Benjamin woke with someone beside him. His cheek was pressed against the window, where rain struck and beaded. It had been the storm that woke him, not his new companion. A brighter flash, a sharper, heavier thunderclap—they must have moved nearer the heart of this weather.

The woman beside him was not asleep, but she sat reclined, feet up, face tilted towards the luggage racks. Benjamin could see by the aisle lights that her hair was red

and thin. Long, held behind her ears by two braids. She’d boarded the train somewhere in the darkness of Wisconsin or Minnesota—where were they now?—and she was soaking wet. Staring at the ceiling, making no move to wipe her face.

“We passed right over the spot,” she said. For a moment Benjamin assumed he must have missed an earpiece of some kind. So many people looked as though they were talking to no one, these days. Then she tilted her head just slightly, and he saw that she was looking at him.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“No need,” she replied, and repeated, “We passed right over the spot.” She shuddered, either from the chill of the cold air on her wet skin, or from what she’d said. There was a current of relish in the motion.

“Huh,” Benjamin said. He’d met cranks on the train before. “Cool. I’m

Benjamin.”

“I’m Grace,” the woman said. A smile tightened the already tense skin of her

face. “I wondered if I would feel something, and I did. He’s still there. I

don’t know why he doesn’t move on.”The way she said “he” made Benjamin shiver in turn. It was so clear, somehow, that she was not talking about a human being. But what, then? Well, what’s supposed to move on but doesn’t? He was hooked. Grace didn’t go on, so he said, gently, “Who is he? A ghost?”

“He was run over a month ago,” she said. “Just outside of Red Wing. He was walking on the tracks.” Her eyes were closed, but she opened them again now. “He was reading a Bible when he died. I saw it. The police show me a lot of things.”

It was such a weird thing to say that Benjamin couldn’t think of a response. Grace was looking at him out of the corner of one eye. She said, “I’m going to read now. I’m still shaken up.”

“Sounds good,” Benjamin said. He leaned his cheek against the window again. He tried to see beyond the blue opacity of his own reflection and the pale blur of Grace’s. Light flashed regularly against the rails. Below, an embankment fell away into mist, punctured occasionally by the lines of a fence or the bold face of a sign too quickly gone to read. Benjamin’s gaze kept shifting focus, the movements that were inside the window becoming confused with those outside as he dozed. One moment, he almost woke with

the vision of something white flying towards him from the blackness—but it was only the reflection of Grace’s face and hands, as she reached up between them to turn on her reading light.

◆

When he woke next, it was light, and the window was hot against his cheek. He sat up straight. Beside him, Grace was reading. The reading light, still on, gave her face a faint extra glow. She was mostly dry now. Benjamin saw that she was older than he’dthought, maybe in her forties. She wore loose layers of black, purple, and emerald green. Rings on her fingers, and a large amethyst on a chain around her neck. Old lady style, but a New Age sort of old lady—one who would have crystals in her living room.

The book she was reading was an old paperback. She’d bent it in half around the spine so she could hold it in one hand.

“What are you reading?” Benjamin asked.

“The Woman in White,” Grace said. She closed the book, bending it back and forth to correct the curve she’d made. Revealed, the cover showed a figure cloaked in pale, voluminous fabric, standing in moonlight. “It’s eight,” she said. “They’re serving breakfast. I don’t know if you’re a breakfast eater.”

She bent, reaching into the large tote bag at her feet and rising with a plastic sack. It held four glossy, fat ovals—hard boiled eggs, ready peeled. Grace took one out and turned it in her fingers, speculatively.

“I have a funny feeling about today,” she said, and bit into the narrow end of the egg.

◆

In the dining car, Benjamin waited to be noticed and seated by the waiter, who was flashing back and forth. The car smelled like salted butter. Families and strangers sat uncomfortably in booths together, spilling syrup.

“Dining in?” the waiter asked Benjamin, as if it were a joke. He led the way to a table piled with magazines on one end. Two people sat there already. An old woman was wiping her mouth as Benjamin sat in the booth beside her. She spiked a pineapple chunk on her fork and regarded it as if it dismayed her, then set it down.

