Sprayed through the pores of space-time, Marie Lang was returned home. The air was still, humid in her lungs. She saw hazy rays of sunlight coming through the leaves and branches of a dogwood tree. Small high-pitched voices cheered and hooted. A slight turn of her head and she saw the children gathered round a picnic table, a little boy—with serious brown eyes—in the process of blowing out candles on a white frosted cake.

Marshmallow frosting, Marie remembered. Her son's seventh birthday party. Her son Eric.

This was the exact moment. Late one July afternoon, when she had been pulled away from her old life, from Earth and everyday reality, just as Eric was blowing out his candles. Twisting in and out of immeasurably distant loops and blisters in the space-time foam, as an agent for Aleph Prime, she'd long since stopped wishing for any possibility of coming back here.

Eric turned to look at her and Marie realized that she was holding a knife. She stepped forward to slice the cake.

The guests were gone and Eric sat on the living room floor, surrounded by his presents, slowly reading the sides of all the boxes they came in.

"I'll clean up the yard,” Marie told Henry. She stared at his neck, noting a darker bump in the skin below his left ear. His hair was finer, more wispy than she thought it ought to be. There were particularly coarse reddish patches of skin on his cheeks. Was this the wrong level of detail to focus on? She couldn't quite line up this man with her memories. Faded memories and very faded emotions. He glanced her way, she averted her eyes.

"Is everything okay?"

"I just need a little time to myself."

With sunset coming, the air outside seemed clearer, tasted fresher. She piled party debris on the picnic table and then lay down in the grass—which was in need of cutting and generously dotted with dandelions. She spread out her arms, stared up at the sky, and noted a hint of moisture in the soil beneath her. Here I am, in my own backyard, she told herself, as if to provide herself with some kind of orientation. Beyond the wooden fence would be more houses, sidewalks, streets, all the neighborhoods of the northeast section of the city. Portland, Oregon, United States of America. Planet Earth—in a reliable orbit around a modest sun, the whole solar system less than a speck, easily ignored from most points of view.

"Mama?” Eric stood nearby. “Well I, well can—well, remember when you said that on your birthday Granny let you stay up watching TV as late as you wanted, even if it was all night? Well, Papa said I should ask you."

"A birthday tradition,” Marie muttered. She sat up and stared at him. “Of course. Yes. Stay up late."

She lay in bed, very aware of Henry's presence next to her, the heat of his body, the weight of him against the mattress, the little pulls on the covers as he adjusted his position in his sleep. She turned and stared at the clock on the bedside table, watching the second hand move and trying to catch the feeling that each moment was immutable, the passing here and now, not to be repeated, never to be altered, or reshaped. She tried to feel that these moments had form, depth, substance.

It didn't feel like she was going to get any sleep.

She wanted to continue thinking of herself as an agent personality for the Aleph Prime. From the timeless beginning of things, to the space and event crammed Omega point, Aleph was the universe's greatest potential, struggling toward full becoming.

Corkscrewing down between dimensions—as an individual or as a component of a complex matrix of personas—she had sensed the dark, unknowable, untouchable places. Sometimes she pictured the numerous layers of creation as a great game board: certain squares were fully occupied by The Opponent, existing now only in another version of the universe, cloaked within the dark of other possibility.

She had “stood” before manifestations of Aleph. Even while she understood that it had to channel itself through a myriad of cut and pasted borrowings of personas and ideas, she was dazzled, in awe beyond words, left with a desperate ache to have the glory she had glimpsed come fully into being. She gladly gave herself over to service, threading back and forth through the fabric of everything on one mission after another, helping to nudge the universe in the right directions.

She slipped out of the house, dressed in T-shirt and sweats. The street's only occupants were the lines of stout old trees; there was comfort in her image of all the people, quiet and unaware in their beds. She could be a ghostly spy, slipping through silent spaces: a role she understood well. On the sidewalk she flexed her arms, shook her legs. She rested her fingers on her breast bone, then touched her stomach, her hips, knees, shins.

Searching within, she could find no regret about having been gone so long—so far away—from her family. Shouldn't she at least feel a little guilt about that?

She lifted her feet and began to jog down the street. The buzz of street lamps and the dopplered whoosh of the occasional car drew her out to the main drag of NE Broadway. She picked up the pace. Passed a hunched, rumbling street sweeper. A flat out run now. Feeling her muscles push and stretch, breath rasping through her throat, easily ignoring the instinct to slow up. She pounded headlong across the bridge and on into downtown, ignoring cruising police cars and the homeless curled up by the shadowed feet of office buildings.

