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25 That Was Then Galileo to Maria Celeste Gregory Fraser Don’t, you kept repeating, you’ll regret it, but that was why I planned to go ahead. I needed to be able to say, in the end, I lived, even if that meant a shattered past. I’d had enough of careful calculations— dead light ricocheting between stars, streets of Florence whorled like a thumbprint. It was time to damage something, someone, first of all myself. All the signs agreed: the late autumn wind, forcing trees to undress like inmates or drafted soldiers being processed, the morning’s racket of grackles, so cacophonous it made a laughing stock of sense. Don’t, you said again, but I could tell what had to be done—by the widow bent with mourning, clouds of dingy sheep’s wool, then a hard, seed-like rain on the window glass. It ticked like the small explosive fashioned in my mind in boyhood—wired with my mother’s quiet rage (the red), my father’s mire (the black)— to detonate at the proper time. This time. Couldn’t you tell, from the start, how oddly I stuck out, like a silo on a family farm, or a water tower in a prairie town? Promise me 26 A Face to Meet the Faces you won’t, you insisted. Sheets of newsprint roamed the streets like tramps. Very well, I promised, studying the bands of grime around the children’s wrists. Forgive me, dear. I lied. ...

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