The Radio Magician and Other Stories

THE INN AT MOUNT EITHER

After a minute spent weighing a fear of appearing foolish against his anxiety, Dorian approached the concierge. Behind the glassy mahogany of the concierge’s booth, through the floor to ceiling windows, the afternoon clouds swept toward them across the neighboring peaks. As always, the view was spectacular. The sun cast long shadows through the valleys while the racing clouds caressed the mountain tops before swallowing them in gray, whale-like immensity, and when the clouds parted, the mountains would be the same but different, just a little, changed by their time in the clouds. That’s why people always looked. Are the mountains the same, they seemed to say, or have they changed?

If Dorian stood at the window, he could peer down the mountain at the long, railed walkways that connected one section of the inn to the next. Curved glass covered some of the walkways so the guests could pass in comfort from the casinos to the restaurants, or from the workout facilities to the spas, or from the tennis courts to the pools, but others were open and guests could walk in the unencumbered mountain air, their hands sliding along guard rails with nothing but the thought of distance between them and the rocks in the sightless haze below.

Dorian cleared his throat. “I can’t find my wife, Stephanie Wallace.” His fingers rested on the polished wood.

Without raising his head from the clipboard he’d been studying, the concierge looked at him. “It’s a big inn, sir. When did you see her last?” The man’s eyebrows had a distinctively rakish look to them, turning up at the ends like a handlebar moustache, and his hair was silvery-gray.

“We were supposed to meet for lunch, but she didn’t show up.” Dorian glanced into the lobby, hoping that she might appear. Behind him, the room towered fifty feet to skylights. Opposite the window, the mountain’s rocky side made another wall. Exotic plants that would never grow outside of the inn’s protection filled every nook, spilling vegetation over the deep-toned stone.

The concierge put the clipboard on the booth. “Perhaps her plans changed, sir. There’s much to do here at Mount Either.”

Dorian gritted his teeth. “Yesterday’s lunch! I’ve been looking for her since last night. Stephanie’s not late. She’s gone.”

“It won’t help for you to be short with me, sir. What is your room number?”

“4128.”

The concierge tapped at a personal digital assistant that nestled in his palm. “This is your wife, sir?” A picture of a smiling blonde woman, glasses slid part way down her nose, peered back at Dorian from the screen.

“Yes.” She’d worn her glasses on the airplane. Once they checked in, she switched to contacts.

“I show that she’s still a guest.”

Resisting an urge to throttle the man, Dorian said, “I know that. What I want is some help in finding her. Can’t you ask the other employees to keep an eye out?”

“Of course, sir. But, as I said before, this is a big inn. Maybe she wants some privacy. Perhaps she’s admiring one of our many gardens. She wouldn’t be the first guest to spend a few uncounted hours sitting on a meditation vista. In fact, getting lost at the inn is a selling point. We advertise it. ‘Lose yourself in the experience.’”

“It’s not supposed to be literal!” snapped Dorian.

The concierge picked up the clipboard again. “I will alert the staff. You don’t suppose she went through a transitionway unaccompanied, do you?”

Dorian felt himself blanching. “No, of course not.” But he remembered how she’d lingered yesterday morning in the Polynesian hallway.

“Guests are to be escorted through the shift zones.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t do that.”

The concierge sniffed. “We’re very specific in our agreement when you signed in. The management will respond strongly to guests who ignore the rules.”

Dorian turned away from the concierge. A new tramload of tourists had arrived, pulling their suitcases behind them. Most were couples. Newlyweds, by the look, or retired folk. A pack of bellboys scurried to meet them, while a mellow-voiced recording intoned, “Welcome to the Inn at Mount Either. You are standing in the new lobby, two-hundred and fifty feet above the historical first lobby built on the site of where Mount Either’s special properties were discovered. If you are interested in a guided visit to the old lobby, dial 19 on your room phone.”

“If she did go…” said Dorian. A hand seemed to be grasping his throat. It was all he could do to croak out, “… unescorted?”

The concierge said, “It’s a big inn, sir. We will do all we can to help, but we don’t really count a guest as missing until forty-eight hours have passed.”

Dorian didn’t know what to say. He drummed his fingers on the counter. Some of the new arrivals were at the window, looking down. The glass leaned away from the mountain, and the lobby itself protruded like a shelf, so they had an unimpeded view of the two-thousand foot drop and the rest of the inn on this side of the peak, clinging to the sheer face.

