THE GULF

What is destiny and can we alter it? This question has run through much of Robert Reed's recent work. Of this latest foray into the realms of the imagination, Mr. Reed says: "Perhaps bits and pieces of the characters are pulled from my life. Or perhaps not. What is genuine is that years ago, a college friend invited me and another friend to do a little sailing on a hot summer day." And fortunately, he escaped to tell us . . .

I LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT I began as someone else.

But life has gradually remade me, as it does all of us. Reshaping my matrix. Remolding my pliable soul. Transforming my nature with minuscule touches and the rare little leap, improving as well as degrading those vital and subtle and basically immeasurable qualities that very much define what is me.

This happened to a stranger some thirty years ago.

He was brilliant and cocky -- an extraordinarily loud undergraduate. A bad mix of traits, that. Give the prick any excuse, and he used to sing his own praises, telling everyone in earshot that here posed a full-blown genius. An intellectual titan. A lighthouse shining Truth across ignorant black seas. With embarrassing ease, he predicted great things for himself and anyone standing in his shadow. Proof of his brilliance was everywhere. His IQ scores. His easy good grades. The trademark audacity wearing its useful veneer of boyish charm. Plus a certain knack for impressing his otherwise tired and dispirited white-haired professors.

Thirty years ago, this happened to me.

I was that bright abrasive prick. And my school was a little university that frankly lacked the prestige and professional heavyweights found in the best schools. Staring back across three increasingly fog-bound decades, trying to resurrect how I got to be where I was, I'm sure that I never gave Harvard or Stanford or MIT any real chance to claim me. And why? Because I secretly understood that I was nothing but a smart young man. Talented, but only to a point. Genius would see through my bluster, and the only way I could feel like the giant was to remain in a smaller, tamer pond.

I was an insufferable, incandescent pain in the ass.

And still am, if you happen to be listening to certain colleagues or lost friends or any of my several ex-wives.

But being an asshole has its benefits. In college and in life. For instance, it's quite amazing how certain women drift toward arrogant, self-assured men. In school, I always managed to keep one active girlfriend, and most of the time I was juggling them. And time was cheap: Studying was an occasional business; my body and young penis lived well enough without sleep. With scholarships and loans and assorted part-time jobs, I could afford to be generous with my social, hypersexed self.

During my junior year, I was the TA in a general physics lab.

In all, I slept with three of my prettier students. A leggy blonde for the fall term. A shorter, chestier blonde in early spring. And when her fiance found out and made her break it off, I waited a respectful few weeks, then began trolling again.

One day, as I was trying to coax an out-of-date apparatus into doing its intended job, someone joked, "Maybe it isn't plugged in."

Looking across the black tabletop, I saw this girl that I must have spoken to on a dozen other occasions. But that time felt like the first time, somehow. She was pretty in a natural, just-rolled-out-of-bed way. Simple brown hair. A handsome, narrow, fit face. Good-sized breasts. But no real ass, which was different for me. Then and always, I appreciate a little swing in the walk.

I'll call her April.

Why that girl, I don't know. Maybe it was because she teased me, and people usually didn't. Maybe I just sensed something special. Most likely, it was because a button had worked loose on her blouse, and as she leaned forward, grinning, I was presented with the glorious view of a clean white bra and an ample breast trying to spill over the top.

She was flirting, I sensed. And I defended myself, remarking, "Theory's my strength. Not hardware."

She winked and said, "Good thing for you."

Then the professor drifted close, aiding with his hands, and our flirting quickly ground to a halt.

That night, I opened my copy of the campus directory. April was a senior -- older than me by two years, since I'd skipped over the second grade -- and she belonged to one of the better sororities. Contriving a teacherly reason to call her, I called. And after a little teacherly noise, I asked her out to dinner and a movie.

There was an unexpected pause.

Then she said, "Why not? It sounds nice."

And it was. Nice, I mean. We had a pleasant time of things. April was quieter than I.

Like most of the world is, frankly. And she was smarter than I'd expected. Except in science, and particularly physics. For her, my favorite science was a mystery wrapped in riddles. I tried to answer a riddle or two over spaghetti, and she seemed to follow the basic threads. I don't recall the movie. But as we left the theater, she brushed against me, and after all these years, I can still remember the sensation of that firm breast pressing against my happy tricep.

During the drive back to campus, April admitted that she was staying in town after school -- another graduate hunting for direction. And after warning me that she had tons of studying to do over the next couple weeks, she kissed me on the mouth, for a little while, before vanishing into the big brick sorority.

We went out once again before finals. And kissed again. And I unbuttoned her blouse and got to play for a little while.

That summer, I rented an apartment off-campus, and work involved helping the head of the department with some of his trivial research. April got an efficiency some five blocks away, working long hours for a local Temp service, but when she had time enough and the energy, she would show up at my place for dinner and for sex.

Somewhere in that routine, I fell in love with the woman.

Sort of.

I have to sound cynical or cold. Looking back, even my excellent memory can't recall what about her made me crazy. Made me lie awake nights thinking of her. Made her swim through my dreams when I could sleep, and monopolize my fantasies while I marched through my days.

In early July, she vanished.

Not unexpectedly. I knew she had interviews for faraway jobs. And there was an extended trip home. I've lost the details, but her excuses were reasonable and frustrating, and since I hadn't had my fill of the woman, her sudden absence made me sick.

I would drive past her apartment, by accident. Or I'd call at the oddest hours, ready to pretend that I was acting on a whim.

