SHEILA FINCH

Reach

THE FIRST THING HE NOTICES when he's finished dying is that the man and woman who've appeared by the bed are over seven feet tall. They don't look like any doctors he's ever seen.

"Welcome, Mr. Thayer," the woman says.

The room is sterile, white, anonymous. He finds it hard to think coherently. He picks something to concentrate on. The woman's skin and hair shine molten gold.

He shakes away the lingering fog in his head. "Where am I?"

"South California."

"No. I mean --"

He remembers now that his car went off the interstate overpass in a freak storm. He would expect a morgue, but these two don't look like morticians. The woman's blue tunic hugs her body in a designer version of static cling. Not angels either. He finds that reassuring.

She lays a hand on his brow. "You must expect some cognitive dissonance, Mr. Thayer. Try moving your legs."

He doesn't feel her hand.

Terror that he might not be dead but paralyzed grips him, and he's afraid to find out. "When Cole Thayer dances - " a reporter once gushed in a small-town paper, "he's ten feet tall!" It's hype, not a view shared by the ranking critics of the dance world, but he can't imagine never dancing again.

The tall visitors wait. He takes a deep breath. He might as well find out right now. He closes his eyes, flexes his toes, raises each leg an inch or two. They move without pain. He opens his eyes and glances down. They're intact. They're also obviously not the legs he used to have. His hands start trembling.

"You have a friend from your own time waiting for you," the man says. He wears some kind of metallic skinsuit that sparks as he moves. "This is her house."

South California. A friend from his own time. "Okay -- When am I?"

The woman smiles at the man. "I would say the brain came through admirably, wouldn't you?"

"What you'd consider the near future," the man explains. "Your friend, Eileen Lambert, arranged for your neurosuspension."

"Charles won't agree to a divorce," Eileen said. "It's against his religion."

They were sitting on the bluffs in her Lamborghini, watching a summer sunset wash over Catalina Island. Middle-aged, she'd never seemed more desirable to him than now when it appeared he couldn't have her. She had eyes such a dark blue they were almost violet. He wanted to run his fingers over the familiar lines of her full breasts, bury his nose in dark hair already turning silver. Memories of her were imprinted all over his skin. Even if his brain suffered from amnesia, he thought, his body would instantly recognize hers.

"Charles doesn't love you like I do," he argued. "Come away with me. Together we could find heaven on earth."

"We're both too old to find poverty romantic." She leaned over to kiss him, taking the sting out of the words.

He pulled back. Her wealth -- or rather, Charles's -- had a nasty habit of intruding into their most intimate conversations.

"You can't expect to dance forever," she said.

And there was the heart of his discontent. No matter how he drove himself, his body never reached the goal he set. Dance classes at the Y had been a skinny kid's ticket off the streets of Los Angeles. He'd worked harder and longer than any dancer he knew -- still did -- and now time was running out. Dancing was a young person's game. Even so, he might've been satisfied with his mediocre success if he hadn't met Eileen.

"I begin to wonder what you see in me, Eileen?"

"A dreamer," she replied. "A prince in exile."

"And what does that make you?"

"You need a fairy godmother."

Money again. Charles controlled the purse strings, but Eileen had enough to buy herself a real celebrity if she wanted one. In the cool offshore breeze, he felt sudden anger at the realization she must recognize him as second-rate. He wanted to impress her, not accept her charity.

It was the last time he saw her before his accident.

"Neurosuspension," he says now. "That means --"

"You wrecked your original body beyond the primitive repair techniques of last century," the man says. "Ms. Lambert had your head preserved."

A wave of nausea takes him. "I never arranged for that --"

The man waves this objection away. "Surely you'd heard of nanotechnology in your day? We simply grew you a new body."

"Do you like it?" the woman asks.

He swallows, glances down at the gloriously youthful legs and is suddenly dizzy. "How old am I now?"

The woman studies him for a moment. "How old would you think?"

He squints at firm, tanned muscles. "Twenty-five?"

"About right."

Concentrate! he tells himself. Think this incredible situation through. He's survived a terrible wreck. He has a new and improved body. This is apparently the future. Eileen's still alive. And he's going to see her again.

A longing to hold her sweeps over him. He remembers Eileen the day they took Charles's yacht out by Catalina Island, laughing at the comparison they made with the suntanned kids in bikinis on the beach. "I'm too fat and you're too skinny," she said. "Better models for Geritol than Armani!" He remembers her skin smelled like the sea.

