The evening before Lyra burns, out of a land in this world to a land in the next, a soul is returned to Earth after wandering the lonely towns of other galaxies, and against the breast of her new mother weeps in awe before losing memory of all that time and all that space; a second later a bomb explodes on a bus in the Holy Land, killing both a scholar of invisibility and a lovesick girl still swooning over the streets of Paris and a man there she’ll never see again; then, in the Indian Ocean, a young dolphin cries for his parents but his voice becomes lost in the din of a ship carrying two honeymooners on their way to the Maldives; for hours a cult in Maine performs a strange nude dance in the woods, and despite their leader’s pathological claims, the wind is pretty in their hair, which is long on both the men and the women; just now a homeless man on his makeshift bed of blankets and rags beneath a wintry New York night finishes the great American book about the poor man who became rich and nevertheless died for money; and at the same time, in Phoenix, Arizona, thousands witness a parade of alien lights pass over the desert for the first and last time.
And here a young man and a young woman lie beside each other, mostly skin, all touching, dreaming one dream. I open my eyes; we are them.
The sea is great beyond this boat. We have floated far away from Lyra. I am curled into him. His breath in my ear is slow, deep. How many times will we get to do this, this simplest of things between lovers? Once, never again. He murmurs in his dreams. His hand is cupped over mine, big as a bear’s. I open my eyes and turn my neck. It is him. My beauty. His hair is more luscious than in memory, thick and full of curls. His eyes are closed, the lashes over them flutter. He is wearing his brown trousers. His chest is bare. The blue shirt still cast ashore. “Gabriel,” I whisper. “Have a look.” The night above us is not like nights seen from Earth. Meteorites burn in every direction. There is no atmosphere. “Gabriel,” I whisper again as I rise. There are other boats around us, in the thousands, boats of dreaming lovers. The sea is shallow, and just some feet below us, illuminating the sea in sapphire, is his fairy throne. This is the entrance to the land of the dead.
“From here you can almost touch it,” Gabriel says, but his voice is no longer in the boat. It arrives upon me like water. “So touch it.”