For Yeli’s service they cast some portion of his ashes off in another swiftly rising balloon, launching it from the same point of the breakwater they had launched Spencer, standing out where they could look back and see all Odessa. Afterward they retreated to Maya and Michel’s apartment. Praxis indeed, the way they held each other then. They went through Michel’s scrapbooks, talking about Olympus Mons, ‘61, Underhill. The past. Maya ignored all that and served them tea and cakes, until only Michel and Sax and Nadia remained in the apartment. The wake was over; she could relax. She stopped at the kitchen table, put her hand on Michel’s shoulder, and looked over it at a grainy black-and-white photo, stained by what looked like spots of spaghetti sauce and coffee. A faded picture of a young man grinning right at the camera, grinning with a confident knowing smile.

“What an interesting face,” she said.

Under her hand Michel stiffened. Nadia had a stricken look. Maya knew she had said something wrong, even Sax looked somehow pinched, almost distraught. Maya stared at the young man in the photo, stared and stared. Nothing came to her.

She left the apartment. She walked up the steep streets of Odessa, past all the whitewash and the turquoise doors and shutters, the cats and the terra-cotta flower boxes, until she was high in the town, and could look out over the indigo plate of the Hellas Sea for many kilometers. As she walked she cried, but without knowing why, a curious desolation. And yet this too had happened before.

Sometime later she found herself in the west part of the upper town. There was the Paradeplatz Park, where they had staged The Blood Knot, or had it been The Winter’s Tale. Yes, The Winter’s Tale. But there would be no coming back to life for them.

Ah well. Here she was. She made her way slowly down the long staircase alleyways, down and down toward their building, thinking about plays, her spirits a bit lighter as she descended. But there was an ambulance there at the apartment gate, and feeling cold, as if ice water had been dashed over her, she veered away and continued past the building, down to the corniche.