Far to the east, beyond the mountains that hide the sun, the wanderer journeyed. The water no longer ran in the creeks, and the waterholes were dry. Many animals were dead in the bed of the river, to which they had come for water, and died from thirst. The shadow of death was across the land, and the wanderer hurried on without resting, lest it should fall across his path.

One day, the wanderer saw in the distance a gleaming waterhole. He ran toward it but fell many times, so great was his weakness. At last the wanderer reached it, but the blackness of night fell upon him, and he slept.

When the wanderer awoke he heard a loud noise in his ears like the buzzing of many flies, and his legs would not support him. He dragged himself to the waterhole, and, bending his head low to drink, he touched the hot, dry sand with his mouth. That which he thought was water was a gleaming bed of sand. An evil spirit possessed the wanderer, and he dug deep into the sand until his hands were torn and bleeding. The sand became firmer, and at last a trickle of water appeared. It gradually increased until it was sufficient for him to drink. He rested there for a day and then went on his way refreshed.

After many days, the wanderer came to a land where grew many high trees. One morning, before the sun had climbed the mountains, he saw its fire gleaming through the trees. Being surprised at the sight, he cautiously drew nearer, and then he saw a cockatoo take the fire from under his crest and light his way with it. In the wanderer's hurry he stood on a dry stick, and its crackling drew the cockatoo's attention to him. The bird threw a spear at the wanderer, and he was forced to flee.

Kate's night sweats were a regular occurrence, now. She'd wake up in the middle of the night in a state of absolute terror, sweating and flailing about in the hope that someone—anyone—would be lying next to her. But no, there was no comfort. Never any comfort. No one ever slept in her bed but her.

It was the fear of death, of aging, of being absolutely and entirely alone in the midst of death and aging. These things were the roots of her terror; lying in the dark, quiet night they became more real than ever—so real that she sometimes sickly wished someone would break in just so that she could have the company. Death was a natural part of human life, she'd always heard about the event. Everybody does it; it can't be that bad. And yet she feared it more and more with each passing day. She had been raised to believe in God and an afterlife, the Heaven and Hell bit, but she didn't really think about it as fact anymore, partially because she was afraid to and partially because society had made it unpopular to shape one's life by such fantasy. Christianity was the stuff of conspiracy theories, nowadays: if you believed in it you were deluded. Her parents, long ago, had taken her and her sister to church every week, religiously, and taught her everything about Jesus and angels and the fiery retribution one was destined to find at the end of an unsavory life. Kate had actually always been the more devout child; she'd taken joy in behaving more righteously than her older sister had, had taken every chance she could get to point out her own good graces as opposed to the wild ways of her sibling, had obsequiously recited every prayer and attended every ceremony her parents had wished her to. Yes, Kate had been a perfect little Christian, and she'd never failed to let anyone know it as she'd grown through her teenaged years. She'd never let boys touch her like her sister did; she'd never smoked or doped and stayed out past curfews or gone to parties where there were drugs and alcohol; she'd never sworn or lied or faked sick to stay home from church. No, not Kate Chilton. She was the perfect daughter, and she'd wanted everyone to know that. When her sister had gone and gotten pregnant at the unmarried age of twenty-three, Kate had already begun a steady career and was making a name for herself. She'd disowned her sister, wanting nothing to do with her—Kate was a well-known person; if she wanted to continue in the right direction, keeping ties with her debauched sister was out of the question. As the years passed, Kate heard little from her sibling; she'd seen her at their parents' funeral, and her child had been a handsome little boy. Kate had felt sorry for him at that time—the poor thing had to live such an unsettled life. But when, five years ago, her sister had contracted and died of AIDS, Kate had found in the woman's will that the boy had been left to her care. It had been a shock, to say the least. Kate had had no room in her life for an adolescent. She'd continued her sister's wishes for the boy by sending him off to a preparatory school, where he'd be better taken care of.

All of that had been long ago. Unfortunately for the child, he'd been as improvident as his mother and gotten himself into a terrible accident; he was now in the hospital and would be for a long, long time. Kate could not bring herself to visit him. She'd never made a bond with the boy, and she felt no responsibility for someone her sister had unjustly brought into the world without a father or proper living circumstances.

