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     "She'll be listening, man, you can bet on that," I said.  "She ain't dead; nobody like her could ever really die."  But he didn't care.  All he knew was that one fine listener, that girl he loved and dug and spent so many notes on, she was gone.  Some bad things had happen and Ginny was dead, in her family's crypt out in the boneyard, and they wouldn't even allow him to face the funeral.  Rich parents, Ginny's parents, and they was bugged at her first for having left the family and the old escutcheon, and second for having taken up with what they called "a no-good jazz musician."

     Which was flat-out not true; he was the best.

     People like that have no idea what it's like, hearing a horn like his.  Bright as a penny, soft and quick and full of tiny things being said close to your ear.  You can know Miles, and you can talk it up that Diz uses a fine axe, and still not take it away from him.  But that's just my feeling, so forget it; has nothing to do with him and Ginny, except it has to be.  With his phrases, his soft blue stuff, and the airy changes, he was good.  Maybe great, even.  No one can tag great, I'm hip, but he was as close as I'll every care to go.

     So, Ginny's folks had no truth in their put-downs.  He was not only the finest trumpet I've ever blown sax with, but after that axe of his, he loved Ginny more than his eyes, even.  So, when she died, and they took her away and put her in that creepy tomb, he busted up pretty bad.  And I said to him:

"You've got to listen, man, because Ginny'll always be with you.  She loved to hear you play, she really loved to hear you play, and wherever she is now, she's hearing you.  So you got to get back with it, because if you let it lay there, then she won't hear a thing, ever."

     But it didn't take until later.  Then he got pretty smashed.  He couldn't hold his liquor in the first place, and when he had to blow five sets a night, without her happy, loving face down there in front, it made him want to get plowed even more.  So he got completely crocked out of his mind, and he came to me while I was packing my sax and said, " I gotta go play for her."

     Marshall and Norman Skeets, both of them were half-way out the door of the club when he layed that one on me.  They paused on the steps going up to the street, and they waited for me to talk him out of it and take him home to the sack, so they could go back to their respective broads and wife.  I launched into it and tried to calm him, but he was stuck on the idea.

     "I'm going over to that thing they stuck her into and I'm gonna charm her outta there.  I'm gonna play so good she'll wake up and cry and come back to me."  He meant it.  The kook really meant it.  He wanted to go find that uppity, creepy cemetery where Ginny's blue-blood parents put her, and blow for the dead.  It was all at once laughable and pitiful and creepy.

     I tried to get him to sit down, but he had his horn in his mitt, walking a hellava lot straighter and truer than a drunk hat the right to be.  Right to the stairs and outside.

     Well, to make it short, we tried everything short of decking him, but he was set on it, so we came around to thinking it might snap him out of it, and maybe he was getting nutty this way because he couldn't attend the funeral and he felt guilty, though God knows he didn't have anything to do with the drunk taxi driver had run Ginny down in the street outside the Detroit Club where we were booked.

     So we figured it might straighten him out and we amde him promise that if he blew for Ginny he'd come home and go to sleep.

     We piled into Marshall's Fairlane and we drove out to the Island - and Long Island, late at night, is much creepier than Spanish Harlem - and finally found the cemetery.  It was surrounded by a big iron fence bet he got Marshall to pull up close, and then we all got out, and with Marshall yelling that we'd dent his top, and Norman telling him to shut up before we all got pinched, we climbed on the car and over the fence.

     Into the tombstones.  Dark and foggy and Christ it was like a horror flick, except there he went, like some kinda nut, all through the tall grass where the graves hadn't been dug yet, past the piles of ready dirt, around a gang of tombs, and down this line of stones, like he knew exactly where he was going.

     As it turned out, he didn't have no more idea where the hell he was going than we did.  But we tagged along, and after we'd been circling around for ten or fifteen minutes, Marshall went, "Pssssst!" and we dug him pointing to a big black shape with two dark angels hovering on one foot each, like gargoyles or something.

     We called him back and I wondered how the caretaker - if there was one - hadn't heard us bumbling around.  He came tottering over, and when he saw the legend on the bronze plate beside the door of that tomb, he sank down on his knees and we heard him making little talking noises to the ground, or to himself, maybe, but they very sad and lonely and wanting sounds.

     The other three of us stood there quietly, remembering her - the way she had been before that stupid taxi driver had sent her through a florist shop window.  We remembered how she'd sit with a cup of coffee, a little boo, the whole night, digging him on the bandstand and just loving him with her eyes.  We remembered it.  None of us felt it was wrong for him to be here.

    Then he got up and started to blow.

     He put the horn to his mouth, and the little hard muscle-ridge of his upper lip stood out, and he started to blow something soft and new.  IT was a strange sound, all minor-key and repetitive, with a wistful, searching thread to it.  I'd never heard it before, and I know damned well no one else had ever heard it, either.

     It was like a million black birds with white wings sailing into the night sky.  Like a sheet of coolness being drawn over a fire; hungry and crying and asking her, charming her, calling her, out of the crypt, out into the night, to hear him playing.

     Then I got scared.

     We were in a graveyard, for God's sake, and he was just as clear as anything, asking a dead girl to come out of her casket with the gold handles and love him, need him, hold him and talk-look-see him.  It was the wrong thing to do, I know that, and I'm not the least bit superstitious.  There just some things you know ain't proper; this was like that.  A guy can be unhappy and want to get his girl back, but this was something God might not like.

     Then we heard the noise; we heard he coming.

     I don't think anyone screamed, but we all knew Ginny was coming back; and the way she had looked after that taxi driver ripped into her, none of us thought we could take it.

     He just kept on laying it, so sweet and charming and compelling that we knew Ginny couldn't keep sleeping with all that goodness coming at her.

     Later, we got back over the fence and into the car.  We took him home, and I had three straight bourbons before I could make my eyes shut.

     He didn't play much after that; a gig now and then, until he finally stopped, but it doesn't matter.  He had his ghost.

     There aren't no ghost except the ones we buy with our guilty desires, you know that.  But with him, who knows which is better: a life filled with emptiness or companionship with a dead memory that likes soundless music.

     I don't know.

     I'd spent the whole day at the Union Hall, trying to pick up on a good horn, but anybody who'd have fitted in was either out on the 'cultural exchange bit' - a little drying out time at the Island - or they'd be on the coast.

     There were half a dozen fat lips lying around - there always were - but I wouldn't have spit on the best of them.  Which left me right where I'd started when Cookie came down with a bad case of holding and the man had carted him away to Lexington.  I could've told them they were flapping their wings out -of-rhythm; Cookie would rather die than lose his monkey.

     But he'd been the best in town.

     Which left us an important side short, going into the most impressive gig in our career.  Saul Maxim wasn't paying us for a four-man quintet, and I was about to call one of the members from the Hall, when this kid came into Maxim's with a horn tucked tight under his wing.

     He looked around, mostly at us on the stand, and finally gave it a leg.  He was tall, long-haired, nice-face and a white muscle ridge on his upper lip that was his membership badge in the trumpeter's club.  Looked like a nice-enough kid, and the boys stopped screwing around as he walked up to the stand.

     "You Art Staff... he 'round here?" he asked.

     I nodded and stuck my hand out.  "The same.  Something I can do for you?"

     He took the hand and looked me cold in the eye with, "The words been goin' around you need a horn.  I was on the loose, so I figured I'd come over, give it a try.  You still needed?"

     "We're still needing," I said, "if you can do the work.  It's five sets a night, and you'll get scale.  That sound okay?"

     He shrugged; it didn't seem to matter.  "Fine by me.  Should I audition now?"  There was something peculiar in his eyes.  I'd have laughed at myself if I'd recognized that look at the time, but I didn't.  It was only lots later that I dug it was the same expression I'd seen in the paintings of the big man, Christ.  Strange how things like that hang with you.  I didn't dig, then, but later it came to me.

     All he seemed to want to do, apparently, was work.

     So I was gamed to try.  We had to work that night, and I was backed against the wall.  We needed the gig bad.

     I figured we ought to give him every possible, so I asked if he knew "Four Brothers".  He said he did, without hesitation, so I gave it a three-bar intro, and Rog came on with the bass the way we rehearsed it; Dreiser hit the drums down soft and Epperson joined at the same instant with his sax.  We were all swinging, and waiting for the first note, when the kid came on.

     Now I want to tell this just so.  He could blow, that was the first thing.  I don't mean he copied; he wasn't Miles of Diz.  He was all himself.

     Then when we hit the solo spot where cookie would usually ride out - "Four Brothers" was a virtuoso piece anytime - the kid went on ahead like Hurricane Hilda.  He caught the repetitive riffs and whanged on each one till it said "Uncle!"  Frankly, I was impressed.

     When he had expended his conversation, we went into a restatement of the theme and finished it up faster than even Cookie had been able to gun it.  I didn't say a thing for a minute, then said, "Let's try 'Laura'."

     He nodded, and Epperson opened it so quick I gave him a long look.  But he didn't give a damn; he wanted to hear more of that horn and couldn't wait.

     Well!

     He blew "Laura" like it would have made Gene Tierney bawl.  And this time I was sure.  The kid was blowing the truth.  It was the kind of sound Monk had in his piano and Louis had for a while.  At least until he found the "tommin'" routine paid better.  It was simply the truth.

     "Laura" finished and the sound still hung.  When it had gone to its velvet rest, I realized the kid had finished the piece alone; we sunk into silence diggining.

     The kid didn't say anything.  He just banged out the spittle and settled onto one hip, waiting for the word.

     I swung around the stool and pulled out a butt.  I lit it, and didn't look at him as I said, "Sorry, kid... don't think you're exactly what we want.  We play a little too hard bop for you, I guess.  Maybe some other time.  No hard -"

     He cut me off with a flat sweep of his hand.  He'd heard it all before.  He holstered the Selmer and mumbled a cool, "Thanks... yeah, later," and was gone.

     Nobody said anything to me.

     But nobody argued with me, either.

     Hell, it was obvious.  I got up and dropped off the stand, making it to the phone booth.  I didn't feel so good, but it was obvious:

     Nobody likes to hear the truth.  Makes you realize how not-so-cool you really are.  The truth hurts.

     That was when I realized the look in the kid's eyes.

     I finally got my hornman, that night.

     He played with the band.

     He sounded like hell.

     Michael James Williams was born in Los Altos Hills, California, at exactly 8:03:47 AM, on April 12, 1968.  His delivery was as stress-less as the early delivery of a multimillionaire's son can be.

     Roger Peter Tobias was born in Dearborn, Michigan, at exactly 8:03;47 AM, on the 12th of April, 1968.  His mother, a prostitute, died giving birth; his father could of been any one of an indeterminate number of multimillionaire businessmen she had services seven months earlier, in Detroit, at an automotive planning convention.

