"Probably. You're not a superhero, you know. Can't see through walls.”
"You can't?" Ben asked.
I frowned at him. "No." Then I realized he was chuckling in his beard. The unexpected respite from their offspring seemed to have made the Danzigers goofy.
I had never discussed the deep Grey with them, the blaze of energy defining the shapes of the world like intelligent fire in a pit of cold blackness. It had been all I could do at the time to say that it was not what any of us had thought it was. I didn't want to discuss it now, either, even if I thought I could have. I'd never had any luck before.
I gave them both a quelling glare. Ben looked a little sheepish, but Mara just made a face at me.
"I imagine once you're in the Grey, some things remain as hard and opaque as they are out here," Mara said. "But I suspect that getting around it's a matter of finding a bit of a hole to go through. Once you've got a path you can follow the strand—or at least get a look at it.”
I groaned. "Are you expecting me to dive in there and chase this thing around right now?”
"Why not?" she said, getting comfortable on the sofa again. "Let's see what we can do about this. I'll have Albert spot you, just in case.”
"I think I can manage without a spotter by now," I said.
"Still," said Mara. "I think what you'll need to be doing is bending the Grey a little while you're inside.”
"Like I do with the shield edge? But that seems to isolate me from the Grey, not help me move around in it. Why am I supposed to be bending this stuff anyway?”
"So you can push the layers around until you find a hole to go through and follow that strand. You've said there seem to be layers to the Grey and it must be easier to bend a single layer just a bit than to pull the whole edge around. You should be able to pull on the layers of it the same way you pull on the shield. That's what I want you to try. Go in and look around. If you can see layers, try pushing and pulling on them and see if you can move them aside a little.”
It sounded crazy, but then the whole thing always did. I shrugged. I breathed slowly, let go of normal, and slid the rest of the way into the mist.
The Danzigers' living room, old as the house was, was not thick with the memories of furniture and other peoples lives. Mara had cleared much of that away when they'd bought the house, but some still remained as shades over shades. The humpbacked shape of an old sofa wavered a few feet from me. In the Grey, its form had the substance of memory. I moved toward it and peered sideways, then straight, through thick and thin veils of mist and cold steam. The sofa flickered a little and I could see that it seemed to flatten a little when viewed from the right angle. I put out my hand at the same angle and pushed.
The ghost sofa warped and bent. I grabbed at it and tugged. It slid. I could do it, but I didn't see what purpose it had, except rearranging the Grey furniture that littered my office and condo.
I pushed myself back from the Grey, breathing a little harder than I'd expected.
"I can do it," I puffed. "Not sure what the point is, but I can shove the furniture around, at least. It's tiring, though.”
Mara shook her head. "I think that's the poltergeist strand dragging on your energy. Pushin' around in the Grey takes some work, but it shouldn't take that much or you'd be exhausted all the time.”
"I used to be.”
"Not anymore. Not in a long time, eh?”
"True. I'm getting used to this stuff and it doesn't seem to be trying to kill me anymore.”
Ben was looking at me oddly.
"What?" I asked.
"I've never seen you do that before. It's rather fascinating.”
"I can't begin to imagine why.”
"You sort of. . fade out. I mean, you're here, but it would be easy to miss seeing you. In fact, you look a bit like most people think a ghost looks.”
I rolled my eyes. "Goody.”
Ben just looked intrigued.
I turned back to Mara. "I'm still not sure I see the point.”
"Well, if it's true that the Grey has layers, then it must have layers of time as well.”
"Yes," Ben chimed in. "We've been discussing it and it seems to me that since memory loops exist in the Grey—that's what the most common ghosts are, after all—these memories must be isolated capsules of time. So the Grey must be stacked up with layers of time, like fragments of pages. Like an archeological dig into time itself. Layers and layers emerging as fragments here and there. Time isn't strictly contiguous in the Grey.”
"Then that explains why it sometimes seems too much or too little time has elapsed when I'm in the Grey.”
"Yes, it would," Mara answered. "It would also give you another way to move through the Grey—by digging into the layers of time.”
"I'm not following you," I said, shaking my head in confusion.
"Neither time nor space are exactly the same in the Grey as they are out here—they simply can't be," she explained. "If a bit of time past can stick up through the present time and show itself as a ghost memory, then it seems likely you could dig down to some other fragment of time, if you can find one nearby.”
"I believe that's how ghosts seem to move through walls," Ben put in.
"How?" I asked.
"Moving along the plane of time fragments in the Grey. The ghost exists on his own time plane. When he seems to walk through the wall, what he's really doing is moving through an open space that existed there in his time. The building has changed, or the space has shifted in the Grey, but on his time plane or fragment, there's no impediment, so he just walks on through. You move like a ghost when you're in the Grey. So if you can get to a layer of time where a barrier doesn't exist, you can move through it, too.”
"But I'm not from that time plane.”
"I don't think it matters in your case.”
"So I could dig down to the days of the Duwamish and walk around on the historic mudflats, if I wanted to?”
"Not quite," Mara interjected. "You can only reach what's there. It's not a solid plane. It's fragments and slices all jumbled up. It's memories. If there's no memory or event strong enough to survive in a spot, there'll be no bit for you to access and you might have to move along in space to find the right bit of time. You might even have to emerge from the Grey to move to another location if the Grey is forgetful.”
I rubbed my hands over my face. "I'm having a hard time sorting this out.”
"Why don't you try again, in the Grey," Mara suggested.
I did try. I immersed myself in the shifting world, studying it and looking for the bits of time that they mentioned, catching occasional flashes like the sun on glass, but pushing the Grey around made me dizzy and tired. Every time I emerged, Albert was somewhere nearby, but never too close, and regarding me through his tiny spectacles as if I were doing something rather shocking. By the end of twenty minutes—or that's what the clock said—I was cranky and had managed to move about as far as the living room doorway. It felt like I'd spent hours at it.
I put my hands up in resignation. "I quit.”
"Oh, you can't!" the Danzigers objected.
"Not forever, just for now. My brain aches trying to bend around this and the rest of me feels like I've just danced back-to-back performances of Swan Lake in combat boots. This must be what you guys feel like after a day with Brian in full rhino mode.”
"Oh," said Ben, running a hand through his curly black hair in sympathy until it stood up in crackling peaks.
Mara laughed, but whether at me or her husband wasn't clear. "Don't vex yourself over it. My own poor brain's a bit soggy with it right now. Think on it and it'll come," she added with a sudden yawn. "Oh, my. Surely it's not so late as that?”