“Mae,” Laurel said, the next time I called, and after a moment I answered her. A little spring opened up in me when I pronounced her name.

And then, I think, we must have had a conversation. Or, at any rate, Laurel began to talk. It’s been so long … banalities of that order. For the first few minutes I listened only to the timbre of her voice.

Laurel had been to a New England prep school, then a couple of years at Stanford before she fell in with D—— and the People. Her patrician manner of speaking probably came from her family, long before any of those other things had occurred. I’d envied that a little, I suppose, in the beginning. But in her passion Laurel spoke differently; her register dropped; the voice took on richer tones. I heard the wildness that was in her, raging to come out.

Then. I heard that then. Tonight, she gave me only her schooled surface, and I said little: Yes … Go on … I let the silence pool whenever she stopped speaking.

Without attending to her words, I somehow gleaned some information. Laurel had moved to New York, where she taught school. She was some stripe of administrator now, in a top-drawer prep school in Greenwich Village. Yes, she was single still, or again. But there was a child, a daughter—I didn’t catch her name.

Beneath the careful modulation of her voice I heard nothing of her old fire, but an uneasiness. A hint of fear. It repulsed me and drew me toward it.

“Laurel,” I said. “I saw you.”

“You—”

“The tapes.” I didn’t mean to say tapes, that I had made them, that I had watched her seven seconds on the order of seven hours. I meant to say the television.

“In the news,” I said.

Laurel held her breath and I pictured her pinning her plump lower lip in her top teeth as she masked the telephone’s mouthpiece with her hand.

“The nine-eleven coverage.”

“Oh God.” A deeper shade came into her voice, though she wasn’t calling on the gods that she and I had served. “I’ve so been trying to forget that. That—it wasn’t me.”

I no longer needed to play the tape to see it, Laurel with her head thrown back, clawing hands raised against heaven, her bloody jaws. Laurel translated into Fury, the blazing self she was meant to be.

“I don’t see how you saw that, Mae.” She was struggling to repair the seamless surface of her speech. “They only played it a few times.” A shudder I could feel across the phone line. “A time too many for me, of course.”

Silence.

“It’s been hard here. It’s … it’s all such desolation.”

“I live in the desert,” I told her, the first and only circumstance of that nature I revealed.

“I don’t see how you found me, anyway. After so long.”

The fear was there again beneath the surface and I wanted to move through my disgust into it, occupy it, and use the fear to hurt her, or rather to make her feel.

There’s a bond between us, never broken. I never lost you, Laurel, and no more could you lose me.

For the first time on the phone, she sounded old. “I can’t do this, Mae. I just can’t handle it. I don’t know what you want from me anyway. Not now. What is there? And besides—”

Besides.

“I’m dying,” Laurel said into the phone.

“You can’t be.”

“Yes I can,” she blurted out. Her voice shifted to irritability, still only on the surface at first. Then something deeper; I thought she might weep. “Mae, I don’t know where you are, but I can’t go back into that crazy fantasy with you. I can be dying like anyone else, and I am.”

It upset me, I am ashamed to say. Laurel, saying a thing like that. It pushed me off my center for a moment, and made me start to plead.

“Don’t you remember … ?”

“Can’t you understand I don’t want to remember?” The voice moved from petulant to firm; I felt her hardening her shell. “Mae, I wish you well, but please don’t call.”

In the desert there was starlight but no moon. The dust had settled, for a time, and the air was calm and dry. I heard coyotes, not so far away, but didn’t see them.

Reach out and touch someone, I thought. I hadn’t yet considered that someone could touch you back.