“I can’t wait that long. I’m going to look for her myself.”

“That is your privilege, sir,” said the concierge. “I’m sure she’s just around the corner. Nothing stays lost here forever.”

The elevator to the Polynesian transition they had visited yesterday was out of order. Dorian looked both ways down the long, curving hall, but there wasn’t another elevator. The inn’s maps were almost impossible to read since the inn itself was aggressively three-dimensional, riddled with elevators, stairs, ramps, sloping halls, ladders, bridges and multilevel rooms. They’d followed a guide to the Polynesian transition, but none were in sight now. Dorian went left, around the curved hall.

Finally, he reached a stairwell that spiraled down for fifty steps. He didn’t recognize the hall it emptied into, but a distinctive arrow in blue and yellow pointed toward a transition. Yesterday, as they approached the zone, the wallpaper had changed from the art deco they’d grown used to, to a palm and beach motif. Following the guide, he’d held Stephanie’s hand until they stepped through the transition’s door and into a Polynesian mountainscape.

“You’re lucky, today, folks,” said the guide. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it looking this good.”

The sun pouring through the open veranda spread heat like a warm flush on their skin. Stephanie’s hand drifted from his own, and she walked to the platform’s edge as if in a dream.

“Oh, Dorian,” she’d said. Instead of the snow-capped mountains of the Inn at Mount Either, a series of rounded hills rose in front of them, covered with forest so thick that it was hard to imagine ground beneath it. A flock of long-necked birds wheeled below, skimming the treetops and crying out to one another. She’d stared into the distance, entranced, her blonde hair just brushing her shoulders, and for a moment he saw the young woman he’d married twenty years earlier, the jaunty athleticism in her posture, the grace in her wrists and hands.

A waiter in a flowered shirt offered them drinks off a platter.

“Can you smell it?” Stephanie said, delighted. “It’s the ocean.”

And Dorian could smell salt and sand under the rich vegetable forest. Stephanie loved the ocean and all that was associated with it, the seals and birds and spiny creatures crawling in tidal pools, and the way the waves slid underneath her bare toes. Her passions were intense. She’d spend hours studying art or collecting children’s literature or working with other people’s kids. Once she’d gotten hypothermia in a mountain stream while sorting through rocks on her hands and knees. “I thought there might be quartz crystals,” she’d said through the shivers. She laughed often.

Stephanie hadn’t wanted to leave the overlook. The hotel guide finally had to insist. “My shift ended twenty minutes ago, ma’am. Perhaps you can come back another day if it’s still here.” Then he took them back through the hallway and into the inn they had left. “This was one of the original shift zones,” he’d said as they walked back to the main lobby. “They found it third.”

“How marvelous it must have been,” Stephanie said. “I can imagine them climbing the mountain. Squeezing through a crevice, and there they were.” She looked behind them.

Dorian rushed down the corridor. He remembered fewer doors in the hallway yesterday, and the carpet had been a different color. Closing his eyes for a second, he tried to picture the inn’s structure. The elevator had only gone down a couple of floors, which was about the same distance the spiral stairs had taken him, but nothing looked the same. Maybe he was in a parallel passage. He passed another blue and yellow arrow. The decor changed from dark-polished woods and brass fixtures to natural pine siding. A long mural of a desert canyon rimmed with cactus covered one wall. Then the hall ended at a door, a rough-hewn, heavy-planked structure marked by a solid iron handle to open it instead of a doorknob.

It was a transition way, but not the one from yesterday. Still, it was close. Maybe Stephanie had come down this path. The elevator might have been out of order for her too. Dorian took a deep breath and opened the door.

On the other side, a wooden bridge reached an open platform. Drooping ropes hung from thick posts that lined the bridge’s side, serving as protection from the drop into the depths below. Dorian leaned on the rope at the platform’s edge. The general shape of the mountains was the same, but no snow covered the peaks. The sun glared, radiating off slick-rock, dark with streaks of desert varnish. He shaded his eyes to look up the mountain. Wood structures covered most of the slope, all light-colored pine. For a moment nothing looked familiar, then he spotted the main lobby buttressed by tree-thick pylons jutting from the mountain.