     Michael's mother considered herself enlightened.  She alternated breast-feeding with a sterilized, sealed plastic envelope of scientifically-prepared formula enriched with vitamins and minerals and purged of any pesticides or harmful byproducts.  An army of servants and technicians cared for the mansion while she lavished time and affection on her only son.

     Roger's wet nurse, an illegal immigrant woman hired by the orphanage, despised the spindly pink premature baby - her own had died before she moved to this country - and hoped he would die.  Somehow, he lived.

     Both babies were weaned on the same day.

     Michael had a naturally-raised beef steak and hydroponic-grown vegetables laboriously minced, mortal and pestled by a skilled dietician on the kitchen staff.  Roger had industrialized Beechnut, purchased by the orphanage in gallon jugs that were left open far too long.

     In the eastern wing of the mansion, the nursery, on the sunny morning of March 16, 1963, Michael said "mama," his first word.  It was raining in Detroit, and unseasonable cold; that word was one that Roger wouldn't learn for some time.  But at the same instant, he opened his mouth and said "no" to a spoonful of caked mashed carrots.  The attendant didn't know it was Roger's first word, but was not disposed to being spoke back at; Roger went hungry for the rest of her shift.

     As the war in Vietnam ground on, Michael had to be without his father for weeks at a time, while he journeyed to San Francisco or Washington, DC or even Detroit, to confer with other powerful men.  In these times, Mrs. Williams redoubled her affection and tried to perk up the little tyke with gifts of toys and candy.  He loved his father and missed him, but shrewdly learned to take advantage of his absences.

     The orphanage in Detroit lost as many men to alcohol and heroin as it did to Vietnam; the stronger women went to weld and paint on the endless line of automobiles being sent down the assembly line.  Roger's family winnowed down to a handful of old ladies and unnoticed addicted men.  Children would die every month from carelessness or simple lack of attention.  They would soil their diapers and lie in the mess for most of the day.  They would taste turpentine or rat poison and try to cope with the situation without benefit of adult supervision.  Roger lived, though he didn't thrive.

     The boys were two years old.  Michael sat at a wife-swapping party in Los Gatos and watched his parents and their friends chase down tablets of LSD with champagne, kissing and laughing and wiping each other's tears away.  Roger was kept awake all night by the drunken brawl in the next room; twice that night he watched with childish curiosity as white-clad couples lurched into the ward and screwed clumsily beside his crib.

     September, after Michael's fourth birthday, his mother tearfully left him in the company of ten other children and a professionally kind lady, to spend half of each day coping with the intricacies of graham crackers and milk, crayons and fingerprints.  His father had a cork board installed in his den, where he thumbtacked Michael's latest creations.  Mr. Williams friends often commented on how advanced the youngster was.

     The orphanage celebrated Roger's fourth birthday the way they celebrated everybody's birthday; they put him to work.  Every morning after breakfast he went to the kitchen, where the cook would give him a paper bag full of potatoes and a potato peeler.  He would take the potatoes out of the bag and peel them one by one, very carefully making the peelings drop into the bag.  Then he would take the bag of peelings down to the incinerator, where the janitor would thank him very gravely.  Then he would return to wash the potatoes after he had scrubbed his own hands.  This would take most of the morning - he soon learned that haste would only lead to cut fingers, and if there was the slightest spot on one potato, the cook would make he go over all of them once again.

     Nursery school prepared Michael quite well for grade school, and he excelled in every subject, except arithmetic.  Mr. Williams hired a succession of tutors who managed - through wheedling and cajoling and sheer repetition - to teach Michael first addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and finally long division and fractions.  When he entered high school, Michael was actually better prepared in mathematics than most of his classmates.  But he didn't understand it, really - the tutors had given him a superficial facility with number that, it was hoped, might carry him through.

     Roger attended the orphanage grade school, where he did poorly in almost every subject, except mathematics.  The one teacher who knew of the term thought that perhaps Roger was an idiot savant (but he was wrong).  In the time he entered second grade, he could add up a column of figures in seconds, without using a pencil.  In the third grade, he could multiply larger number just by looking at them.  In the fourth grade, he discovered prime numbers independently and could crank out long division orally, without seeing the number written out.  In the fifth grade, someone told him what square roots were, and he extended the concept to cube roots, and could process either without the need of an electronic calculator.  By the time he got to junior high, he had mastered high school algebra and geometry.  And he was hungry for more.

     It was 1980, and the boys were starting to take on the appearances that they would carry through adult life.  Mike was the image of his father: tall, slim, with a slightly arrogant, imperial cast to his features.  Roger looked like one of nature's lesser efforts.  He was short and swarthy, favoring his mother, with a potbelly from living on starch all his life, a permanently broken nose, and one ear larger than the other.  He didn't resemble his father at all.

     Michael's first experience was with a girl came when he was twelve.  His riding teacher, a lovely wench of eighteen, supplied Michael with a condom and instructed him in its use, in a pile of hay behind the stables, on a lovely May afternoon.  Come the end of the summer, she had discovered that she had obtained a four-year scholarship to UCLA; Mr. Williams felt it was an equitable arrangement.

     On that same May afternoon, Roger was dispassionately fellating a mathematics teacher only slightly uglier than he was, this being the unspoken price for tutelage into the mysteries of integral calculus.  The experience didn't particularly upset Roger; growing up in an orphanage, he had already experienced a greater variety of sexual adventures than Michael would in his entire life.

     In high school, Michael was elected president of his class for two years running.  A plain girl did his algebra homework for him and patiently explained the subject well enough for him to pass the test.  In spite of his mediocre performance in that subject, Michael graduated with honors and was accepted at Harvard.

     Roger spent high school indulging his love with mathematics, just doing enough work in the other subjects to avoid the boredom of repeating them.  He applied to several colleges, just to get the counselor off his back, but in spite of his perfect score on College Board (Mathematics), none of the schools had an opening.  He apprenticed himself to an accountant and was quite happy to spend his days manipulating figures with half of his mind, while the other half worked on a theory of Abelian groups that he was sure would one day blow modern Algebra wide open.

     Michael found Harvard challenging at first, but soon was anxious to get into the "real world" - helping Mr. Williams manage the family's widespread, subtle investments.  He graduated cum laude, but declined graduate work in favor of becoming a junior financial advisor to his father.

     Roger worked away at his books and at his theory, which he eventually had published in the SIAM Journal by the simple expedient of adding a Ph.D. to his name.  He was found out, but he didn't care.

     At Harvard, Michael had taken ROTC and graduated with a Reserve commission in the infantry, at his father's behest.  A CIA-sponsored subcontractor approached him, and his father (perhaps suffering from guilt at being too young for Korea and too rich for Vietnam... perhaps to keep quiet a backroom deal he had made with multimillionaires to sell inferior equipment to Detroit's automotive industry on a government contract), urged his some to "help out".

     Roger had applied for OCS at the age of twenty and had been turned down (he never found out it was for his "extreme ugliness of face").  At twenty-two, he was approached by a NSA-sponsored subcontractor who took notice of his phenomenal ability with numbers; Roger also noticed the phenomenal numbers he was being offered for his talent, realizing that with the funding offered he could buy his way into any university.  Roger was sent to a 'privately funded artillery school', where he learned to translate cryptic commands like "Drop 50" and "Add 50" into exercises in analytic geometry that led to a shell being dropped exactly where the forward observer wanted it.  He loved to juggle numbers and shout orders to the gun crew, who in turn were appreciative of his ability, as it lessened the amount of work for them - Roger never had a near miss that had to be repeated.  Who cares if he looked like the devil's brother-in-law?  He's a good man to have on the horn.

     Michael became a company commander in a war that didn't exist, leader of seventy covert infantrymen, each one cursing and killing while sweating and counting their income for the contracted year.  He hated it at first; it scared him and put a great weight on his heart when he ordered men out with the certain knowledge that some of them would come back dead and already rotting, and some screaming or whimpering with limb or organ shattered, and some grave with horror, open-mouthed, crying... but he hardened to it and the men came to respect him and by June, 1991, he had to admit that he had come to enjoy it, just a little.

     Roger wasn't disappointed when he got his sealed orders and was relieved to find that, once there, they let him do what he enjoyed most: taking those radioed commands and translating them into reading for his gun crew, a group of men manning a 155-millimeter howitzer.  On the same contract as Michael's.

     Michael's company had settled into a comfortable routine the past few weeks.  They would walk for a day and dig in, and he'd let them rest for a day, setting out desultory ambushes that never trapped any enemy.  The consensus of opinion was that the enemy had moved out of this area, and they were getting a long-deserved rest.  Michael even found time to play some poker with his men (being careful to keep the the stakes down).  Even though it was technically against regulations in the contract, it increased his popularity tremendously, as he was also careful to lose consistently.  It was the ninth of June, 1991, and he had been "on assignment" for five months.

     It was the ninth of June, 1991, and Roger had been with his gun crew for six months.  They liked him at first, because he was so good.  But they were getting distant now - he spent all of his free time writing strange symbols in a fat notebook, he never went into town and wouldn't join them in their weekly gang-bang raping sessions.  The few times they had invited him to pay poker or craps he had gotten that funny look on his face and had taken all their money, slowly and without seeming to enjoy it.  Most of the guys thought he was a faggot, and though he said he'd never been to college, everybody knew that was a lie.

     It was the ninth of June, 1991, and Michael was dealing five-card stud when he heard the rattle of machine-gun fire to the south.  His educated ear separated the noises and, before he dropped his cards, he knew it was one M-16 against  two AK-47s.  He scrambled out of the bunker that had provided shade for card playing and ran in the direction of the firing.  He was halfway there when fire broke out on the western and northern quadrants.  He checked his stride and returned to the command bunker.

     Roger was amusing himself with an application of point-set topology to stress analysis of concrete structures when the radio began to squawk: "One-one, this is Tiger-two.  We're under pretty heavy contact and need a couple a dozen rounds.  Over."  Roger dumped his notebook and carried the radio to the gun crew.  He hollered into the radio as he ran.  "Tiger-two, the is One-one.  We got your morning coordinates on file and we'll drop a smoke round by you.  You correct.  Okay?  Over."

     Michael rogered Roger's suggestion: he would look and listen to the harmless smoke round and tell him how much to drop or add.

     The fire to the north had stepped up quite a bit now, and Michael was pretty sure that was where the enemy would make his play.  The smoke round came whining in and dropped about a hundred meters from the perimeter.  "Drop seventy-five, one HE," Michael yelled into the radio.

     Roger had worked with this Captain Williams before and found him to be notoriously conservative, which wasted shells as he walked the artillery in little by little toward the action.  So Roger yelled out the string of figures for one hundred meters' drop instead of seventy-five.  His crew set the angle and the charge and pulled the lanyard that sent the high explosive round - the "one HE" - singing toward Michael's position.