But for most of that month, she was gone.

And then she returned. As promised, I think. She came back to me with stories about her aging parents and possible careers in distant cities. We called out for pizza, and after coaxing and too much wine, she spent the night. But she made a point of cautioning me that she was anxious to get on her life.

"You mean eager," I warned her. "Anxious means that you're apprehensive. Scared, even."

She watched me. Her brown hair had been cut short for the interviews and tangled by me. The hair and my flattened pillow framed her pretty face, and her dark eyes seemed unusually deep and impenetrable.

"Anxious," I said, "means that you don't really want to."

And she nodded, smiling with a distant amusement, telling me, "I know what anxious means. And I'm plenty apprehensive, thank you. There's a lot in my life that I don't want to have change just now."

She was falling in love with me.

I could see it.

Despite April's thorough plans and her careful emotions, she found herself wondering how it would be to remain with me. Another year spent hovering around campus, waiting for her gifted young boyfriend to graduate. I could see it plainly. I could see what she wanted to admit, her mouth opening and closing again, her tongue nervously tracing the outlines of her narrow lips. Then she made her decision. She said nothing. She just sighed and smiled toward the ceiling, deciding that waiting for a better moment would be best.

Our next evening together, two or three or four nights later, April asked, "Do you remember that friend of mine? Gloria?"

One of her sister temps, I recalled.

"What about her?" I asked.

"Her dad keeps a boat on Two Timber Lake. A twenty-some foot sailboat. She invited us to go out on it this weekend."

I started to say, "Sure."

But April interrupted, adding, "If the weather cooperates."

"It will," I said. "I promise."

And she smiled, winking in my direction, and after finishing her wine, she winked again and looked past me, teasing with the button on her jeans while saying, "This should be fun."

GLORIA WASN'T her name, either.

What I remember is a smallish girl, flat-chested and narrow-hipped, black hair cut to be boring and a personality rooted in some deep, perpetual insecurity. A pleasant enough person, in her fashion. But definitely a sidekick. A shadow. That quiet wisp who stands outside the conversation, smiling when she thinks that smiles are expected, secretly wishing either for the will to join in or the honesty to slip away.

What I remember about meeting Gloria is nothing. I know that it was a Saturday afternoon in late July. I assume that we exchanged little pleasantries, and I probably insisted that we hug. I usually do. But whatever was said between us, like so much of existence, has been lost. The sound and heat of our voices had only one lasting effect --contributing to the general entropy of the universe.

I drove us to the lake. And I do remember some debate about the station playing on my radio. April touched my shoulder, asking if she could pick the music today, and she turned to one of those cutting-edge pop stations where angry women and depressed men screamed about good heroin and bad love. It was a thirty-minute drive, and I was a saint, tolerating that noise for most of the way. But modern music has always left me sick, frankly What I prefer is the sweated elegance of Bach, the effervescent genius of Mozart. Which is why I abruptly punched us back to public radio, preempting complaints by pointing out, "We're halfway, and it's my turn to choose."

And I laughed. Just to show that I was a good sport.

Two Timber Lake was a flood control project, born shallow and growing shallower every year as silt flowed in from upstream. Its earthen dam stretched south to north for better than two miles, and the highway ran on top of the dam, greenish-brown water lapping against a riprap of gray limestone boulders.

Even for early August, it was hot and fantastically humid. The misery index was so high that few people were using the lake. Mostly optimistic fishermen with cold beer. The north beach, built from sand imported at great expense, was the private domain of several hundred shit-squirting geese. The marina was tucked into an adjacent bay. The floating docks were crowded with elaborate cabin cruisers and sleek speedboats and the archaic profiles of sailboats. I nearly leaped from the car, I was that eager. April said, "Wait," and fell in beside me, slowing me, holding my hand as we followed Gloria onto the longest dock.

Her sailboat looked a little small next to its neighbors. A little clunkier than I'd imagined, and older, and named for Gloria's mother, if I recall. Although I can't remember the old woman's name.

I'd sailed exactly twice in my life. And not since I was a kid. But like any excited kid, I had to jump onboard first, circumnavigating the deck before I helped get us ready. The cabin door was a sliding piece of plywood. Gloria opened its padlock and stowed both door and lock below. The cabin was a single room, stale and brutally hot, with a tiny kitchen and a minuscule head. Padded benches were set against every wall, forming a narrow Omega. "She sleeps six," Gloria mentioned. Then halfway laughing, she added, "But we'd have to be an awfully friendly six."

April asked, "What first?"

"Well, I don't want to go out with the sails," Gloria admitted. "I'm not that good." She pulled aside one of the cracked vinyl pads, and, reaching into the cubbyhole, began wrestling with a small outboard motor.

I brought the heavy red gas tank.

We clamped the motor to a weathered board on the stern, and we fueled it, spilling enough gasoline to cover the lake with rainbows. Then Gloria sent us off to do the various jobs that every sailor does before setting to sea. The mainsail and jib had to be untied and the bungee cords stowed below deck. A mossy wooden rudder and a battered tiller had to be slipped into place and secured with cotter pins. Nylon lines had to be checked; all seemed frayed but still alive. And in the time it took to make ready, a hazy clear day had grown cloudier, and a furnace-like wind was roaring out of the south. I heard a radio playing on a neighboring boat. A newsy voice was talking, but over the wind, I couldn't make sense of what I was hearing.

We seemed infinitely ready.

