one side, a small generator hummed and throbbed, burping diesel fumes. The monks didn't move, shotguns in their laps. We walked between them, ducked our heads and stepped inside the cave. A thick orange extension cord ran from the generator into the darkness. We shuffled ahead, bent at the waist.

Ten meters into the cave the tunnel widened, and we stood up straight. At regular intervals the extension cord linked to another and branched off, and a caged construction lamp dangled from a hook on the wall. The cave was the size of a cathedral. Stalact.i.tes like organ pipes hung from the roof. To one side, monks in orange and scarlet sat cross-legged in a semi-circle, their focus a stack of wooden crates. A monk in an elaborate scarlet headdress stalked the shadows, a small whip in the crook of his arm.

"The f.u.c.k is this place, Kate?" I said. "You gone and joined a cult?"

She laughed. "They will call us that, I'm sure. But when they see what we've accomplished, it won't matter what they think."

"What have you accomplished?"

But she refused to say. One more time she slid her arm through mine. The orange extension cord continued to the center of the cave. It ended at a small wooden desk, where a man in blue jeans and a worn tweed jacket sat typing on a laptop.

Construction lamps on wooden posts cast light on the man's face. He was early fifties. A gray combover draped itself like a dead squirrel from one ear to the other. His head was enormous, out of all proportion to his body. Despite the cold in the cave, he wore no hat. Perhaps they didn't make hats that size.

"Two percent," he muttered to himself in a childish sing-song falsetto. He bit a thumbnail. "Two percent, two percent."

"Two percent of what?" I asked. "You a dairy farmer?" My voice echoed in the cave.

"Chance of failure." He sat back in his chair and looked up. He was slight of build. Looked underfed. "Kate, my dear. Please." His accent was Russian. "New recruits go over there."

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, resumed his frantic typing.

Red Cap knelt on the floor near the wall. He clutched an armful of orange and scarlet to his chest. His cap lay upturned on the floor. A monk shaved what remained of his hair with a straight-edge razor.

"In the next life. What will you be?" intoned a second monk.

"A plant, maybe," Red Cap said excitedly. "Krill."

"Victor," Kate said.

She draped an arm around the Russian combover dude's shoulder, a casual act of intimacy that made me gasp for air.

He frowned at his computer screen. "What is it?"

"This is Horace."

"And who might Horace be?"

I slapped the laptop shut on his fingers. "Horse. The friend of Pitt's? Kate's husband?" I laid emphasis on the final word.

Victor pushed back his chair with a screech, bounded to his feet, hair bobbing on his balloon-like head, hands swaying as he breathed, a high-alt.i.tude, cave-dwelling jack-in-the-box.

"Horse! Of course!" He turned to Kate. "Why did you not say so?" To me. "We have much to thank you for!"

His hand was fatty despite his leanness, the handshake like squeezing a sponge.

"For what?"

"For what?" He clapped his other hand on mine, sandwiching my knuckles between two soggy palms. "For sending Pitt our way!"

I pulled my hand free, wiped it on my trousers. "The h.e.l.l is that supposed to mean?"

"What do I mean?" He waved his hands out wide, a marionette on a string. "Without him, none of this could be!"

Kate pulled a folded, dirty postcard from inside her robes. "My postcard. The one I sent you?"

I took the card. On the front, a picture of a sunset from Isla del Sol, the sun setting behind the Peruvian Andes. I flipped it over. The sight of her neat block capitals made me sit on the edge of Victor's desk. It was dated nine months ago. Couple months after what happened in La Paz. The ink was stained with drops of blood and warped by beer, but I could still read what she had written to me then: My Horace-Horse, I found a job. Volunteer work. Yeah, I know. But it keeps me busy. The mind busy. Tire out the body, exhaust the mind, the memories aren't so bad. It's a kind of drug, I guess. Don't know how long I'll need it for. Maybe forever.

You and me...we're self-destructives. There can be no forgiveness, what we did. Nothing we can do will change the facts. But every day I find redemption in my sweat. A way to end the guilt. Working for a better world. A world that I deserve. A world that we deserve.

You and me both.

Please come.

Yours (if you want me) Kate She'd scribbled a cell phone number below her name.

How many months I'd kept that postcard in my pocket, taking it out in dimly lit bars, struggling to read a message I'd already memorized, laying it down in puddles of beer, never quite able to abandon it, never quite able to call her, a living reminder of my sin.

Yours. If you want me.

And then Pitt had plucked it from my hands in a BDSM strip club slash brothel.

"Redemption?" he asked me later in the cab. "What the h.e.l.l is that?"

I slouched back into the c.u.m-stained interior. "If you don't know, I can't explain it to you."

"'A world that we deserve,'" he read. "What do you think she means by that?"

I shook my head drunkenly. "No idea."

He flicked the postcard with a fingernail. Pointed to the phone number. "You gonna call her or what?"

"Or what. Turn here, driver." I knew a cheaper brothel two streets over. The wh.o.r.es were uglier there.

"Last chance, man," he'd said. "Sure you don't want to keep this?"

"No," I said. "I don't." I meant it.

I looked up from the postcard. Kate and Victor watched me in silence. The straight-edge blade rasped against Red Cap's skull. The meditating monks released a simultaneous mantra, an om that lingered in the cavernous s.p.a.ce, reflecting off the many-colored walls, until it splintered against the rocks overhead and no sound remained but white noise.

"Pitt called you," I said.

"Yes." She bit her lip.

"He came here."

"Yes."

"And he believes in all this Gaia c.r.a.p?"

Victor beamed. "Absolutely! That's why he had you kidnapped!"