Free A Mind of Winter by Shira Nayman Page A

unencumbered by civilization or law, a place that had long called out to me, perhaps all my life, in the fluid thin voices of Sirens—and I having strapped myself, one way or another, to the mast on the deck of the slow-moving unstoppable ship.
    Finally, this evening, I had wrenched myself free.

    “There are souls which need altering, if they are to come into their own,” Archibald announced as Barnaby sat down. “So often, I find, people don’t know what it is they want.”
    Archibald’s tiny eyes twinkled. “Actually, I introduced them. Meet your spiritual guide , I said. They both looked a bit perplexed, Han Shu and Christine, as if neither knew which of them I meant.”
    The waiter set down a plate of half shells.
    “Did I ever tell you about my theory of the North Star?” Archibald continued. “Well, I do believe the one will turn out to be the North Star of the other. I do love symmetry, don’t you?”
    Archibald’s new passion was oysters; it was miraculous that Harry, the restaurant owner, managed to keep up with Archibald’s culinary whims.
    “You see, Han Shu and I are masters of the hovering life within, to borrow a phrase. Christine is also a visionary of a sort; she and Han Shu are destined to play a key role in each other’s lives. Every imagination is only a fragment in need of its complement. Artists understand this. Until the artist has found his North Star—the transcendent counterpart that is to be his guide—he despairs, flounders in search of that something which has gone lost.
    “I know all too well what it is like. Oh—the heavenly hurrahs when you stumble upon it! It only seems like chance, my boy. Believe me, it is anything but. After all, that’s the only thing we have: imagination. Besides oysters!”
    Archibald picked up a shell and gently sucked the flesh from it. “I must ask you, while we are on the subject of finding one’s spiritual complement: how go things with Christine?”
    Barnaby hesitated. He was not in the habit of confiding in Archibald. And yet, he found himself feeling a level of desperation he’d not felt in years—perhaps ever.
    “I think I’ve lost her. I thought it was only temporary—that she would come to her senses, realize, after a month or so, what we really have together. I thought I’d just back off, let her taste her old life without me in it, and she’d know it wasn’t a satisfying life. Some breathing room, she said. So I let her be. I waited. One week. Then another.” Barnaby pulled out a white handkerchief and drew it across his brow.
    “Dear boy, I am sorry.” Archibald looked genuinely pained.
    “She’s disappeared. Clear disappeared.” Barnaby could hear the crack in his own voice. The look in Archibald’s face came as a shock: the depth of his sympathy and concern. “I went to her lodgings. She’s gone. That vile landlord of hers told me he sold her belongings weeks ago.”
    Archibald nodded somberly. “Destiny involves Darkness, there’s no getting around it. She is going where she needs to go, and there’s not a damn thing you or I can do about it. We’re neither of us a Virgil, I’m afraid. Which isn’t to say she won’t find one, further down the line.”
    He leaned across to Barnaby and whispered into his face: “There is always another side to consider. Let us not forget Coleridge. Where would English poetry be without ‘Kubla Khan’? And without the exquisite poppy—well, there simply wouldn’t have been any ‘Kubla Khan’ at all.”
    Archibald slid another oyster into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “There’s a brilliance to Christine,” he added. “You must have sensed it. She feels the pulse of the universe.”
    “I only know I have to find her,” Barnaby said.
    Archibald squinted meaningfully through the smoke of his cigar. “Destiny has to be thought through, Barnaby. It doesn’t descend like some ghostly visitation. I met a young man at the club, on my short trip home to London.