Nothing needs doing for a bit longer this dawn, nobody but Gooding Knowles on the southwest Wyoming bluff, his very cell off as in a theater, and indeed it feels like awaiting a cue in the wings. Southeastward dry sage plains, colza plantations in shrill bloom, the wind farms including yonder the newest like mist on the Knowles home spread, swaths of land stripped for yellowcake and coal and for trona to stock Arm and Hammer boxes in kitchens across the land where baking still may happen or be envisioned, a national forest block, interlocking tracts stacked to the horizon under bell-clear sky. No sound but what here counts for stillness, the whoosh that has spirited away the racket of Penny St. Clair’s vintage pickup descending the incline behind and now puttering into view below, weathered sky blue inching toward a county road. Break a leg said Penny, more fellow trouper than the surrogate ma she at her age might well play to a middle-aged birthday boy. Gooding stretches. If this isn’t peace, what is? Wets his whistle charily from the canteen tube. Forty-five today, the last twenty-four outright bonus.

Penny couldn’t know today is also the fifth anniversary of throwing the switch for Knowles Aeolian to connect its eighteen gleaming towers with the high plains grid, tributary to several states’ industry and to irrigation for the Vuillard soybeans and Van Gogh colza below. Even had she known his birthday when she thought of swinging by after a Saskatchewan wake she wouldn’t have scoured Albuquerque thrifts for a kachina doll or carved him a hickory neckerchief slide. Back though they go, neither is much into commemoration.

Gooding begins life here in the least populated state, sibling-less yet embodying a virtually urban pied ethnicity, Scottish highlands in the family name descending through two generations of dour homesteaders marrying catch as catch can and late, Grandpa Knowles a Basque shepherd girl, Papa J.J. in his turn young Wanda Liu, daughter of the only grandparent Gooding knows, Grandpa Guo, a Cantonese railroad worker who must have dreamed of returning to Canton with Wanda and her wild and evanescent mother Céleste, Shoshone and some kind of French, a half-breed, Grandpa terms her. What does that make me? Gooding wonders, and Grandpa Guo says, go get me my abacus. The state, Grandpa Guo assures Gooding, was named for a Chinese sage, Y. O. Ming. Gooding enjoys moments when Guo lapses into Cantonese for a word or phrase, which Wanda may translate when able and inclined.

In 1968, early spring, lightning knocks Wanda into a coma. After four days, on Gooding’s first day back in his second-grade class, feeling as if he himself has stumbled into an alternate reality, J.J. shows up again before noon. Like a dog Gooding recognizes the sound of the Land Rover before it passes the open window, and knows, a moment even before he sees the young teacher’s brow furrow. Wanda was a matter-of-fact parent anyhow in the Chinese manner, and maybe too after the fashion of her own wild mother, and Grandpa Guo takes over as housekeeper.

By now Penny St. Clair, in her early thirties down in Oklahoma, is learning concert arena lighting. She too an only child also loses a parent early, her father to TB. When her mother remarries and decamps for parts unknown, Penny, lodged with relatives, resigns herself to a “scrappy kind of life.” Legally blind in one eye before correction with lenses equally thick for balance, Penny follows the path of least resistance through school and junior college, cheerfully friendless, luckless with her business diploma, and scrapes by in a greater Oklahoma City Nehi bottling plant, three hairnets in eight years, cultivating her whittling hobby evenings and weekends, the driver’s license dicey until an examiner with her own vision problems hints broadly enough for a skin-of-the-teeth pass. A newspaper ad, a whim, a night-school course in lighting, and through the later seventies dumpy Penny climbs scaffolds with men half her age, learns of her mother’s demise months after the interment, sees only one backstage electrocution, and glam rockers, heavy metal, Tulsa disco infernos, Albuquerque, passes up photo ops with Kiss, Johnny Cash—if she kept a scrapbook who would inherit it—quarrels with her union, whittles puppies, braves, magnolia blossoms, and celebrities as if there were no tomorrow.

Gooding meanwhile floats through county schools, he too a cheerful loner. At puberty when he discovers his minority sexual orientation it interests him rather as specimens for his insect collection once did. Diffident and mildly secretive, or at least reticent, he makes no mention of it for years, nor much entertains thoughts of enactment, and the shifts that keep this idiosyncrasy below the public radar of his loose windblown community, and of his own rather ghostly household, these instinctive shifts cost next to nothing. Before graduating high-school salutatorian, February four p.m. spitting dark snow, in a window seat of the thirties brick municipal library that has splurged on a set of Great Books of the Western World, he reads in Plato’s Charmides how Socrates steals a glance inside the toga of a beautiful young man and burns. Gooding scarcely comprehends how it can be so offhand. Is this the Platonic love he has heard of? Shouldn’t it rather be called Socratic? A week later, half doubting his memory, he returns for another look at the text.

