"All I know," Arthur said. He touched Harry's arm. They sat quietly for a few moments, Harry thinking this over. The effort tired him.

"All right," he said. "I've known you long enough. You told me so I could die with some good news, maybe, right?"

Arthur nodded.

"They let you tell me."

"Yes."

Harry closed his eyes. "I love you, old buddy," he said. "You've always managed to come up with the craziest things to keep me amused."

"I love you, too, Harry." Arthur stepped outside the room to call Ithaca in. She resumed her seat, saying nothing.

"I think you must . . . have a lot of work to do," Harry said. "I can't think straight and . . . I'm too tired to talk much now." He waved his finger: time to go.

"Thanks for coming by," Ithaca said, handing him the tape from the small recorder. Arthur hugged her tightly, then bent over the bed and took Harry's head gently between his hands.

Thirty years. I can still recognize him behind the mask of sickness. He's still my beloved Harry.

Arthur squinted, trying to hold back the flooding warmth in his eyes, trying to will another world where his friend would not be dying—ignoring for the moment the Earth's own illness, ignoring the general for the particular, a more human scale of niagic—and knowing he would fail. Also trying to memorize something already passing: the shape of Harry's face, the set of his eyes, slightly athwart one another, even more elfin in his illness, though glazed; unable to imagine this fevered face with rounded nose and high forehead and strawlike patchy hair, even this ill frame, decaying in a grave.

"I'll carry you around with me wherever I go," he said, and kissed Harry on the forehead. Harry reached up slowly and hooked his hand around Arthur's wrist, touching his heated lips to Arthur's right palm.

"Same here."

Arthur left the room quickly, eyes forward. In the parking lot, he sat behind the wheel of the rental car, stunned, his head seeming stuffed with sharp twigs.

"Thank you for letting me do that. I'd like to go back to my family, if there's time."

As the sun rose high over Los Angeles, nothing constrained him from returning to the airport and taking the next available flight back to Oregon.

Chapter 42

42

Hicks leaned against a massive marble-covered pillar, watching dozens of people enter and leave the hotel lobby. Most were dressed in business suits and overcoats; the weather outside was brisk and there had been cold rain just an hour before. Many others, however, seemed ill equipped for the weather; they were out-of-towners, gawkers.