Gloria told us to be ready to cast off, and she primed the outboard and grabbed its lit tie rubber handle and yanked, and yanked, and yanked again. I was standing by the bow, ready to untie us and leap onboard. But after a few minutes of little adjustments and decreasingly vigorous yanks, Gloria looked at me and said, "April says you're smart. Can you make this work?"

Smart is many things. Machinery is rarely impressed with my mind. But I traded places with her anyway, gave the primer a hopeful push, then pulled the cord with a manly vigor, accomplishing just as much as Gloria had.

When I smelled gas, I shouted, "Flooded!"

The lake was covered with a molecule-deep sheen of unleaded. And I was panting, asking, "Can't we just lift the sails and go?"

But Gloria was worried about her father's boat and skeptical of her own skills. She squinted into the gusting wind, suggesting, "We could wait. For the gas to clear." Then she gestured at the parking lot and the hill beyond, adding, "That's a nice enough restaurant up there. We could wait, in the air conditioning."

So that's what we did.

I probably ordered a Pepsi and something greasy. Something that I wouldn't dare eat today. What I'm sure of is that we had the restaurant pretty much to ourselves, since it was mid-afternoon and the weather was miserable, and a radio or television was playing back in the kitchen, another newsy voice talking too softly to be heard.

We waited for our pop and grease. April held my hand under the table. And sitting across from us, feeling desperate to break the lovers' silence, Gloria mentioned, "You're good at science, I guess. April says she can't understand half what you tell her."

I gave a little laugh, then corrected her. "She understands plenty. After all, she's got an excellent teacher."

April gave me a level stare.

I was still feeling bruised by my failure with the outboard. Seeing an opening, I leaned toward little Gloria, winked, and asked, "Do you know what I know better than almost anyone else in the world?"

She blinked.

Warily, she squeaked, "What?"

I leaned back and grinned, then boasted, "I know quantum mechanics."

She absorbed the boast. Or tried to ignore it. Either way, she suddenly couldn't take her wide eyes off me.

And that's when I launched into one of my standard lectures about the universe and electrons and the bizarre nature of Nature. I assured them that everything about the universe only seems solid and real. Every tiny action and every perfect particle can be described only with a beautiful and ethereal mathematics. Our waitress returned with our food, and I charmed a pen from her, then drew electron clouds and nuclei on a napkin. Then I crisply and efficiently described the venerable EPR Paradox: A particle decays, sending two photons in opposite directions. The spin of those photons remains wonderfully undefined until one or the other is observed. But when that observation is made -- after a journey of two meters or two billion light-years -- the sister photon knows it instantly. If one photon spins one way, the other suddenly spins the other. Momentum is conserved. Across the farthest reaches of the universe, a perfect balance is always maintained.

"Isn't that sweet?" I gushed.

Gloria wore an unnerved, somewhat awestruck expression. But if she made any comment, I can't bring it to mind now.

Eating, I slipped into some of the wilder notions in modern physics. Teleportation. The Many-Worlds Hypothesis. I even mentioned the wanky idea that the human mind acts as a kind of quantum computer, allowing its ghostly electrons to exist in a multitude of parallel universes, our every decision arising out of a grand consensus . . . and April interrupted, asking, "Which one's Penrose? Is he that poor man in the wheelchair?"

It was a joke. Surely.

But my laugh didn't sound convinced, or amused.

Gloria was staring out the window. And with a quiet voice, she remarked, "It's sure getting dark out there."

It was halfway to night, I realized.

With a tight little smile, April reminded me, "You promised good weather."

Gloria must have been thinking of her father's toy. "We should close things up again," she muttered. "Before it rains."

April thought that was a good idea.

So I helped pay and gulped down my drink. From the kitchen, I heard noise about unstable air and a thunderstorm watch. Yet when I stepped outside, the day suddenly brightened considerably.

The restaurant's windows were heavily tinted, I realized. Secretly embarrassed by my misinterpretation.

All of us had a little giggle.

Then I said, "It isn't that bad, is it?" Then sun actually came out again, and I looked into a new wind, strong and from the west, adding, "How about it? Out into the water for a quick once-around?"

THE OUTBOARD still refused to help us. But with the west wind in our faces and no boat traffic in our path, sailing away from the dock seemed manageable. Gloria had her crew lift and secure the mainsail, then the smaller jib. Then we untied the boat and pushed hard and leaped onboard, and Gloria used the heavy tiller to turn us enough for the tall white mainsail to take hold of the wind.

The boat moved smoothly, without haste.

In a minute or two, we were on the open water, and after another two minutes, we had escaped the little bay, entering the wide and shallow main body of the lake. The wind gusted and taut sails made their delicious flap-flapping sounds. Miles of water surrounded us, and the only other boat was a catamaran. A pair of boyish young men came flying past us, wearing long shorts and rippling muscles and broad, carefree smiles. One of them waved at my women friends. The other pulled in the main sheet, lifting one of the pontoons out of the rippling waves. With their friction reduced, they shot across the surface. Beside us. Past us. And in the next moment, vanishing into the glare and dirty foam.

April climbed up on the bow, opening her shirt, exposing a sweet little bikini top that I still remember. I can see her sitting with her bare tanned legs crossed, grinning and infectiously happy. Then she glanced back at us, shouting, "I could get used to this."

Gloria laughed, and laughed.

I was holding the main sheet. Gloria watched the sails and shoreline, and she called out when she was going to come about. I started to explain how sails work. They were wings, in essence. "A very elegant system," I assured. Then I lifted my hand, busy making an illustration out of it, and Gloria touched my forearm, asking, "Did you hear that?"