     It landed smack on the perimeter on a small wooden hut right next to a hardworking machine-gun bunker.  The two men inside the bunker died instantly, and the two in a bunker on the other side were knocked out by the concussion.  The hut exploded in a flurry of wooden shrapnel.

     Before Michael could react, a six-inch sliver of wood traveling with the speed of a bullet, hit him one inch above the left eyebrow and buried itself in his cerebral cortex.  He dropped the binoculars he had been holding, put a hand to his head, and fell over in a state of acute tectonic shock; muscles bunched spastically, legs working in a slow run, mouth open wide saying nothing.

     A medic rushed to the captain and was puzzled to find no apparent wound save a scratch on the forehead.  Then he took Michael's helmet off and saw a half-inch of wood protruding from the back of his head.  He told a private to tell the lieutenant he was commander now.

     The lieutenant got on the horn and asked who the fuck fired that round, we have at least two dead, landed right on the perimeter and give us some more but for Christ sake add fifty.

     The gun crew overheard and Roger told them not to worry, he'd cover for them.  Then he gave them the appropriate figures and sent a volley of six HE rounds that providently landed right in the middle of the enemy force grouping for the attack.  Then he put volleys into the west and north, knocking out the diversionary squads.  By the time air support arrived, there were no live enemy targets left.  Roger got a commendation.

     Michael was evacuated by helicopter to a covert medical facility, where they couldn't do anything for him.  They sent him to Japan, where a better - or at least more confident - surgeon removed the wooden missile.

     There was - eventually - a "very private board of inquiry" where Roger testified that his men could not possibly have made such an elementary error and, after demonstrating his own remarkable talent, suggested that it had been either a faulty round or an improper correction by the captain.  The "board" was impressed - and the captain couldn't testify - so the matter was dropped.

     After a few months, Michael could say a few words and his body seemed to have adjusted to being fed and emptied through various tubes.  So they flew him from Japan to Walter Reed, where a number of men experienced in such things would try to make some sort of rational creature out of him again.

     Roger's esteem was now very high with the rest of the artillery battery, and especially with his gun crew.  He could of dumped the whole mess into their laps, but instead had taken on "the board" by himself.  They not only got their contract fees, but had a health bonus added to it.

     Michael was blind in one eye, his right, but with his left he could distinguish complementary colors and tell a circle from a square.  The psychiatrist could tell because his pupil would dilate slightly at the change, even though the light intensity was kept constant.

     The enemy took Roger's fire base by surprise and, in the middle of the furious hand-to-hand battle, Roger saw two enemy soldiers slip into the bunker that was used to store ammunition for the big guns.  The bunker also contained Roger's notebook; the prospect of losing eight months' worth of closely reasoned mathematical theorizing drove Roger to take his bayonet and run across a field of blistering fire, dive in the bunker and kill the two soldiers before they could set off their charges.  In the process, he absorbed a rifle bullet in the calf and a pistol wound in his left tricep.  A visiting government official - who wasn't official there - who was cowering in a nearby bunker saw the whole thing; Roger was released from the remainder of his contract, paid in full, and paperwork was quietly processed to give him a fifty percent disability pension.  The wounds were reasonably healed in six months; the pension didn't stop.

     Michael had to learn to say "mama" again, but his mother wasn't sure he could recognize her during her visits, which became less and less frequent as cancer spread through her body.  On June 9, 1992, she died of cervical cancer that had been discovered exactly one year before.  Nobody told Michael.

     On June 9, 1992, Roger had finished his first semester at the University of Chicago and was sitting in the parlor of the head of the mathematics department, drinking tea and discussing the paper that Roger had prepared, extending his new system of algebraic morphology.  The department head had made Roger his protege, and they spent many afternoons like this - the youth's fresh insight cross-pollinating the professor's great experience.

     On May 30th, 1995, Michael had learned to respond to his name by lifting his left forefinger.

     Roger graduated summa cum laude on May 30, 1995, and out of a dozen offers, took an assistantship at the California Institute of Technology.

     Against his physician's instructions, Mr. Williams went on a skiing expedition to the Swiss Alps.  On an easy slope his ski hit an exposed root and, rolling comfortably with the fall, Michael's father struck a half-concealed rock which fractured his spine.  It was June, 1998, and he would never ski again.  He would never walk again, either.

     At the same instant as the fall, on the other side of the world, Roger sat down after a brilliant defense of his doctoral thesis, a startling redefinition of Peano's Axiom.  The thesis was approved unanimously.

     On Michael's birthday, April 12, 2000, his father, acting through a bank of telephones beside his motorized bed, liquidated ninety percent of the family's assets and set up a tax-sheltered trust fund to care for his only child.  Then he took ten pain-killers with his breakfast orange juice and another twenty with sips of water and he found out that dying that way wasn't as pleasant as he thought it would be.

     IT was also Roger's thirty-second birthday, and he celebrated it quietly at home in the company of his new wife, a former student of his, twelve years his junior, who was dazzled by his genius.  She could switch effortlessly from doting Hausfrau to randy mistress to conscientious secretary and Roger knew love for the first time in his life.  He was also the youngest assistant professor on the mathematics faculty of CalTech.

     On January 4, 2005, Michael stopped responding to his name.  The inflation safeguards on his trust fund were eroding with time and the unforeseen increased charges for medical treatment; he was moved out of the exclusive private clinic - absorbed by a major health management organization - and transferred to a small room in San Francisco General.

     The same day, due to his phenomenal record of publications and the personal charisma that fascinated students and faculty alike, Roger was promoted to be the youngest full professor in the history of the mathematics department of CalTech.  His unfashionably long hair and beard covered his ludicrous ears and "extreme ugliness of face," and people who knew the history of science were affectionately comparing him to Steinmetz.

     There was nobody to give the test, but if somebody had, they would have found that on the 12th of April. 2008, Michael's iris would no longer respond to the difference between a circle and a square.

     On his fortieth birthday, Roger has the satisfaction of hearing that his book, Modern Algebra Redefined, was sold out in its fifth printing and was considered required reading for almost every mathematics graduate student in the country.

     June 17, 2010, Michael stopped breathing; a red light blinked on the attendant's board and he administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until they rolled in an electric respirator and installed him.  Since he wasn't on the floor reserved for respiratory disease, the respirator was plugged into a regular power socket instead of the special failsafe line.

     Roger was on top of the world.  He had been offered the chairmanship of the mathematics department of Penn State, and said he would accept as soon as he finished teaching his summer post-doctoral seminar on algebraic morphology.

     The hottest day of the year was August 19, 2010.  At 2:45:20 PM, the air conditioners were just drawing too much power and somewhere in the Central Valley a bank of bus bars glowed cherry red and exploded in a shower of molten copper.

     All the lights on the floor and on the attendant's board went out, the electronic respirator stopped, and while the attendant was frantically buzzing for assistance, at 2:45:25 PM, to be exact, Michael James Williams passed away.

     The lights in the seminar room dimmed and blinked out.  Roger got up to open the Venetian blinds, whipped off his glasses in a characteristic gesture and was framing an acerbic comment when, at 2:45:25 PM, he felt a slight tingling in his head as a blood vessel ruptured and quite painlessly he went to join his brother. 

Blinded by the night, by the rains, by the fog, by her actions, she drove. The wet sand beneath the tires made control of the Saturn difficult, but it wasn't the focus of her attention. All she could think of, between the synchronized beat of the windshield wipers and her tears, were the 'why didn't I', 'how could I', and 'what was I thinking' questions. The sting of the salt in her tears challenged the content of the seas just on the other side of the guardrail. If it hadn't been for that - if her actions hadn't caused her to create the salty droplets - she would have seen the left turn of the sandy road quicker.

As her right foot joined her left in the unified action of placing pressure on the brake peddle, her hands responding by jerking the steering wheel to the left.

As the white fender of the automobile folded its shoulder into the rail, leaving the scraps of paint as a reminder that it hadn't become airborne.

As her head made contact with the dashboard, a tear was flung to the windshield, its salt never to become one with the elements of the sea.

As her mind lapsed into unconsciousness, she could hear the long, almost-jazzy cord of her car's treble horn playing against the beat of the lighthouse's low bass brass.

                                                                                              ~@~

"I think she's coming to," said the sweet treble voice of an angel, replacing that of the car horn, in the darkness of her mind. "Here. Put these blankets around her while I get some warm chocolate for her," replied the deeper tones of the other angel, which were more melodic that that of the lighthouse. As she began to open her eyes, she could see the light at the end of the tunnel - then realized it was a overhead light dressed in the colored glass gown created by a knockoff of Tiffany's.

As more of her vision returned, she saw the gentle smile of the blonde-haired angel looking down from above her, intersecting the light. She was dressed in a denim work shirt, unbuttoned, acting as a sweater over her tie-dyed tee-shirt, the coils of her hair framing the edges of the collar of the shirt, pouring over her shoulders like spun threads of goldenrod. "Are you all right? That's a pretty nice goose egg you have on your forehead."

"Of course she isn't all right," said the voice of the wiry-haired angle as he approached with a cup in his hands. He also wore a tie-dyed tee-shirt, covered with a leather vest that was a few pounds too small to be buttoned, and a string of puka shells around his neck. "Once she has a cup of ol' Isaac's hot cocoa, she'll be a hundred times better. Ruth, you want the girl to burn her chin? Help sit her up so she can sip this." Looking into her eyes, Isaac said, "We need to warm your insides up as much as your outsides."

"What happened?" she asked with confusion, mostly about the events that occurred after she had blacked out, but Isaac was more than willing to explain both sides of the event horizon.

"I knew there was something wrong. We've lived here for over twenty five years; learned to ignore the sound of the foghorn, but what's there to ignore about a car horn? Especially in the off season, when there’s so little traffic. So, I went out to the sound of your car horn and found you lying in the bushes near the rocks; your head slumped against the smaller ones. What, I should leave you out there in the cold of the rain and fog? Have you miss the creamy taste of ol' Isaac's Hot Cocoa? Of course, not! Now, you sip."

She took the cup to her lips and felt the warmth of the steam rising, causing the senses in her nose to bath in the luxury of the rich chocolate; her tongue was mildly shocked by the heat of the liquid. Even with the bombardment of her senses, her throat swallowed the creamy liquid and she could feel the fingers of its warmth begin to spread and reach outward from the center of her chest.

"So?" asked Isaac.

"It’s good," she replied as she gave her throat a second shock of the warmth.

"You think we serve 'Instant Quik' and ol' Isaac's Inn? No, no!" said Isaac, his chest pumped up prouder than a roaster who had service the entire hen house in a single night. "All of our guest get the finest, no matter where they are from or how they get here. And right now, you are our most important guest."