Along the riverfront she tilted back her head to see the faint stars, the pale sky. Those stars seemed to reel away from her, and she finally noticed the slamming beat of her heart, the painful slap of her feet against the pavement. She gave in, at last, to her body's demand for a stop.

Bent over, panting, hands resting on knees, she took pleasure in the way her awareness slid down through her tingling body. She pushed down hard, into the numb throb of her feet, feeling sure she was on the verge of spreading out from there, into the pavement, to seep down through the wide spaces between atomic orbits, flow on out, to the river and beyond, make the pulse of this one body just a part of the tidal consciousness of the whole planet.

A dark curtain fell across her thoughts.

She found that she was down on hands and knees and that she had been holding her breath in her determination to escape. Exhale, inhale. Try to accept this body.

"Marie, your serve is totally on today. I'm so jealous."

Tennis on a Saturday morning—doubles with her girlfriends—Marie was finding that her body knew all the moves, even though her mind considered this game an unimportant shadow out of memory. But she did have new powers of concentration to bring to bear. The flow of her body and racket, hitting the ball dead on spot—it felt good. In a small way it was a meeting point between her new and old selves.

After two sets the foursome went for a leisurely lunch in a bustling neighborhood, crammed with restaurants and boutiques. They were old friends, Marie recalled, and they had a broad knowledge of each other's lives, which usually led them to extended, satisfying conversation. It was easy to be distracted by light and color and texture—pay attention to people. She reminded herself to nod and make encouraging noises at the right moments, to lean forward, to make eye contact at regular intervals, to maintain the act of being part of the conversation. Margaret was looking for a new job; Miriam was encouraging her step-daughter to see a therapist; Kate was moving into a new house. They discussed the traumas of buying and selling real estate, choosing neighborhoods, discovering the imperfections of a newly purchased home.

She watched her friends. Their eyes, the movements of their hands, the subtle turns of expression at the lips. One could only conjure up shallow little guesses of what was going on inside the heads of other people. She looked around the restaurant, and out the window at the shoppers and strollers passing by, all their faces telling her very little. Behind each of those faces were supposedly ordinary sets of human emotions and experiences. But how did you really know? Could there be others, hidden behind some of these ordinary façades, who had at some time been shunted away from this mundane world, spun off into cosmic adventure, then returned, left feeling lost and empty, but unable to describe or explain their experience to anyone?

"It's quite complicated, isn't it,” he said. Martin was her therapist. He had a Ph.D., a thick auburn beard, a cozy office. She sat on the couch, trying to make herself comfortable, while he sat in an armchair, facing her at an angle, referring to his notes. “You were a kind of secret agent and an angel. And a warrior in a battle across all of time, fighting over a universe in a constant state of being made and unmade. Working for an entity, a thing—sort of like God—which exists and doesn't exist. It is utterly primal and way beyond intelligence and personality, but it needs both those things as tools in its struggle to birth itself ?"

"Yes. Full of complexity,” she agreed. She sighed. “I could only ever grasp a portion of it at any one time."

"And not just complexities. Freighted with contradictions. Self-negating oppositions.” Martin had a beautiful speaking voice; it was slow, with a hint of gentle music, a hint of Southern drawl. He projected patience and good humored acceptance. “These magical experiences of yours have a certain mythic power, but—"

"There's no magic—it is physics."

"Ah, certainly—but, I want us to focus, at this point, on the fact that you are here seeing a psychotherapist. This is a choice you made on your own. It tells us that on some level you acknowledge these elaborate adventures as a construct. A delusion—if you can pardon the term—which you want to get past."

"It would make life easier, I guess, if none of it were true...."

"I think we should try looking past the fate of the universe and put a spotlight on your daily life, here and now,” Martin said.

She decided that it was time to have sex with her husband. She'd lain beside Henry night after night without physical contact, waiting for feelings to come, to inspire action. Now she moved across the bed and pressed against him, planting a kiss on his chin. This act might turn out to be the key to unlocking the door into feeling. So she kissed his lips, his cheeks, his earlobe. And he responded, returning kisses, pressing back against her, moving his hands and then his whole body.

For some time she thought she was actually there, within the act. Feeling how it was to be a human being making love—skin against skin, hips moving, muscles tensed, all a pleasurable flow. Yet she noted the function of knees and elbow joints as much as the sensation of fingertips and tongue. And each sensation might easily have been a universe away from the others. Her grip on the passing moments was further weakened by her attempts to connect everything to her all too abstract sense of self. At best she seemed to be a puppeteer, setting poses that indicated the existence of an inner coherence. Her true desire now was to snip the puppet's strings and free herself from the burden of worrying about having an inner life supposedly connected to all this activity.