“I hate to waste food,” she told Benjamin and her other companion. “Do either of you like pineapple?”

“I’ll take it off your hands,” Benjamin said. The man across from him laughed. “Hungry?” he said.

Benjamin ducked his head, playing bashful. The man was tall and handsome, very dark in a white denim jacket, with two wings of hair just beginning to gray above his temples. He held Benjamin’s gaze, the smile staying.

“Thank you so much,” the old woman was saying, nudging her plate towards

Benjamin. “Will you have the grapes as well? I don’t care for these garnishes they do.” Benjamin nodded and smiled, aware that he was keeping his “best side” stiffly

turned towards the man across the table. Compulsive, anxious flirting.

“Ansel and I have introduced ourselves already,” the old woman said. “I’m Mary Ellen Crandall, and this is Ansel—James? Ansel James. He has one of those names you could switch backwards and it would make more sense.”

“I’m Benjamin,” said Benjamin, nodding more than necessary.

“And have you decided?” the waiter asked, suddenly at his shoulder. His hands were full of shiny, plump packets of ketchup.

“Oh,” Benjamin said, “yes, how about the French toast?”

“French toast,” the waiter repeated. “French toast, French toast—oh, you coach or sleeper?”

“Coach.”

Mary Ellen Crandall grinned, reaching across the table to slap Ansel’s denim forearm.

“I’m not coach,” she said, “and he’s not coach. Traveling in style.”“You shouldn’t tease people that way, Mary Ellen,” Ansel said gravely. “Not everyone has a husband in the Mafia to arrange things.”

Mary Ellen slapped his arm again.

“I have to get out of this dining car,” she said, “before you humiliate me to

death.” She nudged Benjamin and added, “Let me out, young man. I’m sorry to miss your company, but I can’t stick around with that man here.”

“Watch out,” Ansel said in a loud whisper as Benjamin rose to let Mary Ellen pass. “She’s a cougar, Benjamin.”

“Oh, I’ll cougar you, Mr. Ansel James or James Ansel,” the old woman said, raising her purse above her head as she turned to go. “I know where you live.”

“I live,” Ansel said, once she had passed out through the shaking door of the coach, “in E Twelve. For the next however-long-this-takes.”

The information seemed too straightforward to be a come-on. Benjamin blushed anyway. The waiter was at his side, thrusting a slab of toast his way.

“And are you finished, sir?” he added, looking at the last piece of sausage on Ansel’s plate. He wanted him out, that was clear. Ansel seemed to enjoy taking his time answering. He pushed the sausage end around his plate, making a humming sound. Eventually, he looked back up at the waiter.

“No,” he said, “you know, I think I’ll have another cup of coffee.”

◆

The train stopped as Benjamin walked back from the dining car. A strange re- balancing, like walking in air after walking in water—he stumbled a few paces, faster than he meant. They were in North Dakota. The station roof outside looked hot, red, anddry, as if it had never rained. There were a few people moving around on the brick platform. A Mennonite family, or Amish? Benjamin paused to admire the young father, all in blue, a baby in his arms. His blond hair was cut in a single, straight, dramatic line, and curved up where it met his jaw. Prince Valiant, almost. Someone handed him a tin box. He shifted the baby to one arm to take it, frowning. A sighing sound built through the train and it hauled itself forward by what felt like an inch. Then it settled. Benjamin could hear the conductor outside, calling.

Grace had taken his seat, he saw, when he reached their row. She was asleep. Knees tucked up into her, body forced sideways into the seat back. He was relieved, for some reason, to see her that way. He sat carefully, trying not to wake her.

“You want it back?” she said a moment later, surprising him away from his phone. Ninety-some unread messages from Jody waited there, thirty-some missed calls.

“No, no,” he said. “You go ahead and sleep.”

She settled back, nodding thanks. A few minutes passed before she spoke again. “You’ll think I’m nuts,” she said, “but.”

Benjamin waited, torn between curiosity and the uncomfortable feeling of being drawn into prolonged discourse with this stranger, the obligation to listen and form intelligent responses. He could feel Grace looking at him. He kept his eyes on the seat back in front of him. Forced casual. Appropriate engagement levels. Then she said, sharply, “Wait,” and he had to look at her. Her eyes were wide open, regarding him. The palest blue. She shook her head then. She relaxed, and her lids let down slightly—not a full blink. Maybe she never blinked.

“No,” she said. “You’re much too young.”Too young for what? “I am?” he said.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “It was silly of me to think of it. But still. I’m concerned. Of course you remember who I told you about?”

“The man,” Benjamin said. He was, he felt, on the verge of understanding. Grace nodded, slowly, several times.

“He’s here,” she said. “It’s very interesting. If not concerning.” She released her legs, stretching them, pointing her feet in black, thin-soled slippers. Then she rose. “Have your seat back. I’m going to ramble.”

Benjamin put his cheek against the window, above the blurry patch where Grace’s face had rested. He took out his phone and, almost involuntarily, opened the last message from Jody. Ninety-six messages, all clear now, ready to be sifted.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” the last one read. “Do you know how much you’re hurting me? This is worse than anything you did before. Don’t leave me. Please. I can stand anything else. You can do whatever you want. Just please don’t leave.”

Benjamin scrolled backwards. Disbelief, anger, fear. At one point there was a video: the fuzzy still showed Jody’s hands on a dark surface. He didn’t play it. He silenced his phone and put it in his pocket.

Ahead of him, two children were complaining about one another to a silent adult. “He punches more,” one said.

“He never cuts his nails, so he scratches hard.”

◆

Montana came, and stayed all day. The train ran along a tan hillside that dipped and rose, blooming in patches with strewn junk—old tires, machine guts, whole cars tipped on their sides. Rain came and went. They were traveling under a patchy sky: some clouds open, some holding onto their burden of water. Grace came and went, too. She ate mandarin oranges, offering segments to Benjamin. She finished her book, sighed, and screwed her eyes shut.

“I think I’ll go back to the observation car,” she told Benjamin. “It’s good to be where you can see what happens.”

Around noon he walked back to the diner car and stood looking in through the window. Under his feet, the metal plates joining the two cars shifted and squeaked. The tables were packed, he saw, but there was no familiar face inside. He couldn’t really afford to have lunch in there, anyway. He turned and walked up, corridor after corridor, until he reached the observation car with its little snack bar. Grace was in there, sitting with her feet tucked under her skirts, staring out at Montana. She didn’t glance at him while he ordered a burger, paid, and waited for the attendant to microwave it; so he sat on the opposite side of the car to eat, feeling kind of relieved.

Halfway through the moist cardboard of the burger, the train hit another patch of rain. It smacked the huge, curved windows, withdrew, and smacked again. Then it settled into a slow, even pattern of caresses. Benjamin imagined that they were moving into a tunnel of warm water. It rocked him, enveloped him. So easy to fall into it. His head rolled back against the seat. He woke, and drowsed again.

“Dreaming?” Ansel James asked. He was sitting next to Benjamin. Too solid, warmer than a dream. Shaking his head, Benjamin attempted coherence.“No,” he said. “Just ate this burger.” He gestured, realizing the plastic wrapping and the little cardboard tray lay at his feet. He bent to pick them up. The light, both sun and fluorescent, seemed to concentrate itself on Ansel. He couldn’t look. Instead, he glanced around for Grace. She was gone.

“Well, I’m just seeing the sights,” Ansel said. His diction, slow and low, made the remark serious, weighted or coded somehow. Benjamin felt horribly young.

“Not much to see,” he managed. Outside, in the real world, a browner hill went by. No action stirred its slope. No variance but the roof of a low gray house, ugly, unobtrusive. Then gone.

Ansel said, “You have a visionary look about you. I’ve known artists with that expression. A cult leader, a priest or two.”

Benjamin laughed, feeling himself teased, but also bewilderingly flattered. “I’m not sure what to do with that,” he said.

“Seminary,” Ansel suggested, the slender grin breaking from his gravity. “Or art school. But I’d advise you against starting a cult. They cost more than they are generally worth.”

Benjamin looked around for a place to discard the packaging of his hamburger, which he had been crushing between his hands.

