18

The next afternoon Virginia found out that her offer on the house had been accepted. She picked up Anax and began dancing around the room with her, until the dog wriggled out of her arms and freed herself. Virginia took out her phone and flipped through the pictures she had taken on the day she had visited with the real estate agent. Ah yes, roses at the back door. “Anax, you’re going to love it!”

After supper, she sat down to check her email and found another chapter from Steve.

  Eventually the car we were riding in came out of the underground, and the rails just kept going. I wondered again how big virtual Paris could be. The terrain we were riding through had changed dramatically. No more cute cafes or tree-lined streets. In fact, a grassy plain stretched out on both sides as far as the eye could see. The landscape was dotted with single low flat-topped trees here and there, and in the distance a snow-capped mountain spilled its magnificence across the horizon. Someone gasped, “Giraffes!” I craned my neck, and sure enough, a pair of stilted creatures was rocking away from us.

 “Looks like we’ve stumbled into Virtual Africa,” I said to the nearest person. When they looked at me blankly, I realized they hadn’t been on the bus with us. I tried to locate the girl I had been sitting next to, but she didn’t seem to be in this car. One of my fellow passengers who looked familiar nodded at me. “Two for the price of one,” he joked. He didn’t appear to be particularly worried. In a sense, it was more reassuring to be in a virtual environment, even without knowing where, than to be in a real one, considering what we had just been through.

 The train car stopped, and the doors opened. Nobody moved to get out. A hot wind blew in, filling the car with a warm sifting of dust. The doors closed again, and the train began to move. There were no visible rails. I began to wonder if I was hallucinating, although it was obvious that everyone else in the car was seeing the same thing I was. “This is the virtual safari,” said someone nearby conversationally. “I thought about taking it. They guaranteed you could kill a virtual lion, or if you weren’t into hunting, you could take a wildlife viewing tour. It looked just exactly like this.”

  What’s the thrill of killing a virtual lion? Although I admit I don’t understand the appeal of killing any lion, virtual or not. “What made you decide on Paris?” I asked him.

 “They were having a sale. It was way cheaper than the safari. It makes a big difference when there are two of you.” He indicated the girl sitting next to him—wife? girlfriend? “I had just seen Phantom of the Opera, and I sort of thought it was all like that. Anyway, this trip has had a lot more excitement than I expected. But I can see I should have brought my rifle.”

Someone else asked him what kind of rifle he had, and they started speaking a foreign language. Here’s what it sounded like to me: Slim Jim Chesterfield fifteen hundred in a case with piebald rotating hummer attached and flocking basic bare end noodles on the switch activated mega toupee. There was more, but I stopped listening.

Good idea, she yawned to herself. Time for bed. Plug in the phone and turn out the light. But first, look up “Safari Images” on the internet to get an idea of what the passengers on the train car were up against. Elephants. Zebras. Giraffes. Funny-looking trees, a gently sloping mountain capped in white, like the kind you see on greeting cards, people holding cameras, a yawning lion, with here and there a piece of the jeep intruding on the landscape. Enough of that. Let’s get some sleep.

Virginia woke up in the morning with a start, still anxious from the dream she was having. She had been in a jeep driving across the African savanna. They had stopped to allow her to feed the giraffes. She had stumbled over a curb—where had that come from?—and fallen to the ground. When she tried to get up, her leg wouldn’t hold her. The driver of the jeep hopped out to help her, but a lion strolled toward them, and the driver froze. It was a female lion. She nosed Virginia’s foot. Does it hurt? she seemed to be asking. Virginia was petrified.

 She opened her eyes and stretched her legs under the covers. When her foot encountered something that didn’t move, she realized it was Anax. She buried her hand in the dog’s shaggy fur and waited for the dream to lose its hold on her.

Those safari pictures—that must be where the dream came from. She reviewed as much as she could remember. The dream had started in a sort of warehouse that her brain had identified as the place where she lived, and it went on to a watery, almost underwater setting, where a line of women paraded slowly past a guy who didn’t seem to know what he was doing there. When he finally spoke, it was to suggest to everyone that they all go home. A dog barked.

It had been a long time since she remembered a dream—or even tried really. There had been so many that illustrated particular anxieties. None of the dreams recurred, but there were themes that came up over and over, like preparing for a test, or delivering a poor performance, or trying unsuccessfully to help someone. She remembered one where her high school theater teacher announced to her the good news that she would get a very small part in the next play, and how extremely happy that made her.

Her phone dinged. It was another email from Steve. “Sorry, I accidentally sent you the first draft of the chapter yesterday. Here’s the most recent version after I revised it.”

Virginia didn’t see much difference between this chapter and the previous version she had read last night. There was something about Paris being romantic and for that reason a better choice for the guy who was there with his girlfriend. She thought she remembered the choice of Paris being because it was on sale, and she agreed that it was better to replace it with the idea of Paris being romantic, but otherwise, it couldn’t have been more than shuffling a few words around. She supposed it would be appropriate to tell Steve the new version was much improved, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. She thought over the wording of her text. Finally she wrote:

"Thanks. I like it. Can’t wait to read more."

He probably didn’t expect much from her in the way of useful comments anyway, knowing that she wasn’t a writer. She decided it was time to even out the exchange a little bit by sending him something, maybe one of the collages she had made with vacation photos. Or one of the more artistic groupings. She had one she called “Good Fences,” which included some lonely-looking Western plains, a snow fence or two—although none of them had any actual snow, this would be the year for that—a prim picket fence in front of a small house, tall intimidating board fences, and barbed wire tangled up in the underbrush of state forest land. See what he thought of that. She pulled up some of her older collections and sorted through them, seeing with a start of surprise several that she had forgotten about. She settled on two sets of “Good Fences” and one montage called “March On!” where she had juxtaposed some pictures of an abortion rights demonstration with archival photos from the suffragist movement.

She was starting to miss having her own workspace. In Minnesota she had set up her desk next to a window, and she had had excellent lighting to work on her pictures. There was also something a little bit off-putting about working in a space that simply wasn’t hers. It felt wrong. It would be a relief to get into her new house where she and Anax would both have more privacy.