I stopped talking, listening to the wind.

"Hear . . . what . . .?"

Then, yes. In the distance. A soft but insistent booming sound.

The sky was growing darker again. What had been clouds mixed with sun became thick clouds pushing against each other, rolling in from the north and west, fed by the titanic energies of sunlight and heat and angry water.

I resisted the temptation to lecture about rainstorms.

April scrambled back toward us, shouting, "Shouldn't we get back?"

There was no reason to worry. We had plenty of wind. And plenty of time, judging by the distant thunder. For the next few minutes, nobody talked about anything except the boat and wind, and there was an unwritten law that every statement, no matter how trivial, was accompanied by some optimistic sound.

"We're almost there," we kept telling each other.

Believing it, I'm sure.

We reached the north bay without the tiniest adventure. Maneuvering into the wind ate time, but I still couldn't imagine anything but our safe, uneventful berthing. We had come about for the last time and were making our final approach when the wind, acting out of some abrupt maliciousness, stopped blowing, and the lake responded by instantly turning to a silty glass, smooth and fantastically placid. I looked at the outboard motor with frustration and a sudden irrational anger. But there still wasn't any problem. Our boat was halfway streamlined, and she had momentum to spare. We stood together on the stem, measuring our relentless progress. Then April made a little sound. A squeak, almost. I noticed what looked like a cloud of black smoke pushing its way over the hill to the northwest, and watching the cloud's progress, I asked myself how anything could be so low and moving so fast when the air around us was as still as the dead.

Even then, we should have made it back.

I could see the splinters in the dock. We were that close. But then one of the big cabin cruisers gave an important roar and pulled away from its berth, its wily captain deciding to take his chances on the open water.

The asshole passed between us and safety.

His massive craft had a heavy, sloppy wake that our boat had to roll over, losing most of what remained of her momentum.

But we kept drifting, moving gradually closer.

Desperate to do anything, I climbed up on the bow, grabbing the white nylon rope and judging distance to the end of the dock. Then I glanced back at the two women, watching them talk to each other, sharing their encouragement. Nothing left for me. April had left her shirt unbuttoned. Nervous, her nipples stood erect. She saw me watching and smiled fondly, and she tipped her head and said something to her friend, and something about her expression or the thick hard nipples made me think that I had to be in love with her, because I didn't want to be anywhere in the world but safe in bed, with her.

Once more, I looked ahead, ready to jump.

But our boat was nearly dead in the water. With maybe twenty feet to cross, we didn't have the strength. I remember standing tall, a part of me actually considering the prospect of leaping into the warm brown water and swimming, holding the line in my teeth like some daredevil, towing us across that last little way.

Then came a solid, deafening boom of thunder.

And a new wind fell from the northwest, stinking of cold rain and fresh ozone, blowing hard in an instant, and an instant later, sweeping that angry black cloud across the suddenly jagged face of the lake.

The first raindrops were enormous and icy, and few.

But just when I could hope this was just one of those loud dry summer cells that blows past after a couple minutes, the cold rain soaked my clothes and hair and the screaming wind tried to fling me overboard, then swirled and dropped me back into the stern.

Gloria wore a stunned, embarrassed look.

April asked her twice, at least, what we should do. She put hands on her shoulders, screaming, "What do we need to do?"

The girl opened her mouth, and hesitated.

Then she found her voice, shouting, "The mainsail," almost too softly to be heard. "If we drop it, I can take us in on the jib."

To this day, I have no idea if that was sound advice, or pure foolishness. But it was something that I could do immediately. The little bay had turned to a dirty gray froth, and with cold rain lashing at my skin, I felt alert, and pissed. I crawled back up toward the bow with the wind kicking me from one side, then the other. Gloria was fighting to hold our bow toward the storm. To save our sails. But the shifting gusts kept trying to turn the boat. Stooping under the boom, I managed to reach the mast, and with both hands, I grabbed one of the two ropes wrapped figure-eight around matching aluminum brackets.

I yanked. And again, harder.

It was like trying to pull rope out of hardened concrete. The pressure on the sails was relentless. I didn't have a prayer, and hugging the mast with one arm, I waved, and screamed, and tried to look perfectly helpless.

April was helping Gloria hold the tiller. She saw me and shouted something at her friend, and the wisp of a girl said something, and April left her, scrambling over the cabin to me. Together we grabbed the rope and pulled and cursed, and pulled, twenty or thirty impossibly slow seconds invested in finally loosening the damned rope.

We gave out a big celebratory shout.

Then the jib sail -- the wrong sail -- unceremoniously collapsed on our heads.

The folded fabric instantly caught the wind, partway inflating, and the roaring wet air took the sail sideways, with us, and I grabbed the low railing before I went off the side, kicking at the sail and pissed and terrified, furious with myself for forgetting which sail was which.

Gloria was doing a half-stand, waving with one hand, and the big sailboat was turning fast now, nothing about it clunky or slow.

April? Where was she?

Swept overboard, I guessed. But as the horror struck me, she reappeared, crawling up from under the jib with her hair plastered to her scalp and her opened shirt flapping like a third sail and one hand, then the other, reaching out for anything to hold onto as she began crawling back into the stern.

I followed her. To Gloria.

"We've got to! Drop! The mainsail!"

Our captain looked small and fierce now. Still inadequate, yes. But only because this storm would leave anyone looking that way.

"The rope's too tight," I confessed. "We can't --!"