A man wearing a cowboy hat and a leather fringed shirt joined him at the edge. “First time to Mount Either?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dorian, confused. “How could you tell?”

“Your duds. Not quite in the motif, pard.” He smiled, a gold tooth flashing in the sun, then glanced at his watch, a large-faced instrument ringed with turquoise. “You going to the barbeque? I’m going to find my wife and head that way. Gosh, I love the grub you get here.” His leather boots clacked against the wood flooring as he headed to the stairs.

Dorian was alone on the platform again. “I’m looking for my wife too,” he said. Overhead a lone bird circled. He thought, is that a buzzard?

A tram like a large ore cart glided past the platform, heading down. Cowboy-hatted tourists sat at one end, while a pile of saddles and bridles filled the other. At the bottom of the ravine where the tram’s cable ended at a tiny building, a dozen horses no larger than grains of rice milled about in a corral.

The set of stairs that gold-tooth had ascended looked like they led to the main lobby. Dorian took the steps two at a time. If Stephanie had come this way, she hadn’t returned. Would she have realized right away that she was lost? Would she have gone to the lobby for directions? She could be there even now, maybe sipping a cool drink at one of the many, nearby cafes.

But at the top of the stairs were three passages, and none of them looked like they headed up. Dorian paused. If he chose the wrong way, he could become lost himself. A bellboy in flannel shirt tucked into jeans, carrying a tray of dirty dishes on one hand above his shoulder, came out of one hallway.

“How do I get to the lobby?” said Dorian.

The bellboy transferred the heavy tray with practiced ease. His suntanned face crinkled into a weathered smile. “Right hallway until you come to the elevator. The button is marked.”

Dorian nodded, then started forward.

“My right,” said the bellboy as he descended the stairs.

In the lobby, Dorian took a moment to orient himself. It wasn’t that this sage-scented lobby was completely different; it was the similarities that threw him off. The same tall window gazing out on the deserty-looking mountains, the same exposed rock making one wall, a familiar reception desk dominating the room’s center, but all the materials were different: hand-hewed timbers replaced the slick chrome support beams, big-looped throw rugs covered the plank floor where before he’d walked on expensive carpet, but what was most disorienting was the concierge, whose distinctive upward-flaring eyebrows and silver-gray hair waited for him at the reception desk as Dorian crossed the room.

“Thank goodness,” said Dorian. “I wanted to find the Polynesian transition, but I ended up here instead.”

“Excuse me, sir?” said the concierge. His expression was completely bland. No recognition at all.

“It’s me, Dorian Wallace. I told you ten minutes ago that I was looking for my wife, Stephanie.”

“I’m sorry, sir. You have me at a disadvantage.”

“We talked. You said nothing stays lost forever.”

The concierge shook his head. “Maybe I was thinking about something else when we chatted. What room did you say you were in?”

The situation was ludicrous. In the window behind the concierge, the sun blasted the peaks. No snow. No smoothly curved walkways stretching from wing to wing. Just heavy rope and solid wood and thick iron cable strapping the structures to the mountain. It was like an 1860 version of Dodge City turned vertical. “I’m from the real Inn at Mount Either. I’m in one of its rooms.”

The concierge’s forehead wrinkled. “This is the real Inn at Mount Either, sir.”

Dorian stepped back. The man looked similar, but the business suit Dorian remembered had been replaced with a leather jacket, and where the silk tie had hung before, a silver clasp held a black bolo. Something about his face was different too. More wrinkles maybe? More silver in the hair? Suddenly Dorian was sure that they would have no record of his registration, and he realized he’d gone through a transition without a guide. What had the first concierge told him about management “responding strongly” to guests who ignored the rules?

Keeping the panic out of his voice, Dorian said, “My fault. I mistook you for someone else.” He forced a smile. “There’s so many employees here.”

Nodding, the concierge turned his attention to a stack of papers on the desk. “This is a big inn, sir. Perfectly understandable.”

On the way out of the lobby, Dorian paused. Had he come up a short flight of stairs to enter, or had the hallway been on the same level? At the foot of the stairs a mineral gift shop offered its wares on wooden trays inside its door. He vaguely remembered passing something like that, but he’d been in a hurry. Had he?

On an impulse, he entered the shop. Rocks and crystals of all kinds filled the shelves. “I’m looking for my wife,” he said to the man behind the counter. “She might have been in here yesterday.” Dorian showed him a photo from his wallet.

