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elaborate. “And a lot more,” he said. “How do we explain this?”
     
    “Why not just tell the truth?” I asked. “Henry Peel is launching a spaceship. Nobody will be surprised.”
     
    “They’ll want to know why I’m doing it.”
     
    I said, “You don’t have to tell them. Everyone knows how secretive you can be. Maybe you just think it’s time for private enterprise to break the government monopoly on space travel once and for all. Maybe you’ve had one of your amazing ideas, which you are not at liberty to describe.”
     
    “We can’t mislead,” Henry said.
     
    “Who’s misleading? Everything will be out in the open except the purpose of the enterprise.”
     
    “Exactly. So?”
     
    “So who advertises purposes?”
     
    A few days later, an earthquake registering 6.1 on the Richter scale occurred in rural Missouri. In the days that followed, tremors of similar magnitude occurred all over the world, including a number of places where earthquakes were unusual. A volcano in Ecuador and another in Alaska erupted. It snowed in summer on the South Island of New Zealand. Overnight, figuratively speaking, the North Pole moved a full degree of longitude in the direction of Siberia.
     
    Without really knowing why, I worried about the compound of yurts in Hsi-tau. I felt even greater anxiety about the circle of big rockets we had overflown as the Gulfstream came in for a landing. Were these really nuclear missiles aimed at the USA, as I had assumed, or were they launch vehicles for components of Henry’s spaceship? If this was a secret missile site, why hadn’t the Chinese blown it up? If the rockets belonged to Henry, as seemed more probable every second I thought about it, I had less to teach him about hiding things in plain sight than I had given myself credit for.
     
    My life had become a marathon of uncertainties.
     
    Sometimes, crazily, I thought I was in love.
     
    ~ * ~
     
     
     
     
    5
     
     
     
     
     
    IN SOME WAYS, I MIGHT as well have been. I was getting practically no sleep. My routine was taking a beating. My habit was to finish work, lollygag for four hours, go for a run, take a shower, put on my pajamas, make a salad or order takeout and read a junk book while eating it, then watch a movie or a ballgame. In the pre-Henry era I had usually fallen asleep halfway through the movie or in the top of the fifth inning. Since going through the looking glass, I was more likely to watch the movie or the game until the end, then read until dawn—good book or bad, it didn’t matter. The alternative was to lie on my back, thinking about the end of things, eyes wide open, watching a window full of yellowish city light pulsing as if synchronized to my breath.
     
    Listen to me! I would tell myself. No matter how certain or how near the end might be, worrying, much less imagining a romance that would never happen, was a waste of whatever time was left to the world. But I didn’t listen to my saner self—who does?—and I didn’t sleep. The enemy I lived with was not fear. It was realization. This thing, this Event was going to happen. Henry said so. Even if I fell asleep for a while—and now and then I couldn’t help but do so—I would wake with a start, realizing I would see it sooner or later—waves of solid ground filled with boulders sweeping in a towering tsunami across the continents, dust bursting like umber spindrift from the monster as it knocked down cities and mountains and sucked the water from lakes and seas and inhaled all this into itself, changing everything forever. It was always the destruction of inanimate objects—not the death of man but the erasure of his works—that made my heart ache and my lungs fail me. I could not explain this to myself.
     
    Gradually, I got over my insomnia by running a little farther every day and adding an hour of yoga to my routine and just not thinking about extinction after the sun went down. Nevertheless, when I turned off the lights,