"You won't need us anymore," the tall woman says now.

His visitors wink out like a TV program turned off.

He sits up carefully in the empty room -- no pain, though his mind keeps insisting there ought to be after an accident like that -- then swings his legs over the edge of the bed and stands carefully.

He needs a mirror.

One takes shape in front of him. It takes an act of faith to accept that he's looking at himself. He studies his naked image. He's gained at least eight inches in height and has been lifting weights, judging by the muscular arms folded over his chest, the strong, well-shaped legs.

It's a great body. No, a fantastic body. The body he'd always wished for that would draw the huge crowds, maybe bring a movie contract. He grins at his reflection. And as well-equipped as if the doctors knew his secret adolescent fantasies. He can't believe his luck.

He flexes his arms and strikes a pose. Twenty-five, perhaps. But this body's twenty-five as imagined by Hollywood. The face is the original; yet he sees they've fixed that too, smoothing out the wrinkles and removing gray hairs. Perfect.

"Do you like what you see?"

The mirror vanishes. In its place he sees a slender young woman with long golden hair, draped in iridescent silk. At her throat she wears a string of amethysts that match the color of her eyes. For a moment he thinks this one really is an angel.

The cheekbones are higher, nose smaller, skin firmer, lips fuller. But violet eyes—

It can't be.

"Eileen?"

She laughs and comes toward him, hands outstretched. "I knew you'd recognize me."

He touches her stranger's hands hesitantly. They're real.

"Do you approve?" She turns slowly, a rainbow swirling about her slender legs.

"Stunning." That's true, but the truth slashes through his memory of his middle-aged lover.

She sits down on the bed and studies him. "I haven't seen you upright until now. You look absolutely wonderful!"

"So do you."

This will take some getting used to. He didn't know her when she was in her twenties, yet he knows she can't have looked like this. His memory, of the old Eileen seems to be jostling with the reality of this new Eileen, and the discontinuity is jarring. A hundred things he wants to say to her stream through his mind, but he can't get any of them out.

"Are you angry with me?" She takes his hands in hers. "When I saw you in ER after the accident, I couldn't bear the thought of never seeing you again. I took the only way possible."

"So you paid to have my head frozen. It must've been expensive."

This comes out sharper than he intends. She seems not to notice, or perhaps she chooses to ignore it. She's always been more level-headed than he.

"Then I made arrangements to follow you," she says.

"Follow?"

"Years later, of course. And it took a little longer to grow you a whole new body than to fix my old one," she explains. "But you don't want to hear the boring details! You see, I wanted the very best for you, and luckily, I can afford it. That software company Charles founded? It makes Virtual Experiences now. You'd never believe how popular they are."

He feels as if he's making smalltalk with an alien. "And what happened to good old Charles? Is he here too?"

Eileen says coolly, "Charles didn't want to jeopardize his immortal soul."

She glances away, and a window forms in one white wall. He sees a long emerald lawn sloping down to a cliff, cobalt water beyond with a glimpse of an island. He recognizes Catalina.

"You had dreams once, Cole. Perhaps now --" She gazes at him for a moment. "Oh, talking won't work! Come here."

She pulls him down on the bed. Her tongue slides deep into his mouth. The fingers of her left hand twine themselves in his hair; the right hand massages his neck, his shoulder, his chest and finally reaches between his legs. These are actions his brain remembers from a thousand occasions with her.

He's having sex with a stranger. His fingers don't know the contours of the body they trace. He doesn't even know his own fingers. And his nose doesn't recognize her smell.

His flawless body responds, of course, but he can't work up any passion. She's Eileen, he tells himself, his lover, his best friend. Even if she isn't, what man wouldn't want to get an angel in bed?

"You're just a little rusty," she murmurs. "It'll all come back."

They made his new body too perfect not to perform. But it's all physical release, no emotion in it. He's emptied but not refilled. He feels exhausted, but he notes that's the mind's response, not this fabulous new body's. The body isn't even sweaty. The duality is dizzying, as if he's an imposter inside his own skin.

After a while, she gets up.

He wonders if she notices that something's missing.

"Eileen --" he begins.

She puts a finger on his lips. "I've given you your heart's desire. You have the consummate body you always wanted. You have a second chance."

