Lafe's body was sore. The smallest movement, even breathing, was painful. The pain was unique in his experience because he seemed to be outside of time. His sense was that time had stopped, or that he was in a place where the category times did not exist.

"Why am I in such pain?"

"Ask yourself. I do not know."

Lafe felt his anger rise, his famous temper. He started to spring to his feet and fell back, howling with pain. Tears came. He was ashamed.

The tears subsided.

The Indian sat cross-legged, looking at him for a long while.

"Come. We are going up." He picked Lafe up like a child and carried him through a crevasse up a narrows twisting tunnel. They emerged onto the mesa in a clump of large cactus. Lafe was blinded by the sunlight and by the snow-covered desert reflecting the sunlight like an infinite treasure of tiny diamonds He shielded his eyes. His eyes now hurt like the rest of his body.

The Indian laid him on the ground and took two sticklike objects from his pouch. They were colorful, decorated with feathers. He walked about in ever-wider circles for some minutes. He stopped, closed his eyes, opened theme and placed the two objects carefully on the grounds forming an X. Over and around them he moved and gestured slowly, like a dancer performing to music which only he hears. Lafe watching thought of water, the tide, surging in the English Channel, a muddy stream flowing heavily after a spring rain near Tehuacana, the parched earth of late summer opening in a large crack in their old backyard after a summer downpour, swallowing into blackness all the sky offered, dark rivulets flowing from circular puddles around the trenches in France, watery graves for those who would never drown, the vast, brown Mississippi glimpsed briefly through silver flashing bars of a railroad bridge.

The Indian stopped.

Lafe found himself getting to his feet without pain, walking toward the Indian. He walked to him and stopped.

The Indian said, "The door is open."

Lafe looked into his eyes and felt dizzy, started swaying.

The Indian took him, embraced him.

Tears came again. Lafe closed his eyes. He was in France. He relived the war: flashing lights, murderous thunders rivers of bloods parts of bodies floating down rivers of bloods mouths gasping for one more breaths eyes closing forever, FOREVER OH GOD NO, over and over the slide into peace and silence and surcease and always the man-made thunder that would not stop! IT WOULD NOT STOP. He clutched his ears and screamed and screamed and screamed. Still the Indian held him. Through the thunder Lafe heard him saying over and over, "My brothers my brother. It is all right. It is all right. You are all right. Even that is not you."

He lived the war a thousand times and then it was gone.

Gone. Silence. Silence. He took a deep breath. No pain. No noise. Silence. He listened hard. He heard their breathing, a desert breeze, a delicate and echoing sound and he knew he was hearing the crystalline melt of snow, he heard a distant rushing sound, the sound of life flowing through the cactus around them, and an impossibly rich and deep humming, the movement and flow of the living earth, the planet's very breath. He kept his eyes closed, afraid of losing this miracle.

It faded.

He opened his eyes. The Indian was still holding him, looking at him.

"It’s not gone. You only have to learn how to pay attention to it."

Lafe closed his eyes. He heard again. It was as If the whole world were making love to his ears, so great was the pleasure. More than pleasure: Joy.