“I guess I could do anything,” he said, tossing the trash at a cardboard bin and missing. He got up to retrieve it, aware of the attendant’s bored eye on him—aware, too, of Ansel’s appraising look. “I’ve never felt like this before,” he went on, turning back. His ears were hot at the tips. “I’ve always had something to do. Some kind of obligation.Now I don’t know what—I guess I’m going to see my dad. In Spokane. I haven’t talked to him in a long time, though.”

The train had slowed as they spoke, and an indistinct announcement had rung through the car. Now, looking out the window at a growing collection of small buildings, Benjamin was surprised into standing.

“Look at that,” he said, pointing.

They passed it slowly enough to get a good look: an enormous dinosaur, painted in shocking shades of green, yellow, and blue. It stood scowling beside a white building. Nearby, a sign read “Great Plains Dinosaur Museum.”

“Very nice,” said Ansel. He stood beside Benjamin at the window. Casually, he hooked two fingers through the back loop of Benjamin’s jeans, letting the weight of his arm link them as they both looked outwards. “Impressive.” Barely breathing, Benjamin nodded. His lower back felt lit, as by a concentrated ray. It prickled. He shivered, and Ansel’s fingers dropped away.

◆

The door was a slim panel of dark blue, on which Benjamin quietly knocked. They had passed through Whitefish a short while ago, a gleaming white-and-blue vista in the darkness as he looked over Grace’s sleeping shoulder. Shapes clambered around out there, dragging long bags over the ice. The mountain slopes had risen while he dozed away the evening, and blocked all but a strip of gleaming navy sky. He could see pillars and rafters of blond wood lit up by the station lamps. Then they were gone, and the mountains closed off all vision.He could hear nothing inside the room. The sound of the train, rocking and whining, covered all human noise. He stood in fear of conductors, who might turn the narrow corner of corridor at any point and catch him. What would they do to him? A reprimand, or something more sinister—legal consequences? Fines? The door slipped open. Ansel James, hair disarrayed, was smiling in white pajamas. He beckoned Benjamin inside.

The kiss was startling, although it was what he’d come for. Warm, springy mouth on his. The right amount of resistance: the ideal welcome, slip. Benjamin’s body arched itself in Ansel’s arms. He pressed his fingers on the other man’s back, kneading through thin cotton, trying to make Ansel show pleasure. He got his jaw kissed, and his throat. He buried his lips in Ansel’s deep collarbone. He pulled fabric aside to find the skin of a lightly-furred chest, soft, a bit oily. For quite a while they didn’t talk. Their gestures were practiced, habitual: they both knew these rituals, though they performed them in new homes. A home was what it felt like, when it was right, Benjamin knew. This kiss, here. This falling to his knees. Like moving in, again. Like he was a home, too, welcoming a new inhabitant.

My body is so much like yours, Benjamin kept thinking. Kneeling with his lips on Ansel’s flank, his hipbone, his stomach above the elastic of the white pajamas. Alike, in a way the obvious differences only showed off. The bones finer in Ansel’s frame, the hair on his chest and belly gray and white where Benjamin’s ran thick, black. Ansel, bending to kiss the top of Benjamin’s head, blew a breath of warmth through his hair and across his scalp.“You sweet thing,” he said. His voice, of course, was different. Deep, something of the resounding rails in it.

“I’m not all that,” Benjamin said, trying to smile as Ansel pulled him up and close, cleaving like twins, ribs matched up.

He buried his face in the older man’s shoulder and felt his neck kissed, damply, making him tremble. Looking at the curve of Ansel’s nape as it disappeared into white was like looking over his shoulder into a mirror, thirty or so years from now, he thought. Like he could look at his own nape, and breathe on it, and raise the ranks of tiny hairs there. Ansel moved, rocking him, and he responded—realizing, as they turned, that he was being lowered into bed. His knees parted with one of Ansel’s between them. His head relaxed onto the thin, inadequate pillow.