"Right now, you are our only guest," the blonde angel-woman said with a grin and a wink as the survivor took her third sip. "My name is Ruth, and the 'master hot cocoa maker' is Isaac." Then turning to her husband, she said, "And if you don't leave this room and allow me to get her into dry clothes, you'll be in the kitchen all night preparing to become the 'master chicken soup maker'. Now give us ladies some privacy."

"You'd think after over twenty five years with this woman, running this establishment," Isaac said, making a mockery out of being shocked, "I'd receive a little bit more respect." Shaking his head from left to right, he formally spun on the heel of his boot and retreated from the room, closing the door behind him.

"Now that he's off preparing you something to eat - and don't be surprised if it's the largest Rueben sandwich south of Marin - let's get you out of those things." Ruth pulled the blanket off her and helped her up from the bed. "What's your name?"

She had to think for a moment; ‘Isn't that funny? It was right there a moment ago... for the past thirty-seven years! It's...’

"Elena." The words almost had to be coached out of her mouth, even when she remembered. Slipping her legs over the edge of the mattress, the skin on the soles of her feet made contact with the hard wood of the floor. It was cool, but not unpleasant. As she started to stand, the world shifted with a hiccup, then straightened out before her.

Ruth moved to a dresser and pulled out a pair of sweatpants, sweatshirt, a pair of stocking booties another tie-dyed tee-shirt, this one colored all the way to the tips of the long sleeves.

"Your not one of those famous people, are you?" Ruth asked as Elena began to strip away the damp cloth.

"Huh?" grunted Elena, thinking for a moment – ‘Am I famous?’

Ruth, misunderstanding the sound, continued down the wrong path. "You know, like a Cher, or a Madonna, or that comedian, Roseanne."

Pulling on the sweat pants and covering the tee-shirt with the sweater, she replied, "No, I don't think so." Then something told Elena that she knew she wasn't. "Definitely not." She paused. "I can't remember..."

"Maybe Isaac and I should take you into Santa Cruz and..."

"NO!" Elena snapped. Even she hadn't expected how harsh she sounded to the woman who was giving her clothing so she wouldn't catch pneumonia. "I'm sorry, Ruth. I don't know why, yet, but you can't tell anyone I'm here. You can't!"

Ruth could see that the comment had reached the very fibers of Elena's body; she was visibly shaking more now then she had when Isaac brought her cold, damp body in from out of the fog. "Calm down, Elena. It's okay. There were a few times in our youth," Ruth continued, pitching her thumb in the direction of her 'life partner' who had left the room, "that we didn't want anyone to know about us, either. We won't call anyone." Ruth turned back to her dresser and pulled out a long piece of fabric. Moving toward Elena, she placed the knitted scarf around her neck. "This will keep your throat warm. Now, we better go out there and have something to eat. If not, Isaac will be in the kitchen the rest of the night preparing everything he can think of to impress you."

"Could I stay here?" Elena asked. "Just a few days... just till I get my head straightened out? I could do something around here to help.” She paused as she wrapped the scarf around her neck, then added as an after thought, “And maybe a bottle of aspirins."

"The aspirins, I can understand. Isaac said he thought you had hit the steering wheel pretty hard, and that little knot shows it." Ruth reached over to her dresser and retrieved a bottle, handing it to Elena. "As for staying here, well, I don't know. The inn is pretty is packed with all these important people from Redmond checking in..." Ruth winked at her. "...but I think we might be able to find someplace to squeeze you in."

                                                                                              ~@~

Elena rose with the light of day and spent the early part of it changing the linen in the ten modest cabins. Each cabin was relatively small, but she was quick to note that the furnishing seemed almost as if they had been collected over the years and comfortably decorated the room; each element waiting for its time when it would be combined again to form a union with the vacant four walls. With the afternoon and early evening, she helped Ruth in her garden and Isaac with creating an inventory of goods in the pantry. All three knew that none of these things had to be done, yet they all performed their functions as if they were part of the day-to-day operations of the Inn.

The sun setting early, the light of the day being replaced with the wisp of fog that rolled in off the Pacific Ocean, the trio had supper. As the meal finished, Isaac suggested to Elena that she might want to take a walk along the shore. "When I find the pressures of running the Inn creeping up on me, I walk the shore and listen to the ocean; listen to the sirens sing their songs."

"And it helps you?"

"Who knows?" shrugged Isaac. "I should have to pay a doctor to listen to my problems? The solutions seem to come in with the tide, and if they don't, a nice walk after dinner doesn't hurt."

Taking a few pain relievers after dinner, Elena didn't feel the coolness of the evening when she left the main hall of the inn; she thought for a bit that Ruth might be a little bit over protective by insisting she wear an old Navy coat over her sweater. But as she approached the coastline, the moisture in the on-shore breeze made her thankful for the suggestion. With the day’s activities of make-work, she hadn't had much time to think about herself, but with the solitude she shared with the waters, questions began to enter her thoughts. After the sandwich and hot cocoa, the night before, she was taken to a room and given the privacy she needed to go through the few belongings that were in her wallet and pockets.

She now knew that she was Elena Weiss, and lived - at least at sometime - in an apartment on one of the neighboring street to Hollywood Boulevard, though she couldn't find a listing for herself with Directory Assistance. She had some money in a checking account, some more in a savings. She was correct in assuming that she was thirty-seven; the combination of what skills she didn't know she had until she entered Isaac's kitchen, along with some grains of rice that had somehow found its way into one of the change pockets, she thought she might of had a career in the culinary arts. The rest was a combination of gut instincts or paranoid fears; something was after her... or was it that somebody wanted to take something away from her?

After a while, the gentle sounds of the water lulled her thoughts, almost in a meditative state. The white noise of her thoughts were suddenly interrupted when see saw a small flicker of light ahead of her. Proceeding in its direction, she began to run a number of scenarios in her mind that would explain while a small fire would be burning - night surfers, off-season campers, drug runners signaling a boat out at sea... What she found was far less sinister, but intriguing.

Careful not to give away her identity, she watched as a brown-haired man seemed to be leveling a patch of the beach. He stopped for a moment, using the edge of his parka to wipe something off his glasses, and then returned to the operation with a focused determination. Perhaps older, yet close to her age, he seemed to find fault in few offending gains of sand that refused to take their proper position on his silica surface. His arm used like a tool, he almost seemed 'affectionate' with the grains, sweeping the surface of the sand one final time in the creation of a palette.

With precision, he moved from the palette, careful not to disturb it texture, to gather a series of odd-sized empty contained; then turned, without warning, and stared straight at her. Elena was frozen in her footsteps, not knowing whether turn and run into the ocean, or turn back on the path she had just came from; knowing that with either option, if he wanted to, he could catch her. But instead, he noticed that he just looked into her eyes; a strange, haunting, painful look. Then he turned back to the containers and began to fill them with sand.

Elena was intrigued by the young man. Standing still, she watched him methodically fill the containers. He seemed to be very select as to how much of which sand from which area around him, he placed in the bucket. With the palm of his hand he leveled the contents off to the top of each container, packing them with a slap or two. His gaze would turn and look intensely at his palette, as if he could see something there that she couldn't. Then, carefully deciding where its placement matched the image in his mind's eye, he would turn the containers over, forming a 'brick' of sand, its shape would mimic, for a short time, the shape of its container.

At first, it seemed as though his placement of the sandy blocks was erratic - one here, then three closely together some distance from the first, then two more at a right angle from the first, yet diagonally from the group. The operation was called to her, and she moved closer to watch. She wanted to watch him, watch him at his work, yet at the same time, not wanting to disturb him enough that he would see her, let alone stop and say something to her.

As he continued to work on his palette, he moved himself into a position in which he was between Elena and his work, his back turned toward her. With his eyes unable to even glance up for a moment at her, Elena felt brave enough to move in even closer to the sand artist.

"This is the perfect mixture of sand and moisture," he said her; it had to be, since there was no one else on the beach. "Each element is independent of each other. Yet just enough to help each other bond and become stronger then their independent entities." He turned another container over. "With too much moisture, the sand becomes muddy, more liquefied, and unable to support the weight of the next layer that is placed onto of it. With not enough moisture, it's nothing but sand and has no purpose but to be a part of the beach." He turned and faced Elena; a pair of deep-set blue eyes gazed at her through lenses of solidified silica. "For the sand to be strong enough to be more than just sand, it needs the moisture."

"It can't do it on its own," said Elena, trying to make it sound like a statement, but the see-saw came out more like a question.

"Let's see... Here, you take this container and go over there..." he said, handing her a small, four by four by four-inch Tupperware container and pointed to a spot closer to the rock formations, the point farthest away from the ocean. "...and fill it with sand; I'll fill this one from over there." He pointed into the blackness of the ocean.

As Elena walked with her container further on into she shore and began to scoop the sands into her bucket, she glanced back in the direction of the stranger, dressed in the thick, hooded pullover and a pair of sweatpants, moving in the direction of the sea. Within a few moments, a few steps, it seemed almost as if the fog enveloped him and he had disappeared into the ocean. She wondered if she were alone; she wondered if she had always been alone.

No, she knew she hadn't always been alone. There had been another, not too long ago, and the very though brought a slight shivers to her body, which she quickly rationalized as being part of the chill of the night. Returning to the site of the palette with her filled bucket of sand, she wonder, for an instant, if she were alone again. Then she saw the curtains of moisture part and the stranger approach with his container.

Dropping to his knees along side Elena, he reached for her bucket, placing it before him, as he repeatedly slapped the top surface level of sand with his palm. "It doesn't matter how much you try to pack it..." he said as he quickly turned the container upside down and began to lift the container's skin off of its load. The sands began to spread from the raising edge, spreading out and becoming part of the surface level of sand again, "...it just can't stand on its own."

"It's different when you add the water," Elena said, caught up in the simple logic of his visual demonstration. He responded by turning his own container upside down and lifting it from its own contents. He was able to lift his container about two inches, separating it from it contents, before the sides of its shape of sand began to melt and spread from the elevating lips of the bucket.

Elena looked past his lenses and into his eyes. "I guess yours wasn't able to do it either."

"This came from closer to the water's edge. Too much water, the sand is unable to retain enough of its own unique personality to stand on its own, either." Taking the empty contain Elena had filled; he pushed the two fallen piles together. Looking into her face, he said, "Help me mix them together," and reached out to gently pull her hands to the two piles of sand before them. Hesitant for a moment, he moved her hands into the sands, her fingers feeling the slightly rougher surface of the sands she had brought and the colder, damp grains that were his.

Releasing her, the two began to slowly shift the grains, blending them within each other. Along with the occasional brush of his touch, she noticed that the rough surface of her own pile had begun to give way to softer a touch, while the damp, clamminess of his own pile seemed to lose is cold, wetness.