"We'll cut it!" April promised. Then, "Where's a knife?"

"Kitchen?" Gloria replied.

April dove belowdeck, opened a tiny cupboard and spilled a tray of hand-me-down silverware on the stairs, and she grabbed a steak knife and came up looking at both of us. Gloria was still fighting to keep our bow into the wind. I remember thinking that I didn't want to climb back up on top again. I just couldn't. Then Gloria touched my arm and held tight, and shouting in a voice that I could barely make out, she told me, "Go below! Get the life jackets! Under the seat!"

I had a job. A mission. I couldn't have felt more relieved.

April climbed toward the bow. I stumbled into the cabin, into that pool of calm dry air, then began throwing cushions off the seats, looking into cubbyholes one at a time. What sounded simple turned into its own little nightmare. I couldn't find anything that resembled a life jacket. There were plastic dinner plates and rolled up sleeping bags and a soccer ball and goggles and snorkels and a single lost tennis shoe. Halfway around the cabin, I gave up, coming back to the doorway long enough to shout, "Where?"

Gloria said something. Said something and pointed.

And I went below again, flinging away the last cushions, the promised life jackets laughing at me from the final cubbyhole.

They were small and worn, their orange fabric fading to piss.

I handed Gloria her jacket before I looked up. April was sawing away at the taut rope, clinging to the mast with her bare legs and free arm. I'd just started to shout and wave, hoping she'd come for her jacket, and the line parted and the big aluminum boom fell with the wet sail collapsing on top of it. Then the swirling wind inflated both sails and yanked the boom sideways, and our bow followed, boat and Gloria having no choice but to let the next wild gust shove us across the open water.

She screamed for April.

I screamed.

We couldn't see any trace of her. She'd been swept over this time, I was sure, and I felt sick and lost and cowardly, even when some selfish piece of me was glad that I wasn't the one who was swimming.

But as before, I was wrong.

Because a bare arm pushed its way out from under the flapping mainsail, followed by April. She even managed to halfway stand, flinging the knife overboard before kneeling again and grabbing the boom, climbing along it without a shred of grace or the smallest whiff of bravery.

"God," she muttered, tumbling down to us. "Oh, God!"

"I'm sorry, sorry!" Gloria wailed. "My fault . . . everything is . . .!"

Then April said something, just to her, and Gloria seemed to nod, then told both of us, "Sit. Get the jackets on. Please!"

By then, we were flying across the water.

There weren't any landmarks. Looking forward or backward, I couldn't see any shoreline that I knew or that I didn't know. Both sails kept inflating, and the wind seemed to strengthen again, and I was sitting on the built-in bench next to April, the shoving wind at our backs, cold hands clinging to the gunwales, eyes straight ahead now, noticing an odd geometric regularity -- a long horizontal line -- emerging from the blackness.

I nudged April. Pointed, shouted.

Gloria was sitting next to April. She bent back and looked over us, and with a wasted hopefulness said, "The dock again! We're almost there!"

It wasn't, and we weren't.

But I was helpless, having no choice but to believe that we were going to get some second chance now. Even when I knew the winds were wrong. Even when that flat something was too high off the water to be any dock. I kept finding this prickly little optimism inside me. Right up to the moment when I happened to look over my shoulder, watching in astonishment as a tilted orange buoy streaked past us.

But the buoy was anchored, of course.

We were the ones moving.

I remembered.

Then the pounding rain let up just enough, showing us that the looming flat surface was covered with boulders, and I screamed at Gloria, "Come about!" I said, "That's the dam! We've got to come about!"

She seemed to hesitate.

I was ready to pull the tiller from her hands. A little mutiny.

But then she gave it a shove and our clumsy quick boat managed to change directions, the boom flew over our heads and the sail dragged after it, and we climbed to the opposite benches and sat and held tight, instantly regaining our lost speed. We slipped past a second orange buoy, missing it by nothing, and the women stared at the apparition with the same expression that I must have worn.

Stunned, wild astonishment.

In a universe drenched with massless light and instantaneous quantum events, we were streaking along at our own considerable speed.

A ROUTINE, PAINFUL and cola, claimed us.

We would blindly follow one accidental course until some ragged shoreline or the riprapped dam threatened to claim us. Then Gloria would use her entire body to push the tiller, and I'd wrestle with the boom, and we would scramble to the opposite side of the boat as we came about. Better each time, I'd like to think. Smoother and easier, and better.

Somewhere in the middle of the lake, the storm, and my numbed recollections, April screamed a question. I heard the question mark, not the words. But Gloria understood her, and she looked across the torn black water, then shouted to her friend, "I don't know! What it is!"

What was what?

I tried to follow their lines of sight, squinting and seeing nothing but a seething bleak grayness. And then, color. Motion. A rectangular sense of order that lasted for an instant, then narrowed again, and vanished, before whatever it was suddenly returned to being a rectangle.

"What?" each of us asked.

Then lightning poured over our heads, and after an instant of wondering if our mast would catch the lightning, I realized that I could see farther now. And better. And the mysterious rectangle was transformed into parallel blue bars with a pole stuck between.

"It's that other boat!" Gloria screamed.

"The catamaran," I muttered, in horror.

There was no trace of the chiseled crew. The abandoned vessel was walking across the lake. The mast and shredded sail would catch the wind and fall over, and the pontoons would rise up. Then the boat would turtle for a few moments, hanging upside down until waves or a lashing gust lifted the windward pontoon again, the wind flipping the mast skyward again, that eerie circle complete.