It was in the past, in any case. She had no place in the past. Thinking about the past only made her wish she was still a part of it; since she couldn't be, it served only to depress her. The future depressed her, too. No, the future didn't just depress her—it terrified her. The notion of dying, when it was in the forefront of her mind and no other distraction took her away from it, was horrific and frightening beyond belief. What really, actually happened at death? There were many euphemisms for it: passing on, going to a better place, being at peace. But the reality was, nobody could say what it was like. What if, when one died, one was still aware of everything? What if the body died but the brain didn't? It still thought and had presence; it knew it was stuck in a dead body for eternity but could do nothing for it; it felt itself get buried and just sat there, in stagnancy, with absolutely no hope of escape? What if it hurt—death? What if it actually really, really hurt in some otherworldly realm inconceivable until that moment? What if there actually was an afterlife? That was one of the most frightening possibilities. What if something really was out there, judging the good and the bad, the worthy and the unworthy? In such a case, where would she go? Had her life been good? It had been self-serving, that was certain, but was living for oneself such a bad thing? Her youthful days as a Christian had faded quickly when she'd reached the university and parted ways with her family; religion had been, for her, a means of placing herself above her sister. Nothing more. But what if there was actually something to it? If so, what rules were there? How could she know if she'd broken any if no one had ever given them to her? But, of course, the notion of an afterlife was ludicrous. Science and reality were hardly compatible with such chimerical, medieval conceptions.

And then, there was the most frightening possibility of all: the idea that death meant nothing. Absolutely nothing. When one died, that was it. Out snuffed awareness. Out went the lights. There was nothing but a void—an empty space one couldn't even sense because senses were extinguished. One's life, in such a case, would mean entirely nothing at all. If this was what happened at death, then there was nothing at all that mattered. Love, career, one's connections with others, any self-centered gains she'd made in her life, any sacrifices she'd made or any minute details of her days that she'd stored in her happy memories as motes of meaning . . . it was all for naught. In such a case, even Hell seemed inviting.

Such thoughts overwhelmed her in the middle of her nights. Terror would rush through her chest cavity, inflicting unbearable distress that could be cured with nothing but a sleeping pill. A distraction of some sort. Something to keep her mind away from the reality toward which she was growing closer second by second. Did every human being feel this? Was it the curse of humanity? Would it not have been better to be born mentally incapable of comprehending such a thing?

She sat in her bed that moment, pondering her predicament, her sheets swirled around her in the dark like some frozen fabric whirlpool. She neglected to turn on the lights for fear of seeing the age spots no doubt creeping onto her hands. Listening to her heartbeat slowly, very slowly calmed her down. She forced herself to replace her thoughts of death and emptiness with picayune details of her days to come. Tomorrow she had a meeting with her editor. The next day, there was a post-graduation banquet for the department. There were numerous errands to run and several business acquaintances she'd arranged to meet for coffees or lunches. Her calendar was a never-ending business meeting, it seemed. What did any of it matter in the long run, though, when in the end, she'd be dead and the world wouldn't be any better off for her having been in it?

There was a new distraction that she'd hoped would make her happy; however, it was doing the reverse—making her more miserable. She'd hoped that by working her new protégé under her thumb, by having him entirely at her mercy, she'd feel the way she'd used to feel in her youth: vigorous, powerful, purposeful. As if there was nothing in the world which she could not accomplish. That was how she felt when setting her sights on and seducing a man, particularly one younger than she. However, for some reason, this affair with Oscar was serving only to reveal to her how pathetic she had actually become. He was easy enough to manipulate. He was so young, and so naïve. He would immediately acquiesce to anything that Kate asked him to do. At this point, they'd been sleeping together regularly, and it was always satisfactory; it was not in the physical department that the handsome young man was disappointing her. Something else was beginning to gnaw at her conscience (what little she had, anyway): it was Oscar's unwillingness and reluctance to build or design what she asked of him that was stinging her otherwise unyielding character. He made it no secret that he was compromising his integrity by performing the perfunctory tasks she was more and more frequently requiring of him. In fact, he was beginning to get increasingly vocal about his disquiet with each passing day, and it was this acute lack of appreciation for all she was doing for him that bothered her more than anything else and was beginning to eat away at her insides. When she had had affairs in the past, she'd been aware that the men she succeeded in seducing were either in it for the jobs they knew she could get them or the pleasure they believed they could reach by carrying on with a woman of her status. Oscar was clearly interested in neither of these, as he made it obvious that he resented the work she found for him and cared little about paychecks or bragging rights. She could only presume that he was sleeping with her solely because he was attracted to her, and while this should have pleased her, it terribly unsettled her instead. She wanted to be able to hold over his head the power to make or break his future, but this man was so obviously growing disabused of his belief that he needed her assistance that she was beginning to run out of ideas. The subsequent loss of power over him—she was slipping a little more with each encounter—infuriated and depressed her simultaneously.

