He told Sia a bout Crawford Grant a few evenings later, while he was practicing. Ben was away at a meeting of the faculty senate. She sat in a chair with an old newspaper in her lap, carving a block of some dark wood into the shape of a woman. “I have heard of him,” she said. “He sounds like half my clients—they just know they would surely have been happy in some other time, some other civilization. They play endlessly with the stars, the Tarot, the ouija board, to find their real home. Play that one I like again.”

Farrell retuned the lute and struck into the Le Roy galliard that was her current favorite. He loved practicing in the living room; the high ceiling did not dilute the sound, nor the small rugs absorb it, and the notes came out as hard and light as arrowheads. Sia said, “The displaced ones, they are mostly who come to see me. You can be uprooted from imaginary places too, you know.”

The galliard, being played too fast, lost its center of gravity and flapped for balance like a child running downhill. Farrell started over. Sia did not look up from her work, but Farrell was coming to believe that her senses were not as stationary and specialized as those of other people. Her living hair watched his hands moving on the lute, if her head was bent away from him; he suspected that the brown, surprisingly delicate wrist that drove the X-Acto knife over wood as if she were caressing a child would have done as well. Thinking about that, he let the Le Roy drift to pieces again and irritably slapped the lute silent.