We went into the hotel and crossed the lobby. We could hear music: in the lounge, the wedding party had started dancing. I glimpsed Célia and Peter through the glass doors, his arm around her waist. The glass mottled everything but I could tell it was them from the colors. The white and the air-force blue, the black hair and the golden.

“That’s an awful idea,” I said, smiling.

“I knew you’d like it.”

I opened the doors. The music stopped and the air filled with applause and laughter. Célia saw me and waved. Her eyes were still wet but there was determination in them. No enemy was going to take the joy of her wedding day from her. I had misjudged her—misjudged her potential, at least. If she didn’t have the courage now, she would find it.

I drew Sébastien behind me through the crowd so that he could congratulate her. Look who I found outside, I would say. Sébastien followed me with a long leisurely stride. I led him onward like a leopard on a chain.

FIVE

I am traveling at sunset over a strange land. Beneath me lies a vast continent of dried lakes, bare riverbeds, empty canals that flick by so quickly that I know I must be flying at immense speed. The sun, haloed by the storm of scratches on my windshield, hangs above the horizon and casts a black shadow over the near side of every prominence, the far side of every concavity. I race on over the plateaued mountains and towered cities of this enchanting landscape which is as alien as Mars but which I know, on some deep level, is North Africa. At this extraordinary velocity I shall be out of Egypt in minutes, through Libya, Tunisia, Algeria in an hour or so. Before the sun sets I’ll reach Morocco. Fly on out over the Atlantic breakers into the dusk.

I check my fuel. After all these hundreds of miles, I still have eighty of my ninety-seven gallons. Impossible. Even more puzzling is my altimeter. It seems to be stuck, or simply broken. Both the fat “hour” hand, which measures thousands of feet, and the thin “minute” hand, which marks off the hundreds, are nudging the zero at the top of the dial.

Very slowly, I blink. My eyelids descend and lift again.

The continent was a trick of the light. Troughs, hillocks, droughted channels, single stones spin toward me just under my aircraft.

I’m flying ten feet off the ground.

A bell starts to ring in the cockpit, one I’ve never heard before. It must be some kind of warning height alarm. Where is the switch? I can’t turn—

—

“—the damn thing off,” I say aloud.