Frances would probably have had an elegant and corrosive response to that. I only sighed and took six empty bottles back to the kitchen.

The next day the weather was beautiful, in a way it rarely was so close to midsummer: warm, but full of fresh wind and high, white clouds. Theo and I spent almost the whole of it in a shed-turned-machine-shop, overhauling a generator. We came out, sweaty and filthy, and discovered the tail end of what we’d missed just as the sun touched, blinding, on the treetops. Theo scrambled to the top rail of the fence and sat with his face to the dazzle, his eyes closed. I didn’t have the energy to climb; I just leaned.

“This is okay,” Theo said. “You know, for the boondocks.”

“Philistine,” I said contentedly.

He twisted on his rail and looked down at me. “You like it, don’t you? Here, I mean.”

“I don’t… know. That is, yeah, of course I like it. But if you’re saying, am I going to stay here, then I don’t know.”

“There’s not enough tape here,” he said to the field before us.

“No. But I don’t know what to think about that anymore, either.”

“What’s to think about it?”

“Maybe nothing. But I don’t want to suck my living out of the past like a leech, Theo. I’m afraid of it. I’m still afraid of all the stuff I woke up knowing. It was put there to be useful over sixty years ago, so why should it be any good to anyone now?”

“It’s been useful,” he said, ruffled, “and it is useful. So who cares why?”

I sighed. “I do. Because I’ve been useful, Theo, and I am useful, I think. But I popped to the surface fifteen years ago wide awake and full of trivia, and now I want to know why.”

“Zeus and Damballah?” said Theo in a determinedly neutral tone, as if he thought someone ought to bring it up.

“Oh, sure. Or how about — was it the Blue Fairy? Who zapped Pinocchio? No strings on me.” I stopped, because that way lay self-pity, and I was trying to kick the habit.

“I always thought you were more like the Scarecrow,” said Theo. “You know — ‘If I only had a brain.’ ”

“This from the man who watched Guns II six times. What do you want to do?”

He knew I wasn’t talking about the next ten minutes. “Get everything at the Underbridge to work at once.”

“Then I guess you’re not an atheist.”

“Hell, to do that, I’d have to be God. I’d like to record those drummers who played the other night. Man, if I’d had a DAT recorder… ” He sat quiet for a moment; then he peeled all his brown hair back from his face with both hands. “I want to go back, Sparrow. And I can’t. And I hate it.” He did, too. It was in his suddenly harrowed voice, the desperate closing of his fingers. Those things sealed my mouth and robbed my mind of comforting phrases.