When they were done, Henry rolled over and sighed. He pressed his lips together and stared up at the ceiling. She like the impression he gave that he'd let his mind go blank. So she stared up at the ceiling too, reaching out for the sensation of lazily drifting, away, without destination.

Eric wanted to make a collage. He piled stuff on the kitchen table: old copies of Time, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and Premiere, a week's worth of newspapers, and several large sheets of construction paper.

"But, but, but you have to help me,” he told Marie when she came to look at what he was doing. He held up scissors and a stick of glue and waved them at her. “Aren't you going to make sure I don't make a mess?"

"Sure. Of course—I want to help you,” Marie said. “So how do we start?"

"We ... to start, we cut out lots of pictures. But you have to tell me to cover the table with some newspapers, so I don't get glue on the clean table."

"I was just going to tell you to do that. And be careful where you point those scissors."

Marie pulled her chair right over next to his and watched him pick through the magazines. He cut out faces—politicians, models from perfume ads, movie stars, completely ignoring their bodies. He stacked his collection of heads and then moved on to clipping images of cars and trucks and airplanes. Marie idly turned pages and snipped out the shape of a house here, a tree, some flowers there.

This little boy—her son—he had a certain smell to him that evoked deeply felt memory and emotion. The scent of a child was a sweeter thing than that of a grown man. She focused on the sweetness while watching his small fingers manipulate paper and scissors. In a certain kind of way she recalled the even sweeter smell of him as a babe in her arms. She pictured him as toddler, determinedly climbing up into her lap, pressing himself against her body. It was like opening a filing cabinet, reminding herself that there was a whole store of protective and loving memories to draw upon.

Soon Eric was on to the gluing stage of his project, linking human faces with pieces of machinery. When he shuffled through his collection of images, Marie had a flash of the kaleidoscopic shifting nature of Aleph Prime. Here was a sharp emotional experience. Oh to be in the Aleph's presence again! It stung her. Even to just have visions of It flicker before her eyes electrified her thoughts.

She began cutting magazine pages into random pieces as fast as she could. Next she glued these shards of images and text into the form of a jagged pillar stretching up the middle of her own piece of construction paper. She tried to get her creation to imply as many angles and edges as possible. What she had done so far reached toward an idea of the Aleph—which just fueled her desire for more. She pasted new scraps on top of the previous work, feeling she could continuously reach toward a sense of Aleph Prime.

"I'm finished, Mama.” Eric's voice came from somewhere near her elbow. She imagined that he was very far away—that her elbow was way down on another plane. If she didn't glance his way she could stay up on this level, pursuing glimpses of the infinite. “Don't you want to see mine, Mama?” Eric asked.

"In—in just a second. I've almost got something here ... so...."

There was an insistent tapping at her far away elbow. Her vision of the Aleph folded and flattened and became a pile of glossy paper scraps. She turned to her son and looked down into his gaze. She felt blank. Then slowly, she registered the expectant look down there in his eyes.

"There was a species. They were just spreading out into their galactic neighborhood with a new faster-than-light-speed ship drive. I appeared to them—revelation, recruitment—a voice from out of the bellies of their own starships. It was I who spoke—out of energies stretched between lower and higher geometries—the voice of Marie Lang, mother, wife, product of thirty-four years of human experience. But I drifted into abstraction: they couldn't understand me as well, or believe in me. They grew uneasy, fearful. I didn't understand it. Why couldn't they picture the pure beauty in my messages?” Marie paused and then told her therapist: “I think I understand, now. Understand why I've been sent back to my life on Earth."

"Oh?” Martin glanced up from his clipboard, expectant.

"With the accumulation of missions, I was losing my core self. Losing my identity. I have to learn to be human again."

"That's an interesting way to see it. Identity is a lifelong struggle, isn't it?"

"Yes, of course. But I should be able to connect with my own son. To be integrated, on some human level. So this is why I come to see you. Not to get rid of any kind of delusions. To help me find myself. Put my human self back together."

