But there was that look on Ann’s face as she recalled the incident, that look of someone in full possession of a moment of her past, alive with the upwelling— clearly she remembered it too— and yet remembered something different than he had. One of them had to be wrong, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

“Could we really,” he said, and had to stop and try again. “Could we really have been two such maladroit people as to both go out— intending to— to reveal ourselves—”

Ann laughed. “And both go away feeling rebuffed by the other?” She laughed again. “Why sure.”

He laughed as well. They turned their faces to the sky and laughed.

But then Sax shook his head, rueful to the point of agony. Whatever had happened— well. No way of knowing, now. Even with his memory upwelling like an artesian fountain, like one of the cataclysmic outbreak floods themselves, there was still no way to be sure what had really happened.

Which gave him a sudden chill. If he could not trust these upwelling memories to be true— if one so crucial as this one was now cast in doubt— what then of the others, what about Hiroko there in the storm, leading him to his car, hand on his wrist— could that too be. . . . No. That hand on his wrist. But Ann’s hand had jerked away from him, a somatic memory just as solidly real, just as physical, a kinetic event remembered in his body, in the pattern of cells for as long as he should live. That one had to be true; they both had to be true.

And so?

So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future— his life— what then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color. A thread of thought lost in the act of thinking. Reality so tenuous, so barely there; was there nothing they could hold to?

He tried to say some of this, stammered, failed, gave up.

“Well,” Ann said, apparently understanding him. “At least we remember that much. I mean, we agree that we went out there. We had ideas, they didn’t work out. Something happened that we probably neither understood at the time, so it’s no surprise we can’t remember it properly now, or that we recall it differently. We have to understand something to remember it.”

“Is that true?”

“I think so. It’s why two-year-olds can’t remember. They feel things like crazy, but they don’t remember them because they don’t really understand them.”

“Perhaps.”

He wasn’t sure that was how memory worked. Early childhood memories were eidetic images, like exposed photographic plates. But if it was true, then he was perhaps all right; for he had definitely understood Hiroko’s appearance in the storm, her hand on his wrist. These things of the heart, in the violence of the storm. . . .