FEELING SLEEPLESS, HAPPY, PUZZLED, John collected his belongings in the morning gray of their many-bedded room. Laurie had already straightened the blankets of the pallet where they’d lain—as if it mattered, and the people wouldn’t burn everything. Now her head was stooped while she reordered the contents of her bag, the fall of her hair parting to show the back of her neck and a pale line of scalp.

“Shouldn’t we check about the koiyl market here?” she said, fishing for a tissue and then blowing her nose.

He shook his head. After last night he wanted to move on quickly. “The leaf hasn’t been harvested yet. Who would there be to talk to?”

“As you say.” Laurie walked over to him. She put her arms across his shoulders and looked up at him. Her scent was dark, real, sweet. He could feel the air from the arrowslit brushing his hands as he placed them on her warm hips. He could feel the whole planet revolving.

“You didn’t sleep much,” she said, “did you? I mean, after we had…” She paused, careful. “After making love.”

“I just liked watching you.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back at him with her green eyes. Then she kissed him.

Just watching you. Was this, he wondered, the first lie?

It was not like any other morning as they carried their bags down through Tiir’s tumbling, hay-scented streets to the van; it was brighter, the wind seemed sharper, with Laurie walking beside him. And as she hummed, and her eyes followed a kitten in a handcart, and she spoke to the guard at the walled gate and jumped the low stone wall of the field where the van was parked, he felt the tug of part of him moving with her.

After an hour of rattling and banging along the ill-made road, Laurie stopped the van for him to take over the driving. Later, he stopped for her. The rhythm of the journey began. Black dead trees surrounded them, and the reek of old fires. The burnt-out forest seemed endless, but they pushed on, neither of them wanting to spend the night in this place. Finally the trees faded to ashen scrub, and John and Laurie rejoined the bigger highway where the trucks and the grainy lights of the phosphate mines streamed in the distance. Reaching Sadiir after dark, they were stared at and followed by the same children, shown the same room in the same and only hotel by the same hotelkeeper.

A large and amazingly ugly insect scuttled into the wall when John and Laurie pushed the mattresses together. But there was an appealing domesticity about rearranging this filthy room. Here, far from anything, he almost wanted people to know. And the bed-making process was arousing, too. Laurie noticed and laughed. He hugged her, and the room seemed to brighten.

After they made love and all the lights went off, he lay tracing his tongue from the tip of her left breast to her shoulder, tasting her sweat and the charcoal of the forest. Finally she rolled away from him and padded out of the room and along the corridor to wash herself. He sat up and shook a few dead bugs off the sheets, hoping that this time his own phylum-specific secretions would be enough protection for both of them. This truly was a different life, a different way of seeing. Then she came back and lay beside him, propped on one elbow, smelling of soap.

“You’re not entirely new to this,” she said.

“There were times before I was a priest. A girl called Jan-is…” He frowned, unable to think of her last name. “She had a sense of the ridiculous, a sense of humor. It made up, I suppose, for what I didn’t have myself. She was just someone I knew. We had the same friends and went to the same parties and dances. She’d look at me, and we’d share a joke at the stupidity of it all, which no one else saw. We’d be sniggering, and everyone would wonder why…”

He smiled, gazing up. Feeling, even now in this distant room, a ticklish, silvery bubble of mirth ready to rise and break inside him. “So we used to dance together, and of course people started thinking of us as a pair. And we began to kiss outside in the dusk the way the other kids did.” He paused. This was at the same time—it had to be—that he was seeing Father Gulvenny at the church, debating the meaning of existence, looking for the fire within. Also the time when he lost hope that Hal would ever recover. He wondered how it was that your life became arranged into these fragments. “I’d go around to her house in the evenings. We’d walk out down the drive holding hands, in our best clothes. I don’t know…” he said, trying hard to remember those pastel evenings, Janis with her long chin and that gleam in her eye. But, along with her last name, so much had slipped from his memory.

“You made love with her?”

“Yes, but it was never serious. The joke was that we probably had more fun, physically, than the others who were so fumbling and intense, so ashamed to say what they wanted out of fear they might lose the person they wanted to do it with…” He smiled. “But I only realized that much later on, when I had to listen to people’s problems as a priest. Janis and I drifted apart. We made love, but we were never really lovers. There wasn’t much to keep us together.”

“And Hal? Was he in a coma then, when you were seeing Janis?”

“Hal was pretty much then as he is now.” John took a breath, feeling the tensions of his flesh where it touched Laurie’s, the cramp that was coming into his muscles, the itch of some insect dying in the sweat that had pooled beneath his spine.

“Did he mean to kill himself?”

“I don’t know.”

“If not suicide, what would you call it?”

“An accident—that’s what we always called it. Hal’s still alive, and it was an accident. No one’s ever thought of a better word. My mother’s holding on, still hoping—and hope can become a kind of addiction. She’s like me, I suppose. She still wants to know why…”

“Perhaps he just gave up.”

“But if someone like Hal gives up,” John said, “how are the rest of us supposed to keep going?”