A stunned sorry quiet held us by the throats.

Again, the wind found new strength and rage. Again, the world shrank to a screeching little circle of gray, and our boat suddenly tried to flip over on top of us. Our tall mast was nearly horizontal, bending like a fishing pole, and it dove into the waves and pushed deep, and we found ourselves standing, feet set on the opposite gunwales, our heads and shoulders rearing back as far as possible, out of instinct, helping our invisible, blessed keel.

Finally, the keel's weight won out.

We slowly lifted to a steep, endurable pitch.

A long low shoreline emerged from the maelstrom. We came about again. I held the boom until we were settled, then I flung it away and grabbed the gunwales. April was talking. In a private little scream, she was giving Gloria encouragement. Praise. Nothing was her fault, April promised. This was just how things worked out. . . .

I stopped listening, my thoughts contracting into my own narrow world.

My arms ached. I was colder than I'd ever been. And worst of all, a powerful boredom was undercutting everything, including my will to live. For a long moment, I contemplated abandoning the boat. If I could leap far enough and not get tangled in the various tangled lines, I could float in the summer-warmed lake water, kicking lazily and depending on my jacket's buoyancy until my feet found some muddy shore.

Except the life jacket was worn, soaked through, and designed to fit a ten-year-old. And when I bent low and shouted my idea to the others, I was met by lost looks, then April putting her mouth to my ear, remarking, "She can't swim! Not well enough!"

In this weather, who could?

But I didn't say what I was thinking. Secretly, I was wondering what I could say that would make April jump with me, leaving Gloria on her own.

We came about again, and again.

A hundred times, maybe. When you can't measure the passage of time, you can't count even simple things. It wouldn't have taken much to make me believe that we'd been slashing our way across the lake for a century. This was my entire life, my singular existence. It had always been, and everything else was fantasy, and this is where I would stay until the lake won, suffocating me.

Suddenly the wind weakened.

And instantly there came a brightness flooding through the air, sunlight fighting its way through heavy clouds.

Too soon, we celebrated.

I looked at April's eyes and Gloria's eyes and let them see the hopefulness in mine. Which was dangerous, I realized instantly. A blunder. Tricked, I let my body relax and my mind let go of its necessary terror. And then the sunlight was shut out again, and the ram came in fresh sheets, bolts of blue-hot lightning making the drenched air sputter and explode. Following the thunder was a huge burst of wind. Like a giant amoral hand, it slapped at our little vessel, and the flimsy long mast tilted until it dove beneath the surface, lake water pouring over the gunwales and around our feet and us rearing back again, fighting uselessly, everyone knowing that the boat would stop dead and turtle itself and we would be trapped beneath it and in the panic and confusion we would elbow each other and claw at the lines, fighting to hold our last breaths until the burning in our chests forced us to exhale, and drown.

Then for no particular reason, the wind softened.

And our boat, with a belly full of brown water and foam, found just enough strength to lift its mast again, righting itself with a clumsy majesty.

The next gust would kill us.

I absorbed that insight calmly. Stoically. Even when the sky lightened again, I didn't believe anything but my own despair.

Glancing over a shoulder, I saw shreds of blue sky and a grassy green shoreline decorated with little trees bending low in the still furious wind, and big trees shattered at the trunk. A gulf of three decades lies between me and that moment, but I can still see those suffering trees and the sunlight in shifting columns, golden as it is in good poetry and bad, and a sudden gratefulness found me, and I let out an enormous shout.

In another few moments, the awful storm had passed.

In thirty seconds, Gloria and April had managed to turn us toward the shoreline, and I climbed up on the bow and leaped off into the soft stinking mud as we ran aground, and, trembling, I carried the bow line as far as it would reach, then simply dropped it.

The women jumped after me.

They were giggling. Dancing, nearly. And then staring at me, they put on expressions of amused horror.

"Your lips," said one.

"Purple," said the other.

I was that cold. Rain born near the stratosphere had lowered my core temperature, and my body shivered and hugged itself. Maybe for the only time in my life, I wished I was a female, coddled by that extra layer of sweet fat. More than anything, I needed to escape the chilling wind.

On cold clumsy legs, I ran uphill to an ugly public rest room, stepped inside and kept right on shivering. Eventually April came after me. She said something about them going to look for help. "Hurry," was my advice. To make heat, I began jumping in place. Whenever I thought of the lake or the storm, my shivering would worsen. Uncontrollable, terrifying shaking. And in the middle of that show, a young boy wandered in, and seeing a purple-lipped man wearing a kid's life jacket and leaping up and down in one place, he had the good sense to say nothing, backing out before I showed him anything even stranger.

Gloria and April found a retired couple whose RV had been parked in a sheltered place. April came back for me, and the three of us stripped and toweled dry and put on old spare clothes inside the RV's tiny bedroom. One at a time. And we thanked the couple profusely and drank buckets of lukewarm hot chocolate, and we explained what had happened, rehearsing our adventure for the first time, the old couple too polite to say what they were thinking: That we were idiots for trying to sail in this sort of weather.

Eventually we noticed that not only had the storm passed, but that late afternoon was bright and clear and wondrously calm.

A husky fisherman passing in a husky bass boat volunteered to tow our disheveled boat back to the docks.

April and Gloria stayed onboard, handling the tiller and the tow line.