The man hooked his thumbs in the top of his overalls and leaned to look at the picture. “Yep, Stephanie, I know her. She liked the amethyst. I figure she spent an hour hunting for a good specimen.”

Dorian caught the edge of the counter to keep from falling. His legs had no strength. He looked at the crate overflowing with purple crystals.

“Didn’t buy anything, though. I offered her iron pyrite, fool’s gold. She said if she couldn’t have the real thing, she couldn’t be happy.” The man smiled. “Besides, she said her husband sometimes buys her gifts, and she didn’t want to spoil his fun.”

“Which way did she go?”

“Didn’t really notice. Down the hallway, I reckon.”

Dorian dashed to the door, then looked the way the man had indicated, as if there might be a chance to see her still. But the hall was empty. He glanced up the stairs into the lobby. The concierge was talking to a couple of men wearing six-shooters and badges. Security? The concierge pointed toward Dorian.

“Thanks,” he called to the mineral shop man.

“Nice lady. I hope you find her.”

The elevator at the end of the hall was not the same one he’d ridden up, but he didn’t want to talk to security, so he rode it down to the transition level he’d come from. When he stepped out, the doors closed, and the elevator returned to the lobby.

Were they really after him?

After a couple confusing turns down hallways that didn’t look the least bit familiar, Dorian stepped onto an open-air bridge that ended at a platform overlooking the canyon. He breathed easier. A quick dash down the transitionway, and he’d be home, but the long cables that carried the tram he’d seen earlier to the ravine’s bottom were next to a platform a hundred yards farther away. An updraft ruffled his hair and dried the sweat on his face instantly. Wrong platform. The problem was how to get from the platform he was on to the one that he’d come from without retracing his steps?

He crossed the bridge back to the mountain where three choices waited: the hallway he’d exited from, a short ramp to another hallway, and a set of stairs that at least headed toward the other platform. At the top of the stairs, a blue and yellow arrow pointed in the right direction.

But the hallway’s transition theme was heavy stone work, like castle fortifications, and on the door’s other side, towering spires and crenelated restraining walls lined the paths. He’d missed the transition back to where he’d started. A dozen flights of stairs, two ramps and an elevator ride took him to another transition, clearly not the right one, but he needed to get back to the Inn at Mount Either he’d come from. Passing through transitions without a guide, he thought ruefully. I’m probably racking up room charges of astronomical proportions.

The next transition felt vaguely Arabic. He ran into a fellow in a rush going through the door in the opposite direction.

“Sorry, my fault,” said Dorian at the same time the other man said the same thing. He only had a moment to notice the fellow was wearing the same kind of pants and shirt he wore before they dashed their separate ways.

The next had a rainforest look, but he recognized none of the birds that flew past the walkways. A blue and yellow arrow pointed down a hallway lined with jungle plants and short vines that dangled from the ceiling. He hurried past the closed doors until the hallway curved and the decor on the wall changed from matted vegetation to slick aluminum and recessed light fixtures. He pulled the door at the end of the transition zone open with relief.

The door closed behind him.

The lights were out.

He took a few steps into the darkness, then waited for his eyes to adjust. Slowly, the scene became clear. He choked back a gasp. Nothing separated him from the two-thousand foot drop to the bottom of the canyon. For a heart-stopping moment, he felt suspended, as if at any second he would drop to the rocks in an unstoppable plunge, but he didn’t fall. His hands out, he shuffled forward. The floor wasn’t perfectly invisible. He could see now that a walkway leapt to an opaque platform before him, and to each side, no more than an arm reach away, nearly transparent walls and ceiling enclosed him. It reminded him of an aquarium he’d visited once, where the visitors could walk in a glass tunnel right through the water. Sharks and rays swam above and below, and the illusion of being underwater was nearly perfect. Except the illusion here was that he floated in space. Dorian looked up. Stars glinted back at him with unblinking brilliance. He’d never seen a night sky so clean-edged. On the horizon, a quarter moon cast a clear, cold light on the mountain peaks in the distance, and its silver hue glinted off the Inn at Mount Either’s structures that wrapped tight around the mountain above him, but it wasn’t the Mount Either he’d left. Glass and metal flowed smoothly around the contours, seamlessly leading from wall to window to walkway to elevator, and the dim light of the glass told him of the inn’s life behind.