Without words, they each turned their own container right-side-up and began to refill them. With the buckets filled, they each packed the container's contents, looking like dueling bongo player from another era. Before Elena could turn her container over again, the stranger rose to his feet and, with a slight grin, slid her finger from the bucket. He lifted it up from before her, as well as his own, the two walked together to a spot on his palette that seemed to exist only for their eyes. He turned its brick-shaped contents over, forming one, then another, building blocks for the structure, while she took a weathered Popsicle stick and began to carve into one of his previous bricks.

"See," he said, returning to her, "it takes the mixture of the two to form the strength neither possess on their own." Dropping back to his knees, directly across from her, the previous work area the only thing separating them, his fingers returned to the sands and began to scoop up more of the grains, placing them into one of the containers. "Mixed, not only do the two become stronger in their union, the mass becomes greater then their individual parts, while at the same time retaining that which is unique and makes them separates."

His words were haunting, touching a part of her that she knew she wasn't willing to explore - not yet, at least. Having dug into the side of the brick she had created a small, inset archway. "You can't have a castle without a way to enter it." Elena turned her face off toward the waters, noticing the slight edge of its shiny surface slowly seeping its path into the shore. Her eyes followed the waters projected path; it was heading inward towards the area of the palette. "We're going to have to do something about that," and she pointed to the waters. "The tide, it's beginning to come in. We're going to have to do something to block it or it's going to wash away everything you've done."

Rising to her feet, she began to walk back to the rocky areas she had been, retrieving branches, panels and pieces of driftwood. Collecting them in her arms, she returned to him, dropping them onto the stretch of sand that separated the beginnings of their castle from the ocean. "We have to set up a barrier to keep the waters from it," she said.

"You can't stop nature," he replied. "If this is where it is supposed to be, it will stand - if it isn't ready yet, it will be washed away."

"We have to do something or it will all be washed away," Elena replied in an insistent tone. "We have to protect it as well as we can." With her words, he walked away, moving further down the beach. She watched him for a moment, but he seemed to melt into the fog of the coastline, disappearing from her sight. She was alone again, this time not by her own decision.

Then the wisp of cotton-candied airs parted, and he returned with what looked like a railroad tie in his arms. Five foot long, the six by six-inch squared rectangle of wood was dropped on the beach, where the two of them surrounded it, braced it, with the assorted pieces of wood she had retrieved, cementing its place on the beach with the very blend they used to create the structure.

As they came to the end of their chore of piled sands onto the driftwood, Elena smiled in his face. "He's by no means a 'beach-hunk', she thought, "but then, he seems stronger, in some weird way. Confident in his thoughts..." For a split-second, he caught her looking at him, and grinned. She nervously splashed some of the damp sands on his feet.

In mock shock, his eyebrows rose. "Oh, so that's how it is, huh?" His hand became filled with a sandy snowball, which he flung at her right hip. Elena saw it was coming, dug both of her hands into the sand and 'splashed' the beach back at him. For a fracture of time, they returned to their childhood, children play fighting on the beach of time.

Swiftly getting to his feet, he lurched toward her, flattening her to the beach, pinning her back and arms to its surface, his body hovering above hers. Illusions of struggling, they giggled and laughed with the voices of a more innocent time. But eventually, their eyes returned to each other, looking deeply beyond the surfaces of their faces.

And the moment disappeared.

Just as she was beginning to enjoy this chance meeting, she watched the pain, the sadness, returning to his eyes. His head turned, as if to keep her from seeing the history he had lived, and he glanced back to the rocky shores.

Rising to his feet, it looked as though fear had invited its to their chance meeting. "I have to leave..." he said, as he began to leave her, swiftly moving down the beach.

"No!" Elena said, a demand coming from part of herself she didn't recognize. Then, softer: "I mean, will you come back?" Now that's not what I wanted to say, she thought to herself. He said nothing, in return.

"What's your name?" Elena tried, as a last effort to validate that everything that had happened this evening. But he was gone, his body cloaked in the blanket provided by the fog. Standing up, she started to turn, her body moving in the direction of the beach on which she had arrived, when she turned to look at the palette one last time.

She could see it even though it wasn't there. Every tower, every archway, every window that was meant to be, she could picture. She could even see the little sand flag, flying in imaginary breezes from the top of the towers. Then, from somewhere behind her, mixed with the wisp of on-shore fog, she heard it.

Just a single word: "Tonight".

                                                                                              ~@~

"I just think she should have a few days rest before she has to go out and face the world," said Ruth, defending their new visitor.

"Ruth," commented Isaac, "we have this business call 'Ol' Isaac's Beach Inn,' and for the last twenty-five years, I thought that the main purpose of this place was so people could 'rest' - for a night, a few days, a week or more, if they wanted to. But the reason I call it a business is that these people are suppose to pay us for the opportunity to rest: not have to make their beds, clean their bedrooms, mow their lawns, add chemicals to their swimming pool or do the cooking. If I had known we were supposed to do it for free, I wouldn't have spent money each year to pay the license."

"Yes, I know... I know... besides, there is no lawns and no swimming pool to add chemicals too! You know the reason we’re here - where else would you be able to run the kitchen the way you do? Where else would you be allowed to manage in a tie-dye shirt? You look like one those medics working a ‘Day On The Green’ concert in Oakland!

Ruth countered, "Besides, I know that deep down, inside, you care about this girl, Old Man. You wouldn't of made the second trip out to her car, in the rain, trying to find her purse, if you were 'just the innkeeper."

“You know me too well, Old Woman,” Isaac grinned; he had spent way too many years with this woman and she knew his true nature. She was right. He was much more the humanitarian than the businessperson; he just didn't have to let her make him have to see his own reflection. "Well, she's going to have to do some things around her, especially if we get that business retreat for the weekend."

Ruth knew Isaac hadn't forgotten Elena's assistance in the inventory earlier that day, any more than the rooms she had done maid duty on or the time spent helping her in the garden. It was just Isaac's way of having the last word; she had spent way too many years with this man and she knew his true nature. And she loved him.

But Ruth's concern for this particular girl was different from the other 'way-wards' who had crossed their path. It was her dress - comfortable over fashionable, yet attractive - and her age. They were icons that brought back memories of...

"She about the same age as..." It had slipped out of Ruth's mouth before she was even aware that her vocal cords had uttered them. And Isaac's ears caught the vibrations before she had a chance to finish the sentence, redirecting the comment to safer harbors.

"No. We are not going there, Ruth," Isaac declared. "It's been awhile, but it hasn’t been long enough. There is nothing to be said, and nothing will be said."

Accenting the end of the draw round, the little bell above the office door announced that Elena had returned from the beach. The couple, looking up at the earthy-haired woman, shifted their conversation as if it had never happen. "Well, our little beach girl has returned," acknowledge Isaac. "The sea breeze; did it do any good?"

Ruth looked to Elena, and with just a glance knew that something had changed the young woman in some way. "Oh, yes," replied Ruth. "The waves are so soothing. It makes you have to slow down - so different from life in the Silicon Valley."

"It's the reason Ruth and I took this place; the city is fine, if you want to run around with your life in fourth gear all the time. Here, the smell of the ocean is the smell of life. The sound of the waves brings perspective. The sands allow you to feel the earth in a way concrete and asphalt never can."

"Yes... the sands..." The comment caused her to mentally return to the beach. The sands… and the sandcastle maker. Looking to Isaac, she mocked a yawn. "It also tells you when it's time to get some sleep. What time would you like me to come in tomorrow?"

"Well, tomorrow is one of our 'high impacts' days..." Isaac began, and Elena started mentally preparing herself for the list. "We'll have hundreds of things that have to be done. Most important, we have to eat brunch..." Isaac's mouth began to form a smile.

"And don't forget about that staff supper that was scheduled for tomorrow at 7 'clock," added Ruth to agenda."

"Oh, yes, your attendance is mandatory for that," Isaac continued, the grin continuing to enlarge, and like a circuit, began to spread to his wife.

"And finally, there is the late-night snack meeting," Ruth countered, trying not to giggle.

"Yes, a full schedule, young lady." With all symbolism of seriousness deflated from these comic strip word bubbles, Isaac closed the last panel with, "We expect to see you bright and early for our rigorous day of events... Say, how about 10:30 AM?"

With one final round of giggles, Elena was off to her bedroom. "She may be at a loss as to her past, but she's may have found a possible future," commented Ruth to her husbands as they prepared to place the Inn to bed.

Isaac threw his a wife a look of confusion. "She's found somebody she likes, somewhere out there on the beach. You would make the ocean a school of eligible young men that it throws out onto the beach late each night?" Isaac dropped the metal tray into the slot above the safe; the same one hundred dollars he had removed from it at the start of the business day. "So, you have decided to give up your career as accountant and gardener of one of the west coast’s most exclusive inns for a new and exciting career as a psychic?

"Snicker if you want, Isaac, but I'm telling you, our guest bumped into someone out there," replied Ruth, as she turned off the final lights in the small lobby. "Only a woman can sense these things about another woman."

As the couple moved to their own sleeping quarters, Ruth playfully nudged her husband in the side as they entered their room. "I'm so glad you talked me out of firing that one,” she commented. “She show great executive abilities."

"How could I fire someone who loves my hot cocoa?" replied Isaac, as he closed the door.

                                                                                              ~@~

The room was unlike the other rooms in the inn, and Elena took the opportunity to study it. This was more like a private individuals room, with a few of the icons distinctly male: a baseball mitt, ticket stubs for the May 25th 1977 performance of "Star Wars", vinyl long-playing albums by "Yes," "Rick Wakeman," "Styx," and "Emerson, Lake and Palmer," intermixed with "Crosby, Stills Nash and Young," "Quicksilver Messenger Service," and "Jefferson Airplane." And then, almost as accent marks, were a few icons that were different: penguins, macramé calendars; “Duran Duran,” “Hall and Oates,” as well as some “J. Geils Band” cassettes and religious icons from a collection of different beliefs. Of course, the glass-blown image of the Starship Enterprise, a dried flower rising from a pot-oil stained bowl of a large glass pipe, was a cross-over of the two social cultures of the room.

After a simple overview of the room, Elena realized that she was tired. The room being warmer than the night before - obviously, Isaac and Ruth had turn the heat on in the room earlier - she stripped from her clothes and slipped under the thick comforter of the bed, her skin feeling the softness of its sheets. The room was empty, but her thoughts were filled with the stranger she had just met - the sandcastle maker. She felt an unusual attraction to him; unusual, in that Elena had practically run a background check on every potential suitor...

How did she know that? She knew it must be true, because she remembered being asked to team up with her girlfriend, Star, on a blind date with a guy from the shipping department. He turned out to be a two-count on spousal abuse charges.

"It's slowly falling into place," she told herself, dismissing the accuracy of her memory and returning to thought of the young man on the beach. "Well, he's not really a 'young' man - age wise. If anything, the way he spoke, with such reverence, he seemed much older." But there were other things about him, beyond the way he disappeared into the fog and returned

She wasn't too much of a 'supernatural' fan. She was rational enough to realize that anyone who walks into a fog tends to disappear. No, it was the other things. It was chilly, setting that close to the ocean, yet here he was, wearing a simple hooded sweater made of thickly woven wool, and a pair of denim jeans. No shoes. He had to be living someplace close by. A cabin? A tent? Maybe, even a car?

