I sighed and padded out to the picture window overlooking the lake, not bothering with clothes. Looking down at the lake was rarely this humbling--it would usually inspire me, or calm me, but tonight it didn't. The moon shined dully: clouds were moving in, looking stormy.

I could see my reflection in the glass, looking back. It was the first time I had really noticed my body in a while. It hadn't changed much, really. Same sandy hair. Same pale blue eyes. Same tautness. I guess I just hadn't thought about it in a while. I guess I just trusted that it would always be there without my having towork at watching after it constantly.

Clayton stood in the hallway, looking down at the garishly-painted floor. The busy ceiling was no better. So he looked straight ahead: a young twentysomething in a dapper doublebreasted checked his Rolex and tapped his feet. The young thing craned his neck, listening vainly through the thick oaken doorway.

Clayton's head swung to one side. Seven more like the young man by the door were lying in wait, one or two with briefcases, but most of them only with small folders: the better to catch you with, my dear.

Clayton allowed his blase gaze to sweep past them to the young thing by the door. Well-groomed blond hair, aquiline nose, small mouth. No wedding ring. Clayton had seen him at the Circle the night before, with a nipple-hugging lycra shirt on, and a sideburned young man's tongue down his throat. So many circles these people move in down here, so many games.

The door swung open, and people in suits began to flood out.

Clayton strode across Gucci Gulch, as the hallway outside the Senate where lobbyists lie in wait for their prey is called, and buttonholed the junior senator from Hawaii. He had a job to do and, unlike the young thing trotting to catch up to the vigorous senator from New Mexico, he had the tools to get the job done easily and quickly.

He let a little of his Old World Charm, as he called the power of his vitae, seep into his lightly-accented voice as he spoke to the bedraggled senator. The legislator, tired after a late-night wrangle over the budget, was quite susceptible to what Clayton was saying.

I turned away from the window and returned to my room to grab a robe. Not that it was truly necessary, but work had to be done. I grabbed a satchel from next to my bed and returned to the living room.

I sat down in one of the chairs which sat at an angle to the picture windows. From there I could look south past the lake, and also at the framed photograph of Acoma Pueblo in a thunderstorm on the whitewashed cabin wall. I paused in reaching for my lap-desk, and stared at the photo.

I had family down there in New Mexico, where powerful thunderstorms rolled across the desert. Step-family, anyway. Or whatever one calls the herd in which one is the black sheep. The lineage went on beyond me, leaving me off to one side. They often met atop Acoma. It was called Sky City: a pueblo built on top of a mesa in the middle of a flat valley, in the middle of nowhere. From the altar of the church you could see through the wide doorway out over the cemetery over the edge to the floor of the valley and to the mountain beyond, sometimes making you dizzy thinking of floating out, across, and down, flying over the scrub-brush weeds and bushes like a ghost, which was sort of what they all did when they met, moving into and out of the city like ghosts who had never really been there, not really smelling the fry-bread because the pools of grease had cooled when the tourists left with the onset of night, even though the best views from Acoma were of sunset--though he had never seen that, he could imagine it, and could almost taste the dust in the city, until it was washed away by the violent summer monsoon thunderstorms which rolled across the hot desert floor (disturbed by the rising hot air) and crashed with a vengeance against the small island of settlement stuck up atop the mesa as if trying to wash it down into the valley, lightning flashing to every side, rain sluicing down as if the heavens had opened up and relased all of their worries and cares onto the land below and then <SNAP!>-- it's captured in a photograph to hang on the wall for people to stare at.

I shook my head gently, lifting the reverie. I left the lap-desk where it was, and put the satchel the satchel alongside. I went to my room and changed into riding clothes. The thought that I needed to be out where the wind could touch me struck like lightning, and one doesn't ignore lightning. Alcibiades knew that. My family knows that.

The work would get done: *all* of it, not just what was on the papers tucked safely away in my satchel.