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By Root 1627 0

couldn’t have been more complete. You could look over the long fence, but you wouldn’t see anything. And if you did happen to see something out there hovering above the white dunes, it would be incomprehensible to you, and if you tried to explain what you’d seen to others, they would shake their heads and question your sanity. Inside the base, they spoke the same language but kept what they knew to themselves. Stealth—just one of the many black appliances they tested under cover of night out there in their spacious playground—could not have been more aptly named. Stealth was the word, and the word was stealth. Sometimes you might notice a particular hue in the sunset over the mountains, and you couldn’t help but wonder if it was their doing, if they hadn’t got it in their heads to recolor the sun, maybe give the clouds a fluorescent shot in the arm. At night, you were awakened from your sleep by something as subtle as the faint odor of borax. You imagined them out there in a distant playa lakebed. You watched their latest secret flying machine afterburning impossible golds and pinks. Saw a fuselage incinerated and a wing twirlingly ascending moonward, after the pilot lost control and bailed out as a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of equipment plummeted to earth, the fiery spitball of covert hardware gone down in peacetime defeat. And nutty though they were, the theories about Roswell spacemen didn’t begin to cover the point spread. Little green men with pumas’ eyes might fly their saucers here, beaming up housewives and family pets, but they had nothing on local technologies. While you and everyone else slept, the real spacemen were at it. And in the morning, if the ore-of-boron odor had been dispelled by frolicsome breezes, you’d wonder whether the whole business hadn’t been just one more bad dream. There would be nothing to suggest otherwise. And soon you would forget the whole nightmare and carry on with your life, such as it was.

The freeway north was a hasty light show of shrill crimsons and strident whites. Lit billboards and roadside markers, the radio offering a Haydn quartet. Tankers, buses, long haulers, all the streaming cars—where on earth could so many souls be going at this hour, not yet midnight but late enough? Sleepy Albuquerque no more.

They had no idea where they would spend the night but felt giddy from the altitude, if not from the unordinary frisson of having dropped everything to do what had to be done. Normally they’d be asleep in bed by this hour, but tonight they couldn’t be more awake. Granted, Jessica had napped through the second leg of the flight. But Brice was wired, even euphoric. Everybody who meant anything to him was here, one way or the other. Duly acknowledged: All was not as he might have wished. Ariel had not been communicative. His mother’s condition worried him, as did his rapport, or lack thereof, with Bonnie Jean. Kip had, like a new moon, dropped into obscurity. Still, Brice felt optimistic, heartened to be with Jess in the old home state, Land of Disenchantment, as he teasingly called it from time to time. New York, rife with its own disenchantments, often swallowed them up with its reliable solicitude. The client lunch. The court appearance. The dinner with friends. The gym. The movie. The equity trade. The Sunday paper, itself a kind of immersion labor. It was good to be away, even under the circumstances.

“Did I ever tell you that the last time I was here I spent the night in Chimayó in the backseat of a borrowed car?”

“I hope you’re not proposing a repeat performance.”

“Seriously, I did.”

“What was the point? Revisiting your wild youth?”

“Hadn’t thought of it like that. But maybe you’re not wrong.”

“I love it when you put it that way,” she laughed, switching Haydn to rockabilly and turning up the volume. “Maybe possibly I might just be almost not totally incorrect.”

Brice changed the station back to Haydn. Albuquerque’s lights were left behind, and the hour of desert between them and Santa Fe intervened.

“Look. Sleeping in the backseat of a car, if you’re older