A SECOND CHANCE TO be a star. The mirrors of the dance studio in her house on the cliff work like the one he used that first day, appearing when he needs them. He warms up with his reflection -- plié, battement -- extends his arms, port de bras. It's a pleasure watching this young body move. He doesn't understand how the doctors did it, but he guesses it cost a fortune. This marvelous studio, like this breathtaking body, is a gift of faith in his talent.

She comes to watch, standing silently by an unmirrored wall. In their old life, he remembers, she always attended his performances, clapping louder than anybody. He thinks of how she filled his dressing-room with flowers for every performance, champagne after every opening as if he were Nureyev or perhaps Michael Flatley.

Jeté!

"Bravo," she says and slips away.

He doesn't see much of her after this, but he knows how busy she must be running the company that's hers now. It amuses him to think that Charles never suspected how much business ability she had. It sobers him to know he didn't suspect it either.

The studio appears to be empty space, but he understands just enough of how things operate here to know it's loaded with toys and he's learning to use them already. She's given a poor kid the key to F.A.O. Schwarz.

He owes her so much.

The thought of being in anyone's debt to this extent -- even Eileen's -- depresses him.

It takes only a few days for this body to learn the movements his brain remembers, yet he's astonished to find there's no sense of strain, no muscular aches or twinges to be massaged out after rehearsal as he would expect. He's astounded at how fast it all comes back to him, better than ever. He catches himself waiting for a slip or a stumble, to be expected, after all. But they never happen. This body has no bad habits to unlearn.

He always wanted to be acclaimed the best in the world, but in the past his body let him down. Now he has a chance of achieving that goal. He feels again, for just a moment, that skinny kid's hunger.

It seems too easy.

After a week of steady practice, something in the air of the empty studio senses his readiness. Lights dim. Walls recede. He feels himself caressed by unseen hands, his torso and limbs draped in a diaphanous second skin. Something prickles over his scalp. When it's done, he's clothed in a kind of silky, weightless armor, a net of sensors her company has developed.

He chooses a solo from The Firebird, Koshchei, because that was the role he was performing when he first met her.

Spotlights brighten, music swells. Stravinsky's haunting genius pulls him. His veins flood with the savage blood tide of timpani and brass. He lifts an arm and woodwinds thrill down his nerves to his fingertips. He pirouettes, his feet capturing the jagged peaks, flashing with strings and horns. Sound becomes color to him, an asymmetrical, riotous composition of vermilion slashed with white hot gold. He is on fire with the music.

A thought overtakes him at the top of a tour en Fair: A century later and he's finally making truth out of the reporter's exaggeration! Then the flames swallow him up again and there's no Cole Thayer left to think.

Afterward, he wraps himself in a robe that's appeared, and notices a thin stream of sparkling text scrolling across the air in front of him. A news report of some kind. No, a ratings system. Olympic scoring performed by a string of electronic fireflies. The lights inform him that his performance rates an eight on a scale of ten.

At first he's irritated that art should be treated like a sporting event. Then he laughs. He vows to become a perfect ten for her sake.

They have fabulous experiences in bed. There are no positions his wonderful new body can't adopt, no tricks this new Eileen doesn't know, and never a time when either of them is too tired or claims a headache. There's also no sense of being on fire with passion. He feels like an actor in a porno movie, performing without fault, but she doesn't seem to notice.

He wonders if perhaps she's a better actor than he is.

She takes him sightseeing, swooping over South California landscapes he strains to remember. Lush meadows, sparkling rivers, spun glass cities, surely he ought to recognize them? But even geography has been perfected, bumps and snags smoothed out, the ugly and the inconvenient banished, and it's all different. Flawless. There's no aggression here, no violence, no strife, no unmet yearning. No tension.

It makes him uneasy.

He wonders what's new in the world of dance. Art can't be tamed. What new forms have arisen, what artistic heights have been scaled? She insists he take a vacation to find out. She's too busy to go with him; the company demands her attention. He has a moment's suspicion she's glad to see him go.

He's happy to learn that none of the pessimistic predictions of his day have come true. Life is filled with marvels, none more wonderful than the young goddesses with sculpted bodies who play with him everywhere he goes. But it's too easy; he misses the thrill of a chase he almost always used to lose.

