Travellers in Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

a kitchen like the one in the photograph. I’d have a job that involved carrying a briefcase. And in about ten years I’d talk to a boy about five or six years old. Could the boy be my son? At the thought I felt another chill wind through the room and I shuffled that photograph to the end of the pile.
    The picture I looked at the longest, though, was the one of me and the woman embracing. Her face was just under my chin and turned in slightly toward my chest, but from what little I saw I thought that she was beautiful. She had blond, almost gold, hair cut very short, and fine, delicate features. The one eye visible in the picture was closed. I thought she looked happy.
    Surprisingly my trembling had stopped. I accepted—somehow—that I was seeing scenes from my future, but the idea no longer frightened me. I saw nothing bad in these pictures, no death or grief or pain. In fact, the future seemed to hold only good things for me. A job, a house, a beautiful woman, perhaps a child.
    If Cassie had hoped to frighten me with these photos, hoped somehow to win me back, she had badly miscalculated. It was with a feeling of profound satisfaction that I put the photographs in the manila envelope and put the envelope carefully back in the drawer.
    After graduation I got a job with an aircraft company in a suburb of L.A. Feeling a little foolish, I carefully studied the briefcase in the photograph and then went out and got one just like it. I was looking at the photos about two or three times a week now, noting small details. The woman seemed to have small freckles scattered like stars across her face. The boy looked vaguely familiar, though if he were my son that wouldn’t be surprising. A car was parked directly in back of him. There was a poster on the wall of the kitchen on which, after a week of effort, I could read the words “Save the Whales.”
    Laura and I had several arguments around this time. None of them was very serious—I had thrown out a pamphlet she had given me without reading it, for example, or she disapproved of my choice of restaurants—but each time I would think, “The woman in the photograph wouldn’t act this way.” The woman in the photograph, I thought, was wise and loving and giving. After a while Laura and I drifted apart.
    I began to date women for a week or a month and then drop them, secretaries from the aircraft company or women I’d pick up in singles bars in the Marina. One morning I woke up in an unfamiliar bed next to a woman I could barely remember and saw by her alarm clock that I had to be at work in an hour. I staggered out to her kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee. It was only after I drank the coffee that I turned around and saw the Save the Whales poster tacked up on the wall.
    I was buoyant all that day. Several people at work even asked me what I was smiling about. If another one of the pictures had come true, I thought, the rest couldn’t be that far behind.
    The next few months were probably the happiest in my life. I lived in a state of almost constant anticipation. At any moment I might see her, turning the corner or buying a pair of shoes. I invented names for her, Alexandra, Deirdre. I fantasized taking her home and showing her the photograph, telling her the story and seeing her eyes open wide in amazement. I worked hard, dated some, and spent long evenings running the photographs back and forth through my hands.
    You can only anticipate for so long, though. Gradually, so gradually I barely noticed it, the photos became less and less important. I only looked at them once or twice a week, then once a month. I stopped holding my breath whenever I saw a woman with short blond hair. I still felt that my future held something wonderful, that my life was more intense than most people’s, but I no longer thought about why I felt that way.
    After about five years I quit the aircraft company and went into consulting. I had saved