Travellers in Magic Read Online Free PDF

only five of them. The first one showed me at my graduation walking across the stage in a cap and gown to receive my diploma. But I hadn’t been at either of my graduations, not the one at my high school or the one at college where I received my B.A. degree. I turned the picture this way and that, trying to figure out how it had been done. There were these odd details—the guy in front of me was in a wheelchair, for example—but on the whole it was very believable. The person on stage looked a lot like me.
    The next picture showed me in an unfamiliar kitchen, pouring myself a cup of coffee. In the third one I was running down the street in the rain, a briefcase flying out from one hand. I looked harassed, and older too, in some indefinable way. The next one was a picture of me and a woman I had never met. We were in a tight embrace and I had a look of perfect peace on my face. The picture ended just below the neck, but I had the impression we were both naked. And in the last picture I was definitely older—at least thirty—and bending down to talk to a five- or six-year-old boy.
    I ran the pictures through my hands, shuffling them like a deck of cards. So that’s what Cassie’s grandmother had been doing all those months in her room. She must have had a darkroom in there. I could see her bent over the photographs, cutting a head from this one, a background from that one, maybe re-touching them, arranging them so that they looked like actual photographs. What a strange hobby. No wonder when she came out of her room she would say things like “The wind blows the skeleton of his lips.”
    I looked at the photographs again. Very nice, but I didn’t see what the hell I was supposed to do with them. I put them back in the envelope, stuffed the envelope in a drawer and forgot about them.
    There was a man in a wheelchair in front of me at my graduation. I felt vaguely uneasy when I saw him—he reminded me of something unpleasant, but I couldn’t remember what—but I managed to put him out of my mind. My parents had come out from Chicago to see me graduate—otherwise, I suppose, I wouldn’t have gone to this graduation either—and at the reception afterward I introduced them to Laura and my friends without thinking too much about the ceremony. It was only when we were out to dinner that I remembered the photograph.
    â€œWhat is it?” Laura said. “Is something wrong?” Later she told me that until she saw me that night she had never believed in the cliche “his jaw dropped.”
    â€œNothing,” I said uneasily, and, I guess, closed my jaw. Amazing, I thought. An amazing coincidence. I wondered what Cassie’s grandmother would make of it. Cassie. I shook my head. I hadn’t thought of her in months. “I just remembered something, that’s all.”
    When I got home that night I pulled out all my drawers looking for the photographs. I found them at last, buried under the first few drafts of my dissertation. My fingers were shaking when I pulled the photographs out of the manila envelope.
    The scene in the photograph matched point for point with the scene on stage. It might almost have been a picture taken by someone in the audience. There was Dr. Miller, who had been hastily invited to speak when Dr. Fine became ill. There was my friend Larry walking across the stage behind me. You could see his sneakers under the edge of his gown; he hadn’t had time to change his shoes. There was the guy in the wheelchair, rolling down the ramp off stage.
    I felt as though someone had opened a window and let in a blast of cold air. I was shivering and had to sit down. How had the old lady done it? How on earth had she known?
    I looked at the other photographs more intently than I’d ever looked at anything before. My hands were trembling badly. So that’s what Cassie had meant. This was to be my life. Someday I’d live in a house with