Patricia looked peaceful, her arms spread a little, like a snow angel. Her feet pointed down. She wore no shoes. Her socks had pom-poms over the heels. Her shadow fell right over Laurence’s eyes, and her path converged with the gantry that had the precious wormhole machine on it. He tried to get her attention, but she was too far away now. By the time Patricia reached the top, she was a dot. But what happened next was easy to see from the ground: Lightning poured out of the sky, from a cloud that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Slash after slash, until smoke floated down. The light blinded him, but he couldn’t look away, and he screamed Patricia’s name with his hoarse, smoke-singed throat. Laurence could barely stand because he felt like his center of gravity was being crushed by seeing her dear shadow against the hideous white glare. Cinders and twisted pieces of the wormhole machine rained down and nearly hit Laurence’s hot wet face.

Book Four

BOOK FOUR

Chapter 28

28

EVERYBODY WAS SINGING madrigals. Tight staggered harmonies that rang with a lightness that had sharp pieces of melancholy embedded in it. Quartets, quintets, and bigger groups went door-to-door in residential areas or barged into bare-bones eateries, holding sheet music and wearing modest black linen-cotton outfits. A pitch pipe sounding a single note was your only warning that your heart was about to be wrecked. “Now Is the Month of Maying,” “O Morte,” even crazy Carlo Gesualdo. People would stop whatever they were doing and listen to madrigals, until they were tear-soaked. Something about the way the trebles and altos would introduce a soaring melodic line, and then the tenors or basses would come in to fuck it up, was like the musical knife-twist you never saw coming. After the flood, everyone agreed that madrigals were the soundtrack of our lives.

Deedee dropped out of her ska-punk band and joined an eight-person madrigal chorus. She had a clot somewhere deep inside her that was connected to the people she had lost in the flood, or might lose in the aftermath, and the endless conversations where everybody compared notes on their respective tragedies only made her feel shittier. Just saying the words “My brother is still missing” made Deedee want to throw up and then head-butt whoever had asked. She needed an alternative to the dull repetition of facts, a way to share her uncut heartbreak without any particulars, and to her amazement she found it in these strange old songs about doomed lovers.

She was heading for the door, after putting on her white blouse and black skirt (from an old waitress gig) plus black high-tops, and she found herself staring at Patricia’s empty bedroom. A matter-of-fact off-white rectangle, it looked smaller without furniture. Scars in the wall and floor, where a bed had dug in.