And what can he possibly do for a living, to be out at this time of the night, building castles in the sand? Could he be homeless, or one of those eccentrically rich Internet wizards? "I'm sure Ruth and Isaac would know who he is, if he lives around here... He has to live someplace around here…"

Yet, for some unknown reason, she told herself not to ask about him. She didn't even know his name? "Hell, I'm lucky to even know my own name," she teased herself. No, until she knew more about herself, it was foolish to pry into the lives of strangers. Even if he was 'kind of cute'.

"What am I doing?!" Her thoughts were self-shocking. "I just got out of a relationship, and her I am, looking for another? … How did I know I had just ended a relationship?" For a few minutes, she tried to focus her thoughts on her own personal history. She remembered a lot, but it was all childhood memories, of growing up with her parents, her school years, college, even her first couple of jobs, but the events of the past few months... years... they were as cloudy as the fog that hung on the coast. And as hard as she tried to see through the fog of her memories, her mind continued to double back on one image: the maker of castles in the sand.

That, and her self dedication that she was not going to enter into a relationship, whether as 'again,' as her unconscious nagged at her, or ‘brand new’. There was something - a lack of stability, means of support, shoes - that warned her to stay her ground.

But then, that didn't mean she couldn't see him again.

                                                                                              ~@~

[CONTINUED IN PART II]

The day had been uneventful, from an employee's point of view, and monumental, from a friend's point of view. As Elena enter the lobby/dining area of the inn, the glow from Isaac's face was spotted from across the room. "Elena! We got it! It finally came through!"

"Congratulations, Isaac. It couldn't have happened to a nicer man... but what exactly should I be congratulating you about?

"Isaac got the business retreat account for a week - all ten rooms, with two occupants each, for seven days – the entire week, not just the weekend," Ruth said. The innkeeper's wife entered the room with a tray holding three plates of small stack of peach-covered pancakes, covered with a light sprinkle of powdered sugar, and three bowls of sliced cantaloupes and strawberries. Placing the brunch for the three at four o'clock spacing around the circular table, Isaac popped a bottle of sparkling cider and poured each of them a glass. For the next twenty minutes, the two ladies proceeded to eat the sweeten starch and canned fruit as Isaac went into a monologue of how this was the moment he had waited all these years for.

That day, Elena had no problems setting up everything that Ruth had wanted for the 'first sight' of these future clients. Some of the furniture was moved around, and with Isaac's help, they brought in a few couches from a utility room. Fresh flowers, with a spoon of sugar and a Bayer aspirin dropped in the fluted necks of each vase, were distributed on a series of small tables around the room. The room was given the 'Isaac Seal of Approval' with a final dusting of the furniture and the mantle of the fireplace just as the sun disappeared behind the ocean's crest.

Elena ran back to her room, grabbed a quick shower and a change of clothes, took a few more aspirins - the headache wasn't as bad as it had been the first two days, but she still had a slight throbbing - then out the door and off to the beach. Crossing the road that ran in front of the Inn, to a path that lead down to the beach she found the pace of her heart accelerating. The further she walked down the coastline - "I'm sure it wasn't this far…" - the more she began to believe that this was one of those chance meetings, ever to cross his path again.

The fog was slowly moving its way into the shore, draping her with its moisture, but Elena continued to travel on the grains. Suddenly, the translucent curtain was pulled aside, and there was the beginning of their castle. As she approached it, she realized it had been untouched from the previous night; it was as if he had decided to stop and, hopefully, was waiting for her return.

Elena approached it carefully, sitting down in the sands just out side of the framework of the horizontal canvas. Studying one of the towers, she dreamed of it being real. She knew where there should be a window, off the master chamber, so that prince and the princess could share the sight of the setting sun.

Pulling a discarded Popsicle stick, she slowly traced the edge of a window into the tower, stopped in mid-trace, then redrawing it as a wider window; for a split second, felt she was invading something that she had no business touching. "Wouldn't you want it to extend out of the room?"

He was back. She turned to face the voice, exposing the guilt in her eyes, but there was no sign that he was offended. "Besides," he continued, "we should probably make it a balcony so they could have a table to eat their evening meals from as they watch the sunset."

"What make you think it is 'they'?" she asked him

"No one builds a place this grand and build it as a place for a loner," he replied, without a thought, looking at the framework of the sandcastle. Then, turning to the green-eyed woman, looking into her eyes, "Besides, you drew the framework of the window, then enlarged it; it couldn't possible be for one," he continued. "My name is Harlan."

"Elena," she replied.

"Elena," he repeated her name, and she thought she had never heard her name expressed in quite the same way before. There was an unspoken melody the way he said it. "What should we do with the East Side of the place?" he asked.

"Oh, definitely, that is where the maze should go," she replied.

"A maze?" Harlan asked.

"Of course! A maze of rose bushes. You walk through the maze and there are little alcoves with benches, where people could reflect and dream." Elena closed her eyes so she could see the image clearer. "As you move closer to the center, the colors of the flower go from the darker shades of red and violet to the lighter colors - yellows and white. And as a reward, for reaching the center of the maze, there is a wonderful fountain, with coy and angelfish, swimming in a natural pond."

"And off to the north of the maze would be the riding stable," added Harlan voice, and as he spoke, Elena's mind could see the descriptions as Harlan spoke them. The barn, and the small coral on the side of it, where two beautiful Palominos shared a snack of oats, the glow of the moonlight reflecting from the watering hole. The imagery generated by her mind was so detailed, Elena felt she could almost smell the hay in the loft of the barn. Startled by her imagination's authenticity, her eyes snapped open, only to see that Harlan's eyes were closed to the world around them, also enraptured in the visions they shared.

As if the unseen cable line of their high definition displays had been cut off at the network, the couple found that their mutual program had been interrupted by the reality that surrounded them. "I guess if we're going to have to get to work if we're ever going to see it outside of our dreams," said Harlan, with a smile.

And strangely enough, Elena agreed. With a beautiful grin that spread across her wide lips, her eyes accented by the small lines of pleasure that appeared at the border of the outside edge. For minutes that turned into hours, the two of them worked, pulling the elements of nature that stretched out over the beach and remolded them to the shape of their dreams.

Some things came easy, like pulling together the natural elements for the foundation of the structure, while other things were more challenging. Finding items on the beach that were strong enough to support items that extended away from the towers, like the balcony, was difficult. Either they weren't strong enough to support the weight of the wet sand, or the dampness of the grains would slide down the beam before it could set. Harlan became visibly frustrated when one tower, on the southern side of the structure, refused to stay attached and crumbled back into the floor of the beach.

"Let's work on those areas that we can, for now," suggested Elena. "Tomorrow, I'll get a few items from the Inn where I'm staying at that might help. I'm sure when Isaac and Ruth see this..."

Harlan's head snapped in her direction. "You can't bring… you can’t bring anybody here to see this - no one. You can't let anyone know about this. Or about me."

Elena became concerned, not as much by what the sandcastle maker had said, as much as the urgency in which he said it. "Are you wanted by the police, or something?"

Harlan's lips formed a small smile; he almost seemed to chuckle about the comment. "No. No, it's nothing like that. Let's just say that I have a few issues I need to straighten out before I want to deal with people." Looking straight into Elena's eyes, he added "People in general, that is."

Elena could accept, even relate, to that. Although the core of her memories regarding what it was that was frightening her remained hidden, much like the way the ocean’s waves were hidden by the fog that seemed to be so dense around the area they worked, some of them were surfacing. She accepted that there would be a time in which they would all come to light. "I understand," she said. "I have a few issues of my own that I'm trying to deal with."

As she used her Popsicle stick to carve away the grains that hide another window in the castle, she continued to explore some of her thought out loud, sharing them with him. "Have you ever been in a situation where everything was great, yet at the same time it almost seemed wrong that you where there?"

Harlan was silent for a long moment; Elena reflected later that it seemed as if he was thinking out in advance, within the privacy of his own mind, before committing the comments to his mouth. "I think there is a perfect place for every individual; most never reach it by the very nature of its perfection." He continued to talk while he formed a walkway connecting two of the towers. “For most people, you walk through life, trying to find the closes thing to that place. When you find it, you stop and accept that that is ‘the place’ you are suppose to be. For you, it becomes 'the place'."

"Others may spend their entire lives walking, trying to find the perfect place, never to find it. When they come to the end of their walk, they feel cheated and bitter, having passed by so many other opportunities to sit down and make the place they are at 'the place'." Carefully, Harlan dug through the one tower, careful not to damage it enough to make it fall. Elena, seeing his actions, shifted her position and proceeded to slowly carve away the sands from the other side of the tower.

"But on that all-too-rare occasion," he continued, both with his tunneling and his comments, "if you are one of the lucky ones, you find 'the place' - that one place where there is joy and contentment; a place where you can ‘share’ your life with others and still be an individual. A place where you know it's where you were always meant to be. It could be because of the physical surroundings, or some aspect of your life that you were meant to do, and you share it with the people you were meant to be with."

At that point, Elena felt it; her fingertips, her nails, coated with the damp grains of sand dug from the tower, made contact with something equally soft. They touched, their hands hidden by the tower. She looked to Harlan, seeing that he had realized to whom he, also, were touching. "When you find it, you'll know it. And when you know it, in your soul, you won't go anyplace else. But if you're not sure, you're stuck with having to make a decision: stay and be as content as you can be with finding near-perfection, or travel on in the hopes of finding something closer to it, taking the risk that it will never be there for you to find."

He paused, again, and then asked. "You didn't find it, did you?"

"I guess not," Elena replied, slowly pulling her hand from the sandy glove. She looked at it and for a split second, she saw the ring that use to be on it. "Everybody else thought it was the place I should be. And most of my life, I had agreed with their judgement; but not this time. And I couldn’t find a single reason why I shouldn't agree. It was just something in my gut..."

"No," interrupted Harlan, quietly.. "Not your gut. It was your heart that spoke."

"Yes," Elena agreed, "I guess that must have been it. Maybe it's like you said, this was the closest I could find to perfection, but it wasn't perfect; my mind gave me hundreds of reason on why I should sit down and accept it for what it was.

"I left, instead." There was a pause that seemed to be uninterrupted, even by the lapping of the waves coming in from the ocean; a silence that communicated more truths between the two sandcastle builders than any of the words spoken before.

"I know," said Harlan, interrupting the silence communion. "I was at that crossroad three years ago. Everything was perfect for all those people around me that I care so much for, yet it wasn't perfect for me; I wasn't ready to sit down. So I left. Somehow, I came out to this stretch of beach, trying to decide if I was supposed to finally sit down, or continue walking."

