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She was burning up with fever. She was his wife, and she was dying! — He took a vial from his pocket, and began to feed her pills of pure Arctic ice. He held her hand, which weighed nothing. He could feel it cooling down as the red fever-flush went away from her face. - I wuff you, she said. - The nurse detached the intravenous snakes. He put his hand on his wife's heart and kept it there until the pool of sweat between her breasts evaporated. She'd been breathing quietly but desperately through her mouth, and now her lips closed and her sweet eyes opened and she gestured to her throat until he understood that she needed more water. He jumped up to fill the pitcher. The water was tepid and muddy. When he poured it into the cup, he shook in the last pill of ice, and it turned clear and cold at once; after she'd drunk it down she smiled at him just as she had when he'd bought her the gold bracelet, that smile that scorned the world's scorn; then she sat slowly up and made room for him to sit beside her on the narrow bed as she put her arm around him and began very quietly to sing a strange sad song in her lisping voice. He put his cheek against hers. No fever. She laughed and pinched him. She pulled him to his feet and they began to dance together, right there in the hospital, and all the other patients were cured. She took his hand, and they walked together out of the ward and through the jasmine-smelling courtyard whose fire had died down and between the other yellow concrete buildings and past the white cross and out the gate, and then they were gone from sad places forever. White swirly mane-ways, down-pods and foam spilled on the sky-blue sea. He took her where leads unrolled like grey ribbons too long to have ends, their colors changing from a cumulus-white with a slight hint of yellow to a very pale sky-blue. Now she made signs that she was hungry, so they went caribou hunting with his friends in the summer moss. Reddish-black racks of seal meat hung on wood frames to dry. His dear wife felt chilly at first, but when she saw the children (copper-faced like her) laughing in the icy rocky streams, catching fish, then she began to forget the spidery green reflections of palm trees in ricefield water; everyone was good to her; the old ladies made her sealskin mitts; she learned to enjoy raw meat, to saw off a frozen steak… A long low cliff-finger rested lightly on the ice, cushioned by blowing snow, and a dumptruck full of snow left the scatter of houses to discharge its blue-smoking load, which squeaked as it slid out. Pointing at the frozen sea, he laughed and said to her in their secret universal language: Do you remember that wooden stand in Phnom Penh whose only ware was an uneven block of ice, with a rusty sawblade to cut it? and she said nothing, perhaps because she preferred to remember the ice-pills instead, or perhaps because she never said anything anyhow, only chewed on the piece of caribou fat he'd given her, walking beside him up the low ridge that bordered the sourceless river. Almost noon. The low sun and clear sky held the weird subdued transparency of morning and evening at the same time. In her smooth-soled sealskin kamiks she slipped on one of those strange ovals on the ice swept clean as if by spotlight beams; his arm was around her waist before she could fall. Then he saw that the faint breeze had begun to chill her cheeks. He took her face gently between his mitts and blew on it and she giggled because that tickled. When the color came back, he kissed her in the Cambodian way, inhaling in teasing little sniffs through his nose as he pecked her and she hissed with pleasure; he and she were polar bear twins… — He said: Now I'll take you to my house, which I hope you'll like because it's your house, too (he'd asked the photographer: What do you think Vanna will do when she sees this place? and the photographer looked around grinning and said: She'll shit in her pants, man! She's gonna love you so fucking much! By her standards you're a millionaire! Once she sees this place she'll never ever leave you!) — So the Twin Otter taxied in the snow; steam puffed from a tomato-red Quonset hut; a raven flapped; sunrise over blue clouds; past the wires the Twin took off at a sedate angle, leaving the velour hills alone. He'd given her the window seat and she couldn't take her face away from the glass; it was so beautiful. They were going from one heaven to another, by the scenic route because he wanted to draw it out as much as he could before that first time when he'd give her the key to the house and take her to the bedroom and they'd fall asleep side by side. (It was a little strange, the way he almost always imagined her sleeping as he fell asleep. Making love with her, taking her into a supermarket for the first time, giving her her first elevator ride, letting her try ice cream, buying her dresses, gold rings, a new red motorbike to ride up San Francisco's steep hills (her name pricked out in gold on the bar between her legs), these were all things that gave him joy to look forward to, but somehow sleep was the real tree whose trunk was a hundred roots, each root, as big around as an arm, one of these other happinesses, all intertwined like pipes, wrapped with vines of sleep which bore white flowers and blackish-blue berries. He was tired. He felt unwell. He wanted to sleep.) So the plane landed in the desert. The floor of the canyon was entirely river, cool, green and shallow, with the usual surprises in the lowest overhang: grey ferns downheaded like stalactites. In that shadow was the last coolness. After that, slanting rock-sides burned to touch, although there was another shelf at an angle of forty-five degrees from which huge trees jutted, both evergreens and pale green virgins leaning into space as if to drink the vapor, at least, of the river they could not reach. A man and a woman were wading up the stream slowly, knees apart. The woman was soaked and muddy, and evidently had lost her gauzy butterfly hairclip. But she seemed tranquilly happy. A wake formed from her like a shadow. From time to time she stumbled, and then the man would give her his arm, and she'd smile. Her rainbow prostitute dress shimmered like a glorious rage of dragonflies; the drops of river-water that danced up from her knees reflected every color like crystals: the pinkish-red that formerly looked so dramatic in the Cambodian night when she came walking down stenchy greasy pitchblack alleyways, the yellow splash, that hue of streetlights which Cambodia didn't have yet; the electric bluish-green that once shocked its way down breast and belly in the darkness, now a summer riverwater color, a little mournful as artificial glows always are in daylight. . She was smiling shyly and holding her husband's hand. Her earrings sparkled rhythmically as she walked through the water; they glittered like sunlight on mica. He took her slender arm and steadied her when he saw an eddy; he slipped his hand round her narrow waist. (Of course she actually would have hated all this; in Cambodia she always had to go by motorbike even if it was only two blocks, and she wouldn't even ride the same motorbike he did.) The upside-down Vs of her eyebrows glowed blackish-gold in the strong sunlight; the sunlight glistened on her cheeks. - Yellow glare of mustard fields, then phosphorescent white of cottonwoods, then grey-pink and greyer green ridges studded with little blue tree-buttons; he was taking her to their new house hidden beyond a tall slit in the sand ridge so narrow he could barely lead her through. She got tired, and he carried her across the blue desert of Utah, the yellow desert of Nevada, the grey desert of California, so grateful to be able to ease her way. He showed her everything, led her safely between the skyscrapers too aloof and alien even to accept each other's shadows, brought her under the red struts of the Golden Gate Bridge to marvel with him at the fog-colored bay and Marin headlands; on his shoulders he carried his darling wife up the steep slopes knit-sweatered with buttercups, ferns, grasses and raspberries; she stopped to weave him baskets from the windy grasses shaking alertly like sentient porcupine quills and antennae-forests while cars swirled and flickered overhead, bridge-shadow on the water. . Now before sleep Scarlatti's sonata K. 95, the thrilling happy feminine hurrying beats of that bridal march which no one else would ever want to make a bridal march out of because it wasn't sedate; he thought it simply glorious, brief and glorious, like a girl hurrying to her sweetheart; she was rushing to him in that church filled with all his relatives and everyone else he'd ever known so that she wouldn't have come to his distant land believing that he was ashamed of her; he wanted the whole world to see her and love her as she came down the aisle to him on no one's arm, the clavicord pounding like a million angels' hearts, nothing but joy. . He closed the window. Then he opened it once more to look upon the steeply slanting awnings and triangularly-crowned windows of that London street. - Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist.