“No,” Dice said. “I know you. You need to get lost before you will listen. Don’t worry, I’m smiling.” He took my hand and put it on his mouth, and I felt his smile, his prickly skin, his lips, his slick teeth. He removed my hand. “She will die eventually, everyone does. And for you, the right moment for her to die was in the winter.”

He explained that all moments could be lived at once, that time is not a daisy chain but a big stack, each moment stacking on top of the next. You’re always watched over by your future self. So your departed, Dice said, are always with you, and a moment of love is as good as a lifetime of love. “You know, like ice cores,” Dice said. “The ice cores of Lake Vostok. Deep down where the pressure is high, an arm’s length could be a thousand years.” And the pristine lake beneath the ice had been sealed off long before the Argentavis magnificens, with a wingspan nearly as long as a school bus, upwelled from the smaller birds and began to jump off cliffs to force its heavy body into flight. He subsided into silence and I felt that through my tears I could perceive every color that made up the light in the stars.

He told me to sit up and he hugged me, swaying back and forth. His body was hot as fuel and very hard. I could feel his eyelashes on the nape of my neck. I shivered, but with strength—a starting motor. Later, I’d think through his words and I would find them incomprehensible. But up in that empty field, the stars like a cataract thundering down around us, the grass blackly shimmering, all of my attention channeled toward Dice, I felt I’d found the truth of things, which was, like everything with Dice, lonely and compassionate.

“I need my sons and daughters to make sacrifices for the land, to face pain for the land,” he said. “Can you face pain?”

“I think so,” I said. All it takes is a moment of fearlessness. And then maybe Bay kisses you after.

“I think so, too,” Dice said. “If I open your door, what will I find?” His hand on my forehead.

And there my mother was, crying.

He drew back. Had he seen her, too? “I’ll teach you to make weapons,” he said. “We will find the ennobling conflicts that will convey us to a better world.” We walked back up the hill, the stars disappeared, dawn smoked the black sky.

Dice drove me back as the early morning burned off into the sticky midday. The drive took six hours but we were going in circles, I was almost sure—I kept seeing the Dairy Queen where Dice had pressed his cone into the floor.