All that guilt left Jim in a contemplative mood—also very full of very good steak—and he found himself feeling like he ought to get to know the city he’d fled so far to come to a little better. Not in terms of wandering the city, since he figured he’d have a lot of that on his plate in the coming days, but in terms of learning about it, specifically, rather than the general Australian colonization stuff he’d seen in the maritime museum. He remembered seeing something about the Museum of Sydney in the row of brochures at the front of the other museum, so he ducked back into the lobby just long enough to grab it.

A friendly local (and all he seemed to meet were friendly locals: maybe he should move to Sydney. One S city was as good as another, wasn’t it, especially if it couldn’t be Scranton? Stamford, Sydney, San Salvador El Salvador, they were all one. At least this one had nice people and good weather) noticed him staring this way and that with the brochure in hand and directed him towards the museum. Along the way he passed town hall, an ornate building that seemed quite out of place among the steel and glass skyscrapers of modern Sydney—a throwback to a more elegant but also quite probably more brutally colonial time. He slipped past Hyde Park, throwing a salute to the Anzac Memorial in the distance, and there it was: the museum.

Well, actually, as he found out a very confusing twenty-five minutes later, there it was most certainly not. He had found one of the Sydney Living Museums, but not the Museum of Sydney, although after talking to a very unnecessarily apologetic staff member he was convinced to stay for another half hour and check out this version of Sydney’s history too. In fact, as the very polite tour guide the other staff member handed him off to pointed out, both this museum—the Mint, connected to the Hyde Park Barracks—and the Museum of Sydney were owned by the same museum group, and while the Mint was primarily home to research collections that weren’t really up his alley, the Barracks had exactly the sort of old Sydney history in them that he had hoped to find.

He was pretty sure, forty minutes later, that he was really glad he had not been one of the early settlers of Australia—and even more so that he had not been one of the Aboriginal people they’d displaced. The museum was very good about acknowledging the impact of colonization on the local population—as had the maritime museum, come to that, and the Powerhouse—but nevertheless he didn’t feel quite as comfortable leaving as he’d hoped to be after learning more about Sydney.

Maybe the real Museum of Sydney would help. He wandered on up Macquarie Street looking for the turn off, and noting with real amazement just how much of the social and political infrastructure was centered on this one walk: he’d passed the Supreme Court earlier, and now the Bank and Parliament. All of these were for New South Wales, which he figured must be their equivalent of Pennsylvania, but that didn’t make them any less impressive-looking.

It was a nice walk, and for almost two hours he was proud to say he hadn’t thought about Pam.

**

Pam had made her way up to the Sydney Observatory: well aware, of course, that she wouldn’t be able to actually see Jim better if she were higher up, but still draw inexorably to the idea that maybe it would help anyway. After all, Jim did like tall things. Or maybe it was just that Jim was a tall thing, and so she associated them with him. But for whatever reason, it felt right.

It was a lovely view, but it was not the right place to find Jim. In fact, the very loveliness of the view made her more aware of Jim’s absence. She looked out over Miller’s Point and towards the Harbour Bridge and marveled—and with every increase of wonder in her breast there was a corresponding increase in the desire to show this all to Jim. It was silly, she thought. He was the one who’d brought her here—he didn’t know, it but it was true—so he could see this all by himself, he didn’t need her. But she wanted to show him anyway.

She just wanted him to have everything he could have, this view included.

Maybe that was what he meant by telling her he was in love with her and still letting her go when she indicated she was choosing Roy, she thought. That he wanted her to have whatever she could, even if it didn’t include him.

That thought made the view intolerable, and she scrambled down and started her hunt afresh. Maybe he’d do the BridgeClimb? Well, he probably would if he thought of it, but it was also probably one of those things you had to work yourself up to, she thought, as she stared up at the bridge from below. If he was up there, she wasn’t going to find him—she had no illusions about rushing ahead and catching up with anyone, especially Jim, especially uphill—and so she made her way back down towards downtown.

Of course, that route just happened to pass the Museum of Contemporary Art. Not just of Sydney, or of New South Wales, but of all Australia.

And it just happened to be open.

It was a serious indication of how much she wanted to find Jim that she limited herself to the museum shop, grabbing a museum map, and checking exactly when the exhibition halls were open for future reference.