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of his body like the shiver of a taboo, he realized there was no point in being wealthy if you could still be deceived. To him, money represented privacy and comfort, but more than that, if it did not also allow access to the truth, then it was nothing but a deception. A rich man who was conned by a lie had no one to blame but himself. And there was no greater fool than a rich man who was self-deceived.
    And here was the irony: the man who ran a great company; who hired the best people and ruthlessly fired employees who were perceived as weak in their jobs; who took a faltering firm and whipped it into shape, cutting costs here, eliminating a whole department there, walking into offices of old timers and saying, "I'm sorry, but I'm letting you go, clear out your desk"—getting rid of them in a day so they didn't linger and stink up the place with their aggrieved indignation—that same scary CEO who nuked entire floors of workers would meet a young ambitious woman, greedy to be married, swift as a raptor, and the man would offer himself to be snatched. The man who could spot an unreliable employee a mile away could be possessed by the most transparent upstart. Not that she wasn't presentable. She might indeed be beautiful, but that was all, and it was only afterward that the man saw how he had been fooled, how he had fooled himself. The big swaggering toughie from the boardroom found himself snared by someone he would not have hired to work the photocopier. Then the woman had a child and said either "I want stock options for Junior" or else "I don't love you anymore," and she got the penthouse, the plane, child support, and a meal ticket for life. Didn't such a man ever say to himself, "Uh-oh, look out"?
    In the hour or so before he finally subsided into sleep, Audie Blunden saw this with his Indian clarity. Because India was a land of repetition, a land of nothing new. You couldn't say anything in India that hadn't been said before, and if you succumbed to India's vivid temptation to generalize, all you could do was utter a platitude so obvious it looked like a lie:
The poverty's a problem
or
All these cows in the street
or
It's real dirty.
    Like a living, billion-strong festival of futility, India was the proof that you could not do anything here that hadn't been done before. India was a reminder of the extravagance of human self-deception, and the fundamental lesson of Indian life was that people and even animals had previous existences, other lives, past incarnations. They'd lived on earth before, they'd been through all this—they had to have done so, for otherwise how could they stand it? Nothing was new, and even the illusions were hackneyed, the deceptions old hat.
    I've lived enough, he thought, entering the mind of someone about to be reincarnated; I've had everything I wanted.
    On this thinning note, at the vanishing point of consciousness, seeing so little ahead of him, out of hope but weary of the process of perceiving it, Audie fell uncertainly into sleep, at the end of that subterranean river that flowed into oblivion, as though he were no more than a pebble, smoothed by the current and dropped into the dark.
    Beth was still awake. She sensed the ripple of resigned certitude pass through her husband's body, relaxing it until he sank and breathed differently, something innocent in the air that entered his nose and mouth as he lay defenseless in sleep.
    At moments like this, Beth felt like a sentinel. And the sense of her being his protector made her feel vulnerable and misunderstood, keeping guard over him and wishing to be concealed. She had spent most of her adult life standing by her husband or waiting for him to appear, and sometimes he was not there as she stood, or did not return when he said he would. Sometimes she had the feeling she had passed this time in suspense, being a woman, being a wife, being a housecleaner, a cook, a waiter. This trip to India had been her idea, yet they would not