I rode in the bass boat, monitoring the line at that end. After our elaborate, untraceable zigzag, we'd ended up on the south shore of the lake. We'd covered miles, surely. When I asked the fisherman how long the storm lasted, he glanced at his watch, then guessed thirty minutes. Maybe forty, if you counted the first and last raindrops. Was that all? I shook my head and asked about the winds They had to have been hurricane-force, I mentioned. With a knowing shrug, he admitted that some gusts were probably seventy-plus. The worst of them were. Which wasn't as awful as I'd hoped to hear, frankly. So I tried to heighten my sense of accomplishment, mentioning the boys on the catamaran. What happened to poor them? And the fisherman chuckled and said, "Oh, they're well enough. I already talked to them. They beached before the crap hit. Like they should have. They just didn't tie things down right, and their toy got blown back out to sea."

If we spoke about anything else, I don't remember it. Mostly I just watched the tow line, and occasionally, I'd catch a glimpse of April and Gloria sitting together in the sailboat's stern, talking between themselves as both held the old tiller.

The storm had shoved the docks around, but the damage didn't look too severe. We tied up and Gloria gave the fisherman ten bucks for his trouble, then we worked on the sailboat until Gloria felt ready to leave it. I put the seat cushions back in place, and the outboard was stored again and the sails were tied down. Relocking the cabin door, Gloria promised herself that she would come out tomorrow, right after church, and clean up the rest of the mess. Before her father had a chance to see it.

April promised that she'd come out with her and help.

Driving us home, I made a point of turning the radio back to their favorite pop station. Because I was feeling so warm and glad about being alive.

But after a minute or two of raw noise, April turned it off, telling me, "Thanks. But I think we'd rather just listen to the road."

Pulling up in front of April's, I grinned and winked, saying, "I'm starved. How about some dinner?"

April was wearing an old man's spare clothes. A big shirt with its sleeves rolled up and a pair of loose, badly stained jeans. Yet she looked more beautiful, and more desirable, than ever. Mysterious brown eyes stared at my eyes, almost smiling. Then as Gloria climbed out of the back seat, April told me, "Later," with a certain tone.

"Later?" I said.

"Sure. Later."

I said my good-byes, got a quick kiss, and drove home.

Half an hour later and feeling starved, I called April. She didn't answer. So I invented an innocuous story that explained why she wasn't home, and I showered, and half an hour later, I called again. And again, nobody answered. So I put on my own clothes and walked the five blocks to her place. It was an old house. Her car was parked in the street. She lived on the second floor, in a tiny efficiency. I climbed the stairs and hit the door a couple times, then waited, hearing nothing. But it was a nothing filled with potential. Much like our entire universe is. So after waiting a little while longer, I went back down the creaking stairs and opened the front door and let it shut again. Then I crept upstairs on cat feet, scarcely breathing, sneaking up as close to her door as I dared.

I could hear them muttering quietly.

There was a tone of guilt.

A whispered joke.

Then, shame-tainted laughter.

Eventually another noise seeped through the apartment door, and in my mind, I saw exactly what was happening, and what must have been happening for a long while, and despite all of my ego and pride saying otherwise, I knew perfectly well that there wasn't any room for me on the other side of the door.

I crept downstairs again.

Slipped outside.

It was a gorgeous evening, regardless. The sun was setting and the western sky was a spectacle of orange and salmon and gold, and the surface of every object, no matter how bland, prosaic and drab, glistened with a vividness that I had never seen before, or since. Every tree and house and street lamp and slab of concrete was laced with a calm magic, a spirit net just thick within them, but also plainly, achingly visible to me.

And thick within me, too.

I was weeping as I walked, sure. But I wasn't particularly unhappy, either. After everything, even emotional pain seemed like a gift. A blessing. Sacred, and worthy of being cherished by its grateful recipient.

People like to ask me, "Where did you dream it up? This theory of yours. This passage-of-souls business."

Somewhere between April's apartment and mine, genius happened.

One moment, I was thinking how I felt like a changed person. A wiser, older, better person, surely. And the very next instant, I questioned if this was really the same world that I was born into this morning. Or had the storm, with its wind and lightning and its torturing fear, carried me to a similar but distinctly altered Earth?

What if all life is that way? It isn't just the electrons in our heads that wander through the quantum sea, but it's our souls, too. They drift through an ocean of potential Earths, and people under stress, as I was that day, find themselves swept away on a slightly larger, grander voyage than most. . . .

People ask me, "Where?"

Typically, I don't give them anything so vivid as the truth.

But it was somewhere between her apartment and mine. Closer to mine than hers, I'm mostly certain. And nearly twenty years later, when my colleagues and I finally invented a proper mathematics to describe this fantastic business, my own first calculation involved mapping how far I had likely traveled during that summer storm.

If Creation is a respectable ocean, I moved the length of a single water molecule.

Which is a very long ways, indeed.

Three years ago, I shared the Nobel Prize with three authentic geniuses. Two I worked with and depended upon, and a third, a genuine savant, who had published a very similar theory that he'd built entirely on his own.

This autumn, I visited my old school.

I was the returning hero, naturally. Small colleges don't get many Nobel laureates, and it has to make the most of each one of us. I wore the honor with a practiced ease, naturally. I told old school stories at a special banquet. As a favor to the President, I twisted the arms of the richer alumni. As a favor to my old department, I gave a dry long lecture to the physicists and hope-to-be's who were gathered together in the crowded and humid lecture hall. And as a favor to everyone, I stayed charming for the entire weekend, and sober enough on the scale of modern manners.

Oh, and by the way.

I saw her at the banquet. From a distance.