"And you decided to sit down?" Elena asked.

"No, I walked," Harlan replied, and again, there was the long draw of silence. "But for some reason, I apparently didn’t continue walking, either." Again, for just a moment, they shared the silence that spoke so much.

"Harlan, what do you want out of life?" Elena asked, trying to find out more about this mysterious stranger who had suddenly become a part of the short-term memories which were currently her life.

"’Wants’?" Again, there was that pause. "’Wants’ are a dangerous thing. They lead to greater and greater ‘wants’. ‘Wants’ control you."

"So, you mean to tell me that you don't have any 'wants'?" This wasn't going well thought Elena. A person lacking in the things they want tend to have no incentives. ‘No incentives, no future,’ that’s what her father use to say.

"No, I didn't say that," he said in defense. "If you want something, it becomes a controlling force. There are a lot of things that can control an individual; I simply would like the choice in deciding how I am controlled by my 'wants'."

"So how do you want to be controlled?" she asked.

"By my passions in life," he said, then turning to face Elena, "and the person whom I share the time of those passions with."

"How do you expect to find a person to share your life with, if you can't even find the focus to make a life for yourself?"

"The passion I have for life is in direct proportion of the passion I have for the person I am sharing that life with. What good is it to work all your life, chasing the running rats, negotiating the best salary package, a fine home, a powerful car, perk vacations to all the great resorts of the world, if there is no one to share the fruits of those labors with?" Harlan asked. Pointing to their creation, he said, "What is a castle, with all its majesty, all the power and responsibility associated with ruling a kingdom, if there is no queen to share the throne with its king?"

"But how do you plan of finding the queen of you have no kingdom?" Elena asked.

"Even the Court’s Jester has a relationship that is shared with another. The jester makes the King laugh and, in exchange, is allowed to live a life that is in some way an improvement over the life he would have outside the King’s influences.

“If the only reason a woman is attracted to a man is based on the materialism he has earned prior to their meeting, then he might as well hire a prostitute for every morning, afternoon or evening that he feels he has to get his rocks off. It would be a lot cheaper, in the long run, than a passionless union." Harlan's comment was blunt, not in that it was a dramatic phase designed to fire up Elena's anger - which it did! It was blunt because she knew that with every fiber of his being, this is actually what Harlan believed.

"So women are nothing but whores, huh?" Elena fired back at him, her blood beginning to boil at the accusation. She was so tired of hearing all the stories of gold-diggers who marry for money, then hire high-priced lawyers to take it away from the poor, hard-working man.

"Absolutely not!” Elena could tell from the strong way in which Harlan had responded to the accusation that something was wrong with her assumption. Or with her hearing. Just as quickly had she heated up she now felt guilt

Harlan looked up into the nightgown of the ocean for a fleeting moment, then returned his gaze to Elena. "It's getting late," he declared, "and I'm sure you have a lot of things to do tomorrow."

Rising to his feet, Harlan reached out his hand to Elena. Grasping it, she could still feel the gentleness of it, even with the sand wedges within the crevasses and wrinkles. Moving to her feet, the lack of blood caused her legs to tingle and she started to sway, but before she could stumble, Harlan grabbed her in his arms. Holding her close to him, she looked to his eyes and saw the emotional heat that hid behind the lenses of his glasses. Slowly, he lowered his head and she closed her eyes and tilting her head slightly back, waiting to feel the touch of his lips to her own.

But something had changed, shifted; she could no longer feel his touch. Opening her eyes, Elena realized she was no longer in Harlan's arms, her lips were never touched. Everything was hidden, finding herself surrounded in a gauze-like blanket of moisture from the ocean. Turning around and around, and with a shiver, all she could make out was the break in the rocks that lead back to inn.

For six nights straight, Elena returned to the fog and for six nights straight Harlan had been there. With each night, the castle became bigger in bigger, not just in the volume of sand but in the detail of the structure. And just as the details brought out the brightness of character in the structure, the time brought out the darkness in the character of each of them, as well as the ocean tide to their creation.

It had become grand. It was a massive structure that would have turned the golden sheen of Arthur and Guinevere’s Camelot slightly green with envy. There was the balcony off the main tower, which would allow its King and Queen to look over the vastness of its kingdom. The garden maze was complete, right down to the individual rose bushes, fountain and areas to sit. On the other side of the castle were the stables, with a pair horses eating their imaginary oats from a sand-formed trough.

Elena looked to the waters that were creeping upon the barrier. “Harlan, what are you going to do next?”

“Why should I worry about what tomorrow will bring?” he responded, somewhat defensively. “I’m so happy with where I am today.” He arose from the moot he was digging to go along with the draw bridge they had built the night before. “I can’t do anything about what has happened in the past and why should I think about what challenges I may have in the future; the present is where I live. I’m finally happy, Elena; now. Where I am and who I am with is what makes me what I am.”

“But, Harlan, we can’t stay here forever.” She looked to the railroad tie, their barrier from the sea. “Eventually, the waves will be strong enough to wash over the wall.”

Harlan immediately rose to his feet, glancing from side to side, surveying the beach around them. “Then I’ll find a bigger barrier. Maybe I can take some of the sea grass, the weeds, and blend them with the sand to make a kind of adobe…or I’ll find a deserted car bumper and use that to hold back the waters.

“Even if you could hold back the waters,” she replied, “what about life? There has to be more to life than building castles in the sand.”

“Why? Why must there be ‘more’? Is there not enough happiness? Is there not enough pleasure?” Harlan turned and looked directly into Elena’s eyes. “Is there not enough love?”

“How can there be ‘love’ when I can’t even find you outside of these feel hours. I can’t even find this castle! I’ve come out here, a few hours over the past week, and nowhere on this beach can I find this spot. And what about you; where do you go when you leave each night? Is there a wife, a family, another life you live in the light of day?”

“Is this time we have together so bad? Are there other places, other people, you have to be with when you aren’t here? Isn’t the beauty that we share when we are together enough?”

The waves from the ocean took over the conversation.

Harlan turned from her eyes and looked into the flame of the small bonfire. He knew the time had come. “I guess we need to put up the final tower.”

“No!” Elena was the one who overruled the sound of the waves. “Maybe we can find something to shore up the barrier… at least for a bit longer.”

“Why?” Harlan asked. “Eventually, the final tower will have to go up. Eventually, we will have to say it is finished.”

“Then why can’t we build another one, even bigger, even further from the ocean?” she asked.

“Because this is the one we were meant to build,” Harlan said as he slowly step backwards from the fire and into the wisp of the fog.

“Who are you!?” she snapped at him. “Who are you to decide that this – this sandcastle – was the one we were supposed to build? This is what my life is suppose to be about, making a castle for the king and I to live our days in. Harlan? Harlan, come back here!”

She could see it, now that it was almost completed. The towers, the archways, the windows that was meant to be, she didn’t have to ‘picture,’ for they were built before her, right down to the little sand flag, flying in imaginary breezes from the top of the towers. Then, again, from somewhere behind her, she heard it:

Just a single word: "Tonight".

                                                                                              ~@~

Ruth was always the intuitive one in the relationship, but this time, even Isaac could tell there was something wrong with Elena. It wasn’t the smile on her face, which was there, but different. Her shoulders were slightly hunched forward, the moment in her steps was a little labored over the snap she walk with the day before.

“The ocean wasn’t kind to you tonight,” he asked Elena, just as Ruth walked in with a tray that held three glasses of wine. Even without the single comment from Isaac, she knew the world had changed for Elena.

“I think I may be leaving here in a few days,” she replied.

“With each tide, we know that just as it comes into shore, it is only a matter of time before it leave and returns to the ocean,” he said as he lift his glass to the light to examine the color of the wine. Lowering the glass, he looked to Elena. “But Ruth and I were hoping that you wouldn’t be like the waves.”

“Darling,” spoke Ruth, gaining Elena’s attention, “do you know where you are going from here? Pardon my being so personal, but it didn’t seem as if you knew where you were going when you came to us. Are you certain that this couldn’t be enough for you?”

“I really don’t know what I’m doing here, or for that matter how I ended up here in the first place.” Elena looked to the rosé; sipped it. “I may know tomorrow night.” And from there, the three sipped from their glasses in silence.

                                                                                              ~@~

The parties from Redmond began to arrive to begin their week-long stay. As with all groups of people, each individual has their own view of life and what it should be like. For some of the guest, the cabins were quaint and inviting; for others, they were barbarian in the lack of those simple things they took for granted in their own homes. There was television, even satellite, and in-room feature films, but there was no inn-supplied internet access. There was a wide selection of music from the sixties, seventies and eighties, but nowhere was the term ‘Rock’ preceded by the word ‘Progressive’ replaced with the term ‘Alternative’; the term “R&B” was ignorant to the phrase ‘Hip-Hop’ and ‘Urban’. “Coca-Cola” was the classic drink of cola-flavored sodas, even if the word “Classic” wasn’t silkscreened on its 10-ounce glass bottle; aluminum cans were non-existent, and Isaac and Ruth liked it that way.

Ten couples – males and females, females and females, males and males – some of them friends, some of them lovers, some of them trying to decide if they were both. With the Inn filled in a way its owners had always dreamed of, there wasn’t much time to think about the discussion they had with Elena the night before.

But as the light blues of the morning were replaced with the purples of twilight, as the guest began to settle in from their evening meal, the time came when Elena prepared for her nightly departure to the beach. Unlike the other nights, this time her departure was under the watchful eye of the owners of the Inn. They knew she was going to go – they even made a half-hearted attempt at asking her about things they knew she had already done in hopes they could persuade her not to leave this night.

As Isaac tried to please his last guest of the evening, offering him an adapter that would allow the guest to use the rooms phone line to dial out to an internet service provider [“A dial-up account?! You want me to use a dial-up account?”], Elena slipped out the front door of the office and proceeded to cross the highway to the beach. The guest left the counter in a bit of a huff as Isaac reached for his coat.

“Isaac?” It was Ruth; did he really think he was going to slip out without her noticing. “You’re not planning on following her, are you?” Did he really think he was going to do something without her knowing?

“What, you think I’m like J. Edgar Hoover; I’m going to take a roll of eight-by-tens black-and-whites and add it to the file? I just think it was a nice evening and I thought I would take a small stroll around the grounds.”

“Walk around the Inn as much as you’d like, Isaac,” Ruth warned, “but I better not see you follow the chickens.”

“What chickens? We don’t have any chickens.”

“Then there is no need to cross the road to the other side.”

Isaac made a “hurrumph” sound and stepped out the front door; yes, the old woman knew him way too well.

