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seventeenth-century sailors. Perhaps Bjarni Herjolfsson thought that he was just imagining things when he came out of the fog to find himself face to face with the New Founde Lande, and that was why he didn’t try to go ashore.
    A thousand years later, Anton set sail from Rotterdam to find his father, the same port from which this unknown soldier had embarked fifty years ago. Anton’s ship followed the same route Bjarni Herjolfsson had taken. I guess he wanted to set the right tone for the trip. It was the familiar North Atlantic Ocean now, but for him it was still the Sea of Darkness.

Part One
    September 1995

1. FLOWERS OF FALL
    April is in my mistress’ face,
    And July in her eyes hath place;
    Within her bosom is September,
    But in her heart a cold December.
    â€”Thomas Morley
    I n September , everything begins again. At least that is the feeling—unnatural, out of sync, out of season some would say—among those of us who have spent our precious youth in schools and universities, and our working lives at a university as well. Every year we watch the effervescent, efflorescent young, the flowers of fall, in whom we may see buds, blossoms of our former selves, return to campus, or arrive for the first time. Seeing their bright, inviting faces, there is a feeling of hope, renewal, new beginnings, new castles in the air. Farmers and fishers, casters of seed and nets, carpenters and creatures of the air, builders of houses and nests, welcome the spring, but we archivists, scholars, and pedagogues, a more sedentary, monastic, and wistful tribe, welcome the fall.
    So it was not unexpected that Elaine would depart in the spring, in April, the cruellest month that year, for sure—the year of Our Lord, or the cruel god Eros, 1994—and that Miranda Michael would arrive in the fall, in September, though most might think it more auspicious the other way round. But under whose auspices, I might ask, and where on the auspicious-inauspicious scale was the curious fact that I, Michael Lowe, shared a name with this woman who appeared the same year that Elaine left?
    â€œAppeared” may just be the most appropriate word, for though Elaine’s departure had come as no great surprise, Miranda’s arrival seemed like a visitation, like the Perseid meteor showers I had seen for the first time that August, the subject of much talk on the radio. I guess I must have been in a state of mild shock, at least, a numbing disbelief, denial, throughout the spring and summer. In the dog days of August, when all I ever seemed to be doing was waiting for sweet September, I sat in the late afternoons and evenings, often late into the night, practically immobilized in the lawn chair on the verandah, unable to read, unable to think clearly, but trying to read and think, drinking a lot of coffee, wine, and brandy, and smoking again, though that lasted for only a short time.
    I think I was in a sort of trance, a deep gloom, a melancholic reverie, feeling sorry for myself, my gaze locked into a view of the empty house across the street. Above its roof, in the early morning hours, as if radiating from some far-distant constellation—Perseus, I assume—showers of meteors, showers of light, streaked across the sky, falling stars, shooting stars, in the popular lexicon. Myths had once abounded about them, said cbc Radio’s science “correspondent.” (Was he radiating from some celestial realm as well?) They were messengers from the gods, souls on their way to the afterlife, auspicious or inauspicious signs. No, they were merely bits of celestial debris burning up, he said, coldly and dismissively, most no bigger than a grain of sand. I felt like a bit of burned-up earthly debris myself, but nothing that had illuminated anything of worth.
    The vacant house had been for sale since the spring, and at the end of August, seemingly overnight, it was no longer empty. There was terrestrial light in every window, a