Afraid for his balance, Dorian moved back to the door like a man on ice. He tugged, but the handle didn’t stir. A lighted sign in red appeared above: SORRY, TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE.

After tight-roping his way across the glass walkway, Dorian found himself in a vista room. A line of comfortably padded couches faced the window and the star-studded night outside. Illuminated by the partial moon, people sat in most of the couches, staring silently at the view. He looked out. Moonlight bathed the nearest mountain in grays and blues. Shadows, like black swaths of velvet, outlined ridges and rocks and filled crevices. Dorian took an empty couch and settled in its deep embrace. Yesterday, when Stephanie missed lunch, he’d sat in the restaurant for an extra hour, and he knew something was wrong. He told himself that she must have forgotten, but that wasn’t like her. Using the inn’s maps as best he could—the inn’s structure was complicated—he’d searched the gyms and shops, the salons and museums, hour by hour, panic building.

He realized that this was the first time he’d rested in the last twenty-four hours. Dorian closed his eyes, just for a minute, he thought.

He dreamed of Stephanie. They were in a boat crossing a broad lake. Behind them he could make out a line of trees and a distant dock, but the other shore was lost in mist. Water slapped at the bow, and the air smelled of fish and wet wood. “You’re so far away,” she said. Dorian wanted to weep. “I know,” he said. “I know, but I’m trying to find you.” He was dreaming, and he could feel the couch he was sitting in, and he could imagine the people sitting around him, staring at the night-lit mountain, but he also felt the hard wooden bench and the boat’s gentle motion. “Where are you, Stephanie?” In the dream, she laughed the way she always laughed, an honest burst of humor that animated her face and eyes. She said, “No, I mean you’re so far away in the boat.” Dorian braced himself, lifted his feet over the seat in between them, then slid forward. Their knees touched. Stephanie placed her hands palms up on her knees. Leaning, Dorian covered them with his own.

“Your hands are so warm,” she said.

Dorian kept still, his fingers resting on her wrists, her pulse beating beneath them.

Stephanie looked upon the water, the long line of ripples moving past them, breathing quietly. She said, “I could float here forever. I don’t have to be going anywhere.” The boat rocked, and it was like the lake stroking them. She met his gaze. “If you are with me.”

A voice said, “It’s beginning.”

Dorian opened his eyes, and Stephanie disappeared. For a moment, he imagined the couch moved, as if the floor was the surface of a black lake, but that feeling faded, leaving him with the memory so vivid of her pulse in his fingertips and the way her lips parted when she laughed that he wondered for a second if she’d actually been there before him.

“It’s beginning,” an elderly woman in the couch next to him said again. Her arms looked frail, but her voice was firm.

“What?” said Dorian.

“Shhh!” she said, and hunched forward, all her attention directed out the window.

At first Dorian thought the mountain was catching fire. A flicker of red glinted from the middle of a cliff. Then it spread over the length of the rock, a brilliant, deep red like an electric ruby.

“My God,” someone said. Someone else sighed.

The red spread to neighboring cliffs, but now the center glimmered with yellow, and a few seconds later almost all the red had been replaced by the yellow glow.

Leaning toward the woman next to him, Dorian said, “What is that?”

“Just spectacular,” she said.

“No, what is it?”

She didn’t look at him. “Refracted moonlight on the crystals. It’s only this good a couple times a year, and only from this spot. No other mountain in the world does this, and if this room were any other place, we wouldn’t see it. The moon has to be in the right phase.”

Now the yellow light enveloped the entire mountain, except at the bottom, which had acquired a purple tint that crawled up the cliffs until the yellow vanished. Purple was Stephanie’s color, the color of amethyst.

“There were clouds in the spring. We missed it,” the old woman said, then she started crying.

Dorian sat with his hands in his lap, unsure of what to do.

“My husband was with me then. We’d never been here before.” She wiped her tears before looking at him for the first time. Her eyes reflected the purple from the mountain. “It’s just a superstition, I know, but they say if you see the lights with someone you love, they will be with you forever.”

