they sat at the table, her hands in his, sharing precious minutes. As they talked, Seth periodically stood and crossed to the window before returning.
Their predicament was hardly comprehensible. Miriam was an Arab. A Muslim. She was a Saudi princess, daughter to the Sheik Abu Ali al-Asamm, and now she was married to a Saudi prince. Seth, on the other hand was . . . well, what was he? A brilliant man, surely destined to change the world by discovering light travel or a longer-lasting lightbulb. Seth was a Jew, at least in heritage. An American, not a Saudi.
And they were in love; this was a problem.
He told her briefly about his trip to Saudi Arabia, about how he’d awakened in Cheyenne Mountain after seeing her in his sleep, and about how he passed through Saudi immigration. But he seemed disconnected from these events. He’d had these powerful experiences so recently, but recounted them as if they were only distant dreams.
For Miriam they were not remote abstractions at all. Their implications burrowed through her head. Perhaps the problems of love were only illusions of the mind.
Miriam stood and walked toward the candles. When the light was on in Seth’s mind, he could see so clearly, but when it was off, he became blind. Yet the truth was unchanging, waiting to be lit by a candle, wasn’t it? And what was that truth?
Seth sat in silence behind her. She lifted her hand and slowly ran it over the flame. So small and yet so hot, so real.
“Do you think it’s possible that so many millions of people could be wrong about love?” she asked. She felt her pulse quicken even in speaking the question.
He was quiet.
“That love is the only way?” she said. “The implications are almost too much to bear.”
“How so?” He looked at the candle.
“How can you kill your neighbor if you love him?”
Seth nodded. “I suppose you can’t.”
“Why are we not taught this in our mosques? Why do your churches and synagogues and temples ignore this greatest truth?”
He thought about that for a long moment. “Because politics and power are greater.”
“They’d do better to think with their hearts.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“But you now believe?”
“In love?”
“In the God of love.”
“Yes. I do. He changed the future.” The candlelight flickered in his eyes. “But I’m not seeing the future now.”
“You are depending on your mind!”
“What do you mean?”
“When you see things in your mind, they’re easy to believe. All your life you’ve depended on this brilliance of yours. But when these things—these futures you see—are no longer in your mind, you lose faith. The whole world puts the mind before the heart. It’s killing us all.”
He stared at her. She could almost see wheels spinning behind his eyes.
“You saw the futures and you believed, enough to come to Saudi Arabia to save me. But now that you can’t see, you lose faith.”
“Faith?”
“You’ve never had faith,” she said. “And now it may cost us our lives.”
He turned and stared at the boarded-up window, pondering this logic like a stunned child who’d just seen a card trick.
“Faith in whom?”
“In God.”
“Which God?”
Miriam stood and went to the window. She crossed her arms and looked out. A small plume of dust rose on the horizon, but it was too far away to tell its source.
“In the same God who demands that we love our neighbor,” she said.
“Just like that?”
She turned. “Just like that.”