Today's Reading

CHAPTER ONE
THE PRISM

SIX AM, ON A LATE NOVEMBER MONDAY, 2015

You were having an unpleasant dream, but your cell phone's alarm startled you out of it, and the memory is already disintegrating. (Chased by something, maybe? Possibly you shouldn't have binge-watched The Walking Dead right before bed last night.)

It's still dark out. Rain is coming later. It'll be a cold soaking fall downpour, just south of snow; you saw the forecast. Most of the remaining leaves will whirl down into sodden yellow-brown heaps.

You have some kind of unforgiving deadline, this dim morning: You have to leave for work in two hours. The baby will be awake any minute. The dog needs to be walked. You've got to drive, or take the train, so that you can get to your job interview, or to the airport.

And your throat hurts.

When you swallow, a faint but distinct pain runs along your esophagus. That first welcome cup of coffee might help. Or tea with lemon, or a swig of hot toddy. And, you decide, a quick dose of antihistamines and painkiller, a hunt for the nose spray, because you know perfectly well what that sore throat means.

You're catching a cold.

It's the fifty-second (eightieth, one hundred and seventy-second) cold of your life. The string of events is familiar: sore throat first, then streaming nose and eyes, headache, heavy chest, cough.

Maybe this time it's just an allergy, your brain says, always  hopeful.

But you know better. November is the beginning of cold and flu season, after all. And just forty-eight hours ago—a textbook incubation period—you were at a PTA meeting/busy restaurant/Bible study/youth orchestra concert, along with a bunch of other sneezing/coughing/door handle-touching walking virus vectors. One of them has passed a sickness on to you.

You're facing three or four days of unhappiness: head like a cement block, watering eyes, doggedly keeping up with work and life but putting meetings and gym visits off until you feel better. Squirting hand sanitizer, blowing your nose into fresh tissues, apologizing for the sneezing and your hoarse croak of a voice. Telling everyone who asks if you're OK: Yes, I'm fine, I just have a cold.

This too shall pass.

And if it doesn't—the cough wakes you up every half hour, your head becomes a locus of stabbing sinus pain, green stuff starts running out of your nose—you'll sit in a waiting room for an hour, get a prescription for antibiotics, and a few days later, you'll be on the mend. The holiday wedding, the New Year's party, the February trip to a warm place—=life will go on.

You turn over, telling yourself that if you're getting sick you deserve another five minutes in bed, and pull the blankets back up over your shoulders.


LATE FALL, NEARLY FOUR THOUSAND YEARS EARLIER

You open your eyes to the faint light on the horizon and are instantly swept with relief. Sleep, that small death, has released you once more.

You don't always worry about this, but last night you did. You were sweating, restless, hot and wretched, and so you finally abandoned the confines of your windowless bedroom and climbed to sleep on a wool rug on the flat roof. There, a ribbon of cool crept up from the fast-flowing Idiglat, just beyond the village walls: waters shooting like an arrow past the river's banks, carrying away the heat that poured from your body. Drowsiness swirled up over you in a fog you could not resist. Your last thought was to wonder whether you would wake.

And here you are, your soul safely returned to your body, the rug reassuringly rough against your back.

But all is not well. The remnants of a terrifying dream cling. It's fading, but you were standing in a council of the gods, an assembly about to declare war on you for some sin that you cannot remember. Your mouth is dry, your teeth chattering.

You crawl over to the water cask in the roof's corner. It holds the crispness of night air, but when you swallow, pain runs down into your heart.

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