The familiar words echo in her mind as she inspects her dreaming body, buried in its tomb of years, eons, kalpas. Ah, but she will, Carlotta thinks-she must. Well, look at me, Carlotta marvels: skinny girl in panties and a halter, sixteen years old-no older than a gnat’s breath-taking shallow little sleep-breaths in the moonlit dark. The bedroom’s small window is cranked open, and in the breezeless distance a coyote wails. The young woman is her own ancient self, the primordial Carlotta Boudaine, dewed with sweat in the hot night air, her legs caught up in a spindled cotton sheet. Bodiless, no more than a breath of imprecision in the Feynman geography of certain virtual particles, thus powerless to affect the material world, she passes unimpeded through a sheet-aluminum wall and hovers over a mattress on which a young woman sleeps uneasily. Diving back into the universe (now that the universe is a finished object, boxed and ribboned from bang to bounce), Carlotta calculates ever-finer loci on the frozen ordinates of spacetime until at last she reaches a trailer park outside the town of Commanche Drop, Arizona.
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