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phone number.
    A tin sign advertising bread, the blond girl and her buttered slice much faded, was attached to the screen door of the little store; Pierce hadn't gone through such a door with such a sign on it in years. And inside the store was that cool and nameless odor, something like naphtha and raisins and cookie crumbs, which is the eternal smell of stores like this one; stores in the city which sold much the same goods never seemed to have it. Pierce felt swept into the past as he dialed the number.
    There was no one alive at Peter Ramus at this August noon hour except other people's assistants; no one would reschedule his appointment, but he didn't dare cancel it outright; he left a number of vague messages that were only half-heartedly accepted, said he would call again from Cascadia, and hung up, in limbo.
    By the front counter of the store he found a soda cooler, one of the sarcophagus kind that had used to stand in Delmont's store in his old hometown: the same dark red, with a heavy lid lined with zinc, and inside a dark pool of ice and water and cold bottles that clanked cavernously together when he chose one. He took a pair of dark glasses from a card of them by the roundel that held postcards; he considered buying a copy of the local paper, also piled there, but did not. It was called the Faraway Crier. He paid for the Coke and the glasses, smiling at the placid child who took his money as she smiled for him, and went back into the day, feeling weirdly at liberty, as though he had been set ashore, or had struggled ashore. He donned his new dark glasses, which turned the day even more into a landscape by Claude, amber-toned and richly dark: serene.
    He had broken his journey, and with a lot maybe at stake, and a lot no doubt to pay for it in tedium or worse; it didn't matter, he couldn't for the moment care, since he neither much desired to go where he had been headed, nor much desired to return where he had started out from. If he wanted anything, it was simply to sit here at this wooden picnic table in the shade, to be not in motion, to sip this Coke and the deep peace of what seemed a still and universal holiday.
    Serenity. Now you could wish for that, naming no conditions: a permanent inner vacation, escape made good. To somehow have this motionlessness which he drew in with the sweet air he inhaled for his inward weather always.
    But there were problems too with wishing for moral qualities, serenity, large-mindedness. The interdiction (which Pierce thought obvious) against wishing for such things as artistic abilities—sit down at the piano, the Appassionata flows suddenly from your fingertips—applied in a way to wisdom too, to enlightenment, to heart-knowledge, useless unless earned, the earning of it being no doubt all that it consisted of.
    The best thing. Pierce breathed deeply, he had come to these conclusions before. The best thing would simply be to refuse the offer altogether. Thanks but no thanks. Surely he was already wise enough—or at least well-read enough—to know that there was very likely something corrosive to common happiness in the very nature of granted wishes. He did know it. And yet. He could only hope that when the wishes came he would be wise, and not yearning; in good case; not transfixed by some object of desire; not in some dreadful circumstance from which he desperately needed relief: not, in other words, just now. Then, even if he could not refuse altogether, he might at least be able to take the next-wisest course, an option he had long since worked out that was sensible, usually all too sensible for him: and that was, his first two practical wishes for health and wealth having been asked and granted, to use his third wish simply to wish that he might forget the whole thing had ever happened; his safety and ease magically assured, to forget he had ever known wishes could be granted, to be returned to his (present) state of ignorance that such irruptions of power into the