Gradually the purple vanished. The edges of a few of the larger rock faces glinted green for a moment. Finally, the mountain looked like it had when he entered the room. People rose from the couches and headed for the exits. Many were couples holding hands. The old woman didn’t move. She’d wrapped her arms across her chest, as if she were hugging herself. Her knuckles were large and arthritic. She said, “I hope you come back when it isn’t cloudy. I hope you come back with someone you love.”

A chill swept the back of Dorian’s head. “I’m looking for her.”

She shrank a little deeper into her chair. “Not me. I’m waiting.”

At the other end of the room, a bellboy bent to talk to a young couple still sitting. They smiled back at him, then each showed him a small piece of plastic. In the room, lit only by reflected moonlight, Dorian couldn’t tell what the plastic was. The bellboy moved to the next lodger, who also showed him a plastic card. There were only a few people between Dorian and the bellboy when Dorian recognized that they were displaying their room keys. His own key didn’t look like the ones they showed.

“What’s the problem?” said a woman as she put her key back in her pocket.

“Nothing of concern, ma’am. A security issue, misplaced guest.”

Dorian slipped out of the room and into a passageway. Half of the wall was transparent, like the entrance bridge near the transition, except the ceiling glowed to provide dim light. He followed the gentle curve and had walked for several minutes when an acetylene-bright brilliance flushed the hall into overexposed surfaces and shadows. He blinked against the glare before shading his eyes. From the mountain’s base, the light grew more intense, until, soundlessly, a rocket, balanced on a flaming pillar, rose past him and streaked into the night.

He heard the people in the hall before he saw them, but short of turning back the way he came, there was no way to avoid them. They laughed and joked loudly. At first Dorian thought they must be going to a masquerade. All wore bulky suits and carried helmets under their arms.

“I’ve never been outside,” said a young man with glasses and a moustache.

“Just don’t sit on something sharp,” said his motherly-looking companion. “And be sure to listen to the safety procedures. Depressurization is nothing to fool around with.”

They were too preoccupied to acknowledge Dorian as they clumped past.

When they vanished around the curve, Dorian stopped, put his hand on the glass wall, and looked out again. The stars never had seemed so sharp and unblinking, and, he noticed, there was no vegetation he could see. None at all. The landscape was as desolate and bare as the—he paused as he made the comparison—as the moon, but there was the moon, nearly resting on the horizon. He shivered. Every transition at Mount Either took the guests to an exotic location, but it had never occurred to him to wonder how exotic. This is Earth, he thought, isn’t it? Clearly Earth! But what happened to it?

The mountains weren’t just dead. They were swept clean and bare, like a planet’s skeleton, solid, smooth, dry and with no ability to shrug themselves into life. He pressed his forehead against the glass and shut his eyes. Where was Stephanie? She’d be taking pictures. She’d be stopping at every new view, her head cocked a little to the side, as if she were measuring the world for a painting. She’d tell him about what she’d found, and if he was quiet for too long, she’d say, “What are you thinking?” and genuinely want to know.

Dorian pushed away from the glass and continued walking, slowly at first, but soon with a purposeful stride. At a junction he chose the hallway whose stairs led toward the lobby. An elevator took him up, and when the doors opened, a bellboy stood on the other side. The bellboy, wearing a silk vest that sported a shiny name tag that read, NED, CAN I HELP?, held a personal digital assistant in one hand with Dorian’s face on the screen.

“I’m Dorian Wallace.”

The bellboy checked the image in his hand. “Heavens, you are Dorian Wallace! Thank goodness, sir. Your wife has been worried sick. Everyone has been looking for you.”

Dorian’s hand flew to his heart, and he clenched his shirt in a fist. “You know where Stephanie is?”

Two short hallways later, they were in the lobby; the same long window that seemed so familiar looked out on the moonlit mountains. Dorian’s pulse pounded and his face felt hot. The same cliff face covered with plants made the back wall, and, Dorian thought, the same concierge, his handlebar eyebrows pointing upwards, waited at the reception desk. But he wasn’t the same. Similar, but not the same. Shorter, perhaps? A little broader in the shoulders?

Stephanie stepped out from behind the concierge.

Wordlessly they embraced. Dorian held her tightly, his cheek pressing against the side of her head. She trembled in his arms. For a moment, all centered on her, on the feel of her breathing against him, of her fingers on his back. The smell of her skin. The texture of her blouse.

For a moment, all was perfect.

But she stiffened–—he could feel it in her muscles—and she pushed away.

