Free Fireworks in the Rain by Steven Brust Page A

emotions demand that you let them do the driving.
    I took the Fibonacci sequence up to 233, by which time I felt like I was thinking clearly again. While I had the laptop open, I logged onto the board. It was still full of Billy being pounded for meddling with the Supreme Court without talking to anyone first (I mean, Jesus!), and waiting to see how things with Irina would play out. Oskar was being Oskar: demanding we Do More. He wanted gunshots, and the masses in the streets, and fireworks. I can respect that, but it isn’t how I work. I left an insult for Vivian, thought better and deleted it, and logged out.
    The Pirates would be playing the Astros at 4PM Las Vegas time. I made a mental note to record the game if I was going to be too busy changing the world to actually watch it. I poured another cup of coffee, toasted a bagel, ate it with cream cheese. I composed and sent an email to Ren, full of in-jokes and sexual innuendoes and cute things that are none of your business.
    Then I decided that, if I couldn’t find an answer in the real world, there was one other place to check. I closed my eyes, and, as I had so many times before, I imagined the smell of cherry blossoms, and the taste of chive; and then, still with my eyes closed, I looked around.
    The typical Roman villa had no stairways, no basement, no upper floor. Mine wasn’t typical; somehow, without my being aware of it, it had changed over the centuries. The peristylium was still there, but now there was, in one corner, a space where, if I chose, I could imagine a stairway going up. And in the opposite corner was a stairway down that was more or less permanent—more or less because this was the Garden, a product of my imagination, and with the imagination, more or less is all you get.
    I took myself to the atrium, where a rope hung from the ceiling because I wanted it there. I pulled it, and a wall slid open, complete with grinding sound and the stirring of dust, because I have a very good imagination. This was yet another stairway going down, a circular one. Do not try to make sense of the floor plan; particularly the lower floors. Accept my imaginings if you can, reject them if you must. But remember that we are in a place that is real and unreal at once, and that out of imaginings truth can appear in unlikely places.
    There was a torch in my hand because otherwise I couldn’t imagine how I could see, even though, at present, there was nothing to look at. The circular stairway behind me was gone; blackness in all directions, except the floor, which I imagined as a sort of grey flagstone, shining just a little in the torchlight.
    There being no reason to chose one direction over another, I walked forward.
    The things I passed had nothing to do with what they were, unless it was happening at some level of my subconscious too deep to access and too obscure to be useful: A portion of wall became fuzzy, and through it I saw a Porsche 911 driving on I15, which I knew was the Nevada State Bank; on a suddenly-appearing counter in front of me was a glass of some amber liquid, and that was a branch of Citibank; a few bars of a symphony by Rachmaninoff were a branch of U.S. Bank; the light from the Luxor, through the same hole-in-the-wall where I glimpsed the Porsche, was the Bank of America. Yeah, okay; there were a lot of banks that owned the mortgages on a lot of houses, full of a lot people who couldn’t pay. That didn’t give me any clue how to help. I picked one anyway, in hopes a deeper look might inspire something. I passed the antiseptic smell of a hospital and recognized it as Wells Fargo.
    I inhaled the scent, and followed it, no longer conscious of which way my feet were going. The yellow apple hanging from the tree was a teller at the branch on Maryland Parkway. The sound of wind-chimes took me all the way to the top of the corporate ladder. Well, okay. Too small, too big, and … just right? Say, someone in management who oversaw some of the