They dozed, rousing to rock against one another over and over, until Benjamin lost track of whether he was dreaming or waking. He knew he was awake with Ansel’s tongue in his ass, stroking up like a current. He knew he was asleep when he dreamed the cabin contained more rooms, secret rooms, and that he opened one door onto a vista of silk-curtained windows, looking out on the sea. He felt awake, though he couldn’t be

sure, when Ansel’s thighs closed around his head and muffled every noise. He thought he heard, beyond the sea-cave sounds of cock-sucking, Ansel’s voice. A garden in the

desert. An orchard in the drought. She died…on the way to Bethlehem.

Later, sore and more alert, he played big spoon for a while.

“Who are you?” he whispered into Ansel’s ear. “Where did you come from? How did you find me?”“I found you on the train, of course,” came the drowsy baritone response. “Strange thing to ask. Were you hiding?”

“I was hiding,” Benjamin admitted. Not from Ansel, no.

“My funny visionary.” The older man pulled away, turning, to drape his arm over

Benjamin’s waist and lie with their noses touching. “Who were you hiding from?” Benjamin was silent. Ansel said, “A lover.”

“Yes.”

“Ah.” He stroked Benjamin’s back, his hip. “No shame in hiding. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. Take any chance to disappear. If you need it, you take it. You get away.”

Benjamin nodded, his forehead bumping Ansel’s. No shame. There was a story behind that advice, he knew. Not his own.

“You’ve never been to Ephrata,” Ansel said. “Ephrata?”

“That’s where I’m going. Beyond Spokane. That’s home. My water in the desert. They have dams there, apple orchards. And the house I’m building, out by itself in the woods where no one comes. Out in Two Springs. Two Springs—don’t you like how that sounds?”

“You’re building a house.” Benjamin tried to imagine a house that might contain Ansel. High ceilings, bare beams. All windows. Ansel snorted, and turned Benjamin over so that he could hold him and speak into the back of the younger man’s neck.“I’m an architect,” he said. “I was. The house isn’t finished, but the plans…they’re all ready. Everything’s in place. A long time now I’ve been trying to get back there. Just can’t seem to make it.”

“It sounds…wonderful,” Benjamin said. His words felt too light. Small talk, when Ansel was speaking of something so private. My water in the desert. “I’d like to see it someday.”

“You will.” He was quiet for a long while, then. Benjamin thought he’d fallen asleep. He was almost there himself when the next words came, so soft. “In the Bible, Rachel died on her way to Ephrath. She died giving birth to Benjamin. You know this story?”

Benjamin shook his head. He felt a tickle of fear. The Bible, and death. Why was

Ansel telling him this?

“Rachel died, but she had a son. She called him Ben-oni. Son of her sorrow. His father changed his name. You cannot trust a father.”

“Oh,” Benjamin said. He was stiff, with Ansel’s body curved warm and

unfamiliar around him. He didn’t know this man at all. Then Ansel said, “Don’t be afraid, Benjamin,” and he wasn’t. He wasn’t afraid, easy as that.

◆

He woke up with the train’s stillness. They weren’t moving. No light came through the curtained windows. Listening, he thought he could hear voices somewhere; but they were characterless, conveying nothing. Ansel wasn’t beside him. He must have risen to investigate. Benjamin lay, trying to sleep again. He couldn’t. He got dressed, instead, and looked at himself a while in the little cabin mirror. He looked tired. Awrinkle across one cheek where he’d crushed it, sleeping. He should go. Find Ansel, or something. He didn’t even know where they were—what if they’d passed Spokane?

Turning to the door, he was surprised by a soft tapping on it. Ansel. He slid it open, ready to step aside and make room, but another man stood there. Lanky, alert, in a dark blue cap. A startling concavity to his face, the cheeks and eyes sucked deep. The conductor. A faint whine came from somewhere inside the train, echoing the strain of panic in Benjamin’s own chest.

“Mr. James,” the man said quietly. “I’m just trying to update anyone who’s awake. It’s going to be a delay for a while. But you don’t have to worry about anything.”

He’d been mistaken for Ansel. A lucky thing, that he was alone in the cabin. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Just outside Spokane. Can’t say how long it’ll be.” “That’s all right.” He ducked his head. “Thanks.”

“No trouble,” the conductor said. Then he moved on, tapping on the door of the next cabin.