J.J. authorizes state college. Trona and gas under the home spread should provide returns for a good decade more but thereafter it might be wise to have more tricks up your sleeve than sheepherding. Like? Well, TV meteorology, car insurance—trust me, the world is changing. Maybe you can learn to be a cosmonaut. Grandpa Guo shakes his head, let the boy fly lower. Shanghai me jumbo jet to Canton, one last look. That summer however Guo dwindles to a specimen cicada husk boxed and buried near Wanda below the frost line.

Spring ’80 sophomore Gooding greets the new decade with declarations that bemuse him nearly as much as they do J.J., a double major in classics and philosophy, tottering departments both housed on the third, top, floor of the third oldest building on campus, and also membership in the fledgling LGBT student union. Junior and senior years he learns enough Greek to parse Charmides, and enough about classical civilization to admire its polytheism and sexual laissez-faire, yet without kindling passion enough (or even racking up a good enough GPA) for a shot at grad school and teaching. Same for philosophy, from whose jolly chair he takes a nagging hunch that he Gooding might prove constitutionally less Platonist than Aristotelian.

Bimonthly in a multipurpose room in the basement of the student union the LGBT holds socials, a young pre-op FTM faculty sponsor from Poli Sci chaperoning dutifully but superfluously, Gooding thinks. When talk so much as borders the risqué it concerns the liberated coasts the tiny flock means to flee to upon commencement. In fact Gooding suspects that none of the four or five other gays is any more experienced than he, and he wouldn’t be surprised if the relative knowingness of the three lesbians hid equal innocence.

“What do you like to think about?” Gooding asks the gay he usually plays ping-pong with. They loiter by the punch bowl, having ceded table, paddles, and balls to a pair of lesbians.

“Regular things.” The freckled boy nods as if he is saying, “Yes, that’s right.” The third lesbian drifts to the refreshments and cocks an ear.

“Okay,” says Gooding. “But I’m wondering how you know they’re regular.”

The lesbian appraises a cucumber sandwich. “They might only be ostensibly regular.” She munches a corner. “As far as that goes, some folks don’t necessarily relish thinking about anything. Sure, they do think, but it’s not something they particularly enjoy. Maybe you yourself are like that? Or maybe I shouldn’t butt in here.”

“No,” says the boy, riffling back his curls. “But gosh, Gooding, do you just sit down and think for fun?”

I am a philosophy major after all, Gooding almost says. “Is that a problem?”

The lesbian Frisbees her paper party plate into the leaf bag lining a molded garbage barrel. “I’m outta here. Laundry night plus band practice tomorrow before orgo.”

“What do you blow?”

“Trombone, more by necessity than choice. But you, man, what do you yourself get off on thinking about?”

Hmm. “Well, for example, why I did things I’ve done.”

“You mean motives?” the boy asks.

“Sort of, maybe.”

“Unless we’re talking astrology. But doesn’t this make you a touch egocentric?”

“Show me somebody who’s not. I’m no solipsist though, and I also like to think about why other people do things they do.”

“Well,” says the lesbian, “as far as how you like to think about yourself, I like to think I’m as honest as the next guy. And I like to think you can count on me in a pinch.”

“Fair enough,” allows Gooding. “Except, do you like thinking about your virtues? I guess we all must enjoy patting ourselves on the back for taking this or that high road, but what I had in mind is thinking you might do at greater length. You know? Oh well. But you’re fixing to ace that orgo, man.” He high fives her. “Anyhow,” he confides in the gay, “I didn’t say ‘love’ thinking about. Just ‘like.’”

“I like to think about dogs sometimes.”

The lesbian says, “You have one? Pain in the tail if you ask me.”

“Never. Maybe that’s why I think of them almost like brothers. This morning I was dropping off props at Hurdy Gurdy downtown and across the street somebody in Cup o’ Joe had left a shepherd mix on the sidewalk, couple years old, leashed to a bicycle locked against a parking meter. I liked realizing I was effectively invisible so long as I didn’t cause any ruckus. I watched the dog for a good ten minutes. I liked how he gave passers-by (all adult human, as it happened) his full attention, wondering (I supposed) whether any might acknowledge him (none did). He didn’t kowtow or sniff improperly, although he did sniff the spoor, usually without a second glance at whoever had produced the odor wake. I especially liked when the sidewalk emptied. Fido seemed to think, okay, what now? He’d stand lost in thought for a second and then flop down on the pavement, muzzle on forepaws. Or he’d have a whiff of a pedal to reassure himself that, yes, his owner was indeed inside sipping latte and reading the paper or boning for a quiz, and would return. Or he’d sniff a wheel and replay the trot there, in his mind’s nose.”

“Wait,” says the lesbian. “Props? You design sets?”

“Help build them, but mostly I’m a gofer.”

“I’ve driven past. What did it use to be, a body shop? Amateur cast I suppose.”

“Amateur as they come, some of us. All volunteer, but we give it our all.”

“Students?”