Stephanie looked at him, her hands still holding his. Dorian studied her. Where Stephanie’s hair had been curled, it now hung straight. Where her eyes had been blue with tiny white spokes, they were now blue with tinges of green.

“Who are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m Dorian. Who are you?” He released her hands, and they hung in place where he’d left them. She took a single step back.

“Oh, no,” said the concierge. “This is distressing.”

“Where’s my husband?” the woman said. “Where’s my Dorian?”

The concierge took a position between them. “The inn is not at fault here. It doesn’t happen this way. If you’ll come with me, sir.” He took Dorian by the elbow and walked away from the reception desk. “How many transitions did you go through?” he whispered harshly.

“I… maybe…”

“You went through at least two, didn’t you?”

Dorian stopped, pulled his arm away from the concierge. “The damn inn is so confusing that anybody can get lost. Give me a guide, and I’ll be happy to go back to where I belong.”

“It’s a big inn. How many?” The concierge wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t look friendly in the least.

“What does it matter? Five or six, I think.”

The concierge blanched. “You don’t understand, sir. There are nine transition zones.”

“So?”

“When you go through one, you come out at different Inns at Mount Either. Each inn has nine transition zones too. Nine different ones. When you go through two transitions, there are eighty-one different inns you might have come from. If you went through five…” He paused, closing his eyes for a second. They popped open. “You could have come from any one of 59,049 realities. If you went through six, we’d have over a half million possibilities.” He grabbed Dorian’s elbow again with urgency. “Where did you come from to get here?”

Dorian winced and found himself half walking and half trotting. “A jungle, I think. Ouch! What’s the hurry?”

They reached an elevator. The concierge punched the button. Then he punched it again. “Zone drift. When you go through a zone, the door you came from is the way back for two or three hours, but if you wait too long, the place you came from isn’t there anymore. It’ll be another version of the inn. It might even be a really, really close version of the one you came from, but it won’t be the same one. If you didn’t dawdle in any of the zones, though, you should be okay.”

Dorian glanced at his watch. When had he gone through the first transition?

The elevator door opened. “Jungle?” asked the concierge.

Dorian nodded. “Another version? Like a parallel world?”

The concierge grunted as the elevator started down. “Um, sort of. We prefer to call them non-convergent. There’s a lot of variation.”

“But the door to the jungle is out of order. I would have gone back through it on my own.”

“We locked all the doors when we realized a guest was making unguided transitions.”

Dorian followed the concierge, who made turns down hallways and chose stairwells with practiced confidence. They crossed the transparent bridge, but now the door was lit and they passed into the rainforest transition Dorian remembered.

“Okay, how did you get here?” The concierge reached behind a curtain of vines hanging next to the wall, and pulled a phone from a hatch behind.

“From a kind of a desert world, I think.”

The concierge’s forehead furrowed in frustration.

“I’m sure it was desert, like the Arabian Nights.”

He said something into the phone, then listened to the reply.

They hurried around a hallway’s long curve. Dorian hadn’t looked at the scenery the first time through, but now he noticed solid vegetable weaves that made the walls, and the sweaty smell of wet wood and dripping leaves.

“How come you are here? I mean, you’re just like the concierge from the inn that I came from.”

They trotted up a flight of stairs, crossed a dizzying walkway over a ravine and entered a small court circled with open booths. Guests sat on stools drinking from tall bamboo cups or coconuts with straws stuck in them. An elevator rendition of jungle music played softly in the background.

“I’m everywhere,” said the concierge. “So’s your wife. So are you. That’s the problem. You are lost, and so are about a zillion non-convergent versions of you wandering about the inn where they don’t belong. Of course, there are a lot of you who didn’t get lost either. The worlds aren’t parallel. At least your wife had the wit to come back through the same doors she exited.”

“She has a pretty good sense of direction.” Dorian shook his head. “I didn’t come this way. I don’t remember this.”

“Short cuts. Your clock is ticking. With any luck, another version of me is hustling another version of you, the right one, back to my lobby where that woman you met is waiting. How long has it been since you went through the first transition?”

“I’m sure it hasn’t been two hours yet.” When had he started looking?

“Good. We should make it without any trouble.”

Finally they entered a transition with a western theme, rough textured pine walls and the smell of cactus.

“This is the first zone I entered.”