Benjamin waited until he was gone. Then he left the cabin, walking as casually as he could back through the empty diner car, into the dim rows of coach. When he found his own seat, it was empty. One of Grace’s shawls remained, crushed from where she’d been sitting on it. Of course, she’d be investigating too. He took the window seat and looked out, not expecting to see much. But there was a tall lamp nearby, casting some degree of light. And, pressing his cheek against the window, he could see ahead where a

group of figures were walking beside the tracks. It took a moment to focus on them. Capsand uniforms. But not conductors. He saw they were policemen, headed down the tracks with flashlights in their hands. With them walked a small person, heavily draped. Grace.

He saw her gesture up at the train, saying something, as the group passed below him. The movement panicked him. In a few moments, he’d collected all his belongings into his backpack. He stood up, though he didn’t know if it was a good idea, and tiptoed along the corridors again.

Back in E Twelve, he found himself still alone. He sat on the bed. Its cushions, thin foam, felt unreal under him. Standing again, he flipped through items on the rudimentary desk. The train magazine. A slim notebook that revealed pages of tiny graphs, some of them blocked in with floor plans in pencil or blue ink. He noted one precise circle, spoked like a wheel, and realized it represented a spiral staircase. Closing his eyes, he mounted that staircase. He climbed to the top. There was emptiness there, a floor open to the elements, a strange woodland around him under the dark sky. Dizzy, he opened his eyes again. Then, wedged in the hard blue cushions of the nearest chair, he saw Ansel’s wallet.

What am I doing, he asked himself as he opened it. There was more money than he would have expected. Sheaves of bills. A row of sober cards. A library card, bright green. A driver’s license. Benjamin pulled this one out and looked at it. Then, still holding it, he curled onto the bed and pulled his knees tight to his chest.

He thought, this is impossible. He thought, you believe in the supernatural, right? He thought, not like that. Not like that!

His own picture. Ansel’s name. When he could, he looked at the birthdate: that, too, was his.I should talk to Grace, he thought. Then, no, not Grace. She talks to cops. He was culpable for something, he knew. He’d made some kind of mistake. Though how they’d prosecute him he could hardly say. He lay there, the driver’s license cutting into his palm. By the time the train began to move, sending up tones like a tuning orchestra, he was asleep.

◆

“Mr. James,” the conductor said. The voice, outside the door, seemed like it came from inside Benjamin’s own ear. He startled awake. “We’re coming up to Ephrata in about fifteen minutes now.”

Oh my god, Benjamin thought. He sat up, clutching the polyester blanket to his face. Ephrata. That means I missed Spokane. It meant several other things, too. More than he could coherently name.

“Mr. James?”

“Thank you!” Benjamin called, not knowing what else to do. He stood, with the blanket over his shoulders like a cloak. Ansel didn’t seem to have much in the way of luggage. Just a small leather case. Benjamin opened it, and found a clean white Oxford, a pair of slacks, socks. A toothbrush and a tie. A yellow notepad with half the pages torn off, leaving only blank ones. He put the architectural notebook inside and closed the case. The wallet he put in his own pocket. He would wait on the platform, he thought. Surely Ansel would appear, and tell him what happened next.

A thought of Jody came to him, all at once. He felt the need to throw himself into those white, skinny arms; to feel himself gripped so tight, and comforted. Then, recallingthe lizard glare of resentment in Jody’s eyes, he turned himself around. No shame in hiding, Ansel had said. You get away.

He waited in the corridor as the train curved around a bend. Backpack on his

back, the warm handle of Ansel’s case in his hand. The conductor passed by, touching his cap and winking.

“Not long now,” he said.

“I guess,” Benjamin said. He forced a laugh. “Hey, what happened? Last night?” “Last night.” The conductor was serious again. “We’ll see it on the news, I guess,

if there’s anything to see. All I know is, the driver had to be relieved. Thought he saw something, I guess. It’s a hard job.”

Behind him, someone was climbing the staircase from the lower section of the train with some effort.

“Is the diner open yet?” she called.

“Yes, ma’am,” the conductor said, moving out of the way to reveal Mary Ellen Crandall. She reached level ground, panting, and stopped. She looked up at Benjamin. It took her a moment after opening her mouth to say anything.