Kate knew little about Oscar's personal life. Her dealings with him had taken her only to the threshold of inquiring into his background. She did not care about his preferences when it came to design, and she did not care to inquire as to what he did in his free time. She was far too busy to actually care anything about him at all, and she was beginning to lose ground solely because she knew that he was beginning to lose interest. She sensed that Oscar had given up someone to be with her—or that he'd made a mess of a prior relationship. She only knew this because he had mentioned it once or twice in the aftermath of their pleasurable yet emotionless encounters. Whoever she was, Kate felt absolutely no remorse for her own actions, even if he did. The other woman had never been a concern of hers. Her only niggling qualm was how inadequate this obviously-principled young man was making her realize she was.

Kate had never regretted her actions when it came to sex or business; she frequently mixed the two to get ahead for herself or satisfy her own desires. So it was nothing to her when Oscar expressed shame for what he was doing or regret for what he'd already done. She didn't care at all if he guilt-tripped himself into thinking he was harming some other woman or behaving promiscuously. Promiscuity had its purposes. It was not to be too liberal with but to be used under proper circumstances; she had always known this and pitied those who did not, as they were frequently dominated by fears relating to it. No, she felt no pricking of her conscience in this matter. What she was beginning to feel, on the other hand, was the creeping sensation that by forcing Oscar to create that which he did not love and neglect that which he did, she was depriving an artist of his only passion—imprisoning a young man and forcing him to sacrifice his principles in order to meet her demands. This had never bothered her before, so at first, she had not understood what the big deal was, but then she realized that the reason she had never worried about such a thing was because she had never come across someone so truly, inherently artistic. So why didn't he leave her, she wondered? Why didn't he just tell her that no, he was not going to take any more commissions, that she could just forget the paychecks and find someone else to promote? Kate had no idea; maybe it was for the very same reason that despite her increasing shame, she could not stop what had been started either.

The thought frightened her. She had never felt remorse for any of her actions—never even had misgivings; if she was considering admitting to herself that she'd made a mistake in this situation, she would have to look back and seek atonement for far too many sins.

She checked her bedside clock, whose digital numbers glowed in the darkness. Three fifty-two. Too early to get up and begin preparing for tomorrow. But she felt too unsettled to drift back to sleep, so, grabbing the remote control, she turned on her bedroom television and flipped through the streams to try and find something that would distract her from thinking too much. As she lay there in bed, attempting unsuccessfully to deter any thoughts that would serve only to disturb her, Kate felt a strange longing take root in her. It was a want she couldn't ever remember feeling, and she'd felt myriad desires in her lifetime. This was different, and before she really knew what was going on, she had let her thoughts about Oscar consume her once again. Strangely, she had the intense urge to call him, even though it was the middle of the night and she had no reason to bother him beyond the fact that she felt utterly exposed and alone at the moment. That she had never felt so deathly afraid of being human in her entire life.

The knowledge that, had he been there at that moment, he would neither have understood nor cared to understand the complete isolation she was experiencing formed a deep wound in her heart. Here was a man for whom she felt nothing beyond instinctual lust, and now that she had failed to find satisfaction in him, she'd only become sharply aware of the alienation she had until recently been able to ignore. What were her principles? What did she live for? If, at the end of it all, to dust one returned, how pathetic was she to believe at any point that she had somehow controlled a small portion of the world!