The dance world brims with competent Pavlova and Nijinsky look-alikes. They're all very good, and he does discover a few original artists flickering like tiny candles. But he finds no shooting stars erupting, no genius hungry to set the world aflame. They in turn seem to find him a novelty, someone who remembers when art didn't come easy.

After a while, he returns to Eileen. He tries to recapture the past the next time they're in bed. They make love on silk pillows by candlelight, an old favorite that eased creaky joints when they were both middle-aged. His new young body's moving smoothly, but his mind can't get rid of the young goddesses. They are all as lovely as Eileen. Does he need her anymore?

Does she need him? He wonders suddenly what she did here in the years before his new body was ready.

He puts these treacherous thoughts out of his mind and concentrates. They both reach perfect, effortless climax at the same time. What else could he ask for?

Afterward, he's empty again. He sits up, pours wine from the waiting crystal decanter and avoids her eyes. The candles vanish. The chardonnay's chill aquamarine slides down his throat, and he gazes out the window that appears in the wall. Oceanward he sees huge stars sparking against an indigo sky like a painting by van Gogh. He feels as if he's lost something precious.

He makes another attempt to reach back and find her. "Remember how we used to make love on the beach on Catalina Island at sunset?

"How could I forget?"

"Afterward, we'd read poetry together."

"So long ago," she says.

He feels heartened; she always understands him better than he understands himself. "We made it then. We'll make it now."

"Of course we will," she says. "We make a great team."

For a second, he's suspicious. What does she want from him? Aching silence stretches between them.

She stands up, arms clasped across her breasts. She raises one hand to the window wall and the stars wink out. The surf falls silent. On the now blank wall, crushed opal light cascades. In her world, he's learned, scenery obeys the whims of the beholder, beautiful illusion.

Tonight he thinks of that as a metaphor for himself.

She's developed Charles's old software company into a successful entertainment business; she told him that the first day in his new studio. He's seen for himself that people don't struggle to excel in sport or the arts anymore. Instead they buy virtual experiences of somebody else's greatness. It gives him an idea.

Rehearsing and recording in his studio, he spends some of the best months of his life. There seems to be no end to the wondrous achievements of this super body. He's gained mastery of whatever style he pursues, ballet, jazz, tap, modern, ethnic. There wasn't a dancer alive when he was middle-aged who could outperform him now. The VEs he makes of himself in every role he's ever performed become wildly popular. Her company is inundated with demand for his work, the time traveler from an imperfect past.

Dancing provides an excuse to avoid the problem of intimacy with Eileen. And she doesn't have the time to spare that she once had. Sometimes he wonders if that's the answer to his question of what she saw in him.

He makes more money for himself than he ever wanted.

He makes more money for her than she needs.

The electronic insects that crawl up the air in his studio after every session agree he's very good. It's all so easy, yet he's plagued by a sense of something missing.

One night, after he's recorded for her company all the styles and roles he's ever danced or wanted to dance, mind exhausted but body still glowing, he puts on the delicate spidery headset his own fans use to experience him. He wants to measure his performance against those few he considers his competition. He wants to be sure. On command, the magical studio produces VEs of the best dancers in the world.

It's unsettling at first, this raw experience of another dancer. Not to watch, to feel the ripple of someone else's muscles as if they're his own, the feet moving under him, his but not his. It's more than enjoying another's style; it's the sensation of becoming the other, and yet at the same time remaining himself. Art without effort.

He tries on dancers until very late that night.

Until that moment, he's felt the rub of doubt. Now he knows. None of them can compare with him. Realizing the truth knocks breath out of his lungs. The poor kid who never quite made it is finally the superstar.

A ten.

He's reached the top.

There's nowhere else to go.

HE NEEDS TIME to think about what's happening to him. The "exiled prince" she once called him has claimed his kingdom. Everything he ever yearned for is in his grasp. All his dreams have been fulfilled.

Rain gusts over the terrace of Eileen's luminous house on the cliff. Lilacs she planted to echo her eyes bend low over wet paths, scenting the air. He walks outside in tattered moonlight that sparks diamonds on blossoms and leaves. Even bad weather is beautifully done here. Rain falls clear as crystal. No mud. No melancholy, ambiguous fog.

There's an abyss at the center of his being, a sterile void. He feels its darkness tonight. If he were religious, like Charles, he might think he'd defied death only to lose his soul. But in a world where art is scored like a popularity contest, no one else seems to have noticed this lack in him.