She'd always struck me as someone who would age well. And she had. Softer and grayer, but no middle-aged thickness yet. Even across a large room, I recognized her face and her body, and how she sat with her shoulders level and her back straight, and how she held her glass, too. And staring at that apparition, I found myself thinking, of all things, that I honestly couldn't remember any genuine reason why she had generated anything special inside me.

The woman sitting beside her wasn't Gloria. Too large in the chest and the hips. Too young by twenty years, at least. And prettier than just about anyone else in that enormous, overcrowded room.

Later that night, the pretty woman wasn't with her.

Some awestruck faculty members took me out to their favorite drinking hole. The same bar we used in my time; the only cheap beer within staggering distance of campus. We walked in together, and I saw April sitting alone at the bar, and after making some inadequate excuse, I took the stool next to her and smiled and said, "This is later. I guess."

She stared at me, her face surprisingly calm.

Empty, almost.

"You said 'later,'" I explained. "The last time we talked."

Without embarrassment, she said, "I tried to call you. And I came to your door --"

"Five times, I think. At least while I was home."

"Were you?" she asked.

"I'd already figured things out for myself."

She seemed a little bit uncomfortable, which made me happy. But after a long sip of beer, she gathered herself, then mentioned, "I never did leave this town."

The alumni handbook had already told me as much.

But instead of admitting any interest, I lust shrugged anti said, "Oh, yeah?"

She watched me. Smiling, but not smiling, either.

I ordered my own beer and glanced over my shoulder. The professors had claimed a long table, and they were plainly impatient, the end seat reserved for their honored guest.

"It seems you were right about a lot of things," she told me.

"Name something else."

"You promised you were going to be important. For instance." She finished her beer and licked her upper lip dry, then with a tone that I never anticipated, she asked, "Do you think it will work? That machine they're building at Stanford?"

I must have seemed puzzled.

"The Guppy," she told me. Then, "You have heard about it. Haven't you?"

"Absolutely," I growled.

What my colleagues and I proved is that the sentient mind isn't just a quantum computer; it also possesses its own quantum vagueness. Each of us drifts among trillions upon trillions of basically identical earths. It's a relentless, mostly invisible process. But following a sudden stress, the mind perceives minuscule changes. Like the soldier who returns from war to find that his home doesn't feel quite the same. That things are not quite right. Family and friends have the correct names and faces, and his boyhood room remains just as he left it. But the poor fellow has migrated a fraction of a micron, and what he feels is that disruption inside his very soul.

The Guppy is a special chamber. A human will be sealed inside, then subjected to a variety of highly structured, incredibly complex pulses. In simple terms, the mind's electrons will be fooled. And like a tiny fish, that mind will travel a full fat centimeter across the Quantum Sea. Hundreds of times farther than any human travels in any lifetime. Far enough that the mind will find itself on an Earth with millions of changes that can be seen, and measured, and recorded for the benefit of High Science.

The best guess is that if The Guppy works, the human subject will find himself sitting in an identical chamber in a slightly different Stanford campus.

And we, meaning the researchers watching events from here, will find ourselves hosting someone who is almost identical to our brave volunteer.

"Are you working on that project?" she asked.

"I visit. On occasion. And they usually give me some sort of tour."

Worry weakened her smile.

"You probably don't remember. But I'm not much with hardware," I admitted. "And this is very much a hardware sort of project."

"But do you have any pull with them?"

Finally, I realized what she was saying.

Shaking my head, I said, "Sorry. I honestly can't help you."

Her shoulders dropped, a vulnerability taking hold.

"So tell me why?" I had to say. "Why would you want to leave this world? Are things that bad for you?"

"According to you," she replied, "we're always leaving anyway." I didn't say anything.

"According to your theory, we're just souls drifting around inside some endless ocean of possibility."

"That's the simple version. Yes."

She nodded, waiting for the will to get up and leave me.

So I just said it. "I thought I loved you once," I muttered. "But you loved her instead. And in the end, neither of us got what we wanted."

Now she found the will, the strength, hands on the bar as she eased herself to her feet. She was a practiced drunk, standing with a sloppy grace.

With a dry quiet voice, she told me, "Gloria died."

"What?" I sputtered.

"Eight years ago. She was driving to work. She was late and ran a stop light, and a delivery truck collided with her." April said the words while looking past me, wiping one eye with the back of her hand. "That's what happened to her. To us."

Shit.

Then she looked at me with an odd half-grin, remarking, "But it was worth asking, I thought. About volunteering."

What could I say?

"Sorry," I tried.

"Sorry about what?" she growled. "There are plenty of earths where I'm the one who gets to ride your machine. Isn't that right? And there's trillions more where Gloria's still alive. And who knows how many where she and I drowned out on Two Timber Lake, together. And on all those other possible earths, what? What? On most of them, according to you, we aren't even dreamed of. Isn't that what it boils down to?"

I whispered, "Yes."

April was weeping. She was leaning against the bar, wiping at the tears that kept streaming down her face.

Again, I said, "I'm sorry."

Then she straightened up and dried her face one last time, and glancing over at my table, she said, "Your friends are waiting for you. Go on."

"Sorry," I whispered.

"Go away."

So I left her. For the second time in my life, I didn't have any choice. But as I approached my table, watching those adoring faces smiling at a great man, it occurred to me that none of us ever really wanders blind in this sea. What lures us across the darkest, coldest gulf was suddenly obvious. And with that, I smiled too, and sat, and let this little earth warm me for the moment with its charms. . . .