                                                                                              ~@~

Elena had no longer any doubts about where to go or where he would find him. She simply walked to the fog and entered, knowing that he and their castle were just on the other side of the barrier. But tonight, unlike the other nights, she didn’t have to wait for Harlan to appear. As she made her way through the milky mist she saw him, standing on the barrier he had made, looking out into the murky waters of the Pacific. She walked over and joined him on the collection of driftwood and railroad ties, matching his gaze off-shore.

“The moon will be full tonight; the tide will be at its highest,” he said as she joined him; he couldn’t look at her face. “There is no way I can hold the reality back; by morning our dream castle will be reclaimed by the ocean.”

“Just because our castle is gone doesn’t mean that we have to end.” Even as she said the words, she knew they were false.

“For years I have been here,” Harlan spoke. “Each night, I would come out, smooth the floor of the beach and try to build a dream, but each night I knew it wasn’t the castle I wanted and I would let the ocean wash it away. I knew it wasn’t the castle I wanted because I never wanted a castle – I wanted the relationship that would inspire me to build the castle. It was the relationship I had spent all my days – even those days that weren’t might – craving for.”

“I finally found the castle I wanted to make,” Harlan said, turning to Elena and reaching out for her hand instinctively, as he looked to her face, “as well as the person I wanted to make it with.” He paused as he stepped down from the barrier, Elena following. “This has become ‘the place’ where I needed to stop, but I know it isn’t the perfect place. It would have had to be the perfect place for both of us, and it isn’t.”

“Are you certain?” Elena asked, even though she, also, instinctually knew he was right. She spoke false words because they needed to be said. “Why can’t we make another castle – a real castle – where we could live together?

“Because we can’t ever be together,” he replied. “At least, not now. I am part of a world in which my happiness is being selfless to all that is around me. All that I am, now, is because I do what I do for someone other than myself; all that I do, I do it for you.”

“You, on the other hand, are not ready to step over,” he continued as he led her to the side of the barrier. “You’re still tied to the material world, and what you believe it still has to offer you. The risk of ‘love’ isn’t enough, doesn’t have the securities you feel you need to be the individual you are afraid of being.”

“You are right.” Elena spoke, even though she, emotionally, wanted to be wrong. She spoke truthful words because they, also, needed to be said.

With Elena on the side of the barrier closest to where she entered the fog, Harlan spoke as he crossed over to the opposite side. As he reached the other side of the barrier, Harlan turned to face her again. “Elena, we are what we need for each other. But the time isn’t right, not yet. There are things you need to do, discoveries you still need to make. When that day arrives, if the Power-That-Be deem it, we will be one again.”

Instinctively, Elena knew what Harlan was about to do, knew it had to be done. He reached down, grabbing the largest plank that made up the barrier, and lifted it, allowing the waters of the ocean to rush into the bay it was denied. With a final toss, Harlan had removed the dam, allowing the ocean to enter into their world, its force destroying the entire magnificent sandcastle they had created.

As Harlan turned his back to Elena, her heart over-rides her intellect; she tries to make a straight line across the waters that are rushing in to him. She hadn’t even closed a quarter of the gap that separated them when a large piece of wood caught her leg, knocking her over.

“Elena!” It was the voice of a male, but not her male. Isaac, coming through the fog, sees how the water has given her the low blow and runs to help her out of the rushing water. As he reaches her, she turns to him and pleas “Stop him! You have to make him stay!” Isaac looks in the direction of Elena’s gaze and see him… but doesn’t.

He’s stunned, almost to the point of letting Elena drop back into the waters, but he knows he can’t. He had his opportunity, years ago, and it passed. Now he has to deal with the present. As he gets the water-soaked body of Elena up again on her feet, the two of them look to the other side of the bay. Along with the remains of the sandcastle, the footsteps in the sand, and a glimmer of a person. Harlan turns to face the two of them. He smiles a smile that glows, the brightest Elena had ever seen on his face, and although she sees he is looking at her, she feels like it was meant for the both of them. Then he waves, and they stand and continue to watch it all disappear into the mist of the fog.

                                                                                              ~@~

“Oh-my-god! What happened to the two of you? Dammit, Isaac, did you follow her?” Ruth cried out as if they were the only people on the planet. “Ruth, quiet down and get us some towels,” Isaac roared with a force neither woman had heard before.

“Ruth, it’s okay,” Elena pleaded in Isaac defense. “If he hadn’t showed up when he did, I might have been in worse shape than when you originally found me.” Ruth helps Elena to her feet, marches her to the room where she has slept, and tends to the slash on her leg made by the shifting driftwood. As much as she wants to know what happened to her, she knows that the look on Elena’s face has asked for a postponement.

She slowly, quietly, leaves her room and returns to her own room, where she sees the same look on Isaac’s face. She also undresses and crawls under the covers, knowing that whatever happened can last until the morning.

                                                                                              ~@~

The morning sun came, drying up the clouds of fog that hover off the coast. With the afternoon, the sun brought out the deep blue’s of the sky. As the evening approached, the mist began to consolidate out in the waters. The morning discussion fell with the sun. Once again, the techno guest made their way from the conference room that had once held the Inn’s bar - juke box, pinball machines, dart boards and dance floor – through the evening meal of steaks and seafood – allowing Isaac to display the talent he had bottled up within himself for so many years – and onward to their individual rooms with their own individual vices they had moved so far away from Redmond to explore.

“It’s time for me to leave,” Elena declared as she set down at the table where the three of them had grown accustom to. “Are you certain it’s time?” Ruth inquired. “Yes. It’s time,” the guest who had become as close as a daughter the couple could ever hope for replied.

“You found the answers you were looking for,” Isaac spoke, looking down into the untouched meal before him. “Last night; out there, on the beach.”

“Yes,” Elena replied. “Even questions I wasn’t looking for an answer from.” She looked up at the couple. They could see that the words she was about to speak were the truth. “My name is Elena Weiss. I was suppose to of married last week. For weeks, I just kept myself busy with all the preparations for the big dream wedding that I was suppose to of spent my entire life waiting for. He is a Bay Area businessman, and I guess he must be very good at what he does. It’s brought him a large mansion in Los Altos Hills, with servants and grounds keepers. He has a wonderful collection of cars and he’s taken me to countries whose names I can’t even pronounce right..

‘I now realize what I was dealing with was fear.”

“Fear?” asked Ruth. “What fear is there in a marriage… unless it was with someone you didn’t love?”

“I think the fear wasn’t that he didn’t make me happy; I thought he did. But I realize , now, that the happiness came from doing all the things I thought he wanted me to do. The pleasure was going to all the places I thought I was meant to be because he brought me there. I realize, now, that the real fear I was obsessed with was that by taking that walk down the aisle it would have mean surrendering my freedom of individuality. That I would not be able to ‘live’… At least, not the way you and Isaac are.”

“God knows,” said Isaac, defensively, “this hasn’t been the easiest life Ruth and I have live. Elena, this group from Redmond is the first time in over thirty years that we filled every room. Even during the summer months, most of our guest went to other places on the coast, closer to the Boardwalk.” Turning to face his wife of so many hard years, he continued. “There are so many times I wanted to be able to give all the things I dreamed of to this woman, but knew I could never afford them. Many a night, while we raised our son, I thought of closing this Inn, selling it, moving back to Santa Cruz, or Monterey and Carmel, and getting a job in one of the nicer restaurants.

“If you had, I would have divorced you,” interjected Ruth. Her comment couldn’t of had more impact on Isaac than if she had slapped him across the face. “Even after all these years together, you haven’t understood, Isaac – I wanted to be with you. It didn’t have to do with where we lived, or what we did, I just wanted to do it with you. No other.”

“See?” Isaac said, turning to Elena with a grin, his cheeks turning pinkish in slight embarrassment. “I even need her to tell me what I can’t figure out in my own head!” Isaac turned, looking back into the eyes of his soul mate. “But I knew it in my heart. I didn’t want to be by myself. I couldn’t think of anyone else but you.”

“And that was what I discovered out there on the beach, last night,” interjected Elena. “I finally met the one person who could truly show me what love was all about, but there was one thing that would have gotten in the way: my need to be independent. Without that, all the materialism of the world would be hollow, for I’m not ready to share that love with anyone but myself.”

Elena turned her gaze from the could and glanced down at her plate. She wasn’t really hungry, but felt as if she needed a pause, and used a mouthful of food to interrupt her talk. Swallowing the bite with a swallow of wine, she continued. “I also realize that if there ever was someone who I could have “sat down with” – the “ying” of having someone who would respect and be honorable to me, with the “yang” of having the freedom and independence I was afraid I would lose, it would have been Harlan… but it wasn’t right time for him, either. I think we might be right for each other, someday. It’s just right now isn’t that right time.”

Elena looked up from her plate to see all the blood drain out of Ruth’s face. “Ruth? Are you all right?” The question to his wife, unanswered, Isaac rose from the table and walked back into the office area. Opening a drawer, he removed an item and returned to the table. “Was that him? Was that the one you were meeting each night?”

It was just like the icon on Harlan’s hooded sweater, the symbol of ‘ying’ and ‘yang’ that caught her eye first. As her eyes moved onward across the photo, there was his face, with the same inner sadness she had felt in the first night of their meeting. Excited, she looked back to Isaac with pleading eyes. “Yes! That’s Harlan. You know him; you know where he lives?”

It was a gentle sob that nudged Elena’s gaze from the sad face of Isaac to that of Ruth’s; she also was covered with the salty water the ocean across the street would never possess.

“Yes, his name is Harlan. He left here, in a small outboard boat, three years ago. The boat turned up a few days later, gutted on the rocks up the coast. They never found him.” He stopped to take a deep draw from his wine glass. “I wanted him to take over this Inn when Ruth and I retired, but he kept on saying that until he could find that special person, the person he could love and spend his entire life with, there was nothing. He left that night swearing he would never come back again until he found ‘the one’ he was meant to be with.”

“Oh, Ruth! I’m so sorry!” Elena began to rise from her chair to come to Ruth and hold her in support, but before she could get out of the chair, Ruth waved her to sit back down.

“Elena, you aren’t the only one who has walked out on the beach at nights.” Ruth looked up to Isaac, who nodded his approval for her to go on. For the first few months, Isaac and I went to the beach. Occasionally, we thought we say him, but we never could reach him. The closer we got to him, the more we’d see the pain on his face and then vanish.”

“Ruth… Isaac… I’m so sorry.”

“No dear, there is nothing to be sorry about.” Isaac glances back to Ruth. She knows him so well, they don’t even have to discuss it. “If anything, we will forever be grateful to you.”

“Grateful?” Elena was stunned. “Me?”

“You don’t understand, do you Elena,” said Ruth. With a quick wipe of her hand across her face, Ruth’s eyes glowed with beauty, peace and thankfulness. “Harlan said he had to find that one person who would of given life meaning for him, but his life was taken before he could find her.” She looked deeply into Elena’s heart. “I think he found her. And now, I know he can finally rest.”