The obvious thorn in paradise is his missing passion for Eileen. Love sustained him in the past, shaped his ambition. And she loved him too -- or maybe, he thinks now, she didn't. He doesn't love Eileen any more. She doesn't love him. That's the loss that's bankrupting his art.

But it's not Eileen's fault. He doesn't want to hurt her; she doesn't deserve that. Tonight he'll lay his triumph at her feet, his gift to her. Then....

He doesn't know how he'll find words to tell her what he's thinking of doing then.

In their old lifetime, she brought champagne and they celebrated alone. Now, she gives huge parties. When he comes in from the terrace, he finds the magical house filled once again with the important, the glittering, the famous, and the simply incredibly rich. For a moment he wonders which of them kept her entertained before his body was ready.

It doesn't matter anymore.

Phantom nightingales sing Mozart in phantom jacaranda trees. The first time he heard them he was enchanted. Now he's sick of all her elegant illusions. Pushing his way through the swarm of guests fluttering like moths about her, he enters his studio.

Sensing his attention, a window appears, and he stares out at the island in the dark sea. They haven't been to Catalina once since he's been here. Tonight he knows the island's a mirage.

He flings himself on a couch and broods about his situation. He's brilliant at performing every role that any choreographer ever invented. But it doesn't seem enough. He has all he needs or ever yearned for, and there's nothing left to want. He feels like a kid who just opened the last birthday package -- everything he asked for, but the right gift's still missing.

She hardly ever comes to his studio now to watch him perform, and when she speaks to him afterward, it's to give him the latest figures from her accountants. She's a businesswoman who makes business decisions. Sometimes he notes a subtle hint of frustration in her voice, as if he's missing the point.

It makes his determination to leave her seem less like betrayal.

"I used to think we could buy heaven."

He looks up to see her, somber tonight in an old-fashioned cut of black velvet, no jewels at her wrists or throat to rival the violet eyes. Tiredness washes over him, not an exhaustion of this body -- he doubts it would ever feel tired -- but of the heart. To hell with it! He's tried, she can't say he hasn't.

"Everything I've achieved is to repay you, Eileen. What more do you want?"

"More?" she exclaims. "Do you understand so little that you think I want more?"

He's bitter now and needs to punish her for the shadows inside. "You must admit you knew you couldn't lose. There'd be novelty value to my resurrected career if nothing else."

Her head jerks up as if he's slapped her. Color glows on her cheekbones. "I hoped you'd find happiness, Cole. I hoped I'd find happiness. Apparently I misjudged us both."

Some of the old feelings stir. Or perhaps it's just his guilty conscience. He stands up, reaches for her hands. "I've always loved you."

She pulls away.

"The old you used to need the old me. But we're different people now." Then she laughs without humor. "For once, the cliché is truly fresh!"

Because he did once love her, and perhaps still does, he starts to protest. "Give it time. We can't expect --"

"I've tried," she says. "It's not working."

She's taken his thoughts, the words he didn't want to say, and left him with no more evasions.

"It's serious, isn't it?" he says.

"It's over."

He remembers how he once drove himself to reach what he read in her eyes. He loved her for believing in him then.

He says heavily, "So what happens next?"

She tilts her head up at that. "I think you should leave. Go away. Before I change my mind."

But that's the last thing he wants to do now. He suddenly wants very much to prove she's wrong. Yet isn't this just what he's been thinking about? The prospect of leaving her is terrifying, painful, but strangely exciting too.

"It almost worked, Eileen. We almost found heaven."

"Almost."

He sees a trace of the old Eileen in her eyes, a touch of the sorrow that haunted their experience together, gave it meaning and drove ambitions that were always just out of grasp. In that look he sees all that he's just learned to value, all that he's lost. Pain descends like a gray fog over his heart.

And then an odd thing happens. Fireworks explode in the void inside, lighting his darkness with a new dream. His feet are aflame with an urgent need to give shape to this pain. He sees the path unfolding before him through the mist. It will take a lifetime to reach this goal and he may never get there. His own work -- not someone else's -- his masterpiece of paradise lost.

He looks at her. Does she know him that well?

Does she love him that much?

"You see, I forgot something," she says softly, turning as the opal cloud of the wall dissolves before her. "The poet was right. For an artist, heaven should stay out of reach."