"We've been talking about your ... situation for a good number of sessions now. I think you are ready to look at the root causes of your feelings of depression and alienation. And ready to take action.” Martin leaned forward from the edge of his chair, closing the distance between them, locking his gaze onto her. “Look at the obvious. No more talking and obsessing your way around it: you want to leave your husband. A part of you, that is not allowed to speak out, knows you badly need to get out of this relationship. So much so that to surmount your guilt you produce this huge, strange construct. You must be suffocating, but you don't see yourself as the type who leaves or gives up. Thus you wrap yourself in tragic, self-sacrificing fantasies, full of loyalty to sterile, abstract causes. To be a healthy woman you have to make it your own choice to leave your husband."

"That's not it—when I get back in touch with my—"

"Stop.” He held up his hand. “Don't waste any more time. You need to get out. Take responsibility for your desires. Let yourself think about other men. You may find yourself shedding your detachment. Look at other men. And, eventually, spend time with some of them."

Martin's open hand hovered in the space between them. Marie thought he seemed on the verge of resting the hand on her knee. In his eyes she thought she saw the flicker of his own needs replace the façade of detached understanding. Could she actually read the human needs behind his expression? Desire. The thrill of sexual conquest?

"It's going to be a painful process,” Martin said, inching his hand back down to his own knee. “But you have to plunge forward, so that you don't fall back. Give yourself freedom."

She pushed herself back, deeper into the couch, and remained silent. She watched him, and thought that she had perceived something new and that she wouldn't be coming back here.

Marie awoke before her husband.

When the alarm rang she watched Henry fumble with it, press the snooze bar, and wrap his arms back around the pillow. She reminded herself to focus observation particularly on gesture, body language and expression and less on color, texture and light. The third time the alarm rang he flipped over onto his back, opening and closing his eyes many times, as if drifting back down into sleep and then willfully forcing himself up into wakefulness. He jumped up, apparently awake; but soon he sat back down on the edge of the bed, back slouched, head hung low. He held a pair of socks in one hand but sat still for three minutes before putting them on.

She peeked around the bathroom door and found him staring into the mirror, much of his face covered in shaving cream. He wiped some of it away from the corners of his mouth with one finger. She noted the way he pulled the razor up and then brought it down again over the same patch of cheek. His posture suggested deep concentration.

How do you see an ordinary man properly? You absorb all the ordinary details? Before she had left to work for the Aleph she had been very used to life with Henry. She remembered no unhappiness. She had inhabited this life thoroughly and had not thought about wanting another.

She stalked him down the stairs and into the kitchen. He poured two different kinds of cereal into one bowl. He sniffed the open milk carton twice and then poured milk in a circle over the contents of the bowl. She wondered if she'd once known all these details as thoroughly as she was now relearning them.

While spooning up his breakfast he paged through U.S. News & World Report, starting from the back of the magazine, reading a paragraph or two here and there. When he reached the front cover he started turning the pages again, going forward this time. He noticed her watching, for the first time, and gave her a small smile. Was there a brightness in his eyes? What did it mean?

Henry and Eric were in the backyard kicking around the soccer ball. They played at getting and keeping the ball away from each other, zig-zagging from one end of the yard to the other.

Marie was inside, moving between three different windows so that she could view all the action. Each pane of glass contained its own subtle distortions. This was like having views into a series of closely sliced alternate universes. When she noticed that father and son were out of sight she hustled over to the next window.

Of course Henry could take the ball away from Eric anytime he wanted, the advantage of size and adult dexterity. Now it seemed that he couldn't resist showing off, keeping the ball to himself with a blur of fancy footwork, his son always a footstep behind, kicking at air.

Henry relented, behaving like a grown-up again, and let his son bash the ball away. He tried to show Eric how to tap the ball with the sides of his feet. Instead the boy knocked it away with his knee and then chased after it behind a bush.

Both were out of sight now. Marie gathered herself together, focused on the idea of this one world, one backyard, and stepped out the door onto the patio where she had a direct view of the whole yard.

Eric waved to her.

"Mama, look what I can do."

He picked up the ball, tossed it up in front of him and, with a lunge, butted it with his forehead. He made a little victory jump.

"I'll show you a new tree I can climb, too."

Henry boosted him to the first branch of one of the trees by the back fence and Eric scrambled up two more branches on his own. Then Henry climbed up into the tree too, again seeming like a bigger kid showing off.

She approached, smiled at them, and grabbed onto one of the lower branches. She swung herself up, moving from branch to branch without hesitation. Balance, weighting, leverage—she got everything just right without pause, without thought. In a few seconds she was securely perched about five feet above the two of them.

"Look who's suddenly a gymnast,” Henry said.

