Free Points of Departure by Pat Murphy Page B

could not go away,” she said.
    “Go away,” he said dully, repeating her last words. Then in an angry tone, “All right. Go away.”
    She left, a quiet vanishing. The room was too hot and it kept spinning and shaking, and presently, he slept.
    A cold hand on his forehead. The rim of a glass pressed to his lips. He tasted sourjuice on his tongue and felt it dribbling down his chin. “Orange juice,” said Karen’s husky voice. “It’ll help some.”
    He opened his eyes and in the dim light of an early morning (not knowing which morning) saw her face. Large blue eyes in a face thinner than he remembered. “What morning?” he managed to ask.
    She murmured, “Your time? The morning after, I think.”
    Orange juice trickled down hischin and the room whirled. Like a petulant child, he turned his head from the glass and tumbled down through the levels of fever and sleep.
    A scent of flowers. He opened his eyes to her face in the afternoon light now, filtered through the layer of smog over the city. Gray light. Behind her, a bouquet of flowers rested by the chess set on the coffee table. The plastic pieces were set up as iffor a game, but the white queen was missing. Karen held it in her hand.
    “Karen,” Michael said. “I want to come with you. I don’t want to care about the next move.” His tongue was dry and clumsy.
    She looked at him and he noticed wrinkles in the skin around her eyes. The skin of the hand that held the white queen was translucent, parchmentlike. “When you were young you figured out the chess moves.I didn’t care about them. It’s a different way of thinking and I can’t change you, Michael.” She twisted the chess piece restlessly in her hand.
    “I’m getting better,” he started. “Much better.” He tried to lift his hand to wipe away the tears that trickled from her weary looking eyes. But his arms seemed so heavy and the room whirled around him. He closed his eyes against the gray light of afternoonand whirled down, listening to Karen’s husky voice—huskier with age—saying:
    “I won’t lie to you, Michael. You aren’t getting better. The fever is fatal …” Then the voice faded in the distance.
    Again, the touch of a hand—feather light and cool. “Tell me about the Indians, Karen,” he whispered through a dry throat. She had never told him about the Indians because he had not wanted to hear. Andshe told him about the taste of acorn stew and the warmth of the sun and the drink they made with manzanita berries and the way the little children played and laughed. And he whispered, “Tell me about the nicest time you’ve been to. Tell me.”
    The husky voice said, “When the orange trees are in bloom. Orange blossom time.” Michael opened his eyes to his love’s old face. Wrinkled. Weary-eyed. Thehair that was piled on her head was gray. “I’m with you, love,” she said. “I’ve been away many times, but I’ve always come back.”
    She lay beside him on the bed and he felt as light and as pale as the dawn light that filtered through the window.
    “Take me there,” he said, knowing that he would never change the world—not the past, not the future. He felt her thin arms around him and felt soft grassbeneath him and with his last breath he tasted orange blossoms on the breeze.

In the Islands
    T HOUGH THE SUN was nearly set, Morris wore dark glasses when he met Nick at the tiny dirt runway that served as the Bay Islands’ only airport. Nick was flying in from Los Angeles by way of San Pedro Sula in Honduras He peered through the cracked window of the old DC-3 as the plane bumped to a stop.
    Morris stood with adolescent awkwardness by the one room wooden building that housedcustoms for the islands.
    Morris: dark, curly hair; red baseball cap pulled low over mirrored sunglasses; long-sleeved shirt with torn-out elbows; jeans with ragged cuffs.
    A laughing horde of young boys ran out to the plane and grabbed dive bags and suitcases to carry to customs. With the