IF YOU TRAVEL IN SPACE for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I amonly an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world wherenothing quite makes sense. I thought I had been listening to Jesse, but it turns out I haven’t been listening tohim at all. I have listened carefully to Anna, and yet it seems there is a piece missing. I try to work throughthe few things she has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehowfound five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman’s body.

Then it hits me—I am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, lookbetween the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hidingunder the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spotsas there are in the bright ones.

Or this is what I’m thinking, anyway, when my daughter’s lawyer falls to the floor in the throes of anepileptic seizure.

Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, for someone having a grand mal seizure, is the biggie. I jump over thegate of the gallery and have to fight the dog out of the way; he’s come to stand over Campbell Alexander’stwitching body like a sentry. The attorney enters the tonic phase with a cry, as air is forced out by thecontraction of his breathing muscles. He lays rigid on the ground. Then the clonic phase starts, and hismuscles fire randomly, repeatedly. I turn him on his side, in case he vomits, and start looking for somethingto stick between his jaws so that he won’t bite off his own tongue, when the most amazing thing happens—that dog knocks over Alexander’s briefcase and pulls out something that looks like a rubber bone but isactually a bite block, and drops it into my hand. Distantly I am aware of the judge sealing off the courtroom.

I yell to Vern to call for an ambulance.

Julia is at my side immediately. “Is he all right?”

“He’s gonna be fine. It’s a seizure.”

She looks like she’s on the verge of tears. “Can’t you do something?”

“Wait,” I say.

She reaches for Campbell, but I draw her hand away. “I don’t understand why it happened.”

I don’t know if Campbell does, himself. I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without adirect line of antecedents.

Two thousand years ago the night sky looked completely different, and so when you get right down to it, theGreek conceptions of star signs as related to birth dates are grossly inaccurate for today’s day and age. It’scalled the Line of Procession: back then the sun didn’t set in Taurus, but in Gemini. A September 24 birthdaydidn’t mean you were a Libra, but a Virgo. And there was a thirteenth zodiac constellation, Ophiuchus theSerpent Bearer, which rose between Sagittarius and Scorpio for only four days.

The reason it’s all off kilter? The earth’s axis wobbles. Life isn’t nearly as stable as we want it to be.

Campbell Alexander vomits on the courtroom rug, then coughs his way to consciousness in the judge’schambers. “Take it easy,&............