He turned over Will’s postcard, looking at the message he’d written to Max, and he started working on the geometrical pattern Will had drawn. Max asked a question, and Alex said “yes” without really computing what he’d said. He sat up again and stared at the card: and then the text. Bottom left is a square. Bottom right is a square. He traced the patterns Will had made. He had quite literally figured this, then: the five intersecting squares were a visual representation of the words. It reminded Alex of the mathematical squares they studied at Cambridge: magic number squares. Usually the whole sequence added up to a number, but the interior sections of the square added up to a common number too.

I am halfway through the orbit. He swallowed some wine. There was a magic square on one of the pages of vellum. What was half the number of the whole? he wondered.

THEY TOLD LUCY TO TREAD CAREFULLY AMONG THE LIGHTED CANDLES. Lucy nodded and tiptoed into the first snaking coil of the path. “‘Tread softly…’” she heard Alex’s voice, and she thought of what Yeats said about treading on dreams. On my dreams too, she realized, and the words of the poem echoed in her mind. Then her mind skipped again, and this time Alex’s voice was in her ear as though he were narrating Will’s document aloud for her: “Our two souls, therefore…” She finished the line from the source, in Donne’s poem, without a pause, “…which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion…” Then she heard Alex’s voice again in her brain: “I am what I am, and what I am is what I am. I have a Will to be what I am.” The words swam in her head, and her feet traced back, and then forth, and then around; the flickering candles made her light-headed and aware she’d missed eating any lunch. She felt as though heaven indeed beckoned. She loved the sensation of having to be so careful with your steps, but so free with your soul.