The concierge sighed and smiled for the first time since Dorian talked to him in the lobby. “Fifteen minutes back for me. Piece of cake. From here, all I need is your room key.”

Looking at the key, the concierge plucked another phone from a hidden niche. He read a string of numbers into the mouthpiece.

Minutes later, they stood at the transition back to the inn Dorian had come from. The concierge put out his hand. “I’m glad that I could help you, sir. A bellboy on the other side will escort you to the lobby, where I’m sure your wife will be glad to see you.” He paused. “We’ve always said that a guest should lose himself in the experience.”

Dorian grimaced. “I didn’t think that was funny the first time I heard it.”

When he entered the lobby, he spotted Stephanie right away. Her back was to him, but her blonde hair, lightly curled at the end, barely touching her shoulders, caught a ray of sun through the window and practically glowed. He remembered that once he’d told her that he liked looking for her in crowded places. “I just tell myself that I’m looking for the prettiest woman in the building, and when I find you, I’m done.”

She turned, but her smile was tentative.

“Dorian? The real Dorian?”

He tried to speak. Nothing came out, and his eyes blurred.

She was in his arms. Dorian held her tightly, afraid to let go. She buried her face in his neck, and he could feel her tears on his skin. He thought about the first time he’d held her, a night when they’d parked on a cliff’s edge with the city’s lights spread out in the valley below, when he knew that they would be together forever. Her breathing had synchronized with his. Her shoulder fit under his arm as if the two of them had been sculpted at the same time to go together. Dorian shook with sobs, and she held him. Her crying matched his own.

A long time later, it seemed, when they’d dried their faces, made their apologies to the concierge, who just seemed happy that they were where they belonged again, and all thoughts of further repercussions for going through transitions were forgotten, they walked toward their room. Stephanie’s arm wrapped around Dorian’s waist, and he kept a hand on her shoulder, as if afraid that she might slip away again.

“Where were you at lunch?” Dorian asked. “I waited for an hour.”

Stephanie’s inhalation still sounded shaky. “I was in the wrong restaurant. When you didn’t show up, I went back to the room. But you didn’t come, so I started looking for you. That’s when I went through the transitions. Dorian, it was all so beautiful. I lost track of time.” She frowned. “They brought a man who looked like you, but he wasn’t you. I’ve never been so frightened before.”

“I know.”

Dorian pulled her even tighter. It didn’t matter why they’d been apart, as long as they were no longer lost. He loved the feel of her walking beside him. He loved that he could match strides with her so they wouldn’t jar each other. Twenty years of marriage, and he loved that she still surprised him with her laugh.

They reached the room. Dorian slid his plastic key into the lock, but it didn’t work.

“Let me,” Stephanie said. The door recognized her key and let them in. “I’m so tired, I could sleep for a week.” She leaned against the wall, looking at him.

“Me too. I haven’t slept since yesterday.”

She headed for the bed, and Dorian was glad because she couldn’t see the change in expression on his face. He hadn’t slept since yesterday, he’d said, but that wasn’t true. He’d slept in the moon room, where he’d dreamed of Stephanie. “You’re so far away,” she’d said in the dream.

How long had he slept?

Stephanie pulled back the sheets. Dorian watched. Was that exactly the way Stephanie unmade the bed? Didn’t she always wash her face first?

She walked past him into the bathroom. Her fingers touched his as she rounded the corner. “You look like you swallowed something gross.”

The sink turned on. Water splashed. Dorian backed up to the edge of the bed, but he didn’t sit down. Stephanie had left the door open. She always closed the bathroom door, even to brush her teeth, even to blow her nose. Her shadow moved on the carpet in the light of the open door.

How long had he slept?

Much, much later that night, long after the woman had fallen asleep, Dorian lay with his eyes wide open, listening. Straining. What did his wife sound like when she breathed? Could this possibly be her beside him, and what if it wasn’t? How long would it be before she noticed? A year? Ten years? Never?

Or could she wake up right now and know? Would she lever herself up on one elbow and look at him in the dark? “You’re not Dorian,” she’d say. Her breath wouldn’t smell like Stephanie’s. Her voice wouldn’t be Stephanie’s. Not quite. Not exact. Not real.

She stirred slightly. Every muscle in Dorian’s body tensed, but she didn’t wake up.

Not then.