“Some, but mostly older. All ages, nice town-gown mix. Check us out.”

“So you’re one of those thespians. How long you been out? But seriously, this jumper’s my last clean tog, and I don’t want to have to blow off the exam either. The TA writes make-ups and they’re always twice as hard.”

In Tulsa Penny’s knees and years are telling her to hang it up with concert lighting. She signs off with Judas Priest. She’s invested a windfall in a duplex whose rental half covers mortgage and expenses with some surplus for personal necessities like the occasional omelet and even an occasional splurge at the crafts shop. Retirement pension payments even after the short concert lighting career help some. Penny lives two quiet years, as if it took that long to clear her mind of amps and leather and screaming fans.

At forty-six in eighty-four she sells the duplex for a handsome profit, trades her Civic for the blue Ford pickup with a quilted aluminum bed toolbox that can hold her few belongings, and like Okies from time immemorial heads to California. She plans a surprise visit to a distant cousin in Bakersfield, who turns out to have sold his cottage some time before and moved to Ukiah. Penny drives up there without telephoning ahead, hot September, and two blocks off the freeway under a water tower finds the ramshackle ochre stucco eyebrow house, doors and windows agape. When she knocks on the jamb Marvin’s second wife, a blurry forty-something in halter, cutoffs, and flip-flops, explains that this morning the AC failed and she hasn’t been able to reach him for advice. Thus Penny earns her welcome tracking the short so that when Marvin rolls in after a hot day with his road crew in the valley, he finds the house as comfortable as when he left it.

Penny stays a long weekend with Marvin (whom she’s seen only once before, when she was five, it would have been, he eighteen or nineteen) and Belle, who grew up in the Willamette Valley in Oregon and praises the state and especially its coast with such hesitant sincerity that Penny heads there and by October has rented a furnished bedroom in Portland and found part-time work lighting performances Wednesday through Friday at the municipal little theater. She sends Marvin and Belle a picture postcard of Haystack Rock.

Gooding’s freckled chum piques Gooding’s interest in the theater ambience enough for him to attend a performance and then a cast party, and then to audition for a role he lands, a grandfather he plays as a crustier Guo. The mystery fluff runs three weekends, Sunday matinees, sparse but appreciative houses, a brief favorable newspaper notice with no mention of Gooding, who has only five speeches in one scene anyhow, looking doubtful enough to attract suspicion while the overconfident actual murderer lets slip a clue that damns him after the intermission. However routine and forgiving the play, and however reliable his onstage recall, Gooding has stage fright before his every entrance, a gulping twinge as sharp at the twelfth performance as at the first.

One thing leads to another. Gooding spends nine years after graduation in little theater, spring and summer in stock itinerant about Wyoming, Idaho, and eastern Washington, resident fall and winter with a repertory of two or three plays in Boise or Spokane, never starring but rising as far once even as the Fool in a decimated and generally hapless King Lear, whom the director has him play without fioritura but rather as a quiet naïf, puzzled rather than knowing.

The relaxed theater milieu facilitates the loss of Gooding’s virginity in stages during his twenty-fourth year in by-blows and friendly dalliances, never himself infatuated nor sparking anything graver than an invitation to camp in Montana, which Gooding thinks it better to decline and does so with grace, apparently without bruising any self-regard. In what he calls the actual road test he verifies what he has already more or less known, that evidently he lacks the normal complement of libido.

When the Portland government tightens purse strings and the theater cuts costs including Penny’s salary, she pulls up stakes. Curious about Duluth, where a great-uncle dropped off the screen, she stays there through a lean summer living in her pickup, investigating upper Midwest theater at a public library. The Guthrie in Minneapolis offers internships in all aspects of dramatic performance including stage lighting. While Penny knows beans and cares less about aesthetics and audience psychology, she’s a licensed and experienced technician with balls, as she avouches in a late afternoon phone conversation with a southern assistant manager whose drawl charms her, she adds. She hears him smile. She’s in luck: yesterday the mentoring electrician gave notice because of a family crisis. No need to advertise if she can present herself within the month for the five-month bridge position. Of course the renowned Guthrie may have its pick, but he likes the sound of her voice too and prides himself on judging character over the phone.

The stint keeps Penny’s hands full, wiring Man of La Mancha, Ghosts, and Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in Live at the Guthrie, none of which she pays much attention to. Why not, Gooding later asks, when they have become friends after their fashion. Penny throws back her head and laughs. Don’t really know. I suppose I’ve always thought live theater is like acting out a movie. They do the best they can but it’s never more than an approximation.

The Guthrie boosts her résumé when she has to move on and, with connections made there and before in Portland, settles into what feels like a second career in stage lighting, itinerant about the upper Midwest and Northwest. As she traipses through residencies six, eight months long, and the résumé grows, no item outshines the Guthrie and a savvier self-promoter might have omitted some. Penny makes acquaintances, cast, crew, fixtures in the nomadic regional theater world, crossing paths, coalescing in temporary cadres, individual pairings more durable though few even of them quite permanent, Penny more of a singleton than most. The truck odometer rolls over.