And here we go, Benjamin thought. Game over.

“James Ansel,” she said. “No. Ansel James. I’ll never get used to it.”

◆

The Ephrata station was nondescript. A tan building with dark brown accents, vaguely cute, like some European cottage. Benjamin stood on the platform and looked around at whoever disembarked. He would see Ansel, perhaps, laughing at the joke he’d played. Or Grace, accusing. But only strangers milled around him, greeting friends andgetting into cars. He found a bench facing the tracks. Soon enough, the train gave out its whining symphony and departed, and he was watching the bare rails alone.

“Taxi?” someone said. A woman’s voice, a little gruff. Benjamin looked up to see a fat, handsome figure with cropped hair, examining him with her hands in corduroy pockets.

“Uh,” he said. “Actually, I guess so.”

She asked him where he was going, and he said, “Two Springs?” like a question. “Sure,” she said. “Out Baird Springs Road? You’ll show me where.”

He nodded, getting into her black cab.

Ephrata was a blur of one-story buildings, cars, shade trees. It was only on the

road out of town that the landscape began to resemble a desert. Hills in umber and sienna, like the crayons of his childhood. Tiny bundles of green foliage speckled them. Spots of some skin disease. The road widened. The sky ahead grew unbelievably blue through the cab’s windshield.

Benjamin began to worry that the cab driver was looking at him suspiciously through her rearview mirror. Where would he tell her to let him off? What did she think he was doing here? He couldn’t look like he belonged in Ephrata.

“Coming up near Two Springs Canyon,” she sang out, louder than necessary. “I know,” he said. Defiant. “Uh, not yet.”

Then, off to the left, he saw it. He couldn’t say how he knew: just that it was the garden in the desert. Green, deep water green, mermaid green, off there a good distance from the road.

“Here,” he said. “Anywhere here. This is good.”“Just here?” She sounded surprised, but pulled off to the shoulder. “Didn’t know there was anything out here. Know there’s a couple houses a quarter mile on.”

Benjamin said nothing. He drew a bill from Ansel’s wallet, handed it to her and took the change.

He crossed the road in the taxi’s wake. Striking out into trackless terrain, he realized how tricky it was to walk: the sandy silt collapsed under his feet, so each step was a push. Ahead, too far away, the dark green woodland stood.

I am going to die out here, he thought, walking. I’ll die and nobody will find me. Coyotes. Where am I going?

It wasn’t hours before he reached the edge of the trees. Probably an hour, though. He was hungry, thirsty. The muscles at the back of his thighs ached from this unaccustomed tip-toe walk. The trees rose, frighteningly green among all this brown, gray, yellow, pink. He entered their ranks. They made an easier ground to walk on.

Carpets of leaf and needle. Shade cooled his burned neck. He clutched Ansel’s case to his chest now, both hands tired out from holding it. The trees made a path for him to walk. It took a while, but he was calm now. At last, like the greatest tree in the woods, he saw it. Ansel’s house.

It was tall and broad. Its many pillars were rooted in the ground as if they’d grown there. As he’d imagined, it was mostly window: why worry about privacy, with only the trees to look in? Enormous panes of glass showed him an interior half-wild. Grass grew up through the unfinished boards of the floor. Several desiccated spheres

were strewn around, like some avant-garde decoration—tumbleweeds, Benjamin thought. Beyond the weeds, he could see long boards laid across sawhorses. But the center of thevision, which did not change as he walked to the entrance, was a staircase. Honey- colored wood held up with iron, curving around and around.

Benjamin made it to the front door, which was only a frame. Ansel was waiting inside, he thought. Not in person—and a grief came to him, all at once, for that. He leaned on the door frame, wanting. He’d had a moment to know that body, and hadn’t known it would be his only chance. Time stretched ahead of him, fuzzy and alien. His vision was astonishingly clear. He could pick out every grain of unfinished wood, every spine of tumbleweed. But he couldn’t synthesize it. No coherence. He stepped inside.

Here I am, he thought. I’m home. I’m yours. I’m home.

He climbed the staircase. He saw what there was to see.