Handoff

I hesitated over the two images in my Cleft book. One showed the mountain under gray rain-clouds, the other under a sky of relentless blazing desert blue. After a moment, I put my hand on the blue-sky image.

Nothing had changed from when I was last there. The cleft windmill was still turning, the trailer was still locked, the patient raptor was still circling over the bones beyond the mountain. Ah to be a vulture, now that Spring is here.

Gingerly, I picked Zandi's leather-dry and fly-ridden steak off the gas grill and threw it as far into the desert as I could. Perhaps that bird would enjoy it. I scrubbed the grill's grating with sand, and then emptied the warm and rancid water from the Coleman cooler and scrubbed it too. I carried the empty cooler to my Jeep, still parked just outside the gate in the fence.

Climbing the gate was easier than it had been when I arrived. Well, I was probably in better shape now than I'd been. I put the cooler into the Jeep, climbed into the driver's seat, and set out on the thirty-mile drive to the nearest town.

Dealing with people was a little disconcerting, after the long time I'd spent hearing no voices but my own and Yeesha's, but I didn't notice anyone giving me strange looks. I bought groceries: meat for the grill, potatoes to roast, canned fruit, rolls, a bag of tortilla chips, cheese, butter. Fruit juice, soft drinks, several jugs of drinking water. I put the perishables in the cooler along with twenty pounds of ice.

At a discount store I found a portable radio, and stocked up on batteries. There was a lantern, too, that would run on the same fuel I bought for the grill. While I was there, I picked up two hanks of light rope.

I love small-town used book stores. You find some of the oddest things, usually just as you're resigning yourself to an eternity of last year's paperback best-sellers and superannuated Harlequin romances. I bought two volumes of Ferdinand Braudel. A novel by Stephen Brust. Baring-Gould's The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (two huge volumes), and Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice. The requisite desert fare by Edward Abbey, and a couple of old favorites of mine by Rumer Godden.

I'd set out early in the morning, while it was still cool, but it was nearly noon by the time I got back to the trailer. I hoisted the cooler over the gate, dragged it to the shade of the awning and started to work.

First, I closed the door into the kitchen, and opened the one into the laboratory. I randomized the symbols on Yeesha's projector. Carefully I propped the lengths of wood against the drawing on the wall (why should anything be easier for anyone else than it had been for me?).

I hurried to the other side of the cleft and raised the bin. The door in the tree was closed now, and did not open to my touch – I hoped that what was behind it would take care of itself. The hardest task was climbing down one side of the broken bridge, weaving the rope in and out of the rungs, and then up the other – and then hauling on the ropes until the two halves pulled up and met in the middle. By the time that little chore was finished, I was completely exhausted. Last of all, I set the brake on the windmill shaft. The lights dimmed around me. "Thank you, Yeesha – I think," I said into the darkness.

The sun was halfway down the afternoon sky when I returned to the trailer. Staggering a little, I hauled the rest of my gear – sleeping bag, radio, books – to the shade. I refilled the grill's fuel tank and put a salmon steak on to broil, along with a couple of potatoes. Fish tonight, beef tomorrow. Water jugs I slipped into the deep shade under the trailer.

Suddenly I remembered something. I linked back to my Relto and hurried inside. That appalling shirt of Zandi's was hanging in my wardrobe, clean and apparently ironed. Following an impulse of peculiar humor, I slipped it on and then linked back to the Cleft.

I settled down in his chair. The breeze was pleasant, the shirt light and gauzy enough to allow it through. I turned on the radio, leaned back and reached for the bag of books. I rejected my first choice, the Baring-Gould – I'd had altogether enough of puzzles, these last days – and made another selection. Comfortable, I let myself sink into the reassuring familiarity: On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages...

After a few chapters I noticed a plume of dust in the distance. A dented and bondo-blotched pickup truck approached, stopping near my Jeep. It disgorged a single figure from the passenger door. The driver pointed to the gate, and then to the trailer, waved and drove off. As I watched, the passenger – now pedestrian – glanced at my Jeep and then, hesitating, climbed over the gate.

I waited until the newcomer was in speaking distance. "Afternoon," I said.

"Um … hi." So young! Had I really been that young when I arrived? It could only have been days – surely no more than weeks? – since I first descended into the cleft. And yet I felt an infinity older than this fresh-featured child.

"Is your name Zandi?" the new arrival said awkwardly.

"I'm afraid not. Zandi's not here right now, but I'm … housesitting for him, kind of."

"Oh. I'm not sure how to explain this – "

"That's all right." I smiled, as reassuringly as I could. "I probably know more about why you're here than you do. Don't worry about it."