Gooding’s peregrination brings him to Jackson Hole, which funnily enough he’s not visited before, doubling roles in Ten Little Indians for high rollers disposed to turn tables on Lady Luck by showing themselves susceptible to the charms of her rivals Melpomene and Thalia. Halfway through the run friction comes to a head between the director and the lighting tech, and the tech gives notice. Everyone cogitates and telephones with the upshot that a week later the director pries Penny St. Clair loose from a foundering show in Missoula. For the next two months Gooding and she hang together as much as with anyone else in the troupe, knocking back beers from the bottle in a booth in a locals’ low-key tavern, talking bar talk, drawn together by their common solitariness.

Gooding likes Penny’s blithe assurance that her opinion about anything is as infallible as her wiring judgments generally prove to be. Herein she seems a virtual polar opposite to Gooding who, given half a chance, weighs many sides of a question or a statement, the habit owing something to his undergraduate taste of formal philosophy, and surely as much to his mother’s untimely death and to his minority sexuality, not to mention geography and ethnicity. No particular puzzlement of will follows therefrom. Rather Gooding feels hopelessly in thrall to, even infatuated with, perplexities of the understanding, quizzicalities Wittgenstein, Gooding’s favorite philosopher, inveighs against and, far from curing, augments in Gooding. Never tempted to challenge Penny’s certainty, not even when it seems misguided—as with her resolute parochialism—Gooding enjoys it, as he could not if her assurance had any religious dimension. Luckily she is no more theistic than he, if less devoutly atheistic. At the cast party he gives her his Wyoming mailing address. She has none anywhere. Both head to grubbier stints, she to Coeur d’Alene dinner theater, he to a repertory year with possible renewal in a Saint Paul municipal playhouse.

In 1987 Gooding takes a larky anonymous HIV test, his first since AIDS hove itself over the horizon. His scant sexual encounters have usually been protected, so that he supposes the positive false. Queasily he peruses results of a second test, and a third, they too positive, as he learns from the encrypted notice under locked glass at a struggling AIDS clinic. He manages to inform a partner in Jackson and one from a year before in eastern Oregon, who both prove negative. Gooding seems to have contracted the virus in the earliest stages of the epidemic, probably in an anonymous trick. He confides only in the two past partners and a Vietnamese doctor at the clinic. Furrowing her brow, she advises watchful waiting. “Any health insurance?”

“Actually yes. My dad insisted.”

“Excellent dad. So long as you’re asymptomatic the meds aren’t outrageous anyway. Avoid despondence. It may take months, even a year before onset of the disease and, who knows, by then we may have a cure. In case you need tranquilizing I’ll prescribe you for that too. No unsafe sex ever again for this lad.”

“French kissing?”

“Lower risk but still real should the co-kisser have a mouth wound. The virus lives in saliva so long as it’s wet.” Gooding thinks, it’s wet so long as it’s saliva. The doctor continues, “In the literature an adolescent contracted by using his brother’s toothbrush before it dried. Do you live in Saint Paul? Can you come for monthly checkups?”

At first the authentication freezes Gooding’s mind. On autopilot he drifts to his third-floor walkup with a bedroom view of a reflection of the river. Remote in hand, finger on button, he stops. What doesn’t compute is, if he contracted sexually it would seem to have been longer ago than thirty months. He calculates back. Nearly thirty-four. He looks over his shoulder, a silent snarl lifting his upper lip as though the doctor, somebody, might be there enjoying the joke. But no, only the humble loveseat and unillumined floor lamp, the patient coat rack at the door. Chug chug, chugs his poor heart. Overdue he seems, somehow in default.

Through the evening under the weak floor lamp, sentence by sentence Gooding writes a posthumous letter thanking J.J. for everything, forgiving whatever might seem to call for it, and regretting distresses he has given including this last, and then drafts a will bequeathing J.J. worldly goods, and playbooks to . . . he muses, to Penny St. Clair if she can be located. The next morning he rents his first safe deposit box, for the two documents.

He sees no reason to bow out of the little theater that bravely soldiers on in the shadow of the Guthrie across the river. When the run ends, however, and the next scheduled production lacks anything suitable for him, after some woolgathering he determines not to audition elsewhere but instead to cast about for other Saint Paul employment, as if the safe deposit box constituted an anchor. He tries paralegal work with a middling firm, middling ethically as well as in size, and he finds the mindless meticulous fact checking and research to his taste. A year slides by, another, with no changes in his health, and quarterly raises that would permit modest amelioration of digs and diet, except that here too something—maybe half-serious superstition acquired in theater—disinclines him to change even this much of his way of life, as if here too the deposit box were anchoring him.

With few enough regrets this lad resigns himself to a monastic remaining life of exclusively onanistic sex, performed absent-mindedly with rudimentary fantasizing as a sleep aid. Once a month or so he checks up on J.J. by phone. Now that the land lies fallow he has flushed grouse on his drive to the mailbox. Water tables continue to drop and Mrs. Hanke’s housekeeping grows erratic, but the county population’s holding. A momentarily puzzling envelope from J.J., his antique script, brings a picture postcard of the Boise skyline under translucent washes of blushing mauve altostratus from Penny St. Clair, surprised not to have seen him on the circuit lately. Maybe he’s moved east or south, anyway hi if this reaches you. If J.J. read it he probably supposed “P.” a male theater chum.

The Vietnamese doctor’s replacement, a younger lapsed Mennonite, suggests that Gooding visit the Mayo Clinic. In the literature there’s been speculation about innate immunity. Sure enough by the mid-nineties an inexplicable handful of long-term asymptomatic positives including Gooding survives without the elaborate drug cocktails that in the developed world gradually lengthen life expectancy and improve life quality for most other positives. Winging the reprieve equably as the promise of early mortality, now he crosses the river for monthly checkups that serve not merely to monitor cell counts but also for researchers to probe him electronically and draw blood. On balance his luck would be better without the virus, and yet it feels so good that the next holiday—Thanksgiving, as it happens—Gooding opens up to J.J. about his roller-coaster ride of the past decade.

Himself dwindling, J.J. lays a blue-veined hand on Gooding’s knee. “You could have told me the bad news. It wouldn’t have killed me.”

“I know I could, I know it wouldn’t, but you’d have fretted, and you couldn’t have done anything to help.”

“Maybe I could. We’ll never know. Still I can’t help wondering, why you.”

“You’re not the only one. If researchers find an answer to that we might have a vaccine or a cure.”

J.J. nods. “Even then I’d still wonder why you.”

Gooding shrugs. “Why not, though? Anyway, have you thought about those assisted living places?”

J.J. wants nothing to do with them so long as he can care for himself. “It takes longer than when I was your age, is all.”

“What I guessed you’d say.”

Seventeen months later J.J. dies peacefully in his sleep. Mrs. Hanke calls the coroner and the county sheriff, who locates Gooding’s home phone number in the nearly empty flip-up ledger beneath the rotary-dial and calls immediately but says nothing to the voice mail inviting him to leave a message. Even so Gooding, home early, has an inkling. At five-thirty he recognizes the voice that says, “Gooding?”

“Is it Dad?”

J.J. has a quiet burial next to Wanda, two spaces east of Guo with room for Gooding whenever at his parents’ feet, and room to spare in the windy plot Gooding now owns along with the ranch and a living income from stocks and from just under a quarter million in CDs. Back in Saint Paul he gives notice for job and apartment. He retrieves and feeds to the bank shredder the two documents from his lockbox, and terminates that rental. What would Wittgenstein do, he asks himself, watching a lumber barge from a park bench or strolling in a mild shower under his cranky lopsided umbrella. How might the thirty-seven-year-old hero of an uplifting exemplary tale proceed? Never having set foot outside the country, who wouldn’t consider travel? Other venues and vistas of self-improvement and -gratification present themselves, other uses for the time left. Learn architecture?

The approaching end of the month helps galvanize Gooding. At a terminal in the public library browsing pages containing “alternative” he follows leads about wind farming. Into formulae provided by an ecological nonprofit he plugs wind atlas statistics and budget figures, and estimates that with a cooperative bank he should be able to make a go of harvesting energy while in a for now small way countering global pollution and warming. Inevitably some birds will fall victim, although no major fly path crosses the Knowles land. The only other downside seems visual, and yet Gooding himself finds the space-age blades and towers aggressively beautiful. He puzzles about a theoretical further cost, that leaching energy from wind might affect climate.

Gooding blows his Saint Paul savings on a well-used SUV in which he delivers most of his Saint Paul possessions—kitchen ware, television, paralegal wardrobe—to a Salvation Army store where, diffidently browsing, he acquires a vintage rayon plaid short-sleeve button-down that fits, and that he remembers on J.J., as well as a coffee-table volume (no coffee table yet at home in Wyoming, but he’s grown accustomed to the one in his apartment), an introduction to modern European painting loaded with color plates. Mrs. Hanke after her fashion has the ranch house ready when Gooding rattles up the drive at dusk.

Through flukes and an unsullied record of staunch unflappableness Penny St. Clair migrates from transient theater to the resident Santa Fe Opera and therein climbs rungs. Mozart and Verdi count little more for her than heavy metal once did, and she resumes earplugs. Old enough to be some of her fellows’ granny, she peers through thick lenses at them as at frogs or grasshoppers, and enjoys taking them aback with a franker question than they expect from an old-timer or a piece of advice about scoring in the hay, but mostly she keeps to herself. Opera fans from a distance strike her as no rowdier than theatergoers, and no more likely to produce the amusement rock audiences once gave her. She rents in a subdivision in the next county. The pickup shows no sign of flagging as its odometer rolls over again. Outclassed by Native Americans selling in the plaza, amateur woodcarvers meet quarterly in the basement of a mission annex. They welcome Penny and invite her to enter her piñon Inca jaguar head in their group show.

The singers, instrumentalists, and conductors, for all their predictable cliquishness, share an enviable esprit de corps. Indeed everyone seems touched with a high-desert ebullience that, together with Penny’s job security, leads her to plunk down two months’ salary for her first jewelry since her class ring, a squash-blossom turquoise and silver necklace she considers an investment and yet actually wears shopping or to work just like a native. Her health holds, although she has less strength and stamina. She replaces a chipped molar with a bridge. Had it been an incisor it would have sported weapons-grade bling, she assures assistant stage carpenter Rafe.

Loafing about town Sunday evenings and Mondays Penny discovers the internet at the public library. The thirty-minute limit forces her to hit three or four branches a day unless slow business lets an attendant bend rules, but once online Penny finds it almost suspiciously easy to surf. Creem and Rolling Stone have always seemed too in your face for the info they provide, but on the web one may painlessly investigate acts one once lit, who’s disbanded, reunited, crossed genre, departed. A mere grace note of keystrokes takes you to postings by Okie coevals, even classmates. You surrender identity to log on but you can read the mock-modest boasts—children, grandkids, homes, vacations, positions, retirement plans—without reciprocating, all in an hour and then unsubscribe, no one the wiser, like The Shadow. The Shadow herself begins to consider retirement. She has patched things up with her union but changes in the opera company management bode ill for sword carriers.

“Home to Oklahoma?” Rafe inquires.

Penny chuckles. “I’ve been away too long for it to have much pull. Anyway Okies carry the state with us like a spot on the lungs.”

“Here then?” Rafe tucks his flat pencil behind an ear.

“Maybe, or probably not, depending on what we call ‘here.’”

“Cut the crap, Penny. Santa Fe. I don’t see you squatting backstage like the Phantom of the Opera. Or under, like some ghost.”

“Probably not then. Far out as you and I live rents can’t price out the service sector, but I’m thinking more of a twenty-four/seven urban experience. Maybe buy me a little condo. If ‘here’ can mean the Land of Enchantment, maybe then yes for Albuquerque.”

“Friends there? I’ve only driven through. Looked a little gritty.”

“Shucks,” says Penny, “I gets off on grit. No, no friends, but loads of potential ones.”

“More Okies than here (now meaning Santa Fe), I’m guessing.” Rafe licks his blunt lead and inscribes an inverted catenary on plywood.

The chat proves prophetic. When La Fanciulla del West closes, the cast party doubles as a good-bye send-off for Penny. Within two weeks she lives in an Albuquerque one-bedroom rent-to-buy at the back of a converted warehouse, a back street girl as she terms herself in a bread-and-butter note to the Santa Fe gang. Desultorily she scans help-wanteds and now and again interviews to nurse along unemployment payments until she takes her second official retirement late in ’98, only sixty. As it turns out, even down here the real estate market precludes buying any time soon if ever, but annuity payments keep her afloat and it should be possible when necessary to find below-the-table scraps of wiring like a wetback.

Underground high voltage lines laid in the Depression for the old trona mine cut initial Aeolian outlay by a third. Through most of ’99 Gooding drives out to watch experts prepare beds with their earthmoving colossi, pour quakeproof bases for towers winched up and guyed one by one. Lazily, diffidently turn the three tapered blades as they cant above horizontal, and faster rising until aloft and vertical they whirl, adding no whisper to the wind, as if they have so whirled for eons. In his monthly guinea pig visits to Minneapolis Gooding could sleepwalk through the drill, sticks, EKG, swipes, scans, sonogram, cuttings, personnel all relentlessly cheery as months stack up without a lead from Gooding or any other asymptomatic. Rumors of rumors of legalizing marriage glimmer on the horizon yet in ’99 near the campus in Laramie helpless and seemingly goodhearted young Matthew Shepard falls victim to a dead-end gang of young homophobes. Gooding resolves to devote not only his anomalous body monthly to AIDS research but also much of the Aeolian profits. At seven on a Wednesday morning he and contractors and a PPM Energy official throw switches to engage nacelles, and in the control station dials leap to attention. Outside beneath the wheeling blades now you hear transformers buzz, perpetual cicadas.

The farm turning a profit by ’02, Gooding settles in for as long a haul as it will be. He bides time with few creature comforts and no society beyond the ever-slower Mrs. Hanke, not even a border collie. Intractable terrorism and war drain him, even away here. J.J.’s and Wanda’s almost forgotten A-bomb shelter touches Gooding when he happens on the key and sweeps the farm flashlight beam across chests and canisters, staples and ancient water on steel shelves, touches him with its faith. He watches local and national evening network news with misgivings, dutifully, but little else on the tube. Returning from Minneapolis second Thursdays he grabs (as people now say, tellingly, he thinks) Variety and Entertainment Weekly but otherwise eschews periodicals and newspapers, nor does he spend much time online apart from a snowbound fortnight in January, when he researches doings and whereabouts of classmates and theater acquaintances. Paralegal obduracy serves him well here, and yet some of those he tries hardest to locate—Penny St. Clair for instance—elude him in the ocean of information.

Nor does he read much to speak of. During the past year, he realizes, his only book is his student Charmides. Consulting the glossary as needed, Gooding after a few lines has found the quick bright Greek easier than he remembered, and stranger, and far more moving. As though Plato had invoked a minor Socratic devil in him, when he muses about conventions of discourse and thought he constructs questions that might lure the unwary toward recognizing fallacy. While most seem too wary for enlightenment in arenas where such questions arise readily—why reward heterosexuality, after all?—the game has better purchase in the more mundane, for instance, meteorology. Sweeping the verandah after a string of hot, still, humid dog days when wind hasn’t done the job for him, Gooding envisions asking a weathercaster who has explained that high dew point makes today’s eighty-eight feel like ninety-six, “Like ninety-six? At what dew point would that ninety-six be, Critias?”

Penny’s phone gabfests with Marvin and Belle in Ukiah and with a good half dozen other far-flung distant cousins bite increasingly into her spare income, until she calculates that, short of resurrecting forgotten hard mail natter patterns, she’ll need to join the e-mail revolution, even should hunting and pecking demand unaccustomed terseness. A search engine captures woodcarving associations across the continent including two in Albuquerque, rivals, both of which Penny joins, and the younger honors her with a year’s tenure as president in ’02. That year the engine also snags an e-mail address for Gooding Knowles, to whom Penny keys in a hello. You still tread boards? You happen through ‘Querque, you may crash in my parlor.

Gooding replies immediately. He’s now a lapsed thespian and a wind farmer on the family spread in southwest Wyoming. Delighted we’ve regained contact. No plans to drive south really but thanks for the invitation and who knows, and let me reciprocate. Do hope we can sit down together again.

Three years later when Penny stops by for a short week after a cousin’s burial above the border, dust settling, for an awkward moment as she steps out of the cab and Gooding steps down from the verandah each struggles to bridge the trembling gulf that yawns between the remembered face swathed in flattering retrospect and the naked one here lined and hollowed. An imposter? A good hug, and when you draw back to search again now yes, okay then, we are who we are.

Gooding pats Penny’s head. “Thinning but not receding like mine. Did you get lost?”

Penny chuckles. “I haven’t seen another car in the last ninety minutes and only a couple or three houses, seemed like, too far to say for sure. No Eagle Scouts to ask for directions, but your wind turbines homed me in the last stretch. So how long has it been, Gooding, twenty years? Time flies. You’re looking hale.”

“You too. I’ve wondered whether we’d see one another again. What must the odds be?”

Penny hauls out her duffel. “When you come right down to it, what are odds anyway? Now remind me: you spent formative years in this wind, in this nice old house? Fieldstone? I’d pictured something more modest—but hey, not a hovel either.”

Gooding shoulders the duffel. “We’re twenty-first century here, third millennium. You have your own guesthouse, around back.”

“Whee,” says Penny. “Around back sounds like home to me. But why in the world would you have a guesthouse out here? I’m guessing it’s a tool shed—I’d have seen a barn.”

“Hands’ bunkhouse, when we were in sheep.”

The red sun hangs above the horizon like a beneficent Egyptian god extending scores of linear arms and mouse gloves over the land and all its denizens, even countless herds of ghosts.

“I could be wrong,” Penny muses uncharacteristically, “but sunset seems twenty or thirty minutes later up here.”

“I doubt you’re wrong about how it seems, and for all I know you’re right about how it is. Anyhow, for sure this is the next-to-longest day. So, let’s settle you in, and then we can have us a beer and I’ll rustle up some grub. We need to fortify ourselves for tomorrow. Big plans.”

Penny nods. “This is red carpet. Be careful, Gooding, you may have to evict me.”

“I wouldn’t. Listen, I’m serious, stay as long as you can, no rent. Think it over, Penny.”

“Do you have designs on me? Maybe I should inquire about my role in your plans for tomorrow.”

“Chase car.”

“How’s that again?”

“I mean to hang glide southeast into Colorado.” Gooding slides his hand over a blue fender. “I hope to enlist you to pick me up at the end of the flight.”

Penny kneads her chin. “Let me think. Were you hang gliding back when?”

At the guest house Gooding opens the door and steps back to let Penny precede him over dusty pink Navaho rugs past a parlor itself roseate in the horizontal light to the dimmer north-facing bedroom, which he illuminates from a wall switch as she surveys. “My second roomie at Laramie took me to his mother’s for spring break on the North Carolina beach. He’d been gliding since high school. That week I earned my apprentice permit and I’ve progressed a couple of grades since. I do it every six months or so. No records—I’m not rabid, not even avid. I just do it when the mood takes me, providing I have support crew.”

“Check.” Penny fluffs out her short salt-and-pepper coif. “Who’s sleeping here besides me?”

Gooding considers. “Nobody, I’d guess, even if you left the door unlocked. Since I didn’t know whether you’d prefer top or bottom, I made up both.” He sets the duffel on the lower of two bare mattresses.

“Either. Nice to have the choice though. But is this the only bedroom?”

“Even this went begging. We never had work for more than three hands.”

Penny washes up, accessorizes the bib of her camouflage overalls with her squash blossom necklace, and repairs to the main house, for Gooding to lead her through a drab parlor to the larger den—brass chandelier with candle-ends, Remington prints on tongue-in-groove pine, festoons of cobwebs, leather sofa and armchairs, fireplace, television and music console, mah-jong, checkers, Parcheesi, and jigsaw puzzles on a shelf beside a Rand McNally world atlas outdated by half a century, beer nuts in a celadon hemisphere, its basal ring all but invisible so that it seems to balance miraculously, cold brews, windows cracked to mute wind. As the outside light wanes, the two reminisce about shared time and fill each other in with easy sketches of what intervenes. At the kitchen table set with a faded cotton print of bucking broncos and plates celebrating Wyoming’s fiftieth they enjoy Gooding’s bison stew with new potatoes and decent bread, and darker beer. Talk meanders through reflective silences.

Without their again directly addressing Penny’s possible move to the Gooding spread, more than one turn brings the subject rather less fleetingly to one or both minds. No obligations need attend the change, not even routine social ones. The two could live side by side like civilized rural neighbors out here in the wind. Gooding might in time explain his monthly absences, or not. When Penny drove off in her pickup she might be away for days and more. They might dine together once or twice a week on set days, or more often, or less. Penny might hardly miss city life, with her increasing web facility. Worth mulling over anyhow after all. Who’d have imagined?

Gooding walks Penny to her door. “I forgot to ask how your funeral went.”

“Average, except for a comic interlude that threatened to get out of hand. Tell you tomorrow—remind me, the bandanna. Been to many yourself? A few years more and you’ll appreciate them, basically. Well, good night.”

“Sleep well. There’s a night light in the baseboard, and one in the bathroom.”

The western ridge slope still lay partly in dawn shadow as Gooding stepped there. To the southwest three grazing pronghorns who had probably ignored Penny’s Ford now raised heads as one. In the freshening wind Gooding assembled cables and aluminum tubes for his triangular control bar and then stretched and secured the pumpkin-colored nylon and stiffened it with struts. One last time he checked e-mail against late-breaking meteorological developments that could affect the flight plan he had filed two days before, lest he be supposed a terrorist and picked out of the sky. He expected to maintain a modest altitude of around five thousand feet, never rising so high as to necessitate a mummy bag, but even so he wore thermal underwear. He strapped on an emergency parachute, donned goggles and helmet, and harnessed himself into the corselet and knee slings.

He held the airfoil above him. Fearlessly he ran like a waterfowl down the slope five paces, six, and involuntarily took a seventh and eighth in air as the glider hoisted him. Immediately he tacked south. Rising, he raised himself to the horizontal and tightened the lines suspending his legs. He crabbed back and forth across the ridge lift updraft edging southward as he climbed higher and higher in the clear morning. The horizon receded, valleys and plateaus rising into view. By two thousand feet—Gooding didn’t need altimeters anymore—he saw hard to the west northwest his abandoned county school, athletics wing and library ell collapsing, and a mile south of it the copse where at twelve he came closest to losing his virginity early, in the closest and second of four such fraught episodes, this with buzz-cut solemn Reggie who had seemed no more than Gooding to understand what was happening and not happening. Climbing, as always Gooding felt himself shrink while his view expanded. By thirty-five hundred a couple of miles south of takeoff he banked left into the sunshine.

Now with a tailwind he could fly at good ground speed. For ten or twelve miles he still rose to cruise altitude. Ahead he glimpsed a moving speck he took for Penny near the horizon. He could scan the terrain for topography likely to produce wave currents and further ridge lifts, and thermal drafts as patches and strips warmed faster than others. In the nearly effortless storybook glide Gooding spiraled up in thermals above the abandoned settlements of Rudefeho and Elwood. From one to the other he looped east and spooked hawks and a golden eagle riding the same updrafts, as if he were a still larger raptor—and indeed his rig felt yare enough to stoop, more than ever as if the foil had replaced his little arms and stretched directly from his shoulders. Soaring, Gooding exulted in the peerless morning, the extended day, his extended life, and in the solitary pal of a mind to humor him and truck him home at flight’s end.