Dancing in Dreamtime by Scott Russell Sanders Page B

lived.”
    â€œThat’s nonsense. Think about other days. Remember our wedding . . .”
    â€œWhat if those memories are the illusion? What if they’re planted in our minds to hide the fact that we’re doomed to keep repeating this one day?”
    Her gaze rakes across me, then swivels away. “You’ve been under stress—”
    Unable to stop, I push on. “Sleep makes us forget today, so we can wake up and live it again as if it were new. But I’ve seen through the scam. I know I’ve lived this day before.”
    â€œYou need to rest,” she says carefully. “Let’s go to bed.”
    â€œI tell you, I
know
!” I slam the table, scattering pomegranate seeds. One version of me looks on, appalled, as the other self pushes back from the table, upsetting the chair, then jerks his arm free from Sharon’s grip and grabs his coat and lurches away.
    â€œGordon, you’re not going out.”
    â€œI have to.”
    She follows me into the hall and crosses arms over her breast, shivering. “Sweetheart, you’re scaring me.”
    I should take her in my arms, this woman I adore, and I should whisper in her ear a prayer for our coming child. But I cannot. I knot the laces in my boots, swing the door open, and step outside.
    â€œPlease don’t go,” Sharon cries after me.
    â€œI
have
to.”
    The door slams.
    I blunder forward into the night. Snow is falling, large flakes that sway as they tumble. I tilt my face up to feel them settle on my cheeks, but they make no impression. My feet convey nothing about the ground I walk over, my ears capture no sounds, my nose discovers no smells. My whole body is numb, as if all of me, and not just the artificial ankle, were made of metal and plastic. Only my eyes keep me bound to the world.
    I must do something crazy, as Sharon says. For her sake, for the baby’s. So I step into the street just as a snowplow turns the corner and heads my way. In the glare of the truck’s headlights, I cannot make out the driver, cannot tell if he sees me.
    Should I stand here, or should I leap aside?
    At the last moment I leap aside. Without slowing, the truck rumbles on, spewing snow. My heart thuds. My senses revive. Did I choose to live, or was the choice made for me?
    I must go back indoors to comfort Sharon. I will hold her until she sleeps, then I can sleep, forgetting this day, so tomorrow will come as a surprise.

    I awake from feverish dreams to the thunder of jets overhead, which reminds me that I must report to the airbase this morning for X-rays. The daylight world knifes into me.

The First Journey of Jason Moss
    One October day, an accountant from Buddha, Indiana, decided the time had come for him to travel around the earth. Although Jason Moss had always felt a passion for women, as a man might have a passion for bowling or pies, a profound shyness had kept him a bachelor, and so he had no need of explaining his journey to any wife or child. No goodbyes were needed for his kinfolk either. They all lived elsewhere, mostly in trailers on the coasts of Oregon and Maine, where they hunted mushrooms and carved figurines out of tree roots. Every Christmas they would write to him—Box 12, Buddha, Indiana—and send him photographs of a woodstove they had built from an oil drum, or a packet of seeds for growing foot-long cucumbers, or a newspaper clipping about the extinction of Siberian weasels. He would answer these letters promptly, saying that business was good, the weather bad, and his life ticking on as usual.
    And so things had kept ticking along until his forty-seventh birthday, which fell in the middle of apple season. To mark the day, Jason always drove out to Burley’s Orchard, where he picked two bushels of Granny Smiths, enough to keep him in fruit until spring brought rhubarb. On this particular birthday, after his baskets were full, he was standing tiptoe on the highest rung