The muscles in Marie's arms and shoulders were quivering from their sudden use. She let out a grunt of breath.

"Mama's a monkey!"

They all laughed. Then they sat silently, up in the tree, looking around at the view.

She found Henry pulling weeds in the yard. A short heat wave had broken the night before—there were even clouds gathering overhead—suddenly everyone had a little more energy. He gazed over at her.

"Eric's gone to Tommy's for the night,” she said. “Since it has cooled down, I thought I'd bake us a lasagna. We could eat in the dining room and open a bottle of wine."

"Wine sounds great,” he replied, “but with the kid gone, why don't we break the rules a little and eat in the living room, on the rug. We could play a little Scrabble?"

Though there was plenty of daylight, Henry set out candles around the room; he also put on a CD of gentle bossa nova tunes. His actions seemed to say that he knew she was working her way back from the distant emotional space she'd slipped away to.

She let him check his words in the dictionary, but she still pulled way ahead when she landed “juicy” on a triple word square. He struggled but couldn't catch up before they were out of letters. When the food and game were done they leaned back against the couch, sipped wine and held hands. She thought he seemed happy and content with these uncomplicated hours together. And she felt it too. She also saw, distinctly, the desire in his eyes. A human need, and, appropriate to the occasion, melded to companionship and other abiding emotions.

Finally, she let out a half laugh into her glass and said, “I feel almost human."

He stroked her shoulder and kissed the side of her neck, in a spot that gave her goose bumps.

She said: “I know we're ready to ... we should go up to the bedroom. But I—first I just need one more of those little moments to myself."

"I'll just pick up here and in the kitchen.” He stood up. “And I will see you in a little bit, right?"

In the backyard, by herself, Marie pulled a few weeds, adding them to a pile left by Henry. Clouds filled the sky and she felt a light drizzle against her forehead and bare arms.

She lay down in the grass and stared up at the trees fringing the back fence, just listening to her own breath, feeling rooted to this one spot.

Something shifted. She had the sense of an opening of the space around her. The leaves above her blurred and expanded outward, filling her field of vision. From within, and pressing out, came sparkling green tunnels, etched with spiraling grooves. She felt herself stretch out—up and down, and in unnamable, strange directions—toward those tunnels; seeing/ touching, beyond their curving horizon lines, the rippling shape of possibility. The unearthly green pulled insistently—shouldn't she breathe a sigh of relief and let go?

No. She pulled back, snapping into place, into the time bound body. The weight of that body pressed against grass, solid, her own. Breathing, heart pounding, sky above, a heavier rain coming down now.

She found that she was very calm; she stood up, went inside and headed upstairs.

It was another scorching late August afternoon. She sat in the shade, in the park, with Kate and Naomi, both of whom had sons close to Eric's age. They watched their boys wetting each other down with squirt guns.

"I wouldn't mind being squirted,” Kate said. “It feels like nothing could possibly cool me down."

"They're in that stage where they have to assert their independence,” Naomi said. “They like the power of shooting each other."

"Acting out aggression, getting ready to grow up and become like their fathers."

Often we discuss the same things over and over, Marie thought. In a moment they will be back to complaining about the heat. She realized that sometimes her friends bored her a little, but she would be lonely without their voices around her. Friendship was a part of this new version of herself.

Eric came up to them with a fist full of daisies and dandelions.

"Oh my. Flowers for his mother!"

"See,” Marie said, “my son is the exceptional, sensitive, artistic one."

Eric glanced back to the other boys, then he shouted “Nah, nah, hah, hah!” He threw his flowers up in the air so that they rained down on his mother's head, and then ran away, leaping back into the bright sunlight, practically bouncing his way back to his friends.

"Watching them grow up is not going to be pretty,” Kate said.

Marie was back-to-school shopping at Target, with Eric, when she felt the call of the Aleph Prime. Eric had picked out sneakers, a Rusty and Big Guy lunch box, and an assortment of color pencils. Now he was busy examining the pictures on various three-ring binders.

Every mote and particle of the surrounding store unfolded toward her: corners, angles, planes, turning and flowing and expanding. Threads of Aleph, embodied in braids of various probabilities, reached through her and wrapped around her. She couldn't pull away. It was not really a call or a request, it was the simple truth that she was flowing away.

She grabbed for Eric—felt his hand in hers. For whatever long while that she was going to be off, weaving amongst the layers of creation, she wanted to remember that she was also here, in the aisle of this store, holding onto her son's